There's this story bouncing around the blogs about an innocent person in CA having their house searched for pot based on electric bills. I have some issues with Eugene Volokh's explanation.

Under the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment cases, the police may get such information just through a subpoena to a utility company (or perhaps even just by asking the utility company), with no need for a warrant or probable cause. The utility company is treated like any other witness who may have relevant information in his possession: The government may subpoena the witness to get this information whenever there's some reason to think that the subpoena will yield relevant (even indirectly relevant) information; it may also ask the witness to voluntarily turn over this information. Probable cause is not required.

Except that in this case the cops have no idea a crime is committed unless they ask the witness, and the witness doesn't care until the cops ask. It's all screwy; it's like the cops walking down the street asking everyone they see if they know of anyone who's done X, Y, or Z, which while not illegal, are correlated with pot growing. It's kind of analagous to community street policing, but it's all strange.

For one thing, the power company is a monopoly, and that doesn't give a lot of leeway for people to complain about having their bills handed over to the police; there's no way for a company to pop up that's more concerned with privacy than helping the cops go after marijuana growers. I rather doubt the cops could get a blanket warrant for the electric bills of every single customer of a company that refused to comply. Or could they?

Update: Volokh, by email, says yes. Well, that's just dandy.
- posted by Jason @ 11:36 PM

 
I'll put a review in here later, but I'd like to point out the mind-blowing stuff I've gotten from Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies. A lot of this hasn't made its way around yet.

To start off, here's a "so absurd it can't be made up" one. Clarke is giving a briefing about Al Qaeda, trying to convince the new administration how big of a threat they are. Wolfowitz brings up his conspiracy theories about Iraq actually being behind everything terrorism-related. Everyone tells him he's wrong and continues. Clarke tries to paint a broader picture of bin Laden's goals, describing how, just like Hitler, he's already told us his terrifying and ambitous goals, and we shouldn't assume he's not going to try to enact them. In response, Wolfowitz gets all offended that Clarke compared bin Laden to Hitler. It's pricelessly stupid on so many levels.

Page 232:

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: "Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states." Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it: "They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they will do."

Immediatelly Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. "I resent any comparision between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan."

"I wasn't comparing the Holocaust to anything." I spoke slowly. "I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it."

To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. "We agree with Dick. We see Al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority." The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.

Wolfowitz comes off as a total moron throughout the book. A well-meaning one, but useless. Anyway, the highlights:

These all start in chronological order on the morning of 9/11.

Page 12: People continue working as they're informed of hostile aircraft eight minutes out. None of them will leave; Frank writes everyone's name down and emails it out in case they need a body count for when the White House is hit.

Page 13: FBI tells Clarke they've identified names from the flight manifest as Al Qaeda. This sounds like it was before *10 AM*. It was that fast; the towers hadn't even come down yet.

Page 15: Mentions that the USSR had nuclear weapons en route to Egypt when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war stopped. Talk about terrifying things I didn't know.

Page 21: Two F-15s blast across the South Lawn of the White House at 300 feet; staffers start praying.

Page 23: Richard Armitage: "Look, we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it's their ass." This is a total political bombshell. Edit: later in the book Clarke mentions he exceeded his authority by stating this in a national television interview. Interesting little sideshow here.

Page 24: Clarke mentions the President was confident, focused when he arrived at the White House, unlike his speeches.

Page 24: Bush responding to Rumsfeld, who had noted interional law allows the use of force only to prevent future strikes, not for retribution: "No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

Page 25: Clarke is discussing getting the stock market back up with Verizon, who lost one of their main switching centers when the WTC collapsed. The Verizon CEO, dazed, asks for 5 miles of fiber optic cable.

Page 25: CEOs from AT&T, Cisco, and the like have been calling up offering all the manpower and material the government wants, no questions asked.

Page 26: Clarke says he hasn't eaten since last night, when he dined with Richard Bonin of 60 minutes, who was also obsessed with Al Qaeda; he was working on a story about them, interviewing Clarke. "The night before, Bonin had asked if it was true that I wanted a transfer. As of October 1st, I would be starting a new national program on cyber security. Bonin wanted to run the story that I was quitting the terrorism job in frustration with the new administration's lack of focus on Al Qaeda. I asked him not to, but admitted that I had asked for the transfer. So here's a source verifying that Clarke really was pissed off about the non-focus at the time.

Page 26: The President had never seen the plan Clarke & the principals (NSC, etc.) had been working on to roll up Al Qaeda; showing it to him was the next step. Had not been allowed to brief the President on terrorism at all up to 9/11. "It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested 'urgently' within days of the inauguration to approve an aggresive plan to go after Al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened one week earlier on September 4. Now, as I was telling Cressey, I thought the aggressive plan would be implemented. "Well, that's fuckin' great. Sounds like they're finally going to do everything we wanted. Where the hell were they for the last eight months?" Cressey asked. "Debating the finer points of the ABM Treaty?" I asked, looking up at the sky for fighter cover.

Page 27: Clarke says killing bin Laden in the few months before 9/11 wouldn't have stopped it.

Page 30: Clarke heads back to the White House on the first night. "I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq."

From here on out, Clarke steps back to provide a historical overview of counter-terrorism during his career.

Page 49: Clarke praises Richard Perle for helping him get the Stinger missiles to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Clarke makes a rather good argument that turned the war against the USSR.

Chapter 5, total bombshell: The US very *very* nearly went to war with Iran in 1996 in reaction to Iranian terrorism. A full-scale invasion was on the table.

Chapter 7: Following the Aum Shinrikyo sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo, the FBI discovers that they have a division listed in the frickin' NYC phone book.

Chapter 8: The Pentagon fucked up the cruise missile strike to kill Osama in 1999 by not using submarines, which they said they would use, but cruisers. The cruisers were detectable on radar, and the Pakistani ISI warned Osama in time.

Page 127: One really really really interesting bit - there's a theory that Ramzi Yousof taught Terry Nichols how to build bombs. Both of them were in the same city in the Phillipines for a while. Maybe he got known around time as the American who hated his country. His bombs sucked before he went there, but worked after he came back.

Page 224. Clarke has just finished detailing how CIA & the Pentagon had to be dragged kicking and screaming into using a Predator drone to spy on Afghanistan, and now they're refusing to agree to either bomb the hell out of every camp in the country, regularly, disrupting the jihadist training and killing bin Laden if they get lucky, or using armed Predator drones there. Clarke says the CIA bitched because they had to take the 200k to replace one crashed Predator out of their own budget; the book is crammed full of the CIA and FBI whining about budgets.

Clarke then describes how CIA & the Pentagon don't want to do anything about the Cole bombing until they could conclusively prove that either Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad did it, even though everyone knew it was one of them, and they'd recently united operations anyway. "On a brisk October day in 2000, Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watch as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the Pentagon. 'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded, 'Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin' Martians? The Pnetagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won't even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?"

Page 232: Wolfowitz says bin Laden had to have state backing to pull off all the stuff he does, says it's Iraq doing it. Talks about "Iraqi terrorism" and is flatly contradicted by all the career people involved.

Page 233: The Indonesian ambassador, Gelbard, was heavily pressuring the government there on Al Qaeda. Wolfowitz, hearing complaints from his Indonesian connections(?!) got him removed. The 2002 attack in Indonesian was done by Al Qaeda, and the same people Gelbard was after.

- posted by Jason @ 12:04 AM