US Justice Department senior career ethics official removed from post, source says; Reuters, January 27, 2025

Sarah N. Lynch, Reuters ; US Justice Department senior career ethics official removed from post, source says

"The Trump administration has removed the U.S. Justice Department's senior career ethics official from his post, according to a person familiar with the matter, in an action likely to stoke fears about whether the department will be able to remain insulated from political pressures and conflicts,

Bradley Weinsheimer, a department veteran who was appointed as associate deputy attorney general during President Donald Trump's first term, was ordered to report to a newly-created working group on "sanctuary cities" that is based out of the Associate Attorney General's office, the source told Reuters.

Weinsheimer declined to comment about the reassignment when asked earlier on Monday by a Reuters reporter...

Weinsheimer is among dozens of top career officials who have been reassigned to that office and other posts from areas across the department, including the Civil Rights, National Security, Criminal and Environment and Natural Resources divisions, as well as the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

His re-assignment comes after the Trump administration also removed Corey Amundson, the senior career official who ran the section in charge of public corruption and election fraud investigations and reassigned him to sanctuary cities. That section must be consulted on all politically-sensitive investigations, according to Justice Department rules."

Cuban citizen convicted in U.S. streaming piracy scheme; UPI, November 16, 2024

 Mike Heuer , UPI; Cuban citizen convicted in U.S. streaming piracy scheme

"A federal jury in Las Vegas found Yoany Vaillant guilty of conspiring to commit criminal copyright infringement for his work on behalf of illegal streamer Jetflicks.

Vaillant, 43, is a Cuban citizen and knows 27 computer programming languages, which he used to streamline the subscription-based but illegal Jetflicks content for its subscribers who were located throughout the United States, the Department of Justice announced in a news release Friday...

Jetflicks is headquartered in Las Vegas and claimed to have 183,285 copyrighted episodes of television programming, which is much more than Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and any other streaming services.

Prosecutors provided evidence showing Vaillant and seven co-conspirators scoured pirate sites located around the world to access and download its extensive library of streaming titles without obtaining permission or paying respective copyright holders...

"The vast scale of Jetflicks' piracy affected every significant copyright owner of a television program in the United States," the DOJ said.

The illegal streaming caused "millions of dollars of losses to the U.S. television show and streaming industries," the agency said.

Vaillant was among eight defendants indicted in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia in 2019."

Former GOP lawmakers, officials urge Garland to investigate Musk; The Washington Post, October 21, 2024

 Perry Stein, The Washington Post; Former GOP lawmakers, officials urge Garland to investigate Musk

"Former Republican lawmakers, advisers and Justice Department officials have called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate tech billionaire Elon Musk for awarding cash prizes to voters in swing states if they sign his political organization’s petition, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post and sent to Garland on Monday.

The letter argues that the large prizes set up by Musk, a vocal supporter of Republican nominee Donald Trump, violate federal voting laws that prohibit paying people to register to vote.

Musk announced Saturday that his political group, America PAC, would use a lottery to award $1 million each day until the election to a registered voter who signs a petition saying they support free speech and the right to bear arms. Only voters registered in seven swing states — including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada — are eligible for the prizes."

US conservative influencers say they are ‘victims’ of Russian disinformation campaign; The Guardian, September 4, 2024

Guardian staff and agencies , The Guardian; US conservative influencers say they are ‘victims’ of Russian disinformation campaign

"A number of high-profile, conservative influencers in the US have said they are “victims” of an alleged Russian disinformation campaign, after the Biden administration accused Moscow of carrying out a sustained campaign to influence the outcome of November’s presidential elections.

Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson published statements on Wednesday evening addressing allegations that a US content creation company they were associated with had been provided with nearly $10m from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages in favour of Moscow’s interests and agenda, including over the war in Ukraine...

“The company never disclosed to the influencers – or to their millions of followers – its ties to [Russian state media company] RT and the Russian government,” US attorney general Merrick Garland said. His department described Wednesday’s indictment as the most sweeping effort yet to push back against what it says are Russian attempts to spread disinformation ahead of the November presidential election."

DOJ outlines Russia’s disinformation campaigns designed to interfere with U.S. election; PBS News, September 4, 2024

Amna Nawaz, Kyle Midura , PBS News; DOJ outlines Russia’s disinformation campaigns designed to interfere with U.S. election

"Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined sophisticated disinformation campaigns undertaken by Russia to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. He warned that Russia is pumping lies into the U.S. via fake news outlets and real social media influencers. Amna Nawaz discussed more with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby."

U.S. Accuses Software Maker RealPage of Enabling Collusion on Rents; The New York Times, August 23, 2024

Danielle KayeLauren Hirsch and David McCabe , The New York Times; U.S. Accuses Software Maker RealPage of Enabling Collusion on Rents

"The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit on Friday against the real estate software company RealPage, alleging its software enabled landlords to collude to raise rents across the United States.

The suit, joined by North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington, accuses RealPage of facilitating a price-fixing conspiracy that boosted rents beyond market forces for millions of people. It’s the first major civil antitrust lawsuit where the role of an algorithm in pricing manipulation is central to the case, Justice Department officials said."

Justice Department sues TikTok, accusing the company of illegally collecting children’s data; AP, August 2, 2024

HALELUYA HADERO, AP; Justice Department sues TikTok, accusing the company of illegally collecting children’s data

"The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating children’s online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency. 

The complaint, filed together with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court, comes as the U.S. and the prominent social media company are embroiled in yet another legal battle that will determine if – or how – TikTok will continue to operate in the country. 

The latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13. It also says the companies failed to honor requests from parents who wanted their children’s accounts deleted, and chose not to delete accounts even when the firms knew they belonged to kids under 13."

Federal officials caution employers on using AI in hiring; FCW, May 12, 2022

Natalie Alms, FCW; Federal officials caution employers on using AI in hiring

"The growing use of artificial intelligence and other software tools for hiring, performance monitoring and pay determination in the workplace is compounding discriminiation against people with disabilities, federal civil rights officials say.

Artificial intelligence can be deployed to target job ads to certain potential applicants, hold online job interviews, assess the skills of job applicants and even decide if an applicant meets job requirements. But the technology can discriminate against applicants and employees with disabilities.

On Thursday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Justice put employers on alert that they're responsible for not using AI tools in ways that discriminate and inform employees of their rights, agency officials told reporters."

Justice Department ends limiting compassionate release in plea deals after NPR story; NPR, March 11, 2022

 Carrie Johnson, NPR; Justice Department ends limiting compassionate release in plea deals after NPR story

"The Justice Department is directing prosecutors to stop limiting defendants' ability to seek compassionate release in most federal plea agreements, after advocates criticized the practice as cruel and against the intent of Congress.

DOJ officials handed down the order a month after an NPR story detailed the practice, which curtailed peoples' ability to petition for release from prison because of severe illness or other extraordinary circumstances. That story drew the attention of Attorney General Merrick Garland who this week said it seemed "wrong" and pledged to fix the issue...

The compassionate release program has become a crucial lifeline for people in prison during the coronavirus pandemic, even if the petitions are still granted rarely."

Justice Department investigates Sci-Hub founder on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence; The Washington Post, December 19, 2019

Shane Harris and Devlin Barrett, The Washington Post; Justice Department investigates Sci-Hub founder on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence

"Elbakyan’s work has been the subject of legal and ethical controversy. In 2017, a New York district court awarded $15 million in damages to Elsevier, a leading science publisher, for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and other sites...

Sci-Hub has made millions of documents available to users around the world, said Andrew Pitts, the managing director of PSI, an independent group based in England that advocates for legitimate access to scholarly content.

Pitts said there are 373 universities in 39 countries “that have suffered an intrusion from Sci-Hub,” which he defined as “using stolen credentials to illegally enter a university’s secure network.” More than 150 of the institutions are in the United States, Pitts said...

“She is the Kim Dotcom of scholarly publications,” said Joseph DeMarco, an attorney in New York who represented Elsevier in its lawsuit against Elbakyan. (Dotcom ran a famous file-sharing site that U.S. authorities said violated copyright law.)"

The walls are closing in on Trump, says “Enemies: The President, Justice & the FBI” author Weiner; Salon, November 18, 2018

Melanie McFarland, Salon; The walls are closing in on Trump, says “Enemies: The President, Justice & the FBI” author Weiner


[Kip Currier: Good advice from author Tim Weiner in the Q & A exchange below, for anyone writing and creating:]

"You know, I've been a reporter on deadline most of my life. You gotta press the button. You gotta hit 'send.’"

[Salon's Melanie McFarland] "Why does the series end at the Comey firing and his testimony? I'm imagining that a number of people who view it may have questions as to why it halted there, given everything that's happened since.

[Tim Weiner] It's the fact of Mueller and Comey, the two men who ran the FBI from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2017 — 15 and a half years — who are now, by turns, special counsel and star witness.

It’s reminding people about how they teamed up to stop President Bush's assault on the Constitution, and trying to drive home that when Trump fired Comey, the counter-intelligence investigation into the Russian attack on the 2016 election became a criminal investigation, led to the appointment of Mueller and lead to a charge for Mueller that he could investigate anything. He was not delimited to the question of Russia.

You can bet your bottom dollar that there is going to be a sequel. And we talked, the directors, producers and Alex and I, we talked more than once about, you know, when we get to that Sunday in November, what Mueller brings the hammer down on that Friday? The grand jury meets on Fridays.
And you know, we decided we'd just saddle up and start again.

You know, I've been a reporter on deadline most of my life. You gotta press the button. You gotta hit 'send.’

A book needs a back cover. So we've got to decide what is the strongest structure that we can present."

There is no way this man should be running the Justice Department; The Washington Post, November 9, 2018

Editorial Board, The Washington Post; There is no way this man should be running the Justice Department

 

"Finally, and fundamentally most damning, is Mr. Whitaker’s expressed hostility to Marbury v. Madison, a central case — the central case — in the American constitutional system. It established an indispensable principle: The courts decide what is and is not constitutional. Without Marbury, there would be no effective judicial check on the political branches, no matter how egregious their actions.

 

If the Senate were consulted, it is impossible to imagine Mr. Whitaker getting close to the attorney general’s office. He should not be there now."

The White House’s Aversion to Ethical Scrutiny; New York Times, May 25, 2017

Editorial Board, New York Times; 

The White House’s Aversion to Ethical Scrutiny

"Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department disagreed, saying on Tuesday that its ethics experts “determined that Mr. Mueller’s participation in the matters assigned to him is appropriate.” Mr. Mueller did not represent Mr. Kushner nor Mr. Manafort while at WilmerHale, a firm that employs 300 lawyers in Washington and 1,200 globally. Nor was Mr. Mueller privy to any confidential information about their cases, a state of affairs that satisfies both District of Columbia and federal rules.

Why would White House lawyers pursue such a baseless line of attack? “They’re trying to use the ethics rules to fire a special prosecutor,” Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, said. “That’s insane.” If the Bush administration had told him to concoct legal justifications for evading ethics rules and legal inquiries in this way, Mr. Painter said, “I’d have quit.”"

Justice Dept. to review possible ethics conflicts involving Mueller’s former law firm; Washington Post, May 18, 2017

Matea Gold and Rosalind S. Helderman, Washington Post; Justice Dept. to review possible ethics conflicts involving Mueller’s former law firm

"Newly appointed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will undergo a Justice Department ethics review that will examine possible conflicts of interest regarding his former law firm, which represents several figures who could be caught up in the probe into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said Thursday that the agency will conduct a background investigation and detailed review of conflict-of-interest issues, a process outlined in the regulation governing special counsels under which he was appointed...

Ethics experts said they anticipate that the Justice Department will grant a waiver, noting that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein would have taken Mueller’s past employer into consideration when selecting him."

FBI Arrests Hacker Who Hacked No One; Daily Beast, March 31, 2017

Kevin Poulsen, Daily Beast; FBI Arrests Hacker Who Hacked No One

"Now free on bond, Huddleston, 26, is scheduled to appear in a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia on Friday for arraignment on federal charges of conspiracy and aiding and abetting computer intrusions.

Huddleston, though, isn’t a hacker. He’s the author of a remote administration tool, or RAT, called NanoCore that happens to be popular with hackers. NanoCore has been linked to intrusions in at least 10 countries, including an attack on Middle Eastern energy firms in 2015, and a massive phishing campaign last August in which the perpetrators posed as major oil and gas company. As Huddleston sees it, he’s a victim himself—hackers have been pirating his program for years and using it to commit crimes. But to the Justice Department, Huddleston is an accomplice to a spree of felonies.

Depending on whose view prevails, Huddleston could face prison time and lose his home, in a case that raises a novel question: when is a programmer criminally responsible for the actions of his users?"

USPTO Fights Fraudulent Trademark Solicitations; Guest blog by Commissioner for Trademarks Mary Boney Denison, Director's Forum: A Blog from USPTO's Leadership, 12/21/16

Guest blog by Commissioner for Trademarks Mary Boney Denison, Director's Forum: A Blog from USPTO's Leadership; USPTO Fights Fraudulent Trademark Solicitations:

"The USPTO has worked hard to fight solicitations from companies fraudulently promising to protect trademarks, and we have taken a number of steps to help raise awareness of these schemes in an attempt to limit the number of victims defrauded. Our agency works closely with federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the United States Postal Inspection Service to combat the problem...

A registered trademark is a valuable asset, and where there’s money, unfortunately, there are bound to be criminal elements lurking. The USPTO continues to provide its ongoing full support to U.S. law enforcement officials working on this issue."

New Era for Disability Rights; Inside Higher Ed, 11/7/16

Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed; New Era for Disability Rights:

"Disability studies scholars and legal experts say lawsuits like Dudley’s against Miami represent a shift in activism, where high-profile cases help raise awareness about the challenges facing students in an increasingly digital world. More than two decades after the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 was signed into law, advocacy groups are pushing to clarify how it and other laws that prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities apply to technology that at the time seemed like science fiction but now has become reality. At the same time, those and other groups are pushing for new legislation, keeping one eye on the upcoming process to rewrite the Higher Education Act...

Jonathan S. Fansmith, who works in government relations for ACE [American Council on Education], said in an interview that the associations are looking for a middle ground with regulations that ensure core university functions -- registering for classes, paying tuition and so on -- are accessible to anyone but don’t stifle university research output.

“We want to do the right thing here,” Fansmith said. “We want to do it the right way. We want to have cognizance of a process that’s thoughtful, deliberate and can actually be achieved so you don’t get schools that say, ‘Look, this is going to be so costly, so burdensome.’”"

U.S. Justice Department Defends Copyright Anti-Hacking Law as "Unquestionably Constitutional"; Hollywood Reporter, 9/30/16

Eriq Gardner, Hollywood Reporter; U.S. Justice Department Defends Copyright Anti-Hacking Law as "Unquestionably Constitutional" :

"The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding an end to a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of a law that prevents people from getting around the access restrictions on copyrighted works such as films, television shows and songs.

In July, the Electronic Frontier Foundation led the lawsuit that argues that the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Sec. 1201) inhibits free expression in violation of the First Amendment. The law allows for a triennial review where every three years the Librarian of Congress grants exemptions. For example, in the most recent review, the government made it legal to hack a smart TV to achieve interoperability and also allowed grade school teachers to circumvent access controls on DVDs for educational purposes."

Justice department 'uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests'; Guardian, 7/16/16

Sam Thielman, Guardian; Justice department 'uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests' :

"A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.

Freedom of Information Act (Foia) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The Foia law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”."...

Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro told the Guardian, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

“The FBI’s assertion is akin to suggesting that a search of a limited and arbitrarily produced card catalogue at a vast library is as likely to locate book pages containing a specified search term as a full text search of database containing digitized versions of all the books in that library,” Shapiro said.

Bipartisan Disapproval Follows Bill Clinton's Meeting With Loretta Lynch; NPR, 6/30/16

Carrie Johnson, NPR; Bipartisan Disapproval Follows Bill Clinton's Meeting With Loretta Lynch:

"From the standpoint of legal ethics, Lynch did nothing wrong, said New York University law school professor Stephen Gillers. Gillers said he didn't think the attorney general needed to recuse herself from overseeing the email probe. But Gillers took a sterner tone with Bill Clinton.

"It was the height of insensitivity for the former president to approach the attorney general," Gillers said. "He put her in a very difficult position. She wasn't really free to say she wouldn't talk to a former president," after Clinton boarded her plane in Arizona.

"He jeopardized her independence and did create an appearance of impropriety going on to her plane," Gillers added."