Joe Szilagyi

The Blackwater Kabul Shooting Case: What Do We Know?

What a shocker… Blackwater USA, an American company founded by a Christian fundamentalist, runs mercenaries across the Middle East. A bunch of heavily armed Blackwater “staff” shoot up a bunch of innocent Iraqis one day, and eventually have the legal case against them tossed on a technicality. Along the way, Blackwater USA renames itself “Xe” to rebrand themselves. Not unlike how AIG is trying to rebrand themselves, I imagine, after AIG almost destroyed the whole of the financial realm in the Western world. Turns out that Xe/Blackwater thugs shot up more people, this time in Afghanistan.

The particulars of what happened last May 5 — including whether the contractors had been drinking and whether they were acting in self-defense — are in dispute, but everyone agrees the shooting occurred after a traffic accident in Kabul.

The charges have attracted attention for coming so soon after a federal judge dismissed a case against Blackwater contractors who allegedly killed 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. That shooting also unfolded after a traffic incident.

The contractors in the Kabul case, Christopher Drotleff, 29, and Justin Cannon, 27, were arrested last week in Corpus Christi, TX, and Virginia Beach, VA, respectively. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

How long until the Obama administration grows up and cuts off all Federal funding for this operation? It seems like their continued employment is not in the political interests of the United States, to put it mildly. If we’re spread so thin with our actual legal military that we need to hire mercenaries, perhaps that a sign that we shouldn’t be still fighting in these countries that the useless Bush administration dumped us into?

Amazing, that it’s been already one year since hatred and improper out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Mormon extremists conned California into rejecting equal civil rights via Proposition 8. The fact that civil rights, or any human rights, are something that can be voted on is a whole other filthy mess that needs to be legally challenged up to our Supreme Court level. At least in Washington state, when the hatred of Referendum 71 was presented–similar to California’s Proposition of hate–our state voters smartly and overwhelming rejected it despite more out-of-state financial carpetbagging by Christian extremists from Oregon and other areas.

The people of Maine were not so fortunate, where it was reported that some Catholic churches conducted secondary collections to help fund anti-gay voting.

Like women’s rights and interracial marriage, delegating the question of equality to the whims of the state level are fundamentally flawed and unethical. Like what happened with abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the rights of blacks to marry whites in Loving V. Virginia in 1966, I’m thinking this won’t end until someone can challenge it to the Supreme Court. You simply don’t vote on “rights”. The biases of any religion cannot be allowed to affect the lives of all your other citizens who don’t follow that religion, full stop.

It’s gotten so bad now one year later with dangerous religious extremism trying to sway American legal destiny that the Catholic Church announced it would terminate all charity work in our nation’s capital if Washington D.C. legalized gay marriage locally, in revenge.

We’re now getting closer daily to the desires of the far Right for concepts like dominionism and Christian doctrine to be our version of an American Sharia law. Both ideals are patently dangerous, wrong for a secular multi-cultural nation like ours, and frankly evil if imposed on everyone who doesn’t subscribe to those limited precepts. If it happens, our nation is pretty much doomed to become the next Iran.

There were nationwide protests a year ago this weekend, where millions of people opposed the religious hatred and civil rights violations last year in California. These were my photos from the Seattle protests:

A letter I just sent off to my state senator and representatives. If you’re in Washington state, I suggest you do likewise.

Hello,

Thank you all for your continued hard work and service.

I came across this news story, about the TVW and Dow Constantine situation. If you are unfamiliar with this, I implore you to read the below news article. This is troubling for all Washington state taxpayers.

Background: TVW is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation, not a government agency. It is governed by an independent board of directors. The majority of TVW’s operating cash – approximately $2.5 million per year – comes from the Legislature via a contract-for-service through the Secretary of State. TVW receives more than $11 million per year in the form of in-kind contributions of channel space from Washington’s cable television industry.

The story about TVW and Down Constantine is here: http://publicola.net/?p=17512

Politics aside, I am troubled by the fact that materials produced by money levied from taxes paid for by Washington citizens are being held in some form of “copyright” claim by a private entity like TVW, or anyone else. Many US state governments (and many foreign governments) are moving toward any materials produced by the government being “free”, in the public domain or under what is known as a Creative Commons license, which is increasingly popular year over year.

For example, this is a list of state-level US agencies and some Federal that issue content under Creative Commons:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Government_use_of_CC_licenses#United_States

Virginia’s stance is particularly strong:

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?091+ful+CHAP0791

Washington is a leading state in the fields of technology. We have many prominent tech corporations, innumerable technology start-ups, and are known nationally on this stage. The ideals of ‘open sourcing’ and free licensing are a core component of the ethos of many of these corporations. Our state government should at the least be in compliance with what is becoming nationally standard.

What I would like to request is consideration for a bill like the above Virginia one, but with stronger language, that any goods “produced” with tax funding in a fixed form: written text, visual recordings, maps, videos, audio, anything official to come out of Olympia or local government, state and local laws, a random video the City of Spokane may make, etc. be required to be produced and released under a license such as the Creative Commons licensing that simply requires “Attribution”.

This link details the specifics of the licensing I think would be best:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

Washington state would still ultimately retain ownership of all the content in this scenario, but by law it should be mandatory that any government-funded (in any way) materials should be freely available, with no copyright restriction beyond attribution. I have zero problem with an entity like TVW turning an ultimate profit from what they’re doing, that originated with state dollars. Anyone is welcome to do that–good for TVW for coming up with a successful model. But they, nor anyone else, should have exclusive claim over content *I* paid for.

What I’m upset about is that any organization then leveraging copyright claims to squash what is protected “fair use” of their materials that were paid for by my tax dollars. In the wake of the Constantine fiasco posted about on Publicola, they are now going after a political blogger for reposting the now notorious video on another “video sharing” service, as detailed at this link: http://horsesass.org/?p=21640

Please help Washington state be a leader in the realm of intellectual property law, and allow us to do better than other states, such as Virginia. Please initiate legislation based on the Virginia example above, but with stronger language than the “preference” tone they set. Make it mandatory, to allow Washington state tax payers to always have free access to what we have already paid for with our taxes.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Joseph Szilagyi

If you’re not from Seattle or Washington State, this may bore you and/or go over your head.

This isn’t surprising, but I hope they litigate the hell out of it. From the article:

Public records from the state Department of Transportation (WSDOT) contain a number of disturbing revelations about the process that led WSDOT to move forward with the deep-bore tunnel on the downtown waterfront early this year.

Emails, internal memos, and other agency documents reveal that WSDOT appointed longtime advocates for the deep-bore tunnel as “experts” on tunnel costs; redistributed tunnel costs to make the price appear lower; and failed to study the surface/transit/I-5 alternative, subbing in a faux four-lane “surface” alternative that included none of the transit and surface-street improvements in the surface/transit/I-5 proposal.

I went on a tour of the Alaskan Way Viaduct that the deep-bore tunnel is slated to replace back in March. I’m wondering now how much of what seemed like a well balanced, reasonable series of explanations and science presented there were in hindsight political spin and out-and-out nonsense. I’ve got photos here, if you’re curious what the viaduct tour is. For people not from here, it’s our waterfront elevated freeway that needs to be desperately replaced, and that has been at the center of endless legal battles on both the state and local level. It’s especially bad if they played dirty politics here, since this deal to build the tunnel had the City of Seattle on the hook for any and all cost overruns. Not the state.

Read the rest: http://publicola.net/?p=16697

I mailed my state representatives in Olympia late night on Monday, October 19th 2009, for the 36th WA state congressional district. It was based on this submission I did concurrently to Slashdot, which was published by Slashdot early in the morning on Tuesday the 20th: Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law

I wrote to them:

Hello,

I am copying all my 36th reps on this. Please introduce something like this. The I-1033 & R-71 obfuscation is a cancer on WA state. Proposed wording:

###

All Initiatives and Referendums in Washington State are public activities for registered voters, and for purposes of open government, transparency, and so that voters can check all such activities to ensure they are not falsely misrepresented, shall be public record.

The State of Washington shall publish the full names, date of voter registration, town or municipality of the registered voter in Washington State, and the date and location in which they signed the initiative or referendum petition, in a public manner on the Internet for all Washington State residents to review.

The data must be accessible to the public on the Internet with no registration required, in both a searchable (“free, online”) web-based format in addition to normal “offline” formats.

All state generated referendum data will be considered a matter of public record for the good of the community and transparency. Actual public elections and votes will remain private, as subject to other laws.

###

Please get this proposed in Olympia as law. Get it passed, and then if the anti-democracy types want to challenge this in court, let them make a stand.

Thank you.

That went to Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Representative Reuven Carlyle, and Representative Mary Lou Dickerson.

Via Digg, from the It’s The End Of Your Civil Rights As We Know Them Department, also known as Please Read The Manual, Also Known As the Constitution, You Neocon Psychopaths. “Benjamin Franklin long ago warned against rhetoric that demands trading individual rights for corporate security. Asking Americans to greenlight extensive, unchecked electronic surveillance by changing their very definition of privacy is a prime example of such rhetoric.”

read more | digg story

Nice: US authorities, The MPAA and other antipirates are desperately trying to come up with new arguments to cease The Pirate Bay’s activities, but the popular BitTorrent tracker is not planning to back down. Pirate Bay admin Brokep notes: “The US government is losing popularity every day in Europe, and people don’t want to see us give in…”

read more | digg story

Want to read Wikipedia form 990? Backup third party archive here.

Comcast’s filtering/throttling of torrent traffic involves forging TCP reset packets, pretending to be from one end of the torrent session. This is the same technique used by the Great Firewall of China, and a pretty clear violation of various states’ criminal impersonation statues. Could Comcast face legal action?

read more | digg story

Almost half of the world’s countries can be considered democracies, but only 28 qualify as “full democracies”

read more | digg story

Go read this. A man in Ohio was arrested for not showing his driver’s license, after refusing to let a Circuit City employee search his bag.

It’s not proper legal advice, of course, but it’s a fine starting point before a legal war ensues.

read more | digg story

What a stupid idea: “With warrentless wiretapping sweeping the US, a leading congressman is proposing similar measures for the Internet. This isn’t an attempt at ‘fighting terror’ but instead a new measure to reduce so-called ‘piracy’ by making the ISPs the police force.”

read more | digg story

Oops: “Check out the source code to the Facebook index page. This is the only page they have up right now. For more commentary check out techcrunch.com.”

read more | digg story

“Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here is what matters most: [T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.”

This is really it, then? I wonder who’ll finance and drive the next assault on OSS et al, now that SCO is about to fade, er, burn away…

read more | digg story

P2P ’scam sites’ masquerade as genuine file-sharing sites but con inexperienced file-sharers into paying ’subscriptions’ for free software, such as BitTorrent clients and bombard them with ads and popups. uTorrent has had enough of one such site making profit from their work and is stepping up to the mark to hold them accountable.

read more | digg story

Oops.

read more | digg story

An security expert hired by 11 Oklahoma State University students picks apart the testimony of the RIAA’s own expert witness, pointing out the oversimplifications made by the RIAA in its lawsuits against suspected file-sharers. Read the PDF document, it’s awesome. This guy is basically a trusted expert by the FBI, the Secret Service, and he has various National Security Agency certifications, so he likely does undisclosed for them. Toss in little things like a CISSP and being keynote speaker at security conferences…? He outright pwnz the RIAA’s “technical” nonsense on file sharing in this legal document, and it’s awesome.

read more | digg story

Google has been filtering its search results for years, very useful for the Chinese government, and of course content owner representatives like the MPAA and RIAA. According to Google, the filtering of torrents from the search results is a response to the DMCA complaints they receive.

read more | digg story

This story is completely ridiculous, and I can’t believe the wider media hasn’t picked up on it. Well, I can believe it, given the subject matter, and they’re just lowly prisoners, but good lord. They still have civil liberties in prison, and to expect people to be the masters of their domain or face additional persecution? Outrageous, and more here.