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A week or so ago I caught some news that the UN Human Rights Council has passed a new resolution banning the defamation of religion saying that defamation violates human rights. What made me take notice of this is that the story was followed shortly by another which seemed to imply that the Pope was implicate in a cover up of sexual abuse cases. These accusations against the Church and the Papacy have since been continuing news.

It strikes me that these news agencies should be mindful that defamation of religion does not only concern Islam. Any implication that the Pope was complicit in the appointment of a Pedophile Priest or participated in some covered up is now a violation of Human Rights according to this new “defamation of religion” resolution. In Catholicism, the Pope has a special position in the Faith as successor to Peter, the Prime Bishop and the Vicar of Christ (as are all Bishops). Because of this, maligning the Pope and his office clearly defames the faith of all Catholics.

If the Defamation of Religion resolution passes and stands, well.. where will freedom of speech stand again? Everyone should be concerned.

A very important decision has come out for those involved in computer forensic’s, law enforcement and computer privacy. The Ninth Circuit has ruled that search warrants for electronic files must be specific and segregation and redaction must be done by specialized personnel or a third party. Those people conducting the search are not allowed to confiscate files not specified in the warrant and the investigating authorities are not allowed to conduct the search themselves, being only privy to files relating to their case.

For example, in the past if the Government suspected someone of using your email server for illegal activities they could image the whole server and every file on that image would fall under the plain sight rule, meaning if it’s there then it’s there in plain sight. They would be allowed to look at your email, even though it is unrelated to their investigation because it is “in plain sight”. With this new ruling however they would only be allowed to confiscate and examine email that is the subject of their investigation and would be required to leave any other email untouched on the server. This protection of privacy is the object of this extraordinary opinion by Chief Judge Kozinski

The advent of fast, cheap networking has made it possible to store information at remote third-party locations, where it is intermingled with that of other users. For example, many people no longer keep their email primarily on their personal computer, and instead use a web-based email provider, which stores their messages along with billions of messages from and to millions of other people. Similar services exist for photographs, slide shows, computer code, and many other types of data. As a result, people now have personal data that are stored with that of innumerable strangers. Seizure of, for example, Google’s email servers to look for a few incriminating messages could jeopardize the privacy of millions.

You can read the full opinion in pdf format here (pdf).

As I’m sure most out there have, I’ve been reading a lot in the news about Iran’s disputed elections and the protests and it got me wondering just how different their election process is from what I’m used to. I’ve read a little bit about it and it seems that after the results of the popular vote are shuffled through their Interior Ministry they are verified by a Guardian Council and then finally approved by Ali Khamenei who has constitutional authority to overturn the vote of the people if he chooses.

Compare this process to that of the US. We have a popular vote which doesn’t really mean anything on the federal level. Most states use the popular vote to determine the members of the Electoral College and by extension how their Electoral votes will go. The Electoral College generally consists of elite members of each the Democratic and Republican parties. The vote of each states Electoral College is verified by that that states Governor and turned into the President of the Senate who then presents the results to both houses of the Congress. The person with the clear majority is declared president.

There is no Constitutional requirement that I am aware of that requires the popular vote to be used in a certain way and it is very possible to win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. This happened in the Gore / Bush elections of 2000. Gore won the popular vote by over five-hundred thousand in that election but the political elite of electoral college declared Bush the winner… Like Iran, we had riots also but you didn’t see those in the news.

Neither the United States or Iran have direct democracy. Both of our democracies depend on the will of the political elite and their consideration of the popular vote. That’s minus one for democracy in my book. democracy–

This is too interesting not to mention. The State Department under Secretary of State Clinton is hosting the first government sponsored TED Talks (Read some details on the White House Blog). Along with fora.tv TED Talks is one of my favorite outlets on the net. It is an annual conference that aims that offers some of the brightest people around a platform to share their ideas. If you haven’t heard of it you owe it to yourself to set aside a few minutes (the talks are all under twenty minutes i believe) to listen to something different and interesting. So Bravo to Madam Secretary for partnering with the great minds of the country. This kind of partnership gives much reason for optimism about our general state of affairs.

What is the US National dept again? Something like 1.3 Trillion. What happens when we hit the bottom? Where in fact is the bottom? Will the deficit stop us from making changes? Right now the deficit is right around 74.6% of the GDP. In 1980 it was only 33.3%. If you have short-term memory you might say that the deficit is getting out of control but it isn’t. In 1950 the deficit was 94.1% of the GDP. We should keep this in mind when we talk about how the administration is going to be forced to raise taxes on the middle class. They won’t need to. We can handle it and the sky isn’t going to fall.

Today i was one of many people listening intently to the speech by President Obama to both Houses of Congress. In that speech he said that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be included in the budget. I must say that I am strongly against this. I do not believe any war should be budgeted. If the Government is to go to war I believe they should go back to the World War II practice of War Bonds. Make the Government go out to the public and raise funds to fund the War and obligate them to work within the budge they raise. If the public doesn’t want to fund the war then the Government has no business being in a war.