9th Circuit approves random warrantless searches and seizures of laptops

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that border police have the right to conduct random warrantless searches and seizures of laptops--including full forensic disk examination.

I recommend using full-disk encryption.

Hat tip to The Agitator.

VoIP quality degradation shows need for prioritization

A study by Brix Networks, which runs TestYourVoip.com, shows that the quality of VoIP calls has degraded over the last 18 months. Their tests of VoIP connections show that 20 percent of calls have unacceptable quality, up from 15% 18 months ago. Brix's CTO says that the cause is competition for network resources--i.e., congestion.

The solution is, of course, prioritization--putting voice and other latency and jitter-sensitive traffic in a higher class of service with QoS (quality of service).

Thanks to Matt Sherman for the link.

Further comments on the subject may be found at Richard Bennett's Original Blog and by James Gattuso at the Technology Liberation Front.

Tucson #7 most overpriced city on Forbes list

Tucson made Forbes' list of the top 10 most overpriced cities in the United States for 2006 at #7. The list is based on the largest 112 metro areas in Forbes' 2006 list of best places for business and careers, ranking them based on job growth, cost of living, housing affordability, and salaries. The ten most overpriced locations have the highest costs of living, lowest housing affordability, least job growth, and lowest salaries.

1. Essex County, Massachusetts
2. San Francisco, California
3. San Jose, California
4. Honolulu, Hawaii
5. Cambridge, Massachusetts
6. New York City, New York
7. Tucson, Arizona
8. Oakland, California
9. Boston, Massachusetts
10. Los Angeles, California

Judge throws out ACLU lawsuit against NSA

While the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T continues, U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly today threw out the ACLU's lawsuit against the National Security Agency for collecting call detail records from AT&T, MCI, and other providers (though not, apparently, from Verizon or BellSouth).

Visual representation of global data

This is a very interesting presentation at Google by the folks at Gapminder, a Swedish nonprofit that is trying to provide better, visual ways of representing information about the state of the world. These are the same people who put together this set of excellent animated interactive presentations on human development trends (income levels, life expectancy, etc.) for the United Nations Development Program.

(Via Patri Friedman at Catallarchy.)

Scale model of disputed Chinese-Indian mountain range in China

On Google Earth or at The Register. (Via Anson Kennedy on the SKEPTIC mailing list.)

Court rejects government's "state secrets" argument in AT&T case

Today Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California ruled on the U.S. government's motions for dismissal or summary judgment in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T on grounds of "state secrets." The motions were denied, with the possibility of a later dismissal or summary judgment on state secrets grounds. However, the judge noted the limits of state secrets privilege with respect to the infringement of individual rights, and stated that "dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security" (p. 36 of the ruling).

The judge noted that you can't claim that something is a "state secret" if it's not secret, citing not only news stories about interception but public statements by George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales.

Also denied were AT&T's motions for dismiss for lack of standing, for lack of plaintiff demonstration that AT&T lack's appropriate government certification for its actions (though the judge indicates he could be persuaded otherwise on this one later), due to AT&T's claim of common law immunity from civil liability for conducting government surveillance (in part because AT&T has argued that its cooperation has been voluntary, not mandatory), and due to AT&T's claim of qualified immunity.

The judge proposes appointing a qualified, appropriately security-cleared expert to assist the court in reviewing classified material and determining what may be disclosed and to whom.

The next hearing is a case management hearing on August 8.

Bush's veto of the stem cell bill

As everyone knows, Bush's first veto ever was of H.R. 810, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, to authorize federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, on the ridiculous basis that this research involves killing "boys and girls."

As Scott Rosenberg points out at Salon:

Here is why Bush's position is a joke: Thousands and thousands of embryos are destroyed every year in fertility clinics. They are created in petri dishes as part of fertility treatments like IVF; then they are discarded. If Bush and his administration truly believe that destroying an embryo is a kind of murder, they shouldn't be wasting their time arguing about research funding: They should immediately shut down every fertility clinic in the country, arrest the doctors and staff who operate them, and charge all the wannabe parents who have been wantonly slaughtering legions of the unborn. But of course they'll never do such a thing. (Nor, to be absolutely clear, do I think they should.) Bush could not care less about this issue except as far as it helps burnish his pro-life credentials among his "base."
...

If Bush believes destroying embryos is murder, let him take a real stand against it. If he doesn't, he shouldn't make it harder for the thousands of embryos that are being discarded anyway to be used for a valuable purpose that could improve real lives.

That's why Bush's stem cell position isn't Solomonic -- it's craven. His upcoming veto is an act not of moral leadership but of hypocrisy. And the cost of this hypocrisy, assuming Congress can't muster the votes for an override, will be borne by everyone who dreams of new cures for awful illnesses.

The House vote to override the veto failed by 51 votes, 235-193. Arizona's Representatives did not follow partisan lines on this--voting to override the veto were Flake (R), Grijalva (D), Kolbe (R), and Pastor (D). Voting against were Franks (R), Hayworth (R), Renzi (R), and Shadegg (R).

Back in May of last year when the House passed the bill, Grijalva, Kolbe, and Pastor voted for it, while Flake, Franks, Hayworth, Renzi, and Shadegg voted against it as the Eagle Forum insisted.

In the Senate, where it passed yesterday on a vote after sitting there for over a year, Kyl voted against the bill and McCain voted for it. No surprise there.

(Thanks to John Lynch at stranger fruit for the voting info and the reference to Rosenberg.)

UPDATE July 19, 2006: I've corrected the above to put Franks' vote back on the expected side and remove my comments of surprise about his vote. I'm still surprised by Flake's vote to override the veto.

U.S. House votes to place limits on judiciary

Yahoo headlined this story "House votes to keep 'under God' in pledge," but that's not accurate. The House passed a bill (H.R. 2389, the "Pledge Protection Act of 2005," on a vote of 260-167) which prohibits the courts from hearing challenges to the presence of "under God" in the pledge of allegiance, which strikes me as an unconstitutional action by the Congress. (Congress does have the power in Article I, Section 8 "To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court" and "To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof," which gives them at least some powers of regulation (to the extent that it is "necessary and proper") over the courts. But circumscribing the topics which the Supreme Court can address would seem to me to be something only the Constitution can do. Any constitutional scholars care to comment?

Missouri Rep. Todd Akin is quoted in the story saying, "We're creating a fence. The fence goes around the federal judiciary. We're doing that because we don't trust them."

Yet it's Congress, more than the courts, that can't be trusted to be remotely responsible, rational, respectful of the Constitution, or of the people. We'd be much better off putting a fence around the Congress, such as by ending the First Amendment after the fifth word.

"Under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance by act of Congress in 1954 for explicitly religious reasons (to distinguish the U.S. from the godless communists in the Soviet Union), and the U.S. Supreme Court avoided making a ruling on the issue in Michael Newdow's case by throwing the case out on a technicality--the issue of standing, since he didn't have custody of his daughter. He's currently pursuing the case through the courts again with other plaintiffs.

All but one of Arizona's Republican Representatives signed on as sponsors of the House bill: Trent Franks, Jeff Flake, J.D. Hayworth, Rick Renzi, John Shadegg. The one Republican exception was Jim Kolbe (R); the two Arizona Democrats, Raul Grijalva and Ed Pastor, did not. I suspect their voting went along these same lines.

The Senate version of this bill is S. 1046, introduced by Arizona Senator Jon Kyl. While the House bill attracted 197 sponsors, the Senate bill has only attracted 16 and Senator John McCain is not among them. The Senate bill is stalled out in the Judiciary Committee.

Anti-Astroturfing Wiki

Seth Godin has pointed out a new Anti-Astroturfing Wiki, for exposing those who are creating fake grassroots efforts by actions like coordinating letters to the editor or blog comment posts which don't mention the coordinating body--a practice engaged in by both advocates for and against net neutrality regulations.

The current Wikipedia definition: "In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals."

The Anti-Astroturfing Wiki and campaign has been set up as part of TheNewPR Wiki by Paull Young and Trevor Cook in response to the PR Institute of Australia's promotion of a "how-to" seminar on astroturfing even though the practice violates the PRIA Code of Ethics. Young has issued an anti-astroturfing statement:

We oppose the practice of astroturfing, defined above, in any form. The practice should never be a part of a public relations campaign as it is anti-democratic, unethical, immoral and often illegal.

We will attempt to raise awareness of this practice, expose it for what it is, and encourage our fellow communicators to join us in opposition.

We call for all professional communication bodies to strongly, publicly and actively oppose astroturfing; alongside PR agencies, individual practitioners and bloggers.

I endorse this, along with the InOpinion list exposing astroturfing which I posted about back in May. (For those who want to deny that providing prewritten letters on a website without mentioning the name of the organizing group supplying them is astroturfing, I recommend this rebuttal from the InOpinion blog.)

I wrote about an Arizona astroturfing effort by beverage distributors to stop direct wine shipments here. The fact that these astroturfers weren't really concerned about underage purchases of wine by mail was demonstrated by their agreement to a compromise based on the size of the winery--their principle was making sure that they remained in the middle for most wine purchases, not whether or not underage drinking occurs.