If Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, then her replacement will likely be a former RIAA litigator. I don't actually hold that against him, though, only his work on state secrets.
Personally, I am not overly concerned about Kagan's fair-use views, whatever they may be (ultimately I think that problem will and should have a legislative solution), but I think there is a snowball's chance in hell that she will be as or more liberal than Stevens on executive power. Until being appointed Solicitor General, she had no qualification to sit on the Supreme Court, so one might almost wonder if Obama appointed her to the position so he could nominate her to the Court. But why would he go to all that trouble to pick someone who will toss out all of his own national security policies? The arguments Kagan advances in court aren't necessarily her own, but if taking a harder line than Bush on state secrets and executive power really bothered her, she could have resigned.
Those issues aside, it is ridiculous that everyone is reading the tea leaves and slaughtering chickens in an attempt to determine Kagan's actual positions (on Fair Use or anything else), and making cases that it is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (or perhaps with a preponderance of evidence?) that she is not actually liberal, etc. There is a presumption of innocence, but arguing for a presumption of liberalism strains credibility. Instead of arguing that Kagan might be (is probably) liberal (or in favor of personal freedom, civil liberties, checks on executive power, etc.), people should be asking why the nominee is not someone about whom there is no doubt. The only reason is that this is how Obama wants it to be. If not people in general, then at least Slashdotters should take this position, since (aside from all of the drug-warriors who have crawled out of the woodwork for this thread) I think the bulk of Slashdot readership believes in personal freedom, not in, say, executive assassination of American citizens, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention of American persons without judicial review, or an unlimited state secrets privilege and effective government immunity from any legal challenge. Compared to those issues, fair use is irrelevant. Congress could overthrow the Supreme Court's rulings in that area with more legislation anyway.
This summary (and article) is retarded, anyway, because as the writer admits, "Not a whole lot is known about Kagan's judicial philosophy." This alleged "nervousness" is based on Kagan's hiring of Lawrence Lessig, her close personal friend, while Dean of Harvard Law School. She also famously presided over the hiring of many conservative/Republican professors and admires Justice Scalia, so to claim that hiring Lessig reveals her stance on copyright is a dubious argument at best. Everyone has as much right as Hollywood to be nervous about her Fair Use views, since there is no way to tell what they actually are. How about her judicial philosophy? The precedent there is her work as Solicitor General, which would not hearten anyone except authoritarians (but really does not definitely reveal anything).
Finally, let us examine the theory that Kagan is (secretly) sympathetic to fourteenth amendment "equal protection" arguments for same-sex marriage. The primary argument in favor of this is that she might be a deeply closeted lesbian. Wow. The Whitehouse categorically denied that she is a lesbian (!), but what if she were? We know that all the recent examples of outed, formerly deeply closeted gay politicians (Republicans) have made their names as great defenders of gay rights (Defense of Marriage Act, etc.). The only real evidence one way or the other is her confirmati
Opiates are still the best cough syrups: Tylenol with codeine. The potential for recreational use is limited (as with other opiates) by compounding it with Acetaminophen, which will cause fatal liver failure if taken in quantity. A truly humane solution.
You can also make a good argument that ending the war on drugs would do a hell of a lot more toward reducing the homicide rate than any other legislative measure.
It is also absurd to claim that Thomas would have in any case broken with the majority and joined Stevens and Breyer in dissent. An 8-1 decision in the other direction with Thomas in dissent would be considerably more plausible.
The sale of explosives is quite regulated, presently, as is the sale of firearms in many states. But consider what you are really saying when you support denying firearms & explosives to people on a "terrorist watch list." They are only on that list by the fiat of some federal bureaucrat or someone in the executive branch. Like the people on the No Fly list. These are people against whom there is insufficient evidence to make a criminal case, so instead they are extra-judicially punished. That's how crazy it's gotten.
The other problem with your post is that if you resent expansion of second amendment rights (it's not originalist! The Founders meant militia!)--and they have only been expanded to the point that it is unconstitutional to ban firearms outright or require them to be inoperable--then how do you feel about the heavy reinterpretation of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and fourteenth amendments that occurred during the civil rights era? It would be difficult to argue that the original intent of the constitution assumed the inherent coerciveness of custodial interrogation (of course, Miranda may be on a path to be reinterpreted back into oblivion), or that the fourteenth amendment originally precluded segregation (or, hypothetically, allowed gay marriage). The originalist argument for expansion of the second amendment is likely stronger than in many of those other cases.
Your argument amounts to "I resent the expansion of the amendments that I don't like," and "I resent giving equal rights to people that I don't like."
It isn't watermarking; it is a hash that can be computed at any time. It is "resistant to alteration" in the sense that it will not be changed much by alterations that do not actually change the video content, but only add to it or reencode it. At least, according to NEC. The term "fingerprint" is meant, I believe, to allude to the uniqueness of the video frame, not the indelibility of the hash.
The truth seems to be a variation of #1: the writer at PC Authority didn't actually read the press release (alternative hypothesis: did read the release, and is not only innumerate but moderately mentally retarded), but rather made up speculative, mostly incorrect bullshit based on a blog reporting on a blog reporting on...a blog reporting on the actual press release. Like a fucked up internet game of telephone where the original source was there for the picking but still willfully ignored.
The secret sauce actually fingerprints video frames in a way that is invariant against most common alterations, including reencoding, analog capture, and hard-subs. Minor changes to the video...will leave the signature largely unaltered. No more manual checking (or keyword-search DMCA mailings?) for copyright violations.
The firm touts the efficiency of its algorithm, saying that a bog standard PC can search through 1,000 hours video in just one second. Quite what the firm's definition of a "home-class" PC would be interesting to know as we can't quite figure out how even a dual core 3GHz box can go through the 104 billion checks for 1,000 hours of video in a mere second.
1000 hours of video has close to 104 million frames; that would yield around 60 cycles per frame on a dual core (i.e. old) box.
The innumeracy of the author aside, what does this technology even do? Apparently altering the video, even minutely, will alter the "signature." Much like...CRC-32...very cutting-edge. We should name this startling development; I nominate the word "hash." Stupefied by the summary and the "article," I turned to the actual press release to find out what the technology really (purportedly) does.
1. Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
...
4. Compatibility with home PCs
By designing a compact signature size of 76 bytes per frame, the storage memory required for the matching process is minimized. As a result, a home-class PC (*8) can match approximately 1,000 hours of video in 1 second.
It turns out that a home-class PC ("A single core CPU with 3GHz clock speed was used for testing purposes. Signatures were stored in the main memory.") is able to match 1000 hours that have already been hashed in a single second. No doubt it takes considerably longer to actually calculate the signatures. The power of the algorithm is that when the video is altered (in human-recognizable ways) the signature doesn't change much. Ah, things are starting to actually make sense. The truth is (surprise!) the opposite of the linked phrase in the summary.
This technology may allow automated, accurate matching of copyrighted video on youtube or other video sites...who cares? That is already being done, only less accurately. The law would have to change rather drastically for it to be mandated that everyone includes correct hashes in their MPEG-7 video. That is hardly necessary--I'm sure someone will spare the cycles to hash the videos and inform content owners. Like they do now...only better. Maybe next time we can all have fun panicking about the "FaceRecognition descriptor" (only the TOC/summary is free) instead. Really, the 76-byte signature is just an implementation of the metadata schema for MPEG-7. The algorithm should work for any format, however (otherwise it would be rather trivial to evade!).
The only interesting thing I have learned is that NEC's algorithm uses robust, compactly representable edge detection (maybe) to compare short clips of video with extremely high accuracy; yay, computer science. All of this escaped Lawrence Latif, author of TFA (such as it is), who didn't see fit to RTFA himself before he started blogging his paranoid fantasies as fact. I wonder just who the "anonymous reader" that submitted the summary was?
I think that using non-explosive materials to make a bomb goes a little beyond not attracting attention. Propane is not explosive, and urea-based fertilizer is not even flammable. Gasoline is explosive...as a vapor. He could have discovered these facts on the wikipedia. Maybe he couldn't find any ready-made bombs on the shelf of his local home depot, but if he learned some practical chemistry (or read the Anarchist's Cookbook?) he could have made a bomb that actually worked, and did significant damage. I haven't seen detailed facts about his collection of alarm clocks and wires, but it sounds rather cartoonish. Maybe he should have bought a detonator from the Acme corporation instead?
Attributing his failure to the police state rather than his appalling ignorance would be a mistake. Since he was schooled in the United States, it does seem to be a harsh indictment of our educational system, however.
The list(s) are based on names, though. It is easy to get large lists of names, so it would also be easy to generate hash matches to decode passenger lists, thus totally invalidating your security measure. You might as well hand them the original list in cleartext.
My solution to this sticky issue would be to not extrajudicially strip people in the U.S. of their right to travel, and instead perhaps focus on not issuing visas to aliens who are suspected of terrorist connections. If a U.S. citizen (or resident alien whose visa has not been revoked) is suspected of terrorist intent/connection but cannot be indicted...too fucking bad, he can fly. Thus, the Gordian knot of TSA/DHS/airline cooperation is efficiently severed.
I agree that Schneier's post has been seriously mischaracterized. I think what he actually posted is still pretty specious, however. It might indeed be more difficult to pull off a criminal conspiracy these days (especially with the NSA legally/illegally wiretapping everything), but it isn't impossible. I especially don't accept his theory about the need to top previous attacks.
As a result of the two comically inept attacks of the past few months, there is now significant public and legislative (though there is no legislative authority without a constitutional amendment) support for forgoing Miranda warnings for domestic terrorists, or even moving domestic terrorists right into "indefinite detention." At the very least, attempting to milk the "public safety exception" for all it is worth has become official policy. That may very well backfire when courts decide that it does not apply in these cases, that the interrogations were indeed coercive, and that all pre-miranda statements are therefore excluded. Of course, Shazad later waived his rights (and probably repeated everything he said pre-Miranda), and there will be enough physical evidence (for even an impartial jury) to convict both 2010 would-be terrorists even without confessions...
Lieberman has proposed a bill with bipartisan support that would strip the citizenship of anyone who provides any aid or support to an organization identified as terrorist by the State Department, using the "preponderance of the evidence" standard. He has also been speaking out over the past few days of denying the ability to purchase firearms or explosives to anyone on the "terrorism watch list"--additions to which are completely extra-judicial, just like the No-Fly list, which still has not been seriously challenged in court (I cannot conceive how it could be justified on Fifth Amendment due process grounds). In the spirit of Frank Luntz, I think we should call his "terror gap" the "innocence gap."
But what are the prospects for recovery?
...the ACLU has never opposed watchlists that are narrowly targeted and properly run. When there is sufficient individualized suspicion that a person is involved in actual criminal terrorist acts — as apparently was the case with Mr. Shahzad — then we have no problem with it.
The ACLU filed a class action suit in 2004 regarding the No-Fly list, which they settled, resulting in a few (completely mistaken) people being taken off the list, and no legal change. I have to wonder whether even the ACLU takes the Fifth Amendment seriously anymore.
The two failed attacks of 2010, both of which would have been dwarfed by 9/11 had they succeeded, have thrown the country into another frenzy of liberty-denial. If terrorists individually attempted attacks of that caliber or better (and how could they be worse, really?) once a week (even once a month?), somewhere in the United States, I think we would lose what small sanity we have kept, and throw liberty out the window altogether. That has not happened, and indeed only a few subnormals have deigned to attempt an attack, so I think the proper conclusion is that there just aren't any people/groups out there making serious attempts at the United States. If it is impossible to keep a small conspiracy secure in Afghanistan, then why the hell has the occupation lasted ten years? The Taliban seems like a pretty big conspiracy, and they're as strong as ever. The terrorists can't be trying very hard at all.
9/11 did change everything, but in the opposite way that Schneier claims. Post 9/11, even a tiny attack will throw the country into a frenzy. Nothing of that size is strictly needed anymore, just a succession of pinpricks that will eventually push us over the edge.
...The whole point of NoScript is that it lets you turn scripts on sometimes. And right now with Firefox 3.6.3, the only problems I have are with javascript lockup. It just freezes for.5-15 minutes (I waited it out to 15 minutes once because I had just typed in an extremely long and unsaved forum post). In fact, Slashdot is intermittently responsible for these incidents. If NoScript were ported to Chrome, I would switch immediately, just based on javascript performance.
Everything (well, web traffic) "goes through a server." My point was that his statement was so vague as to be meaningless, indicating a probable lack of clear understanding. If he meant "a proxy server," he could have said so.
That doesn't preclude his being more informed than Ted Stevens, of course, but as Internet users I feel we have a solemn and ongoing duty to employ Ted Stevens analogies whenever at all possible.
I agree completely. Primary challenges are being contemplated for Kirsten Gillibrand, but I would much prefer that someone knock out Chuck "The Children" Schumer. He actually has a fairly decent ACLU scorecard, but you'd never guess from his rhetoric. Just yesterday he artfully combined expansions in local surveillance with pork in a single proposal.
Schumer added, “There is nothing more important than keeping New Yorkers safe from an attack. If anything was made clear on Saturday night, it’s that New York is a target. We need to do everything in our power to deliver the funding to protect New Yorkers.”
Judging by his press releases, he also takes credit for 1-5 federal appropriations for New York state per business day.
Well, the bikinis in this case appear to have voids over the nipples and labia. Nevertheless, I don't think that flashing an image from bikini-pleasure.com for a few seconds rises to the level of "looking at porn on the Senate floor" (even for Republicans). No doubt it took him a few seconds to kill the window because he was gripped by an urgent ontological crisis: what is actually the nature of these "bikinis" qua clothing? I am inclined to believe his disclaimer
When asked if he ever looks at pornography while on the Senate floor, Bennett responded, "You'd have to be insane to do that. It all goes through a server. I don't think anybody would be doing that."
You heard the man. It all goes through a server. He may be the intellectual heir to Ted "a series of tubes" Stevens, but he apparently does understand that browsing for porn with the Senate wifi would be...inadvisable in the current (bipartisan) political climate.
I am fairly certain that Cameron et al. v. St. Francis Hospital et al. was the case alluded to but never actually mentioned in the article. It is, anyway, the only malpractice suit that went to trial under Judge Morrissey in the past month (and ended in a mistrial from a hung jury). It began in 2/07, which is also consistent with the article. The lawsuit appears to regard a man whose heart attack was (allegedly) misdiagnosed by the hospital, (allegedly) contributing to his death. Its case summary is some seriously dry stuff, and this is the only remotely controversial information in it:
11-25-2009 CTFREE - 72943283 Nov 25 2009 1:53:28:810PM - $ 0.00
MORRISSEY, LINDA G.: ORDER ENTERED. DEFENDANT ST. FRANCIS' MOTION TO RECONSIDER IS DENIED. THE COURT CANNOT WEIGH THE EVIDENCE OR ITS CREDIBILITY AND THERE IS TESTIMONY THAT THREE EKG'S SHOW A PATTERN OF MYOCARDIAL ISCHEMIA AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN PRESENTED. IF THE JURY WERE TO BELIEVE THAT THREE EKG'S SUGGEST THAT MR. CAMERON WAS HAVING A HEART ATTACK THEN IT IS REASONABLE TO CONCLUDE THAT THEY MAY NOT BELIEVE A DOCTOR WHO SAYS HE WOULD SEND SOMEONE HOME IN MR. CAMERON'S CONDITION. A JURY MAY NOT BELIEVE DR. ANDERSON WHEN HE SAYS HE WOULD NOT HAVE DONE ANYTHING DIFFERENT IF HE HAD SEEN A "PATTERN OF MYOCARDIAL ISCHEMIA" TESTIFIED TO BY PLAINTIFF'S EXPERT WITNESS. A REASONABLE PERSON COULD FIND THAT 1) THE EKG'S SHOW MYOCARDIAL ISCHEMIA; 2) THAT DR. ANDERSON SHOULD NOT HAVE RELEASED MR. CAMERON TO HIS HOME WHILE SUFFERING A HEART ATTACH; 3) THAT MR. CAMERON LOST A SIGNIFICANT CHANCE OF SURVIVAL BECAUSE HIS HEART ATTACK WAS NOT DETECTED TIMELY, AT LEAST IN PART BY THE FACT THAT ALL EKG'S WERE NOT PRESENTED AND THAT 4) ST. FRANCIS BREACHED THE STANDARD OF CARE. PLAINTIFF'S BURDEN AT THIS STAGE IS TO DEMONSTRATE A CONFLICT OF FACTS AND/OR THE REASONABLE INFERENCES WHICH MAY BE REACHED FROM THEM. IT CANNOT BE FOUND AT THIS TIME THAT THERE IS NO MATERIAL QUESTION OF FACT AS TO THE PLAINTIFF'S NEGLIGENCE CLAIM AGAINST ST. FRANCIS. COPY OF THIS MINUTE WAS MAILED TO DAVID G. GRAVES AND BRAD SMITH; LISA RIGGS AND RICHARD GANN; AMY KEMPFERT AND JOHN BOWLING.
That was the reason that the plaintiff's motion to quash,
10-05-2009 MOQ - CAMERON, PAM 72291829 Oct 6 2009 8:47:07:537AM - $ 0.00
PLAINTIFF'S MOTION TO QUASH SUBPOENA DUCES TECUM// CERTIFICATE OF MAILING (C2J)
was granted. Every other entry except for the description of the jury and trail outcome is labeled merely, "Document Available at Court Clerk's Office."
I (finally) found this record buried in the Oklahoma State Courts Network database, so it wouldn't be cached by Google or archive.org. There (unsurprisingly) doesn't seem to have been any contemporaneous reporting on the case's developments, so closing the record for the duration of the trial would have been completely effective in preventing jury contamination. Just by reading the ruling, I am not entirely sure what it means or what legal principle it implements, so I will easily grant that it would have been prejudicial as hell to a jury; probably not in a rational, predictable way, either.
Joey Senat, an associate professor of journalism at Oklahoma State University, said this court order "is essentially closing off court records from the public."
"If she is going to close off court records, she should have a compelling reason to justify it," said Senat, a former president of Freedom of Information Oklahoma Inc., a watchdog group supporting openness in government.
A compelling reason...like hiding rulings about suppressed evidence from the jury. Right. No need to explore that dimension in the article, of course, that would be too much work. Or perhaps Senat actually is familiar with th
Youtube, Facebook, etc. all pay MPEG-LA licensing fees, no different from if they used CoreAVC or some other implementation. x264 is certainly fully encumbered by the patent pool, since it implements H.264.
Source code may be speech for the purposes of munitions export laws, but that doesn't bear on whether open source software can violate patents. If you undertake an unauthorized public performance of a current hit song, that is speech too--but you are still on the hook for royalty fees. Free speech can still violate copyright, and free software can still violate patents. Just because MPEG-LA doesn't sue certain parties, doesn't mean that it couldn't.
If Firefox, for example, included x264 to implement a hypothetical future HTML5 standard and didn't comply with MPEG-LA's licensing demands, even if Mozilla didn't distribute the binaries, it would be (almost certainly successfully) sued. That is the whole reason/. discusses this (again) every day.
If you read TFA, you will learn that in fact the subject of the article, the JTAC, was on the day of the reporting experiencing jamming from equipment in the convoy. The reporter has the curiosity of a rock (or is scared Wired won't get another exclusive), so he doesn't elaborate, but I suspect he is referring to the Army's own IED jammers, i.e. the Warlock system. So if it is that easy for us to accidentally jam our own signals...
Also, crypto hardware that outpaces anything you've ever heard of? Give me a break. They wouldn't need something we've never heard of to be secure, though; that's not really the issue. The issue the GP alludes to is that all of their operations depend on functioning radio links between different forces that are difficult to maintain even without sophisticated enemy action (the Taliban opposition faced by NATO today is even more primitive than what the Soviet Union fought in the 80s, and that was hardly a modern army).
Regardless of the rightness of the occuptation, the Wired piece was naive military cheerleading. No attempt was made to do any investigation beyond the tidbits that the Army/AF doled out to the reporter. I think it was also pretty obvious from the text that he was no war correspondent.
Wired is not exactly known for getting U.S. military exclusives, so no doubt they jumped at this chance. But the text of the article was actually no more technical than I would have expected from some random NYT stringer. Secure frequencies? I think he also got a little confused about the strict meaning of "going kinetic." A Wired reporter got this story because he would be unqualified and uncritical.
Even if you fully support (ahem) "bringing democracy to the people of Afghanistan," you can't seriously claim you just read anything but a military press release.
I haven't had cable since 2001, except for a brief period (with digital cable, new & shiny) in 2004. DVRs still weren't quite the thing in 2004, though, so in general I discovered that there was (still) nothing on, even for $75/mo. I mostly watched Stargate SG-1 reruns on the SciFi channel. Making any sort of "syfy" golden age argument, however, would be a serious mistake: in those days Stargate reruns were just the leader for...Crossing Over with John Edwards. Oh, an CSPAN. It's all over the internet and satellite radio now, though it is, problematically, still financially supported by cable companies.
Today, it is perfectly possible to do the same thing I have been doing since 2001, without even breaking copyright law (well, mostly). For example, recently I (finally) watched all 17 episodes of the classic (1967) "The Prisoner." For some reason AMC won't put it on Hulu (though there is a link), and instead makes us watch it in their crappy player with inserts one 30-second Google video ad at the beginning, one around eight minutes, and one whenever you pause it and then maximize or minimize (and if the moon in in the house of Jupiter...). Further...there was only one ad available. That's right, I watched the exact same fucking 30-second content-less Siemens ad roughly 50 times...in a row. They don't even have consumer products. "Imagine an America..." in which I don't fucking want to murder every person in Siemens advertising agency and everyone who was involved in this technical clusterfuck at AMC or Google ads!
Now that I am calming down, I will say that AMC's decision to maintain "control" of their video appears a bit counterproductive from a commercial standpoint. This model is still...immature. Since it was The Prisoner, the mindfuck, irrational aspect of showing me the same meaningless ad until I was losing my sanity was actually oddly appropriate, though. It's a pity the parallel wasn't intentional. Still, we have reason to hope. If AMC can somehow make money that way, just think of how much they will rake in with a less Kafka-esque profit model. For a similar experience, I recommend reading the C.S. Forester's excellent novel "The Good Shepherd" in one sitting, after remaining awake for thirty-six hours. Whoa.
Some day...there might be some sort of...market...where better shows are rewarded, and awful shows are canceled. Instead of "ratings" there will be "revenue." An unlikely-sounding dream, I know, to say nothing of the dangerous meaning of "better." If people will now spend less on TV, something may have to give, but I doubt it will be anything that we will actually miss. Besides, the internet offers the added value of targeted advertising and accurate (by TV standards) metrics. There is obviously enough demand for what AMC and HBO (and Showtime, and FX, and even...ESPN) are producing (since people pay extra for HBO & Showtime & certain ESPN already), just like the book market has room for John Barth and Gene Wolfe at the same time as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer without the (TV-esque) need to generate sales for Barth and Wolfe by bundling them with vampire-romance-thrillers. There's even room for John Irving to sell the same novel fifteen times, so maybe sitcoms will survive...de gustibus non est disputandum?
IANAL, but I thought this was self-evident? It's hiding in the "penumbra" of the ninth and fourteenth amendments. Obviously.
Whatever your opinion on the penumbra, it has no bearing on this case, since your right to privacy did not have to be violated to collect the initial information used to obtain the subpoena. The defendant's argument was basically that subpoenas in principle violate privacy, which in reductio ad absurdum would make it absolutely impossible to collect evidence in any lawsuit against anyone, for anything (and possibly serve any warrant in any criminal investigation). So it is perfectly plausible to toss his argument while still hewing to the right to privacy.
Specifically, subpoenas are clearly covered by the "due process" language in the fourth and fourteenth amendments. We don't even need to make clever logical arguments.
This isn't even a warrant, it's civil discovery. The evidence the RIAA already has (that some IP downloaded some song, and that the university assigned this IP to a primary owner/user) would be more than enough to establish "probable cause" for a criminal warrant. It would be absolutely insane to assert a higher burden of proof than the criminal standard in these civil cases just because they "involve the internet."
There is no need for precedent. I had assumed that since it was a border stop federal law was at issue (a situation which would still not likely involve precedent), but I assumed wrong. He obviously (well, assuming the facts of the trial) violated Michigan Penal Code Section 750.81d, which states that,
(1) Except as provided in subsections (2), (3), and (4), an individual who assaults, batters, wounds, resists, obstructs, opposes, or endangers a person who the individual knows or has reason to know is performing his or her duties is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 2 years or a fine of not more than $2,000.00, or both.
...
(a) "Obstruct" includes the use or threatened use of physical interference or force or a knowing failure to comply with a lawful command.
This is incredibly draconian and equates wounding a cop with (say) getting out of your car in a traffic stop. You also need to memorize large swaths of Michigan law (at the least, including lawful searches and questioning) to know what a lawful command is (since cops can and will issue illegal instructions, obeying which will be substantially to your detriment). It's basically a felony to look crosswise at a cop in Michigan, and all they need is the cop's word. Compare New York's law:
A person is guilty of obstructing governmental administration when he
intentionally obstructs, impairs or perverts the administration of law
or other governmental function or prevents or attempts to prevent a
public servant from performing an official function, by means of
intimidation, physical force or interference, or by means of any
independently unlawful act, or by means of interfering, whether or not
physical force is involved, with radio, telephone, television or other
telecommunications systems owned or operated by the state, or a county,
city, town, village, fire district or emergency medical service or by
means of releasing a dangerous animal under circumstances evincing the
actor's intent that the animal obstruct governmental administration.
Obstructing governmental administration is a class A misdemeanor.
It's a misdemeanor, and you have to use physical violence, threats, a dangerous animal, or an independently unlawful act. This has seriously dampened my ardor for experiencing Michigan tourism. You can't drag me back to Mackinac Island!
(A) No person, without privilege to do so and with purpose to prevent, obstruct, or delay the performance by a public official of any authorized act within the public official’s official capacity, shall do any act that hampers or impedes a public official in the performance of the public official’s lawful duties.
Shit, it looks like if you want to live on Lake Erie, New York is a veritable land of liberty. Who knew? Maybe you should move to Ontario (apparently they call it something else; I couldn't find the statute).
I felt like looking up one more state. In Massachusetts it looks like you can obstruct and lie to your heart's content (as long as you don't create a substantial risk of bodily injury) but it is illegal to belong to the Communist party (obviously a wildly unconstitutional statute). It looks like adultery will still net you three years as well...that's what you get for living in one of the thirteen colonies. Abortion will get you seven years (twenty-five if she dies). Have they read these laws lat
This is why I think that airplane-lavatory smoking Quatari diplomat is an American hero. If no one had diplomatic immunity, who would make humorous shoe-bomb jokes on airplanes? He should go on a tour and aggravate the Border Patrol, the LAPD, etc., keeping things in perspective for our law-enforcement professionals. Unfortunately, I fear that the humorless State Department would declare him persona non grata (that, and Quatar already pulled him from U.S. consular duty).
Slashdot Mirror
If Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, then her replacement will likely be a former RIAA litigator. I don't actually hold that against him, though, only his work on state secrets.
Personally, I am not overly concerned about Kagan's fair-use views, whatever they may be (ultimately I think that problem will and should have a legislative solution), but I think there is a snowball's chance in hell that she will be as or more liberal than Stevens on executive power. Until being appointed Solicitor General, she had no qualification to sit on the Supreme Court, so one might almost wonder if Obama appointed her to the position so he could nominate her to the Court. But why would he go to all that trouble to pick someone who will toss out all of his own national security policies? The arguments Kagan advances in court aren't necessarily her own, but if taking a harder line than Bush on state secrets and executive power really bothered her, she could have resigned.
Those issues aside, it is ridiculous that everyone is reading the tea leaves and slaughtering chickens in an attempt to determine Kagan's actual positions (on Fair Use or anything else), and making cases that it is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (or perhaps with a preponderance of evidence?) that she is not actually liberal, etc. There is a presumption of innocence, but arguing for a presumption of liberalism strains credibility. Instead of arguing that Kagan might be (is probably) liberal (or in favor of personal freedom, civil liberties, checks on executive power, etc.), people should be asking why the nominee is not someone about whom there is no doubt. The only reason is that this is how Obama wants it to be. If not people in general, then at least Slashdotters should take this position, since (aside from all of the drug-warriors who have crawled out of the woodwork for this thread) I think the bulk of Slashdot readership believes in personal freedom, not in, say, executive assassination of American citizens, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention of American persons without judicial review, or an unlimited state secrets privilege and effective government immunity from any legal challenge. Compared to those issues, fair use is irrelevant. Congress could overthrow the Supreme Court's rulings in that area with more legislation anyway.
This summary (and article) is retarded, anyway, because as the writer admits, "Not a whole lot is known about Kagan's judicial philosophy." This alleged "nervousness" is based on Kagan's hiring of Lawrence Lessig, her close personal friend, while Dean of Harvard Law School. She also famously presided over the hiring of many conservative/Republican professors and admires Justice Scalia, so to claim that hiring Lessig reveals her stance on copyright is a dubious argument at best. Everyone has as much right as Hollywood to be nervous about her Fair Use views, since there is no way to tell what they actually are. How about her judicial philosophy? The precedent there is her work as Solicitor General, which would not hearten anyone except authoritarians (but really does not definitely reveal anything).
Finally, let us examine the theory that Kagan is (secretly) sympathetic to fourteenth amendment "equal protection" arguments for same-sex marriage. The primary argument in favor of this is that she might be a deeply closeted lesbian. Wow. The Whitehouse categorically denied that she is a lesbian (!), but what if she were? We know that all the recent examples of outed, formerly deeply closeted gay politicians (Republicans) have made their names as great defenders of gay rights (Defense of Marriage Act, etc.). The only real evidence one way or the other is her confirmati
Opiates are still the best cough syrups: Tylenol with codeine. The potential for recreational use is limited (as with other opiates) by compounding it with Acetaminophen, which will cause fatal liver failure if taken in quantity. A truly humane solution.
You can also make a good argument that ending the war on drugs would do a hell of a lot more toward reducing the homicide rate than any other legislative measure.
It is also absurd to claim that Thomas would have in any case broken with the majority and joined Stevens and Breyer in dissent. An 8-1 decision in the other direction with Thomas in dissent would be considerably more plausible.
The sale of explosives is quite regulated, presently, as is the sale of firearms in many states. But consider what you are really saying when you support denying firearms & explosives to people on a "terrorist watch list." They are only on that list by the fiat of some federal bureaucrat or someone in the executive branch. Like the people on the No Fly list. These are people against whom there is insufficient evidence to make a criminal case, so instead they are extra-judicially punished. That's how crazy it's gotten.
The other problem with your post is that if you resent expansion of second amendment rights (it's not originalist! The Founders meant militia!)--and they have only been expanded to the point that it is unconstitutional to ban firearms outright or require them to be inoperable--then how do you feel about the heavy reinterpretation of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and fourteenth amendments that occurred during the civil rights era? It would be difficult to argue that the original intent of the constitution assumed the inherent coerciveness of custodial interrogation (of course, Miranda may be on a path to be reinterpreted back into oblivion), or that the fourteenth amendment originally precluded segregation (or, hypothetically, allowed gay marriage). The originalist argument for expansion of the second amendment is likely stronger than in many of those other cases.
Your argument amounts to "I resent the expansion of the amendments that I don't like," and "I resent giving equal rights to people that I don't like."
It isn't watermarking; it is a hash that can be computed at any time. It is "resistant to alteration" in the sense that it will not be changed much by alterations that do not actually change the video content, but only add to it or reencode it. At least, according to NEC. The term "fingerprint" is meant, I believe, to allude to the uniqueness of the video frame, not the indelibility of the hash.
The truth seems to be a variation of #1: the writer at PC Authority didn't actually read the press release (alternative hypothesis: did read the release, and is not only innumerate but moderately mentally retarded), but rather made up speculative, mostly incorrect bullshit based on a blog reporting on a blog reporting on...a blog reporting on the actual press release. Like a fucked up internet game of telephone where the original source was there for the picking but still willfully ignored.
The secret sauce actually fingerprints video frames in a way that is invariant against most common alterations, including reencoding, analog capture, and hard-subs. Minor changes to the video...will leave the signature largely unaltered. No more manual checking (or keyword-search DMCA mailings?) for copyright violations.
The firm touts the efficiency of its algorithm, saying that a bog standard PC can search through 1,000 hours video in just one second. Quite what the firm's definition of a "home-class" PC would be interesting to know as we can't quite figure out how even a dual core 3GHz box can go through the 104 billion checks for 1,000 hours of video in a mere second.
1000 hours of video has close to 104 million frames; that would yield around 60 cycles per frame on a dual core (i.e. old) box.
The innumeracy of the author aside, what does this technology even do? Apparently altering the video, even minutely, will alter the "signature." Much like...CRC-32...very cutting-edge. We should name this startling development; I nominate the word "hash." Stupefied by the summary and the "article," I turned to the actual press release to find out what the technology really (purportedly) does.
1. Accurate detection of copied or altered video content Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
...
4. Compatibility with home PCs By designing a compact signature size of 76 bytes per frame, the storage memory required for the matching process is minimized. As a result, a home-class PC (*8) can match approximately 1,000 hours of video in 1 second.
It turns out that a home-class PC ("A single core CPU with 3GHz clock speed was used for testing purposes. Signatures were stored in the main memory.") is able to match 1000 hours that have already been hashed in a single second. No doubt it takes considerably longer to actually calculate the signatures. The power of the algorithm is that when the video is altered (in human-recognizable ways) the signature doesn't change much. Ah, things are starting to actually make sense. The truth is (surprise!) the opposite of the linked phrase in the summary.
This technology may allow automated, accurate matching of copyrighted video on youtube or other video sites...who cares? That is already being done, only less accurately. The law would have to change rather drastically for it to be mandated that everyone includes correct hashes in their MPEG-7 video. That is hardly necessary--I'm sure someone will spare the cycles to hash the videos and inform content owners. Like they do now...only better. Maybe next time we can all have fun panicking about the "FaceRecognition descriptor" (only the TOC/summary is free) instead. Really, the 76-byte signature is just an implementation of the metadata schema for MPEG-7. The algorithm should work for any format, however (otherwise it would be rather trivial to evade!).
The only interesting thing I have learned is that NEC's algorithm uses robust, compactly representable edge detection (maybe) to compare short clips of video with extremely high accuracy; yay, computer science. All of this escaped Lawrence Latif, author of TFA (such as it is), who didn't see fit to RTFA himself before he started blogging his paranoid fantasies as fact. I wonder just who the "anonymous reader" that submitted the summary was?
I think that using non-explosive materials to make a bomb goes a little beyond not attracting attention. Propane is not explosive, and urea-based fertilizer is not even flammable. Gasoline is explosive...as a vapor. He could have discovered these facts on the wikipedia. Maybe he couldn't find any ready-made bombs on the shelf of his local home depot, but if he learned some practical chemistry (or read the Anarchist's Cookbook?) he could have made a bomb that actually worked, and did significant damage. I haven't seen detailed facts about his collection of alarm clocks and wires, but it sounds rather cartoonish. Maybe he should have bought a detonator from the Acme corporation instead?
Attributing his failure to the police state rather than his appalling ignorance would be a mistake. Since he was schooled in the United States, it does seem to be a harsh indictment of our educational system, however.
The list(s) are based on names, though. It is easy to get large lists of names, so it would also be easy to generate hash matches to decode passenger lists, thus totally invalidating your security measure. You might as well hand them the original list in cleartext.
My solution to this sticky issue would be to not extrajudicially strip people in the U.S. of their right to travel, and instead perhaps focus on not issuing visas to aliens who are suspected of terrorist connections. If a U.S. citizen (or resident alien whose visa has not been revoked) is suspected of terrorist intent/connection but cannot be indicted...too fucking bad, he can fly. Thus, the Gordian knot of TSA/DHS/airline cooperation is efficiently severed.
As a result of the two comically inept attacks of the past few months, there is now significant public and legislative (though there is no legislative authority without a constitutional amendment) support for forgoing Miranda warnings for domestic terrorists, or even moving domestic terrorists right into "indefinite detention." At the very least, attempting to milk the "public safety exception" for all it is worth has become official policy. That may very well backfire when courts decide that it does not apply in these cases, that the interrogations were indeed coercive, and that all pre-miranda statements are therefore excluded. Of course, Shazad later waived his rights (and probably repeated everything he said pre-Miranda), and there will be enough physical evidence (for even an impartial jury) to convict both 2010 would-be terrorists even without confessions...
Lieberman has proposed a bill with bipartisan support that would strip the citizenship of anyone who provides any aid or support to an organization identified as terrorist by the State Department, using the "preponderance of the evidence" standard. He has also been speaking out over the past few days of denying the ability to purchase firearms or explosives to anyone on the "terrorism watch list"--additions to which are completely extra-judicial, just like the No-Fly list, which still has not been seriously challenged in court (I cannot conceive how it could be justified on Fifth Amendment due process grounds). In the spirit of Frank Luntz, I think we should call his "terror gap" the "innocence gap."
But what are the prospects for recovery?
...the ACLU has never opposed watchlists that are narrowly targeted and properly run. When there is sufficient individualized suspicion that a person is involved in actual criminal terrorist acts — as apparently was the case with Mr. Shahzad — then we have no problem with it.
The ACLU filed a class action suit in 2004 regarding the No-Fly list, which they settled, resulting in a few (completely mistaken) people being taken off the list, and no legal change. I have to wonder whether even the ACLU takes the Fifth Amendment seriously anymore.
The two failed attacks of 2010, both of which would have been dwarfed by 9/11 had they succeeded, have thrown the country into another frenzy of liberty-denial. If terrorists individually attempted attacks of that caliber or better (and how could they be worse, really?) once a week (even once a month?), somewhere in the United States, I think we would lose what small sanity we have kept, and throw liberty out the window altogether. That has not happened, and indeed only a few subnormals have deigned to attempt an attack, so I think the proper conclusion is that there just aren't any people/groups out there making serious attempts at the United States. If it is impossible to keep a small conspiracy secure in Afghanistan, then why the hell has the occupation lasted ten years? The Taliban seems like a pretty big conspiracy, and they're as strong as ever. The terrorists can't be trying very hard at all.
9/11 did change everything, but in the opposite way that Schneier claims. Post 9/11, even a tiny attack will throw the country into a frenzy. Nothing of that size is strictly needed anymore, just a succession of pinpricks that will eventually push us over the edge.
...The whole point of NoScript is that it lets you turn scripts on sometimes. And right now with Firefox 3.6.3, the only problems I have are with javascript lockup. It just freezes for .5-15 minutes (I waited it out to 15 minutes once because I had just typed in an extremely long and unsaved forum post). In fact, Slashdot is intermittently responsible for these incidents. If NoScript were ported to Chrome, I would switch immediately, just based on javascript performance.
Everything (well, web traffic) "goes through a server." My point was that his statement was so vague as to be meaningless, indicating a probable lack of clear understanding. If he meant "a proxy server," he could have said so.
That doesn't preclude his being more informed than Ted Stevens, of course, but as Internet users I feel we have a solemn and ongoing duty to employ Ted Stevens analogies whenever at all possible.
Schumer added, “There is nothing more important than keeping New Yorkers safe from an attack. If anything was made clear on Saturday night, it’s that New York is a target. We need to do everything in our power to deliver the funding to protect New Yorkers.”
Judging by his press releases, he also takes credit for 1-5 federal appropriations for New York state per business day.
When asked if he ever looks at pornography while on the Senate floor, Bennett responded, "You'd have to be insane to do that. It all goes through a server. I don't think anybody would be doing that."
You heard the man. It all goes through a server. He may be the intellectual heir to Ted "a series of tubes" Stevens, but he apparently does understand that browsing for porn with the Senate wifi would be...inadvisable in the current (bipartisan) political climate.
11-25-2009 CTFREE - 72943283 Nov 25 2009 1:53:28:810PM - $ 0.00
MORRISSEY, LINDA G.: ORDER ENTERED. DEFENDANT ST. FRANCIS' MOTION TO RECONSIDER IS DENIED. THE COURT CANNOT WEIGH THE EVIDENCE OR ITS CREDIBILITY AND THERE IS TESTIMONY THAT THREE EKG'S SHOW A PATTERN OF MYOCARDIAL ISCHEMIA AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN PRESENTED. IF THE JURY WERE TO BELIEVE THAT THREE EKG'S SUGGEST THAT MR. CAMERON WAS HAVING A HEART ATTACK THEN IT IS REASONABLE TO CONCLUDE THAT THEY MAY NOT BELIEVE A DOCTOR WHO SAYS HE WOULD SEND SOMEONE HOME IN MR. CAMERON'S CONDITION. A JURY MAY NOT BELIEVE DR. ANDERSON WHEN HE SAYS HE WOULD NOT HAVE DONE ANYTHING DIFFERENT IF HE HAD SEEN A "PATTERN OF MYOCARDIAL ISCHEMIA" TESTIFIED TO BY PLAINTIFF'S EXPERT WITNESS. A REASONABLE PERSON COULD FIND THAT 1) THE EKG'S SHOW MYOCARDIAL ISCHEMIA; 2) THAT DR. ANDERSON SHOULD NOT HAVE RELEASED MR. CAMERON TO HIS HOME WHILE SUFFERING A HEART ATTACH; 3) THAT MR. CAMERON LOST A SIGNIFICANT CHANCE OF SURVIVAL BECAUSE HIS HEART ATTACK WAS NOT DETECTED TIMELY, AT LEAST IN PART BY THE FACT THAT ALL EKG'S WERE NOT PRESENTED AND THAT 4) ST. FRANCIS BREACHED THE STANDARD OF CARE. PLAINTIFF'S BURDEN AT THIS STAGE IS TO DEMONSTRATE A CONFLICT OF FACTS AND/OR THE REASONABLE INFERENCES WHICH MAY BE REACHED FROM THEM. IT CANNOT BE FOUND AT THIS TIME THAT THERE IS NO MATERIAL QUESTION OF FACT AS TO THE PLAINTIFF'S NEGLIGENCE CLAIM AGAINST ST. FRANCIS. COPY OF THIS MINUTE WAS MAILED TO DAVID G. GRAVES AND BRAD SMITH; LISA RIGGS AND RICHARD GANN; AMY KEMPFERT AND JOHN BOWLING.
That was the reason that the plaintiff's motion to quash,
10-05-2009 MOQ - CAMERON, PAM 72291829 Oct 6 2009 8:47:07:537AM - $ 0.00 // CERTIFICATE OF MAILING (C2J)
PLAINTIFF'S MOTION TO QUASH SUBPOENA DUCES TECUM
was granted. Every other entry except for the description of the jury and trail outcome is labeled merely, "Document Available at Court Clerk's Office."
I (finally) found this record buried in the Oklahoma State Courts Network database, so it wouldn't be cached by Google or archive.org. There (unsurprisingly) doesn't seem to have been any contemporaneous reporting on the case's developments, so closing the record for the duration of the trial would have been completely effective in preventing jury contamination. Just by reading the ruling, I am not entirely sure what it means or what legal principle it implements, so I will easily grant that it would have been prejudicial as hell to a jury; probably not in a rational, predictable way, either.
Joey Senat, an associate professor of journalism at Oklahoma State University, said this court order "is essentially closing off court records from the public."
"If she is going to close off court records, she should have a compelling reason to justify it," said Senat, a former president of Freedom of Information Oklahoma Inc., a watchdog group supporting openness in government.
A compelling reason...like hiding rulings about suppressed evidence from the jury. Right. No need to explore that dimension in the article, of course, that would be too much work. Or perhaps Senat actually is familiar with th
Youtube, Facebook, etc. all pay MPEG-LA licensing fees, no different from if they used CoreAVC or some other implementation. x264 is certainly fully encumbered by the patent pool, since it implements H.264.
/. discusses this (again) every day.
Source code may be speech for the purposes of munitions export laws, but that doesn't bear on whether open source software can violate patents. If you undertake an unauthorized public performance of a current hit song, that is speech too--but you are still on the hook for royalty fees. Free speech can still violate copyright, and free software can still violate patents. Just because MPEG-LA doesn't sue certain parties, doesn't mean that it couldn't.
If Firefox, for example, included x264 to implement a hypothetical future HTML5 standard and didn't comply with MPEG-LA's licensing demands, even if Mozilla didn't distribute the binaries, it would be (almost certainly successfully) sued. That is the whole reason
If you read TFA, you will learn that in fact the subject of the article, the JTAC, was on the day of the reporting experiencing jamming from equipment in the convoy. The reporter has the curiosity of a rock (or is scared Wired won't get another exclusive), so he doesn't elaborate, but I suspect he is referring to the Army's own IED jammers, i.e. the Warlock system. So if it is that easy for us to accidentally jam our own signals...
Also, crypto hardware that outpaces anything you've ever heard of? Give me a break. They wouldn't need something we've never heard of to be secure, though; that's not really the issue. The issue the GP alludes to is that all of their operations depend on functioning radio links between different forces that are difficult to maintain even without sophisticated enemy action (the Taliban opposition faced by NATO today is even more primitive than what the Soviet Union fought in the 80s, and that was hardly a modern army).
Regardless of the rightness of the occuptation, the Wired piece was naive military cheerleading. No attempt was made to do any investigation beyond the tidbits that the Army/AF doled out to the reporter. I think it was also pretty obvious from the text that he was no war correspondent.
Wired is not exactly known for getting U.S. military exclusives, so no doubt they jumped at this chance. But the text of the article was actually no more technical than I would have expected from some random NYT stringer. Secure frequencies? I think he also got a little confused about the strict meaning of "going kinetic." A Wired reporter got this story because he would be unqualified and uncritical.
Even if you fully support (ahem) "bringing democracy to the people of Afghanistan," you can't seriously claim you just read anything but a military press release.
x264 almost certainly violates MPEG-LA patents. Hope that clears things up for you...sjobs. What chucklehead modded this up?
Theora is only a viable alternative because it avoids the H.264 standard altogether.
I haven't had cable since 2001, except for a brief period (with digital cable, new & shiny) in 2004. DVRs still weren't quite the thing in 2004, though, so in general I discovered that there was (still) nothing on, even for $75/mo. I mostly watched Stargate SG-1 reruns on the SciFi channel. Making any sort of "syfy" golden age argument, however, would be a serious mistake: in those days Stargate reruns were just the leader for...Crossing Over with John Edwards. Oh, an CSPAN. It's all over the internet and satellite radio now, though it is, problematically, still financially supported by cable companies.
Today, it is perfectly possible to do the same thing I have been doing since 2001, without even breaking copyright law (well, mostly). For example, recently I (finally) watched all 17 episodes of the classic (1967) "The Prisoner." For some reason AMC won't put it on Hulu (though there is a link), and instead makes us watch it in their crappy player with inserts one 30-second Google video ad at the beginning, one around eight minutes, and one whenever you pause it and then maximize or minimize (and if the moon in in the house of Jupiter...). Further...there was only one ad available. That's right, I watched the exact same fucking 30-second content-less Siemens ad roughly 50 times...in a row. They don't even have consumer products. "Imagine an America..." in which I don't fucking want to murder every person in Siemens advertising agency and everyone who was involved in this technical clusterfuck at AMC or Google ads!
Now that I am calming down, I will say that AMC's decision to maintain "control" of their video appears a bit counterproductive from a commercial standpoint. This model is still...immature. Since it was The Prisoner, the mindfuck, irrational aspect of showing me the same meaningless ad until I was losing my sanity was actually oddly appropriate, though. It's a pity the parallel wasn't intentional. Still, we have reason to hope. If AMC can somehow make money that way, just think of how much they will rake in with a less Kafka-esque profit model. For a similar experience, I recommend reading the C.S. Forester's excellent novel "The Good Shepherd" in one sitting, after remaining awake for thirty-six hours. Whoa.
Some day...there might be some sort of...market...where better shows are rewarded, and awful shows are canceled. Instead of "ratings" there will be "revenue." An unlikely-sounding dream, I know, to say nothing of the dangerous meaning of "better." If people will now spend less on TV, something may have to give, but I doubt it will be anything that we will actually miss. Besides, the internet offers the added value of targeted advertising and accurate (by TV standards) metrics. There is obviously enough demand for what AMC and HBO (and Showtime, and FX, and even...ESPN) are producing (since people pay extra for HBO & Showtime & certain ESPN already), just like the book market has room for John Barth and Gene Wolfe at the same time as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer without the (TV-esque) need to generate sales for Barth and Wolfe by bundling them with vampire-romance-thrillers. There's even room for John Irving to sell the same novel fifteen times, so maybe sitcoms will survive...de gustibus non est disputandum?
IANAL, but I thought this was self-evident? It's hiding in the "penumbra" of the ninth and fourteenth amendments. Obviously.
Whatever your opinion on the penumbra, it has no bearing on this case, since your right to privacy did not have to be violated to collect the initial information used to obtain the subpoena. The defendant's argument was basically that subpoenas in principle violate privacy, which in reductio ad absurdum would make it absolutely impossible to collect evidence in any lawsuit against anyone, for anything (and possibly serve any warrant in any criminal investigation). So it is perfectly plausible to toss his argument while still hewing to the right to privacy.
Specifically, subpoenas are clearly covered by the "due process" language in the fourth and fourteenth amendments. We don't even need to make clever logical arguments.
This isn't even a warrant, it's civil discovery. The evidence the RIAA already has (that some IP downloaded some song, and that the university assigned this IP to a primary owner/user) would be more than enough to establish "probable cause" for a criminal warrant. It would be absolutely insane to assert a higher burden of proof than the criminal standard in these civil cases just because they "involve the internet."
(1) Except as provided in subsections (2), (3), and (4), an individual who assaults, batters, wounds, resists, obstructs, opposes, or endangers a person who the individual knows or has reason to know is performing his or her duties is guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 2 years or a fine of not more than $2,000.00, or both.
...
(a) "Obstruct" includes the use or threatened use of physical interference or force or a knowing failure to comply with a lawful command.
This is incredibly draconian and equates wounding a cop with (say) getting out of your car in a traffic stop. You also need to memorize large swaths of Michigan law (at the least, including lawful searches and questioning) to know what a lawful command is (since cops can and will issue illegal instructions, obeying which will be substantially to your detriment). It's basically a felony to look crosswise at a cop in Michigan, and all they need is the cop's word. Compare New York's law:
A person is guilty of obstructing governmental administration when he intentionally obstructs, impairs or perverts the administration of law or other governmental function or prevents or attempts to prevent a public servant from performing an official function, by means of intimidation, physical force or interference, or by means of any independently unlawful act, or by means of interfering, whether or not physical force is involved, with radio, telephone, television or other telecommunications systems owned or operated by the state, or a county, city, town, village, fire district or emergency medical service or by means of releasing a dangerous animal under circumstances evincing the actor's intent that the animal obstruct governmental administration. Obstructing governmental administration is a class A misdemeanor.
It's a misdemeanor, and you have to use physical violence, threats, a dangerous animal, or an independently unlawful act. This has seriously dampened my ardor for experiencing Michigan tourism. You can't drag me back to Mackinac Island!
In Ohio, looking crosswise at a cop is a misdemeanor.
(A) No person, without privilege to do so and with purpose to prevent, obstruct, or delay the performance by a public official of any authorized act within the public official’s official capacity, shall do any act that hampers or impedes a public official in the performance of the public official’s lawful duties.
Shit, it looks like if you want to live on Lake Erie, New York is a veritable land of liberty. Who knew? Maybe you should move to Ontario (apparently they call it something else; I couldn't find the statute).
I felt like looking up one more state. In Massachusetts it looks like you can obstruct and lie to your heart's content (as long as you don't create a substantial risk of bodily injury) but it is illegal to belong to the Communist party (obviously a wildly unconstitutional statute). It looks like adultery will still net you three years as well...that's what you get for living in one of the thirteen colonies. Abortion will get you seven years (twenty-five if she dies). Have they read these laws lat
This is why I think that airplane-lavatory smoking Quatari diplomat is an American hero. If no one had diplomatic immunity, who would make humorous shoe-bomb jokes on airplanes? He should go on a tour and aggravate the Border Patrol, the LAPD, etc., keeping things in perspective for our law-enforcement professionals. Unfortunately, I fear that the humorless State Department would declare him persona non grata (that, and Quatar already pulled him from U.S. consular duty).