No-fly list takes legal hit | Hacker News Reader

No-fly list takes legal hit

mercurynews.com

186 pointsandrewfong49 comments

I thought the judge's name sounded familiar, so I checked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Haskell_Alsup

Yup. This was the guy who learned Java because he felt he needed to know how to program to be qualified to make a ruling in Oracle v Google. I usually dislike criticizing or praising individual judges (unlike politicians, it's not for the public to pick and choose -- nor should it be), but this one is really remarkable.

Wow, nice memory; I remember that case, but his name didn't register in the slightest while reading the article.

As for the result, it's nice to see. I'm hoping for more transparency, but if the past year hasn't kicked the government into gear I'm not sure what will (short of the courts, I suppose).

I love one of his quotes from that case:

------------

In one episode, Oracle's star lawyer... was arguing that Google copied the nine lines of rangeCheck code to accelerate development to gain faster entry into the mobile phone market.

Alsup told Boies, "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America --how could you even make that kind of argument?"

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

Thank you for sharing that. It's now my favorite legal quote.

Never argue with Hacker Judge.

http://www.hvjmphotography.com/p954955302

Not a 'hacker' judge. Ugh.

Not quite a hacker judge but certainly the best qualified judge in the system to rule on programming matters.

Got to admire his willingness to learn and his ability to recognize when he needs to learn something before ruling.

Not quite a "hacker judge", but with a mathematics degree and programming experience, maybe "STEM judge"?

Not that we really need labels like that.

I hereby declare Judge Alsup the Patron Saint of Information Technology Law and move his name for immediate canonization by the secret council of hackers.

"Haskell". Huh.

And they say that the universe is random chaos!

I believe what you're referring to was dubbed[1] "nominative determinism" -- the idea that people feel a (statistically-detectable) attraction to careers befitting their name.

The most charitable thing you can say about it: it's not been disproven as of yet.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9664000/9664697....

> It's not been disproven as of yet.

Well, if you're committed to the idea that it must be true, I guess it hasn't been disproven... but it's been very, very severely discredited...

See e.g. http://andrewgelman.com/2014/01/10/look-whos-3-years-date-wh...

Why not? Why judges are not for the public to pick? This puzzles me a lot lately, there's no democracy where Judges are picked by the population, although it's one of the main 3 powers of the state which should be itself accountable.

The historical reason, as far as I can recall, is that it's an attempt to make the judiciary independent. If judges were elected, they'd have exactly the same biases as the other elected offices, which means they'd be a less effective check-and-balance system. That also leaves aside the many, many ways you can corrupt an elected official that cannot be used for an unelected official.

In most western democracies (and certainly in Westminster-style democracies, which I know best) the judges are bound by a certain set of rules that limit how activist they can be: specifically, a constitution. They're required to make findings of law, nor findings of morality, so they can't just manufacture law or destroy law as they see fit: they need a different law they can point to which overrules the one in question. Hence the US Constitution, which acts as the highest law in the land. A judge will always reference their decision, in the end, to an established law (or the constitution).

Conversely, elected officials are empowered to _make_ law. Less true in the US (where the constitution binds the hands of the legislature and executive), but very true in Westminster systems where parliament is the supreme authority.

Thanks for the hints.

Seperation of power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers), but even so they are picked indirectly by the public through politicians. As a european though I am pretty amazed by all the direct voting that is done in US - you can hardly drive through a town here without running into a plethora of posters for people campaigning for various offices. You could argue that this is good democracy but I just can't imagine how voters can make informed decisions when voting for all these various offices - that is if they even bother to vote.

It's an appearance of freedom, but really, many public office officials do whatever they like so long as no one is watching. Scaling oversight past Tragedy of the Commons apathy is a must have in American public politics. (Sounds obtuse bullshit to make another point but the literal meaning is also a point.)

For many jobs, you need a professional rather than a politician. Judges, public prosecutors, police chiefs, etc should not be political positions.

In NY city and state, many judges are elected. However, they are limited to members of the NY bar (min. 10 years practicing in NY). Primarily wanted to point out that "professional" and election-based are not mutually exclusive.

Source (PDF): http://www.nycbar.org/pdf/report/become_a_judge.pdf

Just ask yourself this - do you really want the judges to be politicians too?

- Many US judges are elected. Many (more) aren't.

- Judicial recall certainly imposes accountability, even on unelected judges. Election, in fact, doesn't impose accountability anywhere; only re-election would do that.

He also has a degree in math!

With his name on so many high profile cases recently, I'm hoping he'll make it into Supreme Court.

I definitely hope so. I detest the politicized appointment process for the supreme court, but if you're going to appoint them, appoint this one.

I believe he knew how to program, and said he knew other languages, but he learned Java specifically for the case.

As someone who has had to deal with the list, good for this woman for fighting it. My name (or rather, the name I share with whomever it is the government was really after) led me to having five years of not being able to check in to flights after 2001 without going to the counter, giving ID and confirming my birth date, and waiting for the agent to make a phone call (presumably to Homeland Security), which would invariably take a solid 15 minutes of waiting, until I got the all clear and could be checked in, get my tickets, and board my flight.

Fortunately, sometime in '06 or '07 I received information on how to remove oneself from the list by filling out a form. I can't recall if I found it independently or if it was given to me by an airline agent, but a few months after turning that in I no longer had to deal with the list again.

Perhaps, I should have actually fought against it as well, but in my case it was always just due to the happenstance of having the same name as someone on the list.

Same here, lasted around 2005-08 for me. Completely non-transparent. My name was put on some kind of list without my knowledge (it's a common name), and I was repeatedly delayed every time I tried to fly. Nobody would actually acknowledge anything or give me information about what I could do about it, even though it was pretty obvious what the reason was.

Same story here. I was often delayed by 45 minutes or more. Basically, I as a native-born American citizen with no criminal record (and ironically, worked for the DoD at one time), could not board a plane without the express permission of the government such that I was delayed while waiting for that permission. Everyone I was traveling with was allowed to go on, I was stuck behind. It was a real source of difficulty for me for a few years. At some point it went out of sight, though I still received special treatment at the border for a while.

Consequently, I have a pretty negative view of the "no-fly" lists. Anyone sufficiently dangerous to put on the list is sufficiently dangerous to be arrested. Anything short of that is an obvious lack of due process.

To me the most shocking thing (of many) about this case is the steps DHS took to prevent the woman's daughter (a US citizen!) from returning to the US to testify:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131204/10434025453/dhs-p...

> The Obama administration has vigorously contested the case, the first of its kind to reach trial, warning that it might reveal top-secret information about the anti-terrorism program

How often and how long will we hear this nonsense. The no-fly list has never caught or deterred a terrorist. We cannot stop the legal process with the blanket "national security" card.

Seriously, if there is anybody on that list that is on that list legitimately, why the hell haven't they been arrested for whatever they did to get themselves on that list?

The answer of course is that nobody on that list has actually done anything illegal. The entire thing is a perversion of justice.

> why the hell haven't they been arrested for whatever they did to get themselves on that list?

Read my reply to the parent. It's a preventive measure.

> radicalized American

And yet tried for nothing and convicted of nothing. It is a perversion of justice, full stop.

I'm beginning to feel that the purpose of this list is actually quite different - that it is a deterrant for regular people, an incentive not to speak out or talk to any non-mainstream-political group in fear of having their lives being made increasingly difficult by things like getting included on this list.

This list is not aimed at terrorists, it's aimed at us. Er, US.

That is a really terrifying and cynical possibility. I wish I could conclusively disbelieve it.

Cynical or not, it's suprisingly common. I started to notice those patterns of thinking after reading too much Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict". A good book, btw.

One could ask the same thing about Guantanamo. If those people are sufficiently dangerous that it's necessary to keep them imprisoned for 12 years (and counting), then the least they should expect is to be charged with something and tried for it.

The no-fly list is not about capturing or deterring a terrorist. Or at least not to deter in the way you may be thinking: blowing up a plane? It's about keeping an individual from traveling to a location with the intention to cause violence. For example, a radicalized American traveling to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab.

This probably works as a preventative measure about as well as banning criminals from owning guns.

Who gets to decide who's radicalized and who's not? Some NSA or FBI agent? System cannot rely on that. Being added to the no-fly list should be a result of a court decision and nothing less.

Or to prevent annoying witnesses from testifying: http://boingboing.net/2013/12/04/dhs-stalls-no-fly-list-tria...

You only mean non-stop, right?

Oh please. This line of logic can be abused such that for their own good, as preventative measure, all Muslims could be on a no fly list. And the great bit about that is that if Muslims cant fly it protects them from accusations of terrorism. Its for their own good, you see....

In fact, this logic completely justifies what the NSA are doing.

So you drive to Canada or Mexico, and take a flight from there. Presumably someone who is radicalised enough to want to put their life on the line would just get more angry if faced with the no fly list.

For those who are interested, there's a blog called "Papers, Please!", run by a group called "The Identity Project", which has been following this trial in some detail:

http://papersplease.org

"The Identity Project explores and defends the fundamental American right to move freely around our country and to live without constantly having to prove who we are or why we are here."

Since the mercurynews article didn't cover it, be sure to read the article where the plaintiff's daughter, a US citizen, was prevented from entering the US to testify at the trial.[1]

[1]: http://papersplease.org/wp/2013/12/07/no-fly-trial-day-5-par...

So, an interesting bit:

"In a decision for the most part sealed, U.S. District Judge William Alsup disclosed that Rahinah Ibrahim was mistakenly placed on the controversial list and said that the government must now clear up the mistake."

As I understand it, the vast majority of the US legal system is based on common law--that is, on using the rulings of previous judges and courts in order to determine how a new case is handled.

Isn't the idea of sealed decisions and secret courts pretty much striking at the very core of our entire system of justice?

> The Obama administration has vigorously contested the case, the first of its kind to reach trial, warning that it might reveal top-secret information about the anti-terrorism program. As a result, Alsup sealed his ruling until April to give the government an opportunity to persuade a federal appeals court to keep the order from being released publicly.

Sealed 'til April isn't that unreasonable if we're pretending they're going to spend those three months revamping their anti-terrorism efforts.

The DHS should rebrand as the “Department of Humiliation as a Service”. And, aliens get this service for free, courtesy of the generous US tax payer.

Once a female security officer in Amsterdam airport made loud, snide remarks about how I arranged cables and stuff in my laptop bag. That by itself was very annoying, imagine being called off in front of all people like a criminal for no fault of theirs!

Even if I understand (but probably don't agree with) the existence of the list and the need to keep the contents confidential I don't understand why the criteria/process used to put a name on the list needs to be confidential other than they want judges to rule from fear, uncertainty and doubt.

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