“No-fly” trial: Closing arguments | Hacker News Reader

“No-fly” trial: Closing arguments

papersplease.org

127 pointsrevelation42 comments

Judge Alsup is incredible! You may remember he's the judge that learned to code during the Oracle v. Google trial

> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57445082-94/judge-william-a...

Whoa I didn't catch on to this. Thanks! He truly is incredible.

I think credible is more accurate.

I seem to remember that he didn't exactly start from zero, but had some idea prior to that and simply learned more about Java. Just sayin', because I think it makes it even better.

He has a B.S. in mathematics too. I imagine that was useful as well.

I thought his ruling was extremely well thought out in that case, and yet a Federal Court, which is apparently very patent friendly, has accepted the case on appeal. So I can't wait to see what ridiculous spin they will try to put on Alsup's ruling, if they do indeed side with Oracle. I'm not too worried if they do, because I think the Supreme Court will have more common sense and side with Alsup's ruling.

The main focus of the Oracle case was copyright, not patents.

Judge Alsup's middle name is Haskell.

"I apologize again to the press and the members of the public for having to ask you to leave…. I don’t believe that the SSI [Sensitive Security Information] is really that sensitive, and I believe that it’s a mistaken public policy to exclude you, but for the time being I have no choice."

Judge Alsup for president!

Is there other situations where a judge judgment is not taken into account in his tribunal?

I know nothing of usa law..

The judge is bound by law and procedure during a court case - they can't just say "make this so" and it is so.

Judge Alsup will have authority to rule on the outcome of this case, and his judgment will stand (pending appeal), but he doesn't have the ability to say "The SSI rule is dumb, we're going to ignore it."

yes, but he is the ultimate interpretation of the law. if the law states "secret of states must be out of records" the judge is the one who decides if something is a secret of state or not, right? or can i just say that this chocolate cake recipe should be treated as so and everyone have to comply?

Only when that bit of the law is up for judicial review. This case isn't about what does and doesn't constitute SSI, and while the judge may have decided what to admit or not admit as SSI, he would have done so according to the existing rules, and would be bound by those rules to protect that information under the rules that govern the presentation of SSI in court.

Wow, a new attack vector for terrorists. Wreak havoc by setting up terror groups using names that are confusingly similar to important organizations. This way, they could deny a lot of scientists and researchers to travel to the USA and therefore these people would have to develop their innovations in foreign countries that still have common sense like Malaysia and Japan and China and Russia.

So what you are saying is that all it takes to be a terrorist is to choose the right kind of name for your chess club..

> therefore these people would have to develop their innovations in foreign countries that still have common sense like Malaysia and Japan and China and Russia

I don't understand why a terrorist group would want this as a goal.

Also, whether those countries have "common sense" or not is widely disputed. (For what it's worth, I'm a Russian living in America; it would take a severe change in circumstances to convince me that living in Russia is a better bargain than living in America.)

"Central European Retaliation Militia" Opps, everyone at CERN is on a "no fly" list now...

I haven't been following the news on this particular story (shame on me). Is there something that can put this story into context for me? It was fascinating to read but hard to understand without knowing the story.

A foreign Stanford student was denied boarding, presumably due to the no fly list. Conjecture is that the root cause is confusion between a terrorist organization "Jemaah Islamiyah Malaysia" and a professional organization "Jamaah Islah Malaysia".

Inability to fly to return to Stanford/Silicon Valley has obviously caused a lot of complications and trouble for her, which can be interpreted as monetary damages, and she has filed suit for compensation, and also to be removed from the no fly list.

A few days ago, the government appears to have prevented her daughter (a U.S. citizen) from flying to America to testify about it. The government claimed in court that they did not prevent her daughter from flying to America with the no fly list, but apparently the airline provided the daughter with a copy of the no fly order. Generally, the airline is instructed not to provide said orders to the traveller, so the traveller has no way to know why they aren't allowed to fly.

This sort of lawsuit is difficult to make - the government has argued it should be dismissed because she can't prove the problem is that she is on the no fly list.

Thanks for the quick summary!

This is nuts.

A better definition would be: "This makes perfect sense, and it is easy to understand how it happened, but it is evil and intolerable."

How does a lawyer get to the point where they can defend something like this?

I don't see what the government expects. They go out of their way to keep things secret, like with FISA courts and the gag orders on the no-fly list, and then they say "she can't prove it was us" as a defense. Hello? Rule of law?

That is exactly what the government expects. It is a catch-22 (you can't know that you are on the list (through official channels anyway) unless you sue them into confirming it, and you can't sue them unless you can prove that you are on the list. A seemingly insurmountable circular dependency.), and it is by design.

I was not aware the USA has so many information about every single travel. According to this [1] they record everything.

- amtrack

- trains in the EU (including sit numbers)

- bus travel in the EU

- plane travel in the EU on a carrier that doesn't fly to the US

- hotel reservations

- pedestrian border crossing

Everything.

[1] http://hasbrouck.org/articles/Hasbrouck-Cato-2APR2013.pdf

I found the points about Robert Oppenheimer and Nelson Mandela being on terrorism watch lists to make a particularly good argument for their potential flaws.

It makes the need for good Judicial Oversight readily apparent.

> a visa is not an entry permit, but merely "permission to approach the border or port of entry and ask to be let in

Oh God.

That's standard policy for every country I know of. That's just how visas work.

When you get to passport control in pretty much any country, they evaluate anything that might be suspicious, look at your passport stamps, ask you for explanations, interview you further... and have complete control to send you back to wherever you came from, and not let you in.

It's standard policy, but it was introduced in an age when checking people against a database before they even get on the plane (as the US and many other countries now also do) was not a feasible option.

These days we should be able to pre-clear people accurately enough that passport control at destination should be a formality.

(Also, my country for one does not hassle their own returning citizens at immigration the way the US likes to.)

Well, in 99% of cases I think it is a formality -- I've never been turned away from a border before, nor do I know anyone personally who it's happened to. So I don't know what you mean by pre-clearing, or what you want it to gain.

If you're looking for a 100% assurance that, as a foreigner, if you get on the plane, you get let in the country, that's never going to happen, for security reasons. There will always be only some things that only passport control will catch.

I mean, a country's borders are the last chance to turn someone away, so it makes sense that that's where a certain level of scrutiny will apply. And the only people a country is going to trust to do that, is its own passport control workers. That's just a reality.

And as far hassling returning citizens... as an American, I would be horrified if I encounter trouble returning to the US, just tremendously pissed off.

But I can also understand that, with the US probably being the most popular country in the world to want to sneak into, people might be trying to fake their way into the US as supposed citizens, and that determining citizenship and identity at immigration might not always be as straightforward as it might. (But I still think it's horrifying to have to go through computers, phones, text-messages, etc... - I'm not defending that at tall!!)

Kafka would have been proud of the government's arguements in this trial.

Kafka, esq.

Is there any way for this trial to set a precedent that will lead to the travel situation improving? Because secret no fly orders, secret trials and government saying "yeah don't worry about it, we're policing ourselves, we don't need no judiciary branch" is, well... Reminiscent of other things.

How hard was it for Moxie and friends to get clear of their watchlist status?

Is Moxie now clear?

We sure seem to live in a fucking police state. I sure hope the judge doesn't get a secret visit in the middle of the night. Denying a US citizen to return to the US, or potentially stripping them of their citizenship despite being born on US soil (read the second part) should scare and/or piss everyone in the US off. If the government decides it has the power to cancel our citizenship at will and this is somehow upheld, we are all screwed.

Poor choice of font-size- 11px, really?

Most browsers have a minimum font size option, I recommend you try it out.

Don't fall back on "well, the browser should prevent bad choices from authors/designers."

When it comes to design, there is no such thing as universally bad or universally good.

Too small to read is a pretty safe bet for the "not good" category. In fact, there's entire standards around what should guide your design process[1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility

Man, I know. It used to be most text on the Internet was 16px or similar, and everything was legible.

Now you get people putting up blogs with 11px body text, and blogs with 24px body text. It's truly bizarre. I find myself having to change my browser zoom more and more, per-site, in order to make things a normal, readable size. Lately it's been more zooming out, with certain bloggers deciding to adopt grotesquely large font sizes.

I get that "breaking convention" can be good and all, but sometimes convention works pretty well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com