Monthly Archives: April 2004

Another Everyday Injustice from John Aschroft’s Justice Dept.

Posted on April 4, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

The Miami Herald's best columnist, Carl Hiassen, The An arbitrary deportation campaign writes about the Aschroft Justice Department's assinine campaign to deport productive, legal, US residents:

So this is the new America. Our government wants to deport an Oregon woman who was convicted 11 years ago of growing six marijuana plants.

Kari Rein, a Norwegian citizen, had never been in trouble before, and hadn't been in trouble since. That changed Dec. 30.

She, her husband and two children were returning from a vacation to Norway when she was questioned at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport by officers of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They had run Rein's name through a computer and found the old marijuana conviction. They asked her to step into a private room.

''And that,'' says her husband, James Jungwirth, “was the last time we saw her for three weeks.''

The sentencing judge didn't even think six pot plants for home use merited a jail sentence. But the loonies in Main Justice don't care. The husband and two kids are US citizens. But Main Justice doesn't care.

Remember folks, all this is being done in your name by your government. Be proud. Or throw the rascals out.

And, as Karl Hiaasen says,

Don't think it couldn't happen to someone you know. This is the new America.

Posted in Law: Everything Else | 2 Comments

Judge In His Own Case

Posted on April 3, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It's a little short, but Federal Judge Pulls His Suit From Courts Run by State sure makes it sound like something seriously wrong happened here: a “federal judge in Louisiana has taken control of an accident case involving his car and issued an order transferring evidence about his medical condition to a sealed federal court file.”

Posted in Law: Ethics | Comments Off on Judge In His Own Case

The Economist’s Wonderful Cover

Posted on April 2, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

The Economist almost never comes on Friday. It sometimes comes on Saturday. It often doesn't make it out here until Monday, leading me to grumble that they get better service in Cairo (they do). But this week's came today, and the cover is just perfect. My kids loved it too.

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 2 Comments

100% Increase in UM Law Bloggers

Posted on April 2, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

It seems we now have two, count them two, student bloggers at UM, both first year students. Welcome Barsk to the aether! (His first substantive post, on Mel Gibson's movie and the UM shuttle bus is certainly true to life. (Except maybe for the part where the grocery store is not out of matzah.)

Posted in U.Miami | Comments Off on 100% Increase in UM Law Bloggers

Plame Investigation Metastasises

Posted on April 2, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Prosecutors Are Said to Have Expanded Inquiry Into Leak of C.I.A. Officer's Name. Seems the prosecutor thinks someone might have been lying to him.

I love the smell of justice in the morning.

Posted in Politics: US: GW Bush Scandals | 2 Comments

1984: We’re Just Behind Schedule

Posted on April 1, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Who ever would have imagined that the same IETF which, in the RAVEN process, fought off a proposal to make the Internet wiretap standards compliant, would turn around only a few short years later and adopt the innocously titled RFC3751: Omniscience Protocol Requirements. S. Bradner:

There have been a number of legislative initiatives in the U.S. and elsewhere over the past few years to use the Internet to actively interfere with allegedly illegal activities of Internet users. This memo proposes a number of requirements for a new protocol, the Omniscience Protocol, that could be used to enable such efforts.

In RFC 3751, issued this very day, we have nothing less than a standard that would determine, as the author so crudely puts it, who is a “bad guy” on the Internet, thus enabling those so labeled to be targeted for the treatment proposed by none other than Senator Hatch (“destroying their machines”). Sounds like a compensible Taking to me…at least so long as the parties doing it can be shown to be state actors (not always simple these days).

And it gets worse: the programs defined by this standard will run invisibily in the background, and will be secretly downloaded to all machines that touch the Internet. And they will need to know an awful lot about you to work.

Of course, compliant programs will have to be optimzed for local law, creating a lot of work for tech-savvy lawyers, so this isn't all bad.

Continue reading →

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on 1984: We’re Just Behind Schedule