Tag Archive for: judge

Judge Won’t Reinstate Aurora Pride Parade Permit Amid Security Staffing Woes – NBC Chicago

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A judge on Thursday refused to reinstate a permit for the Aurora Pride Parade after officials said organizers did not secure the needed law enforcement officers required for the event.

Still, organizers said the parade is not off just yet.

The special event permit for the third annual Aurora Pride Parade was revoked after the Aurora Police Department earlier this week said it could not supply enough sworn officers to provide Parade security. Organizers appealed the decision, saying in a statement Wednesday, “Our position has been misrepresented, and we’re making every effort to keep the parade as scheduled.

“It is unacceptable that Aurora City officials have denied a permit for the upcoming Pride Parade,” the ACLU of Illinois, which represents Aurora Pride, said in a statement following the court hearing Thursday. “The Parade has been a family friendly event, aimed at welcoming all members of the Aurora community for a celebration of diversity and inclusion. Rather than embrace this event – as thousands of members of the community have done over the past few years – City officials have created a faux controversy and refuse to provide adequate security so that everyone has the opportunity to celebrate safely.”

The ACLU called the permit issue “not constitutional” and said it plans to take its case to federal court in hopes a judge will “order Aurora to meets it obligation to its residents.”

“The intent of the federal lawsuit is to reverse the action of both the city and the appeals process by attacking that on first amendment grounds,” Aurora Pride President Gwyn Ciesla told NBC 5. “It’s possible there could be an injunction in place to reverse that decision.” 

The lead up to the parade has been at the center of controversy, as organizers and the Aurora Police Department continued to spar over what law enforcement representation would look like at the event.

Last month, Aurora Pride Parade organizers asked that law enforcement officers “participate without service weapons (our rules forbid all weapons), out of uniform, and without the presence of any official vehicles.”

Organizers of the parade said they had made the uniform and weapon…

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US Judge grants bail to Crypto couple in $4.5 billion hack

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A New York judge granted bail for two people charged with trying to launder billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin stolen in a 2016 hack of the Bitfinex currency exchange.

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan appeared in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom Tuesday after being arrested at 7am in New York. The US government said it seized about $3.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency from the married couple, the largest financial seizure ever. The two allegedly conspired to launder 119,754 Bitcoin, currently valued at about $4.5 billion, stolen after a hacker breached Bitfinex’s systems.

The government initially asked the judge not to allow them to be released on bail. Each is facing the possibility of a 20-year prison sentence, so they have the motivation to run, a prosecutor told the judge. When the judge indicated she would set a bond, the government requested it be set at $100 million, an amount one of the defense lawyers called “laughable.”

The judge set bail for Morgan at $3 million and asked her parents to post their home as security. For Lichtenstein, bail was set at $5 million.

Lichtenstein, 34, holds dual US and Russian citizenship. He wore jeans and a gray shirt in the courtroom, his brown hair was slightly messy and he sported a paunch. Morgan, 31, appeared in court wearing a white hooded sweatshirt, her long hair down. They both wore masks, as did everyone else in the room, per court requirements.

They looked at the magistrate judge as she read them their rights. Neither of them spoke publicly during this initial appearance. Their lawyers – they have retained separate counsel – did the talking in court.

Morgan, who was born in Oregon and grew up in California, has foreign ties, the prosecutor said. She has lived in Hong Kong and Egypt and is studying Russian, according to her social media. She’s a journalist and economist and travels internationally for work, according to the government. Her father is a retired U.S. government biologist and her mother worked as a librarian….

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Judge to decide if report on voting machines can be public

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ATLANTA (AP) – Georgia’s secretary of state on Thursday (Feb. 2) called on a voting technology expert to ask a judge to release a report detailing alleged security vulnerabilities in the voting machines used by the state – something the expert had already done.

The report by J. Alex Halderman was filed under seal in July in federal court in Atlanta as part of a long-running lawsuit challenging Georgia’s voting machines. Halderman spent 12 weeks examining the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia and more than a dozen other states and identified “multiple severe security flaws” that would allow attackers to install malicious software, he wrote in a sworn declaration filed in the case.

Halderman, a voting technology specialist and director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Computer Security and Society, told The Associated Press in August that he’d seen no evidence the machines’ vulnerabilities were used to tamper with the 2020 election, but he said, “there remain serious risks that policymakers and the public need to be aware of.”

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Canada judge rejects new request in Huawei extradition case, Telecom News, ET Telecom

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Vancouver: A Canadian judge has rejected a request from Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who wanted testimony from employees of the Chinese telecom giant to be admitted as evidence in her fight against extradition to the United States.

Meng — whose father is Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei — has been in a two-year battle against extradition over charges the firm violated US sanctions on Iran.

She is accused of defrauding HSBC by falsely misrepresenting links between Huawei and its Skycom subsidiary, putting the bank at risk of violating sanctions against Tehran as it continued to clear US dollar transactions for Huawei.

Lawyers for Meng, 49, believe the affidavits could show the banking giant was aware of the links between Huawei and Skycom, which sold telecom equipment to Iran.

The evidence would help demonstrate the prosecution case was “manifestly unreliable,” according to the lawyers.

In a decision released late Friday, Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes of the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that the testimony requested by Meng’s defense “relates to issues properly within the domain of a trial, not the extradition hearing.”

Holmes said it was not for her to rule on issues of credibility in an extradition hearing.

“The proposed evidence could do no more than offer an alternative narrative from that set out” by the United States in its case against Meng, Holmes wrote.

“These would take the extradition hearing beyond its proper scope.”

Last week, Huawei confirmed that Meng was taking HSBC to court in Hong Kong to access banking records she says will help her battle extradition.

In February, she lost a similar legal bid in London.

Meng’s extradition battle in Vancouver has entered its final phase. Hearings resume on Monday and are expected to end in mid-May, barring appeals.

Washington has accused Huawei of stealing American trade secrets and banned US semiconductor chip makers from selling to it.

The case has caused a major diplomatic rift between Canada and China.

Meng was arrested on a US warrant during a Vancouver stopover in December 2018 and is being held under house arrest at her Vancouver mansion.

Two Canadians — former diplomat Michael Kovrig and…

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