Category: Crime

Two commanders in the Massachusetts Air National Guard were temporarily suspended last week in connection with a federal investigation into alleged classified intelligence leaker Jack Teixeira, the Air Force confirmed Thursday.

Col. Sean Riley, commander of the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod, suspended the head of the subordinate 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron where Teixeira worked. The commander in charge of supporting airmen like Teixeira, who are mobilized on full-time, active-duty Title 10 orders, was suspended as well, according to Air Force spokesperson Rose Riley.

In addition to temporarily removing the commanders from their jobs, the Department of the Air Force has also revoked their access to classified networks and information, Riley told Air Force Times. Reuters first reported the development on Wednesday.

Lyft said Thursday it will cut 26% of its workforce, or about 1,072 people, as part of a restructuring plan aimed at rebuilding its core ride-hailing product and boosting profits.

The company also said in a regulatory filing Thursday that it decided to scale back hiring plans and will eliminate 250 open job positions.

Lyft estimates that it will incur a cost of about $41 million to $47 million related to severance and employee benefits in the second quarter of 2023. The ride-hailing company also said it expects additional costs related to stock-based compensation and the corresponding payroll tax expense related to employees who were impacted by this restructuring.

Last week, Lyft’s newly appointed CEO David Risher told employees in an email that the company would significantly reduce its workforce as part of a restructuring effort. Risher said the restructuring would be part of Lyft’s plan to “better meeting the needs of riders and drivers.”

The alleged boss of one of Italy’s biggest mafia syndicates has been arrested by police at a cathedral in the northern city of Genoa.

Pasquale Bonavota has been wanted by police since 2018 after fleeing an arrest warrant for murder and mafia association.

Police say the 49-year-old leads the notorious ‘Ndrangheta mafia.

The group is Italy’s most powerful mafia family and is said to control the bulk of Europe’s cocaine supplies.

Pasquale Bonavota – whom newspaper La Stampa describes as the “baby boss” – had been at the city’s cathedral when arrested and was carrying a fake ID, according to local media reports.

He is one of the defendants in an ongoing “maxi-trial,” in which more than 300 people face charges related to organised crime.

Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the bills actually come out, they’re…

WORCESTER, Mass. — The Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking highly classified military documents kept an arsenal of guns and said on social media that he would like to kill a “ton of people,” prosecutors said in arguing Thursday that 21-year-old Jack Teixeira should remain in jail for his trial.

But the judge at Teixeira’s detention hearing put off an immediate decision whether he should be kept in custody or released to home confinement or under other conditions. Teixeira was led away from the court in handcuffs, black rosary beads around his neck, pending that ruling.

The court filings raise new questions about why Teixeira had such a high security clearance and access to some of the nation’s most classified secrets. They said he may still have material that hasn’t been released, which could be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States.”

More than three years after his arrest, Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, has avoided prison for failing to disclose funding from China. For hiding his affiliation with a Chinese university, as well as income tax and foreign bank account reporting violations, Lieber was sentenced yesterday to time served, two years of supervised release with six…

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has avoided starting her more than 11-year prison sentence on Thursday by deploying the same legal maneuver that enabled her co-conspirator in a blood-testing hoax to remain free for an additional month.

Holmes’ lawyers on Wednesday informed U.S. District Judge Edward Davila that she won’t be reporting to prison as scheduled because she had filed an appeal of a decision that he issued earlier this month ordering her to begin her sentence on April 27.

The appeal, filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late Tuesday, automatically delays her reporting date because she has been free on bail since a jury convicted her on four counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022. The verdict followed a four-month trial revolving around her downfall from a rising Silicon Valley star to an alleged scam artist chasing fame and fortune while fleecing investors and endangering the health of patients relying on Theranos’ flawed blood tests.

The tactic deployed by Holmes mirrored a move made last month by her former lover and subordinate, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, to avoid a prison reporting date of March 16. After the Ninth Circuit rejected his appeal three weeks later, Davila set a new reporting date of April 20.

Two decades of misconduct records will be now trickling out of the NYSP’s hands. One assumes it will be a very slow drip, one perhaps interrupted by last-minute admissions the NYSP has, say, destroyed records it was required to retain. A lot can happen over twenty years, but hopefully it won’t take twenty years for records requesters to obtain what they’re entitled to possess.

The Superior Court (basically the first level of state courts in New York) decision [PDF] is short and sweet. It not only directs the NYSP to comply with the law, but draws some other helpful legal conclusions along the way, like this one, which says cop shops can’t withhold information about officers who were investigated for misconduct, but later cleared of wrongdoing.

It is clear that the mere fact that the complaint was determined to be unsubstantiated does not categorically exempt the records from disclosure.

The U.N. appears to have officially announced that young children have a right to engage in consensual sex– including consensual sex with an adult. The United Nations published a declaration stating that “sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.”

The U.N. document, The 8 March Principles for a Human Rights-Based Approach to Criminal Law Proscribing Conduct Associated with Sex, is the handiwork of the International Committee of Jurists, the UNAIDS [the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS] and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

A Pennsylvania grand jury in recent months accused nine men with connections to the Jehovah’s Witnesses of child sexual abuse in what some consider the nation’s most comprehensive investigation yet into abuse within the faith.

The sets of charges filed in October and February have fueled speculation the jury may make public more about what it has uncovered from a four-year investigation.

A similar grand jury investigation into child sexual abuse by Catholic priests culminated in a lengthy 2018 report that concluded hundreds of priests had abused children in Pennsylvania over seven decades and church officials had covered it up, and more recently a similar report was issued in Maryland.

But documents made public so far include nothing about what critics have long maintained has been a systemic cover-up and mishandling of child molestation within the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located.

The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on top of a hunting magazine. I mean, that narrows it down to people who still buy stuff printed on physical media, a number that shrinks exponentially by the day.

On top of that, the entry level for the leaked info — much of it related to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia — was Discord, which no one has considered to be the equivalent of Signal or any other secure site for the dissemination of sensitive material.

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still viable.)

The UN has been pushing its own version. But its idea of “crime” seems off-base, especially when it’s dealing with a conglomerate of countries with varying free speech protections. The “Cybercrime Treaty” proposed by the UN focuses on things many would consider ugly, distasteful, abhorrent, or even enraging. But it’s not things most people consider to be the sort of “crimes” a unified world front should be addressing — not when there’s plenty of financially or personally damaging cybercrime being performed on the regular.

One of the most notorious privacy-breaching tech companies in operation, Clearview AI, has, according to its CEO, scraped 30 billion social media photos, packaged and curated them, and passed them along to the surveillance state authorities to do with what they will (in the dark, with no oversight, naturally, as the Founders warned such authorities would if left unchecked). Clearview’s…

When Member of Parliament Kenny Chiu was contacted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ahead of Canada’s federal election in 2021, he was puzzled. He had never expected to be part of a CSIS investigation, let alone one that required an in-person talk at the height of Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic. “At that time, everything had moved online, so it was…

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.

TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has been rebuffed in her attempt to stay out of federal prison while she appeals her conviction for the fraud she committed while overseeing a blood-testing scam.