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From the Los Angeles Times

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Police stymied by contradictions in Sky Metalwala's disappearance

In a strange case of life imitating art, it now appears that a recent episode of the NBC television series "Law & Order: SVU" featured a storyline remarkably similar to the account a mother in Washington state gave police about the disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Sky Metalwala, when she left him strapped in his car seat on the side of a road.

Julia Biryukova has told detectives her car ran out of gas Sunday morning while she was trying to take her son to the hospital. When she returned from the gas station an hour later, she said, her son was gone.

The TV show featured a story about a woman who claimed her car was stolen outside a convenience store with her son buckled in the back seat.

In the show, the mother, like Biryukova, is in the midst of a difficult divorce. And police come to suspect that the parents know more about the case than they're letting on.

"I've heard about the 'Law and Order: SVU' episode that has great similarity to this case. I heard that it aired Saturday, the day before the disappearance of Sky," Bellevue Police Maj. Mike Johnson told reporters at a news conference Wednesday.

"I know that there are several folks up in the operations center of the command post that have taken a look at that episode, and have commented that it is strikingly similar in nature," he said.

Beyond that, though, they had little to say. Police on Wednesday expressed growing frustration over the case, which they said remains full of contradictions and confusion.

"We have been challenged to try and find evidence and facts to support Julia's story," Johnson said. "The story doesn't add up. The whereabouts of Sky are not known. The mother's story is falling apart day to day, and her lack of cooperation so far in regard to providing more information proactively and submitting to a polygraph doesn't help."

Police were able to determine Wednesday that the car was not out of gas, Johnson said. "What I can tell you from today is that there was a sufficient amount of gas in that vehicle to run for a considerable distance," he said. "What we need to consider, though, is whether or not there may have been another mechanical problem with the car that made it stop, and I don't have the answer to that yet."

He said police also are puzzled by Biryukova's Facebook page, which features dozens of pictures of her daughter and only one or two of her son. "It's unusual, I guess, at first glance to consider the fact that a mother of two children would only have a predominantly one-sided view of her family on Facebook," he said. "That seems odd to us."

Biryukova's estranged husband, Solomon Metalwala, who had been locked in a custody dispute with his wife over both Sky and their 4-year-old daughter, took a polygraph test again Wednesday after an earlier examination, administered when he was stressed and fatigued, proved inconclusive, police said.

Johnson said several other people close to the family are also being questioned.

But the search effort has hit nothing but dead ends, he said. Wooded areas near the car's route and the family's apartment in Redmond have produced no firm clues; search-and-rescue dogs found the boy's scent in the car but not in the surrounding area.

"The search-and-rescue personnel that were on scene the morning of this event told us that one possible explanation for the lack of scent leading away from the car was that someone took him out of the car, placed him in another car, and left the area," Johnson said.

"We want to believe Julia," he said. "We want to help her find her missing child, and we want her cooperation to do that. And at this point, the information that she's given us has been problematic and has created more questions than answers."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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Nationwide emergency warning test needs fine-tuning

The first nationwide test of the emergency warning system failed to reach all television and radio stations in the country, but federal officials said they will make improvements.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called weaknesses in the system exposed by the test "unacceptable."

"Large areas of the country received the test but some areas did not,'' the Federal Communications Commission said in a statement. Some TV stations stayed on the test longer than the planned 30 seconds. A Washington, D.C., station was stuck on a test graphic for four minutes, ABC News reported.

Some TV viewers never saw any test. "Nothing happened," read a Twitter message from Arkansas.

The FCC said the test, scheduled for 2 p.m. Eastern, "served the purpose for which it was intended -- to identify gaps and generate a comprehensive set of data to help strengthen our ability to communicate during real emergencies."

"It was our opportunity to get a sense of what worked, what didn't and additional improvements that need to be made to the system as we move forward," read the Federal Emergency Management Agency's blog. "It's only through comprehensively testing, analyzing, and improving these technologies that we can ensure the most effective and reliable emergency alert and warning systems available at a moment's notice in a time of real national emergency."

Lieberman commended FEMA for carrying out the test but said "government and media carriers must work together to make sure the system does what it is intended to do, which is to transmit a nationwide message from the president in a crisis."

Federal officials took great pains to put the word out beforehand about the test to avoid panic like that caused by Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of a fictional Martian invasion in New Jersey, fearing it could tie up 911 phone lines.

The system is often tested locally -- and has been used in local emergencies -- but it had never been tested on radio and TV stations coast to coast at the same time.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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Is GPS tracking too '1984'?

The Supreme Court should rule that under the 4th Amendment, police must get a warrant before tracking a suspect using GPS surveillance.

November 10, 2011

Should the police be allowed to affix an electronic tracking device to a suspect's car without a warrant and follow his every movement for a month? That was the question at an oral argument at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The justices expressed unease with such pervasive surveillance, with one comparing it to George Orwell's "1984."

Their misgivings reflect a sense on the part of many Americans, including this editorial board, that there's something creepy about round-the-clock electronic surveillance. But when they decide the case of Antoine Jones, a suspected drug dealer who was arrested after being monitored by a global positioning system, they will have to base any decision in Jones' favor not on creepiness but on the Constitution. Fortunately, that document, interpreted in light of technological advances, supports a ruling that GPS surveillance without a warrant violates the 4th Amendment.

In his argument, Deputy Solicitor Gen. Michael Dreeben asked the court to treat GPS tracking the same way it treats visual observation of a suspect on a public street. "What a person seeks to preserve as private in the enclave of his own home or in a private letter or inside of his vehicle when he is traveling is a subject of 4th Amendment protection," Dreeben said. "But what he reveals to the world, such as his movements in a car on a public roadway, is not."

That accurately summarizes current law, but it doesn't take into account the dramatic technological advances of the last few years. GPS tracking, which allows police to follow as many people as they want for as long as they want without expending many resources, takes invasion of privacy to a new level. As Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in an appeals court decision in Jones' favor, prolonged GPS surveillance "reveals an intimate picture of the subject's life that he expects no one to have — short perhaps of his spouse."

It's true that under existing law, a police officer in a squad car could follow a suspect day and night for an indefinite period of time without a warrant. But Justice Stephen G. Breyer pointed out that, in reality, "no one, at least very rarely, sends human beings to follow people 24 hours a day." In interpreting the 4th Amendment's ban on illegal searches and seizures, the court must consider how the real world works. In that world, GPS tracking allows police a picture of a suspect's life that never would be generated by ordinary police methods. As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. put it on Tuesday: "… you're talking about the difference between seeing the little tile and seeing a mosaic."

A ruling for Jones wouldn't require an end to GPS tracking. All it would mean is that police would have to obtain a warrant before making use of a device that the framers of the 4th Amendment never could have conceived of.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-gps-20111110,0,5546556,print.story

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