National Roundup

New York
TV actor Allison Mack enters prison in NXIVM sex slave case
NEW YORK (AP) — TV actor Allison Mack, who played a key role in the cultlike group NXIVM, has surrendered to a California prison to serve her sentence in a New York case against the group’s spiritual leader.

Mack, best known for her role as a young Superman’s close friend on “Smallville,” was sentenced to three years behind bars  in June. She had previously pleaded guilty to the charges she manipulated women into becoming sex slaves for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere.

A prison website showed Thursday that she had entered a low-security facility in Dublin, California, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) east of San Francisco.

Mack, 39, dodged a longer prison term by becoming a government cooperator in the federal case. Prosecutors credited her with helping them mount evidence showing how Raniere created a secret society of brainwashed women who were branded with his initials.

Raniere was sentenced last year to 120 years in prison for his conviction on sex-trafficking charges.

Virginia
Court rejects lawsuit against NSA on ‘state secrets’ grounds
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — A divided federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of an ACLU lawsuit challenging a portion of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international email and phone communications.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that the lawsuit must be dismissed after the government invoked the “state secrets privilege,” meaning that a full exploration of the issue in a court of law would damage national security.

In the lawsuit the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, said that the National Security Agency’s “Upstream” surveillance program necessarily captures some of its international communications and is a violation of free-speech rights and its Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

Details of the Upstream program are classified, but it collects data from transmissions over high-speed cables that carry electronic communications into and out of the country.

In a majority opinion, Judge Albert Diaz, an Obama appointee, agreed with government assertions that a lawsuit over the program’s constituionality cannot be conducted without harming national security.

“There’s simply no conceivable defense to this assertion that wouldn’t also reveal the very information that the government is trying to protect: how Upstream surveillance works and where it’s conducted,” Diaz wrote.

In a dissent, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on a case that could spell out the breadth of the state secrets privilege, and that allowing the government to invoke it ahead of that ruling is a mistake.

She said that the majority opinion “stands for a sweeping proposition: A suit may be dismissed under the state secrets doctrine, after minimal judicial review, even when the Government premises its only defenses on far-fetched hypotheticals.”

Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, which represented Wikimedia, said he is “extremely disappointed” witht the ruling and lawyers are considering their appeal options.

“Every day, the NSA is siphoning Americans’ communications off the internet backbone and into its spying machines, violating privacy and chilling free expression,” he said in a statement, “Congress has made clear that the courts can and should decide whether this warrantless digital dragnet complies with the Constitution.”

The lawsuit was filed in the aftermath of NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the scope of agency surveillance. The lawsuit was first tossed out in 2015 over the issue of whether plaintiffs had standing to sue. But the 4th Circuit revived the case and sent it back to the lower court, which again dismissed it in 2019 on the state secrets argument.

The Upstream program is just one part of the NSA’s surveillance. The “downstream” portion enlists internet service providers such as Google in collecting the communications of selected targets. The court ruling indicates that downstream collection provides a “vast majority” of what is collected by the NSA.

Texas
Judge: State is to blame for foster care neglect
AUSTIN (AP) — A federal judge has accused Texas leaders for failing to act on her orders to fix the foster care neglect in which 400 or so children are being abused and spending multiple nights each month in motels or offices buildings.

Tuesday’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack was the latest development as the state struggles to implement reforms Jack ordered as she presides over a 2011 class-action lawsuit against Family and Protective Services alleging that children were held in unsafe conditions.

Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters acknowledged Tuesday that case workers “are not adequate” for the tasks they’re assigned.

The steep rise in displaced children only means more and more of them were looked after by case workers whose training amounted to as little as a 60-minute video on how to care for troubled kids, she said.

The number of foster children without a place to stay nearly doubled from August to September of 2020, from 47 to 87, then shot upwards throughout the year and has hovered around 400 since June.

Many of the children have been in foster care for years and were abused while in the care of the state, Masters said, and she had heard reports that some children had engaged in prostitution in the offices of case workers who were supposed to be protecting them.

Tuesday’s hearing finished with Jack saying her focus has shifted away from sanctioning the state . In 2019, Jack leveled $50,000 daily fines for every day that foster care group homes went without 24-hour supervision.

She said she now wants to coordinate with the plaintiffs and the state to find solutions to the problems with Texas’ foster care system immediately. She asked a lawyer for Abbott to find out what he is willing to do to address it, saying she wanted the governor’s “blessing” before proceeding.