Slashdot Mirror

Here's a great article about the full story: New Times LA: Holy Crap!

Kuro5hin has a link to this article at New Times LA. It's unfortunate that I read this and think this is more true than I would have hoped. (Sorry about the dupe. I didn't select HTML formatted previously)

...I found express what I feel quite nicely. The first article was found through Kuro5hin. The second article is from The Onion. The scary thing about The Onion article is how close to the truth they came this time while still maintaining the parody. I guess the only thing that dies on 9/11 is irony. Go figure.

Take a look at this article. Specifically:

Greta Van Susteren, the CNN legal correspondent, and her husband [...] are Scientologists.

So, what's the last time you heard a scientology story on CNN? I certainly don't remember hearing one in recent history. It is quite disturbing that they have control over people so high up in the "visibility" hierarchy...

These reports just deal with federal wiretaps. Unfortunately, I know of no data gathered about wiretaps by state and local law enforcement agencies. According to this article, the Los Angeles Police Department conducted about 100,000 wiretaps thanks to some shady activity on the part of LAPD officers to make the wiretaps look legal. I would not be surprised if such practice was common among many state and local agencies.

I hope you're right, but according to this article, the Los Angeles District Attorney got away with essentially that same thing with a cell phone service and a bunch of pay phones. I imagine cops in other cities have been doing the same kinds of things for years (although it's true that L.A. is particularly notorious for police corruption and abuse). To my knowledge, federal courts haven't yet dealt with the constitutionality of such warrants, and while I think I agree with you that they would rule against them, I would not be too surprised if they found such warrants reasonable if used in a uniform and nondiscriminatory manner.

Look at pilots - they're less bright than coders by a lot, (I speak from USAF experience), but they're highly skilled and unionized - most airline pilots bring in $100,000+ for doing a job that's substantially less challenging than writing complex code. Did I mention they have unions?

2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.

If a company is willing to screw consumers with "content protection" do you really trust it not to screw its own employees?

4. A lot of anti-union people scream "I'm too good for a union - unions are for idiot construction workers." But many industry that depend on highly skilled labor are highly [unionized] - pilots, aviation mechanics, teachers, athletes, actors. It obviously works for other "knowledge industries".

5. Technology unions probably would be different than old-school unions - it would have to be easier to get rid of people, since it's easier to freeload than it is in manufacturing. Contracts would probably be shorter term, grievance procedures would be streamlined/scaled back, working condition issues would be much less important, etc.

Engineering unions do exist, but only at large companies. These are not the kind of companies geeks generally enjoy working for anyway -- they tend to be bureaucratic and defensive.

An anecdote on unions generally: when I used to work for the industrial-defense complex, I worked at a fairly small group within a very, very large company (Hughes Aircraft, if you must know) with about 200 people, of whom the programming staff was about 40 or so. (Yes, you saw that correctly -- 80% overhead. And I think we were one of the leaner organizations!) Somehow, we had inherited a lone union guy, perhaps a Teamster, perhaps a UAW man -- I don't recall. His job, apparently, was to show up for work every day perfectly soused. He was redfaced all the time and reeked of scotch. Most of the time he spent in the warehouse in back. Nobody could say what he did, but we all made damn sure that we didn't try to move computers during the day when he might stumble out from his warren. No matter how incompetent he may have been, he could still issue a grievance against us geeks for taking his (or a co-unionist's) job by moving a Wyse terminal. Ugh.

I know of *no* industry where unionization has decreased wages or really adversely affected employees.

In the end, unions are about solidarity, not intelligence. If history is any guide, and I think it absolutely is, a programmers' union would rapidly dissolve into pissing matches about who gets to write "if" statements, and who gets to write "where" clauses. Nothing would get done, and the fun (and there is a lot of it) in our field would rapidly drain out of it, to the exact extent that the business is unionized. As one of my friends who works as an animator for a major studio observed once he got his union card, the union heirarchy is dominated by people who can't draw worth a damn.

• Luke Thompson, New Times LA
  Bob Graham, SF Chronicle
  

The United States constitution does not specically grant a right to privacy. However, the supreme court has on many occasions upheld this as a basic American right. Many states constitutions specifically include such a right. California is one example.

The Supreme Court has upheld privacy rights via the 4th Amendment: the idea is that there is a strong similarity between spying and search-and-seisure.

However, contrary to popular belief, the Constitution does not enumerate the rights of the people. It enumerates the powers of the Government to restrict those rights. Rights belong to the people by default. I think most people have lost this key distinction. (I don't mean you.)

This excellent article about the LAPD's extensive use of wiretapping contains the following:

The U.S. Supreme Court effectively outlawed wiretapping in 1967 by extending Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure to telephone conversations. But the following year, Congress decided to allow police interception of phone calls -- under strictly limited circumstances. Among them: that taps be authorized only by specified judges; that they be requested only by the highest ranking prosecutors; that they be employed only in investigating serious crimes; and, perhaps most importantly, that they be used only when other means of investigation had been exhausted or had proved useless.

In other words, a wiretap could be used only as a tightly controlled method of last resort -- not as a broadly-cast net in a police fishing expedition.

To insure taps were reasonably employed and to give their targets an opportunity to seek legal redress if they believed their privacy had been violated, Congress also insisted that law enforcement agencies fully disclose their use of taps, even when they didn't lead to arrests. But the federal guidelines were only minimum standards. "It's precisely because wiretaps represent such an invasion into people's privacy and their use is so potentially abusive," says Professor Pugsley, "that both federal and state laws are so stringent."

Indeed, California's 1989 wiretap law put an even shorter leash on the snoopers than did Congress. The state law requires that all defendants be given transcripts of their recorded conversations. It also mandates that notice of the tap be promptly given to all persons whose voices are intercepted -- not just criminal suspects. And local prosecutors were ordered to provide the necessary information so that judges authorizing electronic surveillance could make that notification.

Well did anyone read past the first page? The article wasn't about the release of Wolf2000, it was about "...video games...murder simulators...youthful assassins...military killers." and the role that 'violent' games are supposed to play in the production of adolescent aggression.

Markham defends his possition and the possition of his company on the Littleton massacre to the end "...here I am playing a video game...and you tell me that's going to translate to holding a real gun? You show me someone who says that and I'll show you someone who belongs to the Flat Earth Society..."

Towards the bottom of page 5 Markham talks about the development of previous games touches on what is to come in the future. "...games will get more violent, he says. 'Why? Because they can.' "

IMHO a brilliant article coupled with great researched that will go unread by most as it is billed as a game announcment. COME ON!