Although the United States has maintained complete and uninterrupted control of Guantanamo for over 100 years, the Government’s view is that the Constitution has no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed formal sovereignty in its 1903 lease with Cuba. The Nation’s
basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Habeas applies in Gitmo... The Military Commissions Act was unconstitutional because it did not provide an adequate process for detainees. This mostly means there will be more hearings to determine what sort of legal process is required. The right is likely to likely to blow their collective top on this. Scalia starts things off in his dissent:

[This decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed... The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.

In general these judges "respectfully dissent" as Roberts did...

The Volokh Conspiracy - BREAKING - Gov't Loses Boumediene 5-4:

Justice Scalia made two originalist claims about the application of the Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause to hearsay evidence in his opinion for the Court in Crawford v. Washington... This article argues that neither of these claims was historically sound.

The salient feature of Justice Scalia's originalist claim... is that he offered no actual historical evidence of any such distinction.

The article concludes by sketching out the salient differences between the accusatory criminal procedure that the Framers thought they had preserved in the Bill of Rights from the investigatory criminal procedure that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and argues that the discontinuity of constitutional doctrine is so pronounced that originalism cannot provide a valid approach for deciding contemporary constitutional criminal procedure issues.

See also this:

The distance between framing-era and contemporary doctrine and institutions is so great that originalism is not a feasible approach to constitutional interpretation.

And particularly this:

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

SSRN-The Fictional Character of Law-and-Order Originalism: A Case Study of the Distortions and Evasions of Framing-Era Arrest Doctrine in Atwater V. Lago Vista by Thomas Davies

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

I am embarrassed by whats going in Canada. The U.S. tolerates the expression of a lot of despicable views, and it is particularly frustrating to see the large cross section of conservatives who are vocally opposed to hate speech codes but completely silent or on the other side of other important first amendment issues, as it reveals their sympathy for ideas they claim that they reject. However, government regulation of this speech is a slippery slope that leads to all sorts of silly results such as the German ban on the Wolfenstein games and this trial in Canada, which clearly intends to squelch a political view. You can't stop people from being assholes. Censoring this sort of material doesn't make these opinions go away, and it removes the opportunity to confront them directly in open dialog. If these muslims wanted to make a counterpoint to this article they ought to do it through sound advocacy in the pages of Macleans rather than coersion in a court. Reliance on the later leads one to suspect that you can't win at the former.

Hate speech or free speech? What much of West bans is protected in U.S. - International Herald Tribune

David Brooks:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.

I don't agree with all of this but the main thrust of the argument is sound.

The Great Seduction by Debt

The Transportation Security Administration recently started using body scans on randomly chosen airline passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and New York's Kennedy airport.

Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport near Washington starts using a body scanner Friday.

"It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore-Washington International Airport...

The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers' faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender. "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back," Schear said.

"Some of this stuff seems a little crazy," Reardon said, "but in this day and age, you have to go along with it."

EXTREMELY low resolution images of what the screener sees are on the TSA's website, which doesn't even render properly in Firefox. One suspects that bigger images aren't offered because the public would be shocked by them. I've seen TSA checkpoint people intentionally selecting attractive women for "additional screening" before. I suspect that this will be problematic.

10 airports install body scanners - USATODAY.com

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

This has to be the largest act of government coerced censorship in United States history. Granted, many of these newsgroups are still available via web interfaces like Google Groups, but the precedent set here is worse than the result. It is inevitable that if allowed to stand other content and protocols will be added to this regime. It is worth noting that the ISPs weren't required to block all of these newsgroups, just filter them with a government hash list. A hash list that would have inevitably expanded to include other verboten content that the government recommends that communications services "voluntarily" censor. Its likely that is not a business these ISPs wish to be in.

More here and here.

I have a feeling that June 10th, 2008 may replace February 8th, 1996 as the most infamous day in the history of the Internet.

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

Acidus wrote:
Google's new Favicon pisses me off. I'm not sure why. I know this is irrational, but that doesn't make me dislike that lowercase "g" any less.

I strongly second this. For some reason I cannot associate a lower case purple cursive "g" with Google. The result is that I can't find my Google tabs easily anymore. I have to stop and pay attention to the tab bar to find the window I want. I'm sure this will pass as I associate the two concepts in my head, but generally speaking, Boo.

RE: Google's new Favicon

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has tapped Northrop Grumman to develop binoculars that will tap the subconscious mind. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System program, informally called "Luke's Binoculars," combines advanced optics with electro-encephalogram electrodes that can, DARPA believes, be used to alert the wearer to a threat before the conscious mind has processed the information.

Northrop To Develop Mind-Reading Binoculars | Danger Room from Wired.com

Princeton University and Boston University researchers have developed a silicon wafer that can isolate cancer cells by separating them out according to size.

I don't have access to full text articles at new scientist but this was an idea I discussed with nano many years ago on a long car trip: Placing a nanotech filter in the blood stream to clean out circulating cancer cells. I figure it ought to be possible to do the same thing with virii...

KurzweilAI.net: Bloodstream Cancer filter

Two of the world's biggest glassware makers, Libbey and Cardinal International, say orders of smaller beer glasses have risen over the past year. Restaurateurs "want more of a perceived value," says Mike Schuster, Libbey's marketing manager for glassware in the U.S. Glasses with a thicker bottom or a thicker shaft help create the perception. "You can increase the thickness of the bottom part but still retain the overall profile," he says.

Clearest proof yet we're in an economic contraction. The U.S. needs a pint law! Ah, the benefits of monarchy...

Beer sizes shinking - WSJ.com