Monthly Archives: January 2004

Aerogel – Weird Stuff Indeed

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Using the Right Bait to Catch a Comet describes Aerogel—super light weight, least dense material, hard to see straight, yet a great insulator and hard to crush. It sounds cool. I want some.

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Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment

My Brother Takes Your Questions–And Asks One

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

My brother is currently “Live Online” at washingtonpost.com if you want to ask him questions about the White House or the State of the Union speech.

[#INCLUDE metaphysical question about status at other times]

P.S. Dan also has a question for you:

I asked you in yesterday’s column to help me figure out what Vice President Cheney meant when he asked, rhetorically, if he was [a] “brown cloud.” I’m still working on it. Even a call to his press secretary didn’t clear things up. If you have any more ideas, e-mail froomkin@washingtonpost.com.

Posted in Dan Froomkin | Comments Off on My Brother Takes Your Questions–And Asks One

Meanwhile, Back at Reality, 8000 Spent Fuel Rods are Missing in North Korea

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Jack Pritchard, What I Saw in North Korea

On Jan. 8, North Korean officials gave an unofficial American delegation, of which I was a member, access to the building in Yongbyon where about 8,000 spent fuel rods had once been safeguarded. We discovered that all 8,000 rods had been removed.

Whether they have been reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, as Pyongyang claims, is almost irrelevant. American intelligence believed that most if not all the rods remained in storage, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue and worked laboriously to devise a multilateral approach to solving the rapidly escalating crisis.

Here's what George W. Bush had to say about this critical subject in the State of the Union:

Different threats require different strategies. Along with nations in the region, we're insisting that North Korea eliminate its nuclear program. … America is committed to keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.

Well, I feel better now, don't you?

Posted in Politics: International | 2 Comments

Privacy and Anonymity Take a Blow from the Second Circuit.

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

On first reading, this Second Circuit decision in Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan V. Kerik is pretty awful.

It's not just that the court seems to have outlawed Halloween. No, it's that the precedent is just waiting to be used to block the operation of anonymous remails and the use of strong cryptography.

As we move to a world of mandatory ID cards and inescapable facial recognition, not to mention lie-detector specs, this case could really come back to, um, haunt us.

I discuss the general issues in two papers, Anonymity in the Balance (book chapter in Digital Anonymity: Tensions and Dimensions (C. Nicoll, J.E.J. Prins & M.J.M. van Dellen eds. 2003), and The Death of Privacy?, 52 Stan. L. Rev. 1461 (2000).

The more specific issue of the legal rules relating to strong crypto is discussed in the only very slightly dated The Metaphor is the Key: Cryptography, the Clipper Chip and the Constitution, 143 U. Penn. L. Rev. 709 (1995). You can also skip straight to my discussion of the earlier mask law cases.

Update: For those who don't want to load the slow .pdf case file, I should perhaps explain that the Second Circuit upheld New York's anti-mask law against a group of constitutional challenges—although it dodged one of the key issues, the extent to which a right to speak annonymously was implicated. The court was able to do this by making the scarecely-credible assertion that the right to protect one's associations (NAACP v. Alabama) was not implicated when demonstrators were forced to expose their faces as a condition of appearing in public—in this case at a public demonstration. The court also rejected as irrelevant the claim that this would discourage attendence at KKK rallies, but the argument it uses seems too broad.

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Posted in Civil Liberties | Comments Off on Privacy and Anonymity Take a Blow from the Second Circuit.

A Device That Could Revolutionize Politics (and Dating)

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Lie detector specs soon available to all points to the more serious if nevertheless slightly vaporwarious Lie-detector glasses offer peek at future of security.

A U.S. company using technology developed in Israel is pitching a lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers, and its inventors say it can tell whether a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple question in real-time.

The technology, developed by mathematician Amir Lieberman at Nemesysco in Zuran, Israel, for military, insurance claim and law enforcement use, is being repackaged and retargeted for personal and corporate applications by V Entertainment (New York).

“Our products were originally for law enforcement use — we get all our technology from Nemesys-co — but we need more development time [for that application],” said Dave Watson, chief operating officer of parent V LLC. “So we decided to come out sooner with consumer versions at CES.”

The company showed plain sunglasses outfitted with the technology at the 2004 International CES in Las Vegas earlier this month. The system used green, yellow and red color codes to indicate a “true,” “maybe” or “false” response. At its CES booth, V Entertainment analyzed the voices of celebrities like Michael Jackson to determine whether they were lying.

Besides lie detection, Watson said, the technology “can also measure for other emotions like anxiety, fear or even love.”

I won’t actually believe in such a device until it is tangible and subject to serious double-blind testing. But it is delicious to imagine how useful a pair of lie-detector specs would be for, say, watching the State of the Union. Or candidate debates. (Imagine a meter running in a box under the speaker on TV…). Or diplomacy.

Of course, I’m prepared to believe that, to the (greater or lesser) extent he thought about it, Ronald Reagan believed everything he said. And I suspect Jimmy Carter tried hard to tell the truth. But they were unusual.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 3 Comments

A Heartwarming Story of Crooked, Violent Cops and the Strangely Unnecessary Perjury that Got Them Off Charges for Burning and Beating a Frequent Felon

Posted on January 20, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Federal prosecutors abruptly drop beating charges against 4 Miami cops “Four Miami police officers charged with beating a career criminal were set free Tuesday morning after federal prosecutors admitted the foundation of their case was constructed on perjury concocted by the criminal and his family.”

On its face this sounds like the Miami version of a 'man bites dog' story, with a dash of Perry Mason. With the extra added dollop that this is a re-trial of a long-running case.

Not only does it appear that the cops were telling the truth and the accused beating victim committed perjury, but the truth came out in a made-for-TV moment,

Former officers Aguero and Jorge Castello and suspended cops Jorge ''Termite'' Garcia and Wilfredo Perez were charged with beating, kicking and burning Anazco after he had been picked up.

Tuesday's shocking development started falling into place late Friday when federal prosecutors Curtis Miner and Jacqueline Becerra called Hialeah brake shop manager Armando Rodriguez to the stand.

Rodriguez did not testify at the 2002 trial, but his testimony was key to the prosecution in the retrial. On Friday, Rodriguez said he ordered parts to repair Anazco's Supra — corroborating Anazco's contention that the cops had beaten the wrong man because his car was in the shop when the rock was tossed.

But defense attorneys, led by Castello's attorney, Richard Sharpstein, quickly ripped apart Rodriguez's story.

Over the weekend, Miner said Rodriguez confessed that he fabricated the receipt showing that he ordered parts for the Supra and that he was asked to lie ''by others'' whom Miner did not name.

Rodriguez, who initially testified that he did not know Anazco before he came to his shop, later admitted he had known the career criminal at least 12 years and had even employed his uncle.

On Friday, Sharpstein confronted Rodriguez with forms Rodriguez and his wife signed in September 2001 to visit Anazco in a state prison. On the forms, Rodriguez said he was ''friends'' with Anazco.

During Friday's cross-examination by Sharpstein, Rodriguez admitted that Anazco's father, Asbert, had asked him to visit his son.

''This isn't hyperbole,'' Sharpstein said Tuesday. “In my 28 years as an attorney, I've never had a guy admit on the stand that he committed perjury. It just doesn't happen.''

I would like to write a heartwarming story about honest cops and the truth will out. But wait a minute. This is Miami we're talking about. It's not nearly that simple. For one thing, the victim's account of how he sustained his injuries was partly corroborated by two independent witnesses—both police officers.

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Posted in Law: Criminal Law | 1 Comment