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The Ridiculous LexisNexis Search that the Justice Department Used
[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
Needless to say, when asked about it, Williams first said she didn't remember ever seeing it, then said she'd used an edited version just once. LexisNexis records show she used it, as shown, 25 times." Note that 'sex!' appears twice in the query. Must be VERY important.
A service that provides online legal and business information. LEXIS was the first full-text information service for the legal profession. NEXIS provides the archives of The New York Times as well as Wall Street industry analysis, public records, tax information, political analysis, SEC filings and more. See online services.
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=LEXIS-NEXIS&i=46050,00.asp
Not that I'd expect you to know, I didn't know either.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It is THE most powerful database of public records and sometimes not-so public records in the entire world. You can start with a name and city and match a person and get social, dob, city of birth, all their criminal and civil cases, any citations including speeding tickets, any mention of them in other criminal or civil cases, news articles, legal findings etc. etc. etc.
Needless to say it is very dangerous in the wrong hands.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis
They used Lexis to do a form of background search on people. They used the information from these searches to decide who to hire. The DOJ said the way they did this is federally illegal and also against DOJ policy.
And if you're an actual RTFAer, here you go: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/goodling072408.pdf
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
The massive spending spree, the total ignoring of the constitution, lying to go to war, outing undercover agents (aka treason), just to name a few.
You're not reading it right. It only drops anything that matches one of those results that's within 7 words of the name of the candidate. An article just on sex won't get picked up unless it also mentions the candidate by name.
First and foremost, because it's illegal.
But there are two types of nominations in the DoJ: "Career" & "Political". Political appointments are indeed open to scrutiny of political affiliation, but are temporary and remain active only until a change of administration. Career posts are normal jobs, and those people are supposed to be more neutral. Filtering people for Career jobs based on political affiliations is illegal. The issue coming to light now is that Bush administration officials used the same questionnaires and methods for both types of posts.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I found this here:
/n, +n, NOT /n /s /p /seg /seg
/p and /s connectors with a proximity connector (e.g., /n).
/25 discharg! AND student OR college OR education /5 loan is operated on in the following manner:
/5, the smaller of the /n connectors, ties together the term loan and the previously formed unit of student OR college OR education!. /25 operates next and creates a unit of bankrupt! /25 discharg!.
Connector Order and Priority
Connectors operate in the following order of priority:
1. OR
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. NOT
7. AND
8. AND NOT
If you use two or more of the same connector, they operate left to right. If the "n" (number) connectors have different numbers, the smallest number is operated on first. You cannot use the
Example: bankrupt!
* Because OR has the highest priority, it operates first and creates a unit of student OR college OR education!.
*
*
* AND, with the lowest priority, operates last and links the units formed in the second and third bullets above.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
In the civil service, there is a clear line between "professionals" and "political appointees". The idea being, while the head of the justice department, and probably most of his deputies, change every administration, the people who actually understand the inner workings stay on.
If the search is used to vest someone's political position for a "political appointee" position, that's fine. If it's used the screen "technical/professional" candidates it's probably a violation of civil service provisions and most likely some statutes.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Indeed. Our Sheriff's department uses it (along with other services by the same company), and it's downright scary the ammount of stuff they can pull.
Want all the blue and gray SUV's that have a 9 and an F within a 100 mile radius of a given location? It can pull that up. Want to find out if a particular person has ANY connection to the owner of that vehicle. It can do that. As a demonstration it was able to connect our sherrif to a woman that his wife had been roomates with over 20 years ago (before they were even married).
It was astonishing how much information it could coordinate on any person in the room that we plugged into it.
Also was tied into the sex offenders database. If you wanted to narrow that search for the blue/gray SUV earlier down to sexual offenders within a certain radius that owned or were associated with the owner of such a vehicle, then it could do that.
What's scary is that some level of this functionality is available to whoever wants to pay for it (afterall, most of the information is just public records correlated into a massive database). Law enforcement and such agencies do get more access (for instance, the ability to pull up social security numbers), but the average person with deep pockets could still get a hell of a lot of information for it. They do TRY to be secure with the LEO-only portions though.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I've never used LexisNexis, but it appears the '!' is a wildcard.
'Racis!' would match to 'racism' or 'racist' - as in "he levelled charges of racism" or "was accused of being a racist."
'Controvers!' would match to 'controversy,' 'controversial,' etc.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Why shouldn't an administration be able to hire people on their side of the political fence?
Because it's illegal to do so for these types of Justice department jobs (and rightly so).
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that President Clinton's administration didn't weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs?
For prosecutors in the justice department? I'll tell you that with a very straight face unless you can show otherwise. Everything I've read says this just doesn't happen for these kinds of appointees. The fired prosecutors were shocked to be fired for political reasons.
but I would assume that a given administration would not want to hire attorneys who hate everything that administration stands for, whether the administration is conservative, liberal or anything in between.
I find that a very strange attitude. Criminal prosecutions (which is what the Justice department does) shouldn't have a political slant to it. I'd hope you'd agree that that would be a horrible horrible thing no matter who was doing it. There's a reason why the image representing justice (the one holding the scales) is blindfolded.
AccountKiller
I think this link might explain it - I guess it was a little sensitive to the government: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/02/AR2007100202031.html
We Build Beautiful Websites
Reading some other articles about this, it appears that was not the full extent. They were even excluding Republicans and conservatives that weren't Republican or conservative enough for them. Basically people that they thought would not make loyal "Bushies".
It also appears that experience was not as highly evaluated as political considerations. One cited example of the was a well regarded senior prosecutor with counterterrorism experience was passed over for a junior attorney with no experience for a counterterrorism post just because the senior prosecutor's wife was a Democrat.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's a Shibboleth. Something that you can use to guess at another person's social/regional/political origin.
Back in 1992, there was a plan to log some forest. Republicans liked the idea of logging. Democrats didn't like the idea of logging.
Democrats went with environmentalism -- the notion that a risk to 50 of the 500-odd remaining spotted owls in existence outweighed the commercial interests of the loggers -- as their means of obsctructing the Republicans' goals.
Republicans went with the commercial argument -- "preposterous to forego millions of dollars in revenue over 50 spotted owls!" -- as their means of embarassing the Democrats.
The spotted owl became a shibboleth. Anyone who said "save the endangered owls!" was likely to be a Democrat, and anyone who said "to hell with the owls!" was a Democrat.
Many of the things in that list are shibboleths from the Clinton era. If you followed events such as Iran-Contra (a scandal embarassing to the Republicans), the spotted owl (a shibboleth for environmentalism), the recounts in Florida (which could have only benefited the Democrats), or worked (or ruled) on cases involving other politically-loaded wedge issues -- whether economic ones like NAFTA, outsourcing, and Enron, or sociolopolitical ones like racism, sexism, abortion, homosexuality, and gun ownership -- you had political opinions.
This query wasn't designed to figure out what those opinions were, but it would be a very clear way listing all the times someone identified their political stance by using a political shibboleth within seven words of the name of either Presidential candidate:
"John Doe accused Al Gore of placing the interests of the spotted owl above the legitimate interests of the taxpayers" -> John Doe is almost certainly a Republican.
"Jane Doe suggested Al Gore wasn't doing enough to protect the spotted owl" -> Jane Doe is almost certainly a Democrat.
The spotted owl is a particularly effective shibboleth; most of us have opinions about gun ownership, NAFTA, or Enron that don't necessarily dermine how we vote. But the spotted owl was a manufactured controversy; outside of birdwatchers, very few people knew or cared about the spotted owl until it became the center of a political debate.
Modern-day shibboleths include "homicide bombers" or "the Democrat party" (phrases used only Republicans), or "big business / big health care / big pharma" or "multinational corporations", or "neocons" (which are phrases used almost exclusively by Democrats.)
I assumed ! to be a wildcard, so sex! would match sex or sexual or sexually or sexist or sexism or sexy.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've never used LexisNexis, but the "!" seems to be a 'zero to many' length wildcard character, not an "and". It allows fragments like "blam!" to find words like "blame", "blamed", "blaming", etc.
So, it seems like you would enter the job candidate's name and it would find all instances of that person being mentioned in an article in the LN DB with any of those keywords/fragments.
Limited regular expression functionality.
Some of the items are valid for a job candidate review, like "arrest!", "fired", and "intox!"; but it's telling that they are listed after stuff like "bush", "democrat", and "spotted owl". So you see what the priority of the author was.
It's also a pretty sloppy search, given all the useless repetition.
The law, which the practice was violating (not according to any court, BTW, but only to the new Justice Department), is, probably, unconstitutional in itself, because it tramples on the President's power to run the Administration however he sees fit. He may be limited by the non-discrimination laws, that apply to all employers, but political views aren't among the criteria that one can't discriminate on.
It is incredibly expensive politically to oppose such a law, so it was never challenged in court before. But I would not blame Gonzales for trying to find like-minded people for underlings.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They are endangered, and therefore prevent you from clearcutting certain forests where they live, which is extremely extremely bad. Republicans took out multipage ads attacking the "sheer insanity" of preventing them from wiping out "only 50 owls" (10% of their total population).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The search requires that the candidate's full name is found, along with at least one of the following 'keywords' not more than 7 words (that's the "w/7") away from the name; so in most cases it would be a pretty small return.
Actually, the syntax used seems to be incorrect (I've never used LexisNexus, but just did an exhaustive 30 second search for information on the syntax).
The "pre/2" control assures that the word preceding and the word following are found, with a maximum of 2 words in between. I think the "and" before the "pre/2" is incorrect, or at least superfluous.
No, it's doing this:
((Name of Applicant) + (X || Y || Z || etc))
So it will only return a story with the word "sex" in it if it also has the name of the candidate.
They get in the way of plundering the environments they live in, which happen to be potentially very lucrative ones. If you defend spotted owl conservation, you're a gay hippie commie terr'ist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_owl
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Funny. I wonder whether Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, and Rove understand how many lifetime Democratic voters they've created.
A new electorate in the making
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
The only way out of the "both parties suck" problem is to change the political system so that more than two parties become viable. A system of Condorcet voting does this by eliminating the problem of third party candidates acting as "spoilers" and giving the election to a candidate that the majority of voters actually like the least.
IRV (instant Runoff Voting) is a simple example of such a system that would be easy to implement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
You're looking at the magnitude of the crimes, rather than the mechanism.
Congress didn't tell Clinton to lie in court. None of them even implicitly supported it by making statements like, "If I ever find myself in court over some ridiculous bullshit, and someone asks me an irrelevant question that's none of their damn business, that's a situation where I think a little white-lie minor perjury is ok, since such an act wouldn't really interfere with the pursuit of justice."
On the other hand, Congress did tell Bush to use force in Iraq, and they did pass budgets to spend all that money.
Who impeaches? Congress. To think they would impeach for activities that they not merely approved of, but went on the record and voted for, is ludicrous. Bush was given a get-out-of-jail-free card and Clinton wasn't. That's the difference.
People want Bush impeached because they think he's evil. Impeachment isn't about evil, though. Impeachment is about defiance, and Bush didn't defy anyone important. There isn't any serious conflict between Bush and the Democratic-controlled congress, so why would there be an impeachment?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
AltaVista has a 'NEAR' modifier:
Note that it _must_ be upper cased, or it'll search for the word 'near'.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Clinton didn't fire US attorneys, they resigned, as was expected of them at the start of a new presidency.
This is because they are, indeed, political positions. That, in fact, is the easiest way to tell such positions apart without looking at the law...people in political positions are expected to resign enmass at the start of a new presidency.
US attorneys are 'political' because they are expected to concentrate their office on the laws that matter to them.
It's worth pointing out that such 'concentration' isn't always political per se. Sometimes, on their way up, they get a rep for being really good at a specific type of case, and focusing on that, and a president that wants to concentrate on that crime will hire them even if their political views differ. (I.e., a Republican who's really good at prosecuting gun control violations might end up a USA under a Democratic president who wants to focus on that.)
What Bush did, however, was fill the slots with people who agreed with him, which was fine...but then he attempted to pressure them into enforcing laws in a partisan manner, and fired those who didn't play ball. And then lied about firing them.
There's a difference between a USA saying 'This office will concentrate on tracking down bank robberies and child porn, let's backburner the drugs for a bit' and saying 'This office will attempt to dig up dirt on the Governor of Alabama (because he's a Democrat)'.
Bush fired both people who would not attempt to 'enforce' the law against Democrats when they didn't have a good case, and people who investigated Republicans. It is perfectly fine to politicize the focus of the DOJ. It is not fine to politicize the investigations of the DOJ.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The product you are referring to is called Accurint. It was developed by Seisint, which was aquired by LexisNexis. It is restricted to US law enforcement. More here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50577-2004Jul14.html
No, it was political. Clinton fired all 93 US Attorneys in one day.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009784
This is my sig.
A watch is not a clock, it is a timepiece.
Anyway, the GP is quoting the phrase incorrectly. It is "even a stopped clock is right twice a day". It's a quote from the lovely Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
Right, because there are enough full time, well paying jobs for everyone, and the system would continue to function perfectly if no one did the minimum wage jobs. Get real.
And you are just delusional about the income tax. Payroll tax IS income tax, you moron. You have been grossly misled: Look here and follow the links to more info if you need to. If you make $16.73 an hour, you are SOLIDLY in the bottom 50%. The median income is about $23 per hour. Do YOU pay no income tax?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well, they taste REALLY delicious.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
It's perfectly okay to use coercion to enforce your unilateral ideas about property and take away MY rights to go wherever my legs will take me.
If your legs wanted to go to Pyongyang and walk into Kim's kitchen to get a sandwich, do you think you'd encounter any problems along the way? Guess socialism doesn't fix that problem, either, then.
That's okay, but using 'coercion' to ensure that everyone has enough to eat before allowing anyone to profit outrageously from the hard work of other people is communism.
You're missing the point: yes, it's wrong to steal from someone. But more importantly, when you remove the profit motive from food production, people starve to death because no one grows any food (and certainly not any excess food). Almost all of the famines in the last 100 years that have happened outside of war zones have all been in socialist countries: the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Khmer Rouge. The list goes on.
Classical liberalism has led to some deaths, mostly in revolutions. Socialism has led to tens of millions of deaths. And yet you still want to keep trying it. How many more people have to die thanks to your failed philosophy before you finally realize how completely broken it is?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Admired throughout the whole world? The US educational system? As someone with a non-American perspective (because I'm not in fact American), that's patently ridiculous. America has always had the (not undeserved) reputation of appalling education right through high school and Bachelor level, with it becoming world-class only at the Master level and above.
So North Korea is socialist then? Don't be absurd. It's a tyrannical communist dictatorship.
Want to see a really social democratic country? Sweden. The right to roam trumps the right of property.
What really gets me about you libertarian types is how you equate taxes with loss of rights, or only federal taxes but not state taxes, or only taxes on income, not goods, or only taxes above a certain percent. Or how federal government is evil, state government is good.
Government and organisation are about humans escaping the individual condition and banding together to help each other and defend each other and control their environment. If you don't want to be a part of that, fine, you can live on a house in the prairie and nobody will ever touch you. But please don't foist your ridiculous views on me and take my damn rights away in the process.