Grab this Rake

Rake is utterly charming television series produced in Australia.  The first season aired in 2010, and the second season aired in 2012.  It has been renewed for a third season, which is good news for anyone who enjoys well-written, well-acted dramas focusing on lawyers and the legal profession.  I recently learned that there is an adaptation coming to American television (Fox) later this fall; I hardly see the point, as it is difficult to imagine how an adaptation could improve on the original.

Rake stars the excellent Richard Roxburgh, shown above, who is also one of the creators of the show, as Cleaver Greene, a brilliant barrister who engages in egregiously self-destructive behavior, e.g., frequenting bordellos, drinking to excess, gambling, using hard-core drugs.  He makes lots of bad choices and creates chaos wherever he goes; all the while, however, he successfully defend his clients, most of whom are actually guilty.  Some of his cases are drawn from the news, but all of his cases introduce us to interesting characters and provide a glimpse of politics and the legal system in Australia.  I have only two more episodes of season two to watch, and I will be eagerly awaiting season three's availability on DVD.     

More on Effects of Shutdown

The always provocative Barbara Fister has published a cogent article on the effects of the federal government's shutdown on access to such public goods as libraries, information, museums, land, parks, etc. at Inside Higher Education.  To quote Fister, 

There are few institutions that are open to all and beloved by Americans regardless of their political views.  Libraries and parks are among them.  But the very idea of sharing, of having goods in common, is contrary to a worldview that believes individual freedom trumps everything else and caring for those who cannot care for themselves is a betrayal of the natural order of things. 

Shutdown's Effects on Website Maintenance

There have been a lot of articles about the effect of the federal government shutdown on the public.  One I hadn't thought about was website maintenance.  A student in my Advanced Legal Research class brought to my attention this morning this notice posted on the website of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  The public is informed that the website will not be maintained until after the shutdown comes to an end.  The DHS website carries a similar warning, and I assume that the websites of other federal agencies do as well.  This has a material effect on my students who are creating LibGuides (online research guides) as the major work product for the course.  More importantly, it has a serious impact on the public, who rely on the websites to interact with the government.  The ICE notice states, for example, that "Transactions submitted via this website might not be processed and we will not be able to respond to inquiries until after appropriations are enacted."    

Sharing with students - a fine balance

Janis Joplin: Take another little piece of my heart (YouTube clip)

Over the years that I have been teaching, I have walked a fine line about how much of my personal life to share with students.  The times that I have shared my personal life, though, students have been so grateful, it is something to contemplate. 

Some years ago, when my hands were very painful with arthritis, I was, for a while, wearing the plastic splints that occupational therapists fashion.  I was following the doctor's (not very well-thought-out) advice to wear these ALL the time.  It was only after my physical therapist questioned the advice that I myself thought to question it.  Joints need to move to stay healthy.  Even when they are sore, they need to move and exercise in order to retain the maximum mobility and strength.  I knew that and so did my doctor -- when I asked about it.  So eventually, I just wore the splints at night to hold the joints in a neutral position when they were especially sore.  But when I was wearing the splints constantly, my students were very curious when I came to class looking like the crab woman!  So I told them why I was wearing the splints.  Afterward, several students told me about relatives in similar straits and thanked me for sharing with them.

Then, more recently, I had a student who volunteered for a project.  Completely a volunteer thing, where he was supposed to update a memorandum of law.  I didn't hear from him for quite a while, and then had an e-mail apologizing.  His brother had gotten horrifically sick on the West coast.  All his family had rushed to the brother's bedside, and were keeping vigil, including my student.  It played havoc with this student's semester. Fortunately, he worked with the dean of students, took a leave of absence, and just dropped all those courses.  He was not even sure for a while that he was returning to law school or coming back East.  Eventually, the brother recovered, almost entirely well again.  The student returned to our law school and is working on his project again.

When he popped back up on my e-mail, all apologies, I told him not to worry and that I certainly understood. Then I told him about when my daughter got bacterial meningitis in her freshman year at college.  I just dropped everything.   Projects dropped in mid-stream, e-mail conversations dropped in mid-sentence, I think.  Very unprofessional of me.  I think I must have continued to teach my class, but I am not sure at this point.  I can't imagine how.  I fell completely apart and pretty much lived at the hospital, fortunately in the same town where I live and teach.  So I told my student now, that I certainly understand how one can just drop things, and that I thought he had the right priorities.  I said that afterwards, when my daughter made a complete recovery (a miracle, and thank heavens for Beth Israel hospital and their ICU staff!), I came back to my projects & conversations and explained why I disappeared, that people were so supportive and so kind.  I also began to find out how extremely lucky we were.

My student has been so grateful to have my story back in exchange for his own. I got much more detail as I traded my own story for his.  I completely understand why he dropped away from view. And he seems like a much more sane and reasonable person than when he just "disappeared" from my view on the volunteer project.

And yet this sharing of oneself is a delicate thing and very easy to overdo.  There is a real reason for that imposed formality of the classroom.  It is an unfair thing to invite students to presume too much friendship with a teacher until they are graduates.  I want my students to feel comfortable with me, and feel they can come to me with problems.  But if there is a perception that they can expect favors because I am their friend, or that one or another student is a special friend, that will lead to all sorts of problems.  I am not their friend (yet).  I am their teacher.  Whether I like it or not, I am obliged to judge the quality of their work, to sort the relative merit of the class's output. I would be happy to be the friend of many of my students -- after they graduate. 

Image decorating this is from http://www.weddingbee.com/2011/01/10/wedding-slump/#axzz2gUIijDVh

Credit for Articles

As a lifelong hypochondriac, I often use Wikipedia to look up diseases and medical conditions.  Some of the articles are lengthy and somewhat technical and seem reliable, but most of the time, I have no idea whether the information is good or bad.  I then turn to a site with vetted content, such as WedMD or the Mayo Clinic; both of these sites are directed at laypeople, and tend to be rather superficial, at least in my experience.  Today I read about a new initiative from the University of California at San Francisco; fourth-year medical students will be able to earn academic credit at UCSF by editing Wikipedia articles, adding images, reviewing edits made by others, and adding citations where needed.  Eighty articles are targeted for improvement; these are articles that tend to be accessed often (they are on important subjects--tuberculosis, syphilis) but lack citations and have uneven content.  The project, which is part of Wikiproject Medicine, will help medical students learn how to communicate better with their patients, which would certainly be a good thing.  Today's New York Times has an article that provides more details about the initiative. 

Reading about the project made me wonder if a similar project undertaken by a law school would improve the quality of legal information on Wikipedia.  The opportunities and challenges would be similar in both fields.  One major difference would be the intended audience.  Wikiproject Medicine is aimed at a global audience as a way of disseminating reliable medical information to people who might not otherwise have access to it.  Such a project undertaken by a U.S. law school would necessarily be limited in scope.

Stewardship, and Our Responsibility to Future Generations

I just read Roy Balleste's excellent post at Circle ID blog, Privacy and the Future: Are We Good Trustees of the Internet? He speaks eloquently about the need to safeguard against the government encroachment on privacy online.  But something about the post makes me think about a conversation I had weeks ago with my 23 year old daughter.

I was talking about the revelations of the NSA and DEA tapping citizen and foreign e-mails, phone conversations, and building or accessing huge databases of both types of traffic. I was just amazed and dismayed when my daughter's reaction was, "DUH! We always assumed they were listening. What are you upset about?"

It is one thing to be cynical about your government.  (and sneer at your parents regarding technology)  It is something else entirely to cede your Fourth Amendment rights without a blink. 

Once you give up Constitutional rights, I think you probably will have to shed blood to get them back. Just like the Minuteman decorating this blog post. Frederick Douglass told us, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will."

The image is the The Minute Man, a statue by Daniel Chester French erected in 1875 in Concord, Massachusetts. The photo was originally at the National Park Service page,  http://www.nps.gov/mima/education.htm, which now is a 404 message. The image is on Wikimedia Commons.

Courthouse Dogs!

Everybody has heard about therapy dogs in libraries.  And people all know about junkyard dogs.  But I never heard about Courthouse Dogs until our student newspaper featured a little article about them.  The article begins with our Massachusetts courthouse dog, Wena, who works with Community Voices, a Chelmsford, Massachusetts organization for child protection and crime victim advocacy in the courts. 

Since 2003 courthouse dogs have provided comfort to sexually abused children while they undergo forensic interviews and testify in court. These dogs also assist treatment court participants in their recovery, visit juveniles in detention facilities, greet jurors and lift the spirits of courthouse staff who often conduct their business in an adversarial setting.

Courthouse dogs specialize in assisting individuals with physical, psychological, or emotional trauma due to criminal conduct.  These facility dogs should be graduates from assistance dog organizations that are accredited members of Assistance Dogs International to ensure that they do not create a public danger and are stable, well-behaved, and unobtrusive to the public. Courthouse facility dogs are handled by criminal justice professionals, such as a deputy prosecutor, a law enforcement officer, a victim advocate, or a forensic interviewer.

From the home page of Courthouse Dogs,  a national organization. There will be a national conference of Courthouse Dog folks in Seattle, Washington on November 8, 2013. They will be hosting guests from  Chile, where they have the only Courthouse Dog program in Latin America. 

Besides work as Courthouse Dogs, the service dogs who can be placed, do many other types of service.  I was fascinated to read about them at Canine Companions for Independence, which is one of the leading breeders and facilities for providing service and assistance dogs. They trained both the courthouse dogs featured on websites, Wena and Molly B. in Seattle. They rely on volunteers to raise puppies and help do basic etiquette training.  

They also have a page on Facebook!  :-)  The image above it the logo of the organization from their Facebook page.

Fore-edge paintings in books - hidden pleasures

The Boston Globe Ideas section has a brief article today, Secrets of the fore-edge in the Brainiac feature in print (p. K8, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2013), and the Ideas Blog online.  Kevin Hartnett reports on a lovely discovery at the University of Iowa where a student discovered four books by 19th-century Scottish science writer Robert Mudie.  Fore-edge paintings are invisible when books sit closed, or open entirely.  But when they are fanned slightly, a painting appears on the page edges.

The library at University of Iowa has posted GIF animations of the pages being fanned open here, along with more information and another photo of one of the books.  The Mudie books are about the changing seasons, and the illustrations are the four seasons.  The Globe photo appears to show spring or summer, with blossoms.  And the Iowa website shows autumn. 

The Boston Public Library has a web page dedicated to images of their outstanding collection of fore-edge paintings.   This first is a (loooong!!) series of thumbnail images of the paintings.  What is best about the BPL site is the articles about Fore-edge painting here. From the article, Fore-edge Painting - An Introduction, by Anne C. Bromer:

[In the 17th Century,] Samuel Mearne, a bookbinder to the royal family, developed the art of the “disappearing painting” on the fore-edge of a book.

“Imagine a flight of stairs, each step representing a leaf of the book. On the tread would be the painting and on the flat surface would be gold. A book painted and gilt in this way must be furled back before the picture can be seen.” (Kenneth Hobson, 1949) 

The Globe article includes a link to a special provider of "presses" to display such books. Such presses must also be used to create the paintings, holding the pages in place while the artist paints the image and it dries. This webpage shows several examples of fore-edge art, and has more links to explain fore-edge paintings, including more examples.  Be sure to link to the Boston Public Library link "What is a Fore-edge Painting?" to see some beautiful video clips of books from their collection being fanned.  One of these clips is used without attribution on the press website, but the BPL link has two more examples, and the books are just amazing.

The image decorating this blog post is a fore-edge painting from the Boston Public Library collection, an image of the White House which decorates A History of New York by Washington Irving.  What an interesting thought process that led to White House in Washington, D.C. as a decoration for this book! 

NSA and British counterpart cracking Internet codes

The Guardian, in partnership with The New York Times and ProPublica.org,reports on how the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have successfully cracked much of the code that people rely on to guard security across the Internet.   The NSA has been working for 10 years, concentrating on eliminating encryption algorithms as a possible source of security risks to the country.  In 2010, they made a breakthrough with allowed them to "exploit" vast amounts of Internet traffic which previously was inaccessible.  And now, both the NSA and the GCHQ are working in some collaboration with Yahoo, Google, Hotmail and Facebook to build "backdoors" to these systems and insert exploitable vulnerabilities into their encrypted traffic. From the Guardian article:

The agencies insist that the ability to defeat encryption is vital to their core missions of counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence gathering.

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. "Cryptography forms the basis for trust online," said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet." Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at "defeating network security and privacy".

Chillingly, the documents from the NSA refer to the regular customers of the commercial systems such as Google or Facebook as "adversaries" and seeks to make the exploitable vulnerabilities in the system invisible to such persons. The NSA lists a number of goals in the document, several of which it has achieved. For instance, it has successfully introduced major weaknesses into international standards for encryption systems. The NSA continues to "shape" the worldwide marketplace, and attempts to make commercial encryption software 'more tractable" to NSA attacks.  They continue to try to break the encryption for 4G phones. The funding for the program, more than $250 million, dwarfs Prism, which looks like a bargain at $20 million. They have not yet cracked all encryption, and have not yet subverted all of the Internet.

The other danger is that by building in backdoors, the NSA and GCHQ are opening the door to others who may gain entrance besides themselves.  From the Guardian article:

"Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to heightened risk of data compromise." This is because the insertion of backdoors in a software product, particularly those that can be used to obtain unencrypted user communications or data, significantly increases the difficulty of designing a secure product."

Read the 3 articles in depth.  They overlap a good deal, but are somewhat different from each other.

More on US government data gathering: Project Hemisphere, Spying on Brazil & Mexico

Well, just as President Obama is asking the Congress to grant him extraordinary powers to attack Syria, a couple more stories are popping up about extensive data gathering or spying by the United States. 

Brazil and Mexico are both summoning U.S. ambassadors to discuss how their sovereignty has been violated by spying. This is more fallout from the revelations of Edward Snowden about National Security Agency (NSA) activities.

And, more disturbing to U.S. citizens, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents appear to have had access for six years to a database of telephone calls that dwarfs that used by the NSA.  The New York Times reported on the Hemisphere Project, where employees of AT&T were actually embedded with the DEA and would thus be available on short notice to use the AT&T database as soon as a subpoena was received. The database was owned and housed by AT&T, and not accessed directly by the government agents, which raises interesting questions under the Fourth Amendment for Search and Seizure afficionados. 

But the DEA agents had access to far more data than the NSA agents through the Hemisphere Project. The database includes every phone call that passed through an AT&T switch for the past 26 years, not just AT&T customers.  That is a huge swath of the telephone calls made in the world, and certainly across the North American continent.  The metadata includes the city and state of the caller, and is aimed largely at trying to identify and track the cell phones that criminals buy, discard and replace to avoid tracking by law enforcement.  

The database was actually available to other agencies besides the DEA, and was also largely used by Homeland security, and to a lesser extent by the FBI and several agencies in Washington state.  A portion of the PowerPoint slide show that was released, eventually, to the New York Times (probably accidentally), discusses the importance of protecting the program from discovery.  Project Hemisphere is not classified, but is "law enforcement sensitive."

While the slides show several success stories about arrests enabled by Project Hemisphere, we should ask at what price these arrests are coming.  How much access to records, to privacy, are we willing to cede to government officials?  In an era of increasing digital collection, we should consider, as a society, where we stand on the search and seizure, Fourth Amendment rights enshrined in a different age.