Julia Davis

Some semblance of justice seemingly caught up with Scott J. Bloch, the disgraced former head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). On March 30, 2011 he was finally sentenced for some of his criminal activities. After years of legal wrangling, Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson sentenced Bloch to one month in jail plus one year of unsupervised probation and 200 hours community service. But wait, the Bloch saga is still not over. Bloch may be able to stay out of prison, while his sentence is being appealed. His attorney, William Sullivan said that he will file a motion to keep Bloch out of prison until the U.S. Court of Appeals considers his appeal. Robinson said she will consider this motion, along with a request that Bloch avoid the prison sentence altogether, by serving it out in home confinement instead. Throughout these proceedings, Bloch’s attorneys and federal prosecutors have done their best to keep him out of prison. Yes, Bloch was aided by the Department of Jus...

 We’ve all been told that the whole body scanners are being implemented for our own good. We’ve been assured that our misapprehensions were unfounded. Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that it has been likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. During Department of Homeland Security hearings, Janet Napolitano assured the Congress (and this writer who was present at the hearing) that all images collected by the full body scanners are not stored, cannot be stored and are discarded as soon as they're viewed. Just last summer the Transportation Security Administration claimed that " scanned images cannot be stored or recorded ." Privacy advocates (including yours truly) cried foul. Turns out, they were right. Yet again we’ve been lied to by the government. Of course, as usual, the official ta...

The Justice Department announced that four separate indictments were unsealed in the Southern District of California, the District of Minnesota and the Southern District of Alabama, charging 14 individuals with terrorism for providing money, personnel, and services to the foreign terrorist organization al Shabaab. Al-Shabaab (aka the Harakat Al-Shabaab al-Mujahidin, al-Shabab, Al-Shabaab, the Youth, Mujahidin al-Shabaab Movement, Mujahideen Youth Movement, Mujahidin Youth Movement), is an Islamic organization that controls much of southern Somalia, excluding the capital, Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab leaders have claimed affiliation with al-Qaeda since 2007. In what marked the group's first major attack outside of Somalia, al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for twin bombings that killed more than seventy people in Kampala, Uganda during the World Cup final on July 11, 2010. Jehad Mostafa – Southern District of California Prosecutors in the Southern District of California unsealed an...