Wednesday Writs: Court Is Not Choose Your Own Adventures Book Edition
Tombstone Courthouse. Photo by Matthew A. Lynn,, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
WW1: Todd Zywicki, a professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University is suing over his employer’s vaccine mandate. But the basis of his suit is not necessarily anti-vaccine; it’s just that he has already had the virus. According to Prof. Zywicki, his doctor says his level of antibodies is as protective as the vaccine, and, Zywicki also points out, better than Chinese vaccines, which would satisfy the school’s policy.
WW2: President Biden unilaterally extended the so-called “eviction ban”, despite acknowledging his action was “not likely to pass constitutional muster.” The Supreme Court has already said the moratorium exceeded the power of the CDC and would require a legislative fix. The President has decided to proceed by edict, the exact type of thing we Trump opponents bemoaned. Maybe it’s easier to swallow when the motives are humanitarian? And at least he admits he can’t do what he just did, I guess? I got nothin’ else.
WW3: In a move that is at first blush a good thing, Apple will now flag and report images of child sexual abuse found on iCloud. But consider what that means: Apple will now be going through your iCloud files. The company says its technology uses “hashing” – a type of encryption, as best I can tell – to detect images of child sexual abuse by comparing the “hashing” of photos with that of photos in a database of images maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A human only looks at the image when there is a match. Some may see a slippery slope here; others find it a worthwhile compromise.
WW4: England’s Prince Andrew has been sued by Virginia Giuffre, who claims Queen Elizabeth’s son raped her with the help of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The lawsuit reads in part:
“In this country no person, whether President or Prince, is above the law, and no person, no matter how powerless or vulnerable, can be deprived of the law’s protection.
Twenty years ago, Prince Andrew’s wealth, power, position, and connections enabled him to abuse a frightened, vulnerable child with no one there to protect her. It is long past the time for him to be held to account.”
WW5: Meanwhile, the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program has paid $125 million to 150 claimants, out of 225 claims. Those who accepted payouts did so in exchange for dropping lawsuits; others have opted to continue with litigation. The Epstein estate was worth an estimated $600 million upon his death.
WW6: A Canadian man accused of smuggling methamphetamine into China was sentenced to 15 years. He appealed his conviction and got a new trial – at the end of which he was sentenced to be executed. His latest appeal has been rejected because according to a Chinese High Court “the facts identified in the first trial were clear, the evidence was true and sufficient, the conviction was accurate, the sentence was appropriate.”
WW7: Bayer, owner of Monsanto, continues to have its ass handed to it by one court after another as the company tries to wriggle free from “tens of thousands” of lawsuits and an $87 million verdict.
WW2 – yet another case of SCOTUS telling the Congress to act on an important issue, and Congress punting because …
Biden had little choice. Fail to extend, and set back the economic his administration is working hard to create and sustain, or extending by executive order until the day before the Court returns to session, and get pilloried by the very same Right Side Politicians and Pundits who were in support of Trump’s use of executive orders on a pace that matched Obama’s supposed Imperial Presidency.
Not good choices, but as with a lot of things in the Pandemic, Better Bad Choices.Report
On Prof Zywicki, he claimed that GMU allowed students (and faculty) to claim “prior illness” as an exemption to getting vaccines. As a former GMU student, I referenced the Health Services page, which provides no such exemption. You cannot get out of the measles vaccine requirement by having measles in the past. I knew this back in the mid 00s.Report
Where did he say that? I don’t see it in the Fox News or Reuters stories, or in the complaint. I also can’t find any relevant web pages containing Zywicki and the phrase “prior illness.”Report
WW2: It’s a “Who? Whom?” thing. Tenants are good. Landlords are bad. “Owning property is not a job.”
What are the defenses of the landlords? “Without landlords, who will refuse to give security deposits back?”Report
I think landlords have a right to be made whole in this situation. At the federal level Congress and the Biden Administration agreed (humorously not so much trump). I also think that when SCOTUS told Congress to deal legislatively with the moratorium they should have. The bill could have been about 7 lines long.
The tenants are the least guilty party here. Landlords are only slightly less guilty.Report
Defection Lowers Trust
Increases Defection
Lowers Trust
Increases Defection…
A breaking of standards when the other people do it, acts of prudence/necessity when we do it.
You can read the Emergency Rental Assistance FAQs if you want… they basically acknowledge that the hurdles we placed in front of the program to make sure only the deserving folks got the assistance are the hurdles they are working on improving so that only the deserving folks get the assistance:
“In March 2021, Treasury substantially revised ERA program rules to provide grantees with flexibility and encourage rapid assistance. On May 7, Treasury announced the launch of the second round of Emergency Rental Assistance made available under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021and made significant additional updates to program rules to allow grantees to speed assistance to eligible households. Feedback from grantees indicates that Treasury’s guidance has accelerated the pace of funds being used to support renters
— for example, numerous state and local grantees have implemented fact-specific proxies as described in
Treasury’s FAQs to speed up income verification, which is often the most time-consuming part of the
eligibility verification process.”
Which is govt speak for why UBI payments are better than ‘assistance programs’ and/or why PPP type programs to the landlords would be more efficient but would put $$ in big pockets and have worse optics. But, what’s the objective here?
Bottom line, we’re poorly governed… which leads to defection.Report
we placed in front of the program to make sure only the deserving folks got the assistance
We?
“WE” placed hurdles, so only “deserving” people get the help?
I wonder, during the sausage making process, which WE persons insisted on placing those hurdles, what their political party was, what their political ideology was.
Maybe the landlords should reflect on how it came to be that their tenants had hurdles placed in the way of being able to pay the rent and do some deep soul searching on how, as citizens of this republic, their future votes should be allocated.Report
dunno dude… Republicans typically just shovel money at the corporations… so if I had to guess?
The ‘we’ was making sure that help went to people who were housing the sort of people who needed help, not people who were housing people who could likely pay but would rather not take the hit to savings. That we.Report
Who are the majority of landlords? Big corporations, or individuals?
Back when I rented out my house, I was a landlord. If the moratorium had happened, I would have likely had no choice but to jingle mail the place if my tenants weren’t paying the rent. Better I suffer a destruction of my credit, I guess.Report
Ironically:
Report
My point exactly. The feds did what they could.Report
Sometimes doing your job is understanding how your job works with the other people doing their jobs:
“The problems stem partly from the fact that Congress has never thrown so much money at an anti-eviction program, so officials at lower levels of government have struggled to find their footing.
“In most cases they couldn’t scale up an already-existing program, or if they could scale up an existing program, that program was tiny compared to the funding available now,” said Ann Oliva, a housing policy expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “That explains some of the lag.”
HuffPost reached out to every area that hadn’t handed out any ERAP money through June. The ones who responded cited the difficulty of getting a new program off the ground, inter-governmental coordination struggles, burdensome requirements and even trouble attracting applicants. Many of them also stressed that they have been sending out other housing assistance funds, and others have managed to get their programs up and running in July and August. ”
But the money quotation comes from the newly liberated Oracle of New York City, Mayor de Blasio’s office:
““The main the reason is that the application was fucking impossible,” said Bill Neidhardt, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s spokesperson. “I think it’s strategic incompetence. That’s why they delayed it, and that’s why they rolled out a mind-bogglingly unusable interface. Both those things show they didn’t want people to get the money.””
Which is my point exactly too.Report
And for some strange reason, the idea that those states should actually DO THEIR JOB is just considered inconceivable, in the Vizzini sense.Report
NY should impeach their governor.Report
He tried to free up ownership of as many homes as he possibly could!Report
If he avoids the judgment of politicians, he could end up getting appointed to some powerful position like Lt. Governor.Report
He certainly did his part to create a lot more people guaranteed to vote for him.Report
It’s still amazing to me that Donald J God Damn Trump said “let’s just write everyone a check for two thousand dollars” and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell both immediately convened Congress and worked twenty-five hours a day to make that not happen.
Like, the biggest bipartisan consensus in all of the US Government’s response to COVID was “it would be absolutely terrible if the wrong people got some money.”Report
Who would have gotten the credit?
Not Pelosi/McConnell.Report
For WW5: is there something like a gag order on the people who received a payout? I imagine that there are a non-zero number of the 150 claimants that have stories that are in the public interest to be publicized.Report
Without confidentiality the incentive to settle is greatly diminished.Report
Dude’s dead. What public interest is there when it comes to confidentiality?Report
Public interest is of pretty limited relevance to private disputes.
But beyond that I guess you’d have to ask the estate. From the article it isn’t quite clear to me what exactly the program is. It does mention that the victims were allowed to be heard as part of the process, but isn’t specific on what that entailed.Report
It might besmirch the reputation of the Matt Gaetz Chair of the Epstein School of Modeling.Report
You’d think that more high-profile Democrats would be calling for hearings.
(Maybe they see Gaetz as better than whomever would replace Gaetz.)Report
WW7 is a much bigger deal than I think we appreciate. If the courts are really stating (and they seem to be) that the evidence is overwhelming that Monsanto was willfully hiding ‘scientific’ facts that it knew it’s product was harmful… it’s akin to the tobacco industry.
But, while Tobacco is a personal pleasure/vice… our entire (grain) farming infrastructure is built around glyphosate tolerant crops. One article I read says that Monsanto is removing Round-up from consumer access by 2023, but will still manufacture for commercial agricultural use (it *has* to) … presumably under the guidance that this is a hazardous chemical to be handled only by professionals in hazmat suits.
That’s a band-aid for now… one of the persistent ‘rumors’ for a few decades has been the medically substantiated (but legally disputed) fact that glyphosate (and other chemicals edited in to plants, a’la GMO’s) were argued not to have a pathway into human neurological systems… various intestinal/blood/brain barriers protected us from direct ingestion/exposure. Most of the ‘studies’ challenging these findings were/are funded by the industry.
As in interested bystander, I’ve followed from a distance… but google glyphosate and blood/brain barriers and it’s like the blinkers have fallen from the eyes of scientists. Which is to say, that even use by hazmat farm workers could still have downstream impact on consumers.
There’s more here than meets the eye.Report
I wonder what percentage of the seed they sell is Roundup Ready.Report
Overwhelming is the most common term.
USDA stats that combine the general concept of herbicide tolerant places it at 94% (usually in conjunction with Bt insecticide treatment too).
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/adoption-of-genetically-engineered-crops-in-the-us/recent-trends-in-ge-adoption.aspxReport
That’s a lot. My farmer father-in-law used to give my wife some Roundup for weeds in the lawn, but I would never let her use it. Crabgrass and dandelions are just as green as the rest of the stuff.Report
Yeah… its structural. Too big to fail.
Ironically, using it for crabgrass might be better than using it for soybeans/corn.
You are correct that dandelions are a gift. Bees like them, their greens are edible, and they are lovely… definitely pre-fall (in the biblical sense) creations.Report
WW3::
Hashing is a one-way encryption in this context. it’s used to store things like passwords. The way it works is you take your original information — say your password — and run it through the hash, which results in a string of random looking gibberish. Which you then save.
The important point –the CRITICAL POINT — is you cannot, even if you know the specific type of hash and the hash key, turn the gibberish back into the password. You can easily verify if the password is correct — Bob types in his password, it’s run through the hash, and if he typed in the right password the resulting gibberish is identical to the gibberish you have stored as “Bob’s password”.
What this means is even if someone steals your entire password file, they don’t get Bob’s password of “BobIsTheBestL0L”. They get “d1e8a70b5ccab1dc2f56bbf7e99f064a660c08e361a35751b9c483c88943d082” or something like that.
And because the process is one-way, they cannot derive Bob’s password or even use it to log into Bob’s account there. (If they have the hash method and key, they can do classic dictionary and cracked password attacks where they take known plain-text passwords, hash them through the hash and see if the result matches and derive the password that way, but that still requires Bob’s password of “BobIsTheBestL0L” being in the wild. Or Bob using “Password” or something similar).
So all this to say — what Apple is proposing doing is basically running image files (none of the metadata, just the actual picture) through a hash, and comparing it to know CP hashes. This way Apple does not need to have a database of child porn photos — it just needs the final hash (which is a lot fewer headaches for Apple and I’m sure law enforcement prefers it that way too).
And to compare pictures it’ll strip metadata down to the raw image file, hash it, and compare the hash. Again, no need to look at your photos, because it’s not comparing your photos to photos but a random and very long string to a random and very long string.
It will only flag as CP if you have the actual, exact same image file — every pixel must be the same.
(There’s probably some other wrinkles, like converting all file types into a single file type using a very specific version of a very specific program, so that jpgs and gifs and pngs can all be compared together).
Whether this is a good idea privacy wise is another question.
But it *is* a very specific method of comparing two pictures to see if they are the SAME picture, without anyone actually looking at either photo. And indeed, without giving anyone new access to your iCloud photos — they can send the hash out for comparison,.Report
Yeah, comparing hashes is very limited. It really is limited to exactly pixel-identical files. Even stuff like converting to JPEG or GIF will probably screw it up, as JPEG are lossy.
Now, there are _fingerprinting_ methods that are sorta hashes but not really. It’s the way Shazam and things like that works. However…you start getting mismatches using that. So, who knows?
I think the first one is a reasonable idea, although I will point out that once people start looking at hashes of files it seems very easy for them to add _non_ child porn to the database. Like, oh, hashes of pirated music.
And doing it for one set of things sorta removes the legal justification of ‘We cannot do this, we don’t have the tech and it’s privacy invading’…so we might start seeing copyright owners trying to get courts to order Apple to enforce their copyright and stuff.Report
It’s not a cryptographic hash, so it can detect approximate matches. There’s a white paper giving a high-level (but still pretty technical) overview of the system here:
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf
How would they detect pirated music, as distinct from music ripped from a CD the owner of the computer bought?Report
Yeah, that’s where I get somewhat dubious about this idea.
Also, that whitepaper says they will, inexplicably, do it on the device _before_ uploading it to iCloud, which means that literally everyone reporting on this story has that detail wrong.
How they are doing it is very confusing and weird. They make the hash before uploading the file, and then that hash is compared server side.
This seems to create all sorts of loopholes…I mean, first, are they going to backport this hashing to no-longer supported Apple devices? Second, what about rooted devices (And computers!) that can just _lie_ about the hash? Third, it doesn’t do anything about child porn _on_ iCloud already? (Along with the logical ability to send that to other.)
What a weird way to do that.
Because music compression is lossy and varied, and thus it’s entirely possible to say ‘This mp3 is identical to the mp3 that’s being shared around and is not a new creation of this user. (And nothing is _stopping_ Apple from looking at the metadata, they’re just filtering that specifically on pictures. Almost all pirated music has identifiable metadata unless someone changed it.)
And you’re about to say ‘But what if the person doing the ripping use identical CD, and identical software, and identical settings’, and I respond: No one in this process cares about false positives in the slightest. Music publishers have sent takedown notices to Youtube videos that used a public domain recording of public domain music just because the publisher’s music library had a copyrighted performance of the same music and the automated tools said it was close enough. We’re not talking about a court of law, we’re talking about automated copyright takedown bullshit.
Because, again, I don’t think Apple particularly cares about pirated music or videos, my point is that various industries have been pretty damn successful at forcing _other_ companies, like ISPs and Youtube, to enforce their copyright with automated tools, and thus Apply stepping up and saying ‘We have built a system to automatically check file contents and report matches to certain things’ is just begging the RIAA or MPAA to come in and demand Apple for this for them, too.
And, to close the loop, it is this lack of caring about false positives in matching _copyright material_ that makes me very wary of false positives in what Apple is doing here. This system of automated tools has a bad history (And by history I mean ‘literally still happening in the present’), and trying to use it for _law enforcement_ seems like a bad plan to me.Report
“It will only flag as CP if you have the actual, exact same image file — every pixel must be the same.”
See, that’s the thing — they’re not doing a crypto-hash of the image. Because “crypto-hash a file to see if it’s a copy of some other file” has actually been a thing for a long time now, and what people will do is perform minor modifications to the image – cropping, mirror-reversing, changing colors – to make the image have a different crypto-hash. So Apple’s plan is to have its program do similar modifications and then do a direct comparison of the modified image to the potential-CP image; and this set of automatically-modified images is what Apple is calling a “hash”.
So yes, Apple’s program is looking at the actual images and not a hash; and yes, it is conceivable (although really, really unlikely) that the comparison image could declare a particular image to be Something That Looks Like A Child Porn Image Modified To Hide From Searches and call the cops on you.Report
So yes, Apple’s program is looking at the actual images and not a hash; and yes, it is conceivable (although really, really unlikely) that the comparison image could declare a particular image to be Something That Looks Like A Child Porn Image Modified To Hide From Searches and call the cops on you.
The paper BB linked to also says that it takes more than one matching file to trigger anything. Also that while the “hash” is calculated on the local device, it’s only compared to the naughty database when the image is uploaded to iCloud. I’m an oldster, and properly paranoid, so automatically shy away from storing any of my content on media that I don’t physically control. Given the description in the paper, I assume that even mild encryption will defeat the comparison.Report
Yes, this is literally designed to catch only the dumbest people involved in CP.
Which, from what I understand, is a surprising amount of them.Report
Well, there’s also the people who don’t know they have CP, and thus are rather bad at _hiding_ that they have CP. They’ll get caught real good.Report
Todd Zywicki, a professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason
Do they also have a Mike Lindell School of Computer Science?Report
They recently changed the name to the Antonin Scalia Law School to avoid the inevitable “ASSOL” abbreviation.Report
The money was the only thing that got a vote. Very apt.Report
WW7 makes me appreciate WW6.Report
WW2: One of the main differences btw/ how DOJ will tend to look at the issue and how a tenured law professor might, is that DOJ is going to contemplate having the task of actually managing the wave of lawsuits from landlords that this engendered.Report
Unrelated: It seems like my home IP address has been banned. As far as I know I haven’t been banned, and can’t recall having said anything even mildly ban-worthy recently; maybe I got caught up in a war on spammers or that anti-vaxxer whose comments keep disappearing.
I’m not even getting the moderation notice. I just click the post button and then my browser jumps up to the top of the page and there’s nothing where my comment should be. It’s been happening consistently for at least a day, but my comments on mobile data all go through.Report
I don’t see anything in spam and I don’t see anything in trash.Report
Do you have any kind of IP-based restrictions in place?Report
I’ll ask the grown-ups.Report
They were in Spam. I’ve released them. Sorry for the inconvenience.
We have a couple systems in place. One is that we have a list of IP’s on a gray and black list. I have verified that the your home IP is not on it.
That means our standard filter has the IP blocked for some reason. I don’t know why it would. Maddeningly, they don’t have any “whitelist” for IP addresses. There was one switch I could flip. Brandon, try leaving a comment from home and let me know how it goes.
Sorry again for the inconvenience.Report
Thanks! This is a test comment from my wired Internet connection. If you see this and get a chance, could you delete the duplicate comments I have in response to Motoconomist’s comment upthread? I like the middle one best.
I haven’t paid anything since a fundraising drive several years ago, so I can’t complain about the occasional bug.
Out of curiosity, what was the switch you flipped?Report
The IP address to your account used here is not on any of our blocked or restricted lists.Report
The Supreme Court allowed Indiana University on Thursday to require students to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/us/supreme-court-indiana-university-covid-vaccine-mandate.html
Court of Appeals decision stands: “Each university may decide what is necessary to keep other students safe in a congregate setting,” Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote for the appeals court. “Health exams and vaccinations against other diseases (measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, varicella, meningitis, influenza and more) are common requirements of higher education. Vaccination protects not only the vaccinated persons but also those who come in contact with them, and at a university close contact is inevitable.”
Judge Easterbrook, who was appointed to the appeals court by President Ronald Reagan, relied on a 1905 Supreme Court decision, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which ruled that states may require all members of the public to be vaccinated against smallpox or pay a fine.Report