Funny quote
I think this is one of the funniest judicial excerpts I’ve read to date. Three cheers for dry wit.
If there were a book on the subject of Appellate Game Theory (there is not), this appeal could furnish rich examples for a chapter inevitably entitled “Diversionary Appellate Strategies” or “How to Finesse the Flaw of Immateriality.” . . . Lost in the din of battle may be the more pertinent and dispositive question of, “Does it really make any difference, one way or the other?” . . . Far from being inelegant, therefore, it should be the prime directive of appellate inquiry constantly to ask, “So what?” It is never out of place to question materiality. Wood v. State, 196 Md. App. 146, 151-52 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 2010).
Blog Updates
I am testing new themes to find one which is more readable. Stay tuned.
10SPR-CSCI6621-001 – MD5 Links
NOLA Mayor’s Email Saga
The “Louisiana Technology Council” held a press conference today regarding the ongoing attempts to recover Mayor Nagin’s email and calendar information. I just got back from the press conference, but am somewhat disappointed in its content. Some information can be found in these articles:
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/technology_group_hired_to_do_f.html
http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/wwl063009cbltc.229efbfe.html
I’m waiting for the broadcast tonight to review what was said. The meat of the press conference boiled down to a scenario where an Exchange 2003 mail server experienced a significant failure in 2008, the failure was not specified, prompting the city’s IT department to accelerate a planned migration of the mailstore to a new Exchange 2003 server. The old mail server was purged of 22 GB of data with a post-purge store size of 60+ GB at or around May 5th which the individuals associated with the LTC recovery effort described as suspiciously shortly after a conference call about the recovery effort.
Social media, 3rd party data storage, and warrants
Just a quick post about this article which I came across this morning regarding warrants going after facebook data. This is a very interesting trend with both privacy as well as public policy implications for the continued advancement of technology. One of my colleagues, who I did some privacy and ethics writing with earlier this year, and I have been preparing a paper on the problems the border searches of laptops cause from a technology adoption perspective – essentially our argument in brief involves technology becoming more and more a form of external cognition, and such searches discourage the continued progress for fear of privacy violations.
The flip side of this argument, is technology is adaptive and the past has demonstrated a continued evolution of technical solutions to circumvent legal interference. The evolution of peer2peer networks from Napster to the Pirate Bay and beyond is particularly illustrative. Attempts by US corporations and ICE to shut down these systems have met with increasingly sophisticated adaptations – decentralization, distributed trackers, moves to DNS registrars and TLDs outside of US jurisdiction, encryption, private tracking and so forth.
The former, chilling effect on technology adoption, is more applicable to low technology users who are not competent to judge the measure of their privacy in an online ecosystem. The latter is more applicable to high technology users – early adopters with significant technical savvy and understanding of the implementation details these systems use. Low technology users are more apt to unwittingly void their privacy even if their expectations of it are objectively unreasonable or to not adopt the technology out of fear. High technology users are more likely to meet the legal challenges with technical solutions – like an immune system – to move the technical state of the art continuously ahead of the legal competence.
There is a paper in here somewhere, but that will have to wait until I return from my study abroad session and get back into work mode.