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Arizona Judge Tells Sheriff "Reveal Password Or Face Contempt"
An anonymous reader writes "Four days ago, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona conducted a raid against the county government building hosting computers for a law enforcement database. After threatening to arrest county employees who would stop them, the officers proceeded to secure the room and promptly changed passwords on many of the servers. In a hearing on Friday, a Superior Court judge threatened to hold members of the Sheriff's Office in contempt if they did not reveal the passwords by next Wednesday. Following this, the Sheriff's Office claimed to be conducting an investigation against other Superior Court judges. Courts have asked for passwords before, but never under conditions like this."
The correct article is here.
Amazing this is happening in the United States
Sorry, forgot link:
http://www.arpaio.com/index.php
There's a reason this asshole has such a critical website over him. I firmly believe he's a sociopath.
Rule #3 of the 10 Immutable Laws of Security: if a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Story should serve as a good reminder to everyone out there that in the end, no amount of encryption, biometrics, or obscurity will protect your network when a hacker brings a gun. Physical security trumps all.
Yes they do have an IT guy. Appears he built the system. No I don't believe he does need the password. But he is reported to have told the judge it would be "convenient" to have it but that he didn't really need it.
Hendershott Could End Up in Jail Next Week in Showdown Over Password
It is a Constitutional Federal Republic. This means that there are various check on the majority. 50.0001% of people can't vote to oppress the other 49.9999%. Things like constitutional law can only be changed by a very lengthy process (66% of both congressional bodies, 75% of all states have to approve it).
So while the majority may agree with what he's doing, or at least the parts of what he's doing they are aware of, that doesn't make it right, or legal. He has, on many occasions, been sued successfully for various rights violations.
It is something that needs to be fought, not something that people should just say "Well the majority elected him. Doesn't matter that they did, he is still accountable to the law. That's how the system is setup.
Speaking as a Brit living in Arizona, I can assure you he is NOT popular across all the state.
His constituents in Phoenix, however, think the sun shines out of his arse.
This also explains a lot about Phoenix in general.
He's not going to have any fun with the federal government. DHS is now headed by Janet Napolitano. For those that don't know she was the governor of Arizona (and a fairly popular one) until she was appointed to head DHS. She also hates Arpaio for his tactics and flaunting of the law. As such you can bet DHS is going to be on his ass about any and everything they can.
There is a lesson here about stepping on toes that might be connected to an ass you later have to kiss.
People waiting for trial are not 'criminals'. He has had over half a dozen deaths in custody this year along for people who were not convicted of a crime. County jails should be equivalent in comfort, food and atmosphere to a Motel 6 till you are convicted, imho.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
He gets a certain cash amount from the Feds per prisoner to keep them in his 'jails', a bunch of tent cities, population over 4,000. He spends the absolute minimum on these and runs them in a manner consistent with German concentration camps (without the poison gas showers; he doesn't want to kill his prisoners, he wants the money from it), thus creating a cash surplus he uses to make sure his department has enough weapons to take over a Third World country. You can get thrown into one of his 'jails' by having a couple outstanding parking tickets, or defaulting on your child support payments.
As a resident of Arizona, he makes me ashamed to live here.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Speaking as a Brit living in Arizona, I can assure you he is NOT popular across all the state.
His constituents in Phoenix, however, think the sun shines out of his arse.
This also explains a lot about Phoenix in general.
I dont think he's popular in Britian either, not after trying to extradite law abiding british citizens and threaten to humiliate them
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the sign is there for a reason.
Feeding trolls and flamebaits can lead to excessive burns and karma loss
O.o
Here in Memphis the feds (under that notorious civil liberties champion John Ashcroft) took control of our jails after reported civil rights violations. The federal government is the appropriate agency to step in by means of the USDOJ, and should likewise step in on behalf of the people incarcerated under that maniac's supervision. It would disgust me if we treated prisoners of war the way that "law man" has been treating his charges.
Dostoyevsky said that any society can be judged by the way it treats its prisoners. I sure as hell don't want this man standing as a representative of our civilization.
Why would you think prison was about rehabilitation? Prison terms are specified by the crime committed, not by the estimation of the time required for sufficient behavior modification.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
People should not die in custody and especially should not while awaiting trial. ---- note the period
The US has more deaths in custody than almost any other first-world country but Britain is damn close because of the number of heroin-related deaths there. Deaths in custody after the introduction of the taser in both countries rose as deaths related to overdose, homicide by police officer, cardiac-arrest and many others increased substantially. The taser is over-used and mis-used and police are killing people because of it. Don't be an apologist for murderers, it makes you look like a monster.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Oh please! you can give criminals hard time without abusing them. I'll give an example from my home state as proof. Here we have at Tucker what is called the "hoe squad" and it is what it sounds like. You get your ass up at dawn and hoe and weed and grow your own food so that the state (us) doesn't have to pay for it. It is hard work, but they don't abuse the prisoners, feed them rotten food, etc like that sicko does.
I was laughing my ass of a few months back when I happened to land on Cops! spinning the dial and saw the Arkansas State police chasing a guy with one wheel gone and fire shooting out of the car towards the Tenn line. I turned to my GF and said "I bet he don't want to go to the hoe squad!" and sure enough, he stops when he crosses the border and the Ark State Police give him the usual "what are you crazy! Are you trying to get yourself and others killed?" and he says "I did crime In Tenn and I'll confess! I just wasn't gonna stop til I made it here because I ain't gonna go back to the damned hoe squad!"
So you see you CAN give prisoners hard time without abuse. That Arpaio is simply sadistic and seems to me from interviews gets off on power and the abuse thereof. Our prisoners work their asses off (in fact I passed a local work crew from the county jail coming home cleaning the statues in the court square) but they are given decent food (which they grow themselves), decent medical care, and decent treatment. And for all those "you can't be too nasty!" types? they are gonna get out some day, and you kick and beat a dog long enough they will turn mean as scratch and tear you up. Do you expect humans who have been ritually abused and degraded and starved to act ANY different? Remember that this asshole treats ALL prisoners like that, from hot checks and kids busted with pot to serial rapists. The guy is just a vicious sick fuck, and as we have seen time after time after time that "bullies with badges" just keeping pushing the limit until they go to far and get somebody killed. And the odds are he won't kill some hardened rapist, but some kid caught riding in a stolen car or with a bag of dope. Would you really be fine with that?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What is it about the words -Criminal- and -Illegal- alien that is so hard for slashdotters to fathom.
I know exactly what they mean. I also have a working understanding of the term "universal human dignity." If you want to put a man away for comitting a crime, then do it. But to break a man, to force him to eat moldy food and to sexually humiliate him, let alone reward the state for doing it, is an altogether different thing. Absolute power over others corrupts absolutely; you let cops do awful things to people in jail, and I guarantee that eventually that's how they'll treat people on the outside, too. In this most recent case, they simply invaded a government building and staged a coup -- the police's attitude toward their responsibility as upholders of public trust has been destroyed by their chief's blatant disregard for the law in deference to his political prerogatives and his belief that his role in society is to be an arbiter of violence.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
What is it about the words "cruel and unusual punishments" that is so hard for you to fathom?
Prisons aren't about punishments or retribution or degradation. They're about removing criminals from the society they threaten, and rehabilitating them if possible.
How we treat our inmates reflects more on us than on them. If we have no qualms about doing things to inmates for the express purpose of stripping them of their dignity and humanity, it is because we have already lost ours.
What is it about the words -Criminal- and -Illegal- alien that is so hard for slashdotters to fathom.
It sounds like the sheriff must have broken a law here. But I don't see you, retiredtwice, saying that this sheriff, who has probably done something -Illegal-, should be charged and held as a prisoner until his trial. I'd say it's illegal to raid a law abiding office, to kidnap personnel (i.e. force them to act against their will), to torment law abiding, to commandeer property not your own, and to modify government computers without authorization. Why are you not up in arms about these illegal activities? I can tell you why: because it doesn't matter to *YOU* what crimes someone commits when *YOU* think that someone promotes *YOUR* own distorted ideological agenda. You need to take a look in the mirror. Your morals are corrupt, retiredtwice.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Some would argue he has already gotten several people killed. And Charles Agster was not some kid caught riding in a stolen car or with a bag of dope. Ambria Spencer's daughter certainly didn't commit any crimes. Richard Post really was caught with dope but he wasn't killed. Instead, the guards broke his neck turning him into a quadriplegic, and then they went on to laugh about it.
Actually, the best way to judge any society is to see how they treat their jail prison population.
See, no justice system is infallible. Just look at the number of death row inmates who have been cleared after spending decades behind bars. Are the people who say "we should treat them like shit so they don't want to come back" really willing to put their money where their mouth is and volunteer to spend say six months doing hard time for a crime they didn't commit? How about a year? Five? Ten? Twenty?
We shouldn't treat inmates as if they're pond scum and that we, as a society, would be better off if they were on the compost heap instead of in prison. Sure, quite a lot of the people we throw behind bars end up committing some kind of crime while behind bars, be it doing drugs, breaking the prison rules, violence etc., but what are you supposed to do, if you're the innocent guy? Just let someone shank you? Rape you? Beat you up? Or are you going to try to fight back?
We may not like the people behind bars, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them as human beings.
It's wishful thinking. The East Valley Tribune won a pulitzer for an expose of Sheriff Joe's tactics that concluded, among other things, that his focus on illegal immigration has actually stolen the focus away from violent crimes.
Prison rape is an especially sickening concept.
The idea we can't stop crime in prison is idiotic. If people are even intimidating other people in prison, said intimidates should have their ability to interact with other prisoners revoked until they've learned their damn lesson.(1)
Hey, assholes, we put you in prison because you can't follow the law, you think running around threatening people, aka, committing felony assault, is going to fly?
Apparently, the answer is yes, and we've decided the prisoners 'deserve' whatever happens to them, and for some reason have failed to grasp what that actually means is we are allowing violent convicted criminals to continue to have fun. Forget a damn TV, how about we deny them the pleasure of raping someone? We don't even let innocent people rape people!
1) And, for all this talk about 'prison overcrowding', I suspect prison populations would be a lot easier to maintain, even more of them, if we'd simply move the 10% that cause the problems to solitary confinement until they stop causing damn problems.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
By turning a blind eye to illegal immigration you are fostering an evironment which allows employers to continue to have unsafe working conditions and pay below-market wages. If these people were not present in the US, these employers would either have to move to Mexico and employ local people or pay US citizens real wages.
Why do you think prices at fast food restaurants have pretty much been frozen for 30 years? Because their labor costs have not increased.
Why is it that we have 10, 15 or even 20% unemployment in areas of the US with high populations of undocumented workers? Because it is cheaper to pay these people than legal workers, even when the employers are fined. If we had stronger employment verification laws, like E-Verify, we just might have significantly less unemployment among US citizens and legal workers. Instead, we are continuing to create an environment where we are importing cheap labor to be abused. Then, as we continue to see from the current administration, we are going to give them all an amnesty so they can be a permanent underclass - that will vote for their amnesty sponsors.
This isn't a good way to run a country or a labor force. Having illegal, underpaid and abused workers available to displace legal workers just means we are going to be paying more in unemployment and welfare for the legal workers. While the illegals actually are out there working. Doesn't sound right or even like a sensible policy. The answer is not to make them legal in hopes they then will deserve (and get) higher wages and less abuse. The answer is to make it less attractive to stay and to stop importing these low-wage workers.
Who will do the work then? Well, when there is 20% unemployment plenty of people will line up for jobs. And in cases where the pay is too low and the abuse too much, maybe the employers will either relocate elsewhere or decide to improve conditions. Leaving the illegals in place does nothing except continue the existing practices indefinately. The amnesty in 1986 didn't change anything in this regard and the amnesty in 2009 will not change anything either. Except maybe providing a new crop of grateful Democrat voters.
That's funny because I'm sitting in my tent in Afghanistan at this very moment, and it's equipped with an air conditioning unit just like all the other tents. I've been to some of the smallest, shittiest FOBs in this country and haven't yet seen one where the commander is so inhumane as to require his soldiers to sleep in a bare tent in 115+ degree weather. The other day the power went out when it was 100 degrees out and within a matter of minutes the heat inside was un-fucking-bearable.
And they used "guns" to do threaten public employees. That they ARE public employees makes no difference. They obviously didn't have a warrant from a judge and they threatened law abiding employees in a different department.
Like it or not "law enforcement" is JUST A JOB!!!!! They are no different than any other public employee when dealing with matters like this... BOFH is going to have fun with them.... but if they were smart they'd walk away from their jobs Monday and file civil rights and workplace violence suits against their employers. Not to mention criminal charges with the state police/FBI for hijacking a computer system. Tampering with a public computer system alone ought to get the police 10-20 years!!!
Come to New Orleans. The only difference between the criminals and the police is a uniform.
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