The examples you cite are generally not entrapment because the persons they catch were already doing these things before they met the FBI agents. The difference between the terrorism stings and a traditional sting can be illustrated thus:
Traditional sting: send out agents to places where drugs are sold and arrest those who mistake them for drug dealers and try to buy.
New-style sting: send agents into the community to make friends and introduce them to weed. When they convince someone to try it, they will take him to a "drug dealer" who is really a cop.
The parallel is not perfect, but I think it is close enough to show that these stings are different and the concerns some have are not nonsense.
Yes. As opposed to actual terrorist groups manufacturing terrorists out of otherwise innocent (albeit disenfranchised) people.
These "otherwise innocent" people would have caused mayhem anyway. They would have been manipulated the same way regardless of whether it had been the FBI or an actual terrorist group.
This is an interesting argument. It is probably the justification the FBI is using. However, it contains untested assertions. I would like to know:
* How many persons out there are suceptible to this kind of manipulation?
* What is the likelyhood that a real terrorist group would manipulate any particular one of them?
* Are these FBI operations significatly depleting the supply of easily manipulated disenfrancised persons?
This is no different then a UC prostitute standing out on the corner, if the prostitute was not there then the John would not break the law. All the FBI is doing is giving the means to commit the crime not enticing people to commit them.
I don't think most people have a problem with the kind of sting operation you describe. But would you feel the same if 90% of the prostitues were police officers and they would stalk a John for a year?The NYT article claims similiar levels of persuasion.
If patents really define what makes software "free" or not-free, then no one would be able to chose to make a free H.264 codec.
I am not sure what you are trying to say. One can certainly write H.264 codec and distribute the source code under the GPL. But the recipient does not have the right to _use_ it unless he obtains a license. So, these implementations are not fully free and the authors cannot make them free (without offering to pay the license fees for all of the users).
My point is it's stupid to not support a codec just because of how it was invented. It's still free software.
At present no H.264 implementation _can_ be free software. If you use it for certain purposes or at a certain volume you have to give money to the MPEG consortium. You may think this is OK, but it is not "stupid" to be unhappy with this arrangement.
I suspect the bigger problem is that there are so many patents on video codecs that any better open source alternative would infringe on at least one of those patents.
This is a controversion question. The consortium which licenses H264 has certainly expressed this opinion. They say things along the lines of: "we can't say on which of our patents it infringes but we know it must because 1) it is a modern video codec, and 2) one cannot possibly write a modern video codec without having to deal with at least some of our patents."
The view is expressed by the developers of VP8 (WebM) is that H264 is the result of deliberately steering developement so as to intersect as many of the consortium's members' patents as possible. VP8 is supposedly the result of heading toward the same goal while steering around them.
Whether the VP8 developers can make their codec as good as H264 without involving any of the MPEG consortium patents is still an open question. I gather that they have not achieved that goal yet.
No seriously, why can't they have both h264 and WebM support and let the market decide which one gets used more?
The market has already decided that, hence the decision. If WebM is removed from official builds then anyone should still be free to re-include it in their own builds. Doesn't really seem like an issue either way.
That is cold comfort to those who want to publish video in WebM format.
Ogg Theora and WebM are no better in quality than MPEG3 (i.e. halfway between crappy MPEG2 and the newer MPEG4).
I wish ATSC used MPEG4 cause I'm tired of seeing blocks/mosquitos on my television screen. Oh well... the ATSC arrived too soon (1998).
There is no such thing as MPEG3. They went right from MPEG2 to MPEG4. I imagine they did this because they thought MPEG3 would be confused with MP3. MP3 refers to MPEG audio layer III (part of the MPEG1 and MPEG2 standards).
The ruling is equivalent to "if you have a logon, you should have root".
I think you may have misread the summary. I know I did the first time. But on closer reading it actually suggests that using tricks to obtain a higher level of access is indeed a case of exceeding authorized access.
This question came up because some prosecutors have been confusing (perhaps deliberately) the ideas of exceeding authorized access and exceeding authorized authority. The first is the breaking of locks. The second is the disobeying of rules.
no, it just means it's not a criminal offense when employees take data with them. sales people have been doing this for decades. companies have had data security policies before computers and this is no different
It could still be an offense under a different law. The judge here is making a distinction between exceeding unauthorized access and abusing authorized access. An example: If I pick the lock on a filing cabinet in the boss's office and photocopy the trade secret documents inside and give them to a competitor I have exceeded authorized access. On the other hand if I use my key to open a filing cabinet in my own office and photocopy the same documents and give them to a competitor, I have abused (but not exceeded) my authorized access.
In both cases multiple offenses are committed. But there is one more offense in the first scenario than in the second.
This is not hair splitting. Without this distinction any misconduct by persons with authorized access makes their access unauthorized. This could have very surprising consequences. In one recent case a prosecutor argued that a user who violated the terms of use of a web site had obtained 'unauthorized access' because she had used the site in an 'unauthorized manner'. If we were to access this theory, then web site operators and employers could in effect write their own laws and get people sent to jail for violating them.
I have a similiar story. I had an English teacher in the seventh or eigth grade who conducted a lesson on the proper punctuation of direct and indirect quotations. For the test she took about ten sentences, stripped them of all punctuation and required us to restore it. One of the sentences looked something like this:
the principal said that school opens two days earlier
The was divided in its answer:
The principal said, "that school opens two days earlier."
The principal said that school opens two days earlier.
She insisted that one of them (the first I think) must be marked wrong. She claimed that those who insisted that both were perfectly plausible parsings of the sentence were simply trying to be difficult.
Years later I realized that she had missed a golden opportunity to impress upon us the great importance of correct punctionation. I now think the reason she missed it is that she had no understanding of the purpose of punctionation. She tended to see correct grammar and punctionation as conformance of arbitrary rules by which one proves that one is educated.
Cool Story Bro: When I was in third grade, there was a question on a math test, it was something like:
4444444 -5555555 --------------
I answered -1111111 and had it marked wrong. I argued with the teacher that the answer was correct and his response that it wasn't in this class; the correct answer was that the problem couldn't be done.
What was his reasoning? Am I missing something obvious?
It is mandatory in any/. discussion of cellphones that crusaders from the Obvious League of America swoop in and meticulously and pedantically point out that you have to pay for service in addition to the cost of the phones.
You seem to be missing the point, so it probably is not obvious. One does not buy the phone and then buy service. (That would be obvious.) One makes a down payment on the phone, buys service, and pays for the phone on the installment plan.
The summary states that they are "effectively giving the [phone] away". In reality they are giving a $100 discount on a $450 phone. That is a huge difference.
Projected support costs of Linux version vs. Projected revenue from it would be my guess. It's oft-repeated unfortunately.
Yes, it is a frequently cited reason, but not necessary the true one. Netflix used to work on Linux (until they switched to Silverlight). The last explanation from a Netflix executives of why they still have not restored Linux support was a long string of technical gibberish which basically boiled down to "because it isn't Windows". It was clear that he had no idea what it would take to get Linux support back.
It is not just Netflix that does this. Estimates of how hard it would be to support Linux often assume a separate from-scratch development effort would be required. Often all that is really needed is to provide what they already have in a slightly different form. Sometimes this just means a new installer. In other cases all that is required is a few web pages. Very often the effort would benefit all of their uses. For example, if Garmin were to provided direct links to firmware files and instructions for copying them to the right place on the GPS, it would save users a lot of trouble when the just-click-this-and-don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it programs fail.
However is the "knitted together" text better than, or even different from, just googling and reading some of the top sites, reading various topics on wikipedia?
The difference is that this upstart publisher claims to do the googling for you and to organize the results. It would be difficult to do it yourself since you would have to first borrow the book from a classmate and create an outline so that you would know which topics will be discussed in class and in what order.
I thought educational use was exempt from copyright restrictions.
You are thinking of the concept of fair use. Such uses are called fair because they do not unreasonably encroach on the right of the author to exploit his work commercially. The principle of fair uses recognizes that we sometimes have to make copies in order to study the work, comment on it, and show it to others. But, this principle does not permit us to try to take over the function of the publisher. Copying entire textbooks and distributing them to students (who will be studying the subjects expounded in the textbooks) would be taking over the function of the publisher.
However, photocopying a few pages from a textbook and passing them out in a technical writing class so that students could examine a good (or bad) example would be fair use. It would probably also be fair use to copy an article from a newspaper and pass it out in class in order to aid in a discussion of politics or current events. This is what people mean when they say that copying for educational purposes is allowed.
From the article: Those "Thieves" just copied our work, reworded stuff so it's not a direct copy, and now give it away! The question is how much do you have to re-word factual content in order to not be copyright infringement. There is a limit to how far they can differ and still cover the same (factual) material.
The party which has brought this suit have described the upstart's product as a paraphrased version of their product. A paraphrase is a sentence-by-sentence rewording. If it is copyright violation to publish an unauthorized translation into another language and publish the translation, surely it is also a copyright violation to publish a paraphrase. But, we don't have enough information to say whether this is really what was done.
There are ways to produce a replacement text without paraphrasing. For example, one could have someone read the text and produce an outline. One would then give the outline to a writer (who had never read the original book) and tell him to flesh it out into a textbook. It is likely that one could give the writer an outline with a high level of detail without risking copyright infringement.
Unlike killing another human being, U.S. law seems not to provide for an affirmative defense in crimes against the state. I could be wrong, but I can't think of any at the moment, anyway.
Jury Nullification is not an affirmative defense. To raise a affirmative defense means to say something like, "Even if I did perform the acts of which I am accused and understood what I was doing, I am not guilty because of X". For example, self defense is an affirmative defense against a charge of murder because the accused says: "I may have killed him, but he was trying to kill or gravely injure me."
Such defenses are called affirmative because the accused affirms (asserts) that his actions where justified. They are called affirmative in order to distinguish them from the other broad category of defenses: negating defenses. A negating defense is an assertion that one or more of the essential elements of the crime is absent. For example a negating defense to charge of treason might be: "I did not know that the envelope which I was asked to deliver contained state secrets and that the recipient was an enemy agent."
Jury Nullification may be 'the citizens last defense against the oppressor', but it is not a defense in the sense which the AC meant.
You have to be very sheltered to not know what a cake is, know what a birthday is and not know it's a huge tradition in many places worldwide.
I cannot beleive in 2012 children can be that removed from society.
But, the child failed the test; it highlighted a problem; a birthday cake was shown with the words "this is a birthday cake". Problem fixed in less time than it took me to write this sentence.
If I understand the story correctly, the child was about four years old. At four I was just beginning to think about the idea that there was a world beyond my immediate experiance.
But a subject as mundane as birthdays? If your religion forbids them from being mentioned then I'll happily ridicule you, and you'll deserve it.
I don't think you'll get the chance. This has nothing to do with anyone's religion and everything to do with political correctness. Politicial correctness is the practice of imagining reasons why others might be offended and then taking steps to prevent the alleged cause of offense. The politically correct often get it wrong. For example, many schoolteachers tell children that they mustn't say "American Indian". This dispite that fact that American Indians do not generally consider the term offensive and in fact somewhat prefer it to "Native American". (See: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aihmterms.html)
Only for contrived definitions of "Christian". A Christian is one who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, our Savior, and the Son of God. Jehovah's Witnesses vigorously assert all these points.
The "Jehovah's Witnesses are not Christians" nonsense is disinformation invented by resentful clergymen. They claim that a Christian must also believe that Jesus of Nazareth and the God of the Old Testament (Jehovah) are one and the same person. This is problematic because Jesus of Nazareth, the writers of the New Testament, and some of the early Church fathers made numerous statements which (if taken at face value) flat-out contradict this view. This doctrine (known as the Trinity) became firmly established in the Church about three centuries after the death of Christ. (If you are interested in this, you might start by reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity#History.
In other words, when one bends the definition of "Christian" far enough to exclude Jehovah's Witnesses, one casts doubt upon the Christianity of the Apostles, the Gospel writers and some of the early Church Fathers.
(To those who would nit-pick the above explaination: I am aware that Trinitarians have explanations for the statements in the New Testament which seem to contradict their views. I am also aware that the vast majority of currently existing Christian denominations accept the Trinity doctrine in some form.)
It doesn't override the law, which is why Glik won. But it does make it hard for the police department to punish them. How does this sound: "Yes, we know we told you to do this, but it was illegal and so now we are going to punish you?"
It sounds a lot like personal responsibility to me. The officers took an oath to uphold the law not the police department's policy on the law. That is an oath they should expect to be held to and should, in fact, actually be held to. They should have known that the policy was against the law and should have fought with the superiors over being required to follow it, or at very least, chosen not to and force their superiors to punish them for following the law over policy.
The bottom is this (something America, and perhaps the world, has forgotten): Regardless of what anyone else tells you to do, you are in full control of and therefore responsible for your own actions. All of them.
I don't disagree with anything you have said above. All I am saying is that the punishment has to come from outside the police department.
They acted in a way they believed the law specified. It took 5 years of lawyers and judges wrangling for it to be conclusively decided that the law didn't specify that and the arrest was wrongful.
If it took people who have been studying law most of their lives that long to decide, what chance does a police officer, with a comparatively small legal knowledge and a few minutes under pressure to make his mind up, have to get to the right decision? It would be more than a bit harsh to brand cops criminals when they were forced to make a decision that was beyond their capability.
I think you should go read the appeals court's decision. This question was specifically addressed.
How can it be "wire" tapping to record what your eyes can plainly see, in public? What wire? What tapping?
Despite what the summary says, he was not accused of wiretapping. He was accused of violating a law which is often (and somewhat erroneously) referred to as the "Wiretapping Statue". It is actually entitled "Interception of wire and oral communications".
It sounds like the city had a policy of doing this. So you have some officials of the city saying arrest people with the cameras. Even though it is likely illegal (they didn't have precedent yet so they can claim they where acting on their understanding of the law) and most likely won't stand up in court.
The city lost because the court ruled that there was precedent. A court had already ruled that if someone has a tape recorder out and ready for use, any recording that he may be making is not secret, even if he doesn't say "this thing is on".
Slashdot Mirror
So when the FBI uses stings to catch international arms traffickers, organized crime figures, corrupt public officials, and embezzlers, are they "morons" too, or just would-be terrorists? Your post is nonsense.
The examples you cite are generally not entrapment because the persons they catch were already doing these things before they met the FBI agents. The difference between the terrorism stings and a traditional sting can be illustrated thus:
Traditional sting: send out agents to places where drugs are sold and arrest those who mistake them for drug dealers and try to buy.
New-style sting: send agents into the community to make friends and introduce them to weed. When they convince someone to try it, they will take him to a "drug dealer" who is really a cop.
The parallel is not perfect, but I think it is close enough to show that these stings are different and the concerns some have are not nonsense.
Yes. As opposed to actual terrorist groups manufacturing terrorists out of otherwise innocent (albeit disenfranchised) people.
These "otherwise innocent" people would have caused mayhem anyway. They would have been manipulated the same way regardless of whether it had been the FBI or an actual terrorist group.
This is an interesting argument. It is probably the justification the FBI is using. However, it contains untested assertions. I would like to know:
* How many persons out there are suceptible to this kind of manipulation?
* What is the likelyhood that a real terrorist group would manipulate any particular one of them?
* Are these FBI operations significatly depleting the supply of easily manipulated disenfrancised persons?
This is no different then a UC prostitute standing out on the corner, if the prostitute was not there then the John would not break the law. All the FBI is doing is giving the means to commit the crime not enticing people to commit them.
I don't think most people have a problem with the kind of sting operation you describe. But would you feel the same if 90% of the prostitues were police officers and they would stalk a John for a year?The NYT article claims similiar levels of persuasion.
If patents really define what makes software "free" or not-free, then no one would be able to chose to make a free H.264 codec.
I am not sure what you are trying to say. One can certainly write H.264 codec and distribute the source code under the GPL. But the recipient does not have the right to _use_ it unless he obtains a license. So, these implementations are not fully free and the authors cannot make them free (without offering to pay the license fees for all of the users).
My point is it's stupid to not support a codec just because of how it was invented. It's still free software.
At present no H.264 implementation _can_ be free software. If you use it for certain purposes or at a certain volume you have to give money to the MPEG consortium. You may think this is OK, but it is not "stupid" to be unhappy with this arrangement.
I suspect the bigger problem is that there are so many patents on video codecs that any better open source alternative would infringe on at least one of those patents.
This is a controversion question. The consortium which licenses H264 has certainly expressed this opinion. They say things along the lines of: "we can't say on which of our patents it infringes but we know it must because 1) it is a modern video codec, and 2) one cannot possibly write a modern video codec without having to deal with at least some of our patents."
The view is expressed by the developers of VP8 (WebM) is that H264 is the result of deliberately steering developement so as to intersect as many of the consortium's members' patents as possible. VP8 is supposedly the result of heading toward the same goal while steering around them.
Whether the VP8 developers can make their codec as good as H264 without involving any of the MPEG consortium patents is still an open question. I gather that they have not achieved that goal yet.
No seriously, why can't they have both h264 and WebM support and let the market decide which one gets used more?
The market has already decided that, hence the decision. If WebM is removed from official builds then anyone should still be free to re-include it in their own builds. Doesn't really seem like an issue either way.
That is cold comfort to those who want to publish video in WebM format.
Ogg Theora and WebM are no better in quality than MPEG3 (i.e. halfway between crappy MPEG2 and the newer MPEG4).
I wish ATSC used MPEG4 cause I'm tired of seeing blocks/mosquitos on my television screen. Oh well... the ATSC arrived too soon (1998).
There is no such thing as MPEG3. They went right from MPEG2 to MPEG4. I imagine they did this because they thought MPEG3 would be confused with MP3. MP3 refers to MPEG audio layer III (part of the MPEG1 and MPEG2 standards).
Perhaps somewhere there are. But not here.
The ruling is equivalent to "if you have a logon, you should have root".
I think you may have misread the summary. I know I did the first time. But on closer reading it actually suggests that using tricks to obtain a higher level of access is indeed a case of exceeding authorized access.
This question came up because some prosecutors have been confusing (perhaps deliberately) the ideas of exceeding authorized access and exceeding authorized authority. The first is the breaking of locks. The second is the disobeying of rules.
no, it just means it's not a criminal offense when employees take data with them. sales people have been doing this for decades. companies have had data security policies before computers and this is no different
It could still be an offense under a different law. The judge here is making a distinction between exceeding unauthorized access and abusing authorized access. An example: If I pick the lock on a filing cabinet in the boss's office and photocopy the trade secret documents inside and give them to a competitor I have exceeded authorized access. On the other hand if I use my key to open a filing cabinet in my own office and photocopy the same documents and give them to a competitor, I have abused (but not exceeded) my authorized access.
In both cases multiple offenses are committed. But there is one more offense in the first scenario than in the second.
This is not hair splitting. Without this distinction any misconduct by persons with authorized access makes their access unauthorized. This could have very surprising consequences. In one recent case a prosecutor argued that a user who violated the terms of use of a web site had obtained 'unauthorized access' because she had used the site in an 'unauthorized manner'. If we were to access this theory, then web site operators and employers could in effect write their own laws and get people sent to jail for violating them.
I have a similiar story. I had an English teacher in the seventh or eigth grade who conducted a lesson on the proper punctuation of direct and indirect quotations. For the test she took about ten sentences, stripped them of all punctuation and required us to restore it. One of the sentences looked something like this:
the principal said that school opens two days earlier
The was divided in its answer:
The principal said, "that school opens two days earlier."
The principal said that school opens two days earlier.
She insisted that one of them (the first I think) must be marked wrong. She claimed that those who insisted that both were perfectly plausible parsings of the sentence were simply trying to be difficult.
Years later I realized that she had missed a golden opportunity to impress upon us the great importance of correct punctionation. I now think the reason she missed it is that she had no understanding of the purpose of punctionation. She tended to see correct grammar and punctionation as conformance of arbitrary rules by which one proves that one is educated.
Cool Story Bro:
When I was in third grade, there was a question on a math test, it was something like:
4444444
-5555555
--------------
I answered -1111111 and had it marked wrong. I argued with the teacher that the answer was correct and his response that it wasn't in this class; the correct answer was that the problem couldn't be done.
What was his reasoning? Am I missing something obvious?
It is mandatory in any /. discussion of cellphones that crusaders from the Obvious League of America swoop in and meticulously and pedantically point out that you have to pay for service in addition to the cost of the phones.
You seem to be missing the point, so it probably is not obvious. One does not buy the phone and then buy service. (That would be obvious.) One makes a down payment on the phone, buys service, and pays for the phone on the installment plan.
The summary states that they are "effectively giving the [phone] away". In reality they are giving a $100 discount on a $450 phone. That is a huge difference.
Projected support costs of Linux version vs. Projected revenue from it would be my guess. It's oft-repeated unfortunately.
Yes, it is a frequently cited reason, but not necessary the true one. Netflix used to work on Linux (until they switched to Silverlight). The last explanation from a Netflix executives of why they still have not restored Linux support was a long string of technical gibberish which basically boiled down to "because it isn't Windows". It was clear that he had no idea what it would take to get Linux support back.
It is not just Netflix that does this. Estimates of how hard it would be to support Linux often assume a separate from-scratch development effort would be required. Often all that is really needed is to provide what they already have in a slightly different form. Sometimes this just means a new installer. In other cases all that is required is a few web pages. Very often the effort would benefit all of their uses. For example, if Garmin were to provided direct links to firmware files and instructions for copying them to the right place on the GPS, it would save users a lot of trouble when the just-click-this-and-don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it programs fail.
However is the "knitted together" text better than, or even different from, just googling and reading some of the top sites, reading various topics on wikipedia?
The difference is that this upstart publisher claims to do the googling for you and to organize the results. It would be difficult to do it yourself since you would have to first borrow the book from a classmate and create an outline so that you would know which topics will be discussed in class and in what order.
I thought educational use was exempt from copyright restrictions.
You are thinking of the concept of fair use. Such uses are called fair because they do not unreasonably encroach on the right of the author to exploit his work commercially. The principle of fair uses recognizes that we sometimes have to make copies in order to study the work, comment on it, and show it to others. But, this principle does not permit us to try to take over the function of the publisher. Copying entire textbooks and distributing them to students (who will be studying the subjects expounded in the textbooks) would be taking over the function of the publisher.
However, photocopying a few pages from a textbook and passing them out in a technical writing class so that students could examine a good (or bad) example would be fair use. It would probably also be fair use to copy an article from a newspaper and pass it out in class in order to aid in a discussion of politics or current events. This is what people mean when they say that copying for educational purposes is allowed.
From the article: Those "Thieves" just copied our work, reworded stuff so it's not a direct copy, and now give it away! The question is how much do you have to re-word factual content in order to not be copyright infringement. There is a limit to how far they can differ and still cover the same (factual) material.
The party which has brought this suit have described the upstart's product as a paraphrased version of their product. A paraphrase is a sentence-by-sentence rewording. If it is copyright violation to publish an unauthorized translation into another language and publish the translation, surely it is also a copyright violation to publish a paraphrase. But, we don't have enough information to say whether this is really what was done.
There are ways to produce a replacement text without paraphrasing. For example, one could have someone read the text and produce an outline. One would then give the outline to a writer (who had never read the original book) and tell him to flesh it out into a textbook. It is likely that one could give the writer an outline with a high level of detail without risking copyright infringement.
Unlike killing another human being, U.S. law seems not to provide for an affirmative defense in crimes against the state. I could be wrong, but I can't think of any at the moment, anyway.
Jury Nullification is still legal, although you can be thrown in jail for saying so. http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/25/is-advocacy-of-jury-nullificat
Jury Nullification is not an affirmative defense. To raise a affirmative defense means to say something like, "Even if I did perform the acts of which I am accused and understood what I was doing, I am not guilty because of X". For example, self defense is an affirmative defense against a charge of murder because the accused says: "I may have killed him, but he was trying to kill or gravely injure me."
Such defenses are called affirmative because the accused affirms (asserts) that his actions where justified. They are called affirmative in order to distinguish them from the other broad category of defenses: negating defenses. A negating defense is an assertion that one or more of the essential elements of the crime is absent. For example a negating defense to charge of treason might be: "I did not know that the envelope which I was asked to deliver contained state secrets and that the recipient was an enemy agent."
Jury Nullification may be 'the citizens last defense against the oppressor', but it is not a defense in the sense which the AC meant.
You have to be very sheltered to not know what a cake is, know what a birthday is and not know it's a huge tradition in many places worldwide.
I cannot beleive in 2012 children can be that removed from society.
But, the child failed the test; it highlighted a problem; a birthday cake was shown with the words "this is a birthday cake". Problem fixed in less time than it took me to write this sentence.
If I understand the story correctly, the child was about four years old. At four I was just beginning to think about the idea that there was a world beyond my immediate experiance.
But a subject as mundane as birthdays? If your religion forbids them from being mentioned then I'll happily ridicule you, and you'll deserve it.
I don't think you'll get the chance. This has nothing to do with anyone's religion and everything to do with political correctness. Politicial correctness is the practice of imagining reasons why others might be offended and then taking steps to prevent the alleged cause of offense. The politically correct often get it wrong. For example, many schoolteachers tell children that they mustn't say "American Indian". This dispite that fact that American Indians do not generally consider the term offensive and in fact somewhat prefer it to "Native American". (See: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aihmterms.html)
"Jehovah's Witnesses" are not Christians.
Only for contrived definitions of "Christian". A Christian is one who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, our Savior, and the Son of God. Jehovah's Witnesses vigorously assert all these points.
The "Jehovah's Witnesses are not Christians" nonsense is disinformation invented by resentful clergymen. They claim that a Christian must also believe that Jesus of Nazareth and the God of the Old Testament (Jehovah) are one and the same person. This is problematic because Jesus of Nazareth, the writers of the New Testament, and some of the early Church fathers made numerous statements which (if taken at face value) flat-out contradict this view. This doctrine (known as the Trinity) became firmly established in the Church about three centuries after the death of Christ. (If you are interested in this, you might start by reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity#History.
In other words, when one bends the definition of "Christian" far enough to exclude Jehovah's Witnesses, one casts doubt upon the Christianity of the Apostles, the Gospel writers and some of the early Church Fathers.
(To those who would nit-pick the above explaination: I am aware that Trinitarians have explanations for the statements in the New Testament which seem to contradict their views. I am also aware that the vast majority of currently existing Christian denominations accept the Trinity doctrine in some form.)
That sounds reasonable.
It doesn't override the law, which is why Glik won. But it does make it hard for the police department to punish them. How does this sound: "Yes, we know we told you to do this, but it was illegal and so now we are going to punish you?"
It sounds a lot like personal responsibility to me. The officers took an oath to uphold the law not the police department's policy on the law. That is an oath they should expect to be held to and should, in fact, actually be held to. They should have known that the policy was against the law and should have fought with the superiors over being required to follow it, or at very least, chosen not to and force their superiors to punish them for following the law over policy.
The bottom is this (something America, and perhaps the world, has forgotten): Regardless of what anyone else tells you to do, you are in full control of and therefore responsible for your own actions. All of them.
I don't disagree with anything you have said above. All I am saying is that the punishment has to come from outside the police department.
They acted in a way they believed the law specified. It took 5 years of lawyers and judges wrangling for it to be conclusively decided that the law didn't specify that and the arrest was wrongful.
If it took people who have been studying law most of their lives that long to decide, what chance does a police officer, with a comparatively small legal knowledge and a few minutes under pressure to make his mind up, have to get to the right decision? It would be more than a bit harsh to brand cops criminals when they were forced to make a decision that was beyond their capability.
I think you should go read the appeals court's decision. This question was specifically addressed.
How can it be "wire" tapping to record what your eyes can plainly see, in public? What wire? What tapping?
Despite what the summary says, he was not accused of wiretapping. He was accused of violating a law which is often (and somewhat erroneously) referred to as the "Wiretapping Statue". It is actually entitled "Interception of wire and oral communications".
It sounds like the city had a policy of doing this. So you have some officials of the city saying arrest people with the cameras. Even though it is likely illegal (they didn't have precedent yet so they can claim they where acting on their understanding of the law) and most likely won't stand up in court.
The city lost because the court ruled that there was precedent. A court had already ruled that if someone has a tape recorder out and ready for use, any recording that he may be making is not secret, even if he doesn't say "this thing is on".