If they knew he was using ssh, they would have shot him on sight

Better be careful if you open a Unix shell window on the grounds of Boston College:

On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash [pdf] and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. The problem? Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student's property.

The "evidence" against him? 

(1) He's a comp sci student who knows his stuff.
(2) Apparently other students give him their laptops to fix.
(3) Most damning - he uses *two* different operating systems, including one that (horrors) "is a black screen with a white font that he uses prompt commands on."

Really.  I could not make this up.

Boston College Campus Police: "Using Prompt Commands" May Be a Sign of Criminal Activity (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

A seat in hell for Blago

A Chicago alderman once complained to me about modern reform hiring laws -- the line was so good, I borrowed it, unembellished, for a novel -- "What's this world coming to when a guy can get a job for a stranger more easily than he can for his brother in law?"

But even those who live by this kind of code are appalled by the allegations against Mr. Blagojevich. [...] But unsubtly putting a senate seat up for personal auction, as if it were a piece of family jewelry, is arrogance that makes even hardened pols shudder.

Yet that's not even the item that angers me most. Among U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's bill of particulars is the charge that Gov. Blagojevich sought to rescind a state payment of $8 million to Children's Memorial Hospital if their CEO failed to organize a $50,000 contribution to the governor.

Many shameless politicians would send free turkeys to a children's hospital. The publicity is good, and it might help them sleep at night. But this governor was willing to stint on their care if a hospital official didn't oblige him with cash.

When I was in high school, a group of friends and I would pass out toys and candy to children in the hospital wards there. It was both the saddest and sweetest event of the season, and the thought that a public official would dare diminish the care of sick, innocent children over a campaign contribution doesn't just deserve an indictment. I think it reserves that politician a seat in Hell.

Chicagoan Scott Simon, writing in The Wall Street Journal: Even Chicago's Crooks are Appalled by Blagojevich (13 Dec 2008)

It's a [bleep] valuable thing, you don't just give it away for nothing

The Blagojevich tapes, animated. ;-)

Favorite bit:

(offscreen voice of Patti Blagojevich): Is that the Cubs? Hold up that [bleep] Cubs [bleep]. [Bleep] them.

Governor Blagojevich, meekly: Yes, Patti, I'm doing that now.

Hat tip: Greg.

Pull the string, and the story unravels

At Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog, David Weigel runs those crazy Larry Johnson-fueled net.rumors about Michelle Obama to earth:

Until he comes out with a video tape that shows at least one of the many rumored "Michelle speeches," I think that's the last we need to hear from Larry Johnson.

It's not America, it's an island off the coast of America

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

Gag on 2nd Amendment is City's Aim in Guns Suit (NY Sun, 9 May 2008)

Lies: conceptually cleaner than truth

The November 10 issue of the British magazine New Scientist calls attention to the prevarications of anti-tobacco activists pushing ever-more-stringent smoking bans. A report and editorial highlight maverick anti-smoking activist Michael Siegel's debunking of claims that brief exposure to secondhand smoke has potentially deadly effects on the cardiovascular system. "It is certainly not correct to claim that a single 30-minute exposure to secondhand smoke causes hardening of the arteries, heart disease, heart attacks, or strokes," Siegel tells New Scientist. "The anti-smoking movement has gone overboard." The response from the prevaricators is telling:

"When you take the science and put it in the public domain you can't include all the caveats," says Stanton Glantz, a tobacco researcher at the University of California in San Francisco. "The messages have to be simplified so people can understand them."

Glantz is right, of course. If anti-smoking groups said regular exposure to secondhand smoke, continued for decades, might slightly increase your risk of heart disease (assuming that the weak associations found in epidemiological studies signify a causal relationship), that would be hard to understand. When they say the slightest whiff of secondhand smoke could kill you, that's easy to understand. The only problem is that it's not true.

The Big, Fat Line Between Simplification and Lying (Reason's Hit and Run Blog)

Bruce Schneier: The War on the Unexpected

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense. "If you see something, say something" is how the ads read in the New York City subways. "If you suspect something, report it" urges another ad campaign in Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a seven-minute video. Administration officials from then-attorney general John Ashcroft to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have asked us all to report any suspicious activity.

The problem is that ordinary citizens don't know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can't tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

Even worse: after someone reports a "terrorist threat," the whole system is biased towards escalation and CYA instead of a more realistic threat assessment.

Schneier on Security: The War on the Unexpected (1 November 2007)

---

Updated and bumped because Doc has responded (extensively) at They Rode On. Short version: "Schneier can kiss my sweet ass."

More detailed version here: Flag on the play: Schneier gets it all wrong (They Rode On)

CSI: Mississippi

If your blood pressure is a little -- or a lot -- low, Radley Balko can take care of that for you:

In a remarkable capital murder case earlier this year, the Mississippi Supreme Court, by an 8-to-1 vote, tossed out the expert testimony of Steven Hayne. The defendant was Tyler Edmonds, a 13-year-old boy accused of killing his sister’s husband. Hayne, Mississippi’s quasi-official state medical examiner, had testified that the victim’s bullet wounds supported the prosecution’s theory that Edmonds and his sister had shot the man together, each putting a hand on the weapon and pulling the trigger at the same time.

“I would favor that a second party be involved in that positioning of the weapon,” Hayne told the jury. “It would be consistent with two people involved. I can’t exclude one, but I think that would be less likely.”

Testifying that you can tell from an autopsy how many hands were on the gun that fired a bullet is like saying you can tell the color of a killer’s eyes from a series of stab wounds. It’s absurd. The Mississippi Supreme Court said Hayne’s testimony was “scientifically unfounded” and should not have been admitted. Based on this and other errors, it ordered a new trial for Edmonds.

But it wasn’t the doctor’s dubious claim that made the case unusual. It’s the fact that the court explicitly renounced his testimony. It was the first time that had happened to Hayne in hundreds of cases dating back nearly 20 years.

By any sane standard, the decision was long overdue. Hayne’s career in court is an egregious example of what happens when the criminal justice system fails to adequately oversee expert testimony. He may be unusually careless, but he is not unique—not in Mississippi, and not in the United States.

CSI: Mississippi (Radley Balko, Reason magazine, November 2007)

Move along, citizen

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez resigns, two weeks after Rove.

Countdown to Hugh Hewitt's "there's nothing to see here, move along" post at Townhall in 5... 4... 3...

Frank Rich cites Michelle Malkin on Rove; universe collapses

It's behind the damned, doomed (and soon to be defunct) TimesSelect paywall, but I had to post this snippet of Frank Rich's latest bile-filled screed... which, interestingly enough, I tend to be in near-complete agreement with:

...[T]he Republican reaction to Mr. Rove's departure is more revealing than the cries from his longtime critics. No G.O.P. presidential candidates paid tribute to Mr. Rove, and, except in the die-hard Bush bastions of Murdochland present (The Weekly Standard, Fox News) and future (The Journal), the conservative commentariat was often surprisingly harsh. It is this condemnation of Rove from his own ideological camp — not the Democrats' familiar litany about his corruption, polarizing partisanship, dirty tricks, etc. — that the White House and Mr. Rove wanted to bury in the August dog days.

What the Rove critics on the right recognize is that it may be even more difficult for their political party to dig out of his wreckage than it will be for America. Their angry bill of grievances only sporadically overlaps that of the Democrats. One popular conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin, mocked Mr. Rove and his interviewer, Paul Gigot, for ignoring "the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies," not to mention "the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty." Ms. Malkin, an Asian-American in her 30s, comes from a far different place than the Gigot-Fred Barnes-William Kristol axis of Bush-era ideological lock step.

He Got Out While the Getting Was Good (Frank Rich, New York Times, 19 August 2007)

"The legacy of a director who never said no to anybody"

On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to create paramilitary teams to hunt, capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists almost anywhere in the world. Yet the C.I.A. had virtually no trained interrogators...

[...]

The C.I.A. knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile interrogations. Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of European operations at the C.I.A., and the author of a recent book, “On the Brink: How the White House Compromised U.S. Intelligence,” said, “The agency had no experience in detention. Never. But they insisted on arresting and detaining people in this program. It was a mistake, in my opinion. You can’t mix intelligence and police work. But the White House was really pushing. They wanted someone to do it. So the C.I.A. said, ‘We’ll try.’ George Tenet came out of politics, not intelligence. His whole modus operandi was to please the principal. We got stuck with all sorts of things. This is really the legacy of a director who never said no to anybody.”

Many officials inside the C.I.A. had misgivings. “A lot of us knew this would be a can of worms,” the former officer said. “We warned them, It’s going to become an atrocious mess.” The problem from the start, he said, was that no one had thought through what he called “the disposal plan.” He continued, “What are you going to do with these people? The utility of someone like [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is, at most, six months to a year. You exhaust them. Then what? It would have been better if we had executed them.”

"The Black Sites," The New Yorker, August 13 2007

Counterfeit goods

Government scandal and corruption, North Carolina-style:

State Division of Motor Vehicles Commissioner George Tatum resigned today, a spokesman said.

The resignation comes a little more than a week after The News & Observer reported an allegation that Tatum had helped a friend get a replica of a 1937 Ford truck titled as the real thing.

DMV Commissioner Resigns (Raleigh, NC News and Observer, 18 July 2007)

This is *so* Southern, I can't even begin to cope with it.

Dude resigns in shame and disgrace because he got caught helping a friend counterfeit a pickup truck.

Abuse of "National Security Letters"

EFF has obtained FBI documents showing years of chronic problems with its use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The issue first drew widespread attention four months ago, when the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a report [31M PDF] revealing extensive misuse of NSLs in a sampling of four FBI field offices.

These findings were, unfortunately, not surprising to critics of the Bureau's NSL power. Before the USA PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001, the FBI could unilaterally issue these demands only to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. Under the changes made by the controversial anti-terrorism law, however, the FBI can now use NSLs to get telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records about anybody -- without any court approval -- as long as it believes the information could be “relevant” to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation.

"EFF Receives First Set of FOIA Documents on the FBI's Misuse of National Security Letter Authority" (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 9 July 2007)

Current, apparent definition of a terrorist: Anyone the FBI would like to get a free pass to wiretap.

Finally, a principled, focused attack on media negativity

It's about time somebody did something about those doomsayers and gloom-mongers in the MSM.

“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

Let President Putin show you how it's done.

50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio (New York Times, April 21, 2007)

Stop Illegal Spying

As a constituent who cares deeply about respect for the rule of law, our nation's tradition of checks and balances, and the Fourth Amendment, I urge you to support immediate and thorough investigations into the National Security Agency's (NSA) warrantless spying program as well as other abuses of surveillance powers. Congress must uphold its Constitutional duty as a check on the Executive's power and put an end to such unprecedented violations of Americans' rights.

If anyone involved in the NSA spying program has broken the law, he or she should be held accountable. Hearings should be held to investigate the extent to which the law been broken and how to prevent such illegal activity now and in the future. The inquiry must also uncover the program's operational details, including whom it targets and the information it collects.

Such vigorous oversight is long overdue. It has now been over a year since the press first reported on this clear violation of the Fourth Amendment and the legal safeguards set up by Congress. Yet Congress has so far failed to thoroughly investigate the details of this still-shadowy program.

Meanwhile, more privacy invasions have continued to come to light and must also be the subject of Congressional scrutiny. For instance, the FBI has blatantly misused National Security Letters under PATRIOT Act and violated the law to spy on Americans' telephone, Internet, and other personal records, as documented in a report recently released by the Justice Department's Inspector General.

Congress should also eschew any expansions of surveillance power. It would be highly irresponsible to legislate in the dark, before the past and present abuse of surveillance powers has been thoroughly investigated.

It's time for Congress to do its job and help restore the checks and balances that define our democracy. Please support investigations regarding the secret NSA surveillance program and help stop the illegal spying.

StopIllegalSpying.org

My National Security Letter gag order

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

Usually, I quote excerpts.

This time I just cut and pasted the whole damned thing:

My National Security Letter Gag Order (The Washington Post, March 23, 2007)

Be careful of that door on the way out, Cully

A senior Pentagon official resigned Friday over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects, the Defense Department said.

Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told him on Friday that he had made his own decision to resign and was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Defense Official Resigns Over Detainee Remarks (Associated Press via New York Times)

Related: Previously on enrevanche.

A fundamental failure to grasp how the system works

If recent press reports are correct--if his remarks were reported accurately and in context--Charles D. Stimson needs to be shown the door, or better yet, thrown right out the damned thing and into the gutter:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees (New York Times, 13 January 2007)

His remarks? Repellent, ignorant, and with more than a whiff of authoritarianism and tyranny about them.

Any CEO or board member who would seriously consider the outside activities of a law firm as a criterion for retaining them, rather than the competence of the firm in the relevant core practice areas to protect the corporation's interests, should be removed for malfeasance.

As should, and this should go without saying, Mr. Stimson, once someone snatches the swagger stick out of his hands and stuffs it up his ass.

To their eternal discredit, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page floated this same ugly trial balloon on Friday's editorial pages, billing Stimson as an unnamed "senior U.S. official."

Has the entire bloody country gone mad? This is a war on terrorism, not jurisprudence.