27 Aug 2013 at 12:49 PM

Constitutional Law, Craigslist, Religion, Weirdness

Crusader Requires A Jewish OR Muslim Lawyer: Apparently We’re Going After The 16th-Century Vatican In SCOTUS!!

By Elie Mystal

Pope Gregory XIII be RACEIST.

A Catholic lawyer, a Jewish lawyer, and a Muslim lawyer all walk into a bar. The Muslim lawyer says, “I’m filing an injunction to stop this den of sin from serving alcohol.” The Jewish lawyer says, “I’m suing you for working on the Sabbath.” The bartender looks at the Catholic lawyer and says, “Jesus, what do you want?” The Catholic lawyer says, “How the hell should I know? But I’ll take a scotch while you wait for an answer.”
It’s not every day that you see a person specify that they want a lawyer who is from a certain religious background. Law is generally a secular profession. Sure, Moses is the first law giver in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the only God most lawyers consult before deciding whether or not to take a case is the one bathed in green.
Still, when you are a whack-job on Craigslist who is trying to mount an assault on the calendar, I suppose the only way you’re going to get help is with the aid of a true believer.
Yeah, you heard me right, I’m talking about a guy who wants to sue… somebody… over the calendar…

Actually, being irrationally pissed about the Gregorian calendar is not a new thing. There are the somewhat fair religious arguments (why should the entire secular world keep time in a fashion developed by leaders of one religion). Then there are the bats**t crazy “global conspiracy” arguments. From The Atlantean Conspiracy:

Another subtle yet devastating aspect of the global conspiracy is their manipulation of calendars, clocks, and our perception of time. We are being enslaved by manmade mechanisms and systems for keeping time. Not only are we wage-slaves to bankers, governments, bosses, and landowners, but we are also time-slaves to our watches, clocks, and calendars.

Man, I love benign nut-jobs. I wish I could be there when this guy sees a Peter’s Projection Map for the first time; his head might actually explode.
In any event, one of these dudes managed to successfully operate Craigslist, and he’s looking for some help from lawyers willing to take on the Catholic Church. Here’s the ad in pertinent part (you can see the full ad, with a wonderful picture, on the next page).

Need Jewish or Muslim attorney
I am currently involved in a court case (on appeal) in Paris, [Texas], that is challenging the legality/authority of the Gregorian Calendar — based on the fact that it is a papal-decreed religious instrument and violates the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment.
This will eventually end-up in the SCOTUS to have 6 Catholic and 3 Jewish justices make a ruling on the legality/authority on the papal bull/decree issued by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.
I am looking for an attorney who has integrity and courage – and is willing to stand up for the truth, the rule of LAW and the freedom for people to not HAVE to use the Roman Catholic Gregorian Calendar and use the one that agrees with their conscience/belief/religion.

It’s eventually going to end up in SCOTUS, you think? Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE to see the Supreme Court grant cert in a case regarding whether the Gregorian calendar violates the Establishment Clause. I just want to see who is allegedly in violation — is the mere recognition of “Saturday” by the U.S. Postal Service the issue here?
Still, I think it would be pretty bad if everybody got to use the calendar that’s in accordance to their conscience and beliefs. I don’t want my employer adopting a calendar that pays me once a galactic year. On that scale, there’s still a Tyrannosaur waiting around for a paycheck.
But I want to end where I started: why does it take a Jewish or Muslim lawyer to tell this man he’s crazy take this case? Don’t Buddhist or Hindu lawyers have just as much stake in overturning this expression of Catholic imperialism?
Unless… oh my God… this guy must be part of the Western Illuminati conspiracy that seeks to deny the influence of Eastern traditions in an attempt to extend Western imperialism throughout the far East

30 Nov 2012 at 4:13 PM

Constitutional Law, Pornography, Privacy

FBI Dad Finds Handy Fourth Amendment Workaround to Bust School Principal for Child Porn

By Kashmir Hill

Thanks to spyware, an FBI dad got a gift-wrapped child porn case.

Like any dad, Joseph Auther was worried about what his son might get up to while exploring the wilds of the World Wide Web. So when his 7th grade son got a school-provided laptop from Whispering Palms School in Saipan in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, Auther decided to install a monitoring program on it. He went with a spyware program called eBlaster from SpectorSoft, a company based in Vero Beach, Florida. Unbeknownst to his son, the program captured his website visits, his keystrokes, and every email, chat, and instant message he sent and received. This was all delivered up to his dad in emails, while giving the monitored person no hint that it was doing so.
Auther has a special appreciation for the benefits of surveillance. He’s an FBI special agent. In April, he discovered he was being transferred to the FBI office in Denver. At the end of the school year, Auther let Whispering Palms principal Thomas Weindl know that his family was moving and that they would be returning the school’s laptop. Weindl, 67, was actually a friend of the Auther family; when he got married earlier that year, Auther’s wife gave a reading at the ceremony. Auther told Weindl that he would return the laptop after he removed all of his son’s files, programs, and games.
Auther first took the laptop to his FBI office and asked his colleagues how to wipe it clean. Apparently they don’t have many cyber experts in the Mariana Islands, because they were unsuccessful. So Auther had to instead take it to a computer repair shop, which cleaned out the old files and allegedly re-imaged the hard drive to return it to its original settings. Auther didn’t tell the shop about eBlaster being on the computer — perhaps feeling a little Big Parent shame — but assumed that it would be wiped along with everything else. He then returned the computer to Weindl….

A week later, Auther was surprised to get an email from eBlaster which had survived the attempts to kill it. SpectorSoft claims that eBlaster is as easy to remove as any other program, such as Microsoft Word, though the company wouldn’t comment on this case or elaborate on exactly how to remove it. I consulted computer geek friends who suggested that a re-imaging should have removed it, but that the computer repair shop may not have done a good job of it.
The eBlaster report revealed that someone was using the computer again, and that the person was much naughtier than Auther’s son had been. The report revealed Internet searches for child pornography and visits to sexually explicit websites, including a few that featured young Asian girls having sex with older men.
“An FBI dad getting email notifications of child porn activity [is] like a gift-wrapped present for a law enforcement official,” noted tech law prof Eric Goldman, who brought the case to my attention.
While Auther wasn’t sure who was using the computer, he became suspicious of Weindl based on the type of porn involved because Weindl had “married a Korean woman, and he now had an 11-year-old Korean stepdaughter,” according to court documents. That seems like the point at which Auther should have opened an official FBI investigation, but that’s not what happened.

Continue reading article at link below:

http://abovethelaw.com/2012/11/fbi-dad-finds-handy-fourth-amendment-workaround-to-bust-school-principal-for-child-porn/#more-209784