Day: March 8, 2001

The Detroit News’ Bill Johnson wrote an excellent defense of the First Amendment rights of students. The event that sparked his column was a controversy at the Plymouth-Salem High School newspaper. Student Chris Mackinder wrote a column for the newspaper criticizing Black History Month.

I have not read Mackinder’s column, but as Johnson summarizes it, Mackinder essentially argued that having a separate history month for Blacks only encourages racial divisions. After the column came out, Mackinder apologized as did the teacher, Mary Lou Nagy, who allowed the column to be published. Nagy was also subjected to some undisclosed disciplinary action. The school issued guidelines for future columns saying that essentially they have to be toned down so as not to offend anyone.

But as Johnson notes,

Mackinder was bold enough to say essentially what others may be thinking and lack the courage to say.

Which is not to say that Johnson necessarily agrees with Mackinder, but pretending that such views don’t exist doesn’t help anyone.

The scary thing is that Americans seem more and more willing to censor such views. Johnson reports on a recent poll by the Freedom Forum which asked people if public statements that were considered racially offensive should be censored. Two-thirds of those surveyed said that such views should not be tolerated in American society.

Few people these days seem to agree with Johnson who writes that,

The First Amendment doesn’t discriminate against those who would communicate bigoted and reprehensible expressions. Enduring offensive speech is a small price to pay to preserve the larger body of freedoms that we all enjoy. Like what Mackinder said or not, his right to express unpopular opinions is the cornerstone of our democracy.

Source:

Free speech meets political correctness in Canton. Bill Johnson, The Detroit News, March 9, 2001.

The ancient principle of double jeopardy — that the state may not try a person twice for the same crime — is under relentless attack in a number of Western countries and may fall victim to public outrage at violent crime. A proposal by Great Britain’s Law Commission Kingdom is moving to formally abolish double jeopardy protection for some violent crimes.

Several years ago, a proposal was floated in Great Britain to abolish double jeopardy protection for any crime that resulted in a jail term of more than 3 years. After several years of study, the current proposal by the Law Commission would allow the state to retry a person acquitted of murder if there is “compelling” new evidence that becomes available after the acquittal.

There have been a number of prominent murder cases in Great Britain that have pushed this bill forward. Three men were recently acquitted of the murder of a young black teenager. The sentiment seems to be that the young men were in fact guilty but that the prosecutors botched their own case so badly that an acquittal resulted (akin to the OJ Simpson case, where prosecutorial failure rather than a compelling case by the defense seemed to tip the scales in favor of acquittal — which is as it should be in a nation where the burden of proof is on the state).

In another case, Ronnie Knight was acquitted of the gangland murder of a man, only to later write a book admitting that he had in fact hired a hit man to carry out the murder. In a documentary aired last year, Freddie Foreman, who had been acquitted of two murders, admitted that he had in fact committed those murders (Foreman did serve 16 years in jail for helping dispose of the body of another victim killed by his associates).

The current recommendation by the Law Commission would expose each of these men to possible prosecution since it would apply retroactively, allowing prosecutors to retry KNight and Foreman using their public admission of guilt as evidence in new trials. The Home Office’s National Crime Faculty estimates there are at least 35 cases where defendants have been acquitted but enough new evidence has been accumulated to make a second trial worthwhile if it were an option.

The proposal by the Law Commission actually has the gall to claim that eliminating double jeopardy protection for murder would still maintain “proper regard to the principle that it is not legitimate for the state to continue to pursue a person who has been found not guilty after due process.”

Give me a break. The entire point of such protections in Western legal systems is that protecting the human rights of citizens is more important than ensuring that the state always manage to convict the person it thinks is responsible for a crime. Part of the price paid for that is the fact that sometimes guilty people go free, but better to live with that than the possibility of multiple trials of acquitted persons leading to more innocent people being convicted. Great Britain with this proposal and with a recent proposal to dispense with jury trials for some criminal offenses seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

Sources:

Double jeopardy rule may be axed. Joshua Rozenberg, The Daily Telegraph (UK), March 6, 2001.

MIT student Keith Winstein and MIT alum Marc Horowitz wrote and posted this very short Perl script that decrypts and plays DVD movies (though you’d need an extremely fast computer to watch a DVD movie in real time using Perl):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz <[email protected]>
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=($t=255)&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9 ,$_=(map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t ^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271)) [$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

In doing so, have they committed a crime?

The authors of the program claim it doesn’t violate the DMCA in the same way that DeCSS does since it requires the user to provide the necessary title key in order to work. In a sense they are arguing that computer programs don’t decrypt DVDs, people decrypt DVDs.

I doubt this will fly legally, but this is yet another example of just how futile such copy protection schemes are.