Unenforceable ban on atheists holding public office still on the books in 8 states

This is an old story but after reading an article about a study [PDF] suggesting there are many atheists who don’t want to admit they’re atheists, I remembered reading about how a country which prides itself as a world leader in personal freedom still has laws banning atheists from public service.

My memory was correct, and that country is the United States. Oyez, which publishes Supreme Court resources including audio of oral arguments, has a great page on the 1960 case which declared such laws unconstitutional (as if anyone should have needed the Supreme Court to tell them that…).

In Torcaso v. Watkins, the Court held unanimously that, quoting Oyez:

such a requirement places the state of Maryland firmly on the side of those people who believe in God and are willing to state their belief. With this requirement, Maryland effectively aids religions that profess a belief in God at the expense of any other form of belief or disbelief. The First Amendment expressly prohibits a state from taking this position. Although the candidate has the option of not pursuing public office rather than declaring a belief in God, the test is an unconstitutional encroachment on the freedom of religion.

So these laws aren’t enforceable, but the fact that they’re still on the books is an affront to the Constitution and should embarrass any lawmaker who claims to respect that Constitution.

Mentally incompetent Utah man dies in hospital after jail episode left him paralyzed

Is this the kind of country where we let mental illness go untreated to the point where someone in jail for fighting with a couple of cops is effectively allowed to commit suicide, while on suicide watch?

Jail video shows a naked Hall with disheveled long hair and beard running headfirst into a wall three times before climbing up on the sink and falling headfirst to the floor. At the time, Hall had been waiting five months for a bed and treatment at the Utah State Hospital. Utah designates 100 beds at the hospital for inmate mental health treatment, but once the beds are occupied, additional defendants await openings from jail cells.

And this:

The Utah LegislatureThe Utah Legislature recently set aside $3 million in an effort to resolve a federal lawsuit filed by the Salt Lake City-based Disability Law Center, which alleges mentally ill defendants are not provided a speedy trial and suffer in jail without treatment because the state does not provide enough hospital beds and specialists to treat them.

Why couldn’t they set aside $3 million before they were sued, to solve the problem before anyone died?

United Airlines Tumbles After Social-Media Storm Goes Global

Justin Bachman and Linly Lin reporting at Bloomberg Markets:

United Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz apologized on Monday for “having to re-accommodate these customers.” The airline is conducting a review and seeks to resolve the matter with the man who was dragged off the airplane, Munoz said in an emailed statement. In a subsequent message to employees, the CEO called the passenger “disruptive” and “belligerent.”

This debacle is still unfolding but will clearly end up in PR textbooks.

The magnificent stupidity of the “nuclear option”

It’s a trainwreck. Republicans undoubtedly stole the nomination from Merrick Garland, which makes calls by the GOP for Democrats to stop being obstructionist rich in hypocrisy.

But then again, there’s plenty of hypocrisy in Democratic criticisms of today’s use of the “nuclear option.” After all, they made a similar move in 2013, explicitly eliminating the filibuster for all nominations except the Supreme Court.

It was a stupid thing for Democrats to do in 2013 and it’s a stupid thing for Republicans to do in 2017. Why? Because these rules apply to everyone going forward, no matter which party is in power.

The lack of foresight and critical thinking the nuclear option displays when any party uses it are staggering, and illustrative of Congress’ toxic tendency to put pettiness and blind party loyalty before the best interests of their constituents.

This post originally appeared in my newsletter, Modern Law.

Senate Republicans Vote To Gut Internet Privacy

Hamza Shaban, writing for BuzzFeed:

The Senate voted Thursday to make it easier for internet service providers to share sensitive information about their customers, a first step in overturning landmark privacy rules that consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers view as crucial protections in the digital age. The vote was passed along party lines, 50-48, with all but two Republicans voting in favor of the repeal and every Democrat voting against it. Two Republican Senators did not vote.

Disgusting. This is what buying policy looks like, folks. Kate Tummarello of the Electronic Frontier Foundation also did a write-up, and included a particularly scary piece of information:

Republicans in the Senate just voted 50-48 (with two absent votes) to approve a Congressional Review Action resolution from Sen. Jeff Flake which—if it makes it through the House—would not only roll back the FCC’s rules but also prevent the FCC from writing similar rules in the future.

(emphasis added)

This may not seem like a big deal, but it very much is, especially in an age where ISPs and the data brokers to whom they sell your information are frequently hacked.

More shameful behavior from Senate Republicans whose retirement can’t possibly come soon enough.

Heinz running Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ ads

Tim Nudd at Adweek:

In a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz just greenlighted the ads—and will run them almost exactly as Draper intended, beginning today, in print and out-of-home executions in New York City.

This is awesome, not just because it’s a marriage of television and the real world, but because the ads themselves are actually brilliant.

Trans characters in the first big video games of 2017

Laura Dale, writing at Polygon:

The past month of AAA video game releases might be the most interesting I have ever experienced as a trans woman, meaning someone who was designated male at birth but is now living as female. While far from perfect in execution, I can point out three trans characters in three separate AAA video games released in the past four weeks. That’s pretty unbelievable.

I’ve been playing Zero Dawn with my wife and it’s a truly remarkable game. I wish I hadn’t missed the trans character’s introduction, but now that Dale points it out it does seem like a respectful, if imperfect, attempt to include a trans person in Aloy’s world.

Justice Dept. internal watchdog to investigate FBI’s Clinton inquiry

The inquiry by the Justice Department's inspector general, likely to keep open the wounds of the bitter 2016 presidential race, will focus on whether "policies or procedures were not followed" by the FBI and Justice Department.

Of particular focus will be the letter sent by Comey to Congress just 11 days before the Nov. 8 election that disclosed that his agents were reviewing newly discovered emails possibly pertinent to the then-closed investigation on Clinton’s handling of classified material while serving as secretary of State.

At first I was heartened by this news, but if the review is limited only to whether “policies and procedures were not followed” there will be no investigation into the Hatch Act¹ implications of Comey’s election-week disclosure.

Prenda Law “copyright trolls” Steele and Hansmeier arrested

Justice.

NBC stupidly shutting down Breaking News app, service

The decision, as it often does in the media business, came down to revenue. "Unfortunately, despite its consumer appeal, Breaking News has not been able to generate enough revenue to sustain itself," Ascheim said in the letter supplied by NBC News. "We have therefore made the hard decision to close its operations so that we can re-invest that funding into NBC News’ core digital products to help us achieve our ambitious goals for those businesses."

This is short-sighted. Web-based news isn’t generating revenue? No shit. Breaking News has been a standard-bearer of confirm-before-publishing and still manages to be ahead of every other news outlet’s attempt at a breaking news product.

I’d spend $2.99/month on this thing to keep it alive. Let’s say 1/4 of its Twitter followers would do the same. That’s $84.6 million in revenue right there.

Would that be sustainable?

Wells Fargo Killing Sham Account Suits by Using Arbitration

[Jennifer] Zeleny, a lawyer who lives outside Salt Lake City and opened a Wells Fargo account when she started a new law practice, said it would be impossible for her to agree to arbitrate her dispute over an account that she had never signed up for in the first place.

The bank’s counterargument: The arbitration clauses included in the legitimate contracts customers signed to open bank accounts also cover disputes related to the false ones set up in their names.

Arbitration is reasonable on a case-by-case basis but it’s a hard concept to defend:

1. Ideologically, when a corporation is responsible for the deliberate mass-deception of its customers
2. Contractually, when the affected customers never agreed to anything at all with regard to the accounts at issue

If Wells Fargo has any intellect in the board room or in the C-suites they’re taking this tough stance in public but working quietly on negotiating a mass settlement fund.

Of course, any intellect in the board room or the C-suites would likely prevent the type of sales environment which catalyzed this large-scale fraud and identity theft operation.

‘Dark Meat’ by Gabriel Thompson

Failing to record injuries is one strategy to create the illusion of a safe workplace. Another is to fail to refer workers to doctors for proper tests and diagnoses. Each time an injury causes an employee to miss a day of work or to receive medical treatment beyond first aid, the company is required to record it in an OSHA log book. This data is reported each year to the Department of Labor and is used to identify industries with high injury rates—whose facilities will then face increased inspections. An industry that reports low injury rates is less likely to receive scrutiny from OSHA’s overstretched investigators.

If employers can self-report why can’t employees?

The argument against employee reports would be:

Well, employees will inflate injury rates!

Let’s think about this: employers are already fraudulently minimizing the rates. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s okay for employees to do it, too. It isn’t okay for anyone to massage the numbers in their own favor. But they do, and they will, because self-interest is a helluva drug.

So my thought is that having an inflated employee-reported rate to compare with minimized employer-reported rates may help regulators find the truth, somewhere between the two numbers.

FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda

Wheeler's attempt to impose new set-top box rules that help consumers avoid paying cable box rental fees may also be doomed. Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge sent a letter to Trump today urging him to side with consumers instead of "cable and Hollywood lobbyists" on the issue.

Jesus.

Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials

Kate Conger, reporting at TechCrunch:

Dropbox disclosed in 2012 that an employee’s password was acquired and used to access a document with email addresses, but did not disclose that passwords were also acquired in the theft. Because Dropbox stores its user passwords hashed and salted, that’s technically accurate — it seems that hackers were only able to obtain hashed files of Dropbox user passwords and were unable to crack them. But it does appear that more information was taken from Dropbox than was previously let on, and it’s strange that it’s taken this long for the breach to surface.

Don’t reuse passwords folks. Find a password manager and learn to love it. There’s 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane and many others. That means there’s no excuse for you to keep using your dog’s name combined with your college graduation year or whatever terrible password you’re using for everything.

Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move From Above

Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane’s wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.

It must be the NSA or the CIA or the FBI, right? They must have a warrant, right? They must be deleting the video after a certain period of time, right?

Wrong.

It’s the Baltimore Police Department. The article and accompanying video clarify the motivation of the company providing the technology and the service to BPD. Founder Ross McNutt says he hopes technology like his will have a deterrent effect on crime in cities where its deployment is disclosed. That’s a good goal but it’s not the BPD or the company’s founder I’m worried about.

Anything on a hard drive that isn’t air gapped is vulnerable to exfiltration by hackers. That includes a massive digital video recorder covering an entire city for an indeterminate amount of time.

Scary stuff.

NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals

John C. Ensslin reports for The Record:

New pet stores in New Jersey would be allowed to sell only cats and dogs obtained from shelters, pounds and animal rescue organization under a bill the state Senate passed Thursday.

The bill still has to go to the Assembly and will face industry opposition there, but it’s a great step forward. Find more information about the bill here. You can read an embedded PDF of the Senate version below this post.

A Slack bot to alert about missing children

[caption id=“attachment_2481” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Slack screenshot of MissingKidsBot[/caption]

From the product page of MissingKidsBot, built by David Markovich and Daniel Doubrovkine:

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States -- that's roughly 2,000 per day.

This is a really great idea, and something everyone with a Slack group should consider adding. However small the chances are that you’ll ever see something that might help with one of these alerts, a child’s life will always be worth it.

Nerds can look at the code over on Github. And those of you who don’t use Slack should keep an eye out for MissingKidsBot on Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp.

Apple users targeted in first known Mac ransomware campaign

Jim Finkle reports for Reuters:

Hackers infected Macs through a tainted copy of a popular program known as Transmission, which is used to transfer data through the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, Palo Alto said on a blog posted on Sunday afternoon.

The cynical part of me wonders whether this is a clever move by one or more media companies to discourage the use of BitTorrent clients.

I know, maybe I need to order a tin-foil hat. But when even Kanye is pirating stuff it’s really time to bust out some innovative new tactics.

The perils of marriage equality

Professor Kimberly Mutcherson of Rutgers Law School writes at Concurring Opinions about Professor Katherine Franke’s recent book ‘Wedlocked: the Perils of Marriage Equality’:

We do not want to reinforce familial hierarchies by forcing people into specific family arrangements in order to warrant recognition (2 parents only), nor do we want to fetishize outsider families such that those who do not fit that model are denigrated for their choices (i.e., the adoptive parents who choose a closed adoption or the birth mother who opts for such an adoption thus perhaps not being queer enough in their choices). In thinking about the ways in which reproductive justice calls for us to respect the right to have a child, not have a child, or parent that child in a safe and healthy environment, the upshot for me is that the reproductive justice paradigm does not demand that outsider families conform to some particular form in order to help dismantle hierarchy.

I have thought about this concern since undergrad, where postcolonial literature, feminism and even semiotics courses touched on the nature of othering as an active verb, something done to a group of people. I was lucky enough to take a course in law school called Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and the Law with Professor Leonore F. Carpenter which expanded my understanding and interest in the dynamics of queer identity, family and legal frameworks.

The specific concern with which I’ve been preoccupied since then is that there is a danger in radical acceptance or the success of various equality movements. The danger I see is in achieving a nominal or “seat at the table” equality that normalizes othered groups to the frameworks of the groups that have historically done the othering.

One infuriating example of how I think about this stuff is the so-called equality of separate-but-equal, which of course was not equality at all. In the case of race, equality is not allowing non-white people to do all the stuff white people are allowed to do, but allowing non-white people to do whatever it is non-white people want to do, which is really what has always been allowed to white Americans.

I see Professors Franke and Mutcherson making a similar point about the danger of seeing marriage equality as squeezing queer couples and families into 1) heteronormative cis-gendered and/or culturally/racially segregated family models or 2) altogether new models, sometimes developed by hand-wavingly obnoxious if well-intentioned hetero-cis folks. Maybe I’m mistaken, but the overall approach as I see it being explained by these two scholars is essentially to stop putting up new roads and signs for queer families and just get the hell out of the way.

Read Mutcherson’s entire post, it’s worth it. And I’ve added “Wedlocked' to my Kindle wishlist, which is growing faster than I can keep up.

Enough with the conspiracy theories about Justice Scalia’s death

I read this earlier today:

"As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia," William O. Ritchie wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday, according to reports. After seeking to cast doubt on the conclusion of the deputy U.S. marshals who responded to a call from the ranch, he added, "My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas."

My gut tells me there is some fishing for attention going on in the head of the former D.C. police officer who said that.

Why?

Let’s consider this:

1. Why?
2. Why??
3. Why???

Was it a Liberal conspiracy to get President Obama one more lasting decision about the future of United States legal policy?

Was it a “Conservative” conspiracy to give Congressional Republicans and presidential candidates something “meaningful” to “stand up” to Obama about?

Was it Ancient Aliens?

There was no autopsy, they say! There was a pillow above his head, they say! The President was told long before anyone else, they say (as if the President doesn’t get most of the news before everyone else…)!

Conspiracy theorists demand: “What is your proof Scalia wasn’t murdered?”

These stupid theories remind me of one of the frequent arguments levied against atheists: “What is your proof that there is no god??”

Who proved god exists in the first place?

Pillows

Many articles note the ranch owner who found Scalia said there was a pillow above his head, and many conspiracy theorists point to this as suspicious. I sleep with a pillow over my head every night, and another one underneath it, using the two to drown out the sounds of an increasingly conspiratorial world so I can maintain my slumber all night long.

No conspiracy. Just a light sleeper.

Politics aside

I disagreed with much of Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court jurisprudence but his presence on the Court was invaluable to the development of United States law and the debates from which it springs.

He articulated his positions in such a way that I (almost always) respected them, even when I found it hard to believe someone so intelligent was seriously asserting them. He was rarely conclusory, giving reasons for his views, and whether you agreed with those reasons or not, that’s more than most politicians (and lawyers) usually do.

His death is a loss, but there are few more certain paths to some sort of immortality than thirty years on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Photo: Then-nominee Antonin Scalia, right, with President Ronald Reagan in 1986, via Wikipedia

Google begins rolling out free internet to public housing in Fiber cities

This is a big deal. I worked at the Philadelphia Housing Authority for years and talked to a lot of kids and adults about their desire to get online. Philly isn’t yet on Google’s Fiber expansion roadmap, but this is a great development.

Retiring founder wants $1M for his SCOTUS audio archive

Oyez is a robust archive of audio recordings and other information spanning much of the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. Its founder Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Jerry Goldman is looking for a buyer as he nears retirement. Jess Bravin reports at the Wall Street Journal:

The sticking point, however, isn’t the annual budget; Harvard Law School, for one, has offered to pick up the operating cost. But Mr. Goldman also wants to be paid for the sweat he’s put into his baby–or at least the intellectual property it represents—something he estimates is worth well over $1 million.

Here comes an entitled opinion right here: A decision to somehow “close down” Oyez if no one is willing to put up six or seven figures for it would be morally bankrupt and stain Professor Goldman’s otherwise admirable legacy.

LucasFilm to toy vendors: No Rey

Michael Boehm at Sweatpants and Coffee:

The insider, who was at those meetings, described how initial versions of many of the products presented to Lucasfilm featured Rey prominently. At first, discussions were positive, but as the meetings wore on, one or more individuals raised concerns about the presence of female characters in the Star Wars products. Eventually, the product vendors were specifically directed to exclude the Rey character from all Star Wars-related merchandise, said the insider.

I want to be infuriated and surprised by this revelation, but I’m just infuriated.

U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars

Chris Ziegler reports at The Verge:

DOT and NHTSA will develop the new tools necessary for this new era of vehicle safety and mobility, and will seek new authorities when they are necessary to ensure that fully autonomous vehicles, including those designed without a human driver in mind, are deployable in large numbers when demonstrated to provide an equivalent or higher level of safety than is now available.

This is far more progressive than I expected the federal government to be on the autonomous transportation vehicle front, primarily for safety reasons. It’s good news.

Aside: DOT or Klingons?

The featured image above is a photo of the U.S. DOT headquarters building in Washington, D.C. I first looked at the DOT logo as a potential image for this post, but it looked too much like the Klingon symbol:

[gallery type=“square” size=“medium” link=“none” columns=“2” ids=“2289,2290”]

Huh. Weird.

More than 13,000 untested rape kits in Florida

This bit sent shivers down my spine:

After Detroit processed a backlog of 11,000 rape kits, police identified more than 100 serial rape suspects.

Why shivers? Because it instantly prompts me to wonder how many women were raped who wouldn’t have been raped if these kits were more efficiently processed.