Tag Archives: corporations

The Texas Tribune: Businesses Back Greenhouse Gas Emissions Law

by DougE92 Posted on August 15, 2013

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Farsight Enclaves – A Codex: Tau Empire Supplement – Games Workshop

Commander Farsight was once hailed by every Tau caste as a genius warrior-leader without compare. As his career blazed a bloody path across the Damocles Gulf and back again, O’Shovah split away from the Tau Empire, doggedly pursuing the Orks that had killed so many of his Fire caste comrades. It was the first overt sign of a rebellion that was to change the […]

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Black Legion – A Codex: Chaos Space Marines Supplement – Games Workshop

The Black Legion are among the most hated foes of the Imperium, vile traitors and fearsome warriors responsible for ten thousand years of terror and murder. About this Book: This Codex: Chaos Space Marines Supplement charts the history of the Legion, along with their Warmaster Abaddon, who stands poised to lead them to victory over the Imperium. Also inside […]

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Warhammer 40,000: The Rules – Games Workshop

There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only WAR. In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of destruction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by ravening aliens and threatened from within by Warp-spawned entities and heretical plots. Only the strength of the immortal […]

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Warlords of the Dark Millennium: Belial – Games Workshop

Belial Belial is the Grand Master of the Deathwing and bearer of the sacred Sword of Silence. A masterful tactician and fearsome warrior, Belial has won countless victories and honours for the Dark Angels, earning the enduring respect and admiration of his peers. As leader of the Chapter’s 1st Company he is always where the fighting is at its thickest, leadi […]

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Dogtripping – David Rosenfelt

David Rosenfelt’s Dogtripping is moving and funny account of a cross-country move from California to Maine, and the beginnings of a dog rescue foundation When mystery writer David Rosenfelt and his family moved from Southern California to Maine, he thought he had prepared for everything. They had mapped the route, brought three […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 1 – J.D. Lenzen

J.D. Lenzen is the creator of the highly acclaimed YouTube channel “Tying It All Together”, and the producer of over 200 instructional videos. He’s been formally recognized by the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT) for his contributions to knotting, and is the originator of fusion knotting-innovative knots created through the merging of […]

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Index Astartes: Death Company – Games Workshop

When a Blood Angel Space Marine succumbs to the Black Rage, tormented by the memories of his murdered Primarch, he joins the Death Company. In battle the Death Company are sent against the deadliest foes so they might find absolution and glory in death. About this Series: The Adeptus Astartes are genetically engineered warriors, created by the Emperor […]

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Merle’s Door – Ted Kerasote

Now including a wonderful new photo insert chronicling Merle’s life, this national bestseller explores the relationship between humans and dogs. How would dogs live if they were free? Would they stay with their human friends? Merle and Ted found each other in the Utah desert— Merle was living wild and Ted was looking for a pup to keep him company. As their b […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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The Texas Tribune: Businesses Back Greenhouse Gas Emissions Law

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Dems Defy Obama on Mortgage Protections

by torrie199 Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, President Barack Obama laid out his new housing plan, emphasizing the importance of safe, simple, affordable mortgages. But lawmakers in his own party are working against him, trying to gut historic new safeguards on home loans.

A new mortgage rule issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that takes effect January 1 limits fees on new home loans to three percent. The regulation is “one of the most direct and important responses to the mortgage crisis,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) argued in a recent editorial in American Banker. But 12 House Democrats and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have joined with Republicans to cosponsor bills that would eviscerate the new cap and clear the way for lenders to steer Americans into riskier, higher-cost loans.

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Dems Defy Obama on Mortgage Protections

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Lobbyist Secretly Wrote House Dems’ Letter Urging Weaker Investor Protections

by KetaHeadraf Posted on August 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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A letter that a group of progressive Democrats sent to federal regulators opposing new protections for millions of Americans’ retirement accounts was drafted by a financial industry lobbyist, according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.

The Department of Labor (DoL), which oversees the federal law setting minimum standards for many retirement plans, would like to require retirement investment advisers to act in the best interest of their customers, as opposed to their own best interest.

But 28 out of the 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus—a group of African-American members of Congress that advocates for the interests of low-income people and minorities—signed onto a June 14 letter opposing the rule. So did Democratic lawmakers Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Ed Pastor of Arizona, and Jim Costa of California.

The letter’s metadata indicates it was drafted by Robert Lewis, a lobbyist who works for the Financial Services Institute (FSI), an investment industry trade group:

Together, the liberal lawmakers who signed the letter have received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign money from the securities and investment industry in recent years.

In the letter, the lawmakers caution the DoL against proposing new regulations, warning that a strict new rule on retirement advisers may cause many of them to leave the market, and thus “could severely limit access to low-cost investment advice” for “the minority communities we represent.”

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Lobbyist Secretly Wrote House Dems’ Letter Urging Weaker Investor Protections

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

by tf942pe Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Tesla’s Q2 results.

Tesla Motors surprised Wall Street this afternoon, announcing second-quarter profits of $26 million on $405 million in revenue. Since it reported its first modest profit in May, the electric-car company cofounded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk already had seen its share price more than double, and you can expect it to soar even higher when the markets open tomorrow. Many analysts, after all, were expecting Tesla to take a hit. But so far, the company’s profits have relied on government subsidies and initiatives.

Tesla’s own accomplishments are impressive. The company, founded in 2004, is selling its all-electric cars as fast as it can produce them, even though the baseline price for a Model S sedan is nearly $70,000. Car and Driver says the Model S is possibly the best car it has ever tested. Musk has built a successful company after years of scraping by low on funds while sinking money into researching and developing amazing cars.

In January 2010, as Tesla was developing the Model S, it received a $465 million dollar loan from the Department of Energy (DOE). That’s not to mention other, less direct subsidies, like the millions of dollars in subsidies in Japan that helped Panasonic develop the lithium-ion batteries that are at the heart of every Tesla car. Tesla’s modest first-quarter profit relied on $68 million from zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) credits it sold to other, less environmentally friendly car companies under a California emissions mandate. There’s also the $7,500 federal tax break for people who buy electric vehicles, which makes its pricey cars more affordable.

As for today’s results. Tesla earned $51 million on ZEV credits, without which it would not have been able to report a profit.

Tesla is a model for how government support can help bring ambitious new technologies to market. But you won’t hear Elon Musk saying that. To the contrary, he has tweeted about how he thinks we’d be better off passing a carbon tax instead of the hefty loan that floated Tesla at a key moment. Musk claims the DOE loan was merely an “accelerant” for Tesla. The company was “bailed in, not bailed out,” Musk quipped during an interview with Popular Mechanics last year.

Could Tesla have made it this far without government support? And will the company—not to mention Musk’s other enterprises, SpaceX and SolarCity—stand alone in the future? Let’s take a look at Tesla’s climb to success.

1. Starting in 2004, Tesla drums up millions in private cash so it can build an electric car from scratch. Musk leads several private financing rounds, and dumps in a substantial chunk of his own cash.

2. By 2008, Tesla has spent years designing its first car, the Roadster, but still has nothing to sell to customers. The car is taking years longer to bring to market, and costing a lot more, than Tesla execs had predicted. Tesla slashes its workforce. Musk takes over as CEO and eventually pushes hard for the federal loan, which Tesla receives in January 2010.

3. The loan helps Tesla get the Model S to market. The car gets (mostly) rave reviews, setting the stage for a successful IPO in June 2010, when Tesla raises $226 million selling stock to the public.

4. The IPO and brisk sales of the Model S (made more affordable by that $7,500 federal tax credit) allow Tesla to pay off its loan years early. In May 2013, thanks to $68 million in revenues from selling California clean-air credits to rival car makers, Tesla posts its first profit, a modest $11 million.

5. Profitability sends Tesla’s stock price soaring. Today’s earnings report may boost it even further.

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

One of China’s largest and most prominent media companies—12 percent of which is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox—has been rocked by a major sexual harassment and assault scandal. A lawsuit filed on July 19 in federal court against Phoenix Satellite Television contains a series of jaw-dropping allegations concerning its onetime Washington, DC, bureau chief, Zhengzhu Liu. The Chinese journalist is accused of a litany of offenses, including encouraging job applicants to meet him in hotel rooms for interviews and then groping them, attempting to coerce the wife of a cameraman to have sex with him to preserve her husband’s job, telling a job candidate about the “gigantic and powerful penis” of his black friend, and attempting to rape a reporter.

The plaintiffs, two of whom are US citizens, claim at least one high-ranking Phoenix executive knew about this conduct for years before the company fired Liu last December. They also say that after Phoenix ousted Liu, the media conglomerate installed a new bureau chief who proceeded to retaliate against employees who had complained about the alleged abuses.

Four of the five plaintiffs—Meixing Ren, Ching-Yi Chang, Taofeng Wang, and Haipei Shue—are men who say that Tao Lu, the current bureau chief, punished them for speaking out about his predecessor’s alleged conduct by downsizing their job duties and firing one of them. The fifth plaintiff is a former Phoenix intern who alleges that Liu repeatedly groped her. Another former Phoenix intern filed a separate lawsuit in New York earlier this year making similar allegations. Mother Jones interviewed three of the male plaintiffs and four of Liu’s alleged female victims.

Phoenix Television, which is based in Hong Kong, is one of few private broadcasters permitted by the Chinese government to operate in mainland China. The multimedia empire maintains bureaus around the world, covers more than 150 countries, and is worth about $1.9 billion. In 2008, the company’s current CEO, Liu Changle, won an International Emmy for being “one of Asia’s leading broadcast entrepreneurs.”

The lawsuit is “full of inaccuracies and false statements about the Company,” Wu Xiaoyong, the CEO of Phoenix’s American subsidiary, told Mother Jones in a statement. “We have retained counsel to defend the Company’s interests, and we will have no further comment regarding this case.” Mother Jones left messages at several phone numbers associated with Liu; he did not respond to these repeated requests for comment. Both Xiaoyong and the law firm representing the plaintiffs said they do not know the ex-bureau chief’s whereabouts. Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox declined to comment.

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Inside the Washington Sexual Assault Scandal Rocking a Chinese Media Empire

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Obama Issues Orders to Prevent the Next West, Texas-style Explosion

by Aaron Slot Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

On Thursday, President Obama issued an executive order on chemical facility safety, three and a half months after the deadly ammonium nitrate explosion in a West, Texas fertilizer plant. The order outlines a number of new initiatives intended to modernize oversight of plants and strengthen the coordination of the various agencies responsible for safety at these facilities.

There aren’t new rules in this order. It’s more a list of things that agencies should work on.

Here’s how the White House fact sheet describes it:

improve operational coordination with state and local partners;
enhance Federal agency coordination and information sharing;
modernize policies, regulations, and standards; and
work with stakeholders to identify best practices.

To take up those mandates, the order establishes a new Chemical Facility Safety and Security Working Group, which will include the top officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Homeland Security. It also directs federal, state, local, and tribal groups to figure out how to work together better on this issue.

The West, Texas disaster came after a number of safety lapses. For one, its emergency plan relied on the assumption there was “no” risk of an explosion like the one that happened. Texas regulators hadn’t inspected the plant in five years, and federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors hadn’t been there since 1985. The company had failed to follow federal law on disclosing hazardous chemicals kept on site. The list of failures at the plant is fairly long.

The directive calls for a specific evaluation of how to improve the handling of ammonium nitrate. But what it doesn’t call for is an evaluation of whether we even need to use it at all. As my colleague Tim Murphy has reported, a number of other countries have banned ammonium nitrate because it’s too explosive. There are non-exploding alternatives, but the US chemical industry has fought efforts to change the rules in the US.

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Obama Issues Orders to Prevent the Next West, Texas-style Explosion

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JPMorgan Chase Accused of Manipulating Electricity Prices, Pays Record-Breaking Penalties

by Susie Quan Posted on July 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Just one day after US regulators formally accused it of manipulating energy prices, America’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, has agreed to pay a record $410 million in penalties.

Specifically, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accused Chase traders in Houston of devising elaborate schemes that essentially forced electricity grid operators—organizations that manage the flow of electricity—in California and the Midwest to pay for plants to sit idle, causing them to pay more than 80 times the cost of prevailing electricity prices for ten months between 2010 and 2011. Chase’s alleged price-gouging echoes the infamous 2001 Enron scheme, in which the company constricted electricity supply in California in order to jack up prices.

The FERC action comes at a time of increasing scrutiny of banks’ ownership of commodities. Last week, for example, the New York Times questioned whether Goldman Sachs was manipulating the aluminum market through the metal warehouses it controls.

Even though the penalty for Chase’s bad behavior is the largest the FERC has ever slapped on a company, the fine still falls in line with trifling punishments leveled against the bank—and other financial behemoths—for similar egregious behavior. Chase’s $410 million settlement, which was reached on Tuesday and will be divided between ratepayers and the Treasury Department, represents less than two percent of Chase’s record $21.3 billion 2012 profits—or about what it earns in a single week. (FERC has also barred the bank from trading in US energy securities for the next six months.)

Investigators for the agency initially considered holding one Chase executive and a few specific traders individually liable for the allegedly abusive pricing schemes, but ultimately dropped that idea, according to the Times. The bank has denied wrongdoing, and, as Reuters has pointed out, the settlement will put an end to a troublesome “distraction” for Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

The bank has had other distractions in recent years. In May 2012, Chase lost $6 billion on risky trades out of its London office. So far, the banks has escaped penalty for those actions—US banking regulators merely ordered it to fix the risk-management failures that led to the massive loss.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has repeatedly highlighted the discrepancy between the punishments meted out to ordinary Americans for criminal behavior and those big banks receive for wrongdoing—whether it be tricking consumers into paying higher power prices, causing massive trading losses, or laundering drug money: “If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, you’re going to go to jail,” she said at a Senate Banking Committee hearing earlier this year, referring to the giant international bank HSBC. “But if you launder nearly a billion dollars for international cartels and violate sanctions you pay a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed a night.”

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JPMorgan Chase Accused of Manipulating Electricity Prices, Pays Record-Breaking Penalties

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Will Russian Hackers Cause the Next Financial Crisis?

by Laura Posted on July 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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The US brought criminal charges Thursday against a gang of Russian and Ukrainian programmers in what is the biggest hacking case yet in the United States. The men were indicted for a long-running scheme of stealing and selling 160 million credit card numbers from more than a dozen big American companies. But the case has bigger implications, according to a story in the New York Times today. One of the men was also able to hack into the servers of the Nasdaq stock exchange, raising fears among US and international authorities that the next financial crisis could be caused by rogue programmers.

One of the Russian men, Aleksandr Kalinin, was also charged Thursday in a separate case with having gained access to Nasdaq servers for two years between 2007 and 2010. The indictment reveals that Kalinin, who also went by the names Grig and Tempo, had access to an unknown amount of information on a bunch of Nasdaq servers, where he was able to enter commands to steal, change, or delete data, and at certain points could even perform systems administrator functions. According to the Times, federal prosecutors, international banking regulators, the FBI, and the financial industry are all worried that next time this happens hackers could gain access to even more tightly secured trading platforms and disrupt the financial system.

From the Times:

While Mr. Kalinin never penetrated the main servers supporting Nasdaq’s trading operations—and appears to have caused limited damage at Nasdaq—the attack raised the prospect that hackers could be getting closer to the infrastructure that supports billions of dollars of trades each hour.

“As today’s allegations make clear, cybercriminals are determined to prey not only on individual bank accounts, but on the financial system itself,” Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said in announcing the case.

It is a pivotal moment, just a week after a report from the World Federation of Exchanges and an international group of regulators warned about the vulnerability of exchanges to cybercrime. The report said that hackers were shifting their focus away from stealing money and toward more “destabilizing aims.”

In a survey conducted for the report, 89 percent of the world’s exchanges said that hacking posed a “systemic risk” to global financial markets…

At a Senate hearing on cybersecurity on Thursday, a representative of several financial industry groups, Mark Clancy, said that “for the financial services industry, cyberthreats are a constant reality and a potential systemic risk to the industry.”

The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) report found that 53 percent of all stock exchanges had experienced a cyberattack in the past year.

My colleague Nick Baumann has reported on how mere programming glitches at the mid-sized financial firm Knight Capital a year ago caused losses at the firm of $10 million a minute, and set off turmoil in the stock market. But an intentional attack could have more drastic effects. Baumann pointed to a 2011 article by John Bates, a computer scientist who has designed software behind complicated trading algorithms. “Fears of algorithmic terrorism, where a well-funded criminal or terrorist organization could find a way to cause a major market crisis, are not unfounded,” Bates wrote at the time. “This type of scenario could cause chaos for civilization.”

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Will Russian Hackers Cause the Next Financial Crisis?

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Congress to Fed: End Too-Big-to-Fail Already!

by ElizaTSK Posted on July 25, 2013

Mother Jones

Between 2007 and 2009, the Federal Reserve doled out $16 trillion in massive, super-cheap loans to save flailing Wall Street banks. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called for the Fed to limit its emergency lending powers so too-big-to-fail banks won’t count on the central bank saving them again. But three years after Dodd-Frank became law, the Fed still has not budged to curb its bailout powers—and Congress is losing its patience.

One section of Dodd-Frank requires that any future emergency lending by the Fed has to be backed by good collateral, can’t be used to bail out insolvent firms, and can’t go to a single institution. The law also places time limits on the Fed’s emergency loans to banks. But the Fed still hasn’t crafted these general provisions into specific regulations. Until it does, financial reform advocates say, the central bank can interpret that part of the Dodd-Frank law however it wants—which means banks have little reason to doubt the Fed will again dole out easy money in the event of a financial meltdown.

This “is an important part of Dodd-Frank, designed to explicitly prohibit bailouts,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who sits on the Senate banking committee, told Mother Jones when asked about the Fed’s delay in writing up the regulations. “The Federal Reserve should move expeditiously to issue the required regulations.” Banking committee chair Sen. Tim Johnson (D-Ill.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Reps. David Scott (D-Ga.), and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) all echoed Warner’s comments. Some members of Congress are so fed up that they’re trying to force the Fed’s hand; in April, Brown and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) introduced a bill that would place far stronger limitations on emergency assistance from the central bank.

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Congress to Fed: End Too-Big-to-Fail Already!

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Court: Chevron Can Seize Americans’ Email Data

by Rob Sutter Posted on July 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Thanks to disclosures made by Edward Snowden, Americans have learned that their email records are not necessarily safe from the National Security Agency—but a new ruling shows that they’re not safe from big oil companies, either.

Last month, a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata—which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content—belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn’t violate the First Amendment because Americans weren’t among the people targeted.

Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans—a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and in cases involving Americans, courts have often quashed subpoenas seeking to discover the identities and locations of anonymous internet users. Earlier this year, a different federal judge quashed Chevron’s attempts to seize documents from Amazon Watch, one of the company’s most vocal critics. That judge said the subpoena was a violation of the group’s First Amendment rights. In this case, though, that same protection has not been extended to activists, journalists, and lawyers’ email metadata.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents 40 of the targeted users—some of whom are members of the legal teams who represented the plaintiffs—and Nate Cardozo, an attorney for EFF, says that of the three targeted Hotmail users, at least one is American. Cardozo says that of the Yahoo and Gmail users, “many” are American.

“It’s appalling to me that the First Amendment has no bearing in this case, and that the judge simply assumed that all of the targets aren’t US citizens—when in fact, I am,” says a human rights activist from New York who has been advocating on behalf of the indigenous community, doing both volunteer and paid work, since 2005. He has never been sued by Chevron, nor been deposed. He wishes to remain anonymous—because his legal fight against the subpoena is still pending. The activist received a notice of the subpoena from Google last year (it has not been granted yet.) Chevron is seeking information including, but not limited to, the name associated with the account and where a user was every time he logged in—for the past nine years.

“Chevron is trying to crush, silence, and chill activism on behalf of the people they screwed over,” the activist argues. Michelle Harrison, an attorney for EarthRights International, tells Mother Jones that her clients aren’t comfortable going on record about the subpoenas they’ve received, because “Chevron’s dogged pursuit of anyone that dares speak out against them is regrettably having precisely the chilling effect we warned the court it would.”

Advocates for the plaintiffs in the Chevron case say that subpoenaing the email records is the company’s latest nuclear tactic to win a lawsuit it keeps losing. Chevron was ordered to pay $9 billion in damages in 2011 and to issue a public apology. After the company refused, a judge ordered the damages to double. The Supreme Court has declined to hear Chevron’s appeal. The extortion case is set to go to trial on October 15, after Kaplan—whom the Ecuadorean plaintiffs once asked to be removed from the case—refused to delay it.

Cardozo says there are 101 email addresses listed in the subpoenas to the three tech companies, but EFF has found only two that are owned by actual defendants in the lawsuit. “Subpoenas of nonparties are generally quite routine,” says Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law. But Karl Manheim, a professor at the Loyola School of Law in Los Angeles, notes, “The parties seeking the info have to establish its relevance to the case; you can’t just go on a ‘fishing expedition’ or on a hunch.”

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at CATO, says that “even assuming the account holders aren’t citizens, it doesn’t automatically follow that the First Amendment is irrelevant.” But he notes that while anonymous speech made by Americans is protected under the Constitution, “courts have been inconsistent in applying that protection against civil subpoenas aimed at identifying anonymous internet users.” In the case Dendrite International, Inc. v. Doe No. 3, for example, an appellate court held that a company was not allowed to unmask users who had criticized the company on a Yahoo message board.

Manheim says the judge’s invocation of citizenship is “wrong” in this case and the users should appeal. “The US Constitution applies to all persons (even foreign nationals) within US borders and to US persons abroad. While the targets of the subpoenas are outside of US jurisdiction, the subpoena itself is operative within the US. So the Constitution should apply.” (Chevron did not respond to request for comment.)

“I think if the NSA scandal has taught us anything, anyone who says that ‘it’s just metadata’ doesn’t know what metadata is—if I want to spend the night at my friend’s house and use his computer, that’s my business,” Cardozo says. “And if Judge Kaplan thinks seizing metadata is routine, he doesn’t know how powerful it can be.” The activist adds, “It’s a slippery slope. Once one thing is granted, it will only be easier to ask for more.”

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Court: Chevron Can Seize Americans’ Email Data

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