Nova Scotia Snow

First reports are coming out about the crushing wet snow that hit my old home of Nova Scotia with electrical pylon crushing force. Arthur tells us how the storm kind of snuck up on the province. Mike is still shovelling and has yet to post on it. Reports? It’ll be plus ten here in the tropical upper upper-ty-est part of the St. Lawrence Valley today.

Here is the report from Nova Scotia Power.

Another Internet and Defamation Decision

I was very surprised to read this article in Satuday’s Globe and Mail as I had not heard this ruling about slander by email was coming down the pipeline. Madam Justice Wailan Low of the Ontario Superior Court held against a person who did not appear in court to defend a case of slander by email and awarded damages against him which were acknowledged to likely be the person’s entire worldly wealth. The article canvasses the ruling, quoting from the text farily fully but as the text of the ruling is not on the usual web sites for court reports, I can’t tell of the report covers all the content. From the report, it appears that the email at the heart of the slander was one of those that say:

Please forword [sic] this to as many people and list as possible…

The email accused the Plaintiff, a pre-historic archeologist affilliated with Wilfred Laurier, of being a “grave robber”. The email created a chain reaction in which the false allegations were passed along to persons involved with the field of study.

What the article notes but does not really inquire about is the nature of the damages which were awarded which were acknowledged by the Court to be “equivalent to all or a significant portion of the defendant’s assets”. No other measure of the appropriateness of the damages were discussed in the article other than to note an equal amount – $125,000.00 – was awarded against a homeless person in June for defaming Barrick Gold Corp. That ruling is on the internet and was discussed here when it came out. It is unclear to me why the Globe and Mail describes the defendant as “homeless” when the Court of Appeal ruling describes him as follows:

Mr. Lopehandia is a businessman who resides in North Vancouver, British Columbia. He is an officer and director, and the directing mind of the defendant Chile Mineral Fields Canada Ltd., a British Columbia corporation with head offices in Vancouver and purporting to deal in precious-base metals and strategic minerals. It is a deemed fact in this case that the actions of Mr. Lopehandia at issue in the proceeding were undertaken by him in his personal capacity and in his capacity as an officer, director and representative of CMFCL.

Could it be that the court order and fighting the case has left him destitute? Will the same fate not arise from the ruling in this more recent case reported yesterday by the Globe? I suppose that the implication for now is that this stuff ought to be taken very seriously and sending out a slagging email should be low on each of our priorities. It is interesting to note that I am one a list of recipients of one of these circulating emails for a reason I cannot make out. The person who is sending them has a name identical to an old acquaintance but I have confirmed it is not him. Clearly, a dangerous practice.

All in all, good reason to remember your manners.

Two Maps To Consider

From the very bowels of the beast, from the heart of darkness in the main stream media comes a graphical comparative description of information that the suits were too scared to print! OK, it’s just a couple of maps…but they were secreted to this publication. Any comments?

Irene’s, Bank St., Ottawa, Canada

Last night before going to see the Pixies, the siblings and I took advantage of the moment to visit an old friend, Irene’s pub in Ottawa’s Glebe district. Irene’s is a neighbourhood bar which means it is not necessarily the place to take someone on a first date unless you are on a serious testing night-out. If she agrees to go to Irene’s again, she wins. If she suggests going to Irene’s again, you win.

Opened in 1985 as a sort of Maritime Canadian bar in Upper Canada, its almost 20 years of experience shows in the honeying pine of the wainscoting and the furniture, the colour of good real pale ale. I have seen bands play there, ended work weeks there with pals, had dinner parties collapse into it and wished often I lived nearer to it. People there can be loud. They can also be worse for wear for the night – or even for the decade. A little harder than the Pilot House in Kingston but the same idea. The beer selection is pretty good but not great. The Guinness moves well, however, meaning it is always fresh. Upper Canada Dark on tap is also a good choice. I was driving so those were the brother’s choices.

Morning Read

Somedays I am reluctant to write a post. Sometimes it is because the caffine has yet to organize my mind. Sometimes it is because there is no news. Sometimes. like today, it is because I do not want to see something slip off the front page above the fold. That something is the bowl of Mr. Tran’s excellent Thai noodle soup I had for lunch yesterday. I am confirming all of Pavlov’s experiments this morning every time I go past it. Nonetheless, you have needs. So, here are some good reads from elsewhere:

  • Junk Store Cowgirl writes about events during a western New York military campaign in 1779.
  • Through Rob1 (I have delinked all the other Robs but still like to call him Rob1), I have come across Dina’s site, a well-written blog from India.
  • Alfons in the Netherlands is thinking about tolerance.
  • Living in Dryden continues its comprehensive description of one small US town and does so so well I am starting to think I am actually a shut-in there as long as I leave the TV on channel 5 with its unending ads for apparently unlimited Fuccillo car dealerships of north and central NYS.
  • Ian relives the pre-punk, pre-disco world of being an elementary school kid in the early 1970s home with the radio.

That should help take your mind off Thai noodle soup…Thai noodle soup…Thai noodle soup…Thai noodle soup…Thai noodle soup…

Privacy Through Walls

A few years ago now, I wrote a thesis about a type of surveillance and included a quote from a 1928 dissent in the Supreme Court of the United
Justice case Olmstead v. U.S. 277 U.S. 438 (1928):

Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in Court, and by which it will be enabled to expose a jury to the most intimate occurrences of the home.

…

…as time works, subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy will become available to the government. The progress of science in furnishing the government with the means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring beliefs, thoughts and emotions.

The Supreme Court of Canada recently reviewed a case, R. v. Tessling, similar at least in the use of such new intrusive technologies:

The RCMP used an airplane equipped with a Forward Looking Infra-Red (“FLIR”) camera to overfly properties owned by the accused. FLIR technology records images of thermal energy or heat radiating from a building. It cannot, at this stage of its development, determine the nature of the source of heat within the building or “see” through the external surfaces of a building. The RCMP were able to obtain a search warrant for the accused’s home based on the results of the FLIR image coupled with information supplied by two informants. In the house, the RCMP found a large quantity of marijuana and several guns. The accused was charged with a variety of drug and weapons offences.

The headnote to the Tessling ruling in summarizing the Court’s ruling states that the accused had a privacy interest in the activities taking place in his home and it may be presumed that he had a subjective expectation of privacy in such activities to the extent they were the subject matter of the search. However, everything shown in the heat-generated photograph exists on the external surfaces of the building and, in that sense, it recorded only information exposed to the public. Although the information about the distribution of the heat was not visible to the naked eye, the heat profile did not expose any intimate details of the accused’s lifestyle or part of his core biographical data. It only showed that some of the activities in the house generate heat. Thus, the Court held, when one considers the “totality of the circumstances”, the use of the technology did not intrude on the reasonable sphere of privacy of the accused.

It is interesting to note that the ruling in 2004 was about a fact situation in 1999 and 1999 technology. Despite this delay between the facts before it and its own ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada stated in Tessling:

In my view, with respect, the reasonableness line has to be determined by looking at the information generated by existing FLIR technology, and then evaluating its impact on a reasonable privacy interest. If, as expected, the capability of FLIR and other technologies will improve and the nature and quality of the information hereafter changes, it will be a different case, and the courts will have to deal with its privacy implications at that time in light of the facts as they then exist.

So what can Forward Looking Infra-Red see now? Ratheon sell it to the US Air Force promoting these features. SgmaTel made this press release last month. The US Army Research Laboratory announced this earlier this year. Not exactly a simple infra-red camera hanging from a police helicopter now. Smart image processing is occuring.

As was stated in the dissent in Olmstead,

…the makers of the US Constitution understood the need to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, and the protections guaranteed by this are much broader in scope, and include the right to life and an inviolate personality — the right to be left alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men… It does not matter if the target of government intrusion is a confirmed criminal. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.

This was written by Justice Louis Brandeis and conccurred with by Justice Oliver Wendle Holmes, two fairly strong swimmers. Do you believe that this is a relevant statement regarding the limits of surveillance given the advance of technology? Does a court that reviews the facts of a case five years after the fact inspire you with great confidence that the law has a good handle on advancing surveillance technologies and your privacy?