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Happy Monday, folks. I’ve been off the grid for a few days for a desperately needed re-charging. The news all around is dire these days and information overload can be a bit much. A piece will be forthcoming on how acts of kindness to one’s self can be revolutionary and necessary for change.

Anyway, without further ado:

• Report Finds Google Supervisors Knew About Wi-Fi Data Harvesting
  

  Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

  The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000.

  On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

  The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.

  The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.”

• Not Just Apple, How Microsoft Sidestepped Billions In State Taxes
  

  In 1997, Microsoft et al. lobbied to reduce Washington State’s Royalty Tax from 1.5% to .5%, a threefold reduction. This wasn’t low enough. The company decided to open a small Reno, Nevada office to dodge the tax completely.

  Between 1997 – 2011, the company used its Nevada office to avoid $1.51 billion in Washington state taxes, interest and penalties. If you include impacts from the company’s lobbying and calculate its savings at the original 1.5% rate, it’s saved $4.37 billion.

  Since 2008, Washington State has cut $4 billion from K-12 and Higher Education. We rank 31st in K-12 spending. 18% of University of Washington freshman are now foreigners (because they pay more) up from 2% six years ago. We rank 47th nationally in 18-24 yo college enrollment and 48th in K-12 class size.

• Understanding Hipster Racism: Lester Bangs’ 1979 “White Noise Supremacists”
  

  Lindy West’s piece at Jezebel this week, “A Complete Guide To Hipster Racism,” has been blowing up my Facebook wall (and probably yours too) for good reason. As justice-minded folks have critiqued HBO’s ‘Girls’ for its lily-white representation of New York City, the pushback to the pushback has gotten ugly fast — whether it’s show story editor Lesley Arfin making jokes about Precious, or Vice founder (and old-school hipster racist) Gavin McInnes knowingly throwing the word ‘lynching’ around. At the core of every statement defending the whiteness of ‘Girls,’ and the ‘ironically’ racist jokes that accompany it, is the argument that only bad people are susceptible to racism, so therefore it’s okay for us good people to pretend to be racist, for comedy’s sake. Anyone who doesn’t like it is the real racist. There’s a bunch wrong with this argument, both in terms of logic and basic decency, and West does an excellent job of debunking it piece by piece.

• Public Perception and the Law in Arizona v. United States
  

  Some observers claimed that SB 1070 would increase racial profiling of Latinos. The key question was how police would decide whether there was, as Section 2(B) provides, a “reasonable suspicion … that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.” The fear is that “foreign-looking” people, especially Latinos, will bear the brunt of the mandatory immigration checks. Concerns with racial profiling contributed to the considerable public attention received by SB 1070 and Arizona v. United States.

  As discussed above, the oral arguments focused on federal preemption law, not racial profiling. Counsel for the US government emphatically denied that racial profiling was at issue in the case. Counsel for the state of Arizona, as well as the justices, eagerly accepted that denial. The justices therefore did not ask questions about whether Section 2(B) of SB 1070 might result in the racial profiling of Latinos.

  Unlike some of the other plaintiffs in related cases challenging the Arizona law, the US government had not made any claims that SB 1070 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it was adopted with some kind of invidious discriminatory intent. Claims of discrimination will likely have to wait another day, with the issues possibly addressed in the other cases challenging SB 1070 or in a new challenge based on the application of Section 2(B) by police.

  It should be readily apparent that there is a serious disconnect between the public debate over Arizona’s SB 1070, as well as similar state immigration enforcement laws, and the legal arguments in the Court.

• ALJ’s Errors Win Lawyer a New Hearing on Student Loan Repayment
  

  A lawyer has won her bid for a new student loan repayment hearing after a state judge determined that her initial proceeding was rife with errors made by an administrative law judge.

  Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger (See Profile) found that the ALJ appeared to lose control of the 2009 hearing and made the “shocking” pronouncement that the attorney, Marisa Rieue, owed $108,376, including principal and interest, in unpaid loans in the absence of concrete evidence to support that conclusion.

  “A review of the hearing transcript reveals that it would be a waste of judicial resources and improper to transfer this case to the Appellate Division based on substantial evidence because the record is barely comprehensible and defective in countless ways,” Schlesinger wrote in Rieue v. New York State Higher Educ. Servs. Corp., 107745/09.

  She added, “While the rules of evidence are not strictly applied in administrative proceedings, the hearing must be conducted in an orderly fashion so that it is fundamentally fair, and all exhibits offered into evidence must be appropriately authenticated and explained by a proper party, with evidentiary foundations established where appropriate.”

  Rieue, who once worked in the litigation bureau of the state Department of Law, has an unpublished phone number and could not be reached for comment.

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