That’s the circular logic of a recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that simply remaining silent is not enough to protect American citizens from self-incrimination. Though it’s received scant media attention, the decision has serious implications for criminal prosecutions, legal experts say. It came on June 17 in Salinas v. Texas, which concerned the nature of police questioning in a 20-year-old murder investigation that led to the conviction of a Houston man.

In January 1993, Genovevo Salinas was brought in for police questioning about the murder of two brothers. Police found shotgun shell casings at the scene, and Salinas -- who was not arrested and not read his Miranda rights -- agreed to let police inspect his shotgun. When police asked if the shells would match his shotgun, Salinas did not answer the question. He stayed silent, looked down at the floor, shuffled his feet and bit his bottom lip.

Salinas was later arrested on an unrelated traffic warrant, at which time police decided there was enough evidence to charge him with the murders. Salinas did not testify at the trial, but his reaction to police questioning -- the fidgeting, lip-biting, etc. -- was used as evidence. In other words, Salinas’ silence was used against him, a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights, or so he thought.

Salinas was convicted and received a 20-year sentence. On direct appeal, he argued to the Court of Appeals of Texas that the prosecutors’ use of his silence as part of their case was unconstitutional, but the court rejected that argument. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where in a 5-4 decision last week, the court found that Salinas’ self-incrimination privilege had not been violated, mainly because he never flat-out said, “I’m invoking my right to remain silent.” This despite the fact that Salinas was not under arrest at the time of questioning, and was therefore not read his Miranda rights.

From the plurality opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito:

“Petitioner [Salinas] cannot benefit from that principle because it is undisputed that his interview with police was voluntary. As petitioner himself acknowledges, he agreed to accompany the officers to the station and ‘was free to leave at any time during the interview.’ Brief for Petitioner 2 - 3 (internal quotation marks omitted). That places petitioner’s situation outside the scope of Miranda and other cases in which we have held that various forms of governmental coercion prevented defendants from voluntarily invoking the privilege.”

The Supreme Court had previously held that mere silence is not sufficient for a suspect to invoke his or her Fifth Amendment rights. The difference here is that Salinas was not a suspect at the time he went silent; he was merely a witness brought in for questioning.

Alito was joined in his opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts. While the ruling has been overshadowed by this week's Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, the Defense of Marriage Act and Prop 8, it’s received its share of criticism in both journalistic and legal circles.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of First Amendment law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law,wrote on the ABA Journal Tuesday that criminal defense lawyers will now have to take extra care, advising their clients to explicitly speak up if they wish to remain silent. He added that the new ruling is also likely to cause unnecessary confusion.

“Constitutional protections should not be just for those who have legal training and know what they need to say to the police to invoke their rights,” Chemerinsky wrote. “From a common sense perspective, Salinas was penalized for exercising his constitutional right to remain silent in the face of police questioning. This should not be tolerated under the Fifth Amendment.”

Read the full syllabus for Salinas v Texas here.

The movement started in Santiago in the early hours of Thursday, when central streets were blocked with bonfires near the university campus. The surrounding area was severely damaged, including local businesses, bus stops and traffic lights, and traffic was stopped for hours. By the end of Thursday 16 people had been arrested and around 10 had been injured.

Minister of Homeland Security Andrés Chadwick stated that the movement was planned by violent groups, who ignored the government request for a peaceful conversation and committed acts of vandalism throughout the capital.

The organizers of the protest condemned vandalism, and emphasized the fact that they managed to get over 100,000 people in the street. “Today it was confirmed that our demands are shared by the whole Chilean society,” said President of the Student Federation Andrés Fielbaum to Spanish newspaper El País.

These protests inherit the spirit of the student mobilizations of 2006, which demanded the renovation of the Chilean education system, which dates back to the Pinochet dictatorship years. In Chile only 36 percent of the schools are state-funded, and even public schools cost thousands of dollars a year.

Such an education system allows for only 65 percent of Chileans to finish school before they turn 24, according to data cited by Argentinean newspaper Página 12.

Student revolts became viral in 2011, and have continued at a low intensity since then. For the first time now, other sectors of society have joined in the cause. Copper miners protested in Calama, north of Santiago, where they blocked Chuquicatama, the biggest mine in the country. Similar events happened in El Teniente, south of the capital. In the coastal towns of Talcahuano, San Antonio and Valparaíso, fishermen kept over 2,000 boats on shore.

President Sebastián Piñera announced that Congress is studying a law that would allow police to ask for ID in case of chaos or public disorder. The measure would even require people who are not suspected of committing a crime to identify themselves. Piñera assured that this is not a restriction of freedom, but Fielbaum disagreed, saying that this “reeks of arrest under suspicion.”

Student demands are part of the program of the presidential candidates, who will be running for their parties' choice on Sunday. Polls point at former President Michelle Bachelet, who criticized the protests, as winner for the center-left, and at Andrés Allamand for the center-right opposition. Presidential elections will take place in November.

Atlantic Records is going to need a good spin doctor.

The National Security Agency has been involved in intelligence-gathering schemes since its inception in 1949, but 21st century technology has advanced far beyond the wiretap and the codebook. Modern intelligence gathering, like the recently unveiled PRISM program, is the product of the “big data” era.

“There’s nothing surprising technically” about programs like PRISM, data-mining expert and KDNuggets editor Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro said in a phone interview.

Most technology experts can’t speak with too much certainty about a program they haven’t seen, like PRISM, but based on publicly available information, something like PRISM has been possible for years. The same innovations in software and hardware that aid your Google query or help advertisers track your habits online -- like when you examine a book on Amazon and then see an ad for that book pop up later on Facebook -- also allow the NSA to sort through reportedly tens of billions of pieces of information a month.

One of the major components of PRISM is believed to be an open-source database called Apache Accumulo, which the NSA began working on in late 2007. Originally called CloudBase, Accumulo is built on top of a software framework called Apache Hadoop and is similar to Google’s BigTable storage system. (If you would like to buy Accumulo for yourself, some of the developers that worked on the project with the NSA sell a commercial version through their company.

“Accumulo’s ability to handle data in a variety of formats -- a characteristic called ‘schemaless’ in database jargon -- means the NSA can store data from numerous sources all within the database and add new analytic capabilities in days or even hours,” Derrick Harris wrote for GigaOM.

Some of the other advances aren’t necessarily of the hardware or software variety. The science of studying networks has been growing by leaps and bounds, allowing analysts to tease relationships from seemingly unrelated data points.

“If the NSA just has the metadata -- who calls whom -- that’s sufficient to determine the status of people,” Piatetsky-Shapiro said. “You don’t necessarily need the conversation if you have the network.”

Piatetsky-Shapiro pointed to a humorous Slate article published Monday that imagined British agents flagging Paul Revere as a person of interest based on his relationships with other colonial independence agitators.

“Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed,” Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy wrote for Slate. “All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects.”

The leaks have also highlighted the degree to which almost all Internet communication is part of a giant interconnected and tangled web. For example, online, the difference between a foreign communication -- which the NSA might flag, and a domestic one, which it shouldn't, can sometimes get a little hazy.

“One interesting tidbit from the Guardian leaks is how much the U.S. is the center of global communications,” Piatetsky-Shapiro said. Internet communications often “take the cheapest route.” So, because the U.S. has so much available capacity, an email from, say, Pakistan to Canada, could be routed through America.

When one imagines how the NSA might go about analyzing the content from all the different types of communications it has stored, a line of spooks in a darkened room poring over emails is not what comes to mind these days. The customer service industry is already using language-processing algorithms to break down spoken and written sentences. By breaking down sentence structures and weighing the words contained in any of the various modes of communication, it’s possible for a program to organize messages by “intent.” It’s not too big a leap to assume that whatever actual conversations the NSA does capture would be sifted by a similar algorithm.

“If that stuff’s being used in the commercial world, it’s logical to assume they’d be using it as well,” Forrester Research analyst Glenn O’Donnell said in a phone interview.

The Associated Press reported that during a private mass, Pope Francis was apparently outraged by a newspaper headline which noted that the 400 people who died in a garment factory in Dhaka were only paid the equivalent of 38 euros (about $50) per month.

"That is what the people who died were being paid. This is called slave labor," he was quoted as saying.

"Today in the world this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us -- the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity. How many brothers and sisters find themselves in this situation! Not paying fairly, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking at how to make a profit. That goes against God!"

The five garment factories inside the poorly constructed Rana Plaza in Dhaka housed some 3,500 workers – at last count, 402 had died in the collapse, while more than 2,500 are wounded. At least 150 people remain missing.

This disaster followed a fire in another Bangladeshi factory five months ago which killed 112 people.

The Pope then added: "There are many people who want to work but cannot. When a society is organized in a way that not everyone is given the chance to work, that society is not just."

Meanwhile, thousands of workers and other activists took to the streets of central Dhaka on Wednesday to demand improved working conditions and the death of the owner of the collapsed building,  Mohammed Sohel Rana.

AP noted that one person at the rally spoke through a loudspeaker on the back of a truck: "My brother has died. My sister has died. Their blood will not be valueless."

Sohel Rana, 38, is now under police custody and is likely to be charged with negligence, illegal construction practices and forcing workers to toil in unsafe conditions. If no more charges are filed, he faces up to 7 years in prison (which will anger protesters demanding his death).

"I want the death penalty for the owner of the building,” said one garment employee, according to AP.

“We want regular salaries, raises and absolutely we want better safety in our factories.”

Meanwhile, the Bangladesh High Court has ordered the confiscation of Sohel Rana's properties, and a freeze on the assets of the owners of the factories which operated inside Rana Plaza, so that such funds can be used to pay surviving workers and families of the victims.

The European Union also said it may take steps to force the Bangladeshi garment industry to upgrade facilities and improve work conditions by enacting changes to Bangladesh's preferential, duty-free and quota-free access to EU markets. "The European Union calls upon the Bangladeshi authorities to act immediately to ensure that factories across the country comply with international labor standards," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht said in a statement.

The IndustriAll Global Union, the Swiss-based federation that represents 50 million workers around the world, established a May 15th deadline for Western retailer to propose fire and building safety standards for Bangladeshi factories.

Bangladesh’s huge garment economy accounts for some $19 billion of annual exports, with 60 percent of that figure going to Europe. The next biggest market is the U.S. (23 percent).

Some 3.6 million Bangladeshis work in the industry, the majority of them women. Garments account for 80 percent of Bangladesh’s total export business.

The group is suing the borough of Norristown, Pa., on behalf of a battered woman who said police threatened her with eviction after they were summoned to her home for a domestic disturbance.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for Pennsylvania's Eastern District, the ACLU, its state chapter and a local law firm challenged a Norristown ordinance they say punishes tenants who require police assistance during domestic disputes. The civil-liberties organization blasted the ordinance as “unconstitutional,” saying it violates tenants’ First Amendment right to petition the government. In the complaint, filed by the Pepper Hamilton LLP law firm, the ACLU also said the ordinance violates the Violence Against Women Act, a 19-year-old federal law that increases protections for victims of domestic violence. The law was renewed by the U.S. Congress in March after a brief lapse that caused widespread criticism of Republicans in the House of Representatives.

“After her first ‘strike,’ Ms. Briggs was terrified of calling the police,” Park wrote. “She did not want to do anything to risk losing her home. So even when her now ex-boyfriend attacked her with a brick, she did not call. And later, when he stabbed her in the neck, she was still too afraid to reach out. But, both times, someone else did call the police.”

In a statement released Thursday, Robert Glisson, Norristown’s interim municipal administrator, said he was unable to comment specifically on the lawsuit, as the municipality had not yet seen it. He added that the provision in question -- part of Norristown’s Rental License Ordinance -- was designed to reduce incidences of disorderly behavior by requiring landlords to “assist” in their reduction.

Exactly how the provision does that is unclear. IBTimes reached out to Glisson to request a full copy of Rental License Ordinance, but he did not immediately respond. Updates will be posted here when he does. In his statement, however, he did deny the ACLU’s claim that the ordinance punishes victims of domestic violence.

“The ordinance provision allegedly being attacked by the lawsuit does not, in any way, discriminate against any persons, nor does it punish victims of domestic violence,” Glisson wrote. “Domestic violence is abhorrent to society, and the Norristown Police Department remains constantly vigilant for those crimes. Until the lawsuit is served and reviewed by legal counsel, Norristown cannot respond to specific allegations.”

Park disagrees. In her blog post, she said the ordinance “specifically includes ‘domestic disturbances’ as disorderly behavior that triggers enforcement of the law.” She also said that Norristown is among an increasing number of cities and towns adopting so-called nuisance ordinances. Indeed, a recent study of such ordinances was published in theAmerican Sociological Review, and the results are not encouraging. In the study, Harvard University’s Matthew Desmond and Columbia University’s Nicol Valdez assessed the consequences of nuisance ordinances in cities and towns in every region in the U.S., including Dallas, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Seattle, among dozens of others.

In most cases, these ordinances threaten property owners with fines if they fail to put a stop to nuisance behavior that takes place in their units. But the authors found that, out of 59 municipalities, only four took precautions to exclude domestic violence from the list of acceptable nuisance activities. Meanwhile, a full 39 ordinances “include assault, sexual abuse, battery, or domestic violence among their list of nuisance activities,” according to Desmond and Valdez.

A full copy of the ACLU’s complaint is available here. According to Justia.com, Glisson is also named in the lawsuit, along with Norristown Police Chief Russell J. Bono and others. Click here to read the Borough of Norristown’s initial response to the lawsuit.

The contentious issue was buried deep within the department’s proposed 2014 budget, released last week by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. It may have gone relatively unnoticed if U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., hadn’t sounded the alarm late Friday.

Higgins, who's a member of the House Committees on Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs and serves on the U.S.-Canada Inter-Parliamentary Group, said he would “fight to put the breaks on this shortsighted fee.”

“Putting up barriers to regional and bi-national commerce is the absolute last thing we should be doing if we want to grow the economies of Western New York and the U.S.,” he said.

Higgins also suggested that the fee along the 5,530-mile (8,900-kilometer) Canada-U.S. border would unfairly “subsidize” the more challenging and expensive southwestern border with Mexico.

According to Section 544 of the budget proposal, the Commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection should “conduct a study assessing the feasibility and cost relating to establishing and collecting a land border crossing fee for both land border pedestrians and passenger vehicles along the northern and southwest borders of the United States.”

Currently, travelers aren't charged fees for crossing the border by car, bus or train. Some crossings in cities such as Detroit and Buffalo occur on toll bridges, but the money collected goes to the bridge operators, not DHS.

Under the proposal, the Commissioner would look at the feasibility of collecting fees from these existing operators as well.

The study will also explore any legal and regulatory impediments to establishing and collecting land border crossing fees, and it would need to be complete within nine months of the enactment of the budget proposal.

It remains unclear whether the fee would focus on those entering or exiting the U.S., or both. How much each crossing may cost travelers has yet to be determined.

Canadians took 2.8 million same-day car trips to the U.S. in February -- many of which entailed shopping, Statistics Canada notes. Eager to protect this vital trade, politicians in northern U.S. states have successfully blocked previous proposals to generate more income along the northern border.

Canadians also sounded off about the prospect of a border toll over the weekend.

The Canadian Snowbird Association, a nonprofit group that calls itself “the voice of traveling Canadians,” labeled the proposal a ploy to get Canadians to help ease the U.S.’ “desperate financial situation.”

“While we appreciate the fiscal challenges faced by our friends in the United States, we would prefer the U.S. government focus on ways to reduce obstacles at the border that hinder trade and tourism,” Michael MacKenzie, executive director, said.

MacKenzie noted that the Canada-U.S. economic relationship is one of the largest in the world, with trade in goods and services between the two countries at some 128 ports of entry totaling $645 billion in 2010, or more than $1.7 billion each day.

Transport of many commercial goods and agricultural products already entails fees at the U.S.-Canada border. Moreover, any additional fees are unlikely to help the new bilateral “Beyond the Border” plan to ease traffic and promote trade.

“It’s important to note that this is simply a study at this point,” Chris Plunkett, a spokesman at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, told Buffalo News.

“But we’re confident that any study would conclude that the considerable economic damage any fee would do would greatly outweigh any revenue generated.”

In a statement about the proposed budget, Napolitano said Homeland Security needed to find new revenue streams through fees to hire more border guards and support the increasingly expensive operations at U.S. borders.

“Processing the more than 350 million travelers annually provides nearly $150 billion in economic stimulus, yet the fees that support these operations have not been adjusted in many cases for more than a decade,” she said.

“As the complexity of our operations continues to expand, the gap between fee collections and the operations they support is growing, and the number of workforce hours fees support decreases each year.”

"What were you, raised by wolves?”

Parents usually ask this to cow an unruly child, but actually, when you think about it, the track record of wolf-raised children is pretty good. Mowgli anchored a best-selling book and a Disney movie; Romulus founded Rome. While wild animal encounters don’t always turn out as pleasant as “The Jungle Book,” there are plenty of children and adults that have been saved by wild creatures.

In 2005, a 12-year-old Ethiopian girl was reportedly saved from a group of kidnappers by three lions. Seven men had abducted the girl to try and force her into marrying one of them, and they had beaten her repeatedly. But the lions apparently chased off the men and stood guard over her until the police and her family came.

The case is particularly amazing because lions are well-known potential man-eaters. A 2005 study published in Nature found that lions had killed more than 563 people and injured 308 in Tanzania alone. But in this case, the lions may have been moved to sympathize with the girl because she was crying after being beaten.

“A young girl whimpering could be mistaken for the mewing sound from a lion cub, which in turn could explain why they didn’t eat her,” wildlife expert, Stuart Williams, in 2005, told the Associated Press.

Take heed: If you’re in need of leonine assistance, your best recourse may be to start sobbing uncontrollably.

If you’re looking for more long-term help from the animal kingdom, your better bet might lie with wolves, as Mowgli discovered. Don’t forget that Man’s Best Friend is almost genetically identical to a wolf; that’s why wolves and dogs can interbreed. Wolves do occasionally attack people – especially if they’re starving, habituated to humans or rabid – but despite their fierce portrayal in fairy tales and Liam Neeson movies, wolves actually are more likely to turn tail if they see a person.

“Most people don’t realize this, but wolves are wimps,” Utah State University ecologist and researcher Daniel MacNulty last year told National Geographic.

There are stories of wolves assisting children in the wilds of Russia and India, but these are hard to verify. One of the more famous stories of such wolf children, two girls, Amala and Kamala, was based on a single claim by the reverend who claimed to have discovered the girls.

Wild dogs have also occasionally been reported to take in runaway children, like the feral “Mowgli Boy” of Romania, who allegedly fled an abusive father.

Dolphins might be the most reliably altruistic animals in nature, with accounts of them saving humans stretching back to Greek mythology. There are numerous accounts of dolphins assisting injured podmates, beached whales and humans. A group of dolphins was reported to have circled around four swimmers in New Zealand to keep a great white shark at bay. Another pod protected a California surfer who had just been mauled by a great white.

Other cetaceans have a knack for altruism as well. In 2009, a beluga whale at a Chinese theme-park pushed a foundering freediver to the surface after the human’s legs cramped up.

It’s still unclear what motivates an animal to save a drowning swimmer or protect a girl from kidnappers,or raise a lost child; it seems to defy evolutionary sense. But altruism and cooperation may be just as natural as predation. Some experiments in humans suggest that generosity can induce the same kind of pleasurable reward in the brain that we get from food or sex. And if we're hard-wired to enjoy being nice, there might be similar setups in brains across the animal kingdom.