A federal jury in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday convicted Busby, 37, of lying to protect a married female confidential source he was having an affair with.

“In roughly three hours, Adrian Busby was found guilty by a jury of his peers on all four counts of making false statements that were contained in the indictment,” said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement. “Law enforcement agents who break the law dishonor their fellow officers, disserve the public and must be held to account.”

It all began in 2008 when Busby, who was investigating mortgage fraud, started using a female real estate loan officer as a confidential source. He also began having an affair with her.

On Feb. 5, 2008, the source was arrested and subsequently prosecuted by the Queens County District Attorney’s Office for identity theft and related charges.

Authorities charged that Busby “actively assisted with her criminal defense, met with her attorneys on multiple occasions, and during trial “provided her defense attorney with confidential, law enforcement reports…related to her case….in violation of FBI regulations.”

In December 2009, she was convicted.

Beginning in January 2008, authorities said Busby made numerous false statements regarding the things he did to assist her in the trial.

Busby denied wrongdoing to The New York Daily News earlier this year.

OTHER STORIES OF INTEREST

• Ill. Powerbroker Convicted of Shakedown (AP)
• Ex-Minn. U.S. Attorney Joins United Healthcare Group (Main Justice)
• Allied Mortgage Fraud Could Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion (Courthouse News Service)
• Hotel Guests Recruited With Homeland Security TV Spots (USA Today)
• Texas Gun Instructor Refuses to Teach Muslims How to Handle a Gun (CBS Houston)
• Hackers Cancel Attack on Mexican Cartels (TPM)
• For Julian Assange, A Sort of Homecoming Draws Closer (Wall Street Journal)

A wave of prisoners could be released this week as a result of a change in sentencing for crack cocaine violations.

The Associated Press reports that nearly 2,000 federal prisoners will be eligible for early release Tuesday as a result of a bill signed into law by President Obama last year that reduced the disparities between those convicted of crack cocaine charges and powder cocaine.

Critics argued that the crack cocaine laws discriminated against black defendants. AP reported that the U.S. Sentencing Commission is applying that law to past cocaine convictions, which could mean an estimated 12,000 inmates could eventually benefit.

Lanny Breuer

WASHINGTON — A top political appointee in the Obama Justice Department says he made a “mistake” when he didn’t flag questionable tactics used by federal agents in a gun-trafficking case for his superiors last year.

Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, told NPR he found out in April 2010 that agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had let more than 400 guns connected to suspicious buyers cross the Southwest border during the Bush years, but he didn’t tell senior leadership at the Justice Department.

“Knowing what I know now, I wish that I had alerted the deputy or the attorney general at the time,” he said.

To read more click here.

Read NY Times story 

When Hasan M. Elahi landed in Detroit, Mich., and walked into the country on June 19, 2002, a customs official asked that Elahi follow him to an Immigration and Naturalization Services office at the airport.

That incident initiated a period of “questioning went on for the next six months and ended with a series of polygraph examinations,” Elahi wrote in the New York Times on Sunday, and it “turned my life upside down,” he said.

Elahi, an associate professor and interdisciplinary artist at the University of Maryland,  describes himself as neurotic about record keeping, and in the office at the airport he and the investigator were able to look at his electronic personal assistant and retrace the steps he took on September 12, 2001, he wrote in the Times. Seeming pleased, the interrogator let Elahi go. But Elahi was soon contacted by federal authorities for more questioning.

The level of detailed information he began sharing with the FBI in the months following inspired a project Elahi pursued on his own websites. Elahi was nervous about the FBI’s interest in him and wanted to cooperate in letting them know all of his travel plans and whereabouts. When an interrogator finally cleared him and said for Elahi to let them know if he needed anything, Elahi-not wanting another hassle upon his return-sent agents his plans for traveling outside of the country in the near future, he wrote.

But Elahi piled the information high. “Soon I began to e-mail the F.B.I. I started to send longer e-mails, with pictures, and then with links to Web sites I made. I wrote some clunky code for my phone back in 2003 and turned it into a tracking device … I created a list of every flight I’ve ever been on, since birth. For the more recent flights, I noted the exact flight numbers, recorded in my frequent flier accounts, and also photographs of the meals that I ate on each flight, as well as photos of each knife provided by each airline on each flight.”

On his own websites, which he sent links to federal agents to, he included databases of his personal financial records, his daily habits and whereabouts, pictures he had taken.

Elahi wrote in the Times: “In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value.”

Elahi went further. The actions may be more symbolic than anything, he admitted, “but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system.” He derided the current intelligence system as stuck in a Cold War mentality, and encouraged the many “incredibly intelligent people and very sophisticated computer systems in various agencies in Washington” to move beyond a 20th century mentality and start creating better ways to use and analyze information, rather than endlessly collect it.

Whether the project seems a poignant response to his experience, or just the overly academic philosophizing of an abstract University artist, questions about responding to and dealing with the flood of information federal agents face is something to be pondered. “What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not,” Elahi wrote.