THE US REPORT

(Columbia, SC)—Jesus Perez-Laguna, a citizen of Mexico, was sentenced today in federal court in Columbia, SC, on charges stemming from a sex trafficking ring involving at least one teenage girl. Perez-Laguna was sentenced to more than 14 years imprisonment and ordered to pay $52,500 in restitution to his victims. After his release from prison, Perez-Laguna will be on federal supervised release for the rest of his life. As a condition of supervised release, U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson ordered that Perez-Laguna be surrendered to immigration officials for deportation proceedings and further ordered that Perez-Laguna not return to the United States while on supervised release.

In April, Perez-Laguna’s co-defendant, Ciro Bustos-Rosales, was sentenced to 70 months in prison, ordered to pay restitution, and ordered to comply with similar terms and conditions of release as those included in Perez-Laguna’s sentence.

During their guilty plea hearings in September 2007, both men admitted that they were involved with transporting a 14-year-old girl across the border between the United States and Mexico and the border between North Carolina and South Carolina in order for the minor to engage in prostitution. Additionally, both men admitted that they harbored illegal aliens for the purpose of prostitution.

"Perez-Laguna and Bustos Rosales ruthlessly stole the innocence of young girls and profited from their exploitation," said Kenneth Smith, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Investigations in Atlanta. "Bringing these criminals to justice would not have been possible without cooperation among international, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies."

Many Americans express concern not over immigration, but over those who come to the US illegally, possibly with intent to commit crime. Gary Bauer, in the essay, ‘Will Obama’s ‘hateful rhetoric’ draw Hispanic voters?’  for Human Events, noted, “During the first half of 2008, ICE deported 5,889 illegal immigrants in Florida, including 1,251 criminal aliens with criminal records that included everything from murder and sex offenses to drug crimes.  ICE also has played a key role in arresting persons involved in child pornography.” Bauer further notes, “In the first nine months of fiscal year 2008, ICE returned 7,345 illegal aliens to their home countries who had been living in Washington, Oregon and Alaska, a 39 percent increase in the volume of deportations from the three states since 2007.  Of the more than 7,300 deportations, over 2,000 had prior criminal convictions in addition to being in the country illegally.”

Perez-Laguna and Bustos-Rosales are two of three defendants indicted in August, 2007 by a federal grand jury in Columbia following a federal sex trafficking investigation. The third co-defendant, Guadalupe Reyes-Rivera, also known as "Mama Martina," is a fugitive.

[Source: Dept. of Justice Release, Jul, 18, 2008; no photo of the fugitive was posted with the release. Photo by Kay B. Day: Traffic heading north on I-95.)

Ed. Note: I met Bryan Del Monte through Blog Catalog as he was establishing the conservative site Right Commentary. Bryan is a senior policy and strategy consultant to government agencies on a wide range of defense issues. He worked for the US Government for four years in the Pentagon. A Republican since Reagan defeated Carter in 1980, Bryan is a former Bush Administration political appointee.  I blog at Right Commentary when time permits, and what strikes me about Bryan’s content is the lack of vitriol common to many other political blogs whether they’re conservative or liberal. He agreed to an email interview with The US Report after I asked him why people like us spend time blogging.—Kay B. Day

Day: Why does a busy person like you decide to spend time blogging?
Del Monte: I started blogging in a way before blogs became popular. In graduate school, I used to have an email list of news stories with commentary that I would write weekly. It was a combination of bizarre stories and comment - some political - mostly current events. I had about 100 people a week at my university who used to get it. When I stopped being on campus all the time, I didn't write as much, so eventually it collapsed.

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Most of us non-tech types compute with nary a care each day, but software makers, hardware makers and other tech experts collaborated secretly to fix a vulnerability that if exploited would have allowed hackers to literally take over the Web. In one scenario, you’d type in the URL of your bank but you’d actually be taken to a copycat site that would steal your personal information. Breitbart says, “Security researcher Dan Kaminsky of IOActive stumbled upon the Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability about six months ago and reached out to industry giants including Microsoft, Sun and Cisco to collaborate on a solution.” Kaminsky said he found the vulnerability by accident.

Kaminsky wrote about the experience at the DoxPara Research website. As I read his account of the challenge and the solution, I thought to myself how like poetry technology is, at least as far as the passion and complexity go. Poetry presents a problem—this may sound like overkill, but trust me, poetry will challenge you if it’s approached as art rather than emotional gush—and you pore over the lines, explore the options, see what one tweak will produce, manipulate something as small as a comma and go from there. Kaminsky’s passion for his work is evident. There’s a charming video of him with his niece, explaining the situation in layperson’s terms.

There's a simple clickthrough at DoxPara to check your own DNS security. I was relieved to know mine is safe, at least as far as one can tell.

I tried to thank him and the other collaborators, but wasn’t able to leave a comment at DoxPara. So here’s my expression of gratitude to Kaminsky and all the others who selflessly devoted their time to making the Web a safer place for all of us. The potential fallout from the DNS security flaw was phenomenal—in the 21st century a new category of hero has emerged. These researchers and tech experts are a type of new warrior in my opinion, utlitizing the sort of weaponry that is among the most complicated on the planet. This group definitely deserves a whole lot of our gratitude. Maybe the Nobel Prize Foundation could, for once, recognize a group that did something to benefit common people in every country in the world.

Have you been following the development of the Large Hadron Collider whose purpose is to collide proton beams at levels of energy never before produced in a particle accelerator? That’s a complex way to ask you if you’ve been following the news about the LHC and the fears some have that black holes might be created and/or strangelets might take matter over, transforming that matter into some really strange matter. The physicists are at it again, and I can see why they’re so excited. No one’s ever done this before—created a process something like the Big Bang scientific types attribute the origins of Earth to. The European Center for Nuclear Research is in charge, but scientists from a number of countries are participating including the U.S. The video below gives an idea of the worst-case scenario.

A former radiation expert and a writer have teamed up, suing in a Honolulu District Court to stop the collider from going forward until CERN proves it’s safe. The collider is located in Switzerland. The lawsuit rests on the plaintiffs’ beliefs there’s a possibility the LHC will create tiny black holes which would then suck us all up or perhaps create strangelets. In the latter case we literally might not recognize ourselves. There’s also the matter of monopoles. You might want to read the safety report yourself. This will be an epic accomplishment, but is epic destruction possible as well?

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Sam Kounaves, a co-investigator on NASA’s Phoenix team, said soil tested after the robotic arm of the lander scooped up samples from Mars, “appears to be a close analog to surface soils found in the upper dry valleys in Antarctica.” In a single week, NASA has released some amazing findings. Speaking about the chemical composition of the soil samples, Kounaves added, "This is more evidence for water because salts are there. We also found a reasonable number of nutrients, or chemicals needed by life as we know it... Over time, I've come to the conclusion that the amazing thing about Mars is not that it's an alien world, but that in many aspects, like mineralogy, it's very much like Earth." Kounaves is also a professor in chemistry at Tufts University and that’s why I have his name spelled right. It’s wrong in the NASA release because it’s spelled two ways. We've come a long way in our attitudes about extraterrestrial life, a subject explored by Time magazine more than 30 years ago.

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