You basically make cool retro or vintage looking pictures by taking a picture through the viewfinder of an old top-down viewfinder camera, like a Duaflex.

I really like these.

Flickr pool of photos taken through viewfinders of old cameras - Boing Boing

You should come hear my talk at Phreaknic. I'll cover all of this.

flynn23 wrote:
So is this just an end run on habeus corpus?

No. Habeus Corpus is an unrelated concept ... the notion that if the executive seizes a person they must explain their reasons and authority for doing so to an independent decision maker (the judiciary). U.S. Customs is not seizing people, just laptops. It might be more appropriate to ask if this is an end run around the 4th amendment...

Or is it a legal "grey zone" because we're dealing with border checkpoints and not terra firma?

Yes and no. Its not technically a "grey zone." The 4th amendment is said to apply at the border. However, the 4th amendment has two parts:

1. No unreasonable searches.
2. Warrants require probable cause.

The problem here is that it tells you what you need to get a warrant, but it doesn't tell you when a warrant is required. It has a loophole... It only requires that searches be reasonable, and reasonable means whatever people think it ought to.

The Supreme Court has decided that all border searches are reasonable by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border....

God, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Who is sitting in a meeting where this gets proposed and says "I think that's a good idea..."???

It doesn't happen that way. The water just keeps getting hotter until the frog starts to boil but when the frog complains the cook says "Why are you complaining now? The burner has been on for half an hour and you never said a thing! If it was OK for the burner to be on 10 minutes ago it must be OK for it to be on now! Shut up!"

In the 1790's Congress allowed customs to search shipping vessels if they had reason to suspect they contained contraban. Two months later the same Congress also passed the 4th amendment.

In the 1970's, the Supreme Court decided that the only way to reconcile these two decisions is to conclude that border searches don't require a warrant -- they are presumptively reasonable.

In 1985, during the drug war, the Supreme Court relied on that 1970's decision that all border searches are presumptively reasonable to declare that customs agents do not need a reason to perform a routine search (note that this has morphed somewhat from where we were in 1790). However, they also declared that non-routine searches still require reasonable suspicion.

In 2004, the Supreme Court relied on that 1985 decision to declare that the removal and disassembly of a gas tank from an automobile is a routine search and can be performed without any reasonable suspicion. The frogs were a bit warm at this point.

In the spring of 2008 the 9th circuit court of appeals ruled that searches of the content of laptop computers are routine searches and can be performed without any reasonable suspicion.

The frogs are now complaining that it is quite hot in here. Customs is arguing that there has been no policy change in regard to routine searches and that these court opinions just confirm prior policy. What this argument ignores is that technology has changed. People are now bring far more information across the border on a more frequent basis than they were before, and that changes the stakes. More at Phreaknic.

RE: New bill would tighten rules for DHS border laptop searches

Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG, said the Fed and the Treasury were doing too little, too late, to stave off disaster.

"Unless there is a very rapid change of mind, depression - with all its horrors and consequences - will be inevitable..." he said.

"We fear that a virtual nationalisation of the financial system will now be necessary," he said....

Albert Edwards, global strategist at Société Générale, said Washington's serial bail-outs are the inevitable result of the credit bubble of preceding years. "This was all baked in the cake long ago. What we have seen so far is just a dress rehearsal for the deep recession that is coming. America is going to be losing 500,000 jobs a months. That is when we will see interest rates go to zero. The deficit will be covered with printed money as it was in Japan. The endgame will be helicopters full of cash dropped by Ben Bernanke," he said.

Jesus

naked capitalism: The Great Unwind Has Begun

Satow interviews the above quoted former SEC director, and he spits out the blunt truth: The current excess leverage now unwinding was the result of a purposeful SEC exemption given to five firms.

You read that right -- the events of the past year are not a mere accident, but are the results of a conscious and willful SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1.

Instead, the 2004 exemption -- given only to 5 firms -- allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1.

Who were the five that received this special exemption? You won't be surprised to learn that they were Goldman, Merrill, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley. 

As Mr. Pickard points out that "The proof is in the pudding — three of the five broker-dealers have blown up."

The Big Picture | How SEC Regulatory Exemptions Helped Lead to Collapse

I know that suicide attacks occur elsewhere in the world; but there is something very British, very now, about the mentality of Ali, Sarwar and Hussain; indulged youth who nonetheless feel they have been denied the respec' they crave and then react with the petulance of the terminally adolescent moron. But who then fail to carry out their threats because they are too stupid and have not really, if they're honest, put the work in.

'Have We Ever Faced An Enemy More Stupid Than Muslim Terrorists?' by Rod Liddle, Spectator - RichardDawkins.net

Elonka says: Handy URL to use when trying to troubleshoot things, or to ask someone to tell me their IP so that I can help figure out a connection problem.

I use it all the time.

What Is My IP Address? - IP Address Lookup

Sir Tim and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium had looked at simple ways of branding websites - but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms was needed.

"I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways," he said. "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".

BBC NEWS | Berners-Lee wants to rate website trustworthiness

Customs and Border Patrol agents can grab your laptop, BlackBerry, or external hard drive without needing so much as a reason, but a new bill introduced last week to Congress would at least put some limits on how border searches could be done.

"I was deeply concerned to learn about the lack of protections individuals' have when their electronic equipment is randomly seized," said Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), who introduced the bill. "With the passage of the Border Search Accountability Act of 2008, Americans will be able to travel with more peace of mind knowing that their data will be further protected and that there are stringent accountability measures in place for safeguarding their personal information."

Note what her bill will not do—make searches more difficult.

This isn't what we really want, as it doesn't attempt to set any limits on searches. It does add more transparency to the process, and that is a good thing. It should be supported.

Sanchez's bill would bring more routine to the search process. The bill requires the government to draft additional rules regarding information security, the number of days a device can be retained, receipts that must be issued when devices are taken, ways to report abuses, and it requires the completion of both a privacy impact study and a civil liberties impact study. Travelers would also have the explicit right to watch as the search is conducted.

Sanchez also wants data about the searches, which would have to be turned over to Congress once per quarter. Specifically, she wants to know how many searches are being done, where they take place, and the race and nationality of those being searched.

The Department of Homeland Security actually issued search rules over the summer; while they were the first rules made public on the process, which had started to look quite ad-hoc, they still came in for criticism from groups like the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. ACTE, which doesn't like have executive laptops pinched whenever someone travels overseas, complained in early August that devices could basically be kept indefinitely, the data could be shared with foreign governments, and no data destruction procedures were spelled out.

This is unlikely to make it out of committee in any form before the end of the current congress. The situation is getting much needed attention though.

New bill would tighten rules for DHS border laptop searches

Fearing a financial crisis worldwide, the Federal Reserve reversed course on Tuesday and agreed to an $85 billion bailout that would give the government control of the troubled insurance giant American International Group.

There was a lot of hand wringing that the Fannie and Freddie takeovers were communist, but my perspective is that there is no point in complaining about it when the crisis is actually happening. If you were opposed to that you should have been fighting the guarantees years ago.

This, however, is communist. The U.S. Government now owns an insurance company. AIG was not built with the moral hazards that F&F represent. The tax payer ended up eating this because the finance industry refused, and the systemic financial cataclysm that a failure would have set off would have hurt people like you and me a hell of a lot more than it would have hurt the people who own the big banks.

So, if we're going commie, I say why go half way. Never has the idea of progressive taxation seemed more just. Its not my fault. Its your fault. I ain't paying for it and I support taxing the crap out of your golden parachutes in order to cover it. Don't forget that the taxpayers have a monopoly on the use of force.

At least, until the spectacularly risky bet the Feds made yesterday by allowing banks to invest depositor's money in the stock market comes home to roost and the whole fucking system collapses.

Fed’s $85 Billion Loan Rescues Insurer - NYTimes.com

One of the emergency measures implemented by the Fed was the suspension of the rules prohibiting banks from using deposits to fund their investment banking subsidiaries.

This was obviously done in order to free up enough capital at BofA to buy Merrill, warts and all. It presents some serious risks, as some of BofA's deposits (10% of America's cash) is now being invested in equities. More worrying is what other, less obvious deals are being quietly made under this temporary rule suspension. The risk is that a stock mark crash can now make depository institutions insolvent, and the FDIC is required to bail them out.

So, lets say this doesn't work. AIG fails, it becomes difficult for businesses and individuals who have perfect credit to obtain financing because its hard to hedge credit offers (which is what AIG does), so this causes further economic contraction, which the market attempts to price, overshooting, of course, in a panic, therefore drawing down the assets owned by Merrill and some other investment entities, who loose capital that they owe to depositors like BofA, who are subject to small bank runs because of media scrutiny, and declare bankruptcy, calling in the FDIC... If they bet more than the FDIC could cover it would get out of control fast.

You get the feeling that these guys are right on the edge.. The pedal is too the floor and they are pulling on the wheel as hard as they can. I don't know enough about finance to know how many more tricks they have in their bag, but I know enough to know that this is one that was never, ever supposed to be used.

naked capitalism: A Former Regulator on the Fed Allowing Deposits to Fund Investment Banking Operations