Many Questions on Killing of Pace Student by Police - New York Times

It was the homecoming game, and a reunion of sorts for two childhood friends on the opposing teams. Danroy Henry Jr. was a junior defensive back for the home team, Pace University, in Pleasantville, N.Y. Everyone called him D.J.

Brandon Cox was a running back for the visitors, Stonehill College of Easton, Mass. The two 20-year-olds had been teammates at Oliver Ames High School in North Easton, where their coach called them inseparable. And though Stonehill drubbed Pace on Saturday, 27-0, that was no reason not to get together for some postgame fun at a Westchester County restaurant near campus.

Within hours, Mr. Henry lay fatally wounded in the front seat of a car riddled by police bullets, and Mr. Cox was injured, in a shooting that has mystified people who were close to the young men.

“They were just a joy to be around, never in any trouble,” said Jim Artz, their high school coach. “If my sons grew up to be like these two, I would have been very happy.”

The State Police and the Westchester County district attorney’s office said on Monday that they would join the investigation into the shooting, which involved Pleasantville and Mount Pleasant police officers.

According to the Mount Pleasant police, officers were trying to subdue an unruly crowd around 1 a.m. Sunday in a parking lot outside Finnegan’s Grill, a popular student hangout in Thornwood, about two miles from the Pace campus and about 33 miles north of New York City.

One of the officers approached a car that was parked in the fire lane, where Mr. Henry sat in the driver’s seat. Mr. Cox was in the passenger seat, and a third football player, Desmond Hinds, a senior wide receiver at Pace, was in the back.

When the officer knocked on the window, Mr. Henry tried to speed away, striking one officer and pinning another against the hood, the police said. The officer clinging to the hood then pulled out his gun and fired into the car. Another officer also fired into the car, which crashed into a parked police car and came to a stop.

At an impromptu news conference outside their upper-middle-class home in South Easton, about 30 miles south of Boston, Mr. Cox’s family gave a starkly different version of the shooting.

“They thought the police were asking them to move out of the fire lane,” Thomas Parks, Mr. Cox’s stepfather, said. “The next thing you know there’s a police officer jumping from behind a car and he starts shooting.”

Mr. Cox, who was grazed in the shoulder and wore a hooded sweat shirt covering the bandages as he joined Mr. Parks, said he was “devastated” by the loss of his friend, but did not discuss the shooting in detail.

“We did not do anything to deserve this,” he said. “In my mind, what went on, there was no need for any of that.”

The officer who fired from the hood was identified as Aaron Hess, a former New York City police officer who has been with the Pleasantville police since 2003. The other officer who fired was identified as Ronald Beckley, a 30-year veteran of the Mount Pleasant police. Both were in uniform at the time, the police said. It was unclear on Monday how many shots were fired at the car and how many bullets struck Mr. Henry.

No one has been charged in the case. The officers, who suffered minor injuries, have been placed on administrative duties.

Janet DiFiore, the Westchester district attorney, said the investigation would be “detailed, thorough and complete,” and would include many witness interviews and a review of video surveillance.

Mr. Henry’s parents, who had traveled from Massachusetts along with Mr. Cox’s parents to watch the game on Saturday, did not return calls seeking comment on Monday. The families had met for pizza before the game.

A message on the Henrys’ voice mail on Monday said the family needed some time alone and asked supporters to “tell every single person how much influence Danroy had on you, or the good person he was, and just let everybody know he’s not the kind of person they’re going to try to make him out to be.”

At Mount Pleasant police headquarters, Police Chief Louis Alagno had a pained expression as he greeted visitors on Monday. On his office wall was a classic Norman Rockwell print of an officer at a counter talking with a little boy. The picture could have been ripped from a scene out of Mount Pleasant, where, the chief said he believed, no officer had fired a weapon in the line of duty since the early 1980s.

“This is devastating,” Chief Alagno said. “Just about every officer that was on the scene is truly devastated.”

The chief said he met with Mr. Henry’s father, mother and two younger siblings on Sunday. “They are a beautiful family,” he said. Mr. Henry’s father, he said, “was much more composed than I would have been under the circumstances.”

Nate Schweber and Ted Siefer contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Ky. attack ad hit, even by hopeful's backer - Washington Times

The U.S. Senate race is Kentucky is heading into November much like it started — a bare-knuckled contest with Democrats again trying to define Republican Rand Paul by dredging up his past.

The race has tightened over the past weeks, but such a strategy already appears to be backfiring as one of the biggest cheerleaders for Democratic candidate Jack Conway denounced his recent TV ad questioning Mr. Paul's religious beliefs.

The 30-second ad that began airing last week says that while attending Baylor University, Mr. Paul was in a secret society that mocked Christianity and that he forced a female student to bow to a god named "Aqua Buddha."

The Paul campaign posted a response ad Monday titled "False Witness," with the narrator asking: "What kind of shameful politician would sink so low as to bear false witness against another man just to win an election?"

Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, said Monday the Conway ad was "very dangerous" and "came close to the line" of being inappropriate.

"Candidates who are behind at the end reach, and sometimes they overreach," she said on MSNBC-TV's "Morning Joe" program. "This ad is a very dangerous ad because it reaches back to college. ... I think the ad came close to the line."

Mrs. McCaskill made the comments about 24 hours after she branded the "tea party"-backed Mr. Paul an "extreme candidate" and predicting Mr. Conway, the state's attorney general, would come from behind to win the race.

"Ask Elizabeth Dole what might happen," Republican strategist Elliott Curson said Monday about the Conway ad.

Mr. Curson was referring to a TV ad Mrs. Dole ran in the final weeks of her 2008 North Carolina U.S. Senate re-election bid that questioned Democratic challenger Kay Hagan's ties to an atheist political group.

Ms. Hagan, who was an official at a Presbyterian church in Greensboro, defeated Mrs. Dole, who was seeking a second term.

Story Continues ?

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

View the original article here

Facebook Vows to Fix a Flaw in Data Privacy - New York Times

At the same time, you agree that Facebook can use that data to decide what ads to show you.

It is a complicated deal that many people enter into without perhaps fully understanding what will happen to their information. It also involves some trust — which is why any hint that Facebook may not be holding up its end of the bargain is sure to kick up plenty of controversy.

The latest challenge to that trust came on Monday, when Facebook acknowledged that some applications on its site, including the popular game FarmVille, had improperly shared identifying information about users, and in some cases their friends, with advertisers and Web tracking companies. The company said it was talking to application developers about how they handled personal information, and was looking at ways to prevent this from happening again.

Facebook’s acknowledgment came in response to an article in The Wall Street Journal that said several popular applications were passing a piece of data known as a user ID to outside companies, in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.

Having a user ID allows someone to look up that user’s name and any data posted on that person’s public profile, like a college or favorite movies, but not information that the user had set to be visible only to friends.

Privacy advocates and technology experts were split on the significance of the issue.

“That is extremely serious,” said Peter Eckersley, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online liberties group.

Mr. Eckersley said advertisers could use the user IDs to link individuals with information they had collected anonymously about them on the Web. “Facebook, perhaps inadvertently, is leaking the magic key to tracking you online,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Eckersley said there was no evidence that anyone who had access to this data had actually misused it.

Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and other games on Facebook that have a combined 219 million users, did not respond to requests for comment.

Several technology pundits and bloggers minimized the issue, with some saying that credit card companies and magazines have access to far more detailed information about customers than any Facebook application.

Facebook also sought to play down the importance of the leak, saying the sending of user IDs appeared to have been inadvertent. “Press reports have exaggerated the implications of sharing” a user ID, Mike Vernal, a Facebook engineer, wrote on a company blog for application developers. “Knowledge of a UID does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent.”

In a statement, Facebook said that while it would be a challenge to do so, it planned to introduce “new technical systems that will dramatically limit the sharing of user IDs,” and would continue to enforce its policies on outside applications, shutting them down when necessary. It added that the companies that had received the user IDs said they had not made use of them.

Regardless, the problem underscores another challenge facing the company: Facebook has grown so rapidly, in both users and in technical complexity, that it finds it increasingly difficult to control everything that happens on its site. In addition to more than 500 million Facebook users, there are more than one million third-party applications running on the site.

The latest information leak was made possible by a quirk in a long-established technical standard used by Web browsers. The standard allows Web sites to record the address of the page a user clicked on to arrive there, a bit of information known as a referrer.

Facebook has been including user IDs in these referrers for some time, and last year technology experts pointed out that user IDs had leaked to advertisers that way. Facebook fixed that this year, but apparently never addressed the problem when it came to referrers used by applications on its site.

“Facebook isn’t benefiting from it, and Facebook is not intentionally leaking this data,” said Christopher Soghoian, a privacy advocate and research fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. “But it is not a trivial thing to re-engineer their systems.”

This year he filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, claiming Google was leaking personal information because search terms appeared in its referrers.

The latest issue may have had particular resonance with Facebook users because the company has been reeling from a series of privacy controversies, in part because it has been subtly pushing users to share data more publicly.

This year, for example, many users complained when Facebook changed the way in which users expressed preferences for certain movies or bands, essentially making it more difficult to keep that information private.

And in May, after a series of complaints from some users and privacy advocates, the company made wholesale changes to its privacy settings.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, apologized to users, saying the settings were often too complicated for people to understand. Despite the changes, the privacy issue has continued to dog Facebook.

“This is one more straw on the camel’s back that suggests that Facebook needs to think holistically not just about its privacy policies, but also about baking privacy into their technical design,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert and professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

View the original article here