Quote of the Day: Mr. Sodomsky [sic] Knowingly Exposed Himself

(((child pornography; expectations of privacy when you hand over your computer to a third party for maintenance, repair, or hardware installation: specifically, you have none; is the name "Sodomsky" a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy?)))

The Pennsylvania Superior Court states, in overturning a ruling on the admissibility of files discovered by a Circuit City tech in the process of installing a DVD burner in the defendant's PC:

Our result in this case is consistent with the weight of authority in this area. If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents...

This is plainly bullshit. As Ars Technica notes:

When you drop your PC off at Circuit City for a hardware upgrade (and you do use Circuit City for all your hardware upgrades, don't you?), you probably don't expect the techs to rummage around your hard drive, dredging up "questionable" files and showing them to law enforcement.

Okay, back up. What happened? In short, Sodomsky (o, to change that name!) left his PC at Circuit City for installation of a burner. The tech installed the hardware, then searched Sodomsky's computer for video files to use for testing the burner. He saw video file names that indicated pornography, and then, as AT puts it, "Richert clicked on one that had listed a male name and an age of 13 or 14 and found a video he believed to contain child pornography." He then called the police, who seized the computer and arrested Sodomsky when he came to pick up the laptop.

In the use of what seems to me an important (and telling) phrase, the Court observes that the tech was testing in a "commercially accepted manner," insisting further that "The employee testing the burner was free to select any video for testing purposes, as appellee had not restricted access to any files. Therefore, Mr. Richert did not engage in a fishing expedition in this case..." (emphasis added).

It could be added that you can burn any file to a DVD, not just movies, so using this logic, the tech was precisely free to search for any file, not just a video file, so he had in effect the run of the customer's computer. So, wait, is it possible that the court's decision is vitiated by its ignorance of basic technological aspects of the case? Declan McCullagh, in the C|Net article linked above, notes that the Court's decision refers to "codecs" as "Code X." Clearly, the court knows next to nothing about either burning DVDs or playing or encoding videos. The end result is a decision that says that computer store installation or repair techs have unfettered access to your computer, and whatever they find is admissible in court against you.

Unless . . . you tell them not to run around your computer for files? Even if this is commercially accepted practice, that by no means makes it either legally acceptable, or widely understood, and it strikes me as very odd for the Court to engage in this kind of reasoning. Why isn't the store required instead to tell you that that's what they'll do and give you an opportunity to establish limits within which they are allowed to work? Or, better still, why don't they have, using this case as an example, a standard process that includes a file on a flash drive, which they can insert in the USB [drive] port and burn straight from that drive to test the burner. No use or viewing of the customer's files is required, nor is any copying of files (beyond necessary drivers, user manuals, help files, etc.).

Finally, it's not at all clear what the rationale is for the tech's selection of a video to use for testing. I would argue that his selection of the particular video was itself a fishing expedition. Why does his spotting a file name that seems to indicate pornography give him the right to open that file? Well, it doesn't, unless you say there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, which position I think I have already established is based on specious, indeed pernicious, reasoning.

Let's think analogically: if I spot what appears to be meth lab equipment through the window of a neighbor's house, do I then have the right to sneak into their house to examine the equipment, then grab it to hand it to the cops if I think (rightly or wrongly) that it actually constitutes meth-manufacturing equipment? Surely not (although I might in that case call the cops and tell them I think my neighbors are making meth, but then we would need more evidence for a warrant than my thinking I saw equipment through the window). Let's go a step further and suppose that my neighbors have given me the key to their house so that I can let them in if they lock themselves out. Have they then given me the right to use those keys if I spot through the window what appears to me (ignorant bugger that I am, never having made meth) to be meth equipment? I don't think so.

The long and the short of it is this. First, there are holes everywhere in the Court's logic. Second, I can't believe I'm only seeing coverage of this right now in C|Net and Ars Technica. Third, um, don't be a stupid lUser when you take your computer to Circuit City: set up passwords and guest access and protect your files, since, let's face facts, it's a little bit like trusting the parking garage attendant with your keys. I mean, do we really think this is the first time this tech or some other has accidentally discovered porn on a customer's computer?

tags technorati : Privacy, Sodomsky, Civil Liberties

How Not to Get It

This would make me think they'd been taking lessons from the Bush administration, if it weren't so characteristic of them, already. Indeed, so much so that the Iraq War looks like it models itself on an Israeli policy. Anyway, looks like the Gaza rockets have finally crossed a line. Or something.

Israeli cabinet ministers on Wednesday voted unanimously to declare the Gaza Strip an “enemy entity” in order to shut off fuel and power to the 1.4m Palestinians in the impoverished enclave if rocket attacks continue.

Since June the territory where 40 per cent of Palestinians live has been ruled exclusively by Hamas and its borders have been open only for humanitarian aid.

So we thought it would be a good idea to make sure the humanitarian workers had more to do, which is sure to stop those rockets, since we're seeing that choking harder has slowed them down so much. Oh, wait,

Timed with the arrival in Israel of Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, the move by Ehud Olmert’s administration shows exasperation with continued Palestinian militant rocket fire against the Negev.

Yep, clamping down is clearly working for Israel in the Occupied Territories, just like it always has. Not.

Three dozen young soldiers were wounded last week when rockets struck their base, sparking a public outcry for retaliatory action.

Oh, no! Not soldiers! Only terrorists would fire at soldiers!

Gradual sanctions, imposed by Israel in stages if the rockets do not stop, would allow in only enough fuel to power electrical generators at Gaza hospitals. The borders would be opened only for essential food and medical supplies. Water supplies would continue flowing at present levels, however.

Lawyers also advised the cabinet that any disruption in electricity should be restricted, to avoid violating international law by inflicting collective punishment on the civilian population. More than half the Gazan population is under 15 years old.

Ahhhh, I knew I saw the hand of Alberto Gonzales; at least he's found new work! If less than half the Gazan population were under 15, it would be acceptable to starve them. As it is, it is only possible legally to make them really, really hungry. Even if they did vote for terrorists.

Despite Israeli air strikes and Israeli Defence Forces forays to root out the rocket launchers, which have killed a dozen people in seven years and terrified thousands of citizens in Sderot, in northern Israel, homemade rockets rain down almost daily on Israeli soil.

Almost daily attacks that kill an average of two people a year? Hasn't anyone in Hamas figured out that those are pretty inefficient numbers? Maybe the strategy is to keep the pressure on without, in fact, killing lots of people, but I don't know that you can target those rockets accurately enough to reliably aim not to kill or hurt people.

Tzahi Hanegbi, defence committee chairman, told Israel’s Army Radio there was no need to “pamper” Gazans with fuel and electricity, and that a new incursion into the strip was inevitable.

Yes, fuel and electricity are examples of those modern American luxuries, like private jets. I mean, it's not like they won't have water.

What? You got a problem?

tags technorati : Israel, Palestine, Terrorism, Hamas, Gaza, Politics

Greening Guantanamo, the Sheryl Crow Way

I guess someone was listening. This is an excellent example of how a really great idea from a rockstar that gets pooh-poohed in the mainstream media can nevertheless find new life:

For guards on the front line of the U.S. war on terrorism at Guantanamo, that often involves tedious chores such as counting out toilet paper rations.

"Noncompliant" prisoners who violate camp rules are allotted 30 squares a day because bigger wads of tissue can be moistened and dried to make crude papier-mache-type shanks for use as weapons to attack guards, said Army Staff Sgt. Jerry Rushing.

Ah, the tedium of prison guard life. They should just shut the prison down. Except that would probably embolden the enemy. Much better to have prison guards shanked by dried toilet paper. Now that's American ingenuity . . . from people who hate our freedom . . . to, I don't know, be ingenious or something.

Legacy of Stupidity

From the Economist's review of Legacy of Ashes:

The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner's view the CIA was lamentable at both—and most presidents must take a share of the blame.

The CIA failed to warn the White House of the first Soviet atom bomb (1949), the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950), anti-Soviet risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Cuba (1962), the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It overplayed Soviet military capacities in the 1950s, then underplayed them before overplaying them again in the 1970s.

The record of covert action is little better. In Japan, France and Italy the CIA sought to protect democracy by buying elections. It sponsored coups in Guatemala, Iran, Syria and Iraq, where a Baath Party leader boasted in 1963, “We came to power on an American train.” When an invasion of Cuba masterminded by the agency failed, it plotted to kill Fidel Castro. In ascending order of bloodshed, it took a hand in military coups in South Vietnam, Chile and Indonesia.

One reckons many another tale of woe figures into Weiner's assessment, but this is a really nice synopsis of key debacles. We might throw the SOA in there for good measure.

Was such skulduggery worth it? Did the extra security for the United States outweigh the immediate human cost, the frequently perverse geopolitical consequences and the moral damage to American ideals? Doubters repeatedly warned presidents that on balance the CIA's foreign buccaneering did more harm than good. Mr Weiner has dug out devastating official assessments of covert operations from the 60 years he covers suggesting that many were not worth it. The sceptics were not peaceniks or bleeding hearts but hard-headed advisers at high levels of government.

We're not talking just operational ineptitude. We're talking about seriously stupid decision-making. Stupid and, in many cases, evil.

What we really need is a good intelligence organization. Why is that so hard?

tags technorati : CIA Legacy of Ashes

Doublespeak in Action

I think George Orwell himself wrote Bush's encomium to the new law that lets the NSA eavesdrop, without obtaining a warrant, on any communication involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States."

"When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," Bush said. "And when these same legal tools also protect the civil liberties of Americans, then we can have the confidence to know that we can preserve our freedoms while making America safer."

"Civil liberties" here apparently does not include the Fourth Amendment, or the First, as far as I can tell. But it gets better. Bush is threatening to further protect and extend our freedoms:

The new law updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it will expire in six months unless Congress renews it. Bush wants deeper, permanent changes. "We must remember that our work is not done," Bush prodded. "This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law.

The "clash of civilizations" is turning into the squabble among totalitarian family members.

tags technorati : FISA, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Politics, Civil Liberties

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Love Those Dems

While all the "progressive" bloggers yuk it up in Chicago, both Dem-controlled houses of Congress pass legislation eviscerating the Fourth Amendment.

Let's give W his props. In his second term and facing two opposition-controlled houses, Bush was supposed to be legislatively impotent this year. Instead, he's got the Dems doing his dirty work for him. It would be easy, and perhaps satisfying, to decry the Dems turning their back on the people who voted them into office, but it seems to me more accurate, if somewhat more depressing, to acknowledge the simple fact that Dem success over the last near-twenty years has primarily arisen out of the Clinton-patented strategy of out-GOPping the GOP.

Worse, this latest legislation is just another step down the road Clinton-Gore first trod of extending police power and contracting individual rights. I don't know why we expect anything different from Democrats, now. Clinton was ideologically bankrupt, but tactically brilliant. Today's Dems lack his tactical skill (never mind charisma, or, frankly, intelligence), and have perhaps less ideological integrity than Clinton.

So, if Clinton was in many respects a smarter, prettier Republican, what are we to say of the Dems now running Congress?

tags technorati : Politics, Bloggers, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Clinton, Terrorism, Irony

 

Give Me Back My Star Chamber

Thank God for the new security bill passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. This legislation, approved by a razor-thin margin of 60-28, "would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas."

"Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said.

Excuses, excuses.

I'm writing an article on the Yankees. Every day I don't get to read all the major papers for free, I don't know what's going on with the Yankees. Of course I should have the New York papers, but is it too much to ask that I pay to read a bunch of irrelevant material?

On the other hand, the attitude also resembles that of our lazy-ass airport security, which can't be bothered to identify suspicious travel patterns, and so just makes everyone's lives miserable in a shotgun approach to security: if you take away everyone's everything, you're bound to take away the right guy's everything, too. This exemplifies the precision approach to fighting terrorism adopted by the Bush Administration.

Our senior friend at the White House continues:

"All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

Ahhhh, we need warrantless wiretap authority for the war in Iraq. I didn't even think of that one! I was thinking we could probably bust all those Islamist phone phreakers on pr0n charges, cause if they're rerouting calls all over God's green earth, you know they're anonymizing they're pr0n downloads, too. And Islamofascists love the child pr0n.

Anyway, all I'm saying is, it's a really good thing the Scientologists got penet.fi shut down. Otherwise, our lawyers would need warrantless wiretap authority so they could spend their precious time going after poor Julf.

Adding to the urgency for the administration is a secret ruling by a FISA judge earlier this year that declared surveillance of purely foreign communications that pass through a U.S. communications node illegal without a court-approved warrant -- a requirement that intelligence officials have described as unacceptably burdensome.

Right. So judges free of political pressure refuse to play along with Bush's bullshit "if you hate warrantless wiretapping, you hate America" approach to surveillance, so he gets into a political fight with Dems on the hill. This is a sick irony, that in the modern land of democratic freedoms it takes someone operating in secret to stand up for the Constitutional rights of Americans, rights the Declaration of Independence considers to be granted to us by our Creator (a creator Bush claims to believe in).

I don't believe in the creator, but I believe in the rights, and it runs right straight against my understanding of accountability that elected officials would be the ones to hand over those rights. It's the reverse of the Star Chamber. When the NSA comes to get me, I might actually request a secret trial.

tags technorati : Terrorism, Surveillance, National Security, Politics

Godwin's Law May Apply

In which case, we could just send all copies of the book straight to /dev/null.

The illustrious Jonah Goldberg is "boldly" publishing an expose on the fascist left. It turns out, in a politically risky and "startling new perspective," that the real Nazis are not US conservatives, but US liberals, including FDR, who, ironically, was trying to get the US into a war with Hitler long before it was politically possible. Perhaps that was just because there can, as it were, be only one. Surely this is a dangerous position for Goldberg to espouse publicly, which is why we should all admire his courage, and his, er, ingenuity.

The publisher's page on the book boasts:

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

Yes, that's exactly what American political discourse needs more of: cheers and jeers. Thanks to the editors of the National Review for their contribution to rational conversation, which these days takes the form of mutual name-calling. Apparently, an early working title for the book was, Nunh-Uh! You are!

Great, we're all Nazis. Can we move on, now?

tags technorati : Liberal Fascism Fascism Jonah Goldberg Nazis

To Hell with Checks and Balances

The Constitution is over-rated, anyway.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. He also raps jurists who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences.”

The text of the speech, scheduled for delivery at the American Enterprise Institute, was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. It outlines, in part, what qualities the Bush administration looks for when selecting candidates for the federal bench.

“We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments,” Gonzales says in the prepared speech. “That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

Let me see if I've got this straight. The Attorney General wants to make sure that the President is looking for the right qualities in federal judges, by which he means, deference to the executive in matters of national security. The trick here, it seems to me, is that it is not the job of federal judges "to know what is in the national security interests of our country;" it is the job of federal judges to know what is and isn't consistent with the Constitution of the US. This is like saying that we won't hire political science faculty at a college who don't "know enough about biology" to know that the bio department should be running the school.

Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, has in the past warned about judges who inject their personal beliefs in cases. But his prepared remarks Wednesday mark his sharpest words over concerns about the federal judiciary — the third, and equal, branch of government.

Judges who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences, they actually reduce the credibility and authority of the judiciary,” Gonzales says. “In so doing, they undermine the rule of law that strengthens our democracy.”

Isn't it ironic? Apparently, public political attacks on federal judges do nothing to undermine the independence of the judiciary ("the third, and equal, branch of government"), and appointing judges based on their willingness to defer to an imperial presidency does not "undermine the rule of law that strengthens our democracy."

And war is peace, too, by the way. Viva Baghdad!