Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 13, 2015

The Pentagon’s plan to outsource lethal cyber-weapons

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Law,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 5:51 pm

The Pentagon’s plan to outsource lethal cyber-weapons by Violet Blue.

From the post:

The Pentagon has quietly put out a call for vendors to bid on a contract to develop, execute and manage its new cyber weaponry and defense program. The scope of this nearly half-billion-dollar “help wanted” work order includes counterhacking, as well as developing and deploying lethal cyberattacks — sanctioned hacking expected to cause real-life destruction and loss of human life.

In June 2016, work begins under the Cyberspace Operations Support Services contract (pdf) under CYBERCOM (United States Cyber Command). The $460 million project recently came to light and details the Pentagon’s plan to hand over its IT defense and the planning, development, execution, management, integration with the NSA, and various support functions of the U.S. military’s cyberattacks to one vendor.
…

Violet’s post will bring you up to date on discussions of cyber-weapons and where a large number of questions remain, such as what law governs cyber-weapons.

It isn’t clear how worried anyone should be at this point because the Pentagon is following its traditional acquisition process for cyber-weapons. Had the Pentagon started hiring top name exploit merchants and hackers, the danger of cyber-weapons would be imminent.

Traditional contracting process? We may have quantum computing long before cyber-weapons from the traditional process post a threat to then outdated software.

But in all events, do read and pass Violet’s post along.

November 5, 2015

Trans-Pacific Partnership (full text)

Filed under: Government,Intellectual Property (IP),Law — Patrick Durusau @ 4:14 pm

Trans-Pacific Partnership (full text)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership text has been released!

Several of the sites I have tried were down due to traffic but this medium.com site appears to be holding up.

Be forewarned that this is a bizarre presentation of the text with promotional logos, etc.

A wave of commentary is sure to follow and within a few days I will collect up the best that is relevant to software/IP and post about it.

Just for grins, check your reading time against the suggested reading times by Medium. It rates the Intellectual Property chapter (18) at 106 minutes.

Hmmm, it might be possible to read it in 106 minutes but fully understanding what you have read is likely to take longer.

Enjoy!

November 3, 2015

Locating a Compiled Federal Legislative History: A Beginner’s Guide

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 8:19 pm

Locating a Compiled Federal Legislative History: A Beginner’s Guide by Robert Brammer.

From the post:

Compiling a federal legislative history may seem daunting, but it does not have to be. We hope, through our last few Beginner’s Guides, that we have made this process easier for researchers. There is another, possibly less complicated, option for finding legislative history documents that we wanted to be sure to highlight — determining whether someone has already done the work for you and created a legislative history report! There are many sources of pre-compiled legislative histories available that you will want to check before compiling your own. These compilations range from finding aids that help you locate a compiled legislative history to monographs that contain the legislative history for one act.
…

If you want less friction when researching federal legislative history, Robert has a number of suggestions to help with just that task.

On the other hand, if you want to have a sense of frustration, despair and ultimately joy at persevering, then compile a legislative history on your own. 😉

Seriously, government documents, to say nothing of legislative history, is a world unto itself. There are librarians who don’t do anything but government documents. They are a god-send if you do have to use a depository library.

Of course, legislative histories are for those who take the surface of legislation at face value. For all of the surface action, there are deeper currents of benefit and personalities that are being played out in the legislative dance.

By and large, official legislative histories don’t give you that view.

October 29, 2015

Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 4:07 pm

Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age by Erik Eckholm.

From the post:

Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction.

Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.

“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”
…

While Harvard’s “Free the Law” project cannot put the lone defense lawyer or citizen on an equal footing with a deep-pocketed law firm, legal experts say, it can at least guarantee a floor of essential information. The project will also offer some sophisticated techniques for visualizing relations among cases and searching for themes.

Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others.
…

A very challenging dataset for capturing and mapping semantics!

If you think current legal language is confusing, strap on a couple of centuries of decisions plus legislation as the meaning of words and concepts morph.

Some people will search it as flatly as they do Google Ngrams and that will be reflected in the quality of their results.

Yet another dataset where sharing search trails with commentary would enrich the data with every visit. Less experienced searchers could follow the trails of more accomplished searchers.

Whether capturing and annotating search trails and other non-WestLaw/LexisNexis features will make it into user facing interfaces remains to be seen.

There is some truth to the Westlaw claim that “Core primary law is only the beginning…” but the more court data becomes available, the greater the chance for innovative tools.

October 28, 2015

When Lobbyists Write Legislation,…

Filed under: Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 7:51 pm

When Lobbyists Write Legislation, This Data Mining Tool Traces The Paper Trail by Jessica Leber.

From the post:

Most kids learn the grade school civics lesson about how a bill becomes a law. What those lessons usually neglect to show is how legislation today is often birthed on a lobbyist’s desk.

But even for expert researchers, journalists, and government transparency groups, tracing a bill’s lineage isn’t easy—especially at the state level. Last year alone, there were 70,000 state bills introduced in 50 states. It would take one person five weeks to even read them all. Groups that do track state legislation usually focus narrowly on a single topic, such as abortion, or perhaps a single lobby groups.

Computers can do much better. A prototype tool, presented in September at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange 2015 conference, mines the Sunlight Foundation’s database of more than 500,000 bills and 200,000 resolutions for the 50 states from 2007 to 2015. It also compares them to 1,500 pieces of “model legislation” written by a few lobbying groups that made their work available, such as the conservative group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and the liberal group the State Innovation Exchange (formerly called ALICE).
…

Jessica gives a great overview of Legislative Influence Detector (LID). That wasn’t how I heard “lid” in my youth but even acronyms change meaning over time. 😉

Legislative Influence Detector (LID) has this introduction at its website:

Journalists, researchers, and concerned citizens would like to know who’s actually writing legislative bills. But trying to read those bills, let alone trace their source, is tedious and time consuming. This is especially true at the state level, where important policy decisions are made every day. State legislatures consider roughly 70,000 bills each year, covering taxes, education, healthcare, crime, transportation, and more.

To solve this problem, we have created a tool we call the “Legislative Influence Detector” (LID, for short). LID helps watchdogs turn a mountain of text into digestible insights about the origin and diffusion of policy ideas and the real influence of various lobbying organizations. LID draws on more than 500,000 state bills (collected by the Sunlight Foundation) and 2,400 pieces of model legislation written by lobbyists (collected by us, ALEC Exposed, and other groups), searches for similarities, and flags them for review. LID users can then investigate the matches to look for possible lobbyist and special interest influence.
…

Improvements are planned and I am sure help would be welcome.

Looks like a great tool for public influencing of legislation, that is an identifiable group with posted proposed legislation.

Not quite so great for detecting the influencing of legislation as reflected in details of statutes.

Yes, there is a reason why the income tax laws in the United States are nearly 75,000 pages long. Each detail, exception, qualifier is there at the behest of some interest group.

The same is true with the rest of the United States Code but the benefits are more immediately obvious with tax law.

October 27, 2015

PSA (sort of): The Legislative Process

Filed under: Government,Law,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 9:36 pm

The Legislative Process Congress.gov.

Nine videos from Congress.gov that break the legislative process into nine stages:

  1. Overview of the Legislative Process 5:09
  2. Introduction and Referral of Bills 3:19
  3. Committee Consideration 3:39
  4. Calendars and Scheduling 2:35
  5. House Floor 3:53
  6. Senate Floor 4:17
  7. Executive Business in the Senate 1:59
  8. Resolving Differences 3:29
  9. Presidential Actions 1:58

A civics class view of the legislative process but also useful if you are trying to pass a citizenship exam for the United States.

The videos are done using Flash so view them on a school computer that you don’t care about getting infected.

The biggest departure from reality (I read the transcripts, I did not watch the videos) is where the legislative process says:

Committee members and staff focus much of their time on drafting and considering legislative proposals,….

Some staff spend time on legislative proposals but any number of legislative proposals are written by law firms on behalf of their clients and then proposed by members of Congress.

As far as “considering legislative proposals,” recall the Patriot Act was passed without time for it to be read, 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate.

If you are asking a favor from a delusional person, you best share their delusion or at least appear to do so. Watch these videos before any favor-seeking visit to Washington, D.C.

October 16, 2015

Project Production Glossary

Filed under: Glossary,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 4:39 pm

Project Production Glossary sponsored by LTPI, Legal Technology Professionals Institute.

From the webpage:

The Legal Technology Professionals Institute Production Glossary is designed as an educational resource on terminology used in connection with producing electronically stored information. While a number of useful industry-wide glossaries exist, we could not find one that specifically discussed document production, nor one that discussed not only the “what”, but also the “why”, so we created one.

If you are using or creating topic maps in a legal context, this may be very useful.

Public comments are open.

October 10, 2015

Request to Order Apple to Disable Security of Apple Device

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Government,Law,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 2:06 pm

From In Re Order Requiring Apple, Inc. To Assist in the Execution of a Search Warrant Issued by this Court (United States District Court, Eastern District of New York)

James Orenstein, Magistrate Judge:

In a sealed application filed on October 8, 2015, the government asks the court to issue an order pursuant to the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651, directing Apple, Inc. (“Apple”) to assist in the execution of a federal search warrant by disabling the security of an Apple device that the government has lawfully seized pursuant to a warrant issue by this court. Law enforcement agents have discovered the device to be locked, and have tried and failed to bypass that lock. As a result, they cannot gain access to any data stored on the device notwithstanding the authority to do so conferred by this court’s warrant Application at 1. For the reasons that follow, I defer ruling on the application and respectfully direct Apple to submit its views in writing, not later than October 15, 2015, as to whether the assistance the government seeks is technically feasible and, if so, whether compliance with the proposed order would be unduly burdensome. If either the government or Apple wishes to present oral arguments on the matter, I will hear such argument on October 22, 2015, at 12:00 noon.

Non-lawyers may find the analysis of the All Writs Act a bit tedious but the opinion picks up speed in dealing with the government’s contention that the pen register decision (the recording of phone numbers dialed from a phone) in United States v. New York Tel. Co., 434 U.S. 159 (1977), supports their request.

To summarize the differences found by Judge Orenstein:

  1. Apple manufactured the device but unlike New York Tel. Co. (Telephone Company), Apple doesn’t own it.
  2. Apple is not a regulated utility with a duty to serve the public. It can make a deliberate decision to favor its customers over the needs of law enforcement (in the absence of statutes to the contrary).
  3. In the Telephone Company case, there was no practical alternative to security the information. Here the government can attempt to coerce the owner of the phone, for instance.
  4. Congressional legislation had attempted to require telephone companies to provide the assistance sought and such legislation is absent, even opposed in Congress for unlocking secure devices.

If Apple has done its encryption properly, then even intimate knowledge of the encryption program should not enable Apple to unlock the device in question.

One hopes Apple will prove to the court’s satisfaction that once locked, even Apple cannot assist in the unlocking of such a device.

The government’s request is one borne of ignorance of basic encryption technology.

I first saw this in a tweet by Morgan Marquis-Boire.

PS: Should at some point the court’s opinion “go away,” write and ask for “apple-unlock-gov.uscourts.nyed.376325.2.0.pdf.”

October 9, 2015

Computational Legal Studies Blog

Filed under: Government,Law,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 8:46 pm

Computational Legal Studies Blog by Daniel Katz, Mike Bommarito & Jon Zelner.

From the about page:

The Computational Legal Studies Blog was founded on March 17, 2009. The CLS Blog is an attempt to disseminate legal or law related studies that employ a computational or complex systems component. We hope this venue will serve as a coordinating device for those interested in using such techniques to consider the development of legal systems and/or implementation of more reasoned public policy.

It isn’t important that you believe in “…reasoned public policy” but that you realize a number of people do.

This site collects information and analysis that may be persuasive to “…reasoned public policy” types.

There are a large number of resources and if even a quarter of them are as good as this site, the time spent mining them will be well worth it.

Ping me if you see something extraordinary.

Thanks!

October 7, 2015

Now over 1,000,000 Items to Search on Congress.gov [Cause to Celebrate?]

Filed under: Government,Government Data,Law,Law - Sources,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 4:08 pm

Now over 1,000,000 Items to Search on Congress.gov: Communications and More Added by Andrew Weber.

From the post:

This has been a great year as we continue our push to develop and refine Congress.gov.  There were email alerts added in February, treaties and better default text in March, the Federalist Papers and more browse options in May, and accessibility and user requested features in July.  With this October update, Senate Executive Communications from THOMAS have migrated to Congress.gov.  There is an About Executive Communications page that provides more detail about the scope of coverage, searching, viewing, and obtaining copies.

Not to mention a new video “help” series, Legislative Subject Terms and Popular and Short Titles.

All good and from one of the few government institutions that merits respect, the Library of Congress.

Why the “Cause to Celebrate?”

This is an excellent start and certainly Congress.gov has shown itself to be far more responsive to user requests than vendors are to reports of software vulnerabilities.

But we are still at the higher level of data, legislation, regulations, etc.

Where needs to follow is a dive downward to identify who obtains the benefits of legislation/regulations? Who obtains permits, for what and at what market value? Who obtains benefits, credits, allowances? Who wins contracts and where does that money go as it tracks down the prime contractor -> sub-prime contractor -> etc. pipeline?

It is ironic that when candidates for president talk about tax reform they tend to focus on the tax tables. Which are two (2) pages out of the current 6,455 pages of the IRC (in pdf, http://uscode.house.gov/download/releasepoints/us/pl/114/51/pdf_usc26@114-51.zip).

Knowing who benefits and by how much for the rest of the pages of the IRC isn’t going to make government any cleaner.

But, when paired with campaign contributions, it will give everyone an even footing on buying favors from the government.

Not unlike public disclosure enables a relatively fair stock exchange, in the case of government it will enable relative fairness in corruption.

September 25, 2015

Attention Law Students: You Can Change the Way People Interact with the Law…

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Legal Informatics — Patrick Durusau @ 7:55 pm

Attention Law Students: You Can Change the Way People Interact with the Law…Even Without a J.D. by Katherine Anton.

From the post:

A lot of people go to law school hoping to change the world and make their mark on the legal field. What if we told you that you could accomplish that, even as a 1L?

Today we’re launching the WeCite contest: an opportunity for law students to become major trailblazers in the legal field. WeCite is a community effort to explain the relationship between judicial cases, and will be a driving force behind making the law free and understandable.

To get involved, all you have to do is go to http://www.casetext.com/wecite and choose the treatment that best describes a newer case’s relationship with an older case. Law student contributors, as well as the top contributing schools, will be recognized and rewarded for their contributions to WeCite.

Read on to learn why WeCite will quickly become your new favorite pastime and how to get started!
…

Shepard’s Citations began publication in 1873 and by modern times, had such an insurmountable lead, that the cost of creating a competing service were a barrier to anyone else entering the field.

To be useful to lawyers, a citation index can’t index some of the citations but all of the citations.

The WeCite project, based on crowd-sourcing, is poised to demonstrate creation of a public law citation index is doable.

While the present project is focused on law students, I am hopeful that the project opens up for contributions from more senior survivors of law school, practicing or not.

September 17, 2015

Constitution Day – The Annotated Constitution Celebrated

Filed under: Government,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 8:00 pm

Constitution Day – The Annotated Constitution Celebrated by Margaret Wood.

From the post:

Thursday, September 17th is Constitution Day and on this date we commemorate the signing of the Constitution. This day also recognizes those who have become citizens of the United States by coming of age or by naturalization. The Law Library frequently celebrates this auspicious day with a lecture or scholarly debate. Over the years we have written about different aspects of the Constitution, its history and various Constitutional amendments. This year I thought it would be helpful to highlight one of our most important resources in answering questions about the Constitution and its history. What is this invaluable resource? It is The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation.

This publication, which celebrated its centennial in 2013, is available both in print and online. At the direction of the Librarian of Congress, this publication is prepared by staff from the Congressional Research Service and, since at least 1964, it has been published as a Senate document. Many of the staff here at the Law Library have an older edition of the print publication in our offices, and there are always two or three current editions available in the Law Library Reading Room.

…

Despite my antipathy for some government departments and activities, I have a weakness for the Library of Congress in general and the Congressional Research Service in particular.

The 1972 edition of the The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation was my first exposure to the first of many Congressional Research Service publications.

You won’t have to spend long with a current edition to discover that “interpreting” the Constitution isn’t as nearly straight forward and unambiguous as many claim.

The 2014 edition runs 2814 pages long. A bit unwieldy in print so I will be reading my next copy on an e-reader.

July 2, 2015

Introducing LegalPad [free editor]

Filed under: Editor,Government,Law,Law - Sources,Topic Map Software,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 4:29 pm

Introducing LegalPad by Jake Heller.

From the webpage:

I’m thrilled to officially announce something we’ve been working on behind the scenes here at Casetext: LegalPad. It’s live on the site right now: you can use it, for free, and without registering. So before reading about it from me, I recommend checking it out for yourself!

A rethought writing experience

LegalPad is designed to be the best way to write commentary about the law.

This means a few things. First, we created a clean writing experience, easier to use than traditional blogging platforms. Editing is done through a simplified editor bar that is there only when you need it so you can stay focused on your writing.

…

Second, the writing experience is especially tailored towards legal writing in particular. Legal writing is hard. Because law is based on precedent and authority, you need to juggle dozens of primary sources and documents. And as you write, you’re constantly formatting, cite-checking, BlueBooking, editing, emailing versions for comments, and researching. All of this overhead distracts from the one thing you really want to focus on: perfecting your argument.

LegalPad was designed to help you focus on what matters and avoid unnecessary distractions. A sidebar enables you to quickly pull up bookmarks collected while doing research on Casetext. You can add a reference to the cases, statutes, regulations, or other posts you bookmarked, which are added with the correct citation and a hyperlink to the original source.

You can also pull up the full text of the items you’ve bookmarked in what we are calling the PocketCase. Not only does the PocketCase enable you to read the full text of the case you are writing about while you’re writing, you can also drop in quotes directly into the text. They’ll be correctly formatted, have the right citation, and even include the pincite to the page you’ve copied from.

…

LegalPad also has one final, very special feature. If your post cites to legal authority, it will be connected to the case, statute, or regulation you referenced such that next time someone reads the authority, they’ll be alerted to your commentary. This makes the world’s best free legal research platform an even better resource. It also helps you reach an audience of over 350,000 attorneys, in-house counsel, professors, law students, other legal professionals, and business leaders who use Casetext as a resource every month.

LegalPad and CaseNote are free so I signed up.

I am working on an annotation of Lamont v. Postmaster General 381 U.S. 301 (1965) to demonstrate it relevancy to FBI Director James Comey’s plan to track contacts with ISIS over social media.

A great deal of thought and effort has gone into this editing interface! I was particularly pleased by the quote insert with link back to the original material feature.

At first blush and with about fifteen (15) minutes of experience with the interface, I suspect that enhancing it with entity recognition and stock associations would not be that much of a leap. Could be very interesting.

More after I have written more text with it.

June 26, 2015

FBI Builds Silencers For The Mentally Ill

Filed under: Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 8:45 pm

North Carolina Man Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to ISIL and Weapon Offenses

If you read the press release, you will miss these goodies from the complaint:

…
28. The FBI built a functional silencer at Sullivan’s request. That silencer does not bear the required serial number,7 and is not registered to Sullivan or any person in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.

29. The FBI sent a package constaining the silencer to Sullivan’s home at 5470 Rose Carswell Road, Morganton, North Carolina, according to Sullivan’s instructions. At approximately 4:15 p.m. on June 19, 2015, Sullivan’s mother picked up the mail, to include the package containing the silencer, from the mailbox and returned to the house. FBI surveillance confirmed Sullivan was in the house when his mother entered with the silencer.

30. On June 19, 2015, the FBI conducted a search of 5470 Carswell Road, Morganton, North Carolina, pursuant to the consent of Sullivan’s mother and a federal search warrant. Among other things, the FBI found the silencer delivered to Sullivan earlier that day, which was hidden under plastic in a crawlspace accessible from the basement of the home….
…

How did all this start?

10. On April 21, 2015, Sullivan’s father placed a “911” call to request police assistance at the family residence at 5470 Rose Carswell Road, Morganton, North Carolina. Sullivan’s father said: “I don’t know if it is ISIS or what, but he [Sullivan] is destroying Buddhas, and figurines and stuff.” He stated that Sullivan was destroying their “religious” items, had done so before, and this time Sullivan poured gasoline on some such items to burn them. Sullivan’s father added: “I mean, we are scared to leave the house.” Sullivan could be heard in the background stating: “why are you trying to say I am a terrorist?” and words to that effect, multiple times. Sullivan complained in the background that his father was only mentioning the religious items, and asked his father to tell the police he had destroyed other objects as well. Sullivan could be heard stating that “they” were going to put Sullivan “in jail my whole life,” or, alternatively: “they are not going to put me in jail. They are going to kill me.”

Of course, rather than a referral to mental health services, a FBI undercover agent made contact with Sullivan on June 6, 2015. You can read the recounting of the bizarre conversations with Sullivan in the complaint. It is an image file so I have to re-type anything that appears in the blog.

According to the news release Sullivan was charged with:

one count of attempting to provide material support to ISIL,

one count of transporting and receiving a silencer in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony, and

one count of receipt and possession of an unregistered silencer, unidentified by a serial number.

True enough, a person disturbed enough to:

Sullivan complained in the background that his father was only mentioning the religious items, and asked his father to tell the police he had destroyed other objects as well.

How’s that for an answer to the complaint you are destroying religious items? You want to point out to the police you are destroying other stuff too?

Sullivan was suffering from paranoid delusions but rather than getting him help, the FBI set him up for being charged with attempting to assist ISIS and two silencer violations that occurred only because the FBI built and mailed him a silencer.

Victimizing the mentally ill pads the FBI terrorist statistics and serves to further the fictional war on terrorism.

June 17, 2015

Comprehensive Index of Legal Reports (Law Library of Congress)

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 4:56 pm

Comprehensive Index of Legal Reports (Law Library of Congress)

From the announcement that came via email:

In an effort to highlight the legal reports produced by the Law Library of Congress, we have revamped our display of the reports on our website.

The new Comprehensive Index of Legal Reports will house all reports available on our website. This will also be the exclusive location to find reports written before 2011.

The reports listed on the Comprehensive Index page are divided into specific topics designed to point you to the reports of greatest interest and relevance. Each report listed is under only one topic and several topics are not yet filled (“forthcoming”). We plan to add many reports from our archives to this page over the next few months, filling in all of the topics.

The Current Legal Topics page (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/current-topics.php) will now only contain the most current reports. The list of reports by topic also includes a short description explaining what you will find in each report.

No links will be harmed in this change, so any links you have created to individual reports will continue to work. Just remember to add http://loc.gov/law/help/legal-reports.php as a place to find research, especially of a historical nature, and http://loc.gov/law/help/current-topics.php to find recently written reports.

There are US entities that rival the British Library and the British Museum. The Library of Congress is one of those, as is the Law Library of Congress (the law library is a part of the Library of Congress but merits separate mention).

Every greedy, I would like to see something similar for the Congressional Research Service.

From the webpage:

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS has been a valued and respected resource on Capitol Hill for more than a century.

CRS is well-known for analysis that is authoritative, confidential, objective and nonpartisan. Its highest priority is to ensure that Congress has 24/7 access to the nation’s best thinking.

Imagine US voters being given “…analysis that is authoritative, …, objective and nonpartisan,” analysis that they are paying for today and have for more than the last century.

I leave it to your imagination why Congress would prefer to have “confidential” reports that aren’t available to ordinary citizens. Do you prefer incompetence or malice?

June 12, 2015

Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 7:26 pm

Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare by Professor Michael N. Schmitt.

Description from Amazon:

The product of a three-year project by twenty renowned international law scholars and practitioners, the Tallinn Manual identifies the international law applicable to cyber warfare and sets out ninety-five ‘black-letter rules’ governing such conflicts. It addresses topics including sovereignty, State responsibility, the jus ad bellum, international humanitarian law, and the law of neutrality. An extensive commentary accompanies each rule, which sets forth the rule’s basis in treaty and customary law, explains how the group of experts interpreted applicable norms in the cyber context, and outlines any disagreements within the group as to each rule’s application.

A bit pricey, $129.99 (hard cover), $41.59 (Kindle), $58.48 (paperback), but it is rather specialized.

The conventional “laws of war” are designed to favor current sovereign states and their style of warfare. I would not expect eventual “laws of war” for cyberwarfare to be any different.

June 9, 2015

Fast Track to the Corporate Wish List [Is There A Hacker In The House?]

Filed under: Government,Government Data,Law,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 6:19 pm

Fast Track to the Corporate Wish List by David Dayen.

From the post:

Some time in the next several days, the House will likely vote on trade promotion authority, enabling the Obama administration to proceed with its cherished Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Most House Democrats want no part of the deal, which was crafted by and for corporations. And many Tea Party Republicans don’t want to hand the administration any additional powers, even in service of a victory dearly sought by the GOP’s corporate allies. The vote, which has been repeatedly delayed as both the White House and House GOP leaders try to round up support, is expected to be extremely close.

The Obama administration entered office promising to renegotiate unbalanced trade agreements, which critics believe have cost millions of manufacturing jobs in the past 20 years. But they’ve spent more than a year pushing the TPP, a deal with 11 Pacific Rim nations that mostly adheres to the template of corporate favors masquerading as free trade deals. Of the 29 TPP chapters, only five include traditional trade measures like reducing tariffs and opening markets. Based on leaks and media reports—the full text remains a well-guarded secret—the rest appears to be mainly special-interest legislation.

Pharmaceutical companies, software makers, and Hollywood conglomerates get expanded intellectual property enforcement, protecting their patents and their profits. Some of this, such as restrictions on generic drugs, is at the expense of competition and consumers. Firms get improved access to poor countries with nonexistent labor protections, like Vietnam or Brunei, to manufacture their goods. TPP provides assurances that regulations, from food safety to financial services, will be “harmonized” across borders. In practice, that means a regulatory ceiling. In one of the most contested provisions, corporations can use the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process, and appeal to extra-judicial tribunals that bypass courts and usual forms of due process to seek monetary damages equaling “expected future profits.”

How did we reach this point—where “trade deals” are Trojan horses for fulfilling corporate wish lists, and where all presidents, Democrat or Republican, ultimately pay fealty to them? One place to look is in the political transfer of power, away from Congress and into a relatively obscure executive branch office, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).

USTR has become a way station for hundreds of officials who casually rotate between big business and the government. Currently, Michael Froman, former Citigroup executive and chief of staff to Robert Rubin, runs USTR, and his actions have lived up to the agency’s legacy as the white-shoe law firm for multinational corporations. Under Froman’s leadership, more ex-lobbyists have funneled through USTR, practically no enforcement of prior trade violations has taken place, and new agreements like TPP are dubiously sold as progressive achievements, laced with condescension for anyone who disagrees.
…

David does a great job of sketching the background both for the Trans-Pacific Partnership but also the U.S. Trade Representative.

Given the hundreds of people, nation states and corporations that have access to the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership text, don’t you wonder why it remains secret?

I don’t think President Obama and his business cronies realize that secrecy of an agreement that will affect the vast majority of American citizens strikes at the legitimacy of government itself. True enough, corporations that own entire swaths of Congress are going to get more benefits than the average American. Those benefits are out in the open and citizens can press for benefits as well.

The benefits that accrue to corporations under the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be gained in secret, with little or no opportunity for the average citizen to object. There is something fundamentally unfair about the secret securing of benefits for corporations.

I hope that Obama doesn’t complain about “illegal” activity that foils his plan to secretly favor corporations. I won’t be listening. Will you?

Congress.gov Webinar 11 June 2015 2PM-3PM

Filed under: Government,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 5:51 pm

Congress.gov Webinar

The Law Library of Congress is putting on a webinar about Congress.gov this coming Thursday, 11 June 2015, 2PM-3PM.

Whether you believe laws really matter or you just need to find laws/action for rhetoric, this is likely to be a very good webinar!

See you there!

June 4, 2015

Search by Number (Citation) [US Congress, One Pager on Congressional Citations]

Filed under: Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 1:19 pm

Search by Number (Citation)

From the webpage:

Retrieve legislation (amendments, bills, laws, and resolutions) or committee reports by specifying the congress number, the document type abbreviation, and the document number (e.g. 114hr1, 113s.rpt.25, 104PL104). Citations work with or without spaces and periods, and in upper or lowercase. All supported citation formats are listed at Search by Number.

Alternatively, specify a congress using the checkboxes below and search legislation within that congress (e.g. H.R. 202, s744, ha70, S.Amdt.250, pl113-2).

A new way to search for legislation, reports, etc. from the U.S. Congress.

Especially helpful when reading articles whose authors haven’t mastered the art of hyperlinking to congressional materials.

BTW, from Congress.gov Advanced Search, I created a one pager on congressional citations. I had to use 10pt type to get it all on one page but can post the source if you want to produce it in a different size.

Don’t Give Out Cellphone Advice!

Filed under: Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 10:43 am

It’s dangerous to give out advice on cellphones these days.

David Wright has been charged with “Conspiring to Obstruct National Security Investigation.”

David and Ussamah Abdullah Rahim discussed beheading of a particular individual. The conversations took place over a period of time long enough for Ussamah Abdullah Rahim to become impatient. Ussamah Abdullah Rahim decided instead of the beheading, he would shoot some police officers. In a conversation about the new plan, Wright advised Ussamah Abdullah Rahim to destroy his cellphone so evidence on it would be lost. (The conversation was being monitored by the FBI. Ussamah Abdullah Rahim was subsequently killed in an encounter with police officers.)

As I recall, technically speaking, beheading in most jurisdictions is considered to be murder. So Wright and company were engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder long before any discussion of the cellphone.

Law enforcement agencies should not pad their statistics with marginal national security arrests. It devalues any legitimate warning or advice they may have in the future.

June 3, 2015

Foreign Intelligence Gathering Laws

Filed under: Government,Intelligence,Law,Law - Sources,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 10:14 am

Foreign Intelligence Gathering Laws by Peter Roudik, Director of Legal Research, Law Library of Congress.

From the description:

This report contains information on laws regulating the collection of intelligence in the European Union, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, and Sweden. The report details how EU Members States control activities of their intelligence agencies and what restrictions are imposed on information collection. All EU Member States follow EU legislation on personal data protection, which is a part of the common European Union responsibility.

To the extent that you think intelligence services obey laws or if you need statute and case citations for rhetorical purposes, for the countries covered this report will be quite handy.

Whether you are in the United States or one of the countries listed in this report or elsewhere, your default assumption should be that you are under surveillance and the record light is on.

May 5, 2015

Lex Machina – Legal Analytics for Intellectual Property Litigation

Filed under: Law,Law - Sources,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 4:06 pm

Lex Machina – Legal Analytics for Intellectual Property Litigation by David R. Hansen.

From the post:

Lex Machina—Latin that translates to “law machine”—is an interesting name for a legal analytics platform that focuses not on the law itself but on providing insights into the human aspects of the practice of law. While traditional legal research platforms—Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, etc.—help guide attorneys to information about where the law is and how it is developing, Lex Machina focuses on providing information about how attorneys, judges, and other involved parties act in the high-stakes world of IP litigation.

Leveraging databases from PACER, the USPTO, and the ITC, Lex Machina cleans and codes millions of data elements from IP-related legal filings to cull information about how judges, attorneys, law firms, and particular patents are treated in various cases. Using that information, Lex Machina is able to offer insights into, for example, how long a particular judge typically takes to decide on summary judgment motions, or how frequently a particular judge grants early motions in favor of defendants. Law firms use the service to create client pitches—highlighting with hard data, for example, how many times they have litigated and won particular types of cases before particular judges or courts as compared to competing law firms. And companies can use the service to assess the historical effectiveness of their counsel and to judge the reasonableness of proposed litigation strategies.

For academic uses, the possibilities for engaging in empirical research with the covered dataset are great. A quick search of law reviews articles in Westlaw shows Lex Machina used in seventy-five articles published since 2009, covering empirical research into everything from the prevalence of assertions of state sovereign immunity for cases involving state-owned patents to effect of patent monetization entities on U.S. patent litigation.

If you are interested in gaining access to Lex Machina and are university and college faculty, staff or students directly engaged in research on, or study of, IP law and policy, you can request a free public-interest account here (Lex Machina notes, however, “to enable public interest users to make best use of Lex Machina, we require prospective new users to attend an online training prior to receiving a user account.”)

When I first wrote about Lex Machina (2013), I don’t recall there being a public interest option. Amusing to see its use as a form of verified advertising for attorneys.

Now, if judicial oversight boards had the same type of information across the board for all judges.

Not that legal outcomes can or should be uniform, but they shouldn’t be freakish as well.

I first saw this in a tweet by Aaron Kirschenfeld.

April 21, 2015

Liability as an Incentive for Secure Software?

Filed under: Government,Law,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 7:54 pm

Calls Arise to Make Developers Liable for Insecure Software by Sean Doherty.

The usual suspects show up in Sean’s post:

…
Dan Geer, chief information security officer at the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is often in the news arguing for legal measures to make companies accountable for developing vulnerable code. In his keynote address at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas in August 2014, Geer said he would place the onus of security onto software developers.

In a recent Financial Times story, Dave Merkel, chief technology officer at IT security vendor FireEye, said, “Attackers are specifically looking for the things that code was not designed to do. As a software creator, you can test definitively for all the things that your software should do. But testing it for all things it shouldn’t do is an infinite, impossible challenge.”
…

But Sean adds an alternative to liability versus no-liability:

…
In today’s software development environment, there is no effective legal framework for liability. But perhaps lawyers are looking for the wrong framework.

The FT story also quoted Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at IT security vendor Qualys: “Building software isn’t like building a house or a bridge or a ship, where accepted engineering principles apply across whole industries.”

Like Greer, there are people in the software industry saying code development should become like the building industry—with standards. An organization of computing professionals, the IEEE Computer Society, found a working group to address the lack of software design standards: Center for Secure Design (CSD).
…

Liability is coming, its up to the software community to decide how to take that “hit.”

Relying on the courts to work out what “negligence” means for software development will take decades and lead to a minefield of mixed results. States will vary from each other and the feds will no doubt have different standards by circuits, at least for a while.

Standards for software development? Self-imposed standards that set a high but attainable bar that demonstrate improved results to users are definitely preferable to erratic and costly litigation.

Your call.

April 20, 2015

Same Sex Marriage Resources (Another Brown?)

Filed under: Government,Law,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 4:38 pm

You may be aware that the right of same sex couples to marry is coming up for oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States on 28 April 2015.

The case, Obergefell v. Hodges, has been consolidated by the Court with Tanco v. Haslam (Tennessee), DeBoer v. Snyder (Michigan), Bourke v. Beshear (Kentucky), and the Court has posed two questions:

  1. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?
  2. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

What you may not know is that SCOTUSblog has extensive commentary and primary documents collected at: Obergefell vs. Hodges. In addition to blog commentary covering all the positions of the parties and others who have filed briefs in this proceeding, there are links to the briefs by the parties and one hundred and fifty-one (151) briefs filed by others.

There will be a lot of loose talk about a decision favoring gay marriage as another Brown v. Board of Education. A favorable decision would legally end another form of narrow mindedness, as it should. However, I don’t think the two cases are comparable in terms of magnitude.

Perhaps because I was born the year Brown was decided and due to the practice of “…all deliberate speed…” in the South, I attended segregated schools until I was in the ninth grade. I won’t bore you will distorted recollections from so long ago but suffice it to say that interest on the debt of Jim Crow and de jure segregation is still being paid by children of all races in the South.

Same sex couples have been discriminated against and that should end, but they are adults, not children. Brown recognized sinning against children and started the nation on a long road to recognize that as well.

April 15, 2015

Google Antitrust Charges: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Filed under: EU,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 4:56 pm

The EU antitrust charges against Google will be news for some time so start with the the primary sources.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager

First, the official press release from the European Commission: Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Google on comparison shopping service; opens separate formal investigation on Android, which reads in part:

The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Google alleging the company has abused its dominant position in the markets for general internet search services in the European Economic Area (EEA) by systematically favouring its own comparison shopping product in its general search results pages. The Commission’s preliminary view is that such conduct infringes EU antitrust rules because it stifles competition and harms consumers. Sending a Statement of Objections does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation.

…

EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy Margrethe Vestager said: “The Commission’s objective is to apply EU antitrust rules to ensure that companies operating in Europe, wherever they may be based, do not artificially deny European consumers as wide a choice as possible or stifle innovation”.

“In the case of Google I am concerned that the company has given an unfair advantage to its own comparison shopping service, in breach of EU antitrust rules. Google now has the opportunity to convince the Commission to the contrary.…

In the first paragraph, “Sending a Statement of Objections does not prejudge the outcome….” and by the fourth paragraph, “…Google now has the opportunity to convince the Commission to the contrary.”???

That sounds remarkably like “guilty until proven innocent” to me. You?

Can you imagine a judge in a US antitrust trial telling the defendant:

“We are going to have a fair trial and you will have to opportunity to convince me your’re not guilty.”

It’s unfortunate that vendors continue to use the EU as a pawn in efforts to compete other vendors. It just encourages the EU, with its admittedly Euro-centric view of the world, to attempt to manage activities best left un-managed. Yes, Google is the world leader in search, if you think indexing 5% of the web constitutes leadership. A “leader” that is still wedded to its lemming (page-rank) based ranking algorithm.

Apparently the EU hasn’t noticed that raw search data is now easily available for potential competitors to Google. (You know it as Common Crawl Link is to a series of my posts on Common Crawl.) The EU is unaware of the ongoing revolution in deep learning, which will make lemming-based ranking passé. (Yes, Google has contributed heavily to that research but research isn’t criminal, at least not yet.) And the very technology for performing Internet searches may be about to change (Darpa/Memex).

Does Google dominate the ad-supported, users-as-end-product, search market? Sure, if you don’t like that, why not create a search service that returns one (1) result, the one that I am looking for? No ads, no selling my information, just returning one useful result. Given the time wasted in a day scrolling through some search engine results, do you see a market for that among professionals?

If I search for pizza, given my IP address and order history, there is only one result that needs to show up. With the number highlighted for calling. Think about all the one result searches you need in a day, week, month. I suppose that doesn’t work for dating services but no one search solution will fit all use cases. Entirely different market from Google, paid for by vendors.

Source documents for your topic map:

Antitrust: Commission probes allegations of antitrust violations by Google (2010)

Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Google on comparison shopping service (April 15, 2015)

Antitrust: Commission opens formal investigation against Google in relation to Android mobile operating system

Council Regulation (EC) No 1/2003 of 16 December 2002 on the implementation of the rules on competition laid down in Articles 81 and 82 of the Treaty (Text with EEA relevance) (in English, as of today) The canonical link: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32003R0001.

April 12, 2015

Do You Have An Obligation To Rat Out Your Friends?

Filed under: Law,Politics,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 7:14 pm

Along with arresting a mentally ill person that the FBI assisted at every step of the way in creating a fake car bomb for Fort Riley, the FBI has conjured out of thin air an obligation to rat out anyone you know or suspect may be about to commit a federal crime.

The FBI wants a nation of informers to pad it files with reports. We all know how well that worked in East Germany. Why not in the United States? A toxic brew of suspicion and distrust, of everyone. Your family, in-laws, children, acquaintances at work, etc.

I don’t have an explanation for why the FBI wants such a social policy but I can point to a case in point where they argue for it. Take a look at the complaint filed in April 10, 2015 against Alexander E. Blair.

Blair was charged with violating Title 18, United States Code, Section 4, misprison of felony.

Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Joseph Broadbent explains misprison of felony (the following is not legal advice, for legal advice contact an attorney) as follows:

“Misprision of felony” is a crime that occurs when someone knows a felony has been committed, but fails to inform the authorities about it. The crime originated in English common law and required that citizens report crimes or face criminal prosecution. (Common law is law originating from custom and court decisions rather than statutes.)

Due to the harshness of imprisoning people merely for failing to report a crime, most states chose not to include misprision of felony in their criminal laws. Instead, conduct that would fit the misprision definition is covered by other laws, such as those dealing with accomplice liability.

Federal Law

First enacted into U.S. law in 1789, misprision of a felony in the federal system is a felony punishable by a fine and up to three years in prison. The common-law rule criminalized simply knowing about a felony and not notifying the authorities. But contemporary federal law also requires that the defendant take some affirmative act to conceal the felony. The crime has four elements:

  • a completed felony
  • the defendant knowing about the felony’s commission
  • the defendant failing to notify a proper law enforcement authority, and
  • the defendant taking some affirmative step to conceal the felony.

(18 U.S.C. §4.)

Typical acts of concealment include making false statements, hiding evidence, and harboring the felon. Whether someone’s actions amount to concealment is for the jury to decide.

Suppose Marty knows his neighbor, Biff, is growing marijuana. Marty wouldn’t be guilty of federal misprision simply for remaining silent. But if he lies to the police about Biff’s growing, he’s committed the crime.

Although the crime has a broad definition, misprision prosecutions are uncommon. Prosecutors usually reserve misprision charges for people with special duties to report crimes, such as prison guards and elected officials. That said, nothing in the statute’s language limits it to such cases. The authorities might invoke it for certain types of crimes where the government wants to encourage reporting, like treason and terrorism.

The FBI had these facts about Alexander E. Blair:

…agents contacted and interviewed Blair immediately after Booker’s arrest on April 10, 2015. During the interview, Blair admitted that he knew about Booker’s plan to detonate the VBIED. He further stated that he knew Booker believed he (Booker) was acting on behalf of ISIL; he knew Booker was gathering materials for constructing the VBIED; he knew Booker intended to deliver the device onto Fort Riley; and, he knew that Booker planned to kill as many soldiers as possible. Blair admitted to agents that he loaned money to Booker for rental of the storage unit, knowing that the unit would be used to store and construct the VBIED. Blair also advised agents that he urged Booker to cease talking openly about his intentions to conduct an attack for fear of attracting public attention and being reported to law enforcement. Blair told agents that he believed he had in fact been recently put under law enforcement surveillance. Finally, Blair told agents that he believed Booker would carry out the attack but chose not to alert authorities and report Booker’s actions.

Knowing the elements of Title 18, Section 4, let’s see how those compare to the complaint:

  • a completed felony ✔
  • the defendant knowing about the felony’s commission ✔
  • the defendant failing to notify a proper law enforcement authority, and ✔
  • the defendant taking some affirmative step to conceal the felony. Opps!

No lying to the FBI, no attempt to conceal the felony, no misprison of felony.

A first year law student could have worked that out without any prompting.

It is fair to note that loaning money to someone in furtherance of the commission of a criminal act generates other questions of criminal liability but it isn’t misprison of felony.

I suspect the real reason the FBI keeps assisting mentally ill people and big talkers with terrorist activities is because it can’t find enough real terrorists in the United States. Rather than simply admit that terrorism as a domestic crime is a rare as crimes get, the FBI manufactures terrorist plots so it can ask for more anti-terrorist funding.

There was Oklahoma City, 9/11, the Boston Marthon, Olympic Park in Atlanta, the New York guy who set his car on fire, so what five (5) in twenty years? Can you imagine if there were only five murders, five rapes, or five armed robberies in twenty years?

On one hand, don’t tell me you are about to commit a felony but on the other, let’s not become East Germany. OK?

April 6, 2015

Barkan, Bintliff, and Whisner’s Fundamentals of Legal Research, 10th

Filed under: Government,Indexing,Law,Law - Sources,Research Methods,Search Requirements — Patrick Durusau @ 6:43 pm

Barkan, Bintliff, and Whisner’s Fundamentals of Legal Research, 10th by Steven M Barkan; Barbara Bintliff; Mary Whisner. (ISBN-13: 9781609300562)

Description:

This classic textbook has been updated to include the latest methods and resources. Fundamentals of Legal Research provides an authoritative introduction and guide to all aspects of legal research, integrating electronic and print sources. The Tenth Edition includes chapters on the true basics (case reporting, statutes, and so on) as well as more specialized chapters on legislative history, tax law, international law, and the law of the United Kingdom. A new chapter addresses Native American tribal law. Chapters on the research process, legal writing, and citation format help integrate legal research into the larger process of solving legal problems and communicating the solutions. This edition includes an updated glossary of research terms and revised tables and appendixes. Because of its depth and breadth, this text is well suited for advanced legal research classes; it is a book that students will want to retain for future use. Moreover, it has a place on librarians’ and attorneys’ ready reference shelves. Barkan, Bintliff and Whisner’s Assignments to Fundamentals of Legal Research complements the text.

I haven’t seen this volume in hard copy but if you are interested in learning what connections researchers are looking for with search tools, law is a great place to start.

The purpose of legal research, isn’t to find the most popular “fact” (Google), or to find every term for a “fact” ever tweeted (Twitter), but rather to find facts and their relationships to other facts, which flesh out to a legal view of a situation in context.

If you think about it, putting legislation, legislative history, court records and decisions, along with non-primary sources online, is barely a start towards making that information “accessible.” A necessary first step but not sufficient for meaningful access.

March 27, 2015

United States Code (from Office of the Law Revision Counsel)

Filed under: Government,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 5:08 pm

United States Code (from Office of the Law Revision Counsel)

The download page says:

Current Release Point

Public Law 113-296 Except 113-287

Each update of the United States Code is a release point. This page provides downloadable files for the current release point. All files are current through Public Law 113-296 except for 113-287. Titles in bold have been changed since the last release point.

A User Guide and the USLM Schema and stylesheet are provided for the United States Code in XML. A stylesheet is provided for the XHTML. PCC files are text files containing GPO photocomposition codes (i.e., locators).

Information about the currency of United States Code titles is available on the Currency page. Files for prior release points are available on the Prior Release Points page. Older materials are available on the Annual Historical Archives page.

You can download as much or as little of the United States Code in XML, XHTML, PCC or PDF format.

Oh, yeah, the 113-287 reference does seem rather cryptic. What? You don’t keep up with Public Law numbers? 😉

The short story is that Congress passed a bill to move material on national parks to volume 54 and that hasn’t happened, yet. If you need more details, see: Title 54 of the U.S. Code: Background and Guidance by the National Park Service.

You can think of this as the outcome of the sausage making process. Interesting in its own right but not terribly helpful in divining the process that produced it.

Enjoy!

PS: On Ubuntu, the site displays great on Chrome, don’t know about IE*, and poorly on FireFox.

February 25, 2015

Google As Censor

Filed under: Censorship,Government,Law — Patrick Durusau @ 3:37 pm

Google bans sexually explicit content on Blogger by Lisa Vaas.

From the post:

Google hasn’t changed its policy’s messaging around censorship, stating that “censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression.”

How Google will manage, with Blogger, to increase “the availability of information, [encourage] healthy debate, and [make] possible new connections between people” while still curbing “abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages” remains to be seen.

I wrote an entire post, complete with Supreme Court citations, etc., on the basis that Google was really trying to be a moral censor without saying so. As I neared the end of the post, the penny dropped and the explanation for Google’s banning of “sexually explicit content” became clear.

Read that last part of the Google quote carefully:

“abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages”

Who would have the power to threaten Google’s sponsorship of Blogger and “the freedom of expression it encourages?”

Hmmm, does China come to mind?

China relaxes on pornography but YouTube is still blocked by Malcolm Moore.

Whether China is planning on new restrictions on pornography in general or Google is attempting to sweeten a deal with China by self-policing isn’t clear.

I find that a great deal more plausible than thinking Google has suddenly lost interest what can be highly lucrative content.

When they see “sexually explicit content” Google and its offended Chinese censor buddies:

could effectively avoid further bombardment of their sensibilities simply by averting their eyes.

Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971).

Averting your eyes is even easier with a web browser because you have to seek out the offensive content. If material offends you, don’t go there. Problem solved.

Google’s role as censor isn’t going to start with deleting large numbers of books from Google Books and heavy handed censoring of search results.

No, Google will start by censoring IS and other groups unpopular with one government or another. Then, as here, Google will move up to making some content harder to post, again at the behest of some government. By the time Google censorship reaches you, the principle of censorship will be well established and the only question left being where the line is drawn.

PS: Obviously I am speculating that China is behind the censoring of Blogger by Google but let’s first call this action what it is in fact: censorship. I don’t have any cables between China and Google but I feel sure someone does. Perhaps there is a leaky Google employee who can clear up this mystery for us all.

February 24, 2015

Big data: too much information

Filed under: BigData,Law,Law - Sources — Patrick Durusau @ 11:50 am

Big data: too much information by Joanna Goodman.

Joanna’s post was the source I used for part of the post Enhanced Access to UK Legislation. I wanted to call attention to her post because it covered more than just the legislation.gov.uk site and offered several insights into the role of big data in law.

Consider Joanna’s list of ways big data can help with litigation:

Big data analysis – nine ways it can help

1 Big data analytics use algorithms to interrogate large volumes of unstructured, anonymised data to identify correlations, patterns and trends.

2 Has the potential to uncover patterns – and opportunities – that are not immediately obvious.

3 Graphics are key – visual representation is the only clear and comprehensive way to present the outcomes of big data analysis.

4 E-discovery is an obvious practical application of big data to legal practice, reducing the time and cost of trawling through massive volumes of structured and unstructured data held in different places.

5 Can identify patterns and trends, using client and case data, in dispute resolution to predict the probability of case outcomes. This facilitates decision-making – for example whether a claimant should pursue a case or to settle.

6 In the UK, the Big Data for Law project is digitising the entire statute book so that all UK legislation can be analysed, together with publicly available data from legal publishers. This will create the most comprehensive record of all UK legislation ever created together with analytical tools.

7 A law firm can use big data analytics to offer its insurance clients a service that identifies potentially fraudulent claims.

8 Big data will be usable as a design tool, to identify design patterns within statutes – combinations of rules that are used repeatedly to meet policy goals.

9 Can include transactional data and data from external sources, which can be cut in different ways.

Just as a teaser because the rest of her post is as interesting as what I quoted above, how would you use big data to shape debt collection practices?

See Joanna’s post to find out!

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