Roadblocks in 30 U.S. Cities by Federal Contractors to Collect DNA Samples

Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:

Setting Up Roadblocks in 30 U.S. Cities by Federal Contractors to Collect DNA Samples

Federal contractors have been setting up roadblocks in cities across the country with the purpose of collecting DNA samples from passing motorists.  The multi-million dollar federal program has been disturbing drivers and alarming civil libertarians.

The checkpoints consist of uniformed agents blocking a public road and flagging drivers into a testing area or a parking lot.   There, the drivers are requested to submit a saliva or blood sample to the federal government.

The roadblocks were part of a study orchestrated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).  The agency contracted the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, based in Calverton, MD, to perform the roadblocks.  The program costs taxpayers $7.9 million over 3 years, according to NBC News Dallas-Fort Worth: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/19/21537740-texas-drivers-get-asked-for-saliva-blood-at-police-roadblock

The agency confirmed that the operation is currently being launched in 30 different U.S. cities.

Drivers are offered cash for surrendering DNA samples.  The going rate is $10 for a cheek-swab and $50 for blood drawn from the vein.  The goal, according to the NHTSA, is to decrease impaired-driving accidents by analyzing raw bodily fluids fresh off the street.

“They want to find out of all the people surveyed, how many people were driving with alcohol in their system, or prescription drugs, things like that,” said Lt. Freddie Turrentine of the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department, in Pell City, Alabama.

Voluntary or not?

The NHTSA says that the samples are “voluntary,” but drivers have had varying experiences.

Kim Cope, of North Fort Worth, Texas, said that the checkpoint she experienced was not voluntary at all.  She was forced off the road into a parking lot on November 15th and pressured into submitting to a breathalyzer.  Cope was on her lunch break when she was forced into the checkpoint.  ”I gestured to the guy in front that I just wanted to go straight, but he wouldn’t let me and forced me into a parking spot,” she said to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.

“They were asking for cheek swabs. They would give $10 for that. Also, if you let them take your blood, they would pay you $50 for that.” But Cope was not interested in getting paid. “I finally did the Breathalyzer test just because I thought that would be the easiest way to leave.”

“How voluntary is it when you have a police officer in uniform flagging you down?” asked Susan Watson, executive director of the Alabama chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Are you going to stop? Yes, you’re going to stop.”

“Although this was voluntary it was not voluntary that you stop and hear the DNA for CASH pitch,” said Alabama resident ‘J. Bosey‘ after experiencing a checkpoint in June.

Carl Olund, another driver was subjected to a roadblock in Fort Worth, told NBCDFW.com that he was pressured into provide samples of his breath and saliva to the federal agents there.  Not knowing the stop was “voluntary,” he said his rationale for cooperating was that he felt if he left the roadblock without cooperating he might have had “4 or 5 cops chasing [him].”

“It just doesn’t seem right that you can be forced off the road when you’re not doing anything wrong,” said Cope, discovering the tyranny of police checkpoints.  “None of it felt voluntary.”

And as a Fort Worth attorney discovered in the fine print, some searches are blatantly performed without consent.  Attorney Frank Colosi pointed out that the fine print on a form given to drivers informs them their breath was tested by “passive alcohol sensor readings before the consent process has been completed.”

One such search can be performed with a breath sensor disguised as a flashlight.  When a police officer sticks his flashlight in a driver’s face, its not just for intimidation and humiliation.  It may also be to perform a warrantless search of their breath.

“They’re essentially lying to you when they say it’s completely voluntary, because they’re testing you at that moment,” Colosi said.

Problems

The aura of authority.  While insisting the program is “voluntary,” the NHTSA is going to the trouble of setting up roadblocks and hiring uniformed local cops to staff them.  While they are technically “off-duty” with their local departments — and receiving paychecks directly from the federal government — they are still utilizing their official police uniforms, official police vehicles, and official police equipment to make drivers comply with the roadblocks.  

To reinforce the claim that the checkpoints are voluntary, the survey takers should be dressed in plain clothes, not presenting themselves as police officers giving orders
Ineffective. 

Common sense tells us that if the tests are voluntary, and the goal is to find people who are breaking the law, then the data is going to be useless.  The people who are actually impaired on the road are going to make every effort to avoid being caught.  The resultant test group will be comprised mostly of people who are not impaired and just want to collect some free Federal giveaway money.

Expensive.  For a country that runs trillion dollar deficits annually, the federal government certainly finds some bizarre things to spend money on.  Spending nearly $8 million on an ineffective and invasive survey seems like an easy place to start cutting.

Searches without consent.  Kim Cope’s account draws into question whether the roadblocks are being presented as voluntary at all.  And as pointed out above, the “passive alcohol sensor readings” are performed on people without their consent.

Federal overreach

The roadblocks are, at least in some cases, being set up by the federal government without the local government’s knowledge or approval.  In Alabama, Gov. Robert Bentley received complaints about the NHTSA checkpoints and admitted he had not been notified of their presence.

More dubiously, the program has the passive effect of conditioning the public to accept government agents setting up roadblocks in their communities for any reason imaginable.   If Americans wish to live in a society that does not accept police checkpoints as a routine part of their daily lives, it is important to push back against these programs at every opportunity.

Source... http://worldtruth.tv/federal-contractors-set-up-roadblocks-in-30-u-s-cities-to-harvest-dna-samples-2/

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BREAKING: After 50 Years, The Boston Strangler Case Is Solved, Proved Albert DiSalvo Guilty

Newsflash from your Hollywood Attorney:

This Feb. 25, 1967, file photo shows self-confessed Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo minutes after his capture in Boston. Diane Dodd and son Casey Sherman hold a photo of Dodd's sister Mary Sullivan, who was found strangled in January 1964 and is believed to have been the last victim of the Boston Strangler.

A water bottle recovered from a construction site where Tim DiSalvo – whose uncle Albert DiSalvo had confessed to being the internationally notorious Boston Strangler – gave police the DNA evidence they needed to bring closure to a case that has been a mystery for nearly 50 years, murders for which no one has ever been charged.

"This is really a story of relentlessness,'' Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis explained today as Massachusetts top law enforcement officials revealed that DNA preserved from the body of the Boston Strangler's last victim--raped and murdered in 1964--can now be linked with "99.9 percent certainty" to the late Albert DiSalvo.

"This is good evidence. This is strong evidence. This is reliable evidence,'' Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said of the new DNA result. "But there can be no doubt."

The Boston Stranger case, which inspired a 1968 Hollywood movie starring Tony Curtis, marked a terrifying swath of history in the city – and one that has long been mired in doubt.

t was the 1960s and single women across Massachusetts were the target of a serial killer and rapist. When it was over, the Boston Strangler had killed 11 women. The case baffled the five separate District Attorney's offices investigating the murders because of the spread-out locations of the victims. Then DiSalvo, a convicted rapist, made a jailhouse confession claiming that he was the Boston Strangler and provided details on the 11 murdered women.

But DiSalvo was never charged in the case and was found dead in his cell under mysterious circumstances at Walpole state prison in 1973. This week investigators will exhume DiSalvo's body from Puritan Lawn Cemetery in Peabody, Mass., to make the final determination with DNA testing.

The strangler's last victim would be 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, strangled with her own stocking in her Beacon Hill apartment on tony Charles Street. She was also sexually savaged.

Her killer left behind seminal fluids that were lifted from a maroon blanket her body was covered with. That remains the only DNA evidence in the entire Boston Strangler investigation: six samples that the Boston Police Crime Lab's lead forensic scientist Robert Hayes preserved as he waited for technology to advance to the point where nuclear DNA could be positively matched to a suspect.

First, police had to make sure the Y-chromosomes in those DNA samples were a familial match to DiSalvo in order to convince a judge to let investigators disturb his grave. So BPD Sgt. Brian Albert, a surveillance expert, followed nephew Tim DiSalvo to his worksite in Boston and retrieved a water bottle he drank from and left behind. It was a match to the samples collected in the 1964 Beacon Hill murder, excluding 99.9 percent of the male population from suspicion in Mary Sullivan's killing, Hayes said, and pointing to Albert DiSalvo with near certainty as the man responsible.

Source... http://abcnews.go.com/US/boston-strangler-case-solved-50-years/story?id=19640699#.Ud774flwroI

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New Zealand authorities conduct DNA test on Madeleine McCann look-alike

Whenever someone calls the Queenstown, New Zealand, police to report that they’ve seen a little girl who looks just like Madeleine McCann, the 4-year-old Briton who disappeared from her parents’ holiday villa in Portugal the night of May 3, 2007, police know exactly whom they are talking about. They’ve been called to investigate a Maddie sighting five times in the last five years in the cities of Queenstown, Milton, and Alexandra, and each time they are led to the same young child, who not only shares McCann’s hair coloring and petite stature, but also has the same coloboma in her right eye. The last sighting was New Year’s Eve, when a store clerk in Queenstown reported that a peculiar man came into the store where she worked with a shy young girl who looked “just like Madeleine.” The police went on a five-day manhunt to chase down the little girl, whose parents are transient. New Zealand Detective Sgt. Brian Cameron issued a statement January 4 that police were “absolutely satisfied” that the young girl was not the missing Briton. “This was not the first occasion that someone had contacted the police remarking on the similarity between the two girls.”

But Scotland Yard wants to be sure. As part of the ongoing McCann case review called Operation Grange, which kicked off in May 2011, Metropolitan police want to test the New Zealand child’s DNA to make sure once and for all that she is not McCann. The DNA request has been accepted, but it will take several weeks before test results are complete and the young girl can be completely ruled out as a match.

Operation Grange, which has cost more than $4 million, according to British press reports, will be the definitive read on the case. Under the direction of Scotland Yard, homicide and child-kidnapping specialists are reviewing some 100,000 pages of documents, which contain more than 40,000 pieces of evidence used in the original investigation by Portuguese police. They are also following up on each new lead in the case, including the New Zealand sightings. On January 24, 2013, an English-language newspaper in Portugal reported that an investigative team from Scotland Yard had flown back to Portugal to follow up on several leads. They are meeting with Helena Monteiro, a new Portuguese investigator who was not involved in the original investigation and is reportedly considering reopening the case based on Scotland Yard’s finding of 200 lost threads in the investigation. Many of the forgotten leads deal with reports of active child-trafficking rings during the time McCann disappeared, with reports that children were being “stolen to order” across the region. In one case, several guests at the holiday resort reported seeing a strange man carrying a small child under a blanket late the night she disappeared. The Portuguese authorities at the time never followed up on the sighting, according to Met police familiar with the Operation Grange dossier.

But after a strong campaign by McCann supporters, British Prime Minister David Cameron opened the investigation and launched Operation Grange. So far the review has definitively closed many conspiracy theories in the case, but it has also renewed speculation that McCann may still be alive. Last year Scotland Yard has reviewed long-forgotten leads in Spain after a Gibraltar resident said she had reported seeing a young British girl with a German family at a Spanish campground in the days after the disappearance. The lead was never followed by the Portuguese cops, despite efforts by the woman who spotted the young girl. Other leads, including ties to a known pedophile, Raymond Hewlett, who was living in Portugal at the time and wrote a deathbed letter confessing he knew what happened to the young girl, were ignored and may never be laid to rest. Still, with every new sighting and the discovery of another old lead, McCann’s parents renew hope that they will find their daughter alive.

Read More... http://news.yahoo.com/madeleine-mccann-down-under-094500538--politics.html