DanKohn.com

Chilling Effects is a great reference to the DMCA, copyright law, and other info on our online rights.

WEP sucks, but you already knew that. IMHO, the only reasonable wireless configuration today (assuming you haven’t assigned everyone an 802.1x key, and you haven’t, since nobody’s deployed PKI), is to put the 802.11b WiFi hub outside the firewall and then use PPTP/SSH/etc. to tunnel through. I.e., if it’s wireless, assume it’s insecure, and layer the security on top.

Jamie McCarthy pointed out:

Amendment VI to the U.S. Constitution:

“…the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public
trial… and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”

ABC News story:

[Al Muhajir, a U.S. citizen] “has been barred access to legal assistance. White House officials say he may never come to trial.”

Eugene Volokh quotes “an anonymous but extremely knowledgeable correspondent”:

On the points made about the detention of the dirty bomber, I think this case is instructive: In re Territo, 156 F 2d 142 (9th Cir 1946), [which holds] that a citizen who is an enemy belligerent [there, a prisoner of war] can be held without trial for the duration of the war. The only question is whether the Executive’s determination of belligerent status is subject to habeas [corpus] review. I believe that it is, and should be, and I predict that the dirty bomber will seek habeas, and that the Executive will present its evidence, and that the federal courts will determine that he is in fact an enemy belligerent subject to detention without trial.

However, a war that very likely will never end would seem to throw the precedential value of this opinion into question.

Bad geek humor #3: “This sentence has threee erors.”

It is shocking that there is not more of an outcry over the unlawful detainment of radioactive “dirty bomb” suspect Jose Padilla. Yes, the guy is very likely guilty. But so are most other American citizens arrested for serious crimes such as murder. Freedom of speech is designed to protect objectionable speech, since non-objectionable speech doesn’t need any protections. Similarly, the due process of law is designed to protect individuals who appear guilty but are not. Rumsfeld saying that he “was unquestionably involved in terrorist activities” and Bush saying that he “is a bad guy” are not good enough reasons to lock up Padilla without trial, whether by civilian court or court martial.
It is especially sad to see liberals such as Tribe imply that national security is incompatible with trying Padilla:

“The decision to detain him indefinitely under this new category of enemy combatant is intriguing,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. “It is a source of concern, but the constitutional question it presents is deeply perplexing, given that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Pofessor’s Tribe’s reference to a suicide pact was an echo of a similar sentiment in a 1949 dissent by Justice Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court [meaning] that the protection of liberty cannot be at the expense of the nation’s security.

Spies are regularly tried without intelligence secrets being revealed. I believe that within 10 years, these sorts of potentially indefinite (and therefore unlawful) detentions will be universally regarded as an abrogation of our country’s constitutional principles on the scale of the Japanese internments in WWII.

I took the terms totalitarian fascism and totalitarian communism from one of the best pieces the Economist ever published, where they excerpt a history book from 2992 looking at democracy’s post-1991 failure:

All this was potentially a greater change in the course of history than Britain’s defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815…. Perhaps not since the battle of Actium in 31BC, which made possible the Pax Romana of the next two centuries, had there been such a chance to remake the world; and in AD1991, unlike 31BC, the central idea on which the remaking would have been based was the victors’ belief in every man’s right to political and economic freedom.

Just as the once apparently doomed forces of western liberalism defeated totalitarian fascism in 1945 and totalitarian communism in 1991, we now face a war against totalitarian fundamentalism. (Note that I mean western as a moral appellation, not a geographic designation.) Arnold Kling has a strong essay on the war against terrorism, which mentions two other great pieces:

Elliot Cohen points out that the war on terrorism is better described as World War IV (where WW III was the Cold War). As Cohen says:

The enemy in this war is not “terrorism” — a distilled essence of evil, conducted by the real-world equivalents of J. K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort, Tolkien’s Sauron or C. S. Lewis’s White Witch — but militant Islam. The enemy has an ideology, and an hour spent surfing the Web will give the average citizen at least the kind of insights that he might have found during World Wars II and III by reading “Mein Kampf” or the writings of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Those insights, of course, eluded those in the West who preferred — understandably, but dangerously — to define the problem as something more manageable, such as German resentment about the Versailles Treaty, an exaggerated form of Russian national interest, or peasant resentment of landlords taken a bit too far. In the reported words of one survivor of the Holocaust, when asked what lesson he had taken from his experience of the 1940s, “If someone tells you that he intends to kill you, believe him.”

Ralph Peters in 1998 described the Seven Signs of Non-competitive States:

• Restrictions on the free flow of information.
• The subjugation of women.
• Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
• The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.
• Domination by a restrictive religion.
• A low valuation of education.
• Low prestige assigned to work.

Sounds a lot like the Arab states (other than Turkey, which is actually Islamic but not Arab).

My friend Xander Blakely has a great interview on WNYC (24 mins, RealAudio) about his new book Siberia Bound.

Why 5 9’s availability in telecoms in unachievable and overrated.