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Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

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Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#271

Post by bavila »

schoen wrote: post #225
bavila wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. I used to work as a criminal defense attorney, and the job regularly required that I obtain subpoenas from the court in order to mandate a witness's appearance at court. My state courts have a template that subpoenas must follow,…

> I don't think there's a ton of value someone could get out of obtaining a fake subpoena A subpoena can also order the production of documents (in many cases including business records about other people, such as log files). That could be pretty consequential if the private information turned over was very sensitive. When I was working at EFF I filed some comments on an international law enforcement cooperation plan…

That's a good point.

I think, generally, a subpoena issued as a request for production of documents would likely be vetted by an attorney; however, I could see how a small business owner (for example) may be likely to accept an official-looking subpoena at face value and seek to comply out of fear without first consulting a lawyer.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#272

Post by godelski »

amingilani wrote: post #219
lqet wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Germany we had a few cases where persons worked as hospital doctors for a few years without a license or diploma or even any medical training. They usually submitted a fake license to the hospital. There was a spectacular case in the 1990s where a former postal employee named himself "Dr. med. Dr. phil. Clemens Bartholdy" and later worked as a senior physician in a psychiatric hospital, also giving lectures […

In Pakistan, apparently pilots would fly with fake licenses and it was known to the authorities: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/business/pakistan-fake-pilot-...

Honestly, at least with private pilots, it's probably pretty common (there's a joke that people in Alaska aren't licensed at all). No one is checking your license when you get into and out of the plane. I've definitely flown with someone who wasn't legally allowed to fly me at night.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#273

Post by amingilani »

godelski wrote: post #272
amingilani wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Pakistan, apparently pilots would fly with fake licenses and it was known to the authorities: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/business/pakistan-fake-pilot-...

Honestly, at least with private pilots, it's probably pretty common (there's a joke that people in Alaska aren't licensed at all). No one is checking your license when you get into and out of the plane. I've definitely flown with someone who wasn't legally allowed to fly me at night.

Yes but these were pilots flying national airlines and allegedly even loaned out to other international airlines.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#275

Post by Thorrez »

mjh2539 wrote: post #262
texasbigdata wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems similar to the Catholic concept of buying indulgences as a carbon offset type concept against sins. Pay to play

It's not; indulgences remit the temporal punishment associated with sin (mortal sins incur eternal punishment in additional to temporal punishment; merely venial sins incur only temporal punishment). Mortal sin can be forgiven only through contrition and reconciliation. Temporal sin can be forgiven at the leisure of the Church (i.e., through indulgences). To commit a sin with the intention of attempting to obtain for…

>To commit a sin with the intention of attempting to obtain forgiveness through reconciliation afterward is itself a mortal sin.

Source? If you do it with a mortal sin I can understand it would be a second mortal sin. But it seems harsh to make a venial sin into a mortal sin from this.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#276

Post by darekkay »

viraptor wrote: post #139
OwlsParlay wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For US-based news sites they might well only get a few European visitors. I only ever get this problem for trending stories like this.

If a US site does not have any presence in the EU and is not selling anything to the EU visitors, why would they even bother adding the blocking? They can... do nothing instead. (Or disable buying subscription to the EU)

GDPR doesn't depend on whether you're selling something. Just visiting the website from the EU is enough to require the business to comply with the privacy laws.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#277

Post by camillomiller »

Off topic. This website blocks me as I try to access from Germany, because they don’t want to comply with the GDPR. To me this equal as saying that, as a website, you don’t care about my privacy at all, and therefore disqualifies you in all regards. No matter what you’ll write and say, you’re running a website that has no clue or does not care about protecting user privacy.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#278

Post by jimz »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #265
pseingatl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point--judicial orders contain no security features and are printed on ordinary paper. They long ago did away with the embossed seals, so now copying these are trivial and normally not needed unless a certified copy of the order is required. The article shows surprise at the defendant's cleverness in filing electronically. Not so--in many jurisdictions, electronic filing is mandatory. Pleadings filed by parties…

The adversarial system used in US courts assumes the other side will discover such frauds and bring them to the attention of the court. I think the frauds that appear to be legal but do not actually involve courts are where more harm is. These are the scams asking people to pay fines or else.

And it does, of course, very frequently. The US Court system's problem is not a matter of discovering such frauds and wrongdoing, and in some fields it's almost impossible to get away with this sort of conduct, but overall, there's little avenues of redress. Civil litigation is obviously the biggest area and the best positioned to both catch and remedy the fraud. Some criminal proceedings have similar robust checks, but that is really only on one side - the defense's side. Prosecutors are immune and protections like Batson (racially motivated jury selections justified under pretextual justifications that later are found unreasonable) or Brady (prosecutors hiding evidence favorable to the defense or misrepresenting its existence at all) exist but there's not real accountability outside of personal shame and possibly getting a conviction vacated. Administrative courts are overwhwlemingly immigration courts where the nature of the proceedings ensure that the aggrieved party pretty much is ensured to be unavailable in the legal sense to challenge most of the cases.

There's a lot of fraud, waste,a abuse, or other chicanery in the courts and luckily in my experience they're never simply kept hidden without anyone noticing. The problem is always redressability. So much of the system requires discretionary rulings but the laws that dictate how we handle misconduct is heavily skewed in favor of the state if they ar a party and fails to take into account the urgency in resolving these cases that very often it becomes obvious that there's fraud, yes, but there's no redressability, and therefore there's no real punishment.

A particularly egregious case of falsifying evidence and using prtextual reasons to elicit false testimony and racially-based jury selections is the US v. Flowers case in the Supreme Court last term. There's a podcast on it, but the decision itself is... excoriating to say the least as to how far and how egregious the conduct was to try to execute an innocent man. It's discovered all right, but there's no punishment. So courts can and do definitely figure out fraud pretty readily, but when it comes to doing anything about it, victims not on the side of the state frequently find it cold comfort.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#279

Post by WalterBright »

eru wrote: post #255
WalterBright wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual way to fix these sorts of things is to ensure there are multiple independent barriers to fraud. 2 factor authorization is an example. Double entry bookkeeping is another. Independent audits is another. Separate checks for unusual activity is another.

The latter two explicitly acknowledge that spotting fraud is a probabilistic activity.

If it was certain, one wouldn't need multiple layers of security.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#280

Post by tsimionescu »

WalterBright wrote: post #151
doublekill wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having someone else do your prison time was fairly common. Now with more cooperation between organizations and improved biometrics it has dropped. Different people would be arrested, show up to court, or enter the prison. Impossible for organizations downstream to detect or assume a switch had happened.

Positively identifying people was very difficult before fingerprinting came along. The police used all kinds of schemes of erratic accuracy.

Isn't photo ID much more relevant for the above than fingerprints? Usually fingerprints are used to investigate crime scenes, not to ascertain identity of an already known person (you don't normally ascertain that this person here is Alex A by their fingerprints - you use them to see if Alex A was in the room where the jewelry got stolen).
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