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• George Bush miraculously jumped to the top of a 500+ person waiting list to get his berth in the Nat'l Guard and then failed to show up for a flight physical after the US spent approx $1M to train him as a pilot.
• Dick Cheny got five deferments because he had other priorities in the '60s than military service.
• John Ashcroft received several deferments during Vietnam. One was a critical occupation deferment for teaching business law at a Missouri college.
• Trent Lott (R, MS) avoided the Vietnam draft and lies about it.
• Out of the top three Republicans in the House and the top three Republicans in the Senate, none served in the military.

This is going to be entertaining. The developer memo that Diebold should "Charge them Out the Ying-Yang" for paper copies because it was a new feature will surely come back to haunt the company. Such a disgusting attempt to exploit the customer over product deficiencies will not sit well with a jury.

I think the damages in this case may be "Out the Ying-Yang". That's a phrase that really grows on you when the shoe is on the other foot. Come on say it with me Diebold, "Out the Ying-Yang".

Can't we all just get along?

Protests are supposed to be peaceful for a reason.

...And in the past, you would have been correct. The reason privacy advocates get so worked up about such forms of electronic monitoring and automated law enforcement is simply that it "lowers the bar", so to speak. It reduces the required effort for "them" to check up on anything they want to, and the more a governing authority is able to watch, the more it will do so.

Today, you might not worry because you're not a young Arab male. But, the government DOES care what organizations you associate with, how much cold medicine you purchase, and passes laws allowing secret searches of private homes. Tomorrow, we don't know what might be illegal. What we do know is that when the government knows it cannot pass something frontally, it will attempt to do so incrementally. (PATRIOT II, anyone?) They hope that, like the proverbial frog in the boiler pan, that we won't notice until it is too late. This is why some people are up in arms about seemingly trivial expansion of governmental powers...to stop the slow, incremental erosion of individual liberty.

People in Washington and elsewhere have noticed that terrorists use the internet in much the same way they do. They point to web sites and even combat games used as "online training camps".

Words like that are usually followed by bombs and at least one person has been to jail over it already and speech has not been free everywhere forever. The EFF has a nice list of sites already shut down.

More stupid laws can't be far behind a propaganda ramp up like that. The only way to implement the censorship that would be to continue to centralize telecommunications further. The only way to kill free speech is to kill free enterprise.

The pattern is clear. The government is augmenting it's own power by proping up favorites in industry. It's so unAmerican that I want to throw up.

The Grand Jury is a useful construct in that it inserts "the people" into the process, even before indictment, potentially protecting accused people from all but the initial burden of defense. It does suffer from the same problems facing (petit) juries: supressed training in the options available, like nullification, and the selection process in which "peers" of the accused are excluded. The idea that the 5th Amendment "does not apply" in Grand Jury testimony is absurd. The rights enumerated in the (amended) Constitution aren't privileges, suspendable, but *rights*. They cannot be suspended - only supressed, and then the supression generates actions elsewhere, against the state. Granting immunity at the discretion of a jury just opens the abuse door wider. This is why Grand Juries are commonly feared by people, not welcomed: because their implementation is flawed enough to serve the prosecutor more than the defense. As usual, the system is broken mainly in those respects that rely on the Judicial Branch, and their dependent lawyer class, to implement them.

"And there are plenty of ridiculous examples of innocuous behavior being punished by schools."

Never ?!?

And encode the URL.

Why is that great?

would you want to live in the world with the same freedoms of uncivilized times?

9/10/2001 was uncivilized times? In that case, yes! The only way to ensure democracy is transparency in the government, not in the citizenry. I would consider this age of secret trials, secret military tribunals, and illegal captivity without due process to be uncivilized.

I'm still miffed that I lost my freedom to dump toxic waste in drinking water.

I can't believe you really did that. If you did, and when you say "I lost my freedom", I hope that means you're in jail for violating the rights of others. But, what I don't understand is how that relates to the State monitoring your every move in public, and after that's allowed who knows how much longer before they do it in private?

Why can't I take guns on airlines?

Because, unlike guarding your privacy from intrusive government, carrying a lethal weapon can be contributive to intentionally lethal acts? Couple that with the ease in which a single bullet could quickly wipe-out hundreds of lives, on the plane and on the ground, made the argument for a gun-ban on planes that much easier to swallow. Mass murder, as it happens, was illegal pre-9/11.

Why can't I have the freedom to molest young children?

Because you would be violating their rights?

This cameras sounds like a good one. Do people really have an expectation of privacy when they're on public streets?

Not from each other, but from a government proven to abuse the power granted to it by the people at every opportunity. Your unreasonable fear of everything in life (from sudden heart-attacks to skidding in the rain), and incessant need for safety, encroaches upon my liberty to enjoy life without intrusive government. Just behave sensibly and you'll survive as your forefathers did across millions of years simply to produce the unique individual known as *you*. There's no government-monitored camera on you right now, and look you're still breathing!!

I'd love to see national ID's, I don't even understand the privacy argument against it.

The reluctance you don't understand stems from years of documented abuse by what at first appeared to be reasonable (to the population at the time) requests and benign acts by various governments to keep order. The arguments are always the same, as are the results. I don't have to name recent government abuses to you, you know them. We won't even go into the governmental abuses throughout history. To ignore the lessons from the past and think that they won't be repeated is naive. People haven't changed, and it's people in government who abuse their responsibilities and their authority. Most do so without penalty.

It's simple the government needs a way to identify it's citizens.

How does it do it now? Have

Most of the Democratic candidates have spoken out vocally against extending the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act. To contrast, George W. Bush recently advocated not only extending, but expanding the damn thing-- in his State of the Union speech, no less. (The applause you heard when he said "the PATRIOT act is due to expire soon" was not coming from the pro-Bush side of the room.)

If you believe there is no significant difference between the candidates on this issue, you're just plain nuts. I'm sorry your favorite candidate isn't in the race anymore, but if you keep equivocating and misrepresenting the situation, you're only going to be rewarded with PATRIOT Acts II, III, IV and V.

Nope, five years for the first Enron exec to be sentenced. While I agree that legislation needs to be harsher for such white-collar criminals. The notorious days of "Club Fed" ended in the 80's. These guys will get prison time. The question is, will it be proportional to all the hurt they caused.

Will computer crimes start falling under violent felonies?

They'd better find a good way of determining who's cimmitting these crimes. They may be lethal one day, instead of annoying.

"As computers become more and more prevalent in our infrastructure, the consequences for computer crime become that much more serious. How much responsibility does the owner of an Internet-connected computer have for crimes committed using their equipment, and what are ways we can best determine their involvement, or lack of it, in said crimes?"

I am always taken back when lawyers talk about Ethics, but I guess it has to be understood in a Arbeit Macht Frei sense

IANAL BICUG:

here's one article that mentions the material witness statute being enacted in 1984.

This certainly ranks as an injustice worth making a stink over.

No shit, I don't think that they were implying that this is by any means OK, but it's certainly not an unjustice worth lying about. Let the truth speak for itself.