Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 923

Developing: Shots Fired on Capitol Hill

There were shots fired outside of the U.S. Capitol building on Thursday afternoon, the Capitol Police have confirmed. The police issued a shelter in place order for Capitol Hill, which has since been lifted. There are reports of related injuries, and that  that the suspect is female, and died on the scene. A news conference is expected to begin at any minute. 

When shots rang out just after 2 p.m., people outside of the Supreme Court building were rushed inside, while some walking outside of the Capitol building, including Sen. Bob Casey, were told to crouch behind a car for about two minutes. They were then ushered inside the building. On MSNBC, Luke Russert said that he heard "three distinct booms" outside of a Capitol window. One witness told CNN that the the shots seemed to originate from behind the Supreme Court building on Constitution Ave. According to multiple reports, including that of NBC's Pete Williams, the suspect was reportedly driving a black car, which she tried to ram through a White House gate about a dozen blocks from Capitol Hill. Then, the suspect headed to Capitol Hill, pursued by secret service, where she began shooting, and was then shot herself.

There are unconfirmed reports, apparently from at least two eyewitnesses, indicating that a child was removed from the suspects car after the exchange of gunfire. The car is a black sedan. 

The map below shows where all those locations are:  

The president has been briefed on the incident, according to the pool reports. The Capitol Police responding to the incident were not furloughed by the government shutdown (they're essential employees). But they are not currently being paid, along with the rest of non-furloughed government staff. 

Until an expected press conference gets underway, there's little out there confirmed by officials, however Capitol Hill is brimming with reporters, staff, and members of Congress who have tweeted what they saw: 

Literally was dragged in by cop as he heard shots fired come over the radio. Now this: pic.twitter.com/K1AJwIEV6G

— KateNocera (@KateNocera) October 3, 2013

Helicopter outside the Capitol pic.twitter.com/B0zDujqWHQ

— Lucia Graves (@lucia_graves) October 3, 2013

we are on lockdown in the speakers lobby and house floor. Gunshots maybe six outside says congressman bill posey who heard them.

— Suzy Khimm (@SuzyKhimm) October 3, 2013

Cops were chasing a black car near the Capitol building. They cornered the car and that's when shots rang out.

— Chris Moody (@Chris_Moody) October 3, 2013

Victim now on stretcher being moved to ambulance. Appears to be civilian in white shoes, jeans (?). pic.twitter.com/2WwEgHPwOV

— Eric Teetsel (@EricTeetsel) October 3, 2013

Rep. Gerry Connolly says it sounded like fireworks, coming from direction of Rayburn Office Building

— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) October 3, 2013

Here is a picture of the black car that was chased near the capitol building. pic.twitter.com/F0A6PWyI7i Taken by @JordanSekulow

— Chris Moody (@Chris_Moody) October 3, 2013

At least one police car was apparently wrecked in relation to the incident: 

We'll update with more as it comes in.

       

Wall Street's Megabanks Have Released Their Plans for Fed-Assisted Suicide

Since the 2008 financial collapse, Wall Street's biggest banks have promised they have plans in place to collapse without dragging the world economy down with them. Now the public can see how they plan to do it.

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The Federal Reserve Board on Thursday released a portion of the banks' plans for "rapid and orderly resolution" in the event their finances fall apart and they collapse.

The plans released today are the banks' second attempt to sell regulators on their resolution plans. The Fed—alongside their co-regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.—rejected a round of plans submitted in 2012, saying they were inadequate to ensure the system would remain stable.

The plans are a requirement of the 2010 Wall Street reform law and are a key piece of Congress's efforts to ward off future taxpayer bailouts for the largest banks.

The current set of requirements is for financial firms that control $100 billion or more in U.S. nonbank assets, and some of the firms are listed as controlling more than $250 billion in U.S. nonbank assets. Those include Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase. 

Banks with between $50 billion and $100 billion are required to submit their plans by the end of 2013.

Under the law, the banks must make a portion of their plans public, but there is a confidential section as well. Below are links to the public sections of some of the best-known banks.

Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Deustche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. Here's the Fed's announcement and full list.

       

'Sleepy Hollow' Gets Second Season, Is the First Winner of Fall

Fox really loves the wacky world of Sleepy Hollow. The year's zaniest new show—complete with Ichabod Crane, witches, and George Washington—is also the first to get renewed, the network announced today. Though ratings have been good, the news is still something of a surprise, and shows that Fox may actually be innovating within the stuffy confines of network TV.

As James Hibberd at Entertainment Weekly explained, Fox only ordered 13 episodes of the show in its first season, and this announcement doesn't mean that the network is simply expanding that order. Nope, it's getting an entirely new season, operating on essentially a cable TV model.  "Fox entertainment chief Kevin Reilly has previously said he wanted to do more cable-style short-order seasons, so this move shouldn’t be that big of a shock," Hibberd wrote. "But it’s one thing for a network executive to make such a declaration of restraint, quite another thing to actually do it once they get a show in a time slot that’s working and there’s a whole dark scary season stretching out before them." 

No matter what they might think about this particularly bonkers show, it would be wise for more networks to follow its scheduling model. The 22-episode season, especially for drama, has started to seem increasingly old fashioned, while the short and sweet yearly runs of cable shows have been so satisfying, and successful.

So Sleepy Hollow is the first victory of this lackluster new season. What comes next? Our money is on The Blacklist.

       

Boehner May Be Willing to Buck His Party to Save the Economy

An anonymous lawmaker tells The New York Times that John Boehner is quietly telling members of the House that he would be willing to bring a debt ceiling increase to a vote even without a majority of Republicans supporting the move. Doing so would break an informal party rule —violations of which earlier this year nearly cost Boehner his position.

While the lawmaker who attended the meeting with Boehner isn't named, the Times did speak with Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. "Hurricane Sandy, the fiscal cliff, all of the big votes require reasonable Republicans and Democrats to come together in order to pass it and get it to the president’s desk," Fitzapatrick said, adding, “This will be no different."

Boehner has repeatedly asserted that he would not let the government default on its debts, which the Department of the Treasury has warned could happen in two weeks if the debt ceiling isn't increased. Should the ceiling not be raised, the government wouldn't have enough money on-hand to pay bills, putting the nation's credit at risk — a scenario generally understood to be nearly apocalyptic.

The need to raise that limit has been seen as an opportunity for the Republican Party to extract concessions from the president by some in the party. Last week, a leaked document listed a menu of core Republican priorities that were considered reasonable requests in exchange for such a vote. It's not clear if a vote to increase the debt ceiling without such conditions would lack the support of a majority of the party, but Boehner told those in the meeting that he'd bring the vote forward anyway.

That violates the so-called "Hastert Rule," a stipulation named for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. It established a policy that unless a majority of the majority party wanted to bring a bill forward for a vote, it wouldn't happen. Hastert on Thursday disavowed the rule, which could offer Boehner slightly more space for such a move. But some of the votes Fitzpatrick outlined, ones in which Boehner allowed a vote despite a majority of Republicans endorsing their passage, were seen as contributing to a number of Republican votes against his reelection to be Speaker. In March, he pledged to stick to the rule.

Benjy Sarlin of MSNBC offers a theory for why this news leaked now.

NYT quotes anonymous GOP Rep: Boehner said he'd break Hastert rule on debt limit. Olive branch to markets? http://t.co/LcLqmA8zft

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) October 3, 2013

[image error]On Wednesday, President Obama spoke with CNBC explicitly suggesting that there was cause for businesses to be nervous in the face of the looming possibility of defaulting on bills. On Thursday, The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped quickly in the morning, rebounding slightly around noon, as seen at right. (Graph via.)

Earlier this week, Boehner was able to head off a rumored "revolt" from the same group of Republican moderates who would presumably be called on to help pass a debt ceiling increase. At that point, he asked that they vote with him on a funding bill that included measures the moderates opposed and which assured they'd be killed in the Senate. "Trust me," he reportedly said on the House floor. The leaked report may be Boehner offering a similar message to Wall Street.

       

What All Sides Want in Order to Open the Government Again

Well, we're back to a "grand bargain" as the solution to the gigantic budget mess in Washington, a concept deservedly mocked after an all-encompassing budget deal in 2011 and 2012. Now, the prospect of an everyone-gets-what-he-wants deal is even less likely, because more people want a lot more things.

The renewal of the "grand bargain" as unifying principle emerged slightly before House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went to the White House to meet with President Obama on Wednesday evening. Politico wrote that "pragmatic House Republicans" thought that the best way to come up with a funding bill (ending the shutdown) and an increase to the debt ceiling (preventing default) was "to strike a big budget deal." To The National Review, a "senior Democratic source" described the response from his party when Boehner proposed it: the speaker "was laughed at because everyone feels like they’ve heard this song and dance before. … [T]he history of this from where we sit is Boehner talking a big game, then bailing as soon as he runs into the inevitable resistance from a certain faction in his caucus."

In 2011, the "grand bargain" meant Democrats conceding to cuts to social programs and Republicans allowing a tax increase. In late 2012, the president offered another "grand bargain" with similar components. Today, though, a solution satisfying all sides would almost certainly not be so simple — and not just because of conflicting policy priorities. Any grand bargain resolving the current dispute would need to incorporate all of these demands.

Obama and the Democrats

[image error]Demand: Open government and raise the debt ceiling before anything else.

The Democrats' demands seem simple enough. As Obama explained to CNBC last night, he and his party are perfectly willing to negotiate with the Republicans — after the GOP passes a full funding resolution with no qualifiers and raises the debt ceiling. Or, in other words, after the Republicans sacrifice the pressure points they are trying to use as leverage.

The Democrats' longer-term goals are broader. Reduce or eliminate spending cuts from sequestration, maintain social service spending, increase taxes on high wage earners. But none of those things will be put on the table, they maintain, until government is open and the threat of default is gone. While what the Republicans offer has never been an actual point of negotiation — "Get rid of Obamacare or the government gets it" — some believe that the only way they can get policy priorities they've wanted for a long time is to use a shutdown or default to force concessions. Take that away, and any negotiations are what they would have been earlier this year, when Republicans repeatedly declined to meet over the budget: a contest between two branches of government with a Democratic president acting as tie-breaker.

Odds this demand is met: Reasonably high. The Democrats maintain the stronger position in the debate, as polling continually indicates.

House Republicans

[image error]Demand: Some way to save face.

As inelegant as it is, Republicans being hammered repeatedly on the shutdown are almost certainly happy to bring it to a conclusion — but are unlikely to do so unless there's something that can count as a political victory. The strategy so far has consisted of trying to leverage politically popular points of tension to embarrass the Democrats (the stand-off at the World War II memorial, the very dumb "Harry Reid hates sick kids" meme) to pass small-bore funding resolutions. It hasn't shown many signs of success.

Byron York at the Washington Examiner writes: "the small-bore bills are just a small-bore solution to part of the problem. There is still no government funding, and beyond the targeted measures, Republicans have no new ideas about what to do." He quotes a Republican strategist: The memorial and Reid things "were positive tactical moments that gave some breathing room. But there has yet to be a strategic moment that is a clear, outright win."

Or, as Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman (above right) told the Washington Examiner, "We're not going to be disrespected... We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is." (Stutzman apologized on Thursday, saying in a statement, "I carelessly misrepresented the ongoing budget debate and Speaker Boehner’s work on behalf of the American people.")

Odds this demand is met: Decent. In an effort to resolve the shutdown, it seems possible that Democrats will allow some sort of victory for Republicans that allows a majority to pass legislation. What that victory is, however, leads us to our next point.

House conservatives

[image error]Demand: Some win on Obamacare.

York continues:

One possibility is to pass yet another continuing resolution, this one with just one Obamacare measure attached to it. Perhaps it would be the repeal of the medical device tax, or perhaps it would be some variant of the Vitter Amendment, to forbid members of Congress and staff from receiving special subsidies when they purchase health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

For the Tea Party/conservative caucus, any win on Obamacare is a big win overall. York suggests that the medical device tax repeal, long a priority for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, could find favor in the Senate. It's not clear if such a measure would pass if attached to a funding bill, but it's perhaps the best possibility.

The other question is whether or not anything so minor would actually be seen as a victory by the conservative caucus. In the last full funding resolution passed by the House, several members of this group voted no because it fell short of a full defunding of Obama's health care plan. It's hard to think that they would consider a repeal of a tax that largely benefits corporations to be the sort of victory they hoped to eke out.

Odds this demand is met: Very low. This is the president's line in the sand, and it's unlikely he'll cross it.

House moderates

Demand: An unamended funding bill over the short term.

The 20-or-so moderate Republicans who are on-record in support of a quick, clean resolution re-opening the government are enough to give the Democrats a majority in the House on such a proposal. (The obstruction is Boehner, who would need to allow such a vote.) This group almost certainly wants other concessions further down the road, but for now, representing districts that are mostly middle-of-the-road, they just want the tension to end.

Odds this demand is met: High — assuming that Boehner comes around. If Boehner continues to refuse such a vote, the odds are zero.

Senate Republicans

[image error]Demand: Tying a debt ceiling increase to spending cuts.

In a column at The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Karl Rove spoke on behalf of the Senate's minority group.

Some Senate Republicans are discussing bundling the mandatory and discretionary spending cuts in the president's own budget with an equal amount in Republican suggestions for future spending cuts, and offering to increase the debt ceiling by that amount. The thinking here is that Mr. Obama could hardly object to a debt-ceiling increase offset by his own proposed spending cuts.

That thinking seems wrong on its face. Obama has repeatedly suggested that he will not trade a debt ceiling vote for any concession, and there is a lot to suggest that he means it.

But moreover, this idea — only lifting the debt ceiling as much as spending is trimmed, known as the Boehner Rule — is inherently risky. In January, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explained the long-term effects. In short, it "would require additional deficit reduction in any year in which the debt grows in dollar terms — that is, whenever the budget is in deficit — even if the debt is stable or shrinking in relation to the economy." Growth of debt isn't necessarily linked to an increase in deficit spending, as we are seeing right now. The deficit is shrinking, but the debt is growing. The Boehner Rule that Rove champions would mean that spending would have to be cut regardless — which could itself have serious economic consequences. And even the Republican Party's most austere serious budget proposal, that of Rep. Paul Ryan, shows deficits into the 2020s. Constantly slashing spending each year in order to pay bills could be disastrous.

Odds this demand is met: Very low.

Republicans outside of D.C.

[image error]Demand: Anything at all, just make it stop.

Non-Congressional Republicans are eager to see this entire thing resolved, and fast. MSNBC reports that the party's governors are largely sitting on the sidelines, apparently not eager to be tied to the unpopular behavior of their colleagues in D.C. "I believe [D.C. Republicans] need to get us a budget or a continuing resolution," conservative Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (at right) said, "and we need to get America, the United States back on track."

Perhaps more importantly, the Daily Beast reports that Republican donors are also antsy.

“We are finding a marvelous way to grab defeat from the jaws of victory,” said Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based businessman who was a major donor to both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “The way we are handling this has been a mistake from the beginning. I think we misread where the country was.”

Being seen as a party beholden to extreme interests and unwilling to compromise is not what these donors signed up for. “People need to stand up and not be afraid of the Tea Party," one donor said, predicting that this fight "may be a turning point" in doing so.

Odds this demand is met: Certain. At some point, all of this will end. All that needs to happen is that every demand above needs to be resolved or ignored. Which is what politics is all about.

(Photos via Associated Press.)

       

It's the End of an Era for Movie Lovers

[image error]With a big management shakeup, Focus Features—the specialty distributor that brought audiences films like Brokeback Mountain and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—is getting a more mainstream makeover, and that's sad news for film lovers. 

Trade publications reported yesterday evening that the beloved CEO of Focus, James Schamus (pictured at right with Rosamund Pike), was being replaced by Peter Schessel of FilmDistrict, the company that has produced low-to-middlebrow fare in recent years like Olympus Has Fallen and The Rum Diary. The change means, as Pamela McClintock wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, that Focus will undergo a "personality change." Under Schamus Focus focused mainly on art house films, but now Universal, which owns the distributor, wants to "expand Focus' footprint," meaning it won't just focus on prestige fare. 

This shift has seemed sadly inevitable for a while. As Kristopher Tapley wrote at HitFix, Focus was of a dying breed. "It hurts, but it seems the rule is you don't get to crank out that kind of an art house run and live too long to tell the tale," Tapley explained. "Indie/dependent divisions have been shuttering left and right for years. We lost Paramount Vantage. We lost Warner Independent." 

But Schamus was something special. As Carlo Rotella pointed out in a 2010 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Schamus occupied a strange place in the industry. He was not only a businessman, but also a scholar, occupying a professorship at Columbia. "There really isn’t anyone else like Schamus," Rotella wrote. "There’s no precedent for a real academic — he’s a professor of professional practice in Columbia’s School of the Arts, a teacher and scholar who has served on the editorial board of Cinema Journal — to have a first-rate career as a writer, a producer and an executive in the film industry." Schamus knew how to honor the craft in his role as a CEO too, combining a mix of economic savvy and appreciation for filmmaking. "By controlling budgets and preselling international distribution rights to finance productions, Schamus can position artists to make the movies they really want to make, as long as they want to make movies that don’t cost too much and that he can sell," Rotella explained. 

That's not to say Focus Features' run was entirely successful. Last year its awards-bait films like Anna Karenina, Hyde Park on Hudson, and Promised Land didn't get much love from critics and were mostly ignored come Oscar time. Promised Land bombed at the box office, as did this year's more mainstream Tina Fey/Paul Rudd romantic comedy Admission. (At least last year they had a huge success in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.) It was another mixed bag in 2011, with the critical and box office flop One Day offsetting the minor success of the Oscar-winning fan favorite Beginners. This year, the company is hoping for success with Matthew McConaughey's AIDS drama Dallas Buyers Club, but that's pretty much all they've got in terms of awards hope, unless the underrated The Place Beyond the Pines gets some sort of miraculous second wind.

And it's not that Schessel's FilmDistrict, in its short life, hasn't put out impressive films with some art house cred. There's Drive, Looper, Safety Not Guaranteed, and In the Land of Blood and Honey. Spike Lee's Oldboy remake is opening in November. It's just that Schessel has mixed those releases with junky horror and action titles like Olympus Has Fallen, Lockout,  and the Insidious series. All things considered, Tapley doesn't think the change is that bad, writing that "a mixture of specialty and wide releases is a smart approach and, at the end of the day, it might provide an even better opportunity for specialty product to find its way at Focus as some of the other product (in theory) proves more profitable." 

Even so, the change stings a bit when you realize what Focus Features used to be.

       

Obama Is Beating the GOP on the Shutdown, But Not Like Clinton Did

President Obama is beating Republicans in the battle over public perception of the government shutdown. A new CBS News poll conducted during the first two days of the shutdown finds that 44 percent of Americans think we can all thank the Republican party for the mess we're in, while 33 percent blame Democrats and Obama. But Democrats shouldn't take too much comfort in that survey. During the last shutdown — seen as a disaster for Republicans — polls showed public opinion tilted far more in favor of then-President Bill Clinton.

Republican leaders, with the 1995 showdown with Clinton in mind, hoped to avoid shuttering the government. But conservative activists, led most visibly by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, demanded Republicans threaten a shutdown if Democrats wouldn't defund Obamacare. Republican congressional leaders relented. Now, the public reaction is pretty much what those top Republicans feared. A large majority of Americans, 72 percent, don't approve of shutting down the government over the Affordable Care Act. Even 59 percent of those who oppose Obamacare are also against the shutdown. Less than half of Republicans, 48 percent, support the shutdown, while 49 percent are against it. 

Still, there's some good news for House Republicans. The last time the government shut down, Clinton also had much more support that the Republican-controlled Congress. At the time, according to CBS, 51 percent of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown and only 25 percent blamed Clinton. According to a Pew report, 57 percent of Americans polled between the first and second shutdown thought Clinton was standing up for important priorities, while 52 percent thought the Republicans were trying to gain a political advantage. Both then and now, more than 70 percent of Americans didn't approve of using a shutdown as a bargaining tool.

And whereas most of America agreed with Clinton on limiting cuts to Medicare, polls show most of America isn't sold on Obamacare.  Clinton may have "won" his shutdown, assuming anyone wins with these things, but Obama's dealing with entirely different circumstances.

       

Pro-Life Groups Have Attack Ads Ready to Go for Wendy Davis' Campaign Launch

What made Wendy Davis famous will also be what Republicans use against her in her campaign to be governor of Texas. Davis, who gained national attention after filibustering a bill restricting abortion, will announce her campaign for governor of Texas on Thursday in a suburb of Fort Worth. If Davis wins the Democratic nomination, she'll struggle to beat the Republican candidate, which will likely be Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. Pro-life activists already have anti-Wendy ads ready to go on the radio this weekend.

Texas Right to Life will start running an ad which charges that Davis is an "abortion zealot." "Wendy Davis believes terminating babies even halfway through pregnancy is OK," the ad says. "Wendy Davis is wrong on life, wrong for our children and wrong for Texas." In July, Davis filibustered SB5, a Senate bill that aimed to ban abortions after 20 weeks, as well as shutdown abortion clinics by requiring them to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers. Gov. Rick Perry signed a version of that bill into law on July 18.

In a poll conducted by the nonpartisan public policy group Texas Lyceum released this week, Abbott leads Davis 29 percent to 21 percent, with many undecided voters. Neither candidate has widespread support in Texas yet (though of course, neither has officially announced). But history suggests Davis might not have a chance. Texas is a very red state — Mitt Romney trounced Obama there in 2012. Republicans have won every state-wide seat since 1994. The last Democrat to win the governor's race was Ann Richards in 1990.

Some analysts think the booming Hispanic population in Texas could help Davis. And since 2010, suburban women in Texas have been trending away from Republicans and towards Democrats. Unfortunately, Davis' strongest support comes from Democrats outside the Lone Star state. She has been reaching out to "high placed Democrats" for help in advance of her announcement today. 

       

Lavabit Used Unreadable Fonts to Delay an Order for Access to Snowden's Email

Now we know why Lavabit founder Ladar Levison decided to shut down his secure email service, used by Edward Snowden. At the time, all Levison would say was that he didn't want to "become complicit in crimes against American people." According to court documents unsealed on Wednesday, Levison was ordered to turn over the virtual keys to the communications of every single one of the service's users, so that the NSA could monitor the emails of one of his customers, presumed to be Snowden himself. 

According to the New York Times, the story begins with the business card of an FBI agent, left on his doorstep, almost immediately after the NSA leaks began to roll out: 

When Mr. Levison called the F.B.I. agent who had left the business card, the agent seemed interested in learning how Lavabit worked and what tools would be necessary to eavesdrop on an encrypted e-mail account

The FBI, it turns out, was interested in collecting as much as possible on a single user of his service. That person is without a doubt Edward Snowden, although his name has been redacted from all of the court documents released today. While Levison has complied with orders concerning specific users in the past, the Snowden request was different. The FBI's demands only escalated as Levision began to fight the orders. 

The order that eventually prompted Levison to shutter his decade-old company came in the form of a July search warrant. That warrant was itself the result of series of proceedings in which Lavabit was ordered to hand over and decrypt the metadata of Snowden's account, even though the key to do so was known only by Snowden himself. Snowden, as you might have expected, paid extra to obtain an extra secure email account, meaning that not even Lavabit could access his communications. Meeting resistance, the court threatened to hold Leviston in contempt. Then the government asked for everything: “all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit e-mail account [redacted] including encryption keys and SSL keys.” That information would give the government access to all of the company's 400,000 users, all for the metadata of one single user. 

After unsuccessfully fighting that request in court, Levison complied, but not in a way that would make it easy for the government to use the information: he sent the government a printed-out version of the encryption keys, in 4-point font. He took care to choose a font that was nearly impossible to scan, too. Here's what that document looked like, once scanned: 

[image error]

 

In other words, the FBI would have to manually type in each numeral from the 2,560-character document by hand. That prompted the government to demand an electronic copy of the keys. 

Because that order came with a $5,000 daily fine for non-compliance, Levison did it. And then, simultaneously, he shuttered his site. 

       

Arizona Sheriff Arpaio Gets a Court-Ordered, Anti-Racial Profiling Monitor

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is famously "tough," or "unconstitutional," in his enforcement of immigration laws, depending on who you ask. And, it turns out, a federal judge falls into the latter category after agreeing that Arpaio's department engaged in racial profiling. U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow issued an order on Wednesday to try and correct that, by placing a number of restrictions on the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and appointing a monitor to enforce those changes for at least the next three years.

The 59-page order, among other things, requires the department to: 

Train all officers in anti-discriminatory practice, and post notices clearly outlining the prohibition against racial profiling Record all traffic stops with audio and video, radio in the reason for the stop before approaching the vehicle. Arpaio was sued in the first place by a group of Latinos over the sheriff department's use of “crime suppression” patrols in mainly Latino neighborhoods. The plaintiffs argued that officers stopped individuals simply because they looked like they might be undocumented.  During the traffic stop, officers unnecessarily extend traffic stops, and all traffic stops will be periodically audited. Officers are barred from selecting which vehicles to stop, which individuals to question, and which procedures to use based on the race or ethnicity of the person in question. The order will also bar traffic stop quotas. The department will have to inform the community of the new policies, and have representatives available in Spanish and English to answer questions. 

The order gets pretty specific on the tactics now barred for use: 

Prohibit Deputies from relying on a suspect’s speaking Spanish, or speaking English with an accent, or appearance as a day laborer as a factor in developing reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe a person has committed or is committing any crime, or reasonable suspicion to believe that an individual is in the country without authorization" 

The court-appointed monitor would oversee the training of deputies under the order, along with ensuring that the department complies with all the requirements. Arpaio's office is appealing the May ruling on Ortega Melendres v. Arpaio that led to the order in the first place. He has seen the court order, and issued the following statement to CBS affiliate KPHO: 

I have received a copy of the court order and I am in the process of discussing it with our attorneys. We are identifying areas that are ripe for appeal. To be clear, the appointed monitor will have no veto authority over my duties or operations. As the constitutionally elected Sheriff of Maricopa County, I serve the people and I will continue to perform my duties and enforce all laws.