Quotulatiousness

August 28, 2009

Chilling the news, Toronto style

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

Matt Gurney risks being sued by taking a stand against Toronto city government’s latest brain fart:

Setting aside the oddity of Toronto’s politicians suing their cheerleaders at the Star, there are serious issues at play here. Despite having recently voted down a proposal that would have let city councillors sue citizens on the taxpayers’ dime, it is still permissible for the city to fund lawsuits approved by various officials at city hall. What could be more chilling to free speech than a thin-skinned politician or bureaucrat with a taxpayer-financed legal team? Remember, folks — even asking reasonable, fair, and completely valid questions might bankrupt you, if you can’t afford to pay for your defence.

Beyond that issue is a more philosophical one. When does criticism of a government program become an attack on those running it? Depending on how broad an interpretation the courts choose to settle upon, opinion journalism and political reporting in this country could grind to a halt. Is a criticism of Ottawa’s handling of the isotope shortage an attack on the bureaucrats involved? Imagine a reporter discovering that a department was blowing millions or billions of dollars on a program with almost no practical benefit (Think long-gun registry). Would that reporter dare report it, and risk a ruinous lawsuit filed by the people running the program? Where does political commentary end and defamation begin? I don’t know, but the Toronto city government seems determined to find out.

These worrisome legal and philosophical issues might pale in comparison to the sheer logistics of such a regime. If the Toronto government, or any other, can go after anyone who criticizes it, how long until there is an entire cadre of bureaucrats whose job it is to seek out and bankrupt critics? It might sound paranoid, but remember this is government we’re talking about.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

August 24, 2009

The odd economics of post-Prohibition Pennsylvania liquor laws

Filed under: Economics, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 19:44

I’d just finished dinner at a restaurant within a short walk of my hotel, and I thought it’d be nice to have another beer when I got back to the hotel (in Pennsylvania, you buy less-than-case amounts of beer from licensed bars). I went up to the bar, and ordered six Sam Adams. The server looked at me a bit oddly, then went back to pick up my order.

When she came back, she said, “You know this is going to be very expensive, don’t you?”
“Uh, just how expensive are we talking here?
“Well, six bottles at $4 per bottle expensive. You could probably buy a case for that at [name of nearby beer warehouse].”

Two gents at the bar chime in that I’m crazy to pay that kind of money for just six beers, but they’d happily take any extras from the case I should buy at [nearby beer warehouse].

The three of them then gave me carefully simple instructions on how to find my way to [nearby beer warehouse], where I picked up this:

HopDevil

One of the most hoppy IPA brews I’ve ever tasted . . . for slightly more than what I would have had to pay for six at the bar.

August 21, 2009

Am I a sexist for saying I favour this?

Filed under: Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

By way of The Register. At risk of being labelled as a sexist, I think GoTopless (probably NSFW in most workplaces) is a worthy effort:

Welcome to GoTopless.org! – We are a US organization, claiming that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men.

[. . .]

Why a National GoTopless Protest day? Gotopless.org claims constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. Currently, women who dare to be topless in public in the US are repeatedly being arrested, fined, humiliated, criminalized. On SUNDAY AUGUST 23RD, 2009, topless women will rally in great numbers across the USA to protest this gross inequality in the law and will demand that they be granted the fundamental right to be topless where men already enjoy that right according to the 14th amendment of the Constitution (please see our exact legal argument on the right to be topfree for women under “14th amendment” in news section)

It’s legal here in Ontario, although I don’t think I’ve seen anyone taking advantage of the newly established right since the day after it became legal . . .

However, my support for this particular effort in no way means I’m in favour of the Raelian agenda . . . which is, um, spacey in the extreme.

More on DNA as a crime-fighting tool

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

Charles Stross looks at the situation in Britain:

NDNAD, the UK’s National DNA Database, run by the Forensic Science Service under contract to the Home Office contains DNA “fingerprints” for lots of folk — 5.2% of the population as of 2005, or 3.1 million people. Some of them are criminals; some of them are clearly innocent, but were either charged with a crime and subsequently found not guilty, or had the misfortune to be detained but not subsequently charged (that is: they’re not even suspects). The Home Office takes a rather draconian view of the database’s utility, and objects strenuously to attempts to remove the records of innocent people from it — it took threats of legal action before they agreed to remove the parliamentary Conservative Party’s Immigration spokesman from the database (which he’d been added to in the course of a fruitless investigation into leaked documents that had embarrased the government) — so if senior opposition politicians have problems with it, consider the prospects for the rest of us.

In use …

Whenever a new profile is submitted, the NDNAD’s records are automatically searched for matches (hits) between individuals and unsolved crime-stain records and unsolved crime-stain to unsolved crime-stain records — linking both individuals to crimes and crimes to crimes. Matches between individuals only are reported separately for investigation as to whether one is an alias of the other. Any NDNAD hits obtained are reported directly to the police force which submitted the sample for analysis.

Now, this in itself is merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy: but its use as a policing intelligence tool is indisputable. While there are some very good reasons for condemning the way it’s currently used (for example, its use in the UK has sparked accusations of racism), I can’t really see any future government forgoing such a tool completely; a DNA database of some kind is too useful. So what interests me here is the potential for future catastrophic failure modes.

Now that we’re pretty certain that DNA evidence can be easily faked, the focus of how it can be used in investigations must shift from “presence proving guilt” to “absence implying innocence”.

August 20, 2009

The Billionaire’s Vinegar-scented lawsuit

Filed under: Law, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:14

Mike Steinberger discusses the recent lawsuit launched by Michael Broadbent against the publishers of Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar:

Broadbent, the legendary former head of Christie’s wine department, alleges that Wallace defamed him in his gripping whodunit about the so-called Thomas Jefferson bottles — a trove of wines initially said to have belonged to the oenophilic Virginian but now almost universally believed to have been fakes. Three of the bottles, all Bordeaux, were auctioned off by Broadbent in the 1980s, and of the many wine luminaries caught up in this saga, his reputation has suffered the most damage. Broadbent contends that he was falsely depicted in the book as being complicit in a crime. But his suit makes no claims one way or another regarding the authenticity of the wines that he sold, which can be taken as an acknowledgment that the evidence is not in his favor. Broadbent can’t undo the fact that he was at the center of what now appears to have been the greatest wine hoax ever perpetrated. By pursuing legal redress, he is simply making it harder for a more considered judgment of his actions to emerge.

[. . .]

As Wallace meticulously documents, Broadbent repeatedly and insistently vouched for Rodenstock and the Jefferson bottles. He was dismissive of the researcher at Monticello who cast doubt on the authenticity of the wines and of questions raised in the press. In addition to doing business with Rodenstock, Broadbent benefited from his largesse. Rodenstock was famous in wine circles for the marathon tastings that he held, multi-day extravaganzas that typically featured wines back to the 18th century. Broadbent attended these bacchanals, served as the authority-in-residence during them, and came away with tasting notes for many old and exceedingly rare wines. If, as now seems undeniable, Rodenstock was a con artist who trafficked in counterfeit wines, those tasting notes are worthless.

But contrary to what Broadbent is claiming in his lawsuit, The Billionaire’s Vinegar does not suggest that he was a witting accomplice to Rodenstock. Rather, the portrait that emerges is of a man who let his hopes and competitive zeal cloud his judgment.

I’ve read Wallace’s book — which I heartily recommend — and I think, based on the information presented, that Broadbent was not complicit in the apparent fraud itself, although he certainly took full advantage of the opportunity (and thereby reap the fame to go along with being associated with the “discoveries”).

August 18, 2009

This is very much an unwelcome technical discovery

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

DNA evidence can be created to match a known profile:

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

H/T to Radley Balko.

August 14, 2009

EFF slaps Burning Man around over “creative lawyering”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:01

The annual Burning Man event has a reputation for quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) anarchy, but this year the event organizers are attempting a quick legal coup:

In a few weeks, tens of thousands of creative people will make their yearly pilgrimage to Nevada’s Black Rock desert for Burning Man, an annual art event and temporary community celebrating radical self expression, self-reliance, creativity and freedom. Most have the entirely reasonable expectation that they will own and control what is likely the largest number of creative works generated on the Playa: the photos they take to document their creations and experiences.

That’s because they haven’t read the Burning Man Terms and Conditions.

Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as “any third party displays or disseminates” your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO. This “we automatically own all your stuff” magic appears to be creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined “notice and takedown” process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet.

It’s not particularly anarchic to use one of the most restrictive pieces of post-modern fascism legislation to attempt to control the way event attendees use their photographs and video footage.

August 11, 2009

So much for the right to not self-incriminate

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

The headline really does tell the story: Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data: Up to five years in jail after landmark prosecutions. You will provide the key, citizen . . . or you’ll do hard time:

Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.

The government said today it does not know their fate.

The power to force people to unscramble their data was granted to authorities in October 2007. Between 1 April, 2008 and 31 March this year the first two convictions were obtained.

The disclosure was made by Sir Christopher Rose, the government’s Chief Surveillance Commissioner, in his recent annual report.

The former High Court judge did not provide details of the crimes being investigated in the case of the individuals &mash; who were not necessarily suspects — nor of the sentences they received.

Legal FAIL

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Andrew Orlowski shows why Charlie Nesson might as well have been custom-created by the RIAA:

Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that’s to allow the US recording industry’s lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.

Nice work, Charlie.

Nesson failed in his avowed mission “to put the record industry on trial”. He failed to show why disproportionate statutory damages are harmful, which could have had a lasting constitutional effect. He failed to paint the defendent as sympathetic, or “one of us”. He failed to demonstrate why copyright holders make lousy cops. He even had a Judge noted for her antipathy to the big record labels. In short, he ceded the moral high ground completely and utterly to the plaintiffs, the four major record labels. The labels’ five year campaign against end users is finally at a close, but Nesson’s performance leaves it looking (undeservedly) quite fragrant.

It’s hard to imagine a worse result for anyone except the RIAA . . . they won big, and it’s hard to fault the jury for deciding the way they did . . . Nesson pretty much handed the case to the RIAA on platter:

Nesson could have pointed to the billions of royalties that haven’t been collected by the major labels failure to monetize P2P file sharing. He could have added that the Big Four don’t speak for other parts of the music business in putting Enforcement first. He missed the opportunity to gain the moral and intellectual high ground. Now I’ve no doubt Nesson is sincere in his beliefs that he’s doing everyone a favour, but then again, there’s a bloke on my bus who thinks he’s Napoleon.

Nesson’s case was a misanthropic bundle of intellectual prejudices, a worker’s paradise in which everyone has rights, except creative people. In his Kumbaya world, we’d all be better off, except the people who actually do the art. But once the jury had heard from Tenenbaum — a deeply unpleasant defendant — the die was cast.

The final word, of course, should go to “Weird Al” Yankovic, with his heart-felt, moving “Don’t Download This Song”.

August 3, 2009

The further abuse of common sense by A.P.

Filed under: Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Who ever knew that the Associated Press holds the copyright on the works of Thomas Jefferson?

They tell me I have to use the sentence “exactly as written” and heaven help me if I don’t include the complete footer with their copyright boilerplate. Along the way, their terms of use insisted that I’m not allowed to use Jefferson’s words in connection with “political Content.” Also, I can’t use use his words in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory” to the AP. As if. Jefferson’s thoughts on copyright are inherently political, and inherently derogatory towards the the AP’s insane position on copyright. I require no license to quote Jefferson. The AP has no right to stop me, no right to demand money from me. All their application does is count words to calculate a fee. It doesn’t even check that the words come from the story being “quoted.”

H/T to Radley Balko

Looking for your criminal ancestors?

Filed under: Britain, History, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:50

A wide selection of criminal case records from 19th century England and Wales have been made available online:

The records of more than 1.4m criminal trials held in England and Wales in the 19th century, including the most celebrated cases of the Victorian era, have been posted online for family historians to trace their more nefarious ancestors.

Among those whose names are listed are Roderick Maclean, one of several would-be assassins of Queen Victoria, who was declared “not guilty, but insane” after he threatened the monarch with a pistol outside Windsor Castle in 1882, and Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, the fence of stolen property and model for Charles Dickens’s Fagin, who was sentenced to transportation — not execution as in Oliver Twist — in 1830, six years before the novel was written.

Others include notorious murderers such as William Palmer, publicly hanged outside Stafford jail in 1856 after being found guilty of poisoning a horse-racing friend, and Dr Thomas Neill Cream, one of the Jack the Ripper suspects, also hanged as a poisoner in 1892.

July 31, 2009

In Europe, as few as 11 words may be copyright-protected

Filed under: Europe, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:59

An interesting, and potentially disturbing court decision in Europe implies that copying as few as 11 words from a news article may qualify as copyright infringement:

In other words, the program might catch the good bits that make a newspaper article worthy of copyright protection. But the ECJ said it’s up to national courts to decide if any particular article is “original in the sense that they are their author’s own intellectual creation” and thus protected by copyright.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press has been pushing the boundaries of fair use to go after websites that lift as few as 33 words. It would appear the AP now has some precedent to attack so long as it can convince national courts its stories qualify for protection.

On the basis of the blockquote above, The Register will be coming after me, as I’ve copied a lot more than 11 (or even 33) words from their article.

If this filters down to national courts — and AP will do everything they can to ensure that it does — expect a sudden gagging feeling across the blogosphere . . .

July 28, 2009

“The best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States”

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Ryan Grim looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade:

Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, leaving South Florida with an idle army of welltrained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of the dark arts that would become valuable in the cocaine smuggling business. They knew how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades’ hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload, or dock elsewhere along Florida’s 3,000 miles of coastline.

The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn’t created solely for cocaine, or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and other products subject to tariffs. A “mother ship,” either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the shore, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats — named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco — would zip out to the offshore vessel to load up with coke. The drug also came in by air. In the late ’70s and early ’80s customs officials estimated that more than 80 cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980 the U.S. Customs Service seized 200 cigarette boats and 50 airplanes, one of which was a World War II–era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations.

July 27, 2009

More on the Gates-Crowley affair

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Radley Balko says that this affair is newsworthy, but not for the reasons you might think:

The arrest of Harvard African-American Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates has certainly got everyone talking. Unfortunately, everyone’s talking about the wrong issue.

[. . .]

The conversation we ought to be having in response to the July 16 incident and its heated aftermath isn’t about race, it’s about police arrest powers, and the right to criticize armed agents of the government.

By any account of what happened — Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between — Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.

He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights.

There are undoubtedly good interactions between police officers and “civilians” (as the police tend to refer to non-police), but much of the interaction is related to actual or perceived violation of the law . . . which means the interaction is fraught with tension, fear, and potential altercation. The police officer feels the need to have the visible signs of respect from “civilians”, yet the more contact “civilians” have with the police, the less that outwardly subservient attitude will be displayed.

Police over-reach

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:36

A story of rather amazing police pursuit of Krister Evertson, a criminal mastermind who failed to put a federally mandated safety sticker on a package he sent:

Krister never had so much as a traffic ticket before he was run off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska, by SWAT-armored federal agents in large black SUVs training automatic weapons on him.

Evertson, who had been working on clean-energy fuel cells since he was in high school, had no idea what he’d done wrong. It turned out that when he legally sold some sodium (part of his fuel-cell materials) to raise cash, he forgot to put a federally mandated safety sticker on the UPS package he sent to the lawful purchaser.

Krister’s lack of a criminal record did nothing to prevent federal agents from ransacking his mother’s home in their search for evidence on this oh-so-dangerous criminal.

The good news is that, in spite of the aggressive attempt to gather evidence, Krister was acquitted. But apparently the American justice system has managed to get rid of the whole pesky concept of “double jeopardy“:

So he was convicted of “abandoning” the hazardous materials in Idaho because he was in an Alaska jail awaiting trial on the bogus safety sticker charge for which he was acquitted. But he wasn’t allowed to use that in his defense. Nor were prosecutors required to prove that the materials he didn’t really abandon were actually waste. Note too the ridiculously paramilitary confrontation and arrest for the non-crime of failing to affix a safety sticker to a UPS package.

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