From cell phones to torture to Angry Birds! I might actually start doing this occasionally as things happen in my areas of interest, but perhaps do not merit entire posts themselves.
Apparently the contents of a cell phone are now subject to warrantless search in California. While this annoying, other courts (the Ohio Supreme Court and a federal district court in California, at least) have ruled the other way previously. The area of law is very much up in the air. GPS tracking requires a warrant, according to the DC Circuit, and that seems a little less invasive. However, border agents don't even need a warrant to seize/search your laptop (though as we all know, that's part of the Constitution-Free zone). As a normative question, the right answer seems too obvious for words. We now carry computers in our pockets--computers which include our calendars, our chat/text logs, our contacts,, our email, our dropbox documents, our facebook pages, our bank records--much of which we remain logged into while the phones are not being used. Ever since courts extended 4th Amendment protections to wiretapping in the 70's, the law has recognized that the worries about warrants and searches are not textual, but functional - they're a question of what privacy means in our lives, and how we expect to use it. While there is disagreement over what privacy we're entitled to on the web, there really shouldn't be disagreement about that part of our personal lives we keep to ourselves, which includes our personal computers.
I find this piece about journalistic transparency in London interesting.
"If a Guardian journalist were to interview me, I would definitely assume that they would be trying to penetrate into areas of weakness in what the government is doing ... or particular policies that they are very worried about," says Nick Boles, a Conservative member of Parliament from England's East Midlands region. "Whereas with The Telegraph, they'd probably be more likely to be ... looking for ways in which the government was betraying the Conservative cause."Indeed, indeed. This is the inexorable trend of journalism, and more importantly the right trend. Objectivity is a house of cards that has been successfully brought down by the right's constant screaming of "liberal bias." Transparency, on the other hand allows a publication to respond: "Here is my writing. Judge for yourself."
Boles says he's not crazy about the way either publication treats him, but at least he knows what he's getting.
"In Britain, we feel that it's better to know where people are coming from and then to make up your own mind about what you think, because the truth is nobody can be completely impartial and objective," Boles says. "I mean the idea [that] The New York Times doesn't have a political point of view — it's ridiculous. It does, but it twists itself into knots in an attempt to pretend that it doesn't."

It's good to occasionally try and remind ourselves that we're supposed to abhor torture, because the US government certainly seems to forget that a lot. We also should remember that we aren't supposed to (have our allies) detain and torture anyone, let alone our own citizens. Hell, isn't just blocking reentry into of a citizen into his own country without due process already a violation of international law? Greenwald:
For the government to put an American citizen on the no-fly list while he's traveling outside the U.S. is tantamount to barring him from entering his own country -- a draconian punishment, involuntary exile, meted out without any due process. In June, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of several citizens and legal residents who -- like Gulet Mohammed -- have been literally stranded abroad and barred from returning with no hearing, simply by being placed secretly on the no-fly list.Not like we care if we break international law, I guess. It also seems that we care much more if a guy is Muslim than if he's a US citizen these days.
Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the Earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words civis Romanus -- I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens. Where was Morris's protection, or anybody else on that airplane? Where was the retribution for the families, and where is the warning to the rest of the world that Americans shall walk this Earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of mankind comes crashing down on your house?! In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?! --President Jed Bartlet, The West Wing, Season 1, Episode 3: A Proportional ResponseBartlet was complaining that another country hurt a US citizen and we could not adequately seek retribution. That was a decade ago. Now we harm our own. It's sick and sad.

I only recently downloaded Angry Birds. Given its crack-like properties, I was only moderately surprised to read this, though the numbers are still staggering.
Some math: 200 million minutes a day / 60 minutes per hour * 365 days per year = 1.2 billion hours a year spent playing Angry Birds.
Or, if Shirky’s estimate is in the right ballpark, about [the entirety of] Wikipedia’s worth of time every month.
I wanted to flag this Bruce Schneier post, "Security in 2020," because I found it fascinating. Much of the post is pretty technical, but Schneier is the guy you'd want to turn to for these sorts of predictions, so it's worth trying to work through. I intend to write a longer piece when I get have had enough time to think about the legal ramifications of his technological security predictions. We need to think about these things far enough in advance to write law that's flexible enough to deal with new technology, so that will be a later post.