This quote made me laugh out loud:

Oddly, despite the recent rise of the libertarian-leaning Tea Party faction of the Republican Party, no Republican has decided publicly that privacy protection of Americans’ online communications is a winning issue.

Given that the "Tea Party" is supposedly supported by "Libertarians" concerned with individual freedom, and that a number of "Tea Party" supported candidates are in office from around the country, you'd think that "Tea Party" candidates would support clear cut individual liberty issues like the proper extension of warrant requirements to data in the cloud. This is really a no-brainer, as the article lays out:

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was adopted at a time when e-mail, for example, wasn’t stored on servers for a long time. Instead it was held there briefly on its way to the recipient’s inbox. E-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned, and that’s why the law allowed the government to get it...

But technology has evolved, and e-mail often remains stored on cloud servers indefinitely, in gigabytes upon gigabytes — meaning the authorities may access it without warrants if it’s older than six months...

Leahy’s measure, among other things, would require court warrants to obtain all that cloud data.

Either:
1. The "Tea Party" pays lip service to Libertarian views but doesn't actually support them when push comes to shove.
2. "Libertarians" don't really support individual liberty like they say they do - they really only care about money - low taxes, not personal freedom.

You can talk all you want about how you support individual liberty, but when push comes to shove, if you are not willing to take action, you are not what you say you are.

No GOP Senator Supports Bill to Protect Cloud E-Mail Privacy | Threat Level | Wired.com

This whole situation is truly mind boggling. It's ironic that the person to drive this into the limelight is the Senator that everyone likes to think is a joke. Nothing about rape is a laughing matter.

Decius writes:

This is absolutely mind boggling.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad... Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Seriously!? In my time I've seen many examples of lawyers abusing the imbalanced negotiating position present in employment contacts but this takes the cake. An agreement not to press charges for rape? Are you fucking kidding me?!

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote, earning the support of 10 Republican senators including that of newly-minted Florida Sen. George LeMieux.

30 United States Senators voted against this? What could the basis of their opposition possibly be? Al Franken is not above political grandstanding at all, but when push comes to shove, why would you oppose this? I've searched on Google for an alternative perspective to no avail. Does anyone know a source where these people have articulated their position? As LeMieux put it:

"I can't see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn't have her right to go to court."

If anything Franken's amendment does not go far enough. This is prima facie evidence that there is a serious structural problem with employment contracts. No contract clause of this sort ought to be respected in any context relevant to US law and major reform of rules surrounding US employment contracts is needed.

People who voted against this amendment include:
Alexander (R-TN)
Bond (R-MO)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Corker (R-TN)
Isakson (R-GA)

More on this from ThinkProgress, including video of Franken's speech on the floor.

The Halliburton/KBR employment contract rape clause.

It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting,"

Obama to Palin: 'Don't Mock the Constitution' | The Trail | washingtonpost.com

The bill was sponsored by Senator Joseph Biden

You can read MemeStreams discussions about this bill here and here. When a politician writes up a paranoid, funhouse mirror description of a widespread youth counterculture and attaches to it to a bill intended to target and shut down that culture, well, those youth ought to remind him of that when he desires their vote for political office.

RAVE Act was Biden's idea

Katie Hafner puts Virgil on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

I love seeing my friends in the news. Especially when it's not because someone is suing them.

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

By the end of the 110th Congress, the U.S. House of Representatives could achieve the goal of providing broadcast-quality video of all hearings and the floor for download on the Internet.

This is an important and under-recognized victory for the openness of our democracy.

There is still more that needs to be done though. I feel it is also necessary to make searchable transcripts available of committee hearings in the same way as the rest of the congressional record.

Internet Archive: Report to the Congress: Congressional Hearings Online

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

This is really good news. I can only see good things resulting from this change of focus.

Lessig blog: Required Reading: the next 10 years

This afternoon I was happily geeking away when I heard a knock at the door. I went to answer and was presented with a local sheriff and two FBI agents holding a lovely search warrant (scans coming when I can get down to Kinko's in the morning).

The original prank was covered earlier.

It appears neither McCain's people nor the FBI have a grasp on what has happened here. In short, it was McCain's web staff that screwed up. The only crime committed here was civil in nature, and was on the part of McCain's web staff. They included images in their MySpace profile that were not hosted on MySpace or McCain's servers, and did not follow the license associated with those images. They did not attribute them, so the owner changed them.

If this escalates, it will be an interesting court case. McCain and the FBI will lose.

For some background reading that relates to this, I strongly suggest reading the account of how Jason Scott did something similar, only much more offensive. I suggest reading the entire account, as it is both extremely humorous and insightful.

Update: The original prank was featured on the Daily Show.

Update^2: It was an April Fools day joke. A pretty believable one too. Heh. I expect this kinda thing to happen these days.

Senator McCain web staff and FBI both lacking clue

A push to legalize the Sunday sale of alcohol topped a list of bills that likely died in the Georgia Legislature on Monday.

The bills including a proposed hate crimes law, plans for Confederate History Month and Gov. Sonny Perdue's effort to clarify that church groups may receive state money were not among the ones that made it onto the Senate calendar for Tuesday.

WSB's Capitol Reporter Sandra Parrish reports Tuesday is the so-called Crossover Day in the Legislature. That's the 30th day of the 40-day session and the last on which a bill may pass in one chamber to be considered by the other.

This means that both SB 59 and HB 504 are dead for the year. MemeStreamers may rejoice..

However, you still can't buy booze on Sunday. I guess we can't have everything.

Crossover Day in the Georgia Legislature

In New Mexico, anyone can work as an interior designer. But it is a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in prison, to list yourself on the Internet or in the Yellow Pages as, or to otherwise call yourself, an "interior designer" without being certified as such. Those who favor this censoring of truthful commercial speech are a private group that controls, using an exam administered by a private national organization, access to that title.

Who benefits? Creating artificial scarcity of services raises the prices of those entitled to perform the services.

This discussion and the linked editorial should resonate with people who are concerned about HB 504.

The Volokh Conspiracy - George Will on Rent-Seeking: