The Senate recently voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. But nestled in the Act was an amendment by Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) to add arrestee information to the national DNA database. The national DNA database, which is run by the FBI, is called the Combined DNA Index System (“CODIS”), and it includes DNA from over two million convicted criminals. This DNA is used to identify matches with DNA found at crime scenes.
Bird flu has now captured the attention of the news. While I’m generally not one to become overly concerned with Armageddon scenarios, a flu pandemic strikes me as a particularly realistic and frightening possibility. Pandemics occur periodically, and the experts all seem to be extremely concerned.
I just wrote a post about the possibility of cell phones being used to nab speeders. This raises a larger question regarding law enforcement. If we employ new technologies of surveillance to achieve a more efficient enforcement of various laws, the most obvious concern that comes to mind is the threat posed to privacy. There’s also another problem worth thinking about – Is it desirable to have very efficient enforcement of certain laws?
A glimpse into the not-too-distant future . . .
You’re driving along the highway. There is only light traffic on the road, and there’s not a cop in sight. You decide to give in to that dastardly rebel within and go 10 miles over the speed limit. You get to your destination without incident, a few minutes early. The sun is shining in the sky; there’s not a cloud in sight. It’s a happy day. Life is good.
But then a few weeks later, you discover that the day wasn’t as cheery as you had thought. That’s because you were caught for speeding that day. Your ticket arrives in the mail. But there were no police officers along the route, no speed traps, no surveillance cameras. How did you get caught?
You were ratted out, betrayed by a traitor in your car. No, not a secret agent, not a rat, not a mole. Instead, it was something you trusted the most, an inseparable companion . . . it was your cell phone.
According to the AP [link no longer avilable]:
Bob Sullivan at MSNBC writes:
A second storm surge may soon start slamming into Gulf coast residents hit by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Mounting unpaid bills will lead to a surge of black marks on victims’ credit reports, say consumer advocates, sinking their credit scores. And now, they say, efforts to convince the nation’s credit bureaus to develop new systems to account for victims’ temporary bill-paying troubles have hit a major snag.
Consumers who can’t make their house payments any more – even if that house has been completely swept away by the storm – may face the ultimate penalty in America’s credit-driven society: A credit score so low they won’t qualify for the loans they need to start rebuilding.
Consumer groups, anticipating the coming surge of late payments and account defaults, have asked credit bureaus to help. The consumer groups proposed that the bureaus take a pre-Katrina credit score snapshot of all residents in the affected areas. Later, when victims apply for loans, the pre-Katrina score could be used to identify whether victims were good credit risks before the storm.
After blogging a few weeks ago about the airline screening playset, I went ahead and ordered one.
Each day, I would check my mailbox, eager with excitement about its arrival. Today, it finally arrived. I rushed to open it and began what would be hours of exciting play. Here’s what came in the playset:
I was a bit disappointed in the toy’s lack of realism. There was only one passenger to be screened. Where were the long lines? The passenger’s clothing wasn’t removable for strip searching. The passenger’s shoes couldn’t be removed either. Her luggage fit easily inside the X-ray machine. There were no silly warning signs not to carry guns or bombs onto the plane. And there was no No Fly List or Selectee List included in the playset.
Another oddity was that the toy came with two guns, one for the police officer and one that either belonged to the X-ray screener or the passenger. The luggage actually opened up, and the gun fit inside. I put it through the X-ray machine, and it went through undetected. Perhaps this is where the toy came closest to reality.
The biggest departure from reality was that the passenger had a cheery smile on her face.
Anonymous bloggers received a great victory this week in a case decided by the Delaware Supreme Court — Doe v. Cahill (Oct. 5, 2005). The case involved John Doe, who anonymously posted on a blog statements about Patrick Cahill, a City Councilman of Smyrna, Delaware. Doe, in criticizing Cahill’s job performance, noted that Cahill had “obvious mental deterioration” and was “paranoid.” Cahill sued Doe for defamation.
In this interesting AP article [link no longer available], a man won an invasion of privacy lawsuit when his property manager searched his home and reported to the FBI that there were terrorist materials in the apartment. FBI officials detained, fingerprinted, and handcuffed the man, but eventually determined that the man wasn’t a terrorist:
In an interesting and thoughtful post, Eugene Volokh (law, UCLA) takes issue with California’s Megan’s Law, Cal. Penal Code § 290.46(j), which places personal data about sex offenders on the Internet yet restricts the uses of this data. The law allows people to use the information “only to protect a person at risk.” It prohibits the use of the information for, among other things, purposes related to insurance, loans, credit, employment, benefits, and housing.
The Supreme Court appointment process has become almost pathological . . . ironically, for rational reasons. The incentive is for presidents to select people who are: (1) young, so they have a reign on the Court that rivals Fidel Castro’s in length; and (2) obscure, so they have rarely taken any positions on any major issues. [Sadly, the future prospects for Supreme Court appointments for bloggers are not looking good.]
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