Kind of going crazy not having access to a real Internet signal at home. It’s been days since I’ve been able to properly respond to email, let alone read and work.
I’ve been significantly reduced to catching some of my news from TTC screens in the subways. Such an utterly primitive way to learn!
This is why I’ve been away from the public Interwebz for the past bit. Friday, Friday, Friday!
It’s important to not resist the NSA when it wants something, especially if you depend on them for key contracts. From the Washington Post:
Nacchio was convicted of selling of Qwest stock in early 2001, not long before the company hit financial troubles. However, he claimed in court documents that he was optimistic about the firm’s ability to win classified government contracts — something they’d succeeded at in the past. And according to his timeline, in February 2001 — some six months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — he was approached by the NSA and asked to spy on customers during a meeting he thought was about a different contract. He reportedly refused because his lawyers believed such an action would be illegal and the NSA wouldn’t go through the FISA Court. And then, he says, unrelated government contracts started to disappear.
His narrative matches with the warrantless surveillance program reported by USA Today in 2006 which noted Qwest as the lone holdout from the program, hounded by the agency with hints that their refusal “might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.” But Nacchio was prevented from bringing up any of this defense during his jury trial — the evidence needed to support it was deemed classified and the judge in his case refused his requests to use it. And he still believes his prosecution was retaliatory for refusing the NSA requests for bulk access to customers’ phone records. Some other observers share that opinion, and it seems consistent with evidence that has been made public, including some of the redacted court filings unsealed after his conviction.
Not only was Nacchio charged, but he was unable to mount a full defence in a public court on the basis that part of that defence depended on revealing classified information. That information, itself, concerned the CEO’s unwillingness to engage in what his counsel advised were illegal activities.
You don’t need secret courts to undermine the course of justice, or secret investigations. All you really need to do is establish that some evidence is too secret to be used in your defence. In effect, by precluding a full-throated defence of the accused the very legitimacy of the open court system is undermined.
Like Bellatrix in the gif above, simmering inside me is barely concealed agitation as I watch the days go by without really hearing from my committee. It has been almost a month since I turned in my second draft and the only comments I’ve received have been, “so far, so good, definitely…
I read this and give thanks to my committee which is generally excellent at turning around chunks of my dissertation (usually in 100-200 page blocks) within a week or two (and often within 48-72 hours).
Source: PhDerp: What it feels like to wait (again) for feedback on your dissertation
Zombie Kerry and his horde of zombies are displeased that you don’t support bombing Syria.
Well, just sent in a completed version of the dissertation to my committee. Ended up being just a hair over 90K words (286 pages). I should (ideally) get comments back in the next week or so, implement them, and then submit the dissertation to grad studies by end of the month/early September for an October defence!
All four of Obama’s proposed reforms are useful. The second is adding an adversary to proceedings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which has the power to approve secret warrants. Another is to assemble a committee that would issue a report about the balance between liberty and security. And then there’s a call to increase transparency. Some of this area’s elements are cosmetic—a new Web site for the N.S.A., for example, for which one hopes there is a better graphic designer than whoever puts together the agency’s classified PowerPoint presentations—and others are important but fragmentary. Obama said he’d make public the “legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215.” That is good, but legal rationales, for this and all other collection activities, are not things that should ever be fully classified in the first place. How an agency proceeds in a given case is one thing, but what it and we understand our rights to be should never be secret.
Source: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-dirty-dishes-obama-press-conference.html
You’ll forgive me if thinking that releasing details of how laws are secretly interpreted constitutes ‘transparency’ to any reasonable degree. Though I’m well aware that a vast portion of American jurisprudence is effectively withheld from the public (you have to pay for access to PACER to see how legislation has actually been interpreted by courts, thus excluding individuals from understanding their laws and court processes) it is inexcusable that POTUS thinks that making their rationales public is sufficient. What is legal is not necessarily right nor constitutional, and dragnet surveillance of the world’s communications is an inexcusable affront to basic human freedoms and liberties in today’s digital era.
More than a little startled that it really, seriously, looks like the dissertation might be defended, revised, and submitted in the next 60-90 days!
I often end the work week with the feeling that, although I’ve got a lot done, I’d need another whole week just to catch up. And thatâs before I deal with the stuff that Iâll be facing the following week! It’s easily solved, right? Work late, work the weekend, and just pull more hours. Wrong. Youâre probably setting yourself up for a bunch of problems down the line if you tackle it this way.
As I read this, I saw myself described in paragraph after paragraph. I hadn’t realized how damaging my work behaviour was getting until a month or so ago, when every day was laced with stress resulting from ‘no down time, and too much to do.’ Life was seriously out-of-kilter.
Fortunately I got some relief. A major burden was relieved, slightly, and I’ve been able to breath. I also saw the result of my ‘work ethic’ after it was maintained for months and years on end: I didn’t like what I saw, and worried about the long-term effects.
As part of my recently ‘normalized’ work schedule, I’m actively trying to leave work at work and not bring too much home. The result has been that I’ve been a more productive writer in the past month than I had been in the preceding three months. Sure, I was pounding out ‘rote writing’ at a impressive rate, but the insightful or interesting stuff needed when writing the conclusion for my dissertation just wasn’t coming to the surface. Fortunately, it’s coming at a rapid rate these days and I also get to (try and) enjoy myself for a few hours each night with non-work related things!
Source: Don’t Be a (Work) Hero
Excited Pixels