Monday, June 24, 2019



Ex-Dem Staffer Who Doxed Republicans During Kavanaugh Hearing Sentenced To 4 Years In Jail

The former Sheila Jackson Lee staffer who posted the private information of Republican senators during the final hearing for then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been sentenced to four years in prison for his crime.

Jackson Cosko was described by prosecutors as having “self-righteous entitlement” and believing “that he could violate the sanctity of the United State Senate at will and threaten individual Senators as he pleased,” The Daily Caller’s Luke Rosniak reported. Rosniak further wrote prosecutors sought to make an example of Cosko because his crime allegedly led to other incidents of attacks on political opposition.

Cosko is the son of the CEO of a major construction company who has ties to House Speaker Nance Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Cosko previously worked as a staffer in Sen. Maggie Hassan’s (D-NH) office, but had since moved on to working for Lee. While senators questioned Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who accused the now-Associate Justice of groping her while they were both in high school some 30 years ago, Cosko snuck into his former boss’ office to use a computer to publish the private information of some of the Republican senators who supported Kavanaugh.

Another staffer in Hassan’s office recognized Cosko and reported him, so he sent the staffer an email threatening to “leak it all” if the staffer told anyone what he had done.

“Emails signal conversations gmails. Senators children’s health information and socials,” Cosko wrote to the staffer.

Cosko pleaded guilty in April “to crimes related to an unparalleled effort to ransack a Senate office, extorting a Democratic senator, illegally harming Republicans for their political views, and blackmailing a witness,” Rosniak reported.

Prosecutors, according to Rosniak, asked for a five-year prison sentence.

“The government believes that a significant sentence would help to make clear that difference of political opinion do not entitle people to engage in politically motivated, criminal attacks threatening elected officials with whom he disagrees, and would thereby encourage respect for the law, and deter future criminal conduct,” they wrote.

Rosniak reported that new details about Cosko’s crimes were released in a sentencing memo, including the fact that the senate learned later — because Cosko told them — that the offices were being spied on due to his keylogger devices.

Prosecutors wrote that Cosko laughed about his crimes and said he planned to use the data he stole from the senate offices “to punish people who disagreed with his politics.”

“The defendant operated under the belief that he was entitled to inflict emotional distress upon United States Senators and their families, simply because they disagreed with the defendant and had different political views,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo. “The government believes that there appears to have been an increase in similar criminal harassment, particularly through social media channels, by people across the political spectrum.”

On Wednesday, a second former Hassan staffer was charged for acting as Cosko’s accomplice. Politico reported that Samantha Deforest Davis, a former staff assistant for Hassan who left in December, was expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges for helping Cosko. Davis allegedly tampered with evidence and aided and abetted computer fraud by allowing Cosko to use her keys to repeatedly return to Hassan’s office after he was let go.

SOURCE  




Overthrow the Prince of Facebook
    
Peggy Noonan

I’ll start with a personal experience and then try to expand into Republicans and big tech.

In the spring of 2016, Facebook came under pressure, stemming from leaks by its workers, over charges of systemic political bias. I was not especially interested: a Silicon Valley company that employs thousands of young people to make decisions that are often ideological will tilt left, and conservatives must factor that in, as they’re used to doing.

My concerns about Facebook had to do with its apparently monopolistic nature, slippery ethics and algorithmic threats to serious journalism.

Soon after, I received an email from Mark Zuckerberg’s office inviting me and other “conservative activists” to attend a meeting with him to discuss the bias charges in an off-the-record conversation. I responded that I was not an activist but a columnist, for the Journal, and would be happy to attend in that capacity and on the record. That didn’t go over too well with Mr. Zuckerberg’s office! I was swiftly told that wouldn’t do.

What I most remember is that they didn’t mention where his office is. There was an air of being summoned by the prince. You know where the prince lives. In the castle. Who doesn’t know exactly where Facebook is?

In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.

Predictably, the conservatives “failed to unify in a way that was either threatening or coherent.” Many used the time “to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.”

After the meeting, attendees gushed, calling Mr. Zuckerberg and his staffers humble and open. Glenn Beck praised the CEO’s “earnest desire to ‘connect the world.’”

Never were pawns so happily used.

I forgot about it until last summer, when Mr. Zuckerberg’s office wrote again. His problems were mounting. I was invited now, with an unspecified group of others, to “an off the record discussion over dinner at his home in Palo Alto.” They used that greasy greaseball language Silicon Valley uses: Mr. Zuckerberg is “focused on protecting” users and thinking about “the future and how best to serve the Facebook community.”

I ignored the invitation. They pressed. Their last note reached me at an irritated moment, so I wrote back a rocket, reminding him of the previous meeting and how it had been revealed to be a mischievous and highly political enacting of faux remorse. I suggested that though it was an honor to be asked to cross a continent for the privilege of giving him my time, thought and advice, I would not. I added that I was sorry to say he strikes me in his public, and now semiprivate, presentations as an imperious twerp.

For a second I actually hesitated: The imperious twerp runs the algorithms, controls the traffic, has all the dark powers! But I am an American, and one with her Irish up, so I hit send.

And I’m still here, at least at the moment, so I guess that’s OK.

Facebook’s famous sins and failings include the abuse of private data, selling space to Russian propagandists in the 2016 presidential campaign, starving journalism of ad revenues, monopolistically acquiring or doing in possible competitors, political mischief, and turning users into the unknowing product. I once wrote the signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg’s career is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical ingenuity by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness.

None of this is news. We just can’t manage to do anything about it.

Now there are moves to push back. The House Judiciary Committee will hold antitrust investigations into big tech. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is warning that “unwarranted concentrated economic power in the hands of a few is dangerous to democracy.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made a splash with her pushback on big tech; Sen. Amy Klobuchar included it in her presidential announcement speech.

The New York Times this week had a breakthrough report, from Cecilia Kang and Kenneth Vogel, on how the tech giants are fighting back. They are “amassing an army of lobbyists.” Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spent a combined $55 million in lobbying last year, about double what they spent in 2016. They “have intensified their efforts to lure lobbyists with strong connections to the White House, the regulatory agencies, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress.” Facebook hired Mrs. Pelosi’s former chief of staff. The speaker herself has received major campaign money from employees and political-action committees of all the tech giants. Google pays lobbyists who worked on the Republican staff of House Judiciary.

They’ve got it wired, haven’t they?

But the mood in America is anti-big-tech. Everyone knows they’re too powerful, too arrogant, loom too large in public life.

And something else: This whole new world of new technology was born in the 1970s and ‘80s. We still think it’s new and we’re figuring it out, but we’re almost half a century into it and we can see what works and what doesn’t, what’s had good effects and hasn’t. It is time to move.

We’re Americans and we love money and success and the hallowed story of the kid in the garage who invents the beautiful product that changes the world.

And Republican officials—they can’t help it, they don’t just rightly love business; they love big business, they love titans. It’s almost romantic: Look what people can do in America! He started it in his dorm room! And now we’re at lunch!

It’s all too human, and of course greedy: Maybe these guys will start giving me money! I mean Pelosi-size money!

Here’s what they should be thinking: Break them up. Break them in two, in three; regulate them. Declare them to be what they’ve so successfully become: once a pleasure, now a utility.

It all depends on Congress, which has been too stupid to move in the past and is too stupid to move competently now. That’s what’s slowed those of us who want reform, knowing how badly they’d do it.

Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.

Why are Republicans so slow to lead? The Times quoted Republican Sen. Josh Hawley as saying “the dominance of big tech” is a “big problem.” They “may be more socially powerful than the trusts of the Roosevelt era, and yet they still operate like a black box.”

He’s right.

But I read about lobbyists coming at Republican congressional leaders and I think, it’s going to be like Mr. Zuckerberg’s meeting with the conservatives in 2016. A tech god will give them some attention, some respect, and they’ll fold like a cheap suit.

If they are as stupid and unserious as their critics take them to be, they will go to the meeting and be used.

They should say no and hit send.

SOURCE  






Another crooked cop in Britain

A police officer groomed, raped and sexually abused a string of teenage girls, bragging about his role on the force, a court has heard. In one case David Waller, 33, raped a 16-year-old girl minutes after she had spotted his police uniform hanging in his wardrobe, it is alleged.

He also groomed another teenager by bragging about being a police officer, owning a new BMW and being a glider pilot.

Waller, it is alleged, abused his positions of responsibility as a Cleveland Police officer between 2006 and 2010, as a gliding instructor and as a member of theatre groups.

Throughout a 12-year period from 2004 to 2016 he ignored his duty of care towards the girls and used his position to groom them into sexual activity with him.

He also began a sexual relationship with a woman after meeting her when she went to his force to report a crime.

In total he faces 13 charges with eight complainants, seven of them being girls aged 13 to 16.

Nine of the offences encompass the four years he was as a serving police officer working in Stockton on Tees.

One of his alleged victims later told police that the attentions of the older man made her feel "dead grown up," unaware that she was being deliberately targeted and groomed for sex.

Waller denies three charges of rape, three charges of grooming under age girls, two charges of inciting sexual activity with a child, one charge of sexual assault, three of sexual activity with a child and one of misconduct in public office.

The latter alleges he had a sexual relationship with a complainant in a case being investigated by the police. The trial continues.

SOURCE  







Albo, take faith seriously

One of the first things new Australian Labor Party leader, Anthony Albanese, needs to emphasise to his demoralised party is that they will not return to government without showing they take religion seriously.

Albo’s own seat of Grayndler — which Labor holds with a margin of nearly 16 per cent — is one of a number of Labor-held Western Sydney seats where the electorate includes many voters who are about God.

It matters to Australia’s Muslim, Christian, and Hindu voters — and all the others who have a religious affiliation — that they are free to practise their faith; and, if they wish, to talk about it openly.

No wonder Labor frontbenchers have warned Albanese that Labor needs to work constructively with the Morrison government to address concerns about religious freedom by passing new laws.

It sounds like simple and sensible advice. But the problem for the new Labor leader is that a decision to cooperate with the government on matters of religion is likely to further divide his party.

For a deep and possibly irreparable fissure has opened up — and runs right through the heart of the ALP.

On one side stand Labor’s traditional blue-collar and middle-class voters respectful of belief in God. But on the other side stand the battalions of Labor’s inner-city intellectuals who sneer at religion, dismiss faith as primitive superstition, and wield the cudgels of identity politics.

It is not the deity that commands the unswerving devotion of the elites, but diversity. And they impose on the rest of us what political scientist, Kenneth Minogue, once described as “a dictatorship of virtue”.

The ALP is going to have to get to grips with God if it hopes to occupy the government benches in the House of Reps again. But in order to do that, Albanese is going to have to work a miracle of his own.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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