Monthly Archives: March 2007

Notes From An Alternate Reality

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Someone has a very active imagination. If only this video was real:

Posted in Completely Different, Iraq | Comments Off on Notes From An Alternate Reality

SwapNotes — Boon or Bane?

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Not sure how I feel about this. I (and it appears tons of other lawprofs) got a note today announcing this:

SwapNotes (www.swapnotes.com) is a new free online service that allows students and professors to share notes, outlines, and old exams (which we take down if asked by the professor).

By linking the courses you teach with the casebooks you use, we hope to make it easier for you to see what other professors who use your casebook have to say. By downloading student notes, you can see how colleagues differ in teaching the same material or what common misconceptions your students may have. Additionally, students won't need to wait on long lines, or consult booklists, to quickly find their casebook. They can just check on SwapNotes.

SwapNotes has been around for less than a semester. Despite its short history, thousands of students have uploaded over 3,000 outlines from dozens of law schools across the United States and Canada, transforming it into a useful resource for professors and students.

On balance, it seems like yet another attempt to provide students with shortcuts which will impair their necessary engagement with the material. And thus not a good thing.

Not to mention that I prefer to control my intellectual property myself.

But I'm not quite ready yet to go as far as the colleague who responded as follows:

I do not wish to have material from any of my courses on your site. Further, I would like you to acknowledge that you are not posting material by any student in my courses on your site, as I am asserting my intellectual property in the lectures that students might quote or transcribe prior to such an attempt to post, and I do not grant you a license to disseminate it.

Although, I confess, I feel the temptation….

Posted in Law School | 11 Comments

Bridge to Nowhere

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

You may recall a post last week — How Can We Tolerate This? — pointing out a New Times exposé that Miami was requiring homeless sex offenders, whose housing options are severely constrained by local ordinances, to sleep under a bridge on pain of arrest if they were not found there when regularly monitored by their probation officer.

I thought that was pretty disgusting. And that the article was in the grand tradition of muckraking journalism.

One week later, we can now see the effects of this public shaming. Miami officialdom has swung into action:

Following revelations by New Times that a parking lot under the State Road 836 bridge was being used by probation officers as a dumping ground for homeless sex offenders — and that the lot was located within 2500 feet of eight schools, in violation of a county ordinance — two men were moved from under the bridge and placed … under another bridge. Their new home is under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Surrounded by water, palm trees, and endless traffic, they now, presumably, reside a legal distance from schools.

…

Florida Department of Corrections officers who ordered the men to live in the parking lot won't face punitive actions, DOC spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said in an e-mail. “We are one piece of the puzzle,” Plessinger wrote. “The issue of how Miami-Dade, Florida, and this country deal with sex offenders is one that must be addressed not only by the DOC, but by lawmakers, the court system, and the community as a whole.”

We are, some say, judged by how we treat the least and worst among us. At this point, we can only hope that view is mistaken.

Posted in Miami | 1 Comment

Is Your ISP Marketing You?

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Ars Technica has a very provocative story, claiming that Your ISP may be selling your web clicks:

David Cancel, the CTO of the web market research firm Compete Incorporated, raised eyebrows at the Open Data 2007 Conference in New York when he revealed that many Internet service providers sell the clickstream data of their users. Clickstream data includes every web site visited by each user and in which order they were clicked.

The data is not sold with accompanying user name or information, but merely as a numerical user value. However, it is still theoretically possible to tie this information to a specific ISP account. Cancel told Ars that his company licenses the data from ISPs for millions of dollars.

If this is true, I think consumers will rightly be upset to learn that they're being spied on by their ISPs, even if the data is not easily tied to them. And I can't even begin to understand what ISPs were thinking about doing this without disclosing it. If it's true.

I'd call Bell South and ask them, but somehow I doubt that the call center has a script for this one.

Posted in Law: Privacy | Comments Off on Is Your ISP Marketing You?

New Rules

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

OK, maybe I was too pessimistic in the previous post: four Senators have written Gonzales asking a series of pointed questions about the claim that he blocked an investigation into his own conduct.

Looks like new majority is starting to feel its oats. I could get to like this.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 1 Comment

Gonzales Blocked Investigation Into His Own Conduct

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Murry Waas has the scoop, Aborted DOJ Probe Probably Would Have Targeted Gonzales:

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.

It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry — to be conducted by the department's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility — would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general.

That security clearances are abused to prevent pesky questions into administration misdeeds is unfortunately sufficiently common as to rise almost to business as usual.

That AG's fail to recuse themselves from investigations into themselves, and that they potentially implicate Presidents in their obstruction of investigations is not business as usual. But it's not unheard of either: think “Watergate” for starters.

This is as big a deal as the 'Gonzales 8' but because it doesn't involve lying to Congress I don't suppose it will get quite as much traction. Then again, given the seriousness of the underlying issue — the attempt to procure legal opinions justifying warrant less wiretapping — maybe there's some hope.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 1 Comment