Well, it has begun: my orientation packet arrived this afternoon.
There’s all kinds of fun stuff here, including the standard note to
contact the school if you’ve not yet received your financial aid award
package (they’re still closed on Friday, but you can leave a voice
mail if you call).
Other exciting tidbits are a few briefs to read, a reminder to read “A
Civil Action", and a warning that yes, orientation is mandatory and
that if you’ve got any problems, contact the school.
Gordon Silverstein has an excellent article on where Lawrence Lessig went wrong and why it still matters.
Not that anyone is likely to notice, but I’ve just spent part of my afternoon re-working the guts of the site. Now, we use Smarty as a templating engine. Templates have never really been my thing: I tend to strew my code and implementation all through my markup, pretty willy-nilly. We’ll see how this works out. Also, there is the fun of watching as templating engines get smarter and smarter, until they allow developers to encode more and more of their implementation straight into the page. This causes another developer to come along and implement a templating abstraction in the original language.
Over at Letters of Marque we’ve not only got too many Adams but Counsel gets reamed over a misquote.
Some insight into Section 215 of the Patriot act, which modifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This is also known as the “Angry Librarians” claus. Mrs. Volkert was the librarian at Jefferson Grade school back in the day. Why is it that I can remember her, but was struggling to recall the name of the founder of the EFF earlier today?
On Tuesday, I sat in on an online chat put on my by the school, which did a decent job of answering the usual questions ("Why aren’t my loans processed yet?” “What do the schedules look like?” “How big are the lockers?). I was also excited to find that one of the other students has created a mailing list, which is something that I had thought of doing a while back, but never gotten around to. The most amazing thing was that within 5 minutes of the link to the list being posted, there were 12 members. Within 20 minutes, we had Introduction traffic going around, and before the end of the online chat, we had organized enough to put together a Happy Hour Meet and Greet as a chance for us to get to know each other before school got underway. It also looks as though many of my soon-to-be-co-students (and I hate to say it, competition) are, like me, a little older then average and coming back to school from stints in the real world.
Over at The Uncivil Litigator, there’s a great wrap-up to the story of his first jury trial.
TSA has recently announced their Registered Traveller program.
There’s a lot of elitism in air travel already. Not only are there the various classes, with First being given to those who pay a premium for large leather chairs, first-on-the-plane service, and complementary drinks, but it seems that every airline has their own mileage and premium clubs. The bennies involved range from special service lines at ticketing, to comfortable lounges with drinks, food, and wifi access.
While I really dislike the fact that because I’m generally a small-business or personal traveler, I get treated as though the airlines are doing me a favor by letting me pay for a ticket and stand in line, I can deal with it. Many people fly very little, and a small subclass of Americans fly quite a lot. That class is catered to, since they’re the frequent and lucrative customers.
When it comes to security, however, the current plans by the TSA to create an express system for “pre-screened” travelers don’t sound like a good idea.
TSA already gets quite a bit of flak for relying on CAPPS, which deterministically chooses some travelers for special screening, on the assumption that background patterns will predict which people are likely to be dangerous, and that checking those people more stringently is going to raise the “hit-rate” for arrests. Unfortunately, as is quickly shown, this is easily defeated. Cells of terrorists may be able to test the system in order to find out which hijackers will avoid this scrutiny, and test their historical success/failure in dummy flights. A much better method is to use a completely random search, similar to what I encountered when visiting Mexico. Everyone entering through customs pushes a button. A red light or a green light turns on, selected via some distribution. There is no way of outsmarting this system – it is far too stupid. Creating a group of people who are “pre-vetted” is even worse: this leads to at least two liabilities. Prospective terrorists may be able to pass these initial tests and background checks, or people who have already been vetted may be recruited. Additionally, by creating a set of identities that are able to bypass portions of security (at least, the chance of enhanced security screening), this causes the creation of a set of identities that can be stolen by perpetrators. Sure, there are plans to use snazzy biometric systems. I’m sure that they are infallable.
But on the subject of elitism, by removing a class of people from the pool of those eligible for additional screening, this will cause travelers who are not part of the Registered Traveler program to be more likely to be screened – simple percentages. Do people deserve the additional inconvienience of being more likely to be forced into the additional screening lane?
Sadly, this class system is already on the way. At least at PDX, there is a special line to enter security for members of various premium clubs. They seem to arrive in the same security lanes, and I assume they go through the same security process, and it could be a policy of the airport and not TSA, but I’m also willing to assume that “premium club” status goes into the algorithm when an airline selects someone for special screening. I do not believe that a government entity such as TSA should be particpating in such an unbalanced (and unsafe) scheme
Over at De Novo, Wings & Vodka is taking on the comma as part of their Blogsphere Survivor Challenge.
Not having anything but indignation to add earlier, I resisted posting on the New Republic Online report that the administration seems to be not just pressuing Pakistan to be apprehending or killing terrorists (which is fine) but they are specifically pressing to do it by the 26th of July, so that they can announce in time for the Democratic Primaries. Talk about political ends to a means.
Over at Letters of Marque some good tips on how to use those knee-jerk reactions while still thinking like a lawyer.
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