First it was the Australians who wanted to use
my picture of the Frankfurt airport
in some kind of German course materials they were developing.
Now, a geology professor in Georgia (the U.S. state, not the country) writes:
If you ever wondered why you bothered to put a picture of a recycling bin in Berlin on the Web, let me say I'm grateful. I'm putting together a lecture on environmentally sensitive lifestyles in Europe, and I have several pictures of my own for that purpose. However, I realized I needed a picture of one of those train-station-style recycling bins. You saved me, and your picture (with attribution) will appear in my lecture tomorrow.
Here's a funny problem: suppose you sometimes use IRC in English and sometimes in Portuguese. Now you ask where you should eat and somebody says something like "no Herbivore".
Is this person suggesting eating at Herbivore, or suggesting not eating at Herbivore?
The Supreme Court granted certiorari today in MGM v. Grokster. I will attend the oral argument in March.
One of the best things I've read about evolution and the second law of thermodynamics is an essay called "Thermodynamics and Evolution" by John W. Patterson in Scientists Confront Creationism, edited by Laurie R. Godfrey.
Briefly, a prominent creationist named Henry Morris argued that the second law of thermodynamics means that evolution is impossible. (Patterson shows that Morris did not actually come up with this argument; among other things, R. E. D. Clark and E. H. Betts anticipated the argument. But, Patterson notes, Morris made the argument popular in a book called The Genesis Flood and in his subsequent writing.)
Patterson offers useful analogies that highlight the distinction between local and global increases in entropy. The second law requires that global entropy increases as a result of any thermodynamic process, but not that the entropy of any particular object or system increase. In fact, common processes like metabolism do produce decreases of entropy in some places (inside the body) while producing increases of entropy elsewhere (like in the body's waste products and in the waste heat the body releases into the environment). Patterson cites a discussion from a 1978 textbook by Ira N. Levine in support of this description of what the body does; Levine specifically attacks the notion that "life processes violate the second law", which Patterson thinks is a necessary (if inconvenient) consequence of creationist reasoning about the second law.
One example Patterson does not use is a computer. Anyone who has been in the market for a computer power supply, or who has used a recent laptop, will be aware that modern computers consume a lot of power and generate a lot of waste heat. (They also generate thermal noise and a great deal of waste electromagnetic radiation -- not all of which is quite as disordered as we might wish, given that sometimes useful information about the internal state of the computer or the computer's display can be recovered from it!)
One reason that computers do consume so much power and generate so much waste heat is precisely that they are constantly producing extremely low entropy within their internal circuitry. The state of the computer's processing circuits is highly ordered and remains so over a long period of time even as external inputs are applied to them. (There are actually some rules about how much power must be consumed -- as a matter of physical necessity -- in order to perform certain computations accurately. These rules are derived in the thermodynamics of computation, something I don't understand very well, but a field that's been developed very extensively since the 1970s. Actual computers consume a lot more power than they theoretically would need to, but actual engines are less efficient than an ideal heat engine, too, so it's no surprise that we can't build machines at the ideal of thermodynamic efficiency.)
But a computer is an increasingly familiar machine that generates a huge amount of entropy immediately outside itself (at its exhaust vents) in the process of producing an extremely low entropy within itself. So is a metabolizing organism -- an example Patterson does present. Many people using recent computers are also aware that computers behave erratically when their heat sinks or other cooling systems fail; in that case, they can't move their waste heat outside to dissipate it into the environment, and indeed, their internal entropy increases beyond appropriate engineering tolerances, and they begin to make errors. It is also true that an organism that can't dissipate waste heat effectively is likely to suffer illness as a result of an unreasonably high internal temperature. We need to rely on the outside environment as a kind of enormous heat sink into which we constantly dump entropy. If we couldn't do that, we would die.
Once we have done this, other organisms -- using an external energy source and producing their own waste products -- organize some of our waste products into a useful form again. As lots of people know, this activity couldn't continue without an immense and constant energy input from the sun. Within the sun's power, individual organisms couldn't get the energy they need to keep organizing themselves and to keep disorder out. (I realize that the thermodynamics here are more complicated than what I have described.)
One oddity is that Henry Morris seems to recognize the concept that an open thermodynamic system may experience a decrease in entropy -- but he introduces a spurious requirement that the system "must also contain a 'program' to direct" that decrease. Many people answer Morris by talking about the difference between closed and open systems, but Morris seems to try to add an additional criterion of the "program".
In the case of the computer, for instance, the "program" must consist in the layout of the circuitry, for presumably applying wall current directly to any random circuit has a decent chance of increasing its entropy. And in the case of the body, the "program" must consist in those structures that enable metabolic processes to take place.
Since Patterson does not address Morris's concept of a "program", some people may conclude that Patterson has not actually rebutted Morris. After all, Patterson stresses the open system/closed system distinction, but Frank Steiger notes that Morris -- at least in his The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth -- has added a "program" criterion. But as Steiger observes, thermodynamics does not actually contain such a criterion, and it is definitely not a part of the second law, which limits itself to a conclusion about the total entropy in the universe or in some other closed system.
If there were such a thing as Morris's "program" principle, it would have to come from somewhere other than the second law of thermodynamics. Patterson, for example, describes a machine called a hydraulic ram pump, which "can get low-lying water to pump part o itself uphill" -- an example of "an uphill or backward process [that] can spontaneously occur in nature by being [...] coupled to a more dominant downhill process [in such a way that] the downhill process can actually drive the other process 'backward' or in the so-called uphill direction". This means that, in the presence of a hydraulic ram with no external power source, a portion of a stream of water flowing downhill can provide the means of making another portion of the stream flow uphill. Presumably, if Morris tried to answer this, he would argue that the hydraulic ram is an instance of a "program" and that the hydraulic ram itself could not arise by chance, which is to say spontaneously.
Steiger calls that "misleading" and "arbitrar[y]" because many systems do exhibit behavior that is analogous to the behavior of the hydraulic ram. (Steiger doesn't actually discuss the hydraulic ram example; instead, he uses an example shared with Patterson: the formation of extraordinarily highly ordered snowflakes spontaneously in the atmosphere. It's Morris's program criterion that Steiger sees as "misleading" and "arbitrar[y]" because it isn't actually a principle of physics but simply a way of speaking that can easily lead to incorrect intuitions about which processes are actually possible.)
Patterson's discussion of coupling one process to another -- as in the case of the hydraulic ram -- is extremely illuminating. It reminds me of a remarkable quotation from Tommaso Toffoli, which is given in several different forms.
In a sense, nature has been continually computing the "next state" of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do -- and, actually, all we can do -- is "hitch a ride" on this huge, ongoing Great Computation.
or
We never perform a computation ourselves, we just hitch a ride on the great Computation that is going on already.
In a similar sense, we might say that, in order to do anything at all, we just hitch a ride on the entropy flows that are already going on around us; we couple things we care about to them, so that the mighty flow of increasing entropy will momentarily help decrease the entropy within us and ours.
You can read the MGM v. Grokster certiorari order in the Supreme Court's order list for Friday, December 10. It's only one sentence, but what a sentence.
So, for the first time, an EFF case is going to the Supreme Court. I could also say that, for the first time, a case I've worked on is going to the Supreme Court.
Some people asked me what "certiorari" means. It is the passive infinitive of the Latin verb certioro, certiorare. (I had wrongly believed that the verb was deponent until I looked it up in Lewis and Short just now.) Certioro means "to inform, apprise, show", according to Lewis and Short, which means that "certiorari" means "to be informed, to be apprised, to have shown to one". Some people suggest it means "to learn more", which seems like a reasonable paraphrase.
Although there are many kinds of writs that the U.S. Supreme Court can issue, an appeal that is not "as of right" (that is, an appeal that the Court has discretion to decide whether to accept) is now normally taken by asking the Court to issue a writ of certiorari. (There are infrequent appeals as of right to the Supreme Court; one example is when Congress specifically creates an expedited review process for a law such as the Communications Decency Act or the Children's Internet Protection Act. This is why Supreme Court decisions about those laws show "On Appeal from" some lower court in the caption, instead of the much more typical "On Writ of Certiorari to" some lower court. In the past, for reasons I don't understand, it was much more common to see "On Writ of Error" in discretionary reviews.)
Taking "certiorari" as "to learn more", asking the Court for a writ of certiorari means asking the Court to choose to learn more about a particular case. And so, when the Court chooses to hear a discretionary appeal, it will issue a writ of certiorari to the lower court that originally made the decision under review. That writ essentially asks the lower court to send the Supreme Court more information about the history of the case and the decision, so that the Court may use that information to decide whether or not the lower court got it right. If the Supreme Court denies an appeal -- denies certiorari -- it is effectively saying that it does not care to learn more about that particular case at that time.
So granting certiorari in MGM v. Grokster essentially means that the Supreme Court is curious about that case and wants to learn more about it. By convention, that curiosity extends to deciding whether the lower court (in this case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) decided the case correctly. In very unusual situations, the Supreme Court does not follow that convention; it begins to learn more about a case and then decides the case is not actually interesting or important enough. In that case, the writ of certiorari will be dismissed and the Supreme Court will not decide the case after all. You can find examples of this by doing a Google search for the magic phrase "the writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted". Sometimes the Court will say why certiorari was improvidently granted, and other times it's a complete mystery. One case where the writ of certiorari was dismissed late in the game (after argument) was Kasky v. Nike, the case about whether Nike could be prosecuted for false advertising after it made claims that its labor practices were good when apparently they were actually bad.
Now maybe someone is curious about what a deponent verb is. A deponent verb is a verb that is "passive in form, but active in meaning"; etymologically, it has "dropped" or "lost" or "given up" its active forms. This probably doesn't make any sense for people who don't know an inflected language. Latin has a number of verbs like this, and until today, I had wrongly thought that "certiorari" was one of them.
By the way, "certioro" is closely related to "certus", which is related to the English word "certain", or, maybe more usefully, "ascertain". It might be based to say that the Supreme Court chooses what kinds of things it is going to ascertain.
Eugene Volokh, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time this past week, has written a huge article on "Crime-Facilitating Speech". It's characteristically comprehensive, full of fascinating examples and discussions of real cases, and right in the middle of an area of huge interest to me. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet.
One area where first amendment law has run into difficulty -- and I bear in mind that some people have argued that we can never hope to resolve these difficulties -- is when speech can be useful to people committing some sort of crime. Volokh gives many dozens of examples. That speech is then a magnet for prospective regulation, especially when regulators believe it would be cheaper or easier to suppress the speech than to go after the crime it might facilitate, or when someone believes the crime is especially troubling. I note that, for example, Dean Marks and Bruce Turnbull made explicit their argument for censoring programmers in their infamous 1999 article on how they hoped to use the DMCA on the grounds that it was too expensive to pursue people who might abuse programmers' speech but relatively cheap to censor the programmers. Because there aren't a lot of programmers, you know, and other people are wholly in thrall to their leet skillz in order to be able to do stuff. Here's hoping that changes and that you take personal responsibility for helping undermine the premises Marks and Turnbull employ. But I digress.
One of the interesting parts parts of Volokh's paper is his discussion of the value of crime-facilitating speech. He describes various reasons why crime-facilitating speech might be useful to someone other than a criminal who wants to use it to help commit a crime. One of his examples is as part of an argument about what is possible -- and hence about policy or resource allocation. For example, Volokh mentions that information about how to make weapons might serve an argument that it is expensive or futile to try to suppress those weapons; the more specific the information, the greater the benefit to the argument may be. He gives a related example about information on marijuana cultivation -- to the extent that people learn that it is easy to cultivate marijuana, they may be less likely to believe that laws against marijuana can be enforced easily, and they might conclude that those laws are not such a good idea.
This is particularly interesting to me because I'm about to publish some information about aviation security -- arguably "crime-facilitating" information within the meaning of Volokh's definition -- in the service of an argument that current U.S. aviation security measures are both ineffective and harmful. And even as I think about aviation security, I remember dozens of casual conversations with friends where we started to speculate about just how ineffective airlines' and TSA's screening procedures are and just how easy it would be to defeat or undermine those. In my experience, whenever people start to talk about this, they invariably come up with half a dozen ways of concealing or improvising weapons that would very likely evade the screening process. This can be an interesting thought experiment, but it could also, especially if those ways began to be more widely publicized, form a part of a political argument.
There are at least three kinds of arguments that could benefit from publicizing details of, say, ways of improvising weapons that could evade TSA screening procedures. One argument is that TSA's screening procedures are inherently incapable of stopping attackers and could never reasonably be capable of doing so. Therefore, TSA's budget, power, or influence should be reduced, because TSA's current resources are being wasted. Another argument is that, because many attacks are currently possible and might conceivably be deterred by better screening, TSA's budget, power, or influence should be expanded to allow it to research or deploy new, more effective screening procedures that would make it significantly harder for people to conceal or improvise weapons.
The third argument is that TSA's screening procedures or rules about prohibited items are misdirected because they prohibit relatively harmless items while permitting relatively dangerous items. Therefore, the rules are irrational and should be significantly revamped. Under this argument, one might maintain that there are some screening procedures that could be useful, but they are significantly different from the current screening procedures. (Probably this argument implies that passengers ought to be permitted to carry items such as pocket knives, which were permitted in the past, on the grounds that weapons more dangerous than pocket knives can be improvised or manufactured from other things that are already permitted. However, this third argument does not imply that screening should be abolished or that every kind of item should be permitted. The argument seems to involve two assumptions: first, that every item has a degree of threat or danger associated with it; second, that it is inappropriate to forbid some item while permitting some other item that is more dangerous. Some people would probably agree with these assumptions, while other people would not, because they think about threats to aviation security differently -- perhaps believing that many potential attackers are not especially skilled or motivated.)
Despite Volokh observation that crime-facilitating speech can have these kinds of benefits (and to me, because I think so much of current aviation security is both ineffective and harmful, the potential benefits seem pretty significant), it's probably true that publishing lots of details about improvising weapons would make lots of people angry, and might make law enforcement concerned. Some of that anger might be a result of people seeking peace of mind instead of security (in the sense of an actually reduced likelihood of successful attacks -- think of Bruce Schneier's suggestion that much security, and especially much aviation security, is actually "security theater"). But some of that concern might be justified if it's really true that a lot of prospective attackers are not very skilled or motivated. Under that theory, maybe there are things that a moderately clever amateur could think up in a few minutes, but that some potential terrorist or enraged passenger would not have thought of but for the presence of lots of detailed articles about how to attack airline passengers. Schneier has, I think, mentioned glass and ceramic knives (they figure prominently in the plot of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash), and they could lead to an interesting debate: they don't set off metal detectors, they are sharper than metal knives, but few people know about them, few people own them, and few people carry them around regularly -- whereas many people own and regularly carry metal pocket knives. So ceramic knives and glass knives, as weapons, are something someone would have to obtain deliberately and in advance, whereas metal knives, as weapons, are something that might be widespread for casual reasons. Perhaps someone would say that this makes an important difference.
Volokh's paper goes far beyond these questions, and I think it's a fertile work that will prove important and influential. One thing I think it doesn't address in detail is the prior conceptual question of the problem of defining what kind of things are or can be crimes. For example, sometimes some kind of communicative activity is defined as a crime in itself (as opposed to merely facilitating some other crime, which is the situation Volokh's paper focuses on). Defamation, threats, and obscenity are examples (as is copyright infringement); in an earlier era, "seditious libel" was an example, and the Supreme Court has allowed a narrow but nonempty scope for viewing some kinds of seditious advocacy as crimes even today. Sometimes people make up entirely new categories of speech crime which were not understood as crimes by tradition -- circumvention device trafficking is our newest unhappy example. Sometimes people (including the Supreme Court) make a convenient pretense that certain things are "not speech" (like obscenity); in other cases they say that "nonspeech elements" of some expressive activity are being punished. As many people have recognized, there is a serious difficulty in the apparently logical distinction between speech and nonspeech elements -- say, in a rule like the O'Brien rule. If you make up a new crime, there is nothing in principle to stop you from banning any given speech by saying that you are merely punishing the "nonspeech elements" involved in the utterance of that speech so far as they run afoul of your entirely new kind of crime.
Some people feel that there is a coherent doctrine in O'Brien and other cases that deals with these questions by examining various things at various layers of regulation. I don't ind this very persuasive; I don't think U.S. free speech law is particularly coherent or particularly able to prevent new kinds of threats to speech or to explain exactly why existing speech restrictions are appropriate. And some people, like Stanley Fish, say that it is totally impossible to have any kind of theory that would actually be able to do that. I think I have gone on long enough that I won't try to summarize Fish's argument here. But it has some real power. Partly it relates to saying that the question of what things are expression and what things are not is an arbitrary political question, and that every expressive act has consequences for which one might conceivably hold someone responsible.
I think of myself as a free speech absolutist, but I have to admit that at present I don't know exactly what that might mean. Because there is a real problem about how we might say that it is ever possible to commit a crime solely by using words or another communications medium without also opening the door to the possibility of the political creation of new, additional categories of speech crime. I think Fish says that it is not possible.
One reason that I think that Eugene Volokh is a great teacher is that merely talking with him for a few minutes (totally apart from reading his papers!) is enough to rekindle one's sense that apparently simple free expression concepts are much more complicated that one might have suspected.
I went with Anirvan and friends to the
PowerPoint to the People competition at UC Berkeley on Wednesday. It was a pretty good time. This was a project, inspired partly by things like Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address PowerPoint presentation, in which artists competed to use PowerPoint in original, unusual, or entertaining ways.
Here's Charlie's discussion and the Wired News coverage of the event. The Wired News piece has a good discussion of the limitations of the competition entries, but it contains a particularly egregious error:
In Wednesday night's first piece, artists Greg Niemeyer and Monica Lam, with their piece "Single Origin" Outsourcing, lampooned what could have been a buttoned-down investment seminar or sales pitch by mixing Greek translations of The Lord's Prayer with carefully done slides that, on first glance, could well have been taken for genuine.
"Greek translations of The Lord's Prayer"? Um... Matthew 6:9-13, anybody?
This is exactly the same error that my high school alumni magazine made when it wrote about people singing "the Northfield Benediction, translated into Hebrew". (The Northfield Benediction is a musical setting by Lucy R. Meyer, a 19th-century alumna of my school, of the text "The Lord bless thee and keep thee, / The Lord make his face shine upon thee, / And be gracious unto thee, / The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, / And give thee peace.") The only trouble is that the Northfield Benediction is the King James Version's translation of Numbers 6:24-6, which was, of course, originally written in Hebrew, and which has been a part of Jewish liturgy for thousands of years. (It's called the birkat Kohanim or Priestly Blessing.)
Jewish prayers "translated into Hebrew"? Christian prayers in "Greek translation"? "And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"
... as David Byrne said even before he discovered PowerPoint.
Speaking of the Lord's Prayer, I think it was Nick who pointed out to me that it may be better to interpret the instruction at the beginning as "pray like this" -- in a simple, direct, informal way -- rather than "pray this prayer". The Greek is "outôs".
Nick is a very font of interesting and sometimes counterintuitive information about Christianity.
John Young has taken an abiding interest in the World Trade Center site, and he most recently notes:
Ruins are what's missing at WTC, and visitors continue to lament their lack, and express shock that there's nothing to see there except the usual banalities of development, kitschly decorated and celebrated.
This is a harsher version of my own observations, but it rings true for me.
John has added to his observations some of his journalistic photography, contrasting the appearance of the World Trade Center site immediately after the September 11 attack with its appearance today.
His and my references to memorials of the Holocaust makes me think of Paul Treanor's article about memorials. I bet Treanor would be unhappy with John Young's piece on the theory that it might imply that a sufficent number of catastrophes in New York would make the whole city permanently unfit for habitation solely because of the resulting moral imperative to turn the city into a monument park.
In case anybody wanted to get me a super-fancy Chanukah present, Michael Thompson Books has a first edition of Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values in his latest catalogue (list 77).
(See the Wikipedia entry on Arrow's Theorem if you're not already familiar with it.)
Actually, Michael Thompson catalogues are always full of things I would love to have. For example, the same catalogue has a first edition of William Shockley's Electronics and Holes in Semiconductors.
NewsBruiser lets me keep drafts of posts, but of course it doesn't force me ever to finish them and post them. I'm on the verge of breaking 100 unpublished draft articles. I don't know exactly what will motivate me to go back and finish them, and some of them are no longer timely -- for example, some pieces about the same-sex marriages in San Francisco and something about NMH's decision to close the Northfield campus. So over time what you see here is only a fraction of what I make at least a minimal attempt to write here.
If you haven't read it, please start by reading John Perry Barlow's account of the history of People v. John Perry Barlow, because I don't want to tell the whole story that gave rise to that case here. You would do much better to start off with Barlow's own account, not least because of its account of how John Gilmore bailed him out of jail. (You might also want to see Barlow's collection of legal documents, some of which are alluded to below.)
On Wednesday I went to Superior Court for the hearing on John Perry's motion to suppress. The defense claimed that the search at the airport in 2003 was not "reasonable" and therefore that evidence obtained from it should not be admitted. The Superior Court of California, County of San Mateo, is accustomed to dealing with cases that arose at the San Francisco Airport, but it's not particularly used to constitutional challenges to aviation screening procedures, nor to having multiple camera crews turn out for a single pre-trial evidentiary hearing in a misdemeanor drug possession case.
This hearing marks the moment that I have managed to attend proceedings in all three levels of both the Federal and California judicial systems (among various others, Eldred v. Ashcroft in the U.S. Supreme Court, MGM v. Grokster in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Online Policy Group v. Diebold in the Northern District of California, DVD CCA v. Bunner on the Supreme Court of California and in the California Court of Appeal, and now People v. Barlow in the Superior Court of California). Some time I may have to prepare a more complete chart of what courts I've visited.
In the Superior Court, at least at the pre-trial stage, there is a rotation of judges with the result that multiple judges may hear and rule on various aspects of the case at successive hearings. The judge who was assigned to People v. Barlow on Wednesday had never heard of the case before noon that day; he came around in the rotation and therefore he was responsible for that particular hearing a mere two hours after he first laid eyes on the case file.
The hearing started off with a discussion of what the hearing would be about. The judge wanted to know if the parties were prepared to argue about the substance of the actual motion to suppress (whether the airport search was illegal or not), or whether they were still waiting for other threshold issues. At this stage, we heard a lot of discussion about the presence of an attorney for the Federal government, who was there to try to make sure that nobody said anything in court about how aviation security procedures actually work. (Much more on this below.) The Federal government had actually previously tried to intervene in the case to persuade the judge not to allow evidence about screening procedures to be obtained by Barlow's attorney -- much less introduced. The judge briefly discussed this question (he had only seen a brief notation about it in the file, and hadn't actually heard arguments about it) and said that he was prepared to hear the substantive argument, and to allow the Federal government lawyer to speak up if she thought there was a problem. This turned out to be a problem for Barlow, in my opinion, but the parties agreed to go ahead under these conditions.
Long before the hearing, Barlow's attorney had sent various subpoenas to everyone involved with Barlow's arrest -- including the screener who searched his bag and the police officer who arrested him, and their employers. Both of those people would end up being called as witnesses on Wednesday, but the court was told that they had generally all refused to respond to most of the subpoenas on the grounds that information about how screening in airport works is secret property of the Federal government. They therefore said that Barlow had to ask the Federal government if he wanted to know any of that information. In principle, Barlow's attorney could have fought this; it's hard to say that this judge would have been enthusiastic about ordering that information turned over, but the refusal definitely turned out to have been a sign of things to come.
At the hearing, and in its previous attempt to get the court to forbid Barlow's attorney from obtaining various kinds of evidence, the government made an immense number of references to something called sensitive security information, or SSI. (No relation to server-side includes or supplemental security income.) The SSI system is a modern legal oddity which exists in some sense parallel to, but apart from, the system of classified information. SSI is not (necessarily) classified, but it is, in the government's view, subject to restrictions that I think are in many ways more restrictive than the restrictions on classified information. Google suggests Congressional Research Service article on SSI as a good source of legal information here. Briefly, the Federal agencies involved with regulating transportation argue that they are entitled by statute and regulation to designate an enormous number of facts in any way related to transportation security as "sensitive security information" and then to prevent anybody within the system from disclosing it under the Freedom of Information Act, or even, remarkably, in response to a subpoena.
In the course of Barlow's hearing, we certainly learned that the government is still sticking to this view: in principle, nobody who works in aviation security is really supposed to say anything much at all about it, even under subpoena.
Another case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, has gotten into this particular thicket much deeper than People v. Barlow. Typically, people get to challenge government actions on various grounds (for example, that they are arbitrary or that they violate some constitutional right). However, if the policies implementing some government action are designated as "sensitive security information", it can be amazingly difficult to get into court challenging them. One practical result of this is an immense expansion of the government's power, since it's actually relatively common for courts to overturn actions of the executive branch -- when they know what those actions are! See also EPIC's brief about this.
So the People first called the screener (Sandra Ramos) who actually performed the search of Barlow's bag, and she described what she had done. On cross-examination, Barlow's attorney started to ask her a large number of questions about her training and the procedures she followed. The judge wouldn't allow a single one of these questions. They were all shot down in a flurry of relevance objections by the People and privilege objections by the United States. (In my recollection, the judge did not actually grant a single one of the dozens of privilege objections raised by the United States, but he would always either grant the accompanying relevance objection or else make his own sua sponte relevance objection and then grant it. Thus, in my recollection, he completely avoided ruling on whether a privilege against disclosure of this information actually existed, which irritated me a lot because I was eager to see a court rule that the Federal government cannot actually prevent people from introducing evidence about what baggage screeners do in cases about whether what they do is constitutional. As I understood the judge's rulings, I had no such luck all day. Other people believe that the judge did grant several privilege objections, indicating he believed that the Federal government had a legal basis for keeping this evidence out of court, so perhaps we will check the transcript.)
But here's the thing. The Federal government lawyer sat right behind the People's lawyer and objected every single time that the defense asked anything about screeners' training or procedures, or about statistics, history, trends, equipment, techniques, or anything substantive about the roles of different law enforcement agencies. And the judge essentially always granted the objections on "relevance" even when they were made on "privilege". For example, the defense asked things like whether x-ray machines beep and whether they have two-dimensional displays, and the United States objected. The United States does not want you to know whether x-ray machines beep, or whether they have two-dimensional displays.
Intermittently, I found this hilarious, because much of the alleged "SSI" could be discovered immediately by a passenger or a journalist. (I am still working on a piece that will describe vulnerabilities in vastly more detail than almost all of the information the United States objected to at the People v. Barlow hearing. I intend to describe not only the security procedures used by specific airports and airlines, but a good deal of detail about how they can be circumvented, in the hope of showing that many of these measures cause privacy harm for no benefit. All of those descriptions derive solely from my experiences as a passenger on a single recent commercial aviation trip. That does not prove that the government is legally wrong to say that people within the system are forbidden to talk about equivalent things, but it suggests that there's not much true security benefit at stake in forbidding them.) The security culture is reflexive, or, one might say, knee-jerk -- the Feds are totally dedicated to idea that it is never appropriate to permit anyone within the system to disclose SSI to the public. It would be bad for national security, the theory goes, if screeners could tell people whether x-ray machines beep. Never mind that Federal law enforcement agencies themselves publish detailed information about how to conceal weapons to carry them aboard aircraft, what various kinds of concealed weapons look like under x-ray, which ones appear more suspicious than others, and where you can buy them!
Many of the knives in this collection were commercially purchased and typically can be bought for less than $20. Some of these knives are common items found in most homes and offices. You will notice also that some are made of a plastic material, making them less likely to be considered a weapon.
The secrecy culture cultivated by TSA demands an extensive deference which (as Barlow's attorney pointed out) is often supposedly justified by saying "September 11, September 11, September 11". But in fact many aspects of aviation security practice are still stupid and pointless, or, to be more polite and precise, they are security theater. It would be easy to digress on this, and on secrecy culture in general, but I will simply mention again John Gilmore's observation that secrecy here regularly denied the public the opportunity to challenge actions of the executive branch (and private contractors!) in court.
One obvious example might be racial profiling; if TSA believed racial profiling worked and told airport screeners to use it, TSA's position appears to be that, not only would it not have to tell you if you asked it (under FOIA or whatever), but it would not have to respond to a subpoena in actual litigation, nor would it have to provide statistics, training manuals, etc., that might help make the case, nor could screeners testify about whether or not they personally had engaged in racial profiling. Of course, this issue didn't come up at Barlow's hearing, but I can't see any basis for distinguishing it. By contrast, when ordinary police are accused of all sorts of malfeasance (not just racial profiling), an enormous amount of evidence can be developed. And much of it becomes public.
Ms. Ramos, the screener, seemed deeply irritated by Barlow's case. She referred at one point to having received lots of subpoenas; she appeared upset that people were spending so much time criticizing her and challenging her when she had just done her job. Subjectively, I felt that she was saying something like "isn't Barlow the bad guy for carrying drugs on an airplane, not me for finding them like I was paid to do?". And there was a real sense in which she was on trial: Barlow was contending that she had acted illegally and that she had not been doing her job, or that, if what she had done was actually her job, then her job was illegal. Almost the entire day in court was dedicated to Barlow's efforts to demonstrate this, and, understandably, Ms. Ramos didn't like it one bit.
I think there were also some very remarkable class issues in play, which I will hope to understand better in the future.
After hours of questioning of the People's witnesses (Ms. Ramos and the police officer who actually arrested Barlow), the People rested and the defense got an opportunity to call some witnesses. It ended up calling three. The first was another airport police officer, whose testimony was meant to show that screeners were somehow hoping or being encouraged to look for drugs (contrary to Federal precedent which demanded that they look only for weapons and explosives), but it didn't seem to have that effect. The second witness was a surprise witness who led to great shock and drama in the courtroom.
The surprise witness in question was a former aviation screener who worked for a foreign military during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. I didn't understand, or didn't remember, which country's military the witness said he worked for, and apparently the Federal government lawyer didn't either, because she stood up and started admonishing him that he shouldn't be here at all without following proper government protocol. He politely corrected her -- "Perhaps you didn't hear me properly, ma'am" -- and said that he had never worked for the U.S. government in any capacity. She sat down.
He proceeded to testify that in his extensive military experience with improvised explosive devices and with aviation security screening, he had learned and taught other people how to deal with suspected explosive devices safely.
First follow-up question: If you think a bottle contains an improvised explosive device, is it appropriate to shake it?
No, that's almost the worst thing you can do.
Second: Is it appropriate to open the bottle?
No, that's the worst thing you can do.
The defense then argued that Ms. Ramos could not really have believed that the ibuprofen bottle in question contained an improved explosive device, because she had testified that, on removing it from Barlow's bag, she became suspicious of it, then shook it, and then opened it. These actions were the most dangerous actions she could possibly have taken if she really believed that the bottle might contain explosives (as she testified) -- they were the actions most likely to get her and her co-workers killed. Therefore, she must actually have believed that the bottle contained drugs (not what she was searching for) rather than explosives.
I found this argument compelling, and it looked like a lot of other people in the courtroom did too. Unfortunately, some of the questions that would have made it stronger (for example, whether screeners are trained to shake suspicious items, whether screeners are trained to open them, whether they ordinarily do these things) had already fallen to Federal government objections during Ms. Ramos's cross-examination, and therefore there was no evidence in the record about whether Ms. Ramos was following proper protocol when she (apparently with nearly suicidal incaution, or else suspicion of something outside of her jurisdiction) shook and opened the suspect bottle.
The final witness was Barlow himself, and he gave an entertaining performance, grabbing the actual suitcase that Ms. Ramos had searched back in 2003, and revealing to the court that he had packed it that day with many of the very items it had contained when he was arrested, including an ibuprofen bottle of the very same type Ms. Ramos had discovered, in the very same pouch in which she had discovered it, and this time packed with oregano and dried edible mushrooms. Barlow added that the courthouse security screener had let his bag pass through unmolested and had not seen anything amiss with it. (I also found this a compelling argument, but the judge did not; he said that it was not a suitably controlled experiment, which was true. It is entirely possible that the court's security is not as tight as an airport's, that the airport has better equipment, etc.) Barlow then unpacked the suitcase in front of the judge, revealing where the ibuprofen bottle was, and showing that one would have to search very deeply within the bag in order to discover it.
Despite the drama and entertainment that developed at the end of the defense testimony, the judge ruled against Barlow, denying the motion to suppress and ruling that the search was lawful and that the results of the search could be introduced into evidence against Barlow. In his ruling from the bench, there was not a lot of intricate logical argument about caselaw; instead, it was dominated by references to common sense. (In appellate courts, in my experience, and perhaps even in Federal trial courts, judges may be more apt to plunge into abstractions and theoretical principles and the categories drawn by caselaw; this judge seemed extremely disinclined to do that. I do keep in mind that he had only seen the case file for the first time two hours before, and that he was perhaps surprised by the explosion of highly abstract civil liberties arguments, some of them likely matters of first impression. I imagine that usually disputes in state trial courts are a good deal more concrete!).
The judge mentioned that the penalty Barlow would face, if convicted, would not be particularly severe, and seemed to express slightly obliquely the view that it would be in Barlow's best interest to plead guilty -- and that it was surprising that he hadn't done so, or would be surprising if he didn't do so. (I think there's also a class issue at work here. Most defendants can't afford to fight for principle and can at the very best afford to look out for themselves, not for the abstract rules by which the fourth amendment is brought to bear on a class of cases.)
The judge remarked that obviously it must not be the rule that screeners have to ignore contraband when they find it. So the question, he said, is whether they have a reason to look in the first place; if they have a reason to look, then they can use their own judgment -- and that's what Ms. Ramos did. When she shook the bottle and opened it, that didn't indicate that she was looking for drugs; perhaps she was stupid to do so, but being careless about one's own safety is not sufficient to make a search unreasonable under the fourth amendment. She used her own judgment about the nature of the threats and the best way of investigating them, which is a reasonable search. Hence Barlow's motion must be denied; his argument about reasonableness, while founded on a commendable concern with privacy, is too broad in its implications, because it would ultimately suggest that screeners must ignore contraband they find.
Apparently, Barlow did intend to suggest this. At least, he was prevented from introducing a lot of evidence about how screeners do things that are useful for finding drugs. At a minimum, Barlow wanted to suggest that screeners who are supposed to be looking for explosives should not be permitted to use search techniques or procedures that are specifically aimed at finding drugs rather than explosives (arguably, for example, shaking a bottle).
The stronger claim that screeners really ought to ignore non-explosive contraband they discover while searching luggable is advanced in a recent Washington Post op-ed by Peter Moskos, a law professor and former police officer. Moskos argues that privacy has been undermined by allowing intrusive searches that were originally justified for one purpose to be used as general searches for evidence of unrelated activities. Noting the general expansion of police power entailed by the blurring of the lines between rationales for searches, and the likelihood that justifications for searches will end up being merely pretextual, he concludes:
One must expect law enforcement to use all its available tools. As a law enforcement officer, why deal with the tedious process of probable cause, judicial approval and paperwork?
In order to stop and search any suspect, not just a terrorism suspect, law enforcement need only wait for a person to enter an implied consent area such as a subway or a shopping mall. Their action justified by the "war on terror," police may then conduct a full search. The true object of the search -- most likely drug possession, but any contraband will do -- is unrelated to terrorism.
[...]
In airport security today, items deemed suspicious are not necessarily dangerous: Large amounts of cash, pirated CDs, pornography and, of course, drugs -- not just illegal drugs but even prescription drugs in certain circumstances. [...]
The solution -- the balancing of public safety with constitutional liberties -- is surprisingly simple. The only way to prevent creeping use of implied consent is to limit the doctrine of plain view. Before searching a person, the government must choose either plain view or implied consent. If the government must search without probable cause, let it search, but only for illegal weapons or bombs. If security outweighs the Fourth Amendment, the scope of such searches must be limited to objects representing a clear and present danger to public safety. Any unrelated suspicious or illegal objects found must be ignored.
This seems to be the view the judge rejected as absurd, but I think it would be an improvement over the status quo. (Moskos seems to think it is a lost cause to hope for his principle to be adopted in connection with aviation, although he gives no reason why it shouldn't be.)
I like the analogy of physician-patient confidentiality. Doctors and other health professionals routinely learn about illegal activity. Not only are they not required to disclose what they learn to law enforcement, they are forbidden to disclose it to law enforcement. A doctor may learn about someone's routine use of illegal drugs, for example, but the doctor is forbidden to call the police and turn the patient in. There are sound and easily-understood reasons for this; the doctor's role requires that the doctor learn things about the patient that are very personal and private and this role can only be properly fulfilled if the doctor is not also required to perform an unrelated law-enforcement role. There are very narrow exceptions that allow doctor-patient confidentiality to be breached in order to prevent serious harm to a third party (such as ongoing child or elder abuse or a credible threat to murder someone) or the most extreme cases of self-harm such as a credible suicide threat. General criminality, including regular drug use, definitely does not cut it. Whenever I go to a new doctor, I'm asked to fill out a form that specifically asks what illegal drugs I use and how frequently; it is clear that the doctor is forbidden to report my answers to law enforcement.
Given the understanding that the role of a luggage screener is to detect safety threats to an aircraft, and not to detect general criminality (which would, according to some courts, be forbidden by the fourth amendment if it were the luggage screener's goal or prior intention), it seems only plausible to me that the law should, in fact, instruct screeners in that role that they must ignore other contraband or other violations of the law that they happen to discover, just as doctors must. I see nothing more perverse, unusual, inappropriate, or harmful about airport screeners not reporting evidence of drug possession or drug use than about doctors doing the same thing. Both are certainly in a highly unusual and intrusive position of knowledge and power, and the purported social benefit of each's job is plainly not that more people will be arrested for drug possession!
I wonder if I would see this differently if I thought people should not be permitted to possess drugs and carry them when they travel.
I'm sorry for covering so many different topics in my account; I'm sure that I have managed to bore almost every possible reader in some way or another. Thanks to everyone who is trying to defend travellers' privacy, and let's hope that the spell of national security, sensitive security information, and the like will lose some of its magic power.
I've just been reading portions of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg (I'm writing a separate post about that book), and while I was working on this post, I happened to open to this quotation by H. R. Haldeman ("Oval Office tapes, June 14, 1971, on the impact of the Pentagon Papers"):
To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.
I am having a problem related to CSS. (I suppose we all have a problem related to CSS, but this is a printing kind of problem rather than a cartels-and-censorship kind of problem.)
So perhaps I should say that I'm having a browser problem. I should probably submit this in Bugzilla, but maybe I have readers who can help here.
Suppose you have the following HTML document:
<html>
<head>
<title>simple css background</title>
<style type="text/css" media="all">
.lorem {
background-image: url("http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/23/CiceroBust.jpg");
};
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="lorem">
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain. Nobody loves pain because it is pain.
</p>
</body>
<html>
Some people will observe that the background image of Cicero shows up on the screen but not in the printed version or even in Print Preview, notwithstanding the media="all" attribute.
"Aha!", says the standard advice. "You just need to enable 'Print Background (colors & images)' in your Page Setup dialog!"
This done, the background image of Cicero now shows up perfectly in Print Preview. However, it still doesn't print.
Indeed, printing to a PostScript file makes it very clear that the CSS background image does not print at all, even with media="print". But it does consistently show up in Print Preview, so that Print Preview and the actual print output are consistently different from one another.
Here is what Print Preview looks like after turning on "Print Background (colors & images)":
And here is what the actual printed output looks like immediately afterward:
Note that the background image is completely absent from the printed output even though it is present in the preview.
I have this problem with Firefox 1.0 and also with Mozilla 1.7.
Right after the People v. Barlow hearing, danah boyd was talking about her observations of body language (and other subtextual aspects) in the hearing. I had thought about this very little, since I was concentrating on things like whether or not the judge had actually granted any Federal objections based on alleged privilege -- which would determine whether that legal issue would be argued on appeal. In an imperfect sense, I was thinking about the hearing as if I were reading the transcript, or at least as if I were trying to imagine reading the transcript. Which issues were raised? Which objections were accepted? After all, that's all an appellate court is going to get; it's against the rules to make an audio or video recording of the trial. The California Court of Appeal is going to end up with a bunch of words on paper -- "Objection, relevance." -- "Sustained." No indication of what the judge was thinking or feeling or what led him to that.
It's clear that danah perceived things differently -- one might say that she was more concerned with what was going on socially (which I believe probably affords a better prediction of the ultimate outcome than I and many other people might expect) or interpersonally. For instance, danah says that "[a]s an ethnographer, it was brutally painful to watch the body performance of each side show their values more deeply than anything that came out of their mouths." Now she's written up some of her observations; you can compare them with my observations. A typical danah observation:
The judge gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling. He clearly sympathized with Barlow, but he was also dealing with conflicted feelings about the recent laws that have come down - his sarcastic tone signaled that he felt very burdened by what was happening, but his judicial manner also made it clear that he felt it was his responsibility to follow the letter of the law, even those to which he was opposed.
The attorneys were caricatures of themselves. The federal attorneys had a hard-edged, no-smile Yale/Harvard rigidity that was stunningly performed. Kafka would have been proud. Milgram at its best. Barlow's attorney was most distinctly an ACLU type with long hair, funky glasses, curved shoulders and a revolutionary demeanor that signaled that he believed in the cause. The Cause.
A typical Seth observation, for contrast:
The defense then argued that Ms. Ramos could not really have believed that the ibuprofen bottle in question contained an improved explosive device, because she had testified that, on removing it from Barlow's bag, she became suspicious of it, then shook it, and then opened it. These actions were the most dangerous actions she could possibly have taken if she really believed that the bottle might contain explosives (as she testified) -- they were the actions most likely to get her and her co-workers killed. Therefore, she must actually have believed that the bottle contained drugs (not what she was searching for) rather than explosives.
I probably get closest to danah's observational style in my fragmentary questions about what Sandra Ramos, the security screener whose actions were challenged and examined and re-examined at the hearing, thought about the whole exercise, and what kinds of class differences were in evidence. Do screeners tend to feel, for example, that the busted guy is really the bad guy but that rich white guys want to "make a Federal case out of it" (in this instance, a state case) and hire lawyers to paint the screener as the bad guy and the person who was busted as the innocent victim? Do they feel that they are just doing their jobs and that activists are engaging in a practically incomprehensible (and useless, and expensive) exercise in trying to turn things around so that there's made to seem something wrong with that? Is Sandra Ramos off somewhere cursing Barlow as a rich criminal who wants to waste her time trying to use sophistry to make her perfectly ordinary job sound somehow evil? But my observations don't really go into this kind of thing; it's just an idle question.
When I visited Aaron Swartz recently, he recommended a book called Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Aaron suggested that this book is helpful for thinking about systems and institutions and how they shape the behavior of the people within them. I should probably rush out and read that, because it's an incredible thing to think about how the system is set up here and what kinds of outcomes it produces. Apart from the deeper matters of incentives and culture and whatnot, the aviation security system is set up so that screeners act as agents of policymakers who are totally unaccountable (nobody can even find out what policies they make). Hence screeners are just doing their jobs (with very little discretion in the sense that they are not invited to worry about what's right and wrong, what the fourth amendment says, etc.), while the people who set them to those jobs are never answerable to those affected by them. Then those who get caught up in the system are angry at the screeners, who, in the culture of secrecy, act as screens or shields for the trainers and bureaucrats who told the screeners what to do. If you try to go beyond that shield to ask who told these screeners to behave this way, and why, you are met with objections that national security precludes even telling you, let alone giving you a chance to change it.
This reminds me of the experience of getting a call from a modern telemarketer. I usually criticize the telemarketer for calling me (though politely, cordially), say that I don't want any further calls, and then try to track things back to the genuinely responsible party. I ask the telemarketer who is paying him or her. Today (despite the ironic prospect that this particular secret may violate Federal law) I usually hear that the telemarketer is a contractor and does not know the employer's identity or has been specifically enjoined not to reveal it. For example, I recently got what was probably an illegal solicitation call. I asked on whose behalf the call was being made, and the telemarketer responded that he didn't know, he just had a script, and he would be fired if he deviated from the script, and even if he did know who wrote the script, he would be fired if he told me. We can ask the telemarketers to quit their jobs, but, as their trade associations remind Congress, they've become an enormous part of the economy, and the economic pressures are simply incredible...
Now I am far afield from what danah wrote. Please have a look; it's pretty interesting. Another view of the courtroom elephant.
Here's one more thing about the institutional arrangements. Very possibly Ms. Ramos is reading this, if she isn't totally sick to death of reading about People v. Barlow already. But very possibly Covenant would fire her if she were to write to me to tell me whether she is or is not angry with Barlow or his attorney for what they said about her and what the case has put her through. Presumably Covenant doesn't let its employees talk about things like that without some kind of official clearance, because it might make Covenant look bad or might conflict with its official perspective on the case.
John Perry Barlow has posted his own account of his court hearing and the status of his case.
[Here's something I wrote on a mailing list in response to a discussion about the restrictions Apple added to iTunes to require that computers receiving iTunes music streams be located on the same IP subnet.]
Lovely things, subnets. A lot of people have been trying to use
IP addresses not only as evidence of geography but as evidence of
"locality" or "proximity" (e.g., whether devices are in the same
physical location or not). VPNs, tunnels, and bridging mean that
neither IP addresses nor MAC addresses are actually any evidence
of any of these things. Much of the Internet community has always
assumed that this is as it should be; the Internet has long
practiced layering and encapsulation and used new software to make
old software work in network configurations the authors of the
old software didn't envision.
The interesting result of this is that some DRM vendors are falling
back on other tricks. One you hear a lot about is "IP TTL" (a
part of the Internet Protocol specification where routers are supposed
to subtract 1 from a header field, to prevent a misaddressed packet
from floating around the Internet forever). That doesn't provide
evidence either, though, because (1) IP headers like TTL are under
the minute control of end-users wielding firewall software, and (2)
"bridging" software doesn't subtract 1 from TTL in the first place
because conceptually it is not acting as a router.
So the last resort of people trying to use TCP/IP and get evidence
about locality or proximity has been to measure latency -- how long
it takes for one device to communicate with another. Latency is
harder to tamper with because there are physical limitations like
the speed of light. For example, you can never get any message
from New York to Paris in under 19.5 milliseconds because that is
how long it takes light to go from one to the other. If you're
using a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, there is a magic number
around 250 milliseconds (depending on your latitude) because
geosynchronous orbits can only occur at one particular altitude
and it takes light about 250 milliseconds to cross that entire
path. (Geosynchronous orbit is far away!) So some systems have been adopting rules about not sending some programming to devices
that take more than a certain number of milliseconds to answer you
when you say hello and ask them for acknowledgment, on the theory
that devices that answer really quickly plausibly are on the same
local network, whereas device that answer more slowly probably are
not.
That scheme also is subject to some question, generally because
the range of network latencies is so great that it's likely to
produce very significant numbers of both false positives and false
negatives. But I think that will take some more study and I know
that DRM developers are doing some of that study (whereas DRM
critics unfortunately seem not to be, unless you count this message,
which I don't).
I think the difficulty in using Internet technologies to determine
proximity speaks to many interesting things about Internet design
and philosophy, things I would love to try to articulate sometime.
I will say that we heard a lot in the boom about the death of
distance and the erasure of place, but that DRM developers have
been working hard (between region coding, location-awareness,
geolocation, and proximity detection) to bring place and distance
back to life. And physics is going to influence the extent to which
distance can be measured or detected -- but in another sense there
is going to be a cultural and a political conflict about location
and who gets to use location to affect commerce and communication,
and how. And I think we are in the middle of that conflict now.
I have a question. News media constantly refer to Viktor Yushchenko as "pro-Western" or "Western-leaning" and to Viktor Yanukovych as "pro-Russian" or "Russian-leaning". What does that mean? How do they know?
I filed bug 276071 about the CSS background image printing problem I've been noticing.
What is it called when you patent something in order to try to stop anybody from practicing the patent because you believe the technology is evil or simply likely to be abused? I first heard that people were trying to do this in biotechnology in order to prevent anybody from practicing certain genetic engineering techniques, or perhaps cloning techniques. Of course, this only works for the lifetime of the patent, but perhaps it seems like a delaying tactic and people might hope that, during the intervening time, laws or norms or architectures might have changed enough that the technology would no longer be used to quite the same ill effect.
Is this tactic simply hopeless because of the costs of enforcing a patent (especially for noncommercial purposes and perhaps without trying to obtain damage payments)? Is it a good thing for people to do this, assuming that they are right in their judgments about how a technology is about to be used? If this practice became somewhat prevalent, would it be a new source of pressures for patent reform?
Apart from genetic engineering, I've heard talk about patenting concepts in censorware and DRM not in order to collect license fees but in order to try to prevent people from building modern censorware or DRM systems. I don't know of any such patents that have been granted, and I've never yet heard of anyone even threatening to enforce a granted patent for solely ideological reasons.
If you wanted to pursue this, an interesting field is the technology of proximity detection (recently discussed here), how machines can try to tell whether other machines with which they communicate are physically near or far. There are a lot of subtleties about this that are likely to be considered patentable subject matter, and perhaps there would be some good in having unlicensable patents held over the heads of people considering implementing proximity control schemes, or considering improving those that don't perform well.
I'm working on an article on contemporary Latin for Other. I'm having a difficult time getting interview responses and was hoping to speak with some more Latinists. So perhaps I should just include my interview questions here and invite anyone who can understand them to respond (December 2004).
This isn't really my best Latin writing; this was more a matter of quick and dirty notes for interview questions. There may be some grammatical errors or nonidiomatic usage lurking here. And I haven't translated two questions that I wanted to ask (about what academic classicists think of modern Latin, and about machismo or difficulty as a motivation for learning Latin).
Ubi et quando linguam Latinam didicisti?
Magistri tui Latine docuerunt? De Latine loquentibus quid opinati sunt?
Cui prosit discere Latinam?
Quare debemus hodie discere linguam Latinam? Et, cum discere decet,
quare debemus hodie loqui Latine (non modo legere, aut legere
scribereque)? Quomodo respondere soles, cum aiunt linguam Latinam
mortuam esse? Roduntne te amici, familia, discipuli, etc., tui propter morem tuum locutionis Latine? Rodit te aliquis?
Ubi invenire soles verba nova, sicut de rebus novis quorum verba non
habuerunt Romani nec habuerunt scriptores aetatibus mediaevalibus?
Quis valet eligere verba nova? Suntne scholae multae Latinitatis
modernae, quorum quisque sequitur auctoritates suos? Quid opinaris
de fontibus variis verborum novrum (circumlocutio, sive periphrasis;
retroformatio; capere ex linguis aliis sicut lingua Gallica, lingua
Hispanica, linguave Lusitanica; fingere analogias classicas)? Estne
quidquid inaptum temptando extendere, propagare, etc., vocabulariam,
literaturam, et culturam Latinam? Debemus ullo modo dicere literaturam
Latinam terminavisse victoria literaturae vulgaris Europae fine
aetatum mediaevalum?
Quibus occasionibus loqueris Latine? Quando incepisti?
Nonnulli credunt linguam Latinam esse hodie id quod olim fuit lingua
Graeca Romanis: lingua difficilis nec utilis laboribus, quem pecuniosi
soli igitur discere potuerunt, quia culturae artibusque studere
versarique aestimabant nec uti poterant labore. Ullo modo consentis
(aut pensas eam olim veritatem fuisse)? Quid scis de quomodo discipuli eligunt ad discendum linguas?
Quare inceperunt magistri Latinae docere linguam modo scriptam, et
quid suadebit illis ut morem illum alterent?
Nathaniel pointed me to a pair of articles by his friend in the Ukraine, a supporter of Yushchenko. Part 1 (about Yushchenko) and Part 2 (about Yanukovych) discuss the "pro-Western" and "pro-Russian" ideas in terms of economics, political ties, and language issues.
Also, some U.S. conservatives, supporters of Yanukovych, are saying that "pro-Western" means "pro-European" and not "pro-United States". (Among other things, they say that Yushchenko wants closer ties with European Union, not with the United States, and wants to reverse Ukraine's policy of sending troops to Iraq.)
Everyone seems to agree that Russia has actively favored Yanukovych, but that doesn't seem to be enough by itself to merit the term "pro-Russian"! Similarly, the U.S. government has favored Yushchenko, but that doesn't seem to be enough to call him "pro-Western". An immediate question might be why the Russian and U.S. governments favor any particular candidate in the Ukrainian election, and what led them to favor different candidates. It isn't that this question is impossible to answer, it's just that I haven't seen any press reports that have analyzed it. Clearly Russia would like to support people who are "pro-Russian", for example, but that's a little circular.
I really wish the press could be clearer about this. I found several other references to politicians who were called "pro-Western", but what does that mean? Supporting Enlightenment values? Entering lots of bilateral treaties with the United States? Speaking Romance languages? Trading with European countries? Doing whatever the U.S. administration asks? Running a public relations campaign about the virtues of Americans? Being secular? Being Christian? Having a lot of friends in New York City or London? Joining the E.U.? Protecting human rights? Admiring the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or some particular periods or event in European history? Loving cowboy movies?
I'm here in Providence at Eric and Kate's, preparing to whip up a technology project for the New Year's Eve party.
I wish there were a lawful way to transport model rocket igniters by air, especially in carry-on baggage on airplanes. The TSA forbids model rocket igniters while permitting the equally flammable matches. A model rocket igniter is essentially a match that uses an externally-supplied electric current instead of friction to provide the heat for ignition. If only smokers used them to light cigarettes, they would certainly be allowed on aircraft.
One rare pleasure of visiting Eric and Kate is getting to drink Moxie again. "It's the drink that they serve that will build up your nerve."
I got my highest-ever-scoring Scrabble play this evening, or at least as far as I can recall. I played ALBEDOS on a triple word score, and the S turned the pre-existing word QUAD into SQUAD. Including the 50-point bonus, I scored 104 points. (The albedo of an object like a planet is the proportion of the light falling on it that it reflects; the planets in our solar system have a variety of different albedos.)
While thinking about new year's resolutions, I came across this passage:
Do not say that repentance is not necessary except for serious transgressions such as illicit sexual relations, robbery and theft.
Just as a person must repent of acts such as these, he is required to examine his bad traits and turn away from such negative characteristics as anger, hostility, jealousy, the tendency to ridicule, pursuit of material possessions and honor, and gluttony. A person must repent of each of these. These offenses are more difficult to deal with than the other ones because such traits affect our actions at all times, and it is difficult for a person to refrain from such habitual behavior.
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 7.3
(Thanks to USCJ. There are lots of other translations of this floating around that give slightly different senses to what Maimonides was trying to convey. And whatever he meant to convey, I don't mean to say that the concept of repentance that Maimonides had in mind when he wrote this -- I suspect he called it teshuva, though I don't happen to have the Mishneh Torah around in Hebrew -- is easily accessible to me in translation at such a great distance.)
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
