I pre-ordered Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record, his autobiographical memoir of how he came to be – well, what did he become? Is he a traitor? Or a hero? Such is the confusing character of our times that I could see, prior to diving into the book, a case for both perspectives.
Considered from the perspective of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism he is certainly prophetic, if not a hero. Ms. Zuboff lays bare a brave new world of digital surveillance, with Apple, Facebook, Google and the like becoming digital overlords....
October 14, 2019
I understand and accept the syllogism, I really do:
"All men are mortal.
"Mr. X is a man.
"Therefore Mr. X is mortal."
It’s a sing-songy soliloquy.
But substitute the name Warren Eginton for Mr. X and the syllogism will rip your heart out. Judge Eginton, or, simply “The Edge,” or “The Edgemeister,” as he was known to some, was one of the good guys. He presided as a United States District Court Judge in Connecticut for some 50 years before dying this week, at 95.
I had heard he was ill, and meant to go to see him. Cases and...
October 10, 2019
Suppose money were no object: Would you declare in your will that, upon your death, every effort should be made to preserve your body, and, when technology improves, the best reasonable effort should be made to revive you? If you answered in the affirmative, read Neal Stephenson’s Fall or, Dodge in Hell. It just might change your mind.
Richard “Dodge” Forthrast made such a will. When he died abruptly, his body was preserved. Years later, when the time and technology were ripe, his brain was copied, one axon at a time preserved digitally and...
August 8, 2019
We live in dangerous times, and it won’t take much to destroy the accomplishments of generations. This much is clear after the mass shootings last week in El Paso, Texas. Twenty people were killed, and 26 more wounded, by a young white male. It was an act of domestic terrorism by a white supremacist, people were quick to assert.
Not so fast.
Although police are still investigating, the narrative arising from the killing is clear enough. Twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius of Allen, Texas, is suspected of driving 10 hours from his home to El Paso, tucked along the border with...
August 4, 2019
May 15, 2019
Let me put my cards out on the table: I represent Alex Jones and Infowars. I despise efforts to silence him because his speech discomfits the...
February 17, 2019
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian with a love for the long view, as in where did we, as a species, come from, the topic of his...
June 28, 2019
How do you represent those people?
The question is common enough for criminal defense lawyers. In the past few weeks,...
January 3, 2019
I like to say the following to folks after one of my all-too-frequent displays of bad temper: “I’m sorry. I’m in AA. That outburst...
February 20, 2019
Gov. Ned Lamont lives in a bubble, and that bubble is impenetrable. I know this because he was once a potential juror on a criminal case...
February 20, 2019
I suppose it was inevitable that Connecticut’s Attorney General would sign on to California’s federal lawsuit seeking to block president...