What a good survey of animal law, where it came from, where it is and where it’s going. A pleasant surprise, as I usually write off Huffington Post pretty fast.

The only people that argue against the treatment of dogs, and other animals, as more than property are those who have never experienced the profound bond that develops between a human and a pet.

But the ASPCA efforts are the ones to watch here. Their moderate approach is more palatable to the establishment and therefore more effective in the long-term than the jarring advocacy of more extreme groups like PETA.

Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, in an email to the Wall Street Journal’s Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rolfe Winkler:

Courts are doing pretzel twists to slot modern electronic privacy issues into antiquated statutory schemes. Congress badly needs to update the nation’s privacy laws; we can’t leave the courts with so little guidance and expect consistent results.

The inconsistent application of the law across states suggests the issue may be ripe for appeal on both fronts, and may be on a long journey to the Supreme Court. The Delaware court saw no harm in Google’s circumvention of browser-based privacy settings and thus no cause of action.

What interests me is that the information you can collect via someone’s browsing behavior with a cookie is probably similar to the information you can collect by scanning their email, the action at issue in the North Carolina case, in which the judge denied Google’s motion to to dismiss the suit.

Thus, it’s the difference in the method of collection, even where the subject of collection is the same, that may be triggering the proliferation of multiple interpretations of privacy law.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the wiretap law refers specifically to communication interception, which applies directly to email. While browsing history can tell a great deal about someone, it’s not, strictly speaking, a mode of communication, so plaintiffs probably need to rely more on the common law.

I wish I had more time to sink my teeth into the issue, but I’ll have to settle for sharing a few useful links on privacy law for those interested in learning more:

• EFF on Privacy
• Wikipedia, particularly good for the history of privacy law in the U.S.
• Prof. Daniel Solove: The Chaos of U.S. Privacy Law
• Michael McFarland, SJ: Privacy and the Law

Hancock County Probate Court Judge Allan Davis, who declared Donald Eugene Miller Jr. dead in 1994, eight years after he vanished from his rental home in Arcadia, told Miller in court Monday the law only allows death rulings to be overturned within three years of the ruling.

Sometimes the law refuses to be boxed in by little technicalities like reality. This is very much one of those times.

This is useful. If you have delayed starting your own blog because you’re nervous about the legal issues, give this a read and reconsider.

This is a great article, but this bit is particularly rich. Tyler Bass of Vice’s Motherboard reports the now well-known Petraeus affair with an elegant juxtaposition of facts:

“Oaths do matter,” David H. Petraeus, then C.I.A. director, said at the time. “And there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”

Just weeks later, Petraeus would fall from grace after FBI agents, conducting a separate investigation, discovered emails that revealed an extramarital affair.

Oaths indeed.

Terry Carter, writing at the ABA Journal:

Poulshock, 38, is writing source code for each law, which can then be entered into computers and applied to fact patterns. (The project is open source, online at GitHub). Tax and immigration law lend themselves to this approach more easily than some other areas, but in many instances, he says, law can be turned into a mathematical function: If this, then that; if these, then that or those.

Ian Hurd, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, writing at preeminent international law blog Opinio Juris:

It is well known that the [U.N.] Charter forbids the use of force except as self-defense or as sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Everything else amounts to aggression and is illegal.

The issue of whether and how the U.S. and/or the rest of the world should react to the use of chemical weapons in Syria is open to debate on ethical, moral, political, and practical levels.

But it is not open to any debate from an international law perspective: the U.S. proposal, whether approved and implemented by President Obama or the Congress to which he has deferred on the decision, is prohibited generally by international law and specifically by the United Nations charter.

This is fascinating, especially with immigration such a hot topic recently.

The definition of terms essential to the application of a law is the most basic requirement for competent lawmaking.

Sometimes one or more terms are appropriately defined in an open way, to provide flexibility in the application of a law. This is not one of one laws. The shield law is meant to protect reporters, so defining what exactly a reporter is should be done wi surgical precision.

I am open to arguing how broad or narrow the definition of journalist should be in a shield law, but that conversation but result in a specific outcome that is codified in the new law.

It is impossible to have that discussion and achieve that specific codification when legislators shirk their fundamental responsibility.

As Morgan Weiland of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in the article linked above, Senators Feinstein and Durbin, and all the legislators who contributed to the poorly-drafted law, have failed in their duty to their constituents and the rest of our country. Hopefully a competent legislator will step in to correct their shortcomings as the law progresses.

John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, reporting for Reuters Washington bureau:

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial.

This goes well beyond spying. This is, I would argue, exactly why people object to such domestic spying.

The logic is that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. However, the “Special Operations Division” probably isn’t infallible, since, well, no one is, and that means that you may have nothing to hide, and think you have nothing to fear, and be completely wrong.

Innocent people may have been convicted as a result of what appear on their face to be unconstitutional, extrajudicial practices.

Those arguing that the price for protection from terrorists and other would-be evil doers is letting the National Security Agency have a peak at our Gmail will have a much more difficult time making the same case for falsifying an evidence trail.

The defense was often held in the dark and, apparently, at least in some cases, investigators misled both the prosecution and judicial evidentiary discretion.

Oh, and as a cherry on top, here’s a gem from near the end of the Reuters story:

A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit’s annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.

The monitoring of internet communications for sensitive information, it would seem, goes both ways.

I wrote recently about my disappointment with Twitter’s response to a woman deluged with rape threats. Today, David Edwards of t The Raw Story reports that a man has been arrested in England for threats made against Caroline Criado-Perez.

Twitter said in a statement to Sky News :

[the] ability to report individual tweets for abuse is currently available on Twitter for iPhone and we plan to bring this functionality to other platforms, including Android and the web.

Good idea, let’s make that a priority.

It’s been ten years since Lawrence v Texas saw anti-sodomy laws declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but I suppose stupidity is eternal. At least the District Attorney is ending the absurdity by refraining from prosecution. There may yet be hope for Baton Rouge.

Sue Reisinger, writing at Corporate Counsel:

In a warning to employers, the National Labor Relations Board has “unliked” certain social media policies that restrict an employee’s right to speak critically of the employer online, unless the policies were set in collective bargaining.

It’s clear many companies didn’t consider the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) implications when they developed their social media policies. It’s often HR professionals that have to draft these policies, but the onus can’t be placed solely on them to catch how the new rules might implicate nuances of the NLRA. Any company who has implemented or plans to implement a social media policy is well-advised to have a labor and employment attorney review it first.

John Futty, reporting for The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio:

Judge Michael J. Holbrook placed Young on probation yesterday for five years and ordered that she spend a minimum of three days in jail each Christmas while on probation.

This made me smile. Now, crime is bad, and Christmas in jail is bad. But what a creative way to punish a fraudster without wasting taxpayer money on a non-violent offender.

I wrote yesterday about Ms. Dalelv’s 16-month sentence for sex outside marriage, among other absurd charges to levy against a victim of rape, in the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. I’m happy to report that, according to Reuters, the 24-year-old has been “pardoned” and will be able to go back to Norway.

The fact that UAE called it a “pardon” is as unconscionable as the sentence itself, but freedom by any name is better than being jailed in the kind of nation that would punish a rape victim.

Update: she has been “pardoned.”

A Norwegian woman was raped, reported it to police, and was charged and convicted of extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and perjury. She was sentenced to 16 months in jail.

For being raped.

And that’s three months longer than her attacker.

This is a major problem of international law. What happens when the economic and business relationship between two states places citizens in the crosshairs of antiquated and ignorant laws? What is the remedy when the Western expectations of a visitor are shattered by foreign norms that, well, prompt Western folks to use words like “antiquated” and “ignorant.”

The Norwegian government has the woman safely housed in what sounds like a naval base, but there is a warrant out for her arrest.

We will find out. I’ll be keeping an eye on this story.

Kevin Poulsen, at Wired's Threat Level blog:

MIT argues that those people might face threats and harassment if their names become public. But it’s worth noting that names of third parties are already redacted from documents produced under FOIA.

MIT has screwed up repeatedly throughout this ordeal, and this is not a sign of improvement. If anything, their interference itself might prompt anonymous hackers to launch new salvos against their networks or dox their personnel.

With US authorities pushing for easier backdoors into electronic communications systems, a network of anti-graffiti drones looks like a good front for general state-wide surveillance. The German privacy ethic runs deep, but it may provide an interesting model for US authorities to consider in the long-term.

Number twelve and counting; this looks to be a big year for marriage equality in the United States.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published data on what hospitals charge for the most common procedures. There is much to look at, and other have done good reporting on it, notably Sarah Kliff and Dan Keating at the Washington Post and Barry Meier, Jo Craven McGinty and Julie Creswell at the New York Times.

The bottom line is that hospital pricing practices appear from this data to be arbitrary. I wouldn’t be surprised if pricing flucutated from year to year based on what revenue each hospital brings in. That’s unconscionable, and a failure of the free market in arguably the most important industry. Hospitals and canadian pharmacies would do well to get together and establish transparent and ethical best practices for pricing, because the alternative is onerous regluation to ensure they are not gouging insurance companies, government agencies, and individual patients without regard to actual costs.

And the steady march continues, as Delaware joins their ten predecessors in granting gay couples the basic American right to marry.

Charlie Savage of The New York Times:

the new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving wiggle room for companies to say they tried but could not make the technology work. Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not.

Concerns that this would prompt similar measures from repressive governments abroad are not overblown. If we expect foreign companies to submit to these procedures, their governments will expect US companies to do the same. I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention anything about what the Obama administration’s diplomats and international law folks think about all of this.

Disgusting. Anything less than dishonorable discharge and jail time will be an insult to victims and to this country.

Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”

Law student Cody Wilson has added some steel to make it detectable and lawful, and gotten the appropriate firearms manufacturing license. But that doesn’t mean the world at large will do the same when Wilson uploads the files needed to print the gun to the internet.

I often write about how technology has made the cost of copying trivial, while the laws on the books still hail from a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial. When it comes to audio and video copyright, that triviality can be economically disruptive at best, and can disturb entire industries at worst. But when it comes to weapons, that triviality to copy is downright dangerous.

The inexorable march of time sees a tenth state grant gay and lesbian people the statutory right to marry.

Those states who have yet to get on board would do well to hurry: you’re quickly running out of time to look like you were ahead of the curve in the common sense of twenty-first century civil rights.