Monday, July 08, 2013

Did you know we had a secret court, operated by similar thinking judges on an ex parte basis?

The New York Times had a front page piece on the FISA Court this weekend.  The whole thing is worth a close look.  From the article:

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.
***
Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court’s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.

Created by Congress in 1978 as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government, the court meets in a secure, nondescript room in the federal courthouse in Washington. All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and 10 of them were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Most hail from districts outside the capital and come in rotating shifts to hear surveillance applications; a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court.

Closer to home, visa-fraud prosecutions are up.  According to the Herald:

A report released in April by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) showed that visa fraud criminal prosecutions now rank third among the top 10 immigration law prosecutions in the country.
Also, a Government Accountability Office report issued in September said the State Department screens visa applicants for fraud.
But GAO auditors found that consulates do not systematically employ methods to prevent fraud.
“State has a variety of technological tools and resources to assist consular officers in combating fraud, but does not have a policy for their systematic use,” the GAO report said.
In response, the State Department said it generally agreed with GAO findings and would implement recommendations to improve fraud tracking .
The GAO report said the top 10 countries where visa fraud occurs are China, Dominican Republic, Mexico, India, Brazil, Ghana, Cambodia, Jamaica, Peru and Ukraine.

Friday, July 05, 2013

Your Friday moment of Zen

Gotta love technology.  Here's Rachel Maddow on the Zimmerman trial getting Skype Bombed:




And here's the actual raw footage of the whole thing:

 

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Happy Birthday to the Blog!

Yesterday, the blog turned 8 years old.  Pretty neat.

This was the original post, asking the President to appoint a Floridian to the Supreme Court.  We are still waiting 8 years later....

Since then, your first local legal blog has had 2,361 posts and almost 2 million page views

The most popular post this year was breaking the story that AUSA Mike Garofola was going to be a contestant on the Bachelorette.  Second, was Dore Louis' NSA motion.

After the United States, the blog's readership is as follows:

EntryPageviews
United States
918641
Russia
12746
Germany
12597
United Kingdom
11530
Canada
10289
France
8799
Norway
7695
Netherlands
3722
Ukraine
3142
Malaysia
1532


The blog has broken a number of stories this year, including your newest magistrate judges and the nomination of Will Thomas to the federal bench (he needs to get confirmed already!).  Speaking of magistrates, Alicia Valle was officially named to the bench yesterday.  Congrats to her!

It's been really fun for me to post over the last 8 years, and I hope you have enjoyed the blog as much as I have had doing it.

Happy Fourth of July!

--David


Monday, July 01, 2013

What was Chief Judge Roberts' favorite case of the Term?

A.  DOMA
B.  Voting Rights
C.  Affirmative Action
D.   DNA
E.  Fane Lozman's house boat case

Yup, you got it -- E.  The Chief Justice loved the case from the Southern District of Florida about whether the floating structure was a house or a boat.  From Forbes:

Turns out the Chief Justice felt the same way. In this interview on C-SPAN, John Roberts called the lawsuit over whether a floating house was a boat one of his favorites from the last term.It’s surprising to hear this, given the momentous cases that were also before the court: The Voting Rights Act, gay rights, affirmative action, human gene patents — nearly all of them had broader implications for society at large than Fane Lozman’s Quixotic battle with the authorities of a coastal city in Florida over whether they had the power to haul his home away.“There are going to be  half-dozen cases people are going to be talking about,” Roberts said in the interview with Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III.“The littler ones can be quite fascinating,” he said, however. “My favorite from last term was a case called Lozman."“The way cases develop in the law, you have something that seems to fit not comfortably on either category,” Roberts said. “Depending on which side you were on, it was either a floating home or a house boat.”In Lozman’s case, it was a seedy-looking house on a floating platform, connected to shore with a garden hose and an extension cord. Lozman had towed it hundreds of miles around the Florida peninsula, but the house didn’t have any power to move itself. City officials argued it was a boat for purposes of obtaining a maritime lien and impounding it. The court decided otherwise, in a decision with implications for much more significant structures like floating casinos.“We had a lot of fun with it …looking at the different characteristics and posing a lot of interesting hypotheticals at the argument,” Roberts said. At one point, the justices seemed to be toying with the lawyer for Riviera Beach, trying to back him into ridiculous definitions of a boat.Roberts asked if an inner tube qualified. After all, it could support a human and move him from place to place. Then Justice Stephen Breyer chimed in: “This cup. what about the cup?” Justice Sonia Sotomayorasked, “what about a garage door?” And Elena Kagan followed up with: Take the inner tube, and you know, paste a couple of pennies on the inner tube. Now it carries things.”
On a separate note, I haven't been watching the Bachelorette, but I'm told that local AUSA Michael Garofola has made the top 5....  And that he is very against other contestants cursing on the show.  

So you wanna be a federal judge?

The Federal JNC is reconstituted and its finally taking applications for Judge Seitz's open seat.  Applications are due July 31, and interviews will take place on August 21.

The Florida Bar website listing the JNC members was wrong, and so my prior post had the wrong list of JNC members.  The correct list is:

Kendall Coffee
Alex Acosta
Georgina Angones
Reginald Clyne
Vivian de las Cuevas-Diaz
Albert Dotson
Phil Freidin
Carey Goodman
Cynthia Johnson-Stacks
Manny Kadre
Ira Leesfield
Dexter Lehtinen
Richard Lydecker
Thomas Panza
David Prather
Dennis Alan Richard
Jon Sale
Stephen Zack
Marilyn Holifield
Harley Tropin
Danny Ponce

You can grab the application here if you are interested.

Meantime, Holly Skolnick's memorial service was Sunday, and it was an amazing outpouring of love and support.  Really nice memories of her from her family and friends...  What a big loss for the community. Holly is survived by her husband Richard Strafer,* their daughter, and her parents. 

*As an aside, Richard is working on the Kaley case (along with Howard Srebnick), headed to the Supreme Court next Term, which Curt Anderson covered yesterday:

When Kerri and Brian Kaley came under federal investigation for allegedly stealing medical devices, they took out a $500,000 line of credit on their New York house to hire lawyers. Yet after their indictment in 2007, prosecutors sought to prevent the Kaleys from using the money because the government intended to seize the house.
The Kaleys insisted they were legally reselling the medical items. At the very least, they wanted a hearing to determine whether the government's case was strong enough to justify freezing most of their assets and denying them the right to hire the attorney of their choice.
It's an issue federal courts around the country are deeply divided over. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has a chance to settle the matter after agreeing earlier this year to hear the Kaleys' appeal.