"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Police say syringes will help stop drunk driving - Yahoo! News
Topic: Miscellaneous
8:33 am EDT, Sep 14, 2009
A friend of mine asked me to comment on this. I wrote the following:
My perspective is that such tests constitute a search and should require a warrant. If you look at the story, the people running this program agree - the story dances around that a bit. They say:
The nation's highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done on a drunk driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner.
That ruling basically has nothing to do with this story. The after arrest part is key - if you've already been arrested the constitutional issues are not the same. You are a prisoner. Later down in the article they say:
Under the state's implied consent law, drivers who refuse to voluntarily submit to the test lose their license for a year, so most comply. For the approximately 5 percent who refuse, the officer obtains a search warrant from an on-call judge and the suspect can be restrained if needed to obtain a sample, Layden said.
So, a warrant is required. However, "we pulled the guy over because he was weaving" is probable cause sufficient to get a warrant, so it doesn't really matter.
So, the question really boils down to what you think about "implied consent." If they had absolutely no basis to suspect you of being intoxicated they couldn't get a warrant, but you'd still loose your license.
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea of "implied consent" when it comes to the fourth amendment. It goes to show you how little respect the fourth amendment has when the game for legislators is to come up with a creative way of thinking it out of existence.
Imagine you started a neighborhood, and you wanted it to be crime free. You create an Home Owners Association with an HOA contract. In that contact you include language that says that if you buy a home in this neighborhood you consent to suspicionless searches of your home and property by the police. Its buried in the fine print - most people don't really notice its there and the police rarely exercise this power anyway so its not a practical concern, until it is. Here consent is more than implied - you actually signed paperwork authorizing searches of your property.
If this practice became common, over time it might be harder and harder to buy a home in a "nice" neighborhood without signing your constitutional rights away.
Now, imagine you started an ISP, and you wanted it to be crime free...
We estimated that our balloon achieved an altitude of about 93000 feet before returning to the earth. The balloon’s ascent took about 4 hours, and its descent took 40 minutes.
RE: ‘Anonymous’ Declares War on Australia Over Internet Filtering | Threat Level | Wired.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:31 am EDT, Sep 11, 2009
ubernoir wrote: since I'm not opposed to censorship in principle I don't have a problem with the blocking of child porn sites since I regard freedom of speech as fundamental yet not an absolute.
I certainly agree that child porn is not protected speech. I'm not arguing that they shouldn't regulate child porn. However, there are different ways that they can choose to go about regulating it. This particular approach is dangerous.
In general, speech is speech. In my view the government has no business censoring any kind of speech. However, there are places where speech extends to action, such as when something is both speech and an act of trafficing in stolen credit cards, and those are places where government regulation can be warranted.
I think child porn is one of those cases. I tend to think about it in terms of privacy - the people depicted did not consent to being depicted and even possession of the images constitutes continued violation of their privacy. This view of the issue is somewhat inconsistent with how governments view the issue. Many people cast this in the terms you did - that freedom of speech is not absolute - so some kinds of speech can be regulated as long as we find them offensive. This is an unbounded (and in my view somewhat unprincipled) way of looking at the issue that opens the door to censorship of a great deal of speech. Viewing regulation of child porn through the prism of privacy creates a clear distinction with speech that is purely expressive, and it also raises questions about other kinds of privacy issues that I think ought to be raised, such as the case of the "starwars kid," but this is a huge digression.
No matter how you slice it, child porn is a small exception to the general rule that speech is speech and the government has no business regulating it. The government has choices in how they go about regulating speech and I believe that they need to be careful in this domain that they are not posing a threat to legitimate speech. There are various ways that the UK government could go about dealing with 100 or so URLs that contain content they believe to be illegal. Clearly, one approach would be to work with other countries to get that content pulled down.
Filtering creates four problems.
First, it requires building an infrastructure that can be used for the censorship of any content. A different government elected to power could quickly react to a "crisis" situation by blocking access to international news sources. They could literally move from decision to implementation in hours. So the infrastructure represents a significant threat to liberty regardless of how it is being used today.
Second, it is usually overbroad in practice. The system in the UK seems very carefully maintained and so it is the exception to the rule. But even they ran into a problem where they literally blocked anonymous editing of Wikipedia for the entire coun... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]
With the passage of every week it becomes more apparent that Obama, having been vetted and receiving the nod years ago from a coven of Big Men (the Pritzkers, hedge fund and PE players, etc.) is there to forestall, divert and deflect any meaningful attempts to control the voracious greed and impunity of our masters. However, events are likely to overwhelm his ability to fend off reality with eloquence, and he may face a powerful backlash when more and more people realize that there is less there than meets the eye and ear.
‘Anonymous’ Declares War on Australia Over Internet Filtering | Threat Level | Wired.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:48 am EDT, Sep 10, 2009
Hackers identifying themselves as “Anonymous” launched a denial-of-service attack Wednesday against a web site for Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to protest a government proposal to filter internet content, according to the Australian Associated Press.
This seems like a stupid stunt, but then again, the news reports caused me to notice the issue. I'm dismayed that the UK has allowed this kind of filtering scheme to be deployed with hardly a whimper of protest, at least as far as I heard over here. That success has emboldened censors in numerous western countries who want to deploy similar systems. I have the impression that the filter list that is running in the UK is fairly carefully managed such that most Internet users don't know its there. The only controversy that I've heard of was over that Scorpions album, which is obviously an edge case. The Australian filter list was leaked, and reports seem to indicate that it contains material that should not have been listed. Making matters worse, the Australian government has tried to censor the list.
I don't think goverments should filter the internet. If they insist, there is something to be said for doing it transparently.
The three men convicted in the United Kingdom on Monday of a plot to bomb several transcontinental flights were prosecuted in part using crucial e-mail correspondences intercepted by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to Britain’s Channel 4.
Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a U.S. court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence.
It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas. If the former, it’s possible the interception was part of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program — a surveillance program aimed at intercepting foreign correspondence as it passed through domestic internet switches.
Its possible that these emails were obtained illegally, which is an interesting datapoint for the TSP. There is quite an argument in the attached thread.
Basically, Yahoo is a US entity. Intercepting communications between Pakistan and Yahoo involves a US party, even if the content of that communication is an email that someone in the UK is going to pick up from Yahoo later. Traditionally, a FISA warrant would be required for that. Under the TSP the NSA was picking this stuff up without a warrant. The change to FISA made in the last days of the Bush administration was intended to allow them to do that going forward.
The widespread opposition to a Presidential address to students, a priori, for partisan reasons, is a total disgrace. This is a new low for political polarization in this country. The outrage represents basic disrespect for our democratic institutions and is fundamentally unpatriotic.
You can disagree all you want with the policies, and you all know that I disagree vehemently with many of the policies of this administration as well as the previous administration. But if you don't respect the institution of the Presidency and right of the elected President to serve that roll, you invite disdain for democracy on the whole and for our system of government on the whole. I might understand that if it was coming from the political margins, but its an entirely different thing when it comes from a vastly powerful political coalition that can and does win elections and make policy. In those shoes it is an invitation to political collapse.
What message are you sending to children who don't understand your politics when you tell them you don't want them to hear an address from the President?
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been "a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."
Apparently, that innocent person's name is Cameron Todd Willingham.
Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”
Justice Scalia in 2009:
"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."
I think this is one of those moments when there is a clear division between right and wrong.
In 2003 I recommended an interesting web site:
Here you can see the last statements of people executed in Texas.
Sure enough, this site is still in operation, and today, Cameron Todd Willingham's Information Sheet and Last Statement are there, although the Statement is incomplete because the government omitted part of it "due to profanity."
No shit?
Click through for Noteworthy's post, and then through again for the article.
