Hi Alison,

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Alison Cassidy <cooties@mac.com> wrote:

Hi Barry,

Well, I guess you made Andrew Morrow's wacky mailing list, as I saw your name on the list of dignitaries. Congrats, I think :/

I never, ever reply to these BTW, nor does Mike G. or Sue G.

-- Allie

Do you have any notions of the most appropriate way of dealing with sociopaths like Andrew Morrow, Don Hopkins, and other similarly disturbed individuals?  Will you be mentioning any of this in The 300 Club?

I'll copy Nan Williams on this one, too, as she is considerably more insightful than me on covering stories like this.

Barry

 

On Sep 22, 2008, at 12:34 AM, Andrew Morrow wrote:

Guys:

Apologies as a non-lawyer playing a matchmaker for those legal scholars who have studied the Elizabeth Morgan case, but I am interested in how the Internet might allow greater collaboration on this subject.  There is a new publication by Profs. Carbone and Harris that you will appreciate.

http://ssrn.com/abstract=983770

Family Law Armageddon: The Story of Morgan v. Foretich

Abstract:    
This book chapter tells the story of the contempt case brought against Elizabeth Morgan, a Washington, D.C., doctor imprisoned for her failure to produce her daughter for extended visitation with the ex-husband she accused of sexual abuse. The chapter sets the stage for the proceeding in terms of the shift in custody law in the mid-eighties from the maternal presumption to a preference for shared parenting and the discovery of and almost immediate backlash against allegations of childhood sexual abuse. It also details Morgan's parents' flight with the child to New Zealand and provides an update of what has happened to the law and the parties since the case ended.

I have made some posting on the Internet since the Elizabeth Morgan Act was overturned in 2003. These posting were very amateurish and they tend to wander, but the point in the direction we are headed:

http://www.geocities.com/andrew_morrow62/elizabeth_morgan.htm

I like the Morgan story because it makes you think. She gives you experience by showing how even our top lawmakers sometimes still make avoidable mistakes. US Bills of Attainder that were struck down as such are rare. Very rare:

* Ex Parte Garland, 4 Wallace 333 (1866) - Requirement for admission to practice law in the federal courts of an oath that a lawyer had not taken part in the rebellion was invalid as a bill of attainder.
* Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wallace 277 (1866).
* U.S. v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437 (1965). [1] [2]
* Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S.425 (1977). [3] [4]
* Selective Service Administration v. Minnesota PIRG, 468 U.S. 841 (1984). [5] [6]
* Foretich v. United States 351 F.3d 1198

But just look at something like

http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/1375772

Does not really answer the question: how did it happen in the first place. For that, you have to understand Elizabeth Morgan herself. The same could be said about the Terri Schiavo saga. It is also clear that, had the genders been reversed in those two cases (the fleeing parent or the vegetative hospital patient had been male), then not such a fuss would have been made. It is not about their status as females but rather how we as a society react to their situations.

I am cc'ing several more people and will ramble a little for the remainder of this message:

I strongly encourage each of you to listen to Brad Patrick's talk at the Berkman Center:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2006/01/patrick

Brad's talk asks the listener to think about the implications that Wikipedia or its analogs could have on our society over different periods of time such as 10 or 20 years. It's Brad's talk that really got me thinking about where a massively-detailed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_Reality

based on our nation and our world would take us. I predict that the Internet is destined to become that resource and that Wikipedia's effect will be to be an early example or how to get there faster. If you think about it, the future-world he talks about could happen in 100 years or in 10 years. It could be a world where things that are implemented in molecules, like my DNA, are not private (as opposed to things like money, which are not some pile of gold somewhere but simply a construction of our human minds and our society). Kennedy got the USA to the Moon in ten years. The USA could have taken its time about it and probably still beaten Russia, but we, as a nation, chose a faster approach.

Something like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

is a part of the next step, but it does not yet use enough data based on real American communities to be convincing. I am talking about a presentation where you zoom into the buildings and then into the bodies that you find there and then zom down to the base pairs of the DNA of that person. Oh look, my DNA/SNP information is now on the web:

http://www.geocities.com/andrew_morrow62/genome_c1.txt

(This is the whole file, but it is rather large)
http://www.geocities.com/andrew_morrow62/genome_Andrew_Morrow.zip

Just substitute in my SNP base paris into James D. Watson's fully-sequenced genotype and you would have something very close to my genotype.

http://jimwatsonsequence.cshl.edu/cgi-perl/gbrowse/jwsequence/

With that information, you, in my science-fiction scenario, could grow my identical twin see what I look like without any clothes on. (just kidding, sort of). Now, where was that privacy of mine? We should just be able to start with something like Google Earth and zoom in further: into the buildings, into the bodies, into the DNA and all of of the other atoms that make up the world around us. Of course, not all of such information can be real and true about each molecule can be presented, but any good educated guess about the human knowledge those atoms represent will do.

Oh look, the WikiMedia Foundation HQ seems to be going through its own privacy singularity:

http://www.wikimapia.org/7667160/WMF-International-HQ

All those other buildlings around it are labeld with fairly up-to-date information.

And I notice that Alison Cassidy is still appears to be very happy even after she lost her anonymity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alison

So, if she is so happy now, why was she using the F-word so much here?

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=16801

Oh Alison, your privacy was just a figment of your imagination all along. Anyway, some fake SirFozzie told the world about your domain name around a month ealier:

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php?title=Bureaucratic_Fuck&diff=1997426058&oldid=1997420089

It suppose you were just anticipating a little stage fright as you stepped out on the world stage to join the rest of us.


Here is a YouTube video that provides a great deal of detail about reality. It is presented by caring professionals who provide informative commentary. It is of an autopsy. The video indicates that the deceased probably died of an Amitriptyline overdose.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRAh3Qse-Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wej5Z4dyjDU

At first, it might be a little unsettling, having all tha detail, but it is presented by caring professionals in a neutral context. Watching such a video tells you more about yourself and about reality but we tend to hide such informaion in our modern society. My expectation is that the Internet of the near-future will be Megan's Law website that simply lists all citizens

http://www.registeredoffenderslist.org/megans-law.htm

Such a resource will help to make our large urban space feel more like small towns or villages. In my opinion, the upcoming California's  Researcher Protection Act of 2008 will be enacted, but it is short-sighted. People will simply take the Brandt approach:

http://wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html

and display the information in a neutral fashion anyway. Sam Sloan only this year presened another example of the same issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Sloan

Replies to his Usenet posting provide a link to the relevant Virginia law

http://groups.google.com/group/va.politics/browse_thread/thread/c20926e74ad0d5d2

http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+18.2-186.4

As an interesting aside, in Virginia, it is a Class 6 Felony to list a law enforcement offericer's home address. For now.

I try not to forget the negative and somewhat emotional reactions I got here:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.privacy/browse_thread/thread/c8ae4ffc2494574f

but I did not invent these other web sites; I just recognized how to better organize their combined data. I tried to slightly refine my ideas here:

http://amorrow.wikidot.com/the-coming-privacy-singularity

I take an engineering approach: I am not judging this future, I am just predicting it because it is going to become easier and easier to create and "easy" has a way of trumping lots of other issues. You could argue that we should bring back the Prohibition of alcohol, but it is too easy for individual citizens to make it themselves and as a nation we had a long to time acclimate to its availability. The same will happen with having massive amounts of well-organized information about the world around us on the Internet for the World to browse. With more information about buidlings and bodies, we will figure out how to make our world even safer and more stable for the next generation. We might have to acclimate to it, but it will be the only worldview that some future generation will ever know and they will look back on us and worder what the fuss was all about. It is not really such a bad new world. It is just different. Some things are easy that did not used to be so easy. When a 10-year-old can do it without much effort, we will make it not illegal anymore. In a free society, once intelligent people have more and better-organized information about the world around them, they are not just going to agree to dumb themselves down again. It is very easy to make the world dumber but intelligent people recognize that such actions are a step backwards.

Again, I listened to Brad Patrick and asked myself the question: Where as a nation and as a society are we going? I really do care because I have a teenaged daughter and I want that world to provide more information while stilll being safe and stable for her and all of the next generation.

Andrew Morrow

Barry

--
The Process of Enlightenment Works In Mysterious Plays.