You Don't Own Your Tweets?

This may prove an important case: Staten Island Judge Sciarrino Jr. has just ruled that an Occupy Wall Street protester can’t complain that the police searched his tweets, not only because they’re public (fair enough) but also because he doesn’t own them. It'll be interesting to see what if anything Twitter says about this ruling. Twitter has previously warned folks when the authorities were reviewing their tweets.

The fact(?) that you don’t own your tweets though, if true, would seem to have potential ramifications for anyone wanting to repurpose their tweets or monetize them. By the judge's logic, do all photographers who upload their photos to Flickr lose ownership of them? After all, this is his flippant regard for the idea that anyone's data has a "home"on the Internet:

As a user, we may think that storage space to be like a “virtual home,” and with that strong privacy protection similar to our physical homes. However, that “home” is a block of ones and zeroes stored somewhere on someone’s computer. As a consequence, some of our most private information is sent to third parties and held far away on remote network servers.

Now, Twitter may not care what you do with your own tweets. Still, this doesn’t seem like a helpful precedent. Does it mean that anyone could publish a collection of someone else's tweets, for example? That might be good news for some people, I suppose.

Also, an interesting side note: Judge Sciarrino was disciplined in 2009 for attempting to friend on Facebook lawyers who were scheduled to appear before him.

Maintaining a Healthy Constitution

Seems Obama has offended the religious right with his irksome preference for Constitutional law:

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" Obama asks in [a 2006] speech. "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination. Or we could go with Deuteronomy which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount."

"So before we get carried away, let's read our Bible now," Obama also said to cheers. "Folks haven't been reading their Bible."

How refreshing to hear an American politician state the obvious. That it's the Constitution and not anyone's holy book that establishes rule of law in this country. Of course, Obama gave that speech two years ago, so I wonder if he'd speak quite so frankly now.

James Dobson, naturally, is incensed.

Jury Blogging

I served on jury duty this week for three days, the first simply sitting in the jury pool, reading, checking email, jockeying for power outlets; the second and third actually participating in the jury selection process for an alleged criminal arms possession case. The latter part was pretty fascinating, but since you can't exactly live blog such a procedure, what follows is a selection of highlights from all three days.

Day One

• Guy sitting next me is trying to access wireless Internet when his Mac laptop crashes and he screams like a little girl. His way of getting out of jury duty?
• General activity first two days: watching 60+ year old men (potential jurors) flirting with girls a few years my junior, taking them to lunch, and so on.
  

Day Two

• Guy sitting near me has 20+ minute animated conversation about politics and basketball with himself. His way of getting out of jury duty?
• The court officer who escorts us to the courtroom looks exactly like Chris Elliott with long hair in the back. No, I mean, exactly. Of course, this means I cannot stop looking at him.
  
• In jury selection now and one woman confesses that just looking at the defendant, she believes he (a young Hispanic gentleman) must be guilty. She admits she would vote with her "gut" and could not make a judgment simply upon the evidence or the lack thereof. Her way of getting out of jury duty?
• One guy in the front row is playing with his belt, opening it, closing it, bending his head way down to examine it, much to the alarm of the court officers. His way of getting out of jury duty?

Day Three

• Sixty-something year old man confesses he believes in profiling and might not be able to separate this belief - and what he knows about statistically valid stereotypes - from the need to judge someone fairly. He is congratulated by the defending attorney for his honesty.
  
• Others similarly express support for the Police and their tendency to give men in uniform the benefit of the doubt where their veracity is concerned over other human folks. (Near as I can tell, all of these people were dismissed as jurors without exclusion.)
• Many - upwards of half even - of the potential jurors were not born in the United States. Several could not speak English. One had lived here since 1964 and couldn't speak English. 5 years longer than I've been alive.
  
• A white woman sitting near me tutted quite audibly at these non-English speakers. Afterwards, she approached the sixty-something gent above (the profiling fan) and told him she would've said the same thing. Nice to see people so self-congratulatory in their bigotry.
  

Overall, it was a fascinating process and I was glad to serve. If not for a mountain of work awaiting me at my desk, I'd love to have been selected and to have heard the entire case. I barely missed the questioning process though, as I came back for a third days, as they were down one juror after two round of questioning on my day two. Interestingly enough, most people get dismissed for one reason or another. Of course, when some folks say something, it's pretty fascinating to watch the attorneys begin scribbling away in earnest, and you just know that person isn't going to make the cut. I have to say that people I saw who did seemed to be the most impartial - insofar as you can tell, given so little questioning and follow up.

Almost makes me wish I'd studied law.

Wire Writers Against the War on Drugs

Five writers from HBO's The Wire, including Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, make a bold and impressive statement against the War on Drugs in the past week's issue of Time:

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

In the last couple of decades, we've seen more and more addicts shipped off to jail where they can be forgotten about and more and more people turned out of psychiatric facilities and on to the street. When can we look forward to the "kinder, gentler America" George H. W. Bush once spoke of?