Archive for the ‘law’ Category
Ballot stuffing in Ohio
Good proof that the Bush win in 2004 was fixed in Ohio has surfaced here. Should be the biggest story on US news at the moment. I wonder if it is?
In: law, observations, world
John Howard and refugee policy
Background: Refugees as political advantage. Australia is famously a nation of immigrants, an idea which ignores a bunch of people who have been here for around 45 thousand years. The attitude of the white residents to further migration, however, has been split between a need for their skills and labour and a fear of competition [...]
AT+T and wiretap of whole internet
Wired describes how AT&T may be attempting to conceal documents relating to a case EFF is bringing against it for funnelling it’s internet backbone into the NSA for monitoring. Not that it comes as any surprise really that NSA would monitor the internet in detail. Get yourself a copy of PGP.
Culture, autonomy, and human rights
An attempt at a universalist approach to Human Rights, which if not culturally neutral, at least imposes an explicit moral underpinning rather than an implicit set of cultural values. Liberals are conflicted people. It’s not a bad thing, it comes about because there’s not always one right answer to a question. Sometimes there are two [...]
In: law, philosophy, world
Evade China’s firewall
Anonymizer have produced a tool to allow Chinese web surfers to circumvent the national firewall, by encrypting communication and routing it through one of a number of IP addresses. Google.com should be accessible by this means. The current site from where the software can be downloaded is here, but this will be changed from time [...]
In: law, net, observations, world
Thinking the unthinkable
There has been a major but silent shift in US nuclear policy under the current administration. This was first apparent in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, and became clearer under the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. To maximise deterrence of WMD use, it is essential US forces prepare to use nuclear weapons effectively and that [...]
Steal Claire’s Poem
From Steal this Poem by Claire Fauset: Think about it, I can’t tell you anything new. In all these millenia of human existence there can only be a few new ideas to be thought through. So do we treat them like rare commodities? Because intellectual property is theft and piracy is our only defence against [...]
Citizen arbitration: an utopian suggestion
This is the third part of a series examining the morality of the behaviour of groups, corporations and governments. The first two talk about the Psychology of tribes, and Meme systems and category mistakes. This time I’m really going out on a limb, making a suggestion about what could be done to balance the power [...]
In: law, philosophy, society, theory
Nuclear weapons and international law
What follows are my notes on a recent talk by Prof. Dr. Michael Bothe, Chairman of the specialized committee for humanitarian international law, German Red Cross, Chairman, German society for international law, Em. Professor Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. It was given at the Law School, University of Tasmania, 14 February 2006. The [...]
Censorship, Google, and China
Reporters Without Borders (on 25 January) accused the Internet’s biggest search-engine, Google, of “hypocrisy” for its plan to launch a censured version of its product in China, meaning that the country’s Internet users would only be able to look up material approved of by the government and nothing about Tibet or democracy and human rights [...]
Aus Anti-terror laws pt 2
An interview on the radio this morning with an ex bomb disposal expert from Northern Ireland, talking about the effect of the draconian anti-terror laws in that country. He said the immediate effect was that the republican population were transformed overnight into strong supporters of the IRA, and any chance of the Ulster constabulary getting [...]
Anti-terrorism laws, and civil liberties
Duncan Kerr gave a quite impassioned talk to the Tasmanian Council for Civil Liberties, in which he argued that fair and reasonable checks were in fact being built in to the proposed anti-terrorism legislation. I’m not at all convinced of this, in spite of what Duncan has to say, and in spite of my respect [...]
Yahoo and Google aid censorship
Yahoo and Google are cooperating with Chinese authorities in their clampdown on “dissidents”, and also in their censorship of the internet. For some Microsoft has treated any attempt to create a blog with the words democracy or freedom in its title in the same way as an attempt to create a blog with obscene words [...]
