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Sekrit: a tutorial on encryption

By on October 12, 2012 in Lounge, Tutorial

Letter - Top Secret

In order to pull the birthers’ chain and to contribute to a sense of community, Obots use the word “sekrit” instead of “secret.” I was reminded of secrecy when I read the article over at the Oh, For Goodness Sakes! blog that mentioned a birther project called “White Rose.” Like something in a chain email, it’s probably fantasy rather than real. The birthers had a lot of fun passing the story around, though. Squeeky Fromm did a hilarious look at the thing on the Birther Think Tank blog.

The part that I want to focus on is this:

Working over the last several months, using information already gleaned by other investigators and communicating via encrypted email and private social networks, the group has pieced together a web of conspirators including members of the legal profession, the IT community, journalists, web bloggers, Obama operatives and government officials.

I’ve never bothered much with encryption except for the KeePass program I have on my flash drive where I store passwords. Encryption seems more trouble than it’s worth for most things. When I was working, I transported protected health information (including medical records of AIDS patients) and vital records, and when doing that one must be responsible in handling other people’s information, and so of course I encrypted these files heavily.

There is strong encryption and weak encryption. Tools on the Internet will crack (read without the password) many PDF files that use PDF encryption. Some protection that office productivity programs provide when saving a file are easily cracked too. If you rely on any encryption scheme, read up on it first to see how strong it is.

I wanted to mention a few strong encryption options, should you need that type of security. I’m a Microsoft Windows user, so those are what I’m talking about, although some of these are available on other platforms. Continue Reading →

The birther contribution to American jurisprudence

By on October 10, 2012 in Birthers, Featured Articles, FOIA, Lawsuits, Orly Taitz, Philip Berg, Sanctions, Tutorial

Dealing with frivolous litigation, whether filed by a seasoned attorney or a novice pro se litigant, is a bit like wrangling cats.

Robert J. Davis

Where's the Birth Certificate? billboardWhile one doesn’t usually combine “birther” and “contribution” in the same sentence, the birther phenomenon has left its mark on the US justice system through educational examples, black letter law, and a bit of humor to spice up otherwise dull legal briefs. This article details ways in which the birthers in general, and Orly Taitz in particular, have contributed to the law.

A good example of bad behavior

I don’t know whether they teach this at the William Howard Taft online law school, but there are certain standard reference works that attorneys rely on to inform their practice and to find the citations that they need to make legal arguments. One source is the Practicing Law Institute whose mission is:

To enhance the professionalism of attorneys and other qualified persons by providing, in a cost effective manner, the highest quality and most innovative programs, publications and other services to enable them to practice law competently and ethically, and to fulfill pro bono responsibilities.

In 2010, the PLI published a paper by Koral and Price titled: “Trying the Court’s patience instead of the case: common litigation mistakes” to draw the line between “zealous advocacy” and “impermissible or injudicious tactics.” One way of brightening the line is to give examples of what constitutes “impermissible or injudicious tactics” and the birthers, in the person of Orly Taitz, provide a featured example of being on the wrong side of the line. Writing about Rhodes v. MacDonald, where Judge Clay D. Land sanctioned Taitz:

Attorney Orly Taitz provides a notorious recent example of an attorney’s conduct succeeding more at irritating the judge than at advancing the interests of her client. A member of the “birther” movement, which challenges President Obama’s citizenship on the grounds that he had failed to adequately prove that he was born in the United States, Ms. Taitz filed a motion in connection with this litigation on behalf of a Captain in the United States Army to enjoin her deployment to Iraq. District Judge Clay D. Land held that the motion was frivolous, and further found that “Plaintiff’s motion is being presented for the improper purpose of using the federal judiciary as a platform to espouse controversial political beliefs rather than as a legitimate forum for hearing legal claims.”

Taitz was sanctioned for her conduct in the case because, as Judge Land said:

[t]his pattern of conduct reveals that it will be difficult to get counsel’s attention [and so a] significant sanction is necessary to deter such conduct.

The PLI article was written in 2010, before Orly Taitz brought a federal lawsuit against Judge Land. I wonder what the article would say if it were written today!

Black letter law

The Wikipedia article on Precedent says:

gavelIn common law legal systems, a precedent or authority is a principle or rule established in a previous legal case that is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts.

Black letter law is the body of cases that attorneys and courts look to for established precedent. If you have ever read a birther legal decision that involves dismissal for lack of standing, you will almost invariably see Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife cited. Once the body of birther lawsuits built, one began to see citations on standing to decided birther cases, notably Hollander v. McCain and Berg v. Obama. More recently we see extensive citations to Ankeny v. Governor of Indiana alongside US v. Wong on the question of whether Obama is a natural born citizen and Robinson v. Bowen on ripeness of election challenges.

The precedential value of birther lawsuits now extends beyond the backwaters of birtherism; they have become mainstream precedent in several areas of the law and now appear in the standard reference resources used by attorneys.

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Spell checking

By on October 3, 2012 in Lounge, Tutorial

imageSince I’ve been running this blog, I have been puzzled by bad spelling in the comments, and I don’t mean comments from illiterate birther mouth breathers, but from professional folks. I know that they know better. I sometimes notice misspelled words in comments and correct them, but you certainly cannot rely on that happening.

So today I found that Ms. Conspiracy had misspelled a word on her Facebook page, and I asked her why the spell checker didn’t catch it.

“What spell checker?”

And thereby I learned something: Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn’t have a spell checker. I use Firefox for almost everything and of course it has a real-time spell checker so that anytime I misspell a word it’s underlined in red and a right-click menu offers suggestions that can be selected to replace the misspelled word.  Google Chrome has a spell checker too.

A little searching found add-ins for Internet Explorer that check spelling. One example is Speckie, free for personal use (I’ve not used this myself and this is not an endorsement). So, save yourself some “embarrassment” (the word Ms. Conspiracy misspelled) and consider a spell checker for your browser.

Forensic document stuff (Part 2—Typewriters)

By on March 24, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Tutorial

I’m not an expert on typewriters, but I own one and I’ve used one since at least 1967 when I took typing in high school. There are forensic document examiners that specialize in typewriters, but so far as I know, none are birthers. One birther, Paul Irey, says he was a typist, and that at one point in his career he used a typewriter for publishing. He is what birthers call “an expert.” Neither of us would ever make the cut to testify in court. But I’m a blogger, and I can write about anything.

In basic terms, a typewriter is a mechanical device that works when a type slug bearing a raised character, strikes an inked ribbon, that in turn strikes paper, leaving the imprint of a letter or symbol. A mechanism in the typewriter moves the paper after each strike to position it to receive the next letter. In the best of worlds, the typewriter would produce results like this:

Honolulu_typewriter_Sample

What we see above is perfectly-aligned simulated typewriter printing with additional grid lines to show how each letter is perfectly centered within a conceptual horizontal region (typically one tenth of an inch wide).

The print slug sits at the end of a type bar that is swung at the paper. There is some play in that mechanism, so an additional piece of hardware is used to keep the spacing uniform; it’s called a “type bar guide.” The type bar travels through a narrowing wedge defined by the guide so that it falls dead center within the tenth of an inch region, or should. One typewriter repair manual puts it this way:

The type bar guide is an important factor in alignment. If the sides of the guide are too far apart, there will be a lot of play in the bars as they enter the guide. A summary of all the bars should be made and the type bar guide closed up by means of set screw to suit the majority of the type bars.

Type bars and guides are subject to wear:

[There is] wear on the type bar due to the constant chopping action of the type bar on the type guide at the moment of the blow of the type on the platen. No matter how hard the surface of the type guide or bar may be this constant chopping will wear the guide and as a consequence destroy the alignment.

Rudolph P. Brandt – 1926

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Forensic document stuff (Part 1—Documents)

By on March 24, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Tutorial

I’ve used a typewriter since at least 1967 and computerized paint programs since the mid 1980’s. I guess in birther terms, I have 72 years experience as a forensic document examiner. But actually, I am not a lawyer, a doctor, a typewriter expert nor a computer graphics guru, but my position as a blogger entitles me to write on these topics anyway; and while I am not a forensic document examiner, I was privileged to listen to one on the Reality Check radio program and I once attended a talk given by a (reformed) professional forger. I served for two years on the Fraud Prevention Committee of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, the national vital records association. As a result of all of my experience, I know enough not to be fooled as easily as some.

One of the things I learned is that forensic document analysis is a scientific process and when properly done, uses the scientific method. The way a real forensic document examiner normally determines if a questioned document is likely to be a fake is to compare it with similar documents that are unquestioned—the more “similar” the better, and the more examples available1, the more certain the document examiner can be about the results. Two things muddy the waters when looking at Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate, the lack of real forensic document examiners, and the lack of real documents—both questioned and unquestioned.

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Milk: a study in fallacy

By on February 29, 2012 in Ballot Challenges, Mario Apuzzo, Tutorial

This is from Mario Apuzzo’s brief in the Kerchner nomination challenge in Pennsylvania:

…some person’s argument regarding the Minor definition of “natural-born citizen” is the equivalent to one arguing that the definition of milk which is:

“milk”
noun
1.
an opaque white or bluish-white liquid secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals, serving for the nourishment of their young.
2.
this liquid, as secreted by cows, goats, or certain other animals and used for food or as a source of butter, cheese, yogurt, etc.
3.
any liquid resembling this, as the liquid within a cocoanut, the juice or sap or certain plants, or various pharmaceutical preparations” [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/milk ].

does not provide the limits, parameters, basic qualities, essential qualities, the variables of what milk is because in the definition itself it is not stated that other liquids cannot be milk. Hence, even orange juice can be milk. So these persons are basically saying that because Minor did not say that any other person cannot be a “natural-born Citizen,” any other person can be. This example easily shows the fallacious nature of this argument.

Actually this excerpt exhibits the fallacy of “begging the question,” that is, assuming in advance what one is arguing. Here, Apuzzo assumes that Minor gives a definition “natural born citizen” which is what he is trying to show. He then gives an obvious dictionary-style definition that is totally unlike what we see in the Minor decision. Apuzzo goes on to say things like “when a court decision or a statute provides a definition, the elements of the definition given are not provided with an additional statement that they are each necessary and sufficient conditions …” Here again, Apuzzo begs the question by asserting that Minor provides a definition.

If you’ve ever looked at legislation, you will see a section at the top titled “Definitions” such as this example from the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996:

image

In contrast, nowhere in the Minor decision is there anything labeled a definition. The text relied on by Apuzzo from Minor says:

The Constitution does not in words say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.

This is about as un-definition-like as I could imagine, talking about some authorities saying one thing and others saying something else, about doubts, and the non-necessity of deciding certain situations. In the Minor case, it was only necessary for the court to determine the citizenship of Virginia Minor, and that’s as far as they went. They did not define “natural born citizen”.

If Minor is not providing a definition (and I have no doubt that it is not), Apuzzo trying to use it as a definition is the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The formal fallacy is symbolized:

  • P –> Q
  • not P: therefore not Q

It’s like saying:

  • The people who own 100,000 share of Microsoft the the very rich.
  • Warren Buffett does not own 100,000 shares of Microsoft; therefore he is not very rich.

Of course, normal people already understand this and Birthers probably never will.

Rules of Interpretation and Construction

By on February 28, 2012 in Ballot Challenges, Tutorial

I want to thank a commenter very early in this blog’s history for pointing me to the “No Points” video. I was reminded of one bit of it when reading Mario Apuzzo’s Brief in the Pennsylvania ballot challenge by Kerchner and Laudenslager. It goes:

Everyone in this room is dumber for having listened to it.

It was apparent that the Brief was not intended for the court – it was intended for the public. A good example of this is the section titled “Rules of Interpretation and Construction.” No judge needs to have interpretation and construction explained to him. Indeed there are no hard and fast “rules” of interpretation and construction1. There are general principles and maxims, but not rules (a lawyer told me that). Leo Donofrio, and now Mario Apuzzo have undertook to “reeducate” the public in their own unconventional methods of how laws are interpreted and constructed so as to make other parts of their unconventional arguments sound better.

No one with a legal education is going to buy any of this for a moment, and so I conclude that the Brief is not for the Court but is rather a publicity stunt in the guise of a lawsuit (as are many birther lawsuits).  After all, Kerchner is the same guy who takes out half-page advertisements in the Washington Times newspaper to sell his theories. This ballot challenge is just another marketing tool. Kerchner isn’t even eligible to file a real challenge in Pennsylvania according to Obama’s attorney.

Anyone who naively reads the Brief will be dumber for having listened to it.

However, no bait and switch with the article’s title this time. If you would like to learn about statutory interpretation, I can think of no better place to go than the Congressional Research Service’s report for use by the Congress that actually constructs those statutes. Here is the report: “Statutory Interpretation: General Principles and Recent Trends” (August 31, 2008) by Legislative Attorney Yule Kim of the American Law Division:

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