Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Malaysian Airliner Shot Down in Ukraine

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Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (cross-listed as KLM Flight 4103), a Boeing 777 carrying 298 passengers and crew, has been shot down over eastern Ukraine. There are no survivors. The plane was en-route from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was struck by a Russian-built Buk surface-to-air missile while flying at its 33,000 foot cruise altitude. It crashed thirty miles from the Russian border near the village of Hrabove. The crash site is in a contested region claimed by both Ukraine and the Donetsk People’s Republic, an independent state proclaimed by separatists in the region allied with Russia.

Leaders of the Ukrainian government, the Russian government, and the Donetsk separatists have all denied responsibility for the attack, but it now appears that the separatists—with or without Russian support—downed the plane. Separatists have shot down several Ukrainian cargo planes and fighters in recent weeks, and are also known to have obtained a Buk missile launcher following the capture of a military base in the region. Both Russia and Ukraine also operate Buk missile launchers. Around the same time that Flight 17 went down, separatists claimed to have shot down a cargo plane nearby, but that claim was quickly retracted when it became clear that a civilian airliner had been hit.

It has been reported that Donetsk officials have so-far refused to allow Ukraine or international investigators access to the crash site. There are also unconfirmed reports that the plane’s voice and data recorders will be transported to Moscow, Russia.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has prohibited U.S. airlines from flying through certain areas of Ukraine’s airspace since April due to concerns about violence and instability (FDC NOTAM 4/7667). The same FAA notice recommended that pilots exercise ‘extreme caution’ if they choose to fly elsewhere in Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia have been embroiled in a military crisis since Russian troops invaded and occupied the Crimean peninsula earlier this year. Russia has since annexed Crimea, but most of the international community does not recognize the legitimacy of the annexation. Fighting continues in other areas between separatists who desire to join with Russia and the Ukrainian military.

In March of this year, another Boeing 777 operated by Malaysia Airlines—Flight 370—disappeared shortly after departing from Kuala Lumpur en-route to Beijing, China. There were 239 passengers and crew aboard. That plane is presumed crashed in the Indian Ocean with all lives lost. Despite the most expansive search in history, no crash site or debris has yet been found.

There have been a number of airline shoot-down incidents in the past. In three notable incidents, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet (Russian) forces in 1983, Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by the U.S. Navy in 1988, and Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 was shot down during a Ukrainian missile exercise in 2001.

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Religious Liberty

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The United States Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that First Amendment religious liberty rights apply to certain closely-held businesses as specified under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Companies like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties, two of the businesses that brought the case, may not be forced to provide contraceptive and abortion services in violation of company leaders’ conscience. The majority opinion states, in part, that, “Protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations . . . protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.”

Under RFRA, the federal government may not take any action that ‘substantially burdens’ the exercise of religion unless it is the least restrictive means of serving a ‘compelling government interest.’ The law was intentionally crafted in a way that included for-profit corporations.

The majority opinion points to the ‘accommodation’ that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has made for religious non-profits, whereby the organizations are permitted to opt-out of providing insurance coverage for morally objectionable services, but the government then provides those services through other means. “HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available when the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.”

Typical of the Roberts court, the ruling is narrowly crafted and leaves many broader questions about the contraceptive mandate and collective religious liberty unanswered. For example, having found that the HHS mandate violates RFRA, the court did not even address the underlying First Amendment issues in play. Thus, Congress need only repeal or amend the RFRA if they wish to send this all back into the courts again. In addition, the ruling applies only to ‘closely held’ corporations owned by religious individuals, specifically excluding large, publicly held corporations. And finally, the court does not address the constitutionality of the aforementioned ‘accommodation,’ which is being challenged in other cases working their way through the system.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. Kennedy also filed a separate concurring opinion. A dissenting opinion was filed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan concurred with all but one part of Ginsburg’s opinion.

‘No-Nonsense Weather’ Will Return: A Preview

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No-Nonsense Weather
No-Nonsense Weather

You may remember No-Nonsense Weather, the weather application that I built for the defunct Palm WebOS mobile platform. I discontinued it when Hewlett-Packard announced that they were killing WebOS, but I had always planned on bringing it back someday for other platforms. I even worked up a proof-of-concept in early 2011, bringing the bulk of the code of the WebOS app straight over into a jQuery Mobile framework that would let it run in the browser (locally). The plan was to port that into an app for iOS, Android, and whatever else.

Not long after I got that proof-of-concept running—and even got it running as an Android app on the Motorola Droid 2 I had at the time—I decided to shelve the project. Web-based apps performed pretty poorly at the time, and I began to realize that the app also had some serious technical shortcomings. First, the app’s JavaScript code needed to communicate directly with U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) data sources. This worked fine when it was running as an app, but meant it couldn’t be easily ported to a web-based system (due to cross-site scripting issues). It also meant the app would crash and burn if the NWS systems were having downtime.

The whole idea of No-Nonsense Weather was to give users all of the important weather information they wanted with none of the extraneous crap. No blogs, no clutter, no giant, pretty pictures . . . just the weather. And although there are a million sites out there that provide weather information, and a million apps on Android and iOS to do the same, I still haven’t found any that I like as much as I liked my old weather app (but maybe I’m biased). Many of these apps are really pretty to look at, but require you to tap or click all over the place to get the info you’re looking for. Some have really obnoxious, in-your-face advertising. Some have so much information and clutter that you can’t find what you really want. And some go to the opposite extreme, clean and simple but with so little actual weather information that it’s practically worthless.

Read more . . .

Iraq’s Failure Isn’t Our Failure

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Iraqi and Syrian Civil Wars (Haghal Jagul [CC0])
Iraqi and Syrian Civil Wars (Haghal Jagul [CC0])
Back in September 2011, as the U.S. military involvement in Iraq was beginning to wind down, I wrote an epic review of the Iraq war and the persistent popular misconceptions about it. Coming in at about 6,000 words, The War in Iraq: Ten Myths remains the most complete overview of what I believe about the war, why I believe it was legally justified, and why I continued (and still continue) to believe it was the right thing to do. As I explained there, and in many other posts before it, that doesn’t mean I always agreed with the way we went about things in Iraq. We made many strategic errors . . . some that we can only see now with 20/20 hindsight, but far too many that we should have seen ahead of time.

The insistence that Iraq remain intact and that its colonial-era borders were non-negotiable is one of the most obvious mistakes. Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship was the only thing holding Iraq’s various ethnic and religious groups together. There was no reason to try to force them to stay together after the dictator was gone. We should have enlisted the help of Iraq’s neighbors—Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey—to assist in the war effort, serve as the primary occupiers of the areas most ethnically linked to themselves, and possibly annex those territories if approved by its people in an open, internationally-monitored referendum. Much of the post-war violence and terrorism in Iraq could have been held in-check by occupiers that were seen as local ‘friendlies’ and coreligionists, rather than as infidel crusaders from America and Europe. Instead, these neighboring countries stood quietly on the sidelines or, worse, actively encouraged sectarian violence. After all, they knew it would be our problem, not theirs.

Read more . . .

Reset the Net

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Reset the Net

One year ago today, thanks to Edward Snowden, we first learned that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was engaged in a massive domestic surveillance program. The program collects information about everybody—whether or not they are suspected of any wrongdoing—in a sort of worldwide ‘fishing expedition’ that plainly violates our Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. It targets countless innocents, including citizens of the United States at home on American soil, which is impermissible except after a war-time suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus and a formal imposition of martial law—as I have explained before.

Despite an intense public outcry, the United States Congress declined to terminate the illegal program. A bill that would have de-funded the NSA’s broad domestic surveillance program (without affecting the NSA’s ability to execute duly-issued search warrants or perform legally-acceptable international surveillance) failed 205-217 in the House of Representatives. I have posted a list of the 217 Congressmen who violated their oath of office, and each and every one of them deserves to be thrown out of office in November.

Today, the NSA continues collecting everybody’s phone records, and continues monitoring everybody’s Internet activities. We haven’t been able to stop them through the courts or the political process (yet), but we can still take steps to improve our security and protect our privacy from those who would invade it—and not just the NSA, but also hackers, Internet providers, and others who might have an interest in watching what you’re doing. The Internet has built-in security features that can help protect us, but we have to make an effort to start using them!

Off on a Tangent is proud to join with Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Google, Mozilla, and countless other organizations and web sites that are working to Reset the Net. We are improving privacy protections, directing visitors to useful privacy tools, and generally ‘making noise’ about civil liberties, Internet freedom, and the right to be secure in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

Here on Off on a Tangent, as part of today’s world-wide campaign, I am taking an important step to help protect your privacy. From now on, all content on this site will be served over a secure HTTPS connection. What this means is that somebody snooping on your activities—whether they be the NSA or your run-of-the-mill cyber-criminal—won’t be able to see anything more than that you visited the IP address (and possibly the domain name) associated with my site. They will not be able to see what particular pages you visited, or what particular content travels back and forth between you and me. I encourage you to use HTTPS connections everywhere you possibly can as you move around the Internet; the HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin can help automate it for you. More advanced users may also want to consider secure proxy services that add an extra layer of privacy and security.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.