The march attracted protesters from both ends of the political spectrum as liberal privacy advocates walked alongside members of the conservative Tea Party movement in opposition to what they say is unlawful government spying on Americans.

What a weird image.

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.

Alex Morris wrote a great piece at Rolling Stone about what can only be called the social abuse being perpetrated at Christian schools.

You should know before you read the quote below that “they” refers to the leadership of one of the Christian schools discussed in Morris’ article:

"They found out she was a lesbian, and they made her go in front of the entire school and tell them," says Tristan. "And then they kicked her out the next day."

I was raised Catholic.

I know the Bible inside and out.

I read it twice, cover to cover, in addition to about 16 years of Catholic-affiliated schooling.

I know Catholicism and other forms of Christianity are sometimes mutually unintelligible.

But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, Christian about behavior like that by an adult authority figure.

To out someone against their will, before their peers, only to cast them out afterward, as a means to teach them they are inferior, is the very definition if evil.

It is petty, resentful and indicative of a disgusting superiority complex coupled with a total lack of moral intelligence.

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

CNN’s Miguel Helft, in a great profile of Sandberg at the Money blog:

How Sandberg, amid all her Facebook activities, managed to write Lean In, orchestrate flashy book tours on three continents, launch a foundation, and become a ubiquitous spokesperson for the ambitions of women, remains baffling to most people.

Her advocacy for women in business is great, but what I find most impressive about Sandberg is not that she is a woman and an executive, but an executive with such a full plate who seems to truly love what she does.

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.

That’s a shame. This image alone illustrates the design strides made by the Next team (the cancelled redesign is on the right). 

The Reuters iOS app is better than that of Associated Press, for what it’s worth.

This guy is in charge of a country. 

Crazy.

New York Times news editor Dean Baquet suffered a serious lapse in editorial judgment. I mean, he can’t be serious, can he?

This is a great story precisely because Victor wasn’t writing a blog post about how to properly commit journalism on Twitter, he was properly committing journalism on Twitter.

John Gruber:

Better, I think, not to treat smartphones and tablets as separate categories, but merely as different sizes of the same thing.

I think he is absolutely right, but even a year ago I would have argued like a lunatic against that very point.

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.

It’s something I put here in January, but I thought I’d point it out in case you hadn’t seen it, or you prefer Medium, or you have yet to see Medium in action.

At the end of the day, expertise or a lack of it will define your requirements in this space. Less savvy folks love Google+ Photos because the auto-upload is effectively unlimited for them with the appropriate size setting.

Actor Kevin Spacey, speaking at the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival:

Clearly the success of the Netflix model – releasing the entire season of House Of Cards at once – has proved one thing: the audience wants control. They want freedom. If they want to binge – as they’ve been doing on House Of Cards – then we should let them binge.

It’s so simple, and while Netflix and a few others have learned the lesson the music industry so painfully failed to learn for so long, the television industry still fails to recognize and adapt to the dissipation of distinctions between which piece of glass is glowing with their product.

it was not in the least like losing one’s reason… I was rationalising all the time, it was simply one’s reason working hard on the wrong premises.

— novelist Evelyn Waugh, speaking retrospectively of his own psychotic episode

This is a fascinating article, discussing at times the sometimes blurred line between fiction and mania, and generally looking at how paranoid delusions keep impressively abreast of modern technology.

If you follow one link from my blog this week, make it the one above. It’s well-written and disturbingly possible-seeming.

In case you thought I was becoming a Facebook fanboy, let me just say that this celeb crap is something Zuck will be adding to his list of regrets within the year.

Granted, that’s probably a very short list, but this VIP thing is a distraction an a gimmick and it’s going nowhere.

And yes, I’m prepared to try some claim chowder if I’m wrong. I’m just pretty confident I’m not.

My headline says it all.

If you still had any doubt about the importance of mobile to anyone doing anything on the Internet, this stat should disabuse you of that uncertainty.

Amazing.

Eliot Higgins’ work is a prime example of how the Internet and user generated content are changing journalism on a molecular level.

What a fascinating read.

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

Great idea but, more to the point, brilliant marketing.