privacy positioning

With the Citizens United decision so much in the news lately, it seems like the Supreme Court hasn’t gotten a lot right in recent years, but yesterday they scored a victory for personal privacy and a blow to our culture of digital surveillance when they decided that the use of warrantless GPS data by law enforcement officials violates the Fourth Amendment.

It’s a powerful but still limited judgment, though. Reports the Washington Post:

The unanimous opinion is relatively limited. It applies only to the placement and use of a GPS device that had to be attached to the suspect’s car. The justices said the device was an intrusion onto the suspect’s property, even if the car was being driven on public roads. The opinion doesn’t say anything about what would happen if the government were able to track the car through other electronic means, without ever touching the vehicle.

“The present case does not require us to answer that question,” writes Justice Antonin Scalia, succinctly leaving the matter for other poor schmucks to handle.

But it’s a big question. As technology becomes more advanced, law enforcement is increasingly collecting information from video cameras, cellphone signals, license plate readers and the like to build a picture of people’s activity, even without physically intruding on a suspect’s property.

That said, the justices appear eager to engage the larger issues when the moment presents itself.

What’s really interesting, though, is that a majority of justices on the court seem prepared to tackle that question themselves, should they ever be presented with a case.

In a concurring opinion joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, Samuel Alito writes that “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy” – an idea that has nothing to do with whether anyone physically touches a suspect’s property.

Sonia Sotomayor seems to go even further, suggesting that the court may need to consider something called the “third party doctrine,” the idea that if a person knowingly gives data to a third party, they lose their Fourth Amendment protections for that information. “This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks,” she writes.

And even Scalia says “it may be” that electronic surveillance “is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”; he just doesn’t think the court needs to tackle that in the Jones case.

Even Scalia got this one at least a little bit right. As they say, even a broken clock tells the truth twice a day.

aurora man

Dig this crazy photo of a human face appearing in the glow of the Northern Lights. It was snapped by Jonathan Tucker in Yukon, Canada, using a thirty-second camera exposure. Almost as cool as that face in the storm clouds, am I right?

tribute’s end

After more than six consecutive decades, Baltimore’s mysterious Poe Toaster appears to have hung up his cloak. I first wrote about the annual graveyard visitor back in 2009:

For years now, this day and the occasion of Poe’s birth have found tribute in a fittingly peculiar and elusive tradition.  Each year, as the clock tower strikes midnight over the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, a mysterious figure cloaked in black, face hooded, carrying a silver-headed cane approaches the church yard and enters the burial ground. 

According to witnesses, the figure wanders the lonesome rows of headstones to Poe’s grave, there opening a bottle of cognac and raising a single toast to the poet himself.  At the ritual’s completion, the visitor lays three black roses at the foot of Poe’s stone.  Though the significance of the roses remains unknown, they are thought to represent Poe, his young bride, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm, all interred on the same grounds.  After laying the roses, the toaster can be seen quietly vacating the cemetery, vanishing into the night.

The curious homage has become an annual tradition, known to locals and Poe enthusiasts the world over.  According to media reports, the visits began in 1949 on the 100^thanniversary of Edgar’s death.  Though the identity of the toaster remains unknown, he has left occasional missives alongside the cognac and roses, including one in the early eighties which cryptically read, “Edgar, I haven’t forgotten you.”

But the year after that writing, the Toaster failed to appear on the night of Poe’s birthday. So too in 2011, and then again last night. Reports the Baltimore Sun:

Early Thursday morning, a tired Jeff Jerome, curator of the city’s Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, “officially” pronounced the Poe-toasting tradition over. Having spent the night inside Westminster Hall, awaiting the toaster’s arrival, Jerome declared that the furtive stranger’s poignant tribute would be left nevermore.

“I more or less resigned myself that it was over with before tonight,” said Jerome, who has been curator of the Poe House — and de facto keeper of the Poe flame — since 1979. “What I’ll miss most is the excitement of waiting to see if he’s going to show up.”

As he had for the past 15 years or so, Jerome spent the night inside the former church on West Fayette Street, just yards away from Poe’s grave, with a select group of friends and acquaintances. Outside, a few dozen fans — including visitors from Rhode Island, Chicago, California and even Russia — held their own vigil. But the toaster, whose identity has remained a mystery since at least the 1940s, never made an appearance.

parallel pictures

Unbreakable starring Paul Newman? Drive with James Dean? Imagine, if you will, a strange parallel dimension in which many of your favorite films belong to another era. Oh, what bizarro fun could have been…

the composer and his accomplice

The LA Times has a short and sweet glimpse at John Williams’ and Steven Spielberg’s longtime pairing. The two have collaborated across four decades now, with Williams scoring 25 of Spielberg’s 26 features, excepting only The Color Purple, for which Quincy Jones wrote the music.

The “undisputed elder statesman of Hollywood composers” has been nominated for 45 Oscars and taken home five statuettes. When he’s next nominated, he will be second only to Walt Disney for the all-time record of total nominations.

Below is a great and oft-cited anecdote about the creation of perhaps Williams’ most famous score:

It was the score to Spielberg’s second film, “Jaws,” that cemented the partnership. Spielberg had used Williams’ atonal music from the Robert Altman movie “Images” as a temporary soundtrack while editing “Jaws,” and he expected Williams to deliver similarly cerebral music for his shark movie. The composer, however, had other ideas.

“I fiddled around with the idea of creating something that was very … brainless,” Williams said. “Like the shark. All instinct…. Meaning something could be very repetitious, very visceral, and grab you in your gut, not in your brain. Remember, Steven didn’t have the computer shark. He only had his rubber ducky, so the simple idea of that bass ostinato, just repeating those two notes and introduce a third note when you don’t expect it and so on. It could be something you could play very softly, which would indicate that the shark is far away when all you see is water. Brainless music that gets louder and gets closer to you, something is gonna swallow you up.”

“When Johnny played me the ‘Jaws’ score on the piano, I thought he was pulling my leg,” Spielberg said. “And he played it again. And then he played it until I stopped laughing. I had a more esoteric idea musically in mind. He said, ‘The sophisticated approach you would like me to take isn’t the approach you took with the film I just experienced. This is a huge, over-the-top pirate movie.’”

Spielberg deferred to Williams; the score won Williams his second Oscar; and 37 years later, that two-note theme is still a musical shorthand for mortal danger.

the full moon primary

Through some quirk of scheduling either human or divine, today’s New Hampshire primary happens to coincide with the full moon. Wouldn’t it be cool if ol’ Mitt, the inevitable winner, went full werewolf on the stump?

Might be the only thing that could liven up such a dull day of voting.

Just imagine that perfectly coiffed head of hair bristling into beastly fur…

I can see it now: Willard Mitt – or Wooly Mitten, as my wife has taken to calling him – stops into some Manchester diner to press the flesh with the voting public as they warm up over a hot cup of black coffee. But it’s just as night has begun to darken the cold winter sky, and – KAPOW! – Wooly Mitten transforms into a befanged alter ego, ripping diners apart and exploding into the streets.

Oh, what a sight that Were-Mitt would be.

But I’m sure he would never change his colors so monstrously. The man is nothing if not authentic.

luz fosca

Luz Fosca; John Swope, 1939

the new santorum

After Rick Santorum’s eleventh-hour surge to essentially tie Mitt Romney for victory in the Iowa caucuses, today might be an appropriate moment to reflect on one of the more repellent facets of his political CV: the man’s blatant and troubling anti-gay attitudes.

It was these that led Dan Savage, relationship/sex columnist and co-founder of the “It Gets Better” campaign, to inaugurate a new meaning of the word “Santorum” into the popular vernacular. It’s a move that’s given the former Pennsylvania senator a “Google problem.”

View Savage’s new definition at your own risk, then if you’re feeling bold, drop his “Santorum” into polite conversation as the opportunity arises.

locavore publishing

In an effort to stem the loss of sales to Amazon and other online retailers, more and more independent bookstores are turning toward publishing in what’s being described as a locavore twist on the book business.

Writes Steve Almond for Salon:

As publishers, indies enjoy a few distinct advantages over the competition. First, they can emphasize titles of local interest by local writers. Second, they can showcase the books in their shops. Third, because of advances in printing, they can bring books to market more quickly than traditional publishers. Just as important, when an independent bookstore sells a copy of one of their own titles, they collect all the profits, rather than a sliver. Consider it a poor man’s version of vertical integration.

And after all, there’s a venerable lineage for such indie imprints. As a friend of Almond’s notes in the piece, it was Paris’ famed Shakespeare & Company who originally published Ulysses, or San Francisco’s City Lights that first brought us “Howl.” 

Could we be witnessing the rise of similar indie operations? Could be an intriguing way to get the locally owned bookshop back on the “must visit” list.

happiest of new years