Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

ID Standards: the Trans-National Dimension

Posted on May 13, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Here's the 2-page outline of the talk I gave today at the seminar on ID cards and human rights.

Continue reading →

Posted in ID Cards and Identification, Talks & Conferences | Comments Off on ID Standards: the Trans-National Dimension

Ugly Things Grow In Dark Corners

Posted on May 13, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Secret prisons. Harsh interrogations. Heard this one before?

Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations: The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as “water boarding,” in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

How many detention faciilities does the CIA run? How many prisoners? How long are they held? Are they released?

And those are the easy questions. The tough ones are about how often the CIA launders its torture through foreign intelligence agencies.

Posted in Iraq Atrocities | Comments Off on Ugly Things Grow In Dark Corners

Off to Cambridge (MA)

Posted on May 12, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I'm off to Cambridge (MA) today. Tomorrow I speak at one event and probably listen in on another. I had thought to try to look up old friends, or newer friends, but it turns out that today is shot for socializing because I have to be on an 8pm conference call this evening, which pretty much messes up any chance of serious dinner plans.

But if anyone reading this knows me already and is interested in a late evening post-conference call beer in the general vicinity of Harvard Yard / Harvard Law School this evening, please drop me an email, ideally with a phone number. I land in Boston around 3, should make it to the hotel by 4, and they swear they have high speed internet in every room so I should get the message. (They better, as it turns out I have a lot of work to do before that 8pm call.)

Suggestions as to where to grab a quick, decent, solitary pre-call bite in that area also gratefully welcomed. Although I get up there ever few years, I really don't know my way around Cambridge (MA) at all. Cambridge (UK), that's another story.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Off to Cambridge (MA)

The Countdown

Posted on May 12, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Is It Over Yet?

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | Comments Off on The Countdown

Losing the Hinterland

Posted on May 11, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Stuff like this tells you something.

MADISON, Wis. – Faced with a scarcity of letters praising the president, a newspaper in a Republican-leaning district appealed for pro-Bush letters, then backed off the request Tuesday amid complaints of blatant politics.

Last week in an editorial, The Post-Crescent said most of its letters had been coming from one side and asked readers “to help us 'balance' things out.”

“We've been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him,” the editorial said. “We're not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today's increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance.”

On Tuesday, the newspaper located in Appleton, Wis., with a daily circulation of just over 56,000 ran a second editorial stepping back from the appeal.

…

The newspaper is located in a congressional district that Bush won handily in 2000, beating Gore, 52 percent to 43 percent.

Posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election | 2 Comments

Formatting Woes (Long URLs in Comments Dept.)

Posted on May 11, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Sometimes readers put URLs in their comments. That's good. Sometimes they format them as HTML URLs with short text to click on. That's even better. If we're just in the 'good' zone, then funny things can happen while a comment with a long URL is one of the five most recent comments showing in the right margin—at least in most browsers.

Apparently, if you read this blog with Firefox, it handles comments with long URLs fine. But I gather that if you use pretty much anything else, it doesn't. So when people put a long URL in plaintext into their comments, and it shows up in the right margin as one of the five most recent, it shoves that column left, making it look as if the middle column got too big.

I've fixed the problem for today by editing the comment that was causing the problem, but if there's a more general fix, I don't know what it is, since MT's parser isn't built to deal with this.

Thank you to the people who were kind enough to warn me about the problem. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Posted in Discourse.net | 2 Comments