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bookmark_borderThe immense ramifications of the NIT Warrant fiascos

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That the DOJ is a corrupt organization (specifically the FBI & DEA) is accepted as fact by a majority of citizens. A DC Magistrate just ruled on the latest example of such corruption.

An ethos of “the ends justifies the means” permeates most of law enforcement in America. When this occurred exactly is difficult to ascertain; but, the “War on Drugs” (which replaced the War on Poverty in the 1970s) appears to be the likely starting point of it being pervasive. I actually think it got its start in 1928, as Judge Brandeis warned in his dissent:

To declare that – in the administration of criminal law – the end justifies the means, to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution.

Olmstead v. United States – Justice Brandeis

Brandeis was affirmed in Katz v. United States, but that left 39 years for law enforcement to develop unconstitutional methods (i.e the ends justify the means). In other words, the damage was already done because bad habits had taken hold and persist to this day.

For example, Keith A. Becker (and his minions) obtained an obviously illegal NIT warrant(s) to commit a heinous crime to catch those committing equally or less heinous crimes. Digest that fact for a moment. Operation Torpedo, (then Pacifier) consisted of Keith (and his clowns) actively distributing CSAM – completely unfettered – for weeks! Then (to catch people committing equal or lessor crimes), they fraudulently obtained a warrant to install malware on visiting machines. As I’ve explained before, Operation Torpedo consisted of legitimate and illegitimate malware schemes. Pacifier’s malware was legitimate as well; but, the courts ruled that “Leon” applied to the NIT warrant without considering that Pacifier was the second time Keith used that illegal warrant scheme. (My FOIA lawsuit aims to shed light on that criminality).

What I’m saying is that the ends justifies the means law enforcement ethos is unconstitutional and un-American. And more people should label it as such, so we can eradicate it before we are really subject to an unfettered American Gestapo.

bookmark_borderThe Backpage Persecution

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For anyone who doubts the vindictiveness of the DOJ, one needs to look no further than the backpage.com case. But there are plenty of other examples, like this decade old case against Aaron Swartz. Sadly, like Aaron, Jim Larkin committed suicide before this third ridiculous trial began.

As you can see from the case link above, the Judge in this third trial has thrown out most of the remaining charges against Lacey (because they are baseless) and proves that Kamala Harris is not a good person.

But since our justice system is severely corrupt, there will be no consequences for any of them. Just look at my open Letter to Josh Stroschein, who can face no consequences for his misdeeds in my case but refuses to engage in a dialog.

Update 8-30-2024: So it looks like the Injustice Department got its pound of flesh from Michael Lacey via their Backpage persecution. This case – among many others (including mine) – proves that most of America’s criminal justice activities are like those of any authoritarian police state (e.g. over-criminalization & zero accountability for prosecutor misconduct).

Hopefully, Mr. Lacey will be exonerated on appeal, but in a system as corrupt as ours, I wouldn’t bank on it.

bookmark_borderOpen Letter to Josh Stroschein Ph.D

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Hi Josh:

I’ve been trying to get answers from your team (you, Podhradsky or Miller) for the last three years about why you helped the government railroad me. Podhradsky told me to talk to Miller & Miller told me to “go away”. I’m not going away, nor will I ever “let this go” until I find out what happened.

Last year, while doing research, I came across the paper your team authored regarding the FBI’s NIT for a conference in 2016. Needless to say, it angered me. Sections 2.6 & 2.7 were particularly infuriating. While I am an “expert”, I’m not at your level, but I knew that the FBI was lying about how their NIT worked and that you were actively helping them lie about it. (That’s why I fired Joe Gross Jr. to fire your team in February of 2015.)

The “smoking gun” regarding your team’s participation in this travesty of justice, is this sentence in section 2.6 – where you declare: 

The DNS requests go over UDP and thus they can be spoofed. However, the cornhusker log indicates that DNS request was made via the proxy server and thus that data was not logged in this case. 

As you surely know, that – in regards to the flash player – was impossible.

The proxy server was TOR and the NIT attack relied on the flash player ignoring TOR (thus making direct connections to  cpimagegallery.com. Therefore, flash player’s UDP (DNS) & TCP (Socket) communications must bypass TOR. So the scenario your team omitted from your June 2015 report (where flash used TOR for UDP but didn’t for TCP) was such a HUGE RED FLAG – that FBI shenanigans were afoot – that experts such as yourselves must have withheld it on purpose. If you have a conscious, you should feel very guilty about that. Furthermore, in 2022, I had Nathan Zaugg (of Mindfire Technology) answer 3 questions that your team willfully refused to answer in your June 2015 report. Those 3 questions were:

1) Does Tinyboard have a visitors table?
2) Does Tinyboard issue session ids to clients?
3) Does Tinyboard track user activity in any way?

Nathan’s answer to all 3 questions was NO! That means that your team’s Figure I is perjury and that my conviction was totally fraudulent, without considering the NIT’s additional fraud (discussed above). As I told Miller, the statute of limitations has passed for your team’s perjury, and I cannot sue you for your lies. However, if you come clean about your team’s misdeeds (which my pending FOIA litigation may uncover anyway) I may be able to get exonerated.

So, if you have any decency, I would like you to answer the following 6 questions:

1) When and how did you become involved with NE case no. 8:13CR108?

2) Why did your team examine the wrong server for your first report (January of 2015)?

3) Why did you parrot the government’s lie that the NIT was just a flash application?

4) When and how did Attorney Joseph Howard keep you involved with my case (I desperately tried to fire your team because I knew you were lying)?

5) Why did you lie about Tinyboard Software in your June 2015 Report (Claiming the visitors table was legitimate & Tinyboard issued Session IDs to visitors)?

6) What did you communicate with Keith A. Becker about and when (Please provide dates so I can amend my FOIA litigation for these communications)?

Thank you for your time. I hope you’ll help me uncover your team’s part in railroading me…

– Kirk Cottom

bookmark_borderBell’s palsy update

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So about two weeks ago I was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy. According to the literature, I should have been seeing some improvement this week if my situation was caused by inflammation only. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no improvement, thus my paralysis is probably caused by Ramsay Hunt Syndrome.

In sum, it means my recovery will likely be measured in months, not weeks.

April 30 Update: As of today, I’m at 75% recovered. After 3 weeks of no progress, my fourth week has shown daily improvement of about 25% a day, so I may be 100% by Friday.

May 13 Update: As of today, I’m at 90% recovered. I can now raise my left eyebrow and my lip control is almost back. I’m able to drink for a soda can again. Left lips and cheek are at 90%. So I think my recovery time will be about 8 weeks…

June 24 Update: As of today, I’m 95% recovered. My left side is a little weaker than my right side. I’m thinking it may stay that way. But I can eat and talk 100% normal now…

bookmark_borderI Got Bell’s Palsy

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So, I was minding my own business this weekend when (on Friday) I developed an odd ear ache. It was a twitching sharp pain that would occur periodically. So, I chalked it up to another ache/pain of being a member of AARP.

But, when I woke up Sunday the left side of my face was basically paralyzed. So, I gave myself the stroke tests in a pamphlet I have because I’m a member of AARP and we need to know these things. I passed all the stroke tests, so I diagnosed myself with what the pamphlet called Bell’s Palsy. On Monday I went to an urgent care that will see you for a flat fee of $125. (Since I’m a struggling sole proprietorship making little (read “no”) money, I do not have any health care coverage, thus my reluctance to go to the emergency room; BUT, I don’t think I’d gone to emergency even if I did… IMO, that is really just a place for gun wounds, car accidents and heart attacks.)

The nurse practitioner chastised me for self diagnosing BUT concurred that I “presented” as text book Bell’s Palsy. He said that it might be have been caused by the virus that causes shingles (chickenpox) and that it attacked my cranial nerve seven. So he put me on an antiviral to combat the possible underlying cause (that cost $80) and a steroid to deal with the inflammation that was continuing to irritate nerve seven (that cost $17).

Now, I just have to wait and hope nerve seven returns to normal giving me the left side of my face back sometime in the next few weeks.

bookmark_borderPerfecting an Appeal Shouldn’t Be Difficult

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I’m trying to appeal the nonsensical decision made by a lower court concerning my SORA level. I should be a Tier 1 (not on the website) per two health care professional assessments. This is especially true since the second assessment was done by the professional that provided my Court Ordered treatment.

It’s not a problem that Court’s make mistakes, that’s just apart of being human. The problem is that most Courts have a propensity to pretend that they don’t occasionally make mistakes or wrong judgements. (As far as judges are concerned, they never make mistakes; which is absurd on its face.) This is especially true when their mistake was based upon false evidence and they refuse to acknowledge it.

My dilemma for both my original conviction and this ridiculous SORA determination are based upon false evidence presented by the government at the initial stages of the proceedings. Trying to correct these falsehoods is proving to be far too difficult for our justice system to claim legitimacy. It’s just totally corrupt to allow the government to lie at an initial proceeding then declare that nothing can be done about it after that initial hearing.

Which brings us to the title of this post. I’m trying to “perfect” my appeal to the Appellate Division, Fourth Department and all they have provide me with is a rules of practice (because they cannot give legal advice). I don’t consider how to compose “the record” legal advice. I’ve got a letter into my previous lawyer to provide me with a copy of the record she used, to give me a template on how to compose my record for my current appeal.

My appeal is simple, the lower court’s decision is baseless nonsense, please vacate and reverse; but, they are making it ridiculously complicated.

bookmark_borderJanuary FOIA Hearings

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So, the vindictive DOJ says that they need a year (that’s right, 1 year) to process about 1500 E-mails (and their attachments). This was after I narrowed the scope. My previous request return 80,000 documents.

The FBI has declared that they cannot find the NIT reports (16 or so) that I requested, so I have to wait a year to convince the judge that their response is/was nonsense and order them to find the “missing” reports, so the soonest that I’ll have them is sometime in 2025!

So here is the “new” scope – 1500 or so Emails from Becker to the following categories of documents between January 1, 2012, and January 31, 2016:

  1. Emails to Podhradsky, Stroschein, and Meinke (Meinke is news to me, he wasn’t my expert)
  2. Emails to addresses with foreign suffixes
  3. Emails referencing NIT warrants between January 2012-August 2015 without attachments
  4. Emails containing references to Rules 41 or 41b between the dates 9/1/2013-3/1/2015
  5. Emails from Becker between January 1, 2012 through November 31, 2012, plus attachments.
  6. Emails from Becker to private attorneys in 2014.

And so I await the first batch of redacted documents. Meanwhile, you should check this out, the government is watching you.

bookmark_borderHail Mary Fail

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My “petition” to the Supreme Court was rejected out-right, as one apparently has no permission to appeal circuit court denials of §2255(h) petitions. The fact that the Eighth Circuit didn’t explain its denial makes my path forward undetermined. In of the words, that rejection puts my 2255(h) litigation on hold until my FOIA litigation completes. Hopefully, it’ll uncover the smoking gun(s) that technological ignorants can comprehend.

I presented evidence to the Eighth Circuit that proved my conviction was obtained fraudulently, satisfying 2255(h)(1). The government argued that the evidence wasn’t “new” and that it was merely impeachment evidence. Both claims were absurd & false.

IOW, The premise that our justice system is fair is ludicrous.

bookmark_borderLike Trump, my Court Battles Continue into the New Year

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So, the criminal candidate’s legal issues continue and so do mine. Currently waiting on a State Court to issue a ruling (that I’ll probably have to appeal). Also waiting for the Federal government to reply to my appeal to the Second Circuit and for them to produce some documents for my FOIA lawsuit. Also, as per the previous post, I sent a “Hail Mary” to the SCOTUS overlord for the Eighth Circuit.

That Hail Mary inspired me to send a letter to Joseph Morelle to ask him to initiate some desperately needed criminal justice reform. Making me think that I may have to become an “activist”…