A good start

Reuters reports:

During a fund-raiser in Denver, Obama -- a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School -- was asked what he hoped to accomplish during his first 100 days in office.

"I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution," said Obama.

That would be fantastic. Would would be even better would be if he would continue on with all standing executive orders from any president, after cleaning up the messes from the most recent one. It would be nice to see the federal government actually staying within constitutional limits of its power, but I won't be holding my breath.

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

CIA operatives on trial in Italy

26 Americans, mostly CIA operatives, are currently on trial in absentia in Italy for the kidnapping and "extraordinary rendition" of a radical Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, who was taken to Egypt to be tortured. On Thursday, Italy's top counterterrorism official, Bruno Megale, explained in court how they identified the CIA operatives responsible for Omar's kidnapping:

Megale obtained records of all cellphone traffic from the transmission tower nearest the spot where Abu Omar was abducted, for a 2 1/2 -hour period around the time he disappeared. There were 2,000 calls.

Then, using a computer program, Megale was able to narrow down the pool by tracing the phones that had called each other, in other words, an indication of a group of people working together. Seventeen phone numbers, which showed intensifying use around the time of the abduction, were pinpointed. By following all other calls made from those phones, the investigators ultimately identified 60 numbers, including that of a CIA officer working undercover at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

In his testimony, Megale revealed that one telephone number he recognized was that of Robert Seldon Lady, then-CIA station chief in Milan. Lady and Megale had worked together in counter-terrorism investigations. It was a number, Megale said somberly, that he and his team knew.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Major League Baseball misuse of IP law

I saw on The Colbert Report that Major League Baseball is telling Little League teams that they can't use the names of MLB teams unless they purchase their uniforms from MLB-authorized licensees. Nonsense--a Little League team called the A's or the Twins or the Mariners is in no danger of confusion with the MLB team, so there's no infringement.

Techdirt reports on this issue, and also that MLB is also still trying to claim ownership over game statistics, even though facts cannot be copyrighted.

Little League teams should tell MLB to take a hike.

UPDATE (June 2, 2008): The Supreme Court denied cert on MLB's lawsuit against C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing for its use of the names of MLB players and statistics for fantasy baseball, without a license from MLB. The court of appeals in St. Louis had already ruled that C.B.C. has a free speech right to use player names and statistics, which have previously been regarded as facts not subject to copyright. Some have worried that this ruling will endanger licensing arrangements regarding the use of celebrity names, but cases that involve an endorsement of a product seem to me to be clearly distinguishable from this case.

Drug war led to Chicago PD corruption

Former Chicago police officer and FBI informant Keith Herrera told "60 Minutes" that pressure to get results in the war on drugs led to police officers lying about the facts in order to get arrests, and ultimately to a corrupt ring of officers engaging in thefts from drug dealers and a plot to kill two of fellow officers who weren't with the program and were prepared to testify against them. Herrera is one of seven officers in the Special Operations Section who have been charged with robbery, kidnapping, and other crimes.

(As reported by Reuters on Yahoo.)

MediaDefender launches denial of service attack against Revision3

Anti-piracy company MediaDefender, which defends its clients' intellectual property by disrupting the content on peer-to-peer networks, launched a denial of service attack (SYN flood) against Revision3 over Memorial Day weekend. The attack was launched after Revision3 discovered that their servers were being used by MediaDefender to post spoofed BitTorrent index files and Revision3 shut off their access.

Revision3, a legitimate company that distributes HD video over the Internet using BitTorrent, was not amused, and the FBI is investigating.

Any legitimate Internet provider should refuse to provide services to companies that engage in illegal or immoral tactics to try to stop peer-to-peer piracy of copyrighted content, such as denial of service attacks or interference with services that are being used legitimately, even if they are also being used for piracy. If they don't have methods which can be targeted specifically against the copyrighted content they are authorized to protect, then their methods cross the line, in my opinion.

MediaDefender's upstream network providers are Savvis (ASN 3561), Beyond the Network (ASN 3491), WV Fiber (ASN 19151), and SingTel (ASN 7473). They all should have a problem with denial of service attacks by their customer.

MediaDefender was previously in the news in September 2007 when its security was breached by hackers and 700 MB of executive emails and the content of VoIP telephone calls from the company were leaked to the Internet. This seems to me like a company that should not be in business.

Footage of Palestinian boy killed by Israeli fire apparent hoax

The footage from eight years ago of a Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, being killed by Israeli gunfire, which was used by the killers of reporter Daniel Pearl in the video they posted to the Internet of that murder, was apparently a hoax, as reported by Australia's Daily Telegraph.

In an appeals trial for a civil defamation lawsuit by the France 2 network and its cameraman, Charles Enderlin, against a media watchdog who claimed the footage was a hoax, the jury was shown 18 minutes of footage rather than the 57 seconds which were broadcast. That footage includes staged battle scenes, rehearsed ambulance evacuations, and even the boy--supposedly dead--moving and looking at the camera.

The French press, which had been siding with France 2 against Philippe Karsenty, director of the Media-Ratings watchdog group, appears to have been proven wrong and Karsenty vindicated.

Enderlin has apparently been caught fabricating other footage as well.

(This story also covered by the Wall Street Journal online, but apparently not by many other news sources, which is why I'm giving it attention.)

Richard Cheese in Phoenix

Today's Arizona Republic has an article about Richard Cheese, who will be appearing at the Celebrity Theater on June 7 with his Lounge Against the Machine band. The article describes his roots in Arizona and the man behind the leopard-print tuxedo--who shared a table with me (we didn't have desks) in sixth grade. (Mark and I attended the same schools and were friends from third through eighth grade, then went different ways, though we have crossed paths from time to time since then, including when he got me a DJ job for ASU's campus radio station, KASR-AM, when we were both undergrads there. Sadly, KASR's call letters now belong to a sports radio station in Arkansas.)

Einzige, Kat, and I will be at the show.

Phoenix New Times had a similar, more detailed story about Richard Cheese the week of May 19, 2005, "Big Cheese" by Jimmy Magahern.

Also watch for Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine on TV3's "Good Morning Arizona" program on Thursday, June 5, at around 8:30 a.m.

Gary Habermas' D.D. degree

The Access Research Network, a young-earth creationist organization formerly known as Students for Origins Research, states the following in its description of a DVD it sells of the 2003 debate on the resurrection of Jesus between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas, a professor at Liberty University:

Dr. Habermas holds an M.A. in philosophical theology from the University of Detroit; a D.D. in theology from Emmanuel College, Oxford; and Ph.D. in history and philosophy of religion from Michigan Sate [sic] University.

The D.D. in theology from Emmanuel College, Oxford is also mentioned in the description of Habermas on a website advertising the DVD "Jesus: Fact or Fiction." It shows up in his bio for a talk he gave at First Family Church in Overland Park, Kansas.

There's a slight problem with a doctorate of divinity in theology from Emmanuel College, Oxford--there is no such college at Oxford. This same false claim is made in the Wikipedia article for Gary Habermas, with a link from "Emmanuel College" to the Wikipedia entry for Emmanuel College at Cambridge University, not Oxford. (Emmanuel College at Cambridge does have a "sister college" at Oxford, but its name is Exeter College.)

Habermas's current online resume lists no D.D. degree at all.

So what's the story? Is this Habermas's error, or someone else's? And what kind of error is it? If Habermas has a D.D. degree from a UK school, why doesn't his current resume list it?

(Hat tip to Roger Stanyard, who pointed this out in a comment at RichardDawkins.net last year.)

I once exchanged some letters with Gary Habermas, beginning with a critique I wrote of the first edition of the book on immortality that he co-wrote with J.P. Moreland. I don't believe anything in my critique was accounted for in the second edition of their book; the second edition still includes this false statement about psychic detective Peter Hurkos, even though I pointed them to critical material: "In carefully documented situations, Hurkos demonstrated very precise knowledge of cases as famous as the stolen Stone of Scone...and the Boston Strangler murders." Even if they rejected my criticism, shouldn't a matter of simple honesty to their readers have demanded that they include a reference to the existence of published rebuttals?

Phony financial planner defrauds churchgoers

James J. Buchanan of the Christ Life Church in Tempe, Arizona, is accused of defrauding 30-40 people out of over $5 million over the last ten years. He claimed to be a financial planner, and took many people's life's savings, as well as money from the church. The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office says it's hard to tell where the money went, but it appears that he used some of it to pay off early investors in classic Ponzi scheme style, and spent the rest on himself. His scheme collapsed this March, after he refused to provide documentation to show where one investor's money was, and that investor refused a payoff to stay quiet and went to the police.

(A previous discussion of religious affinity fraud on the increase, at the Secular Outpost.)

UPDATE (11 February 2012): Also see "Affinity fraud: Fleecing the flock" from The Economist, January 28, 2012.

D'Souza dishonesty about Rev. Moon

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars tells how Dinesh D'Souza wrote an article in the 1980s about conservatives taking money from Rev. Sun Myung Moon, but then when he took money from Moon himself in 2007, denied that he knew anything about Moon.