Interesting Stuff

Bonus nerd points to anyone who gets the reference in the title.

The story so far: three honors students on the Duke lacrosse team were accused of rape after attending a party at which a stripper claimed to be gangbanged. The media dragged them through the mud, talking about how horrible they were to rape this girl. Two years later, they were proven wholly innocent of any wrongdoing (mostly because they left the party before the rape purportedly occurred, and the DNA evidence did not point to them in any way whatsoever). Now, the head prosecutor for the case has been disbarred due to unethical conduct during the trial. He was apparently running for public office, and wanted to use the case to show how he’d crack down on crime. He frequently told the media how he was going to make life horrible for these guys, and then proceeded to hide the results of the DNA test from the defense attorneys for months because it would have shown that they were not in any way guilty. I’m glad to see this has happened and former district attorney Mike Nifong plans to accept the disbarment as a fair consequence of his actions.

There seems to be some push-back about my previous allegations that it was an invasion of privacy to require all government labs employees (even those without security clearance) to submit to investigations of their medical, military and financial records. When pressed on the issue, I argued that it seemed wrong because it unnecessarily pries into one’s personal life. Well, an employee at JPL has written a much more eloquent discussion of it to his congressman. In it, he claims that the Privacy Act of 1974 makes it illegal for a government agency to obtain these records without voluntary written consent, and these people have been given the choice “of either waiving our rights as guaranteed by law and the Constitution, or losing our jobs.” He furthermore states that this will have a chilling effect on the workplace environment because it sets the precedent that the government can come in and request any records it wants for no particular reason. Goddard Space Center employees are similarly disconcerted, and further echo that this “consent” to private records is hardly voluntary and borders on coercion.

I can understand that it’s important to have in-depth investigations into anyone who is granted clearance to work on sensitive material, and that it’s important to only allow people with clearance to have access to this information, but it sounds like this investigation is not going to grant anyone such clearance (though those who already had it are likely to keep it). I still don’t see how the government can request this of citizens that it will not treat as having special clearance: if you want to screen these people, give them clearance (which comes with a $10,000/year raise, which the government is loathe to grant), or treat them like the ordinary citizens as which they have been classified and accord them all rights to which they are entitled by law (take that, preposition danglers!).

To get it out of the way, 32 people were killed today by a gunman at Virginia Tech. No one seems to have any more details yet, and I really can’t speculate on anything here.

The Democrats have tied military funding to a withdrawal of troops in 2008, though Bush plans to veto this bill. Expectations are that the Democrats will then try to tie such funding to measurable progress in Iraq itself. This seems unlikely to happen, however, because six Iraqi cabinet members resigned in protest of Prime Minister Al-Maliki’s close ties to the United States. These resignations were called for by Moqtada Al-Sadr, who also organized rallies in Baghdad in protest of the current government. This is a pretty big blow to Mr. Al-Maliki, but the government is expected to remain intact.

The European Union has reproached Russia for its heavy-handed crackdown on protesters, which ostensibly included beating reporters and passers-by, as well as arresting chess legend Garry Kasparov. I’ve caught bits of Russia becoming more USSR-like, but this has brought the issue to a head. President Putin has been locking down the country slowly but surely, with the latest move to pass laws of questionable constitutionality restricting the rights of protestors. Russia is gearing up for an election, and I honestly don’t know how these measures will affect it.

Finally, some good news for a change: the former Duke lacrosse players have been found wholly innocent of raping a stripper at a party. Unfortunately, they have already been found guilty in the eyes of the media, have received death threats, and can no longer safely return to Duke. Can anyone at Duke comment on how the student body has perceived these events?