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Tag: Jerry Brown

  • California Drones Bill Vetoed, Police Not Required to Obtain Warrants for Unmanned Surveillance

    California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have instituted regulations on drone use by public agencies – including the police. Among other things, the bill would have forced police, in most cases, to obtain a warrant to surveil the public with unmanned aircraft systems.

    “I am returning Assembly Bill 1327 without my signature,” said Gov. Brown in his veto letter. “There are undoubtedly circumstances where a warrant is appropriate. The bill’s exceptions, however, appear to be too narrow and could impose requirements beyond what is required by either the 4th Amendment or the privacy provisions in the California Constitution.”

    What are these ‘narrow’ exemptions? According to the text of the bill:

    (1) emergency situations if there is an imminent threat to life or of great bodily harm, including, but not limited to, fires, hostage crises, “hot pursuit” situations if reasonably necessary to prevent harm to law enforcement officers or others, and search and rescue operations on land or water.

    (2) To assess the necessity of first responders in situations relating to traffic accidents.

    (3) (A) To inspect state parks and wilderness areas for illegal vegetation or fires.

    All other public agencies (other than law enforcement) would be able to operate drones – after reasonable public notice – if it was to “achieve the core mission of the agency provided that the purpose is unrelated to the gathering of criminal intelligence.”

    The bill’s author, Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, is none too pleased with the veto.

    “We’re increasingly living in a surveillance society as the government uses new technology to track and watch the activities of Americans,” he told the LA Times. “It’s disappointing that the governor decided to side with law enforcement in this case over the privacy interests of California.”

    The bill had the full support of privacy advocates. As Ars Technica points out, 10 states have already enacted similar legislation, forcing police to obtain warrants for drone surveillance.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • ‘Yelp Bill’ Passed In California

    ‘Yelp Bill’ Passed In California

    California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that prevents consumers from facing legal action from businesses over negative reviews. The law keeps businesses from being able to prevent customers from writing negative reviews or penalize them for doing so.

    As a Washington Post article that Yelp points to explains, “The bill bans businesses from forcing consumers into contracts in which they waive their right to comment on the service they receive, and it also bars businesses from otherwise penalizing customers for such statements. It imposes fines of $2,500 for the first violation and $5,000 for each thereafter. If a violation was willful, intentional or reckless, an additional fine of $10,000 could be levied.”

    The bill is being referred to by some (including Yelp) as the “Yelp Bill”. The company says on its blog:

    From time to time we hear about businesses that are so afraid of what their customers might say about them that they sneak clauses into consumer contracts designed to forbid their customers from saying anything bad about them on sites like Yelp. Some of these contracts even threaten fines or legal action. These types of non-disparagement contracts not only seek to intimidate potential reviewers away from sharing their honest experiences online, but also threaten to deprive the public of useful consumer information.

    A five-star rating for a business who had used one of these clauses to simply scare all negative reviewers into removing their comments wouldn’t really represent the experience a consumer could expect to have at that business in our opinion.

    AB 2365 makes it explicitly clear that non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts for goods or services in the state of California are void and unenforceable. What this means is that individuals writing online reviews in California are now further protected from those bad actors who hide jargon in consumer contracts in attempts to prohibit you from posting reviews — positive or negative — online.

    One hotel recently came under fire for charging guests $500 for negative Yelp reviews, but ultimately removed that from its policy after a wave of negative publicity.

    The passage of the Yelp Bill is the second favorable piece of legal news for the company in as many weeks. Last week, an extortion suit was dismissed.

    Yelp still faces a class action suit from shareholders who claim the company mislead them about the legitimacy of reviews.

    You can look at the bill here.

    Image via Twitter

  • California Expected to Set Water Restrictions

    In an attempt to help curb the impact of a three-year drought, California is likely to soon issue a first-time mandatory water restriction.

    The California State Water Resources Control Board is expected to pass the emergency measure Tuesday, as reservoirs across the state and in the region are dwindling. Officials have stated that the new mandate would ban practices such as washing cars without hoses equipped with a shut-off nozzle, and allowing sprinkler water to run off lawns onto streets. Maximum fines for violations would be $500, enforceable by local water agencies.

    California’s Lake Oroville presently stands at 39 percent capacity, while Nevada’s Lake Mead, which is the largest supply of drinking water in the Southwest, has sunk to its lowest level since it began filling in the 1930s after the completion of the Hoover Dam.

    Lake Oroville looking low:

    California Governor Jerry Brown had urged all Californians to conserve water voluntarily in January, in hopes of cutting wasteful use by twenty percent. A statewide water survey conducted in May revealed that voluntary efforts had yielded savings of only five percent. State and federal agencies have sharply reduced water shipments in California, with farmers, ranchers and some cities in the northern part of the state feeling the greatest effects.

    Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the California water board, remarked, “There is a need for people to take more dramatic action. We are saying: ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t waste water.’”

    The water shortage in California has also affected seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault. The fault, a continental transform that runs roughly 810 miles through California, is being affected by irrigation practices in the area, according to a study by Geologist Colin Amos from Western Washington University.

    Satellite data has shown that groundwater in and near the California Central Valley has been depleted more quickly than it can be re-filled over the past decade, and Amos’ study related the water in association to the mountains in the area as being akin to a weight sitting atop a piece of bendable wood. As the water is depleted, its weight is lifted, which in turn pushes the mountains to rise from the Earth’s crust.

    Amos confirmed that seasonal fluctuations in water usage have coincided with minor earthquakes around the San Andreas Fault, and that new developments for water usage and natural groundwater retention need to be implemented.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • BART Strike: Last-Second Proposals Could Avert Friday Morning Shutdown

    The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has until midnight Thursday to arrive at an agreement with its labor unions. Negotiators offered a last second contract proposal Thursday afternoon in an effort to avoid a Friday morning shutdown that will affect some 400,000 riders in the San Francisco Bay Area.

    As of 6pm, BART and union officials were still negotiating. No deal had been reached, and to the frustration of Bay Area residents, union officials hadn’t made an announcement about whether or not they would strike.


    Today marks the end of a 60-day cooling off period ordered by California governor Jerry Brown back in August. Not surprisingly, one of the big points of contention in the negotiations is wage increases. The opposing sides were getting closer to an agreement when an all-day negotiation session fell through Wednesday night due to what BART called a “miscommunication.”

    Union officials claim that management caused Wednesday’s break-down in negotiations by taking back a recent offer. Josie Mooney, chief negotiator for one of the two major labor unions involved said “We were stunned.”
    As negotiations continue, Bay Area commuters hold their breath and hope that they won’t see a repeat of the July strike that slowed automobile traffic on freeways and bridges to a crawl and overtaxed the city’s busses and ferries.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Timothy Leary, Psychedelic Guru, Research Displayed

    A new exhibit might make your visit to the New York Public Library a “trip” back to the 1960’s psychedelic and drug counterculture. A cache of files from the original pusher, Timothy Leary, is being put on display. Denis Berry, trustee for the Leary estate, calls the files, “the missing link in every attempt to piece together an account of research into Timothy Leary and the emergence of scientific research into psychedelic drugs and popular drug counterculture.”

    The New York Public Library bought the trove from the Leary estate in 2011; he died in 1996. Today marked the first day materials—purchased for an undisclosed amount—will be displayed to scholars and the public.

    Rare-book dealer, John McWhinnie, who appraised the Leary stash wrote that it, “details a program into psychedelic research that was akin to Kinsey’s research into human sexuality.” McWhinnie—who passed away last year—represented the bookseller that brokered the deal with the Library.

    Leary’s research into the use of psychedelic substances for therapy, specifically LSD and mushrooms, attracted a number of the names we automatically associate with the 1960’s: Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac and others. They visited him at Millbrook Estate in upstate New York, where Leary retreated after Harvard University fired him as a psychology lecturer, officially because of too many missed classes, unofficially because of bad press and scrutiny surrounding his LSD work.

    Leary’s life and work are undoubtedly the stuff of legend and controversy. His intent to join the 1970 California gubernatorial race reportedly inspired the Beatles song, Come Together. He experienced multiple arrests and prison stays, some of which were overturned. In the 1970’s he escaped from prison and fled to Algeria while serving a 20 year sentence, continuing around the globe and seeking shelter from the Black Panthers and arms dealers until his arrest in Afghanistan in 1972. After his conviction, he was incarcerated in Folsom Prison in California until Jerry Brown—in his first round as California Governor—released him in 1976.

    The files contain unpublished correspondence and manuscripts from critical personalities of the time. Other items include drug session reports, completed questionnaires and letters relating to his experiments post-Harvard, manuscripts and letters from prison and a description of the psychedelic training courses he conducted at Millbrook circa 1966.

    A highlight of the collection is a letter written in 1975 to Ken Kesey—author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—saying, “I think the time has come for me to go public about what I’ve been doing and learning.”

    The revelation of 1,000 floppy discs containing Leary’s work on cyberculture and the development of computer software for his self-help games shows that Leary never stopped exploring uncommon avenues with which to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

    [Video and Image via History Channel official website.]

  • $10 Minimum Wage to be in California by 2016

    Reuters reported via NBC News this morning that minimum wage workers in California would see their wages rise a dollar a year from $8 today to $10 in January 2016.

    California Republicans argued that hiking minimum wages would hurt the smaller employers, or the “mom and pop operations” as they said. Many business-friendly Democrats were also skeptical, as was Gov. Brown at first. But when the bill was amended to give the specific date of January 2016 to have a $10 minimum wage, most found themselves in support. One Democrat assemblyman who was initially against the bill, Al Muratsuchi, said that “this time I’m supporting this bill because it is a compromise… It gives employers predictability to plan for the higher labor costs.”

    Although no states currently legislate a minimum of $10 wages, the highest minimum is currently Washington with $9.19, and several states are thinking about following in California’s footsteps.

    Regardless of what businesses California Republicans are claiming will take a hit from increased wages, it is giant multinationals like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart that possess the loudest voices in the room. The 24/7 Wall St. version of the story via Yahoo Finance has the big corporations painting a higher minimum wage as wrecking their profits and making it impossible to take care of shareholders, but pressure from voters can have an interesting effect when it comes to reducing the power of lobby dollars.

    Some businesses are even thinking they can just wait out the fury, because worker-friendly movements like Occupy Wall Street have a tendency to fizzle and fade away like a forgotten trend. But the biggest problem with Occupy Wall Street revolved around their leaderless lack of direction and focus with regard to any one societal ill. The California wage fight has a focused goal (the transformation of a minimum wage into a living wage), and businesses should go ahead and acknowledge the writing on the wall: that $7.25/hour is not a living wage for anyone, and that’s a fact.

    [Image via a PBS news story on YouTube about Jerry Brown’s budget balancing initiatives]

  • Two Password Protection Bills Signed in California

    A few months ago, multiple reports surfaced of employers abusing their power to extract social media passwords from current of prospective employees – and the topic gained a lot of traction around the country. Bills were introduced in state legislatures as well as on the national level to deal with the practice of employers asking for employee passwords. Lawmakers succeeded in states like Maryland and Illinois.

    California was one of the states to quickly propose legislation barring the controversial practice, with two bills rising from the Senate and the Assembly. The first, AB 1844 proposed a ban on employers requiring a current of prospective employee to “disclose a user name or account password to access a personal social media account.” The second bill, SB 1349, sought to keep passwords safe in another realm – postsecondary education.

    Now, both bills have been signed by Governor Jerry Brown. Passwords are on their way to being protected in California.

    Here’s what Jerry Brown had to say about the legislation on Twitter:

    While AB 1844 prohibits employers from demanding passwords related to social media account, it does not cover employer-issued electronic devices (like a work phone). “The bill further stipulates that nothing in its language is intended to infringe on employers’ existing rights and obligations to investigate workplace misconduct.”

    SB 1349 reads the same way, with a stipulation that universities are still allowed to investigate “misconduct,” just not via demanding access to a student’s personal social media account.

    Let’s conclude with a warning to other states from SB 1349 sponsor Leland Yee:

    “[W]hat has happened is that there are just more and more states that are beginning to understand that the social media accounts so, in fact, have personal and private information, and if states do not somehow enact their own laws, that they are putting the residents in those states at risk. It’s extremely important that individual states respond to this emerging problem.”

  • California Driverless Car Bill to Be Signed into Law at Google HQ

    California Driverless Car Bill to Be Signed into Law at Google HQ

    UPDATE: It’s been signed.

    Late last month, California’s SB 1298 landed on the Governor’s desk after being passed in both the Senate and the Assembly (37-0, 74-2, respectively). And today, Gov. Jerry Brown plans to sign the bill into law at Google Headquarters in Mountain View.

    Sergey Brin will be there, and you can watch the event at 1 pm PT over on Google’s YouTube channel.

    SB 1298 will force California to adopt regulations for the operating of driverless cars as well as legalize operation on public roads. It will also change the definition of the word “operator” to include a person who engages driverless technology.

    “Existing law requires the Department of the California Highway Patrol to adopt rules and regulations that are designed to promote the safe operation of specific vehicles, including, among other things, schoolbuses and commercial motor vehicles,” says the bill. “This bill would require the department to adopt safety standards and performance requirements to ensure the safe operation and testing of “autonomous vehicles,” as defined, on the public roads in this state. The bill would permit autonomous vehicles to be operated or tested on the public roads in this state pending the adoption of safety standards and performance requirements that would be adopted under this bill.”

    Bill sponsor Senator Alex Padilla has made the argument that “autonomous vehicles have the potential to significantly reduce traffic fatalities and improve safety on our roads and highways,” considering that the “vast majority of vehicle accidents are due to human error.”

    Of course, it’s fitting that Gov. Brown plans to sign the bil into law in Mountain View. Although Google isn’t the only company working on driverless technology, they are the the most outspoken champions of it.

    The Bay Citizen reveals just how much effort Google put into making this new law a reality. The company paid $140,000 to lobby the California Highway Patrol, and a couple years back gave $64,000 in campaign contributions to Senate and Assembly candidates. The company also donated to Gov. Brown as well as the woman he defeated, Meg Whitman. And that was a few years ago – they’ve no doubt upped their game in recent years.

    Reminder: You can watch the event live here at 1 pm PST.

  • Jerry Brown Thinks Facebook Was Invented in California

    Far be it for me to criticize a guy for spouting off information that’s not entirely accurate. I’ve had my fair share of debacles over the years, as have we all. However, most of us aren’t governors, and all of us aren’t California Governor Jerry Brown. The next time he decides to spill the contents of his brain on national television, I sincerely hope he does a bit more research on the topic at-hand before waxing intellectual on a subject he’s clearly not well-versed in.

    During an appearance on “CBS This Morning”, Brown decided it was time for him to spit some knowledge on the Facebook IPO. You may have heard something about it. During the interview, the governor boldly declared that California is the magical land where Facebook was invented.

    “Not in Texas, not in Arizona, not in Manhattan and certainly not, you know, under the White House or the Congress,” he proudly expressed. Charlie Rose quickly pointed out that, in reality, the social networking site originated at Harvard University in Cambridge.

    In order to correct the snafu, Brown retorted that the inventors of the website soon moved to California where all of the other innovators reside. Nice try, my friend, but you’ve already let your ignorance out of the proverbial bag. To be fair, the Facebook HQ has been in the state since 2004, though it’s really no excuse for such a mistake. Given that nearly every other article penned about Mark Zuckerberg and his company references the whole Harvard thing, Brown should have read that somewhere. Or, at least, had someone read it to him.

    Brown is probably just overwhelmed with emotion that the state will collect nearly $2.1 billion dollars in taxes thanks to the IPO, so I suppose we can cut him some slack. This time.

  • Steve Jobs Day Proclaimed for California

    Steve Jobs Day Proclaimed for California

    California Governor Jerry Brown has declared today (Sunday, October 16) Steve Jobs Day in the state of California.

    As previously reported, Apple is holding a memorial service for Steve Jobs today at Stanford University, where Silicon Valley’s elite have been invited to attend.

    @JerryBrownGov
    Jerry Brown    This Sunday will be Steve Jobs Day in the State of California. 1 day ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

    Apple will hold another memorial event for the company’s employees on October 19.

    Jobs passed away on October 5, and has been remembered around the web perhaps like no other before him, in terms of the amount of people expressing their condolences and paying tribute, from the tech elite to celebrities and the rest of us common folk. Here, we looked at 100 quotes from well-known people.

    Jobs was laid to rest at a small private ceremony on October 7. More on the death of Steve Jobs here.

  • In California, Police Can Still Search Your iPhone Without a Warrant

    California Senate Bill 914, introduced by state Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), would make it illegal for the police to search a person’s mobile device during an arrest without a warrant. It received nearly unanimous support in passing the state legislature, 70-0 in the assembly and 32-4 in the Senate.

    But California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed the bill.

    Here’s the veto message he sent back to the State Senate on Sunday:

    I am returning Senate Bill 914 without my signature.

    This measure would overturn a California Supreme Court decision that
    held that police officers can lawfully search the cell phones of
    people who they arrest.

    The courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific
    issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizures protections.

    That California Supreme Court decision that Brown references is the People v. Diaz, a case ruled upon by the supreme state body in January of this year.

    In that case, the suspect Diaz was arrested for selling ecstasy to an officer during an undercover drug bust. Upon his arrest, his cellphone was seized and put into evidence. During the interview of Diaz when he was back at the station, an officer looked through his text messages and found texts about the selling of ecstasy. Diaz, naturally, moved to suppress that evidence as a violation of his 4th Amendment rights.

    The California Supreme Court upheld that the evidence would remain admissible, because the mobile device was found to be “property incidental to the person” instead of a “pathway to personal data.” That means that it doesn’t require a warrant to be perused.

    The Supreme Court of the United States upheld this ruling when they declined to hear the case.

    California Senate Bill 914 would have in effect overturned that court decision and made that type of mobile search illegal. Brown’s veto will allow it to stand.

    Wired suggests that Brown’s decision in this case could be tied to political gain, in that it “shores up support with police unions,” one in particular that donated $38K to his campaign.

    Senate Bill 914 was supported by big name organizations like the ACLU as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who asked Californians to take actions and petition the Governor to sign the bill. Here’s what they had to say about it:

    Modern smartphones are a candid window into the intimate details of our lives carrying everything from text messages to emails, from webpages we’ve browsed to our real time location, from lists of contacts to photo albums. But under California law, an arresting officer can reach into your pocket, pull out your cell phone, and thumb through everything on it regardless of whether your phone has anything to do with the arrest itself.

    SB 914 ensures that law enforcement officials can’t search your phone without a warrant. This law will also cover other forms of sensitive mobile devices, like tablets and organizers.

    It doesn’t matter if you’re arrested at a street protest or pulled over for a traffic stop; the sensitive data on your mobile devices shouldn’t be subject to the idle curiosity of law enforcement officers.

    The EFF paints a pretty frightening picture of what warrant-less mobile device searches could mean for the public. Just think about everything that a police officer has access to if they start browsing your iPhone – it’s not just your text messages.

    It means emails, call history, location data as well as all your photos. Since most apps on smartphones keep you automatically logged in, that means that technically your Facebook and Twitter accounts would be open to a warrant-less search as well.

    There’s no word on whether or not you are compelled to relinquish your passcode if your phone is passcode locked and if so, what the penalties would exist for refusal.

    This surely feels like an unsettling path to be traveling down. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments.