A Congressional Research Service report.

In the consolidated cases of Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States, decided June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 opinion that aliens designated as enemy combatants and detained at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus. The Court also found that § 7 of the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which limited judicial review of executive determinations of the petitioners’ enemy combatant status, did not provide an adequate habeas substitute and therefore acted as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ of habeas. The immediate impact of the Boumediene decision is that detainees at Guantanamo may petition a federal district court for habeas review of the circumstances of their detention. This report summarizes the Boumediene decision and analyzes several of its major implications for the U.S. detention of alien enemy combatants and legislation that limits detainees’ access to judicial review.

Boumediene v. Bush: Guantanamo Detainees’ Right to Habeas Corpus

Fifteen years ago, you couldn't even own a car in China.

Now everyone is desperate to buy one.

It's the stuff of salesman's dreams and an environmentalist's nightmare.

Carole Cadwalladr and renowned British photojournalist Martin Parr go to the Beijing car show to witness the birth of a nation of Jeremy Clarksons

From the archive:

This is a data-heavy presentation from two economists at CIBC World Markets. You'll have to make your own soundtrack. See how China dominates the growth in demand for natural resources. See how much is accomplished by Americans' purchase of hybrid vehicles, in the face of massive market growth in Russia and China. Watch how gasoline hits US$7/gallon by 2012. Watch ethanol peter out and energy capacity fall short. Watch the Case/Shiller HPI continue to plummet as delinquencies soar. And so much more!

Top gear, please, and step on it

Irina, a Moscow teenager with white-blond hair dressed in laddered tights and a black leather jacket, sits on a park bench in the city center with two girlfriends, drinking a bottle of beer and enjoying the warm summer afternoon.

The girls, sporting punky combinations of dyed hair, nose rings, and slightly sullen expressions, look like average teenagers in many parts of the world. But in Moscow, they are the target of a new government campaign to purge Russia's youth of immorality and sin. Irina, for one, is skeptical.

The plan that has Irina nervous is a package of bills and amendments, introduced in Russia's State Duma in June, aimed at "protecting children's morality." If some Duma deputies have their way, young Russians could soon find themselves in trouble for activities as seemingly innocent as carving pumpkins or listening to music.

Together with proposals to combat child alcoholism and pornography, the policy project outlines a raft of draconian measures such as a 10 p.m. curfew for all school-age children and a ban on tattoos and body-piercings.

Under the new measures, schools would be prohibited from celebrating Western holidays like Halloween and St. Valentine's Day, which are deemed inappropriate to "Russian culture." Toys in the shape of monsters or skeletons would be banned as "provoking aggression."

From the archive:

Looks like Warez has a new friend this year.

Rattle's protest:

When have I EVER stopped a rabbit from wearing glasses?!? Name me one time...

Russia Mulls Legislation To 'Save' Its Youth

In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America. Today it's ranked 48th.

In 1950, there were almost 900,000 people living inside the city limits. Today that same land is home to only 300,000. That's out of two and a half million people in the metro area.

In the 1990s, the metro population increased by 1 percent. The land consumed by that population went up fifty percent.

At any given time there are about 6,000 abandoned buildings in St. Louis. I say approximately because the old ones keep falling down and new ones keep taking their place. An entire industry has built up around the millions of red bricks that come from wrecked houses. They're stacked on pallets and shipped to other cities.

A hundred years ago, fifty, even 30 years ago, the city was full of life, the streets vibrant and bustling, the neighborhoods full of people and activity. But today you can walk around many of the streets in the old city and they're empty. Nobody's there. Four decades of urban decay have left the city of St. Louis, Missouri with some of America's most devastated urban landscapes.

Some people say the city is no longer dying; they say it's dead.

The Slow Death of a City Block: 1900 Montgomery Street, St. Louis

The truth, though it would not exactly set Americans free, would at least open a window to wider economic and political understanding. Readers should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might be if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent), and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3–4 percent range). We might ponder as well who profits from a low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage. Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?

Let me stipulate: the deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms. As we will see, the political blame for the slow, piecemeal distortion is bipartisan—both Democratic and Republican administrations had a hand in the abetting of political dishonesty, reckless debt, and a casino-like financial sector. To see how, we must revisit forty years of economic and statistical dissembling.

Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know

Oh, the suffering surfer!

For years, Chris Mauro took a 10-mile detour on his way to work each morning to check out the swells at his favorite surf break and plot the best location for his afterwork wave-riding.

But with gas now approaching $5 a gallon, Mauro recently cut out his daily ritual in favor of the savings.

He isn't alone.

The surging cost of oil has been a dose of reality for many surfers who have long thought of their sport, with all its sun-kissed lore, as a counterculture niche shielded from the pressures of mainstream America.

From the archive:

This is a data-heavy presentation from two economists at CIBC World Markets. You'll have to make your own soundtrack. See how China dominates the growth in demand for natural resources. See how much is accomplished by Americans' purchase of hybrid vehicles, in the face of massive market growth in Russia and China. Watch how gasoline hits US$7/gallon by 2012. Watch ethanol peter out and energy capacity fall short. Watch the Case/Shiller HPI continue to plummet as delinquencies soar. And so much more!

Costly gas crimps surfers' style, roils industry

We study two aspects of information semantics: (i) the collection of all relationships, (ii) tracking and spotting anomaly and change. The first is implemented by endowing all relevant information spaces with a Euclidean metric in a common projected space. The second is modelled by an induced ultrametric. A very general way to achieve a Euclidean embedding of different information spaces based on cross-tabulation counts (and from other input data formats) is provided by Correspondence Analysis. From there, the induced ultrametric that we are particularly interested in takes a sequential - e.g. temporal - ordering of the data into account. We employ such a perspective to look at narrative, "the flow of thought and the flow of language" (Chafe). In application to policy decision making, we show how we can focus analysis in a small number of dimensions.

The Correspondence Analysis Platform for Uncovering Deep Structure in Data and Information

Dmitri Krioukov (et. al.):

Several users of our AS relationship inference data (this http URL), released with cs/0604017, asked us why it contained AS relationship cycles, e.g., cases where AS A is a provider of AS B, B is a provider of C, and C is a provider of A, or other cycle types. Having been answering these questions in private communications, we have eventually decided to write down our answers here for future reference.

On Cycles in AS Relationships

We consider the problem of securing a multicast network against a wiretapper that can intercept the packets on a limited number of arbitrary network links of his choice. We assume that the network implements network coding techniques to simultaneously deliver all the packets available at the source to all the destinations. We show how this problem can be looked at as a network generalization of the Ozarow-Wyner Wiretap Channel of type II. In particular, we show that network security can be achieved by using the Ozarow-Wyner approach of coset coding at the source on top of the implemented network code. This way, we quickly and transparently recover some of the results available in the literature on secure network coding for wiretapped networks. We also derive new bounds on the required secure code alphabet size and an algorithm for code construction.

On Wiretap Networks

Phillip Hallam-Baker:

Internet crime keeps getting worse...but it doesn’t have to be that way. In this book, Internet security pioneer Phillip Hallam-Baker shows how we can make the Internet far friendlier for honest people–and far less friendly to criminals.

The dotCrime Manifesto begins with a revealing new look at the challenge of Internet crime–and a surprising look at today’s Internet criminals. You’ll discover why the Internet’s lack of accountability makes it so vulnerable, and how this can be fixed – technically, politically, and culturally.

Hallam-Baker introduces tactical, short-term measures for countering phishing, botnets, spam, and other forms of Internet crime. Even more important, he presents a comprehensive plan for implementing accountability-driven security infrastructure: a plan that draws on tools that are already available, and rapidly emerging standards and products. The result: a safer Internet that doesn’t sacrifice what people value most: power, ubiquity, simplicity, flexibility, or privacy.

PHB has a web site specifically for this book.

The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime