Judi­cial tor­ture and the NatWest 3. The case of the “NatWest three” has stirred up huge con­cern among busi­ness peo­ple in the UK. This week, how­ever, we learn that the three for­mer NatWest bankers have pleaded guilty to wire fraud. So was this just much British ado about noth­ing? My answer is: “no”. The fact that these three men pleaded guilty does not prove they were. It demon­strates that the offers made by US pros­e­cu­tors are of a kind sen­si­ble peo­ple can­not refuse. The pres­sures the for­mer can exert make it ratio­nal, even for the inno­cent, to plead guilty. I do not know whether that hap­pened here. But it would not be very surprising.

[…]

Plea-bargaining is effec­tive because of four salient fea­tures of Amer­i­can jus­tice: the excep­tional sever­ity of pun­ish­ment; the jus­ti­fied ter­ror of what might hap­pen in prison; the uncer­tain out­come of fight­ing cases before juries; and the pos­si­bil­ity of obtain­ing a far lighter sen­tence by agree­ing to pleas of guilty.

In the case of the NatWest three, the accused faced the pos­si­bil­ity of up to 35 years in prison for their alleged offences. It is a reflec­tion of the gulf in cul­ture that has grown up between the US and the UK that what are in effect life sen­tences might be imposed for their alleged involve­ment in help­ing Andrew Fas­tow, then Enron’s chief finan­cial offi­cer, defraud Enron.

Such a sen­tence would be far longer than all but the tini­est pro­por­tion of mur­der­ers could expect to serve in the UK. Yet, appar­ently, it is regarded as per­fectly rea­son­able in the US. Nor is this all. A sen­tence in a US prison, par­tic­u­larly for middle-class men, is likely to be entry into a life­time of tor­ment. Indeed, a few cyn­i­cal Amer­i­cans responded to com­plaints about what hap­pened to Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib by argu­ing that it could not truly be tor­ture since it was no worse than what might hap­pen to inmates of a US prison.

[…]

To my mind, this sys­tem is tan­ta­mount to extract­ing con­fes­sions of guilt under a form of psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture. That tor­ture con­sists of the rea­son­able fear of being found guilty and fear of the length of time one might then serve in prison and of what might hap­pen while one was there. All but excep­tion­ally brave peo­ple will con­fess to almost any­thing to escape even the pos­si­bil­ity of tor­ture. In the same way, the major­ity of peo­ple would surely con­fess to almost any­thing to avoid the pos­si­bil­ity of spend­ing the rest of their lives in prison. Recog­ni­tion of the mean­ing­less­ness of con­fes­sions extracted under threat of tor­ture was the main rea­son civilised juris­dic­tions aban­doned its use. The same objec­tion applies to pleas of guilty made under the kind of plea bar­gain­ing employed in the case of the NatWest three.

Let me be clear: I am not assert­ing that the men are inno­cent. But the fact that they have made a plea of guilty does not prove their guilt. It could just as well show that the US judi­cial sys­tem has a potent machine for extract­ing pleas of guilty to lesser charges. In this way, it has also effec­tively elim­i­nated a pre­sump­tion of inno­cence. It is, for this rea­son, not a sys­tem with which the UK should retain its cur­rent extra­di­tion arrange­ments. At the least, the US must be asked to make a prima facie case. The con­clu­sion is that sim­ple. [Finan­cial Times]

Cre­ation­ists Vio­lat­ing Copy­right. The_Rook writes “The Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute, more a lawyer mill than a sci­en­tific insti­tu­tion, copied Har­vard University’s Bio­Vi­sions video ‘The Inner Life of the Cell,’ stripped out Harvard’s copy­right notice, cred­its, and nar­ra­tion, inserted their own creationist-friendly nar­ra­tion, and renamed the video ‘The Cell As an Auto­mated City.’ The new title sub­tly sug­gests that a cell is designed rather than evolved.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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What makes this par­tic­u­larly amus­ing is that nearly all cities actu­ally are evolved rather than designed. Per­haps these reli­gious nutjobs are argu­ing that their god is a Com­mu­nist dictator?

UN Says Tasers Are a Form of Tor­ture. The use of Tasers “causes acute pain, con­sti­tut­ing a form of tor­ture,” the UN’s Com­mit­tee Against Tor­ture said. “In cer­tain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reli­able stud­ies and recent real-life events.” Three men — all in their early 20s — died from after taser­ing in the United States this week, days after a Pol­ish man died at Van­cou­ver air­port after being tasered by Cana­dian police. There have been 17 deaths in Canada fol­low­ing the use of Tasers since they were approved for use, and 275 deaths in the US. “Accord­ing to Amnesty Inter­na­tional, coro­ners have listed the Taser jolt as a con­tribut­ing fac­tor in more than 30 of those deaths.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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No kid­ding. It’s blind­ingly obvi­ous from the many news sto­ries on the use of tasers that cops use tasers almost exclu­sively as instru­ments of torture.

Social­ist Fire­fight­ers To Spy for Feds. They don’t need a search war­rant, and are being trained to look for signs of ter­ror­ist activ­ity, such as peo­ple who are hos­tile or unco­op­er­a­tive, show dis­con­tent or hatred towards the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, or own guns and ammu­ni­tion. No sign… [LewRockwell.com Blog]

If you live in one of a few major cities, pri­mar­ily New York, your fire­fight­ers have cho­sen to aban­don their tra­di­tion­ally help­ful role in favor of spy­ing for Big Brother.

Skype Encryp­tion Stumps Ger­man Police. Tall­GuyRacer writes “Ger­man police are unable to deci­pher the encryp­tion used in the inter­net tele­phone soft­ware Skype to mon­i­tor calls by sus­pected crim­i­nals and ter­ror­ists, Germany’s top police offi­cer, Joerg Zier­cke, said. “The encryp­tion with Skype tele­phone soft­ware … cre­ates grave dif­fi­cul­ties for us… We can’t deci­pher it. That’s why we’re talk­ing about source telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion sur­veil­lance — that is, get­ting to the source before encryp­tion or after it’s been decrypted.”“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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This is good news, although since Skype is closed-source I still wouldn’t rec­om­mend it for peo­ple con­cerned about eavesdropping.

Feds Have Access To Cell­phone Track­ing On Request. Mike writes “Accord­ing to a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle, fed­eral offi­cials are rou­tinely ask­ing and get­ting courts to order cell­phone com­pa­nies to fur­nish real-time track­ing data on sub­scribers. The data is used to pin­point the where­abouts of ‘crim­i­nal sus­pects’, accord­ing to judges and indus­try lawyers. In some cases, judges have granted the requests with­out even requir­ing the gov­ern­ment to demon­strate prob­a­ble cause that a crime is tak­ing place or that the inquiry will yield evi­dence of a crime ‘Pri­vacy advo­cates fear such a prac­tice may expose aver­age Amer­i­cans to a new level of gov­ern­ment scrutiny of their daily lives. Such requests run counter to the Jus­tice Department’s inter­nal rec­om­men­da­tion that fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors seek war­rants based on prob­a­ble cause to obtain pre­cise loca­tion data in pri­vate areas. The requests and orders are sealed at the government’s request, so it is dif­fi­cult to know how often the orders are issued or denied.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Slash­dot]

This isn’t any­thing new, but it’s good to see addi­tional light being shed on the government’s use of cell phones to track and spy on people.

Vote To Elim­i­nate Leap Sec­onds. Mortimer.CA writes “As dis­cussed on Slash­dot pre­vi­ously, there is a pro­posal to remove leap sec­onds from UTC (née ‘Green­wich’ time). It will be put to a vote to ITU mem­ber states dur­ing 2008, and if 70% agree, the leap sec­ond will be elim­i­nated by 2013. There is some debate as to whether this change is a good or bad idea. The pro­posal calls for a ‘leap-hour’ in about 600 years, which nobody seems to believe is a good idea. One philo­soph­i­cal point oppo­nents make is that the ‘offi­cial’ time on Earth should match the time of the sun and heavens.“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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It’s a lit­tle silly to argue about elim­i­nat­ing leap sec­onds in the name of mak­ing time “match the time of the sun and heav­ens” when we’ve still got day­light sav­ings time.

Hyper­poly­glotic Gmail. Posted by Jonas Shen, Asso­ciate, Con­sumer Operations

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, the world’s most accom­plished hyper­poly­glot is Ziad Fazah. This guy can read­ily com­mu­ni­cate in 58 (f-i-f-t-y e-i-g-h-t) lan­guages. Wow.

Well Mr. Fazah, while we’re not quite up to your stan­dard yet, you bet­ter watch out — because Gmail is now avail­able in 41 lan­guages, and don’t think we’re going to stop there.

If you’re mul­ti­lin­gual, feel­ing adven­tur­ous, or if you just want to test how well you know the Gmail user inter­face, try chang­ing your account lan­guage set­tings. Sound a lit­tle risky? Don’t worry — it’s easy. You can change the lan­guage through the Set­tings menu. Get a taste of what hyper­poly­glotic Gmail has to offer:

How many of these lan­guage UIs do you rec­og­nize? [Offi­cial Gmail Blog]

This is much more inter­est­ing than those silly quizzes peo­ple like to put in their MySpace pages. Too bad there’s no answer key, though! Here are mine, in order:

1. Chi­nese (I don’t know Sim­pli­fied from Tra­di­tional on sight.)
2. French
3. Russ­ian
4. This one I don’t rec­og­nize, but it’s East­ern Euro­pean or pos­si­bly Scan­di­na­vian. My guess is Czech.
5. Greek
6. Fin­ish
7. Korean (This was an easy one, given where I live.)
8. Ger­man

Any­one who’s ever had to deal with an IT department’s idea of “secu­rity” will appre­ci­ate Friday’s Dil­bert.

Here’s a neat idea: Deli­cious Library, an OS X app that can use a web­cam to scan bar­codes on books and auto­mat­i­cally add them to your library catalog.