Wacky (academic) fun at Thoughts Arguments and Rants: Silly Talk about Philosophy (spotted via Leiter) in which real live (academic) philosophers respond to this invitation:
what about a thread on the silliest things people have said to you about philosophy, or silliest philosophical claims you’ve heard made?
Isn't this just charming: the UK is considering establishing Secret courts for terror cases. That's “Special anti-terror courts sitting in secret to determine how long suspects should be detained without charge.”
We had to kill liberty and justice in order to save it?
Since we’re doing such a good line is worrying about cell phones this week, here are two more items to tickle the fancy.
First, Michael Zimmer writes about Public Surveillence via Cellphone, pointing to a Wired article on some work at MIT:
Eagle’s Reality Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers, and was quickly able to guess whether two people were friends or just co-workers. It also found that MBA students actually do spend $45,000 a year to build monster Rolodexes, and that first-year college students — even those who attend MIT — lead chaotic lives.
He and his team were able to create detailed views of life at the Media Lab, by observing how late people stayed at the lab, when they called one another and how much sleep students got.
Given enough data, Eagle’s algorithms were able to predict what people — especially professors and Media Lab employees — would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.
Ben Hyde noticed the same Wired story and supplements it with this amazing story:
A few years back the Irish cellphone company discovered that they had neglected to discard ten years of this data. Traces of every cell phone user in Ireland for a decade!
In what may not be tinfoil, Mark Odell reports in the Financial Times, a reliable newspaper, that in the UK at least, governments can turn cellphones into spy microphones,
If ordered to do so, mobile telephone operators can also tap any calls, but more significantly they can also remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call, giving security services the perfect bugging device. “We have inadvertently started carrying our own trackable ID card in the form of the mobile phone,” said Sandra Bell, head of the homeland security department at the Royal United Services Institute.
The source is “LONDON BOMB ATTACKS: Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect and brother” (sub. req.) published Aug. 2, 2005. It is available on Westlaw (Westlaw acct. req.).
It's August, so the tinfoil is out.
Sources close to the Chicago federal grand jury probe into perjury and obstruction charges against President Bush and others said indictments were handed down this week, but a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois refused to comment.
Uh-huh. I grant you that it fits with the grim seriousness with which the special prosecutor has been working, but even so…
Don't even hope for this: Another presidential indictment would be bad, even one for something that mattered, like outing a CIA agent. (Impeachment, and perhaps indictment, for lying to start a war is different; that at least would be about an offense of suitably major proportions. But while that's surely a 'High Crime' I don't know if it violates the US Code.) An indictment and the fury it would cause risks distracting from, maybe even aborting what looks like it would otherwise be a substantial Democratic gain in the upcoming national elections. Not to mention that there's no one in the line of succession who seems likely to be in any way an improvement over the current Grand Vizier, Dick Cheney.
CNN interviewed me for more than 20 minutes. According to the transcript of 'Paula Zahn Now' this is what survived:
MESERVE: The prospect of more surveillance and interlocking systems puts privacy experts on edge. They worry about whether information and some of those intimate images will be recorded, archived, searched and shared.
A. MICHAEL FROOMKIN, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW SCHOOL: Are those tapes ever going to leak? How secure are they going to be? Are they going to be encrypted? Who's going to have access to the tapes? Are they going to be passing them around for office parties?
Could have been worse.
Jotwell Blenderlaw