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Review: Moneyball

 Posted by on September 17, 2011 at 2:42 am  cultural phenomena  No Responses »  Tagged with:
Sep 172011
 

Had the opportunity to see Moneyball at a sneak preview yesterday. I’m always a little leery of sports movies, afraid that they will turn horrendously cliche’ or overly smarmy. But Brad Pitt was the main producer on this film. He put his own money into so he could play the lead character,  Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. This is the man who led the Oakland A’s to an unprecedented 20 straight wins and arguable the man who changed how modern baseball is managed. I’m glad to be able to report that Brad Pitt has an eye for a good story and that the movie is neither cliche’ nor smarmy.

The premise of the movie is that Billy Beane is the general manager of a relatively unsuccessful team in a small market. Because he’s in a small market and the owner can’t afford to buy the players that other teams like the Yankees can. Anytime he gets a good player, some other team outbids Beane and he loses the player. Beane knows he can’t compete with other teams on money, so he has to find a way to be successful without the money. Bean is observant and willing to try anything and as a result he stumbles across Peter Brand, an economics graduate from Yale. Not exactly the type of guy to fit into the good old boys club in team management. But Brand is from an emerging school of baseball junkies that believe you can use high powered statistics to find good players that other teams have passed over. He compares them to “an island of misfit toys.” The one thing you can say about Billy Beane is that he had courage to try something different. He hires Peter Brand as his assistant and then together they start putting a team together from the league’s rejects.

But this is not at all a Bad News Bears kind of movie. In fact, Beane’s relationship with the players is deliberately distant. Does Beane’s team succeed? In a way. After everyone, including his own staff has totally has written off Bean and his misfit players, they begin to show signs of promise and before the season is over, they have broken the all time winning streak in Major League Baseball.

It turns out that the team’s success, or lack of it, is irrelevant to the point of the movie. The real question is, Did Beane change the way people think about baseball?  Did he prove that statistics are a better tool for recruiting than veteran scouts? The answer to that one is, hmmm, well now we’re moving into spoiler territory. And what really emerges from the plot is why Beane was so driven to change the game of baseball and whether or not he managed to put his own demons behind him. I liked how the screen play doesn’t make a showcase of Beane’s personal problems you barely even notice them through the movie because he’s so focused on his job of managing the team. But at the end of the movie, you realize it’s less about “Moneyball,” less about changing the game of baseball, and more about what drove Billy Beane to have the courage to try something so radically different. And that makes the story really interesting.

The Tenth Anniversary of Al-Qaeda’s War on the United States of America

 Posted by on September 12, 2011 at 1:35 am  current events  1 Response »  Tagged with:
Sep 122011
 
“A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” Those were the words that White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered into the ear of President George W. Bush. Those were the words that launched the USA into the war on terror. Within a few minutes of those words being uttered, the pentagon had been attacked and Flight 93 was off its scheduled route, heading to Washington. This interview that Andrew Card gave to MSNBC does a pretty good job of catching the spirit of that exchange. 
 
My overwhelming memory of that day was also that the United States of America was under attack. No one knew who or what was going to be bombed next. I was at work that day and in an ironic twist of fate, the telephones were not working in the building. I didn’t have a cell phone with me. So our only connection to the outside world was the internet. You couldn’t get to any of the major news sites because they were so swamped with requests. A buddy of mine was in the army reserves and he was getting some word from contacts in the reserves about the attacks on the Pentagon, etc. But information was sketchy. Desperate for news I got in the car and headed home, tuning into the radio. It wasn’t until then that I began to get a decent picture of just what was going on. 
 
Ten years later now, a lot of the details of that day are starting to fade and we run the risk of glossing over the details. So I think it’s fitting to take a few minutes to remember the actual people who lost their lives that day.
One of the best ways to do that is to visit the Project 2996 web site. The goal of this site is create a personalized tribute to every single victim of the September 11th attacks. Reading through these tributes will send a shiver down your spine. It’s a work in progress and I can’t think of a better way to do something positive about the Sept 11th attacks than to volunteer to help with this project. But at very minimum, I encourage everyone to read through a few of the profiles so that ten years later we won’t forget that we’re talking about real people losing their lives. 
 
There’s been nothing else on the news today except coverage of the various September 11th memorial services. Every politician who can get in front of a camera is giving a speech or telling us what it means.
Some of these folks are more sincere than others. President Obama declared 9/11 as a “National Day of Service and Remembrance” and called Americans to pay tribute to the victims of 9/11 by volunteering at a service project. From the White House blog:
“the First Family paid their respects by joining a service project. The Obamas prepared food for those in need at DC Central Kitchen, an organization that turns leftover food into meals for thousands of at-risk individuals while offering nationally recognized culinary job training to formerly homeless and hungry adults.”
President Obama and President Bush also attended services at the National September 11th Memorial. President Obama also published a video message for the families of the victims in which he said:
“We can never replace all that you have lost. But what we can do, what we will do, is honor the memory of your loved ones by being the best country we can be, and by standing with you and your families, now and forever.”
I think that’s an entirely appropriate message for the families. I might disagree with President Obama on what it means to be “the best country we can be.” But I think he hits the right tone. So kudos to him.
I’m glad we are spending the day paying tribute to the victims. I’m glad we’re taking a few minutes to remember the heroes that day. I briefly watched some of the tribute coverage that has been airing on The History Channel all day. It was too much for me. I couldn’t watch much of it. But there was one thing that struck me over and over again as I watched various video clips from Manhattan taken that morning. I was struck at the fantastic job all the “first responders” were doing on the video. You could tell they were also kinda shell-shocked at what was going on, but they were Doing Their Job as best they could to help manage the situation. And we can’t forget the firefighters and other emergency personnel that lost their lives trying to fight the fires at the World Trade Center. And who could forget Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer, and the other brave people on board US Airlines Flight 93 who overcame their hijackers at least enough to prevent the plane from crashing into its presumed target, the US Capitol building.
In the wake of the September 11th Attacks, the United States of America has toppled the Taliban Government in Afghanistan under the doctrine that United States had the right to secure itself against countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups. We have created the Department of Homeland Security and given it a whopping budget of $56,335,737,000 and given it unprecedented authority to invade every aspect of our lives including the ability to read every email we’ve ever sent without a warrant, see every aspect of our financial lives, take naked pictures of us, and feel our genitals to look for bombs. Just a few years of ago, we would have called these “Big Brother.” Today we call them “security.”
The Pew Research Center for the People and The Press has been tracking attitudes on this since September 11th. They recently released a report on their polling about post 9/11 attitudes.
From my viewpoint, most of the reponses and trends found in the report are somewhat positive. Immediately after the attacks, 55% of the population thought that it is necessary to give up civil liberties in order to ensure our security, which lead to the erosion of our civil liberties via the PATRIOT Act and other legislation. Now 10 years later, only 40% of the survey respondents believe it’s necessary to give up civil liberties in exchange for security. Let’s hope that our elected officials follow suit appropriately.
But there are troubling trends in the survey as well. The survey tries to capture people’s perception of the conflict between the “western world” and “Islam.” Immediately after the September 11th attacks, only 28% of respondents saw the attacks as a broad conflict between “the people of American and Europe” vs. “the people of Islam.” while 63% saw the attacks as a conflict “with a small radical group.” Today those numbers have changed. 35% see the attacks as a conflict between the US/Europe and the people of Islam and 57% see the conflict as being against “only a small radical group.”
That’s not a huge swing, but it’s a disturbing trend indicating that more people are starting to see the 9/11 attacks as a conflict with Islam.
Personally, I am not at all worried about Islam. I have worked with msulims off and on over the years and every one I’ve worked with has been a decent, civilized, professional person. I shared an office with an extremely devout muslim for a couple of years. He excused himself at various times during the day because his devotion called for praying at certain specific times. I never really understood all the particulars and I didn’t pry. He kept his practices as private and discreet as he could make them and still keep to his devotions. And I never pried. I figured if he wanted to share them, he would have. My main point is that there is absolutely nothing in my personal experience to lead me to believe that the the vast majority of muslims are not as peace-loving as anyone else on the planet.
Having said that, I wish the Pew survey had worded the questions a little bit differently. I wish they’d worded the questions as “The US/Europe” vs “the people of Islam” and “The US/Europe” vs “only a small, radical group of muslims.” Because ten years after the 9/11 attacks, the facts seem (to me at least) blindingly clear that our conflict is not with the vast majority of muslims, but with a small radical sect who call themselves Muslim. To be specifc, the conflict is with Al-Qaeda and the people who follow them and are inspired by them.
Just like we must not forget the victims of 9/11 as individuals, we must not forget that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are individuals as well. To make it a little more real, here’s pictures of them:
Here’s a pretty good summary of the known facts about them.
Why did these 19 people hijack 4 planes, crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and try to crash into the Capitol building? Why were there people in the world that were able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the attack. What motivated these people to give up their lives in order to kill as many American citizens as possible.
Well, they didn’t leave a nice video on YouTube that said “we’re hijacking these planes and killing these people because of X, Y, and Z.” To my knowledge, there was no communication released on that day or even in the following days claiming responsibility.
But in the weeks that followed, as the 19 hijackers were identified and their pre-9/11 movements were tracked, it became clear that they were inspired, funded, and directed by leaders of Al Qaeda, notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden.
And why? Again, there’s a pretty good summary online here. The proximate greivances of Al-Quaeda against the United States of America were articulated in a 1998 fatwa:
  • Al-Qaeda identified the sanctions in Iraq as justification for killing Americans:
    “despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation….On that basis, and in compliance with Allah’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim…”
  • Another Al-Qaeda approved motivation for killing Americans was the presence of a permanent US military base in Saudi Arabia.
    “for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.”
  • The United States’ support of Israel was also a justification for killing Americans.
    “[T]he aim [of the United States] is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.”

These are the stated reasons that Al-Qaeda has published as justifications for terror attacks against the United States and arguably short of the hijackers making personal declarations of their motives, that’s the best we have for understanding why the United States of America was attacked on 9/11.

Since then there have been more attacks on the United States. Some successful. Some not. Virtually all have a significant connection to Al-Qaeda. I haven’t found an exhaustive list, but just off the top of my head there was “the shoe bomber” (member of Al-Qaeda), the “underwear bomber” (studied under a spirtual leader who was a member of Al Qaeda), the Fort Hood shooter (email communication with a spiritual leader in Yemen who is believed by US officals to be a recruiter for Al Qaeda.), and the Times Square bomber (received training in bomb making from the Pakistani Taliban).

Admittedly, my list is not exhaustive and some of the connections don’t have public records to back them up and are reported by US officials without public evidence. But can’t we even admit that there’s a body of evidence to conclude that the United States of America has been unwillingly drawn into a violent conflict with a small, but capable group of radical muslims who call themselves Al Qaeda?

Why do we have to blandly refer to the 9/11 attacks by the date they happened? Maybe that was appropriate in the immediate days after the attacks. But ten years later, we’ve killed Osama Bin Laden and captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Why have we done this if not because of their leadership, planning, and funding of the 9/11 attacks and other subsequent attacks?

It’s important that we remember the names and faces and stories of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. It’s equally important that we remember the names, faces and stories of the perpetrators. Otherwise the term terrorist becomes vague and abstract.

I can think of no better tribute to victims of the attacks on September 11th 2001 and the subsequent terrorist attacks than to stop referring to those events as “The 9/11 Attacks” and start calling them by what they really are, “Al-Qaeda’s War on the United States of America.”

Review: Contagion

 Posted by on September 10, 2011 at 10:33 pm  cultural phenomena  1 Response »  Tagged with:
Sep 102011
 

I went to see Contagion, expecting a more or less standard issue disaster movie,  but it turns out to be very different. Contagion went for the super-realism aspect of the disaster and I’d say it was more of a cross between magic realism and a documentary, which is to say it’s an odd beast of a movie.

The tag line for the movie is “Nothing spreads like fear.” Problem is, the movie didn’t focus on the fear. The movie focused mostly on the sober-headed public officials trying to track a population-killing virus and find a vaccination for it. Even the Matt Damon character who is supposed to give us a man-on-the-street view of the disaster is remarkably stoic given that he’s lost half his family to the contagion.  The few scenes of civic panic and mayhem are much less dramatic than what you see in typical disaster movies.

But at the same time, I suspect that everything shown in this film is a much more realistic portrayal of what would happen in an epidemic outbreak like that. And so the movie’s creepiness comes from how easy it is to imagine it actually happening. Virtually every scene in the movie tracks the what the public officials are doing, how they use a network of researchers to learn how to reproduce the virus so they can work on a cure, how the work with governments and local officials, and the challenges they face in distributing vaccine to such large populations. Honestly, I felt like I was sitting in one of those grade school educational films most of the time.

What makes this movie at all interesting is that because it’s super realistic, it is also realistic about how individuals react to the crisis. All the characters are real people who occasionally demonstrate heroics, self-sacrifice, street-smarts, and compassion. They also demonstrate panic, fear, stupidity, greed, and abuse of authority, which complicates the battle against the contagion.

The one or two scenes in the movie that are not a documentary about how public officials battle the contagion suffer because we haven’t had enough time to explore the characters back-story. When the Bad Guy gets hauled away you kinda watch it with a detached compassion. When you get to see Matt Damon’s character coming to grips with his loss and making a first step to picking up the pieces of his life, you are watching the scene with a documentarian’s eye, not from a sympathetic perspecitve. It’s like, “yeah, people cry when they lose a loved one. Someone call a grief counselor.”

One aspect of the movie particularly stood out for me. The Jude Law character plays a sleazy citizen journalist who can’t get a job with a “real newspaper” and so he publishes his work on a web site. In the movie, he’s one of the first to notice the virus by noticing a video of one of the first victims. He quickly uses the video to boost traffic to his web site and he’s gets drunk on the influence he has with his followers. Next thing you know, he’s using his fame and influence to peddle snake oil “cures” for the virus thanks to some shady dealings with hedge fund operators who help him and themselves get rich selling the snake-oil.

So it kinda pisses me off that the only portrayal of bloggers and business men in the movie are negative. It’s certainly true that bloggers have to watch out for the temptations that come with fame and influence. But doesn’t everybody? Couldn’t they have spared a minute or two in the movie to show positive ways that citizen journalists can help people in a disaster? In a disaster like the one portrayed in this movie everyone has a part to play and everyone has a choice between doing right and wrong. Why do we get to see both sides of the public officials, but we only get to see the negative aspects of citizen journalists and business people?

Contagion is actually an interesting movie and I recommend it if you are into documentaries. Don’t go into expecting a typical disaster movie.

Climate Change Models Will Have To Be Substantially Revised

 Posted by on August 28, 2011 at 4:45 pm  current events  No Responses »  Tagged with:
Aug 282011
 
photo credit

The Register, one of my favorite IT journals, posted an article recently titled “CERN: ‘Climate models will need to be substantially revised” which does a good job summarizing CERN’s recent research into cloud formation and its impact on global temperatures.

The team investigated the impact of the sun’s variability on the creation of aerosols in the atmosphere that drive the seeding of clouds and therefore drive the amount of cloud cover. From the press release:

“We’ve found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we’ve found that the vapours previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays.”

The Register also quotes supporting materials that state:

“”[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.” 

Bottom line: Latest research indicates that global temperature change is due more to the variability of the sun’s rays hitting earth than man-made causes.  That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be lobbying China, the world’s top air polluter, to adopt the same environmental standards we subject ourselves to. But perhaps it’s not quite as urgent as we have been led to believe.

30 Years of Bipartisan Debt Ceiling Raises

 Posted by on August 28, 2011 at 2:51 am  current events  1 Response »  Tagged with: ,
Aug 282011
 

Lots finger pointing going on these days about who’s responsible for the national debt. Republicans are to blame! Democrats are to blame! You can feel the venom going back and forth. So it’s great to see some objective research like this study done by Veronique de Rugy. “30 Years of Bipartisan Debt Ceiling Raises” sourced straight from the Office of Management and Budget. I strongly suggest you go through the whole thing. But here’s the bottom line, in red and blue:

The great thing about statistics is that they can be used to back any position you want. For example, a democrat can say, “Republicans have raised the debt limit more than the Democrats” or they can say, the longest period of keeping the debt under control (no increase) was under a Democratic president.” On the other hand, Republicans can say, Obama has raised the debt more in three years than GW did in 8. Republicans can also say that the reason Clinton’s numbers look so good is because they controlled Congress and therefore controlled spending during those years. 
But if you step back and look at the graphic in black and white, forgetting which party was in charge when, and just look at the trend lines, you’ve got to start getting a sense of creeping doom. The question we have to be asking now is not, “who’s to blame?”, but “who can fix it?”

Shake My Memories Like A Polaroid Picture, Baby

 Posted by on August 20, 2011 at 2:36 am  true stories  1 Response »  Tagged with:
Aug 202011
 

A few weekends ago, I was helping P. clean out her house as part of the Big Move to combine our households. My job was to bring stuff down from the attic so we could figure out what to do with it. You know how attics are, full of odds and ends and relics of the past we don’t want to get rid of because we still have a sentimental attachment to them and yet not enough of an attachment to actually keep them in the house.

As I was hauling down stuff, I spied a small plastic object. It looked like something that had fallen out of a box and been forgotten. So I walked over to investigate and found this:

A Polaroid Land Camera! That sure brought back memories for me. It’s probably hard to believe for most young folks these days, but there was a day when the Polaroid Land Camera was THE GADGET TO HAVE.

I’m trying to remember when the Polaroid cameras were all the rage, my recollections was early to mid 70′s. At least that’s when I remember having one at our house. I distinctly remember several birthdays where a Big Part of the entertainment was giving us kids the Polaroid and a pack of film and letting us take goofy pictures of each other. The miracle of watching the film develop in front of our eyes was the epitome of high tech consumer gadgets.

So sitting here in 2011, where we measure the cameras in our phones in terms of megapixels, the Polaroid seems so, well, plastic and mechanical. As far as I understand, there are NO electronics involved from the point that light enters the lens to the point it hits the film. The only powered circuits are for the shutter and the light bulbs. I could be wrong about this, but I seem to remember that the film cartridge also had a battery in it so that the camera itself is inert.

I love how this plain plastic shell of a camera is festooned by a thin rainbow sticker that goes from the lens to the place that the print comes out of the camera. It’s like they put it there to indicate to you that path of the light in case you could not figure it out.

The other thing that seems so amusing to me know is the neck strap which attaches to it. Now, the camera is not that heavy, event with the film cartridge in it. But it’s bulky and fixed. It would be a real annoyance if you actually tried to walk around with this thing hanging around your neck. To their credit, the Polaroid corporation did produce some folding cameras. These looked kinda cool in almost a steampunk kind of way. Check this picture of the Polaroid SX-70 for a good example.

Hmmm there’s an interesting idea for a steam punk story. An Edwardian inventor invents a Polaroid camera that is spring driven. Imagine how the world would have been different if Polaroid pictures had been widely used during that era.

As far as I know, there is absolutely no reason to keep this camera around and it totally goes against my commitment to reduce clutter at my house. But it’s tough to just let it go. Maybe I’ll go put it back in the attic at P’s house and let some future owner discover it someday so he/she can enjoy the stroll down memory lane just like me.

Review: Every Which Way But Loose

 Posted by on August 12, 2011 at 2:41 am  cultural phenomena  1 Response »  Tagged with:
Aug 122011
 

When I went to see Rise of The Planet of the Apes the other day, one of the minor characters was an Orangutan and it reminded me of Every Which Way But Loose. So I had to rent it. Holy Frijoles! This movie is so low-brow you culd sweep the floor. When I say Clyde the Orangutan is the best actor in the move, I’m not lying.

It’s kind of funny to see this version of 1978. Tough guys fighting in meat packing plants. Bar fights. Truck driving. Honky tonks. Bikers as keystone cops. Fun with Trash Compactors. Cars on blocks in the front yard. Everyone smokes like chimneys.

There are also 1970′s era head nods to racial integration that look oh so painfully contrived now. There were references to women that would get guys tared and feathered today and they just roll right through the movie like there’s no tomorrow. 

Another surprising thing about the movie is just how many guns show up. I love the sight of a little old lady repelling bikers from her front yard with a shot gun. Yes!

Think of this movie as Animal House for the blue collar crowd. I can’t exactly recommend this movie. But You gotta remember this movie was so popular they actually made a sequel. So it’s worth it to see what was popular that year and you can laugh at it while you are laughing at it. 

Review: Rise of the Planet Of The Apes

 Posted by on August 7, 2011 at 7:07 pm  cultural phenomena  Comments Off  Tagged with:
Aug 072011
 

I enjoyed Rise of the Planet of the Apes a heck of a lot more than I expected to. Given how cheesy all the other Planet Of The Apes movies are, it’s downright stunning how non-cheesy this one is. It’s an origin story which does a good job of explaining not only the big story arc in terms of how the Apes developed speech and intelligence and how humans fell from grace, but it sets out the basic intra-ape-society personality conflicts. It also does a great job setting up the advantages that Apes have over humans. The science tropes aside, the evolution of the Apes reaction to humans seemed to evolve naturally in a way that made you feel somewhat sympathetic to the central Ape character while still maintaining that creeping doom feel that you know is coming.

Not much to say about the acting. No one stood out as being particularly bad, but it’s not a movie designed to make you appreciate the emotive capability of the actors.

Review: Cowboys & Aliens

 Posted by on July 31, 2011 at 11:33 pm  cultural phenomena  No Responses »  Tagged with:
Jul 312011
 

I never read the comic book that Cowboys & Aliens is based on, but I think the premise is fantastic. Aliens among us in 1870. The movie starts out very much like a spaghetti western. Daniel Craig does a passable job as the movie’s version of Outlaw Josey Wales. Harrison Ford is the cranky cattle king. Sam Rockwell the nerdy barkeep. Olivia Wilde the mysterious woman with dark eyes and a distant gaze. Every cliche in the Spaghetti Western Handbook is thrown at us in about the first 15 minutes. But it works. It works because there’s never once a wink at the camera or a campy moment. They play the movie absolutely deadpan as if it is a serious Western movie.

The humor, such as it is, is very subtle. The aliens are rounding up people like intergalactic cattle herders. Lassoing them from their space ships above and taking people away like so much cattle. The aliens without spoiling too much are mucking about in the mountains of New Mexico for the same reason everyone else in the godforsaken town is mucking around in the mountains. There are horse/alien races. There are battle scenes that resemble a cattle stampede as much as anything else.  I really like the fact that the movie did not beat us over the head with the cowboys-as-cattle metaphor. It was just there for you to discover and recognize as you went along.

The aliens, of course, were ridiculously impossible. But so what? They were aliens. They were the bad guys that had to be Dealt With or they would continue to steal the women folk and scare the cattle. Or is it the other way around? Doesn’t matter. They were the bad guys.

The one really interesting thing about the script to me was how the aliens make their appearance in the middle of everyday live. The bad guys are being bad guys. The good guys are being good guys. The jerks are being jerks. And then the Alien Stuff happens and there is a brief alliance of humans against the aliens. And then at the end everyone kinda picks up where they left off. Yeah, everyone kinda learned their lesson and dealt with their stuff as part of fighting the aliens. But there was no smarmy Scene of Redemption at the end. Just more like a tip of the hat to what they’d all been through together.

And yes, there is riding off into the sunset. Deal with it.

Even though the movie is only rated PG-13, I’d say this is a great summer action movie for adults. I highly recommend it.

DOJ Claims You Can Be Forced To Give Up Your Passwords

 Posted by on July 28, 2011 at 1:32 am  current events  No Responses »  Tagged with:
Jul 282011
 

Just in case you thought there was any respect left for the 4th or 5th amendments, let me point out this article, “DOJ: We can force you to decrypt that laptop” reported by CNET.

The crux of the case is whether a defendant can be forced to reveal a password used to encrypt data on a laptop.  The defendant’s lawyer as well as many other civil rights organizations who have filed amicus briefs, claim that forcing someone to reveal a password is a violation of the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination.

The Department Of Justice claims that this is just a matter of routine administration and it has the right to gather the decrypted data.

Here’s the Orwellian part of it. The DOJ lawyers assure us that they do not require the actual password. The defendant is welcome to type in the password while no one is looking. They claim that they are happy to let the defendant keep the password secret as long as they get access to the decrypted files. That’s like telling  someone they can keep the keys to the house as long as you are allowed to go in and take anything you want anytime you want to.

Unbelievable.

The other interesting point in this story is that this is not the case of a rogue prosecutor trying to bend the law to his will, according to the CNET story:

“Because this involves a Fifth Amendment claim, Colorado prosecutors took the unusual step of seeking approval from headquarters in Washington, D.C.: On May 5, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer sent a letter to John Walsh, the U.S. Attorney for Colorado, saying “I hereby approve your request.”

The Assistant Attorney General position is an appointed position. He was appointed by President Obama. So the position taken by the DOJ apparently represents the policy position of the Obama administration.

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