Loss of Privacy

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has managed to screw up royally by holding an American for deportation and refusing to verify his citizenship in a timely manner.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine.

Court officials were skeptical. Not only did his story seem preposterous, but the longtime heroin addict also had a Southern accent and didn’t speak Russian.

Colorado court officials quickly determined his true identity in a national crime database: He was a Minnesota-born man who grew up in Georgia. Before Warziniack was sentenced to prison on the drug charge, his probation officer surmised in a report that he could be mentally ill.

Although it took only minutes for McClatchy to confirm with Minnesota officials that a birth certificate under Warziniack’s name and birth date was on file, Colorado prison officials notified federal authorities that Warziniack was a foreign-born prisoner.

Warziniack, 40, told McClatchy that he has no memory of telling anyone he was Russian. Instead, he recalled the shock of withdrawing from his heroin addiction after 18 years of drug abuse.

Even after he produced a US birth certificate and his half sisters vouched for him, Warziniack was still told he could be deported because a judge had to investigate his birth certificate to verify its authenticity.  Although he is to be released this week, ICE officials are still refusing to admit any wrongdoing in the matter.

Katherine Sanguinetti, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections, suspects that prison officials were relying on information that Warziniack gave when he was first taken into custody because they never received the Colorado court documents concluding that he was a U.S. citizen.

Even now, the prison records inaccurately show his current location as “the Soviet Union.”

Wait for this story to reappear in its new incarnation, “Why We All Should Have Identity Cards.”

In one of the stupidest things I’ve read this year, a woman was almost prevented from boarding a plane because of her apple pie.  According to security, apple pies can be quite dangerous.

He told me he was keeping watch for pies with cream and custard fillings. Anything that could be construed as a “gel.” He’d already turned away a pumpkin pie.  Pumpkin pie filling, he confided, “has the same consistency as certain plastic explosives.”

A dozen Thanksgiving pies were confiscated last year at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. They were all donated to the airport’s USO lounge, which serves traveling soldiers.

Oh, so these pies are so dangerous that you are not allowed to bring them on the plane, but you can slice them up willy-nilly and serve them to soldiers?  On what planet does that make sense?

It was also obvious that they weren’t going to cut open the pie to see if there was anything bad inside.  They were just nitpicking without a lot of cause.

Again, we see here an example of our tax dollars at work.  Dangerous pies are being kept from going on board, mainly because the TSA wants to show us that they are doing something to prevent terrorism, no matter how stupid it may be.

Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, if you use copyrighted music in public in the United Kingdom, you must get permission from every single copyright holder or pay a fee in order to sing or play it.

Car maintenance chain Kwik Fit is currently tied up in a bitter legal battle with the UK Performing Rights Society (PRS). It’s alleged that Kwik Fit’s mechanics allowed their radios to be played within earshot of the public – a truly heinous crime for which the PRS are demanding £200,000 in damages.

According to a report, the PRS are at it again. The staff at a charity also received a visit from a PRS officer who declared that because a staff radio in the kitchen could be overheard by the public in their tea-room, they would need a license. The charity, Dam House, which was originally set up to save a historic building and offer community and health facilities, had to have a fund-raising event to raise the money for the license.

Having bought the license, the charity thought they were in the clear, but they weren’t.  The PRS found out that children would be singing songs in a concert.  PRS told them, either sing songs out of copyright or cough up some more cash.

Seriously, what kind of jerks sue kids singing songs for Christmas?  Last year, this same charity was told that they had to pay a fee because their kitchen staff listened to the radio.  Why a fee? Because the radio could be heard in the tea room, thus the general public could hear the music being played and a fee was required.

Jerks.  All of them.  I hope the PRS had a crappy Christmas this year.

Under very tough, new legislation, UK drivers caught using their mobile phones while driving face up to two years in prison.  Mobile phones, however, aren’t the only items listed.  Adjusting your GPS device, fiddling with your MP3 player, or sending text messages can also land in jail.

If the police decide that you are being a danger to others, you could be facing some serious time behind bars.  Although using a mobile phone while driving was outlawed in 2003, millions of people break this law each day, with police doing little to stop it.  Currently, the police are prevented from doing more than fining a motorist a maximum of £5,000 and up to nine points on their license.

While the police believe the new law will force drivers to sit up and take notice, imposing a mandatory £5,000 fine from the start would have helped as well.

The new guidelines mean prosecutors will be able to go for a dangerous driving charge, which carries the punishment of an unlimited fine as well as a two-year jail term.

In addition, drivers who kill while using mobile phones could be charged with causing death by dangerous driving, which carries a 14-year jail term. In extreme cases they could be charged with manslaughter for which a life term can be imposed.

A new offence of causing death by careless driving is to be created under the Road Safety Act, due to come into force early next year.

Whoah, back the truck up there buddy!  Why is there no offense for death by careless driving already?

There are also other options available that would have prevented these sterner measures and without threatening the general populace with jail time.  Mandating small jamming devices be placed in a vehicle at the manufacturer would prevent the use of cell phones in the car.  As long as the ignition is on, the cell phone doesn’t work.

You could have actually enforced the law already on the books.  If the police have statistics about how many people break the law every day, then they aren’t enforcing it enough to prevent it from happening.

Then, there’s that little thing called a “hands-free” device, whereby you don’t have to have the phone in your hand.  It doesn’t cost much but it can certainly save you a load of cash in fines.  While it’s not the best solution, as you are still distracted, it at least provides you with giving you both your hands to drive with.

Good thing the British prison system is letting out rapists and muggers early so they can make room for these terrible mobile phone users.

Olympic champions, Carolina Klüft and Stefan Holm, believe that the only way to stop doping is for athletes to be chipped or have GPS transmitters attached to their bags so that they can be tracked at all times.

“I have previously proposed that we should have computer chips surgically implanted into our skin. But it might be just as good if everybody at a certain level had a key ring with a GPS transmitter on their training bags. That way everybody involved knows where we are at all times and can find us for tests,” Klüft told Svenska Dagbladet.

And how exactly is this going to prevent doping?  Sure, they see you’re hanging out in the local coffee shop, but are you really there to get coffee?  And what about your bag?  Is it with you all the time or do you leave it at home while you’re out jogging?

“I wouldn’t have any complaints about surveillance of this kind. In fact, I think we have an obligation to go along with most things. Doping is terrible, which means it is important we have an open mind and are brave enough to discuss and debate the issue,” she added.

The Swedish superstar, who has not lost a single heptathlon or pentathlon event since 2002, also revealed that the mere thought of consuming a banned substance filled her with dread. If ever she failed a doping test, Klüft said that her life would not be worth living and she would have to leave Sweden.

Oh Nos!  I haven’t won my latest competition and I somehow managed to fail a drug test.  I have to leave my home country now and kill myself!  Seriously, these are the people they are taking advice from now?

Stefen Holm is a bit more of a nutter.

“Honestly, why not? [A GPS transmitter] might be radical and it sounds brutal but sometimes it feels like a good solution to avoid being treated with suspicion for no reason. But it’s hard to be one hundred percent sure without having a chip surgically implanted into the skin,” he told Svenska Dagbladet.

Uh, the entire reason you will be fitted with such a device means that they can’t trust you and you are being treated with suspicion for no reason, you dolt.

“They really do want to know where we are at any given moment and in a way it would be the easiest way to keep track of us athletes, however science fiction and absurd it may sound,” Holm added.

Geesh, with logic like this, how can you argue with them?  It’d be like banging your head against a brick wall for no reason.

Besides the fact that this is a very bad idea, it is the top of the slippery slope.  First, you get star athletes to agree to be monitored at all times, which doesn’t really prevent anything.  Next, you move on to the criminals.  After all, why wouldn’t you want the criminals to be tracked (even if they did their time to society and are supposed to be forgiven)?  The military will be the most likely target after that.  Why?  Because they are told they need this and will be dishonorably discharged if they don’t adhere to commands.

Then, you move on to the children, because, well, we have to think of the safety of the children, don’t we?  Once that’s done, they move on to you because now it will be compulsory.  After everyone is used to being kept track of, they add in other things, such as checking your DNA.  You don’t have anything to hide, do you?

So what’s the big deal?  The big deal is that some athletes take illegal drugs to get an edge.  While the sport is harmed by such actions, it isn’t going to stop anyone.  They will just move on to other drugs that are more difficult to detect.  Tracking their whereabouts is not going to solve anything.