On the list of jurors released last Friday by the federal court in Boston the second name listed was “HOTYCKEY, SCOTT F. FRAMINGHAM “
You can also find the Hotyckey is also listed two other times in the records of the federal court in Boston: one time as a plaintiff in a civil rights suit against the Framingham police; the other as a defendant in a cease and desist suit filed by a large corporation. The latter case was settled, the former was dismissed.
Hotyckey is a defendant’s nightmare on a jury. He was for guilty all the way and frowned upon jurors with opposing opinions. He said if Whitey knew the person who committed the crime then he was guilty. With 12 like him you’d have had a verdict in an hour. It really points out the crap shoot involved in selecting jurors.
I think though there was a way, at least with Hotyckey, to get an insight into his character. Not that the defense counsel would have had a chance to do it in the limited time it has available to challenge any jurors who are selected. This, of course, is a problem with selecting jurors the way we do where much of their background is hidden.
Take Hotyckey’s civil rights suit against the Framingham Police. He states: “What Mr. Hotyckey whats to state is being able to be heard by the Police fairly is a wright.” His complaint is the police took a complaint out against him and not another.
He goes on to complain that the Framingham police did not have the same concern for a man as they did for a woman. He writes: “Under the law A man should have the same wright to be heard and his statement taken. If not this is discrimination and it shows how in only a few years the whole legal system has been changed into a extremely prejudice force in domestic violence.”
Hotyckey tells us: “It all started on a cold winter night on 1/5/2009 . . . ”
He concluded by saying: “Because of Impractical Prejudice and Discrimination” the police would not take a report from him or investigate what happened. Noting the Framingham police “were totally ruthless in protecting womans rights to the point of being totally blind. They tried to convict an innocent Man when he obviously was Assaulted and Battered.”
Because of this he demanded for his “[L]egal fees and loss of work for one year and related losses are between 80,000.00 and 100,000.00”
There was much rambling in it about his rights such as complaining, … The complaint ran eight pages. I know if I were trying a case and read a complaint like this I would not want this type person with this mental capacity and view of life on my jury. Even worse imagine being accused of a crime and having people like Scott Hotyckeys sitting in judgment of you.
Matt,
Switching back to NSA again, here’s a good post by Ben Wittes at Lawfare on why the NSA report on 2,776 errors is a non-issue and serves as yet another example of how the media makes a mountain out of a molehill:
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/the-nsa-the-washington-post-and-the-administration/
The NSA, the Washington Post, and the Administration
By Benjamin Wittes
Sunday, August 18, 2013 at 12:00 PM
I cannot decide if I am more annoyed at the Washington Post or more annoyed at the Obama administration for the way this latest cache of Snowden-leaked NSA documents is playing. I have now gone through the documents with some care, and I find both the Post’s formulation of the story and the administration’s response to the leak mind-boggling.
The Post, for its part, has managed, in my opinion at least, to completely mislead its readers as to the significance of these documents. The problem is not the paper’s facts. It is with the edifice it has built with those facts.
On the administration’s side of the ledger, if there were a way to botch more completely a public response to these disclosures, I’m not sure I know what it would look like.
“The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers to 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents,” screams the Post‘s lead sentence. In the second paragraph, we learn that “agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.” Two paragraphs down, the story reports that the FISA Court “did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for months” and then “ruled it unconstitutional.” In a separate story, the paper ominously informs us—again in the lead paragraph—that the FISA Court’s presiding judge, Reggie Walton, has warned that the court’s ability “to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs . . . is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.”
What with unconstitutional surveillance, hidden for months from the court, agency officials instructed to withhold information, thousands of privacy violations, and a court enfeebled in its oversight responsibility, you’d think we were dealing with COINTELPRO here.
And certainly, the administration’s weedy and defensive response would do nothing to convince you otherwise. “We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official told the Post.
Way to go, guys.
The administration also issued a collection of statements that are cumulatively about as compelling as its protestations that it does not have to cut off aid to Egypt because it doesn’t have to decide whether or not a coup has taken place.
Here’s what an administration confident in itself, its compliance procedures, and its counterterrorism policies more generally and with the imagination to try to change the narrative would have said:
Shameful as it is that these documents were leaked, they actually should give the public great confidence both in NSA’s internal oversight mechanisms and in the executive and judicial oversight mechanisms outside the agency. They show no evidence of any intentional spying on Americans or abuse of civil liberties. They show a low rate of the sort of errors any complex system of technical collection will inevitably yield. They show robust compliance procedures on the part of the NSA. And they show an earnest, ongoing dialog with the FISA Court over the parameters of the agency’s legal authority and a commitment both to keeping the court informed of activities and to complying with its judgments on their legality. While it took a criminal act to make this record public, we are deeply proud of this record and make no apologies for it.
The underlying documents support every component of this statement the administration for some deer-in-the-headlights reason is not capable of making.
Let’s start with the audit report that supposedly shows thousands of violations of privacy rules and legal breaches. To be clear, not one of these 2,776 “incidents” (over a year at the NSA’s headquarters) involves a decision by any NSA employee to engage in illegal surveillance against an American. They are nearly all inadvertent mistakes of a technical nature—the majority of a few discrete types (See pp. 5-6). The bulk are “roamers,” which take place when a valid foreign intelligence target happens to cross into the United States. The IG report notes that “Roamer incidents are largely unpreventable, even with good target awareness and traffic review, since target travel activities are often unannounced and not easily predicted” (emphasis added).
There are also a fair number of database query errors—that is, typos, confusions of boolean terms like “and” and “or,” syntax errors, and the like. You know . . . mistakes. These mistakes are caught through a combination of automated checking, auditing, and self-reporting. In other words, the fewer than 3,000 incidents reported over the year in question involve the NSA’s own systems—and people—catching and correcting technical errors.
Even the section entitled “Significant Incidents of Non-compliance” (pp. 11-13) does not detail anything like any intentional violation of the privacy rights of Americans. One incident involved the retention of FISA business records material longer than the permitted five years. Another involved an incident in which collection continued against an individual after indications had arisen suggesting he had a green card; this stopped when a senior linguist figured out that those indications had been received and not noticed.
In other words, what this document shows is that among the billions and billions of communications the NSA interacts with every year, it has certain low rate of technical errors, many of them unavoidable, which it dutifully records and counts.
As we used to say in grade school, big whoop. Or rather, it is a big whoop—just for the opposite reason than the Post’s story suggests.
Then there’s the matter of the supposed withholding of information from the Justice Department and the ODNI—a reference to this document, which contains guidance on what to report in memorializing why an analyst is requesting a targeting. The gravamen of the complaint seems to be that the NSA is telling its people not to provide DOJ and ODNI with more than the question on the electronic form asks. “While we do want to provide our FAA overseers with the information they need, we DO NOT want to give them any extraneous information,” the document says. So if the question asks for the reason you want surveillance, the memo says, give the reason, not the information that underlies reason. The guidance here may reflect, to some degree, what was by some accounts a difficult adjustment for the NSA to having programmatic oversight from the Justice Department and the ODNI at a very granular level.
But come on. It’s hardly a news flash that a secret, clandestine intelligence agency might resist giving out information about its operations when not legally required to do so.
This is not the stuff of Frank Church.
The Post similarly considers it newsworthy that the NSA isn’t even reporting certain incidental collection against U.S. persons that it handles using minimization procedures—as reflected in this Powerpoint slide. But to think that fact interesting, you really have to not understand the law. Sometimes, the intelligence community does legal collection against a legitimate foreign intelligence target and that target interacts with U.S. persons, against whom our people thus end up collecting information as a collateral matter. There is nothing illegal about that; that is why we have minimization procedures. And the procedures in question are quite clear on this point. The Section 702 minimization procedures require the government to “destroy inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person at the earliest practical point in the processing cycle at which such communication can be identified” if it “does not contain foreign intelligence information” or “evidence of a crime.”
Then there’s the matter of the FISA Court’s declaring an unspecified NSA activity illegal under both FISA and the Fourth Amendment. This issue is certainly more substantial than a mere technical error. It provoked an 80-page opinion, after all, and it did involve a finding of illegality by a judicial tribunal on the part of the agency.
But here’s the thing: the FISA Court knew about this incident because the NSA kept it informed of its activities, and as the document (an internal newsletter) the Post cites makes clear in summarizing the incident, the agency was committed to complying with the court’s order and bringing the program (whatever it was precisely) into compliance.
The common mythology is that the FISA Court is a rubber stamp. But in this incident, as the document recounts, “the judge ordered certain ‘upstream’ or ‘passive’ FAA DNI collection to cease after 30 days, unless NSA implements solutions to correct all deficiencies identified in the opinion document.” The agency noted that its components were “coordinating a response, which includes planning to implement a conservative solution in which the higher-risk collection will be sequestered.” This solution is “designed to comply with the judge’s order; however, the judge will have to determine if it does.” It sounds suspiciously like a court here was holding the government to its vision of the law—and the government, even while contemplating an appeal of this decision by the rubber-stamp that wasn’t, was snapping to attention.
This brings us to the Post’s final point, to which it devotes an entire separate story: that the FISA Court lacks the power to investigate government conduct and is entirely dependent on the government itself to report problems. Again, the paper’s facts are right, but it draws entirely the wrong inferences from them. The story reads:
“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” its chief, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”
I’ve italicized the key line in Judge Walton’s statement, which says very directly something the entire Post story (headline: “Court: Ability to Police U.S. Spying Program Limited”) seems to miss: Courts are not investigative agencies. They nearly always rely on the parties before them to bring to their attention violations of their orders. The oddity of the FISA Court is that its proceedings take place ex parte, so the government is the only party—and thus bears a particular responsibility for candor and openness with the institution. But this is hardly any kind of surprise. Yes, as the Post says breathlessly in its opening, the FISC “must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.” What we’ve learned from this incident, however, is that the government does so—even when doing so may be costly to its operations.
In the fevered environment in which we are now operating, the NSA can’t catch a break. And perhaps it shouldn’t be able to catch a break. It’s a clandestine spy agency, after all.
But if the administration can’t be troubled to defend it in a full-throated and serious way, why should anyone pause to ask whether we’re pervasively confusing minor technical mistakes with real civil liberties infringements and whether we’re confusing a remarkable big picture portrait of self-policing and intelligence collection under the law with a portrait of rampant spying on Americans?
Jon:
That’s a good article but it doesn’t address the problem of an agency policing itself. Wittes says: “This is not the stuff of Frank Church” We don’t know that. If Frank Church asked the CIA and FBI to investigate itself we never would have heard of those violations of rights of American citizens routinely committed by those agencies. Church was outside the agency and looked at it with a free hand, he did not depend on the agency to disclose its prior programs like mail openings and COINTELPRO. We depart in our trust of an agency to investigate itself. We don’t on the need for robust surveillance within the law.
Matt,
I actually do not disagree that it is preferable to have independent investigations. My takeaway on this point though is that it is precisely the NSA’s self-reporting that brought errors to the attention of the FISA court.
Jon:
That point is well taken. I know little about the NSA and the FISA court so seeing that it did disclose some of their wrong doings is a point in its favor.
Does his complaint actually state Scott Hotyckey fathered a child with a woman married to another guy and she conspired to steal his child? And Hotyckey wanted the Framingham PD to charge her with adultery? And the married woman caught him cheating on her with another woman at his parent’s house and victimized him?
Yikes!
Patty:
Yes, in a convoluted way it seems he got a married woman pregnant and she came to visit him and got upset. I’m not sure why she was so upset. I read it as he wanted the Braintree police to charge her with adultery and he’d be the witness against her having been her partner. It shows you the mentality of the guy. It reminds me of the woman I knew who really liked the guy she was living with until he told her he’d never want to marry a woman who lived with him before they were married. Hotckey is truly the one juror you would do anything to avoid. Most of his complaint is similar ramblings and I think some comments rightly pegged him as a dope.
Was that James Ring handing out autographed copies of his book
to juror members as they exited the Federal Courthouse building?
Just kidding, eh?
http://northendwaterfront.com/2013/08/local-former-fbi-agent-james-ring-publishes-terror-plot-novel-necessary-assets/
Local Former FBI Agent, James Ring, Publishes Terror Plot Novel, “Necessary Assets”
By Matt Conti on Sat, Aug. 17, 2013 in Arts & Culture
Necessary Assets is a newly published novel that hits home by James Ring, former FBI agent and longtime resident of Boston’s North End.
MS:
Ring was a terror plat all in himself. He went with O’Sullivan to a big law firm. Funny how those two binded. Gives credence to Whitey’s allegations.
Matt,
I haven’t mentioned his case in awhile, by bob George’s jury couldn’t have been much better then 12 people like the juror you highlighted. the only thing worse was the informing they used, and allowed to lie. Repeatedly. One of these days I’ll give you all the details. I’d love to get your opinion on it as well as some of the other people that comment here
Declan:
Bob’s jury was out for such a short time it had to be filled with people like that ignoramus. I don’t know how you can protect yourself against twelve dummies sitting in a jury but we let that happen all the time. You could explain things to a guy like him fifty times and he’d never understand because he already knows everything.
This guy is a moron. Never trust a guy with negative sideburns.
Jim:
Another good descriptive word besides dope. Imagine having him deciding something important for you? Like whether you go to jail or not.
Mr. Scott Hotyckeys sounds like a dope. Wish I had been called to serve on this jury. Along with the plenitude of reasons the Feds provided the jurors to come forth with some form of “jury nullification”, debating the merits of the case with this scholar would’ve been a blast …. If I had been called to be on this jury we’d STILL be in deliberations !
Gus:
You summmed up in one word what I tried to do in many.
I am Scott Hotyckey. I would like to say without any real facts you have made some strong opinions. One i would have set Mr Bulger free if he did not have all his frenids rat him out for three months. And eye witnesses say he put guns in there mouth. I was one of 12. No i did not rule a jury. And if anyone who reads this wanted to have a reasonable reason why ask.
As far as my past. I can say i would find anyone not guilty for any reason that made sense. I am sorry the evidence said something different.
Scott hotyckey