You know, I wonder if there might be a simple test for these voting machines. Keep the things from being tampered with after the election is done. Then, reset them and have some trustworthy people visible enter a known number of votes for various candidates. If the end result is not akin to the data entered, then somebody has screwed with the machine to make it skew in favour of particular candidate(s).
It's been done, more or less. The reason it can't be done the way you describe is that at least one of the easy ways to tamper with the results is to pre-load the machine with non-zero results (from the link):
A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.
At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.
Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6
However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1
No, SCO filed first in the unrelated North Carolina state court to force the deposition to take place there, thereby arming the hidden legal trap they had set.
Interesting. I was basing my statement on Shaughnessy's declaration:
...SCO had provided a copy of a subpoena that purported to require Mr. Wilson to appear for a deposition on January 27, 2006 (with no location for the deposition specified),...
And Wells's order:
By petitioning the court in North Carolina to quash his deposition, Mr. Wilson submitted to the jurisdiction of that court in matters pertaining to his deposition.
Which, of course, isn't conclusive. Out of curiosity, where'd you see that SCO took it to the state court first?
Why does everyone assume he was stupid? Maybe he was bought off and "threw the game" so to speak for SCO?
Because there are lots of easier ways to "throw the game" than submitting yourself to hours of interrogation about your arrest history, prior relationships, etc. He could, for example, have done it just be being a little too rabidly pro-IBM in the deposition as originally outlined (responding with things like "While I wouldn't claim that IBM invented electricity, they were certainly the first to make good use of it!").
Besides, no one is saying that he's stupid (by all accounts, he's not), just that he was perhaps a little too trusting. It is, after all, a little difficult to get your mind around just how underhanded SCO really is. He can be forgiven for assuming that they really aren't as underhanded as laywers in the movies, when (as it turns out) they're worse.
IBM's lawyer? Why exactly does a company like IBM only have one lawyer, and why is he/she the sort of person who just runs off without telling anyone beforehand?
The article summary is poorly worded. Shaughnessy (the lawyer) was the only one that was part of an earlier teleconference and could rebut (from first hand knowledge) SCO's account. And he had no idea what was going on because Wilson (the retired guy who's being disposed) had taken it to an unrelated court in another state (presumably, the state where he lives) without telling the right people. So it was, I gather, just him and SCO's lawyers, and he let them tell the court that Shaughnessy really wasn't representing him anyway, being IBM's lawyer and not his.
Even the best lawyer can't be expected to hear an ex-employee starting to stick their foot in it in an other state, dive into a phone booth, come out in a cape and fly to the other side of the country in time to stop them. Heck, even the NSA would be hard pressed to pull it off.
The moral of the story: if you're involved in a multi-year litigation with known bad apples, don't do random stuff at the bidding of the opponent's lawyers without at least telling your own side's lawyers.
I think this is entirely wrong. You are punishing the wrong people:
By saying the corporation no longer exists and firing everyone you are simply putting countless thousands of INNOCENT people out of a job (the people who maintain the lines, the customer service reps, the secretaries who do nothing but file papers all day, etc...the every day people who work 9-5).
First off, they aren't all innocent. The CEO may have decided to go along with the illegal acts, but I doubt he/she actually did the dirty work. Just as the top dogs failed to stand up to the corrupt government officials, the middle managers failed to stand up to their bosses, the workers failed to stand up to their middle managers, and everyone failed to blow the whistle.
Secondly, unless the company wasn't doing anything useful, the jobs aren't going away. The same work will need to be done, just by some other company.
And thirdly, having everyone in the company responsible to some extent keeps everyone on their guard. It eliminates the "I was only doing my job" defense, and adds an additional pressure on unethical companies--they have to pay higher wages if they want people to work for them, since the people know (or suspect) that they might be thrown out of a job at any minute.
I agree with your suggestion that it might make sense to have hefty rewards for whistle blowers too, though I'm not sure about dividing them equally among the employees.
And the last thing America needs is LESS competition in the telecommunications industry...This would just drive prices up higher than their already inflated level punishing the customers of the company or at least the company that replaces them.
I think you are missing the point of competition. The whole reason competition helps the market place is that no company is indispensable. They can (and should) go out of business if they fail to perform as well as they others. All I'm saying here is that they present system, where the ability to craft misleading rate plans counts for more than the ability to refrain from breaking the law, doesn't represent what the market really needs. If we have to loose a few lawbreakers and wind up stuck with a couple of second stringer wannabes who never got the knack of putting together a deceptive rate plan, I say so be it.
By auctioning off the assets and giving the proceeds to the shareholders you do not punish the very people who should be...the people who own the company. These people will just take there money and invest it elsewhere only caring about making more money and not about any constitutional ethics.
Agreed. I accepted this point within an hour or so of my original post (see my comment "Good Point", above).
Don't let the stockholders get off either, or a slap on the wrist. If stockholders don't try to fight against this there should be no "get out of jail free" card. Shareholder enjoy limited liability, they are only liable for the amount they invested, let them pay the full price by loosing what they invested if they don't try to stop it.
Good point. The company's stock should be delisted and the proceeds of the auction should go to the victims. Knowing that that would be a likely outcome might serve as an even better deterrent than the thought of losing their jobs. If nothing else, it will cause people to bail out of companies that don't take the problem seriously.
If you honestly believe this, why waist your time writing a note to tell me? In any case, your selective quoting does not have anything to do with my ability to read.
Prosecutors in Michigan were standing by the charges against three Texas men,
The guys from Dallas, whom the grandparent was talking about, are still being charged.
Sorry if my referring to two cases in the same paragraph confused you. The first sentence was, as you surmised, about the Dearborn men. The second part was about the guys from Dallas, about who the FBI says they have no case:
The FBI said Monday that it had no information to indicate that the men in custody had any ties to terrorist organizations, the Associated Press reports. Nevertheless, the local police and prosecutors seem persuaded that they've foiled a dastardly plot, and appear prepared, for now, to go through with the prosecutions.
I can see why, if you just skimmed these articles, you might think the Texas men were still being charged. However, from the first paragraph of the link provided in the GGP (entitled "Texas men will not be facing terrorism charges"):
A county prosecutor backed off terror charges he had filed against three Palestinian-American men from Texas who were found buying large numbers of cell phones.
So no, no one is being charged for terrorism in either of these cases.
Could you perhaps provide a source for your outrageous claim that you somehow know that these guys were knowingly aiding terrorists, when the FBI can't find any evidence to support even weaker claims? I'm sure they'd love to know what you know.
--MarkusQ
P.S.
By the way, the impeachment of Clinton wasn't about a blowjob, it was about perjury and witness tampering. He was disbarred in Arkansas for the offense.
In the same way that Nixon's wasn't about Watergate.
I liked Clinton, but I can't support someone who sexually harrasses women, then perjures himself and tells witnesses to do the same to cover it up.
I, on the other hand, never liked or trusted Clinton and considered is extramarital affair, perjury, and obstruction of justice to be totally consistent with his personality.
It is a tribute to G. H. W. Bush's ability to systematically undermine everything this nation stands for that he actually makes my miss Clinton and his (by comparison) petty mendacity.
There never can be danger that the judges, by a series of deliberate usurpations on the authority of the legislature, would hazard the united resentment of the body entrusted with it, while this body was possessed of the means of punishing their presumption by degrading them from their stations. While this ought to remove all apprehensions on the subject, it affords at the same time a cogent argument for constituting the senate a court for the trial of impeachments.
While I feel the wiretapping is illegal, suing the companies that helped the government I feel is bad practice. These companies are in a bad position both ways. First you got a governing body to tell you to do something or face the consequences. You can be noble and such and be placed in jail and/or pay for lawyers to defend you, or just do what they say because they tell you it for national security and you have to assume that it is legal.
They're in a bad position? Oh, the poor corporations! We, the people, have for generations had to fight and die to defend our freedoms, but the new "Corporate people" who demand all the rights of citizenship might get stuck paying a fine or something if they refuse to actively break the law! The horror! The unfairness of it all!
I say the consequence for violating the constitution should be stiffer than anything corrupt officials can impose--say, complete and utter destruction of the corporation. Collaborate with corrupt government officials in an unconstitutional act? Fine. You aren't a corporation anymore. Everyone is fired, the assets are auctioned off and the proceeds (after all the corporation's debts are paid) goes to the shareholders. That way, it becomes a no brainer to say "No way!" the next time you are asked to betray the nation at the behest of a few power hungry elected officials or their minions.
That, or we could just give 'em a pass this time and hope that they've learned their lesson...
But here's the thing. Earth's Moon was born in a catastrophic collision more than 4 billion years ago.
So is this established fact now? I thought the that was far from proven, and even a quite debated theory.
But maybe the impact hypothesis has gained traction in the science community since I heard of this?
Then you probably haven't heard for twenty years or so. The Hartmann/Davis/Cameron/Ward theory is pretty much the only one that accounts for the known facts (composition, angular momentum, etc.) and has been the standard explanation for decades. It's never been really seriously questioned since it was proposed in the mid 1970's. Are you perhaps thinking of the pseudo-scientific collision-with-Venus nonsense instead?
but then turned out only to be buying cell phones to resell in Dallas at a profit.
Yes, to someone who ships them to a terrorist organization in the ME. And, yes, they knew where the phones were going.
That must be why they're dropping all the charges against them. Seriously, if you can substantiate this claim, I'm sure the FBI would love to talk to you. As it is, their case has basically been reduced to "they could have made money doing it, and foreign looking people that make money have been known to use it to aid terrorists" -- which, thank goodness, still isn't considered a very solid case in these here United States.
Please don't accuse me of ethical relitivism when you are apologizing for warrantless searches.
Hello? You're the one peddling the "everybody does it" line. I'm the one saying that what Bush did was a crime, illegal, wrong, and he should be impeached for it (see, for example, the link in my my sig.)
Where in the heck do you get off saying that I'm apologizing for Bush's conduct, or for Clinton's? And, for that matter, why is it that you focused on the phrase "ethical relativism", made a baseless accusation in return, but managed to totally ignore the point of my post which is that your "everybody does it" talking point is factually incorrect, in that it conflates two very different things as if they were the same?
President Coolidge fed his cat at the table, the first President Bush vomited into the lap of the Prime Minister of Japan, and the present President Bush talks with his mouth full of food. If some future President kills a dinner guest (which, unlike the other items, is illegal, even when the president does it), would you trot out some sort of "Presidents have always had atrocious table manners" line?
They have been doing this kind of thing since the Carter administration, unfortunately. The famous spy Aldrich Ames was captured during the Clinton administration by a warrantless search of his property using the same 'precedents'.
This ethical relativism talking point doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The specific searches that Clinton ordered were legal at the time he ordered them, while, as judge's ruling described in TFA reaffirms, the ones Bush ordered were illegal. Further, even at the time Clinton ordered his searches, he could not have done what Bush has done without breaking the law. Guess what? He stuck to what was legal.
He also gives Java credit for byte-codes, which predate it by decades (Smalltalk, USD Pascal, a portable Forth which I don't recall the name of, most prolog interpreters, and many other systems used byte codes before Java was even dreamt of).
The fact that he leaves off LISP, Smalltalk, Visicalc, includes no editors, no symbolic mathematics programs, and yet includes a worm and the Apollo software ruined it for me. The software behind CAT scans is way more impressive than the Apollo software, and worms...bah!
While I don't agree with the parent poster's spin re: "the editors" he's right about his core point: this is an astroturfing campaign, and even (as he points out) has a tracking ID built into the link.
Mod him up +1 Informative since we can't mod stories "-5 Astroturf"
Granted. I could quibble, but I'd be chasing crumbs.
Quality of lead
Thanks.
Getting warrants vs. seeking warrants
A key point that you seem to be skipping over here is that none of what you have offered explains why they wouldn't ask for warrants in the first place, as they are legally required to do.
As the story showed, they went to the FISA court. They argued their case. And the FISA court turned them down for requesting a much too broad warrant. It's not that they didn't try. It's that it didn't fly. One could even imagine that they wiretapped the area for 3 days and it was on the third day that it was turned down and they had to stop. The point is, the judge didn't okay their warrant request.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. They "they" I was referring to was the present Bush administration, not the hypothetical people in the scenario under discussion. Clearly, the people in your example sought warrants, as they are required by law to do. And, you've convinced me that there is at least one conceivable case in which such investigators might not get warrants that the legitimately need to prevent an attack.
But that isn't what the Bush administration has done. They problem isn't that they were refused warrants, but that they never even sought them in the first place.
Going back and re-reading this thread from the begining, as you suggested, I realize that I have, through out this discussion, been assuming that what you were saying was that there were certain cases where they would need to refrain from seeking warrants in order to catch the terrorists, when in fact you are saying that it would be more effective for them to proceed with an investigation even after warrants were denied, and thus people who care about our freedoms and the rule of law would be ill advised to focus on the effectiveness of illegal wiretaps and should instead concentrate on the illegality of illegal wiretaps.
So, after all this thinking, can you concede that it'd be possible that at least one attack would manage to get through that only an illegal wiretap could stop?
Yes, and I would say let it. If we have to destroy our freedoms "in order to save them", we will have suffered a far worse loss. Or, to quote More (via the pen of Bolt):
More: "Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
Roper: "I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
I know this may strike some people as harsh, but, when you consider our stands on pretty much any issue which could potentially cause the life of people individually and our stand on other matters (such as defensive war) which could cause the death of people en mass, it can be seen to be totally consistant with who we are as a people, and what we stand for when we aren't being manipulated by fearmongers. "Give me liberty or give me death" is not an un-American sentiment, no matter how much the present administration would like to paint it as such.
I will mostly grant your contention about probable cause, but I'm not as sure that it is as cut-and-dried as you seem to think. For example, suppose a kidnapper was captured, and, in confessing, admitted that he had locked his victim, unconscious but still alive, in a random car in the long term parking lot at LAX. Would (in your opinion) some sort of warrant or warrants be needed to legally search the cars and, if so, would it be legal for a judge to issue it?
The quality of the information
I'm still having trouble with the certain-but-unconvincing duality of the information you are assuming. It seems to me crucial to your case that they have information which is absolutely convincing to them but would not be to anyone else (say, a judge). Is this in fact a keystone of your argument, or would you still support it with either 1) rock solid proof, enough to convince any judge or 2) the information being questionable, and the agents in charge deciding to go ahead with it dispite the flaws?
Applying for a warrant vs. getting a warrant
A key point that you seem to be skipping over here is that none of what you have offered explains why they wouldn't ask for warrants in the first place, as they are legally required to do. You almost have me convinced that there might be a situation in which they felt they were justified in doing something for which they needed a warrant but that they simultaniously felt they would be unlikely to get one. But still, in such a case, I fail to see why the wouldn't at least try to get one.
On the other hand, failing to even seek a warrant in the first place, which is what they have repeatedly done, is rather easy to explain by assuming that they are using the wiretaps in bad faith (e.g., to spy on political opponents, anti-war activists, etc.)--in short, engaging in exactly the sort of misconduct that their predecessors (and in many cases, mentors or even parents) engaged in, prompting the creation of the FISA court in the first place.
If I may offer an analogy, there may be perfectly good and legitimate reasons why someone might veer off the highway and go four wheeling through people's yards at high speed to get around a police sobriety check point, but they aren't as easy to come up with as the more plausible (and more probable) nefarious reasons.
Untrusted guards, etc.
The untrusted guards assumption, if allowed, makes the whole thing way more complicated than it needs to be. If we're going to assume that we can't adequately vet members of "our team" we might as well cut out all the deadwood and just assume that the FISA judges themselves are in cahoots with the terrorists. As I said very early on, this sort of thing would neatly justify not seeking warrants without any other assumptions.
Alternative solutions
There is a certain asymmetry here; I pointed out (but agreed to ignore) all sorts of practical problems with the scenario, yet you are raising much smaller issues (essentially, "it would be deucedly inconvenient") against my proposed alternative solutions. There's little point in trying to come up with a full hundred alternatives if you plan to nit-pick them in this way, since it would be easier to take the gloves off and go after the practicality of your necessarily - illegal - wiretapping solution on the same terms instead.
Still, in case you really doubt the existence of a wealth of ideas as yet unexplored in this discussion, I'll throw out a few more:
Narrow the list by data mining; there is plenty of publicly available information that should be useful in significantly reducing the scope of the search, possible to a small enough list to get warrants for
Destroy the Statue of Liberty yourself, or at least publicly schedule its destruction, to force them into the bridge-plan, and otherwise take the initiative in controlling events. There are all sorts of variations he
That site is such a google rip off that it's not even funny.
That's odd.
My thought when I found it (and I specifically googled for such a site to use in the joke above) was "How funny! This site is a complete google rip off!" Exactly what I need for this joke!
First off, let me say that that is an excellent description; I believe I now understand what you are getting at. There are a few assumptions in your description that are a little extreme:
They have the ability to reliable monitor all phone traffic from Queens for keywords via some automatic system, with only a 1% false positive rate. Given the range of accents there, I would find this an amazing accomplishment.
The terrorist would use phone calls with a simple "telegraph cypher" for their activation codes. This would be very silly of them, since is would be an extremely traceable / breakable way to communicate what amount to only a few bits of information. The whole point of a "cell" system is that you don't have the sort of high-bandwidth traffic (e.g., voice calls) between cells, as very simple methods (e.g., caller ID) would break down the partitions between cells. A more reasonable system would be, say, the position a flowerpot in public place or the color graffiti on a wall somewhere.
You are assuming that all of this would be well documented in a central office somewhere, yet the terrorists would have no way of changing plans if their "headquarters" were raided.
You are assuming that they would make these calls from their home phones, and not, say, from a random pay phone in the city.
etc.
However, these are all well within the Cheney-in-a-tutu bounds I set, so other than noting them here I will ignore them.
Assuming all of the above (and other, similar but not enumerated points implied by the "etc.") are adequately accounted for, the core of your argument is either that 1) the FISA court could not grant their request or 2) it would not, and that, in spite of this, it should. Taking these points in that order:
The assumption that the FISA court could not grant such a request
I think you are on shaky ground here. First off, all constitutional limits have recognized exceptions in the case of "clear and present danger." Free speech does not mean you can falsely yell fire in a crowded theater, nor do the property rights of the theater owner prevent fireman from entering a burning theater without a warrant. But more importantly, you use hindsight to say that some number of the warrants would be illegal, but you will only know which ones after the terrorists are caught. The whole point of a warrant is to look for something; it does not automatically become "illegal" if what they are looking for isn't found. And you haven't backed up your earlier claim that there is some sort of magic upper limit on the number of warrants that could be issued.
If your logic worked, a crook could rent a dozen apartments (or maybe it would take twenty, or a hundred), rob a bank, and hide the money in one of them. The police would be powerless to search any of them because they couldn't establish probable cause for them individually even though they had certainty about them collectively. I would not, however, advise robbing a bank to test this theory.
If their evidence was good enough to convince the judge to issue the warrants, there's no question in my mind (failing incompetence on the part of the judge) that the warrants could not legally be issued by the court. Which brings us to the second point.
The assumption that the FISA court would not grant such a request
Here, you start off by assuming that the evidence they have is rock solid--they know all of the things that you have posited, but then you turn around and assume that the evidence is unconvincing to the judge. I say you can't have it both ways. Either the information is strong enough and you should be able to convince the judge, or it isn't and the real problem is with the botched investigation. In any case, this still isn't an argument why they shouldn't ask for a warrant, just a description of the case in which they might not get it--specifically, when they don't have
My point was that the time metric offered might not be sufficient.
Yes, I understand that. But my question is why wouldn't it be? They have to tell somebody that they want the wiretap in order to get it in the first place--unless you postulating some James Bond type who is a field agent, policy maker, and telecommunications tech all rolled into one. Chuck Norris may do the actual wire tapping himself, but in the real world, they call somebody and ask to have it set up. Why could that same call not also start their lawyers on getting the warrant?
So, one can legally wiretap an entire city by obtaining a warrant by the third day? I was under the impression that these post-72-hour wiretap warrants were designed to allow wiretapping one's target instantly instead of having to wait for a warrant, not to allow wiretapping large regions just to file a few wiretaps after the fact.
I'm not at all sure what you are saying here. Do you really believe that they have the resources to listen to that much traffic all at once, on short notice, but they don't have a spare lawyer they could send 'round to the judge to explain why they think they need to? Or that they would be justified in doing such a thing but couldn't convince any of the judges from a court that has never turned down a request that they needed a warrant?
If you consider it dancing around to point out that the major components of the most liberal wiretapping program available under the FISA courts have both a space and a time limit from which it's hardly inconceivably that a terrorist attack might not be covered (and I tried to give two examples, though you seemed to dismiss them), then I really do consider you unimaginative.
But you haven't pointed out any such thing. You talk about "getting warrants for an entire city" (some of the practical weaknesses of which I mention above) but you haven't said anything about there being a limit on the number of warrants they can request at one time.
If you're wanting me to make up specific examples to demonstrate the point, then you'll have to give me some guidelines on just how "real" you want it before you consider it no longer "dancing".
It's not that hard of a concept. All you need to do is:
Come up with something that the terrorists might try
Explain why a certain type of wiretap would be the best / only hope to catch or stop them
Explain why the FISA court wouldn't let them do it
So far you haven't really done this. You've sort of hinted at it, but if the FISA rules set a limit on the number of warrants they can request that is lower than the number they could reasonably execute, I can find no mention of it anywhere. The easiest way to get me to take back the "dancing around the issue" claim would be to point out where this limit is (e.g. in the law, or a responsible analysis of it).
--MarkusQ
P.S. Because I don't want you thinking I'm unimaginative, they might legitimately nuke the open ocean:
To kill off a pod of whales accidentally infected with a bio-terror disease that would kill off all mammals if it spread.
To produce a shock wave to probe a fault threatening to cause a tsunami in the mid Atlantic, or to trigger a calculated release of tension along such a fault
To create cloud cover as a temporary counter to global warming or to ease a drout.
In any case, the fallout from such a blast (similar to many that were routinely performed in early test programs) would be minimal compared to the disasters they are imagined to be mitigating.
As you can see, I'm setting the bar pretty low here; you should be able to come up with something at least this plausible.
P.P.S.:
Oh, and there's little evidence that a nuclear bomb would actually disrupt a hurricane significantly
Sure, but it's at least as plausible as the pre-Iraq invasion WMD claims. As I said above, I'm intentionally setting the bar low here to see if you can come up with some sort of remotely plausible example of your 1% case.
What would your "1% case" look like? Remember, they can already wiretap for 72 hours before getting the warrant
The time they need to wiretap 73 hours before getting the warrant.
Restating the question isn't the same thing as answering it. If I asked you to "name one thing that you thing would cure baldness" and you replied "a baldness cure," you'd hardly expect me to accept that as a responsive answer, would you?
The time that they know that someone is going to attack a specifically national monument and generally where they'll be when they get their "go ahead" call, but they don't know the exact phone to be used or who the hidden contact is.
Huh? Either way, they start the wiretap at exactly the same time. Only in one case (the legal one) the notify their superiors and have somebody get a warrant going within the first three days of the wiretap.
I'm sure you can come up with all sorts of other examples where the only way to stop a terrorist plot involves bending or breaking the law as the threat is imminent and the information is insufficient in the time provided to legally find the person to commit the attack.
No, I can't think of any; that was the point of my question. And, so far as I can tell, you can't either, otherwise you wouldn't be dancing around like this. I'm certainly not unimaginative; I can think of legitimate cases where they might want to drop a nuke in some otherwise empty spot in the middle of the ocean, wiretap the pope, or dress Cheney up in a tutu*. But I can't think of a single legitimate reason why they'd need to go around FISA.
Can you?
--MarkusQ
*
In an attempt to disrupt a category 7 hurricane, heading for an unprepaired Eastern seaboard
If they found out Bin Laden was really Catholic and the pope was his confessor
To distract the public from the mess they've made in just six short years
Slashdot Mirror
It's been done, more or less. The reason it can't be done the way you describe is that at least one of the easy ways to tamper with the results is to pre-load the machine with non-zero results (from the link):
--MarkusQ
This is the same ES&S who's chairman got into trouble with the Senate Ethics Committee because he failed to disclose his involvement with the company when he, as virtual an unknown in his first bid for public office, ran for and won a Senate seat against two well known and popular opponents in what was widely called "a surprise upset" -- in an election which was counted exclusively on machines manufactured by ES&S. Subsequently, the law in his state was changed to prohibit election workers from looking at the ballots, and outlaw hand recounts. The only recounts permitted by law are on machines manufactured by ES&S.
In case that helps put this in perspective.
--MarkusQ
Interesting. I was basing my statement on Shaughnessy's declaration:
And Wells's order:
Which, of course, isn't conclusive. Out of curiosity, where'd you see that SCO took it to the state court first?
--MarkusQ
Because there are lots of easier ways to "throw the game" than submitting yourself to hours of interrogation about your arrest history, prior relationships, etc. He could, for example, have done it just be being a little too rabidly pro-IBM in the deposition as originally outlined (responding with things like "While I wouldn't claim that IBM invented electricity, they were certainly the first to make good use of it!").
Besides, no one is saying that he's stupid (by all accounts, he's not), just that he was perhaps a little too trusting. It is, after all, a little difficult to get your mind around just how underhanded SCO really is. He can be forgiven for assuming that they really aren't as underhanded as laywers in the movies, when (as it turns out) they're worse.
--MarkusQ
The article summary is poorly worded. Shaughnessy (the lawyer) was the only one that was part of an earlier teleconference and could rebut (from first hand knowledge) SCO's account. And he had no idea what was going on because Wilson (the retired guy who's being disposed) had taken it to an unrelated court in another state (presumably, the state where he lives) without telling the right people. So it was, I gather, just him and SCO's lawyers, and he let them tell the court that Shaughnessy really wasn't representing him anyway, being IBM's lawyer and not his.
Even the best lawyer can't be expected to hear an ex-employee starting to stick their foot in it in an other state, dive into a phone booth, come out in a cape and fly to the other side of the country in time to stop them. Heck, even the NSA would be hard pressed to pull it off.
The moral of the story: if you're involved in a multi-year litigation with known bad apples, don't do random stuff at the bidding of the opponent's lawyers without at least telling your own side's lawyers.
--MarkusQ
So, do you live in CR, or just bike here?
--MarkusQ
First off, they aren't all innocent. The CEO may have decided to go along with the illegal acts, but I doubt he/she actually did the dirty work. Just as the top dogs failed to stand up to the corrupt government officials, the middle managers failed to stand up to their bosses, the workers failed to stand up to their middle managers, and everyone failed to blow the whistle.
Secondly, unless the company wasn't doing anything useful, the jobs aren't going away. The same work will need to be done, just by some other company.
And thirdly, having everyone in the company responsible to some extent keeps everyone on their guard. It eliminates the "I was only doing my job" defense, and adds an additional pressure on unethical companies--they have to pay higher wages if they want people to work for them, since the people know (or suspect) that they might be thrown out of a job at any minute.
I agree with your suggestion that it might make sense to have hefty rewards for whistle blowers too, though I'm not sure about dividing them equally among the employees.
I think you are missing the point of competition. The whole reason competition helps the market place is that no company is indispensable. They can (and should) go out of business if they fail to perform as well as they others. All I'm saying here is that they present system, where the ability to craft misleading rate plans counts for more than the ability to refrain from breaking the law, doesn't represent what the market really needs. If we have to loose a few lawbreakers and wind up stuck with a couple of second stringer wannabes who never got the knack of putting together a deceptive rate plan, I say so be it.
Agreed. I accepted this point within an hour or so of my original post (see my comment "Good Point", above).
--MarkusQ
Agreed. See my post "Good Point" above.
--MarkusQ
Good point. The company's stock should be delisted and the proceeds of the auction should go to the victims. Knowing that that would be a likely outcome might serve as an even better deterrent than the thought of losing their jobs. If nothing else, it will cause people to bail out of companies that don't take the problem seriously.
--MarkusQ
If you honestly believe this, why waist your time writing a note to tell me? In any case, your selective quoting does not have anything to do with my ability to read.
Sorry if my referring to two cases in the same paragraph confused you. The first sentence was, as you surmised, about the Dearborn men. The second part was about the guys from Dallas, about who the FBI says they have no case:
I can see why, if you just skimmed these articles, you might think the Texas men were still being charged. However, from the first paragraph of the link provided in the GGP (entitled "Texas men will not be facing terrorism charges"):
So no, no one is being charged for terrorism in either of these cases.
Could you perhaps provide a source for your outrageous claim that you somehow know that these guys were knowingly aiding terrorists, when the FBI can't find any evidence to support even weaker claims? I'm sure they'd love to know what you know.
--MarkusQ
P.S.
In the same way that Nixon's wasn't about Watergate.
I, on the other hand, never liked or trusted Clinton and considered is extramarital affair, perjury, and obstruction of justice to be totally consistent with his personality.
It is a tribute to G. H. W. Bush's ability to systematically undermine everything this nation stands for that he actually makes my miss Clinton and his (by comparison) petty mendacity.
That would be silly, given all the unconstitutional/illegal things he has admitted (even bragged) about doing.
Not at all correct. As Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers, impeachment of judges for rulings which go against the intent of congress is an essential part of the checks and balances:
--MarkusQ
They're in a bad position? Oh, the poor corporations! We, the people, have for generations had to fight and die to defend our freedoms, but the new "Corporate people" who demand all the rights of citizenship might get stuck paying a fine or something if they refuse to actively break the law! The horror! The unfairness of it all!
I say the consequence for violating the constitution should be stiffer than anything corrupt officials can impose--say, complete and utter destruction of the corporation. Collaborate with corrupt government officials in an unconstitutional act? Fine. You aren't a corporation anymore. Everyone is fired, the assets are auctioned off and the proceeds (after all the corporation's debts are paid) goes to the shareholders. That way, it becomes a no brainer to say "No way!" the next time you are asked to betray the nation at the behest of a few power hungry elected officials or their minions.
That, or we could just give 'em a pass this time and hope that they've learned their lesson...
--MarkusQ
Then you probably haven't heard for twenty years or so. The Hartmann/Davis/Cameron/Ward theory is pretty much the only one that accounts for the known facts (composition, angular momentum, etc.) and has been the standard explanation for decades. It's never been really seriously questioned since it was proposed in the mid 1970's. Are you perhaps thinking of the pseudo-scientific collision-with-Venus nonsense instead?
See the Planetary Science Institute's writeup for more details, or just Google.
--MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
Hello? You're the one peddling the "everybody does it" line. I'm the one saying that what Bush did was a crime, illegal, wrong, and he should be impeached for it (see, for example, the link in my my sig.)
Where in the heck do you get off saying that I'm apologizing for Bush's conduct, or for Clinton's? And, for that matter, why is it that you focused on the phrase "ethical relativism", made a baseless accusation in return, but managed to totally ignore the point of my post which is that your "everybody does it" talking point is factually incorrect, in that it conflates two very different things as if they were the same?
President Coolidge fed his cat at the table, the first President Bush vomited into the lap of the Prime Minister of Japan, and the present President Bush talks with his mouth full of food. If some future President kills a dinner guest (which, unlike the other items, is illegal, even when the president does it), would you trot out some sort of "Presidents have always had atrocious table manners" line?
--MarkusQ
This ethical relativism talking point doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The specific searches that Clinton ordered were legal at the time he ordered them, while, as judge's ruling described in TFA reaffirms, the ones Bush ordered were illegal. Further, even at the time Clinton ordered his searches, he could not have done what Bush has done without breaking the law. Guess what? He stuck to what was legal.
--MarkusQ
He also gives Java credit for byte-codes, which predate it by decades (Smalltalk, USD Pascal, a portable Forth which I don't recall the name of, most prolog interpreters, and many other systems used byte codes before Java was even dreamt of).
The fact that he leaves off LISP, Smalltalk, Visicalc, includes no editors, no symbolic mathematics programs, and yet includes a worm and the Apollo software ruined it for me. The software behind CAT scans is way more impressive than the Apollo software, and worms...bah!
--MarkusQ
While I don't agree with the parent poster's spin re: "the editors" he's right about his core point: this is an astroturfing campaign, and even (as he points out) has a tracking ID built into the link.
Mod him up +1 Informative since we can't mod stories "-5 Astroturf"
--MarkusQ
Probable cause
Granted. I could quibble, but I'd be chasing crumbs.
Quality of lead
Thanks.
Getting warrants vs. seeking warrants
Sorry, I wasn't clear. They "they" I was referring to was the present Bush administration, not the hypothetical people in the scenario under discussion. Clearly, the people in your example sought warrants, as they are required by law to do. And, you've convinced me that there is at least one conceivable case in which such investigators might not get warrants that the legitimately need to prevent an attack.
But that isn't what the Bush administration has done. They problem isn't that they were refused warrants, but that they never even sought them in the first place.
Going back and re-reading this thread from the begining, as you suggested, I realize that I have, through out this discussion, been assuming that what you were saying was that there were certain cases where they would need to refrain from seeking warrants in order to catch the terrorists, when in fact you are saying that it would be more effective for them to proceed with an investigation even after warrants were denied, and thus people who care about our freedoms and the rule of law would be ill advised to focus on the effectiveness of illegal wiretaps and should instead concentrate on the illegality of illegal wiretaps.
So, after all this thinking, can you concede that it'd be possible that at least one attack would manage to get through that only an illegal wiretap could stop?
Yes, and I would say let it. If we have to destroy our freedoms "in order to save them", we will have suffered a far worse loss. Or, to quote More (via the pen of Bolt):
I know this may strike some people as harsh, but, when you consider our stands on pretty much any issue which could potentially cause the life of people individually and our stand on other matters (such as defensive war) which could cause the death of people en mass, it can be seen to be totally consistant with who we are as a people, and what we stand for when we aren't being manipulated by fearmongers. "Give me liberty or give me death" is not an un-American sentiment, no matter how much the present administration would like to paint it as such.
--MarkusQ
Re-organizing, by issues.
Probable cause
I will mostly grant your contention about probable cause, but I'm not as sure that it is as cut-and-dried as you seem to think. For example, suppose a kidnapper was captured, and, in confessing, admitted that he had locked his victim, unconscious but still alive, in a random car in the long term parking lot at LAX. Would (in your opinion) some sort of warrant or warrants be needed to legally search the cars and, if so, would it be legal for a judge to issue it?
The quality of the information
I'm still having trouble with the certain-but-unconvincing duality of the information you are assuming. It seems to me crucial to your case that they have information which is absolutely convincing to them but would not be to anyone else (say, a judge). Is this in fact a keystone of your argument, or would you still support it with either 1) rock solid proof, enough to convince any judge or 2) the information being questionable, and the agents in charge deciding to go ahead with it dispite the flaws?
Applying for a warrant vs. getting a warrant
A key point that you seem to be skipping over here is that none of what you have offered explains why they wouldn't ask for warrants in the first place, as they are legally required to do. You almost have me convinced that there might be a situation in which they felt they were justified in doing something for which they needed a warrant but that they simultaniously felt they would be unlikely to get one. But still, in such a case, I fail to see why the wouldn't at least try to get one.
On the other hand, failing to even seek a warrant in the first place, which is what they have repeatedly done, is rather easy to explain by assuming that they are using the wiretaps in bad faith (e.g., to spy on political opponents, anti-war activists, etc.)--in short, engaging in exactly the sort of misconduct that their predecessors (and in many cases, mentors or even parents) engaged in, prompting the creation of the FISA court in the first place.
If I may offer an analogy, there may be perfectly good and legitimate reasons why someone might veer off the highway and go four wheeling through people's yards at high speed to get around a police sobriety check point, but they aren't as easy to come up with as the more plausible (and more probable) nefarious reasons.
Untrusted guards, etc.
The untrusted guards assumption, if allowed, makes the whole thing way more complicated than it needs to be. If we're going to assume that we can't adequately vet members of "our team" we might as well cut out all the deadwood and just assume that the FISA judges themselves are in cahoots with the terrorists. As I said very early on, this sort of thing would neatly justify not seeking warrants without any other assumptions.
Alternative solutions
There is a certain asymmetry here; I pointed out (but agreed to ignore) all sorts of practical problems with the scenario, yet you are raising much smaller issues (essentially, "it would be deucedly inconvenient") against my proposed alternative solutions. There's little point in trying to come up with a full hundred alternatives if you plan to nit-pick them in this way, since it would be easier to take the gloves off and go after the practicality of your necessarily - illegal - wiretapping solution on the same terms instead.
Still, in case you really doubt the existence of a wealth of ideas as yet unexplored in this discussion, I'll throw out a few more:
That's odd.
My thought when I found it (and I specifically googled for such a site to use in the joke above) was "How funny! This site is a complete google rip off!" Exactly what I need for this joke!
I hope our senses of humour never shake hands!
--MarkusQ
Seriously, when you see a word like "Moodle" that you don't know, why don't you just Omgili for it?
--MarkusQ
First off, let me say that that is an excellent description; I believe I now understand what you are getting at. There are a few assumptions in your description that are a little extreme:
However, these are all well within the Cheney-in-a-tutu bounds I set, so other than noting them here I will ignore them.
Assuming all of the above (and other, similar but not enumerated points implied by the "etc.") are adequately accounted for, the core of your argument is either that 1) the FISA court could not grant their request or 2) it would not, and that, in spite of this, it should. Taking these points in that order:
The assumption that the FISA court could not grant such a request
I think you are on shaky ground here. First off, all constitutional limits have recognized exceptions in the case of "clear and present danger." Free speech does not mean you can falsely yell fire in a crowded theater, nor do the property rights of the theater owner prevent fireman from entering a burning theater without a warrant. But more importantly, you use hindsight to say that some number of the warrants would be illegal, but you will only know which ones after the terrorists are caught. The whole point of a warrant is to look for something; it does not automatically become "illegal" if what they are looking for isn't found. And you haven't backed up your earlier claim that there is some sort of magic upper limit on the number of warrants that could be issued.
If your logic worked, a crook could rent a dozen apartments (or maybe it would take twenty, or a hundred), rob a bank, and hide the money in one of them. The police would be powerless to search any of them because they couldn't establish probable cause for them individually even though they had certainty about them collectively. I would not, however, advise robbing a bank to test this theory.
If their evidence was good enough to convince the judge to issue the warrants, there's no question in my mind (failing incompetence on the part of the judge) that the warrants could not legally be issued by the court. Which brings us to the second point.
The assumption that the FISA court would not grant such a request
Here, you start off by assuming that the evidence they have is rock solid--they know all of the things that you have posited, but then you turn around and assume that the evidence is unconvincing to the judge. I say you can't have it both ways. Either the information is strong enough and you should be able to convince the judge, or it isn't and the real problem is with the botched investigation. In any case, this still isn't an argument why they shouldn't ask for a warrant, just a description of the case in which they might not get it--specifically, when they don't have
But you haven't pointed out any such thing. You talk about "getting warrants for an entire city" (some of the practical weaknesses of which I mention above) but you haven't said anything about there being a limit on the number of warrants they can request at one time.
It's not that hard of a concept. All you need to do is:
So far you haven't really done this. You've sort of hinted at it, but if the FISA rules set a limit on the number of warrants they can request that is lower than the number they could reasonably execute, I can find no mention of it anywhere. The easiest way to get me to take back the "dancing around the issue" claim would be to point out where this limit is (e.g. in the law, or a responsible analysis of it).
--MarkusQ
P.S. Because I don't want you thinking I'm unimaginative, they might legitimately nuke the open ocean:
In any case, the fallout from such a blast (similar to many that were routinely performed in early test programs) would be minimal compared to the disasters they are imagined to be mitigating.
As you can see, I'm setting the bar pretty low here; you should be able to come up with something at least this plausible.
P.P.S.:
Sure, but it's at least as plausible as the pre-Iraq invasion WMD claims. As I said above, I'm intentionally setting the bar low here to see if you can come up with some sort of remotely plausible example of your 1% case.Restating the question isn't the same thing as answering it. If I asked you to "name one thing that you thing would cure baldness" and you replied "a baldness cure," you'd hardly expect me to accept that as a responsive answer, would you?
Huh? Either way, they start the wiretap at exactly the same time. Only in one case (the legal one) the notify their superiors and have somebody get a warrant going within the first three days of the wiretap.
No, I can't think of any; that was the point of my question. And, so far as I can tell, you can't either, otherwise you wouldn't be dancing around like this. I'm certainly not unimaginative; I can think of legitimate cases where they might want to drop a nuke in some otherwise empty spot in the middle of the ocean, wiretap the pope, or dress Cheney up in a tutu*. But I can't think of a single legitimate reason why they'd need to go around FISA.
Can you?
--MarkusQ
*