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2006 Aug 19 rinoa


Guy Blade Guy Blade---09:00:00


I am not a barrister
But I do read a fair share of court decisions.

Earlier this week, the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program was found unconstitutional by US District Court judge. Now, lots of talk has been going on about the decision. Some of it is rather hyperbolic, so I thought I might talk for a bit about the issues on which the case was decided by providing brief sumaries of the major points of the judge's decision.

The government attempted to have the case thrown out of court on the bassis of two issues: plantiffs lack of standing and the state-secrets exception. To the former, injury and a method of repairing the injury are all that is required (the method of redress is left as an excersize to the reader).

To Injury - The plantiffs who brought this case were lawyers, journalists and educators. In the course of doing their occupations, they communicated with people who might fall under the definition of monitored people as set forth by the Bush Administration (people who are terrorist suspects, associated with terrorist groups). Essentially, all three groups claimed that they were harmed in the going about of their occupations by the Terrorist Surveillance Program by being unable to talk to their clients, sources, witnesses, etc. due to the forementioned client's, source's or witness's fear of being monitored.

To State-secrets - State secrets privilege takes on two forms in US case law. The first kind is used in cases in which an individual is suing the government to honor its agreements under a secret contract (e.g., forcing the government to pay one of its spies). This kind was deemed immaterial to the case at hand. The second kind "deals with the exclusion of evidence because of states secrets privilege" (pg 4). These cases revolve around the government being unable to sustain a case without revealing state secrets. Essentially, if a case falls into this category the government says, "We can't defend this case because doing so would require revealing sensitive information." Here, Judge Taylor decided that enough information about the program existed in the public arena already to make a competent ruling. In my opinion, this is most likely the area in which this case will be argued on appeal.


With those two issues sorted out, the case was kept in play. Thus the issues of the plantiffs case were considered. There were four arguments made against the program: violating the first amendment (free speach/association), violoating the fourth amendment (privacy/searches), seperation of powers argument, and exceeding satutory powers.

Fourth Amendment - Essentially, since no warrant is in evidence AND the program does not follow the rules set forth in FISA, it is unconstitutional. The judge here uses the word obviously to describe this ruling and it isn't hard to see why: the fourth amendment clearly requires that searching or seizing require warrants. Here there are none. Now, FISA exists to allow the government some leaway in such matters, but since it isn't being followed here -- no dice.

First Amendment - Here the argument is built largely on the fourth amendment arguement with a few things tacked on to make it first amendment specific. The gist of it is that by searching someone, you can find out things about that person that might be protected under the first amendment. Personally, I don't think this is the strongest argument here, but again I am not a lawyer.

Statutory Powers - The crux of the issue lies in this argument. The reasoning goes something like such: There already exists laws governing the monitoring of people via wiretaps without them knowing (i.e., FISA). Since there is law there, the President is required to uphold these laws, not create new policies. He created new policies without getting congress to changes the law. Bam, it's unconstitional.

Seperation of Powers - This issue is tightly tied into the statutory powers problem. The argument hinges on the definition of the roles of the President and the Congress in the Constitution. The Congress makes laws and the President enforces them. Congress had already made law in this area, but the President decided that he didn't like it so he made new law (the Terrorist Surveillence Program).


The President and his representatives have said that the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2001 gave him the authority to enact the Terrorist Surveillence Program. Judge Taylor rejects this notion for several reasons.

1. The AUMF makes no mention of intelligence matters.
2. The AUMF, if it were read to provide such powers, would be in direct opposition to both FISA and the Constitution.
3. The AUMF is a very general document and more specific documents (i.e., FISA) are chosen over general ones when analyzing law.
4. Even if the AUMF did apply, it violates first, fourth and seperation of powers issues.

The other argument is one of "Inherent Executive Power." Here, Judge Talyor takes a very dim view. Perhaps one quotes sums it up best:

The Government appears to argue here that ... [the President] has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.




Ultimately, if you want to understand the ruling, read it for yourself. It is only 44 pages long. This is not meant to be a complete airing of the issues, just something to clear up some misconceptions that seem to be flying about. I am still not a lawyer.

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2006 Aug 16 aeris


Guy Blade Guy Blade---23:57:00


Runaround
So today, I spent a bit of time updating Wikimapia around Rose-Hulman. In doing so, I looked up the exact name of a few buildings using the map on Rose's website. I happened then to stumble onto the virtual tour campus life page which has photographs of various people and places on campus. I quickly noticed, however, that these pictures were wildly out of date. I recognized noone in any of the pictures (except Dr. Ditteon) and in fact recognized a person using a laptop as using one of the old Acer brand laptops that were given out to people who were Juniors or Seniors when I was a freshman.

I thought, "Well this is absurd! Surely I can contact someone to get something done about this!" So I called IAIT to find out whose responsibility it was to maintain the site. The person at the help desk gave me the run around and said it wasn't their responsiblity to update such things. I assured them that I had only called to find out whose responsiblity it was since they do in fact control the website. IAIT suggested that I call student affairs, so I did. It took 5 calls before the phone was answered by something other than immediate voice-mail. The nice lady on that end suggested that perhaps Dale Long could be of some assistance, so I was transferred there. In the course of discussing my concerns with Mr.Long, I discovered that this particular duty belonged to Bryan Taylor who was out of the office today.

This shouldn't have been this difficult. I originally planned to just fire off an email to Jakubowski. That would probably get more done anyway...

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2006 Aug 14 elly-miang


Guy Blade Guy Blade---23:15:00


Vengence
So, I went home to Anderson this weekend to do various things. One of those things was to restore the network to functionality (they switched ISPs and as such ended up with my 4 machines there disconnected). Most of the restoration was completed by pushing a wire in and moving the router up the stair case; however, one of my machines had given up the desire to keep going. Ultimately, I discovered two problems with it:

1) It needed more air circulation as it was crashing under either heavy disk access or heavy cpu usage. I drilled a hole in the side of the case directly above the cpu and northbridge and installed a fan in the hole. This stopped the crashes there.

2) The network card betrayed me yet again. This particular network card had caused problems in the past on several occasions. I replaced it with an old Realtek 8029 network card (10 Base-T is good enough for most things). Once it had been replaced, I decided to take the old network card and make it an example to any other devices that choose to betray me.

I chose to proceed by taking the drill bit that I had used earlier and punching two holes right through its controller chip. Two in the head and all that.





Blur = camera phone.

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2006 Aug 10 aeris


Guy Blade Guy Blade---21:02:00


Technocrati
I signed up fortechnocrati.

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2006 Aug 06 terra


Guy Blade Guy Blade---00:09:00





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2006 Aug 01 aya


Guy Blade Guy Blade---23:27:00


Waiving
So, I went online today to waive my RHIT insurance. On the page, I was present with (among other things) this message:



Now, my question is simple: Are they using the words "PRIOR" and "START" ironically or are they simply quoting from another source? I ask because I cannot think of another gramatically valid reason to put those words in quotation marks. If they are using them ironically, does that mean that I can only waive my issurance after the "START" of the quarter or does it mean that I can waive it whenever I please? If they are quoting just those two words, why did they choose a source which wrote them in capitalized, bold-face letters and fail to cite the source? That just seems silly. Now, I suppose they could be using the words in some abstract sense in which they don't actually mean the common definition of either "prior" or "start", but instead mean to reference the words themselves. Or perhaps they may be trying to refer to the title of short peice of artistic work such as a short story or poem and that I am to use the contents of such works to help understand the sentence they have given me. Regardless, no one answered when I tried to call to inquire about what the sentence actually meant. Perhaps they are only availible "PRIOR" to the "START" of the workday...

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