Every once in a while, someone in the blogosphere makes a move that must inexplicably seem like a stroke of genius until someone else, usually either the young, old or infirm, tells them they’re nuts.  Just such a move was announced by the  Lawyerist,  Aaron Street’s attempt to pretend he has something to offer new lawyers who know less than he does.

This week, Lawyerist acquired Bitter Lawyer. We are excited to revive a great humor website, and we have big plans for its future.

In case this isn’t clear, the Lawyerist “acquired” a dead website.  You wouldn’t know it from the  Alexa blog rankings on Avvo, which put Bitter Lawyer in fourth place as I type (showing yet again why Alexa is goofy and a meaningless metric), but it’s been defunct since September, 2010 (as far as I can tell). 

If you never bothered with Bitter Lawyer before, it was a humor blog based on the world view of young unemployed lawyers who hate and blame the world for their personal misery.  From that point of view, it was very funny at first.  And then, like most attempts at humor, it grew strained and forced and unfunny.  The problem with one trick pony humor is that once the joke is told, it’s told.

In the past, I’ve described content on the Lawyerist as a mile wide and a millimeter deep.  I’m not just being kind when I say that.  No reader leaves the Lawyerist without being diminished as a sentient being.  Still, Aaron and his pal Sam Glover have tried to create something to pay for their Cheetos habit, and I give them credit for trying.

But the purchase of a dead website is a novel approach in the search for the nadir of the blawgosphere.  Bitter lawyer petered out because the joke got boring.  Other attempts at legal humor have similarly proven that it’s hard to be funny, and harder still to maintain it.  Not everybody can be Kevin Underhill, whose  Lowering the Bar has taken legal humor seriously for years, and is fresh and funny with every new post.  There hasn’t been another blawg capable of maintaining legal humor for more than a few posts.

The price for the acquisition was not disclosed, but confidential sources tell me it was nine dollars (US), six peanut M&Ms, three marbles (including one aggie) and a coupon for a half price latte at Starbucks.  If Aaron was a better negotiator, he could have kept four of the M&Ms for himself.

What will the Lawyerist gang do with Bitter Lawyer now that it owns the place?  Being funny isn’t something one buys.  Even if you can’t help but laugh at the Lawyerist content now, the humor is in the fact that it’s offered as serious advice for the rookie lawyer, with such gems as “never walk into court with your fly open or shirt tucked into your underpants, as it makes you look unprofessional.”  And it’s adoring fans find this advice critical in their mission to become filthy rich, successful lawyers.  Okay, maybe I exaggerate.  A bit.  But I didn’t make this up, Sam Glover’s how to start a law firm for under $3000, because new lawyers don’t need to waste money on legal research.

So why should anyone care that some vapid blog has purchased a defunct blog?  Because  Kevin O’Keefe posited that the blawgosphere is the new mentor for young lawyers.  Keith Lee at  An Associate’s Mind explains why this doesn’t work (and I plan to add his blog to my blogroll as soon as I can remember my new password).  And if you’ve read any of the small law columns at  Above the Law recently, where the  latest proposition is that lawyers don’t need business cards anymore, as they’ve been replaced by giving out twitter names, there will be no doubt that Keith is right.

And yet there are far more new lawyers who take comfort in the simplistic drivel at the Lawyerist than at the substantive blawgs about which Kevin speaks.  They also wrap themselves up in the dark humor of blaming everyone but themselves for their ill-conceived choice of becoming lawyers, the crux of Bitter Lawyer’s humor.

As absurd as this acquisition may seem on its surface, it reflects a far more sinister problem confronting the legal profession, that the next generation of lawyers prefers easy answers, someone to blame and nothing to interfere with happy hour.  Aaron Street is betting his M&Ms on it, and I’m betting that Aaron has a better feel for what new lawyers want than I do.

Many readers here take issues like the criminal justice system very seriously, appreciating that we hold people’s lives in our hands and have a duty to handle them with the utmost care and zeal.  The reason you should care about these collateral issues, the ones that don’t describe the latest outrage or show a video of another cop beating another person for breathing wrong, is that these are the next generation of hands into which lives are commended.  If you don’t connect the dots, we’re doomed to suffer young lawyers who think Bitter Lawyer is funny and everyone is to blame for their misery but themselves.

I would like to wish Aaron and Sam the best with their new acquisition.  I would like to, but I really hope it dies a quick and painful death, and that they put their efforts into a decent used car lot the next time they feel compelled to find a business venture. 

The  WSJ Law Blog posts about the impending cuts to public defense, because there was all that fat in the budget to pay for PDs sitting in their oak paneled offices eating bon bons in the spare time.  The combination of the populist ideology of sharing the pain and the perpetual issue with the public’s prioritization of indigent defense falling slightly below limos for lesser public officials makes this a gimme.

Public defenders maintain that they should be insulated from budget cuts for two reasons, the first being that they were sorely underfunded before the recession came along.  Secondly, they point to the fact that states have a duty, enshrined in Gideon v. Wainwright, to provide indigent criminal defendants with the right to counsel.

[Head of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, Edward] Monahan told the WSJ that public defenders offices in the state already have average caseloads in excess of 450 per lawyer and that, with budget cuts, lawyers will have to represent more than 500 clients at any given time.

While heads were  spinning in outrage that an employee of the government of the United States of America was charged with the duty of rubbing her hands over the body of a six year old girl, we may have missed the point.  From the Washington Post :

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a leading critic of the agency’s passenger screening policies, called the incident “another example of mistreatment of an innocent American at the hands of TSA.”

Last fall, agency officials began reviewing whether to move beyond TSA’s current “one-size fits all” passenger screening system, “while maintaining a high level of security,” he said in an e-mail.

Part of the review includes finding ways to “improve the screening experience for low-risk populations, such as younger passengers,” Kimball said. Significant changes could be announced this year, he said.

Pistole has said he is considering the concept of a “trusted traveler” program, which would speed passengers through airport security checkpoints who are willing to provide detailed personal information in advance.

It seems in my outrage that I forgot all about the “trusted traveler” program.  That’s the funny thing about being outraged, it clouds the mind and impairs the thought processes necessary to fully analyze a situation. 

It doesn’t mean that the theater of the absurd created by the touching of this child was deliberate, part of a carefully crafted scheme to generate sufficient outrage that people would become more willing, more pliable, to accept a choice that gives the government something it’s always wanted from the public, unfettered access to a private information with our blessing.

It seems that there will be three choices offered people who take issue with the TSA’s inappropriate touching of people, young or old.  The first is a choice they expect few to consider rational, to forego flying.  We’re not a nation inclined toward self-sacrifice these days, and getting somewhere by stagecoach fails to satisfy our need for immediate gratification. 

So given the sense of need for protection from the terrorists, carefully nurtured for a decade and part of our national psyche, the TSA has raised the threat level to its max.  When our mothers, our daughters, our infirm and ourselves, reach the point where the confluence of fear and disgust can no longer be tolerated, there will be a relief valve, and third choice, an option where no uniformed person will touch our genitalia, our children’s genitalia.  And still we will be safe.

Consider the thought that went into the name, trusted traveler.  Trust.  Isn’t trust a wonderful thing, the characteristic that we all strive to achieve in ourselves and seek out in others?  Trust is good, so much better than molesting a child.

And the TSA won’t be offering Sophie any other choices.

By now, I would expect anyone inclined to spend any time in the blawgosphere to be fully familiar with  the video of the TSA enhanced pat down of a six year old girl.  A few thoughts on what happened.

1.  No reasonable person can watch this without thinking it’s absurd.
2.  The touching of this six year old girl by any person not in uniform would have resulted in prosecution.
3.  The message to children that strangers and adults are not to touch their “private parts” is dead.
4.  The TSA is not only untroubled by this video, but asserts that this was a proper exercise of authority and standard operating procedure.
5.  In response to this video going viral, Blogger Bob at the TSA Blog posted about puppies.
6.  Had I been the parent of this child, chances are exceptionally good that I would be in custody.

Kevin Underhill, whose posts are about the humor to be found in the law, is no longer laughing. He writes:

In any other context, if you saw a stranger doing that to a six-year-old girl, wouldn’t you kick that person’s ass? Wouldn’t you at least try? Even at some risk to yourself? I bet you would. So why do we walk by when the government does it? Have we really become such cowards that we are willing to put up with six-year-old girls being groped because we think otherwise we can’t be 99.999% safe?

We are cowards to allow anyone to touch a six year old girl this way.  We are a nation of cowards.  Our government has authorized people to inappropriately touch little girls and we stand there and allow it.  It’s acceptable because our government tells us it’s “standard operating procedure.”  Our government has made molesting little girls its official policy, and we are docile and watch as it happens, afraid to scream “enough.”

We are the home of neither the free nor the brave.  We are cowards.

My guess is that someone made a clerical mistake.  They meant to call some renown biophysicist named Schechter and dialed the wrong number.  As it happens, they reached my old friend Marvin Schechter instead and invited him to be on the commission formed by the National Academy of Sciences that produced the report, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward.” 

Remember the report?  It blew open the doors on most forensic disciplines used regularly, and for generations, to conclusively prove defendant’s guilty of a wide variety of crimes.  And after the party, was largely forgotten. 

No tweedy Ph.D.,  Marvin Schechter is a criminal defense lawyer, and peculiarly suited to the task of presented by Congress to the National Academy of Sciences, and similarly suited to being an evangelist for the past-due demise of bad evidence masquerading as forensic science.  He’s enough of a geek to stay awake and pay attention through the voluminous testimony presented to the NAS, and more than enough of a criminal defense lawyer to dedicate himself to making us remember that he suffered that testimony for our benefit. 

Speaking yesterday at the Nassau Criminal Bar Association, I had the opportunity to hear Marvin’s pitch.  Despite his geekiness, Marvin can be a very entertaining and enthusiastic speaker, but it belies the substance of his message: defendants are still being convicted on the basis of phony forensic science every day.



For anyone unfamiliar with the report, it attacks a wide swathe of what has long been taken for granted as true, that fingerprints, toolmarks, bitemarks, blood splatter, trace evidence, arson analysis, have developed as disciplines by law enforcement without any of the standards, protocols or methods demanded of any other scientific proof. These captive disciplines, run from top to bottom by law enforcement, with the manufacture of their own accreditation agencies, professional associations and journals to bolster their existence and validity, are little more than convenient guesses and wildly baseless assertions of accuracy.

The problem, as Marvin pointed out, is that this evidence has been held admissible forever.  The commission went back to the beginning and found that on the scanty, unproven claims, carefully packaged to sound authentic but shockingly vapid to real scientists, judges adopted forensics disciplines. 

The best explanation for how this fiasco was allowed to happen is that lawyers and judges are particularly clueless when it comes to science, which largely explains how they ended up in law school.  Putative experts talked scientific jargon, everyone got bored and the next thing you know, fingerprints were conclusive proof. 

The problem now, and the strongest argument available to those who defend the admissibility of forensic evidence, is that it’s become embedded in the public mythology of science and they dare any judge to be the posterboy for tossing out proof that’s put defendants in prison for 100 years. 

Nonetheless, Marvin contends that it’s happening.  Just slowly.  And with judges like Nancy Gertner (ripping the failure of defense counsel to challenge Billy, the magical arson dog, in United States v. Hebshie), who unfortunately won’t be around on the federal bench much longer as she’s going to Harvard come September.  The problem, of course, is that while there may be a case here and there where a judge is bold enough to call out the prosecution’s proof, conduct a Daubert/Kumho Tire hearing and proclaim a forensic discipline the nonsense it is, it’s hardly the tidal wave one would have expected following the NAS report.

This report should have sounded the death knoll for phony forensic evidence, and judges across the country should have been outraged at having been played for fools by law enforcement all these years.  It hasn’t happened.  Not even scandals of the magnitude of  North Carolina’s crime lab have woken up sleeping judges.  The prosecution was right, judges don’t want to be the one to toss out 100 years of facile evidence and great CSI television.

The criminal defense bar, on the other hand, has yet to do its part in bringing this sordid chapter in phony science to a close, failing to educate itself on the myriad failings, lack of scientific methods, application flaws, inherent bias and internal self-dealing of the experts.  While judges are charged with being the gatekeepers, and have let in any piece of garbage that tends to incriminate a defendant, the defense has been less than vigorous in its challenge to forensic evidence, presenting motions that provide strong, perhaps incontrovertible, reasons why this beloved, long-standing evidence is phony now and always has been.

It’s hard work.  It’s daunting.  It takes time to learn, prepare, and pursue arguments against the use of evidence that we can fairly presume judges to ignore as they continue to do as they’ve always done, turn a blind eye to the fact that defendants are being convicted based on the mythology that’s grown around such sacred cows as fingerprints.  But if we don’t do it, do it continually and pursue it even though it may well be futile in any particular case, then we are complicit in the conviction of defendants based upon phony evidence.  Let’s face it, judges have not, and will not, seize upon the inadequacy of time-honored evidence of guilt on their own.  We need to push, and persist in pushing, if there is any hope of change.

For those who haven’t read the NAS report, which is a great educational tool for any lawyer who must argue a motion to preclude or cross-examine some phony prosecution expert, it can be purchased from the NAS.  And should Marvin be speaking in your neck of the woods, take the time to go.  It would be a shame for the NAS’s mistake of putting a criminal defense lawyer on the commission to go to waste. 

I’ve long been a big fan of Carolyn Elefant, and saw her as one of the few honest voices among the cheerleaders at their self-proclaimed cutting edge of the future of law.  But her participation in Ignite Law, and the glow of good feelings among the iToy apostles, may have colored her view.  Just a little.

Carolyn writes about the “big news” out of Chicago.

Perhaps the most surprising piece news from last night’s Ignite Law was Jay Shepherd’s  announcement that he’s shutting down his firm to focus full time on his business, Prefix LLC which teaches lawyers how to price knowledge.

This isn’t a post about whether those who leave the law are better or worse than those who remain. Instead, more generally, I wonder about the implications of the loss of energy and talent and teachers from our profession. Knowledge once imparted through the ages as mentorship has now been product-ized and commoditized.

Yet at the same time, informal mentorship can’t keep pace with rapid changes in the profession, or offer the same level of advice – nor can mentors develop products and new technologies that help solo and small firms advance. Perhaps in fact, the whole concept of mentorship doesn’t even make sense in an age of new ideas where lawyers may be better off buying the advice that they need instead of relying on tips from colleagues. Selling mentorship makes our profession a far less collegial and generous place – but perhaps it’s more effective and efficient.

Carolyn’s fear, that mentorship is dead, is confused and confusing.  To the vast number of practicing attorneys, the Jay Shepherds of the internet are completely unrelated to anything remotely resembling the practice of law.  At best, he’s a one trick techno-pony, and to those of us in the criminal defense niche, the trick is as old as it gets.  To lawyers who aren’t consumed by the significance of every shiny new toy developed by Apple, the notion that Shepherd’s flight from law to consulting reflects a mentoring issue at all is ludicrous.

If lawyer mentoring is the topic, then look to a lawyer.  Jeff Gamso, for example.  He’s a lawyer. He practices law.  He has no tricks to sell and he’s not about to announce the opening of Gamso-r-Us at the local strip mall.  Instead, he speaks to  the stuff lawyers do in the course of practicing law.

Earlier today, on a strange legal listserv, I’ve been looking at for a few months, a new lawyer (or fairly new or something, it was less than clear) wrote this.

I am on the precipice of hanging out a shingle. I’m wondering two things:

(1) What is the minimum I should get done before I start. I.e. does it matter if I have no marketing up via websites or even business cards? What is absolutely necessary before you start other than office space and malpractice insurance. 

(2) My background is in civil law. However, even after three years, I don’t feel as though I am really equipped to do that over many other areas of law and I’ve been thinking about opening as a criminal practice but open to civil litigation. Is this too broad? Do I need to focus on one area? I have no background in criminal law, but my deepest desire is to get trial work and I feel that is the area of law best suited for the experience.

After three years in civil law, he’s not “really equipped” to do that work by himself.  But criminal? even with “no background”? The only issue is whether to limit himself to death penalty work or represent whatever sort of bad guy walks in the door.  Oh, and whether he needs a website and business cards before he starts.

This ought to be a matter close to Carolyn’s heart, having to do with a lawyer on the “precipice of hanging out a shingle.”  Carolyn, if you don’t know, is probably the most credible voice for solo practitioners in the blawgosphere, having written the premier instruction manual, Solo By Choice. 

My bet is that the listserv to which Gamso refers is the ABA flavor, SoloSez, populated by a curious mix of lawyers in solo practice, lawyers who want to be in solo practice, and people who may have practiced law at one point or another who now have an agenda to flog or a service to sell to the uninitiated.

Gamso has nothing to sell, yet he apparently bothers to read the listserv.  Despite there being nothing in it for him, except the likelihood of argument, aggravation and angst, he informed the inchoate solo criminal defense lawyer wannabe that he was headed down the road to perdition.  No doubt, he won a fan for his sound advice, particularly since the questioner didn’t ask whether he should leap blindly into a practice area where he had neither competence nor experience, but whether he needed business cards before doing so.

Compare Gamso’s advice with what someone like Jay Shepherd would have said.   Don’t worry about experience or competence kid; just glom onto some high profile case even if you don’t get paid for it, bluff your way through, and make sure the newspapers spell your name right.  What if you lose?  Then try it again, and just keep trying until you get lucky and fool them all.

The loss of this advice isn’t a flaw of mentoring, but a feature.  At least if we’re talking about mentoring lawyers.  If there are people out there who are foolish enough to pay someone for their snake oil, despite the readily available sound advice of someone like Jeff Gamso, so be it.  Gamso as done what he can to mentor young lawyers, to guide them toward responsibility and competence.  He can’t force them to ignore the prophets of profit.

But don’t bemoan those who flee the practice of law to sell front row seats to their tricks.  These aren’t the mentors that lawyers need.  There is no “rapidly changing pace” of the law, but only of some of the tools used to perform the fundamental functions of practicing law. 

Mentors are still here.  Mentors don’t “develop products or new technologies.”  Mentors don’t confuse an iPad with competence.  Mentors don’t claim to have discovered magic bullets that others have used for generations.  At least not lawyer mentors. 

The problem, Carolyn, is that if you are troubled by Shepherd’s decision to sell his new trick,  you’re looking for the wrong mentors.  At least if your concern is about mentors for lawyers.

About a dozen times since I started Simple Justice, someone showed up to argue a point and substantiated their credibility with the statement, I write for Huffington Post.  The earth started to move. Angels sang, A bright light from above enveloped my computer.  They were important.

That was then, when people whose self-worth was established through their connection to Arianna Huffington, their access to her platform as their very own.  It made them . . . worthy.  As it turned out, it wasn’t so bad for Huffington either.  When the reality of money on the table hit home, the warm feeling of importance, strutting their stuff around the blogosphere, the light from above suddenly shined less bright.

One writer, Jonathan Tasini,  started a class action against Huffington, promising to make her a pariah in progressive circles.  His allegation:

“In my view, the Huffington Post’s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation.”

Disclosures: I used to be shamelessly exploited by the Huffington Post myself, until the managers there changed their posting policies in a way that seemed likely to yield fewer eyeballs. Then, “modern-day slave[]” that I was “on Arianna Huffington’s plantation,” I just took advantage of the traditional right of slaves to stop working. (What, that’s not a traditional right of slaves?)

I’m also ruthlessly enslaved by radio and television programs that ask me to appear on them, and that indirectly make money from my priceless punditry without paying me a penny. And of course I run a veritable forced labor camp here, where the authors of our million comments are (doubtless to their shock and horror) entirely unpaid, even though they drive up our page views and thus our income stream.

(Aside: Yes, VC has past the million comment mark.  I plan to reach it too, the only caveat being that I live to 397 years of age.)

The young Turk on the AOL/HuffPo Payroll, Radley Balko, is similarly unpersuaded to shed a tear.

A bunch of people agreed to write for Huffington Post for free. Or rather, in exchange for a platform that gave them access to a pretty large audience. They did this knowing full well that the goal of Huffington Post has always been to eventually become profitable. If they agreed to sit behind their keyboards and voluntarily churn out free content, how exactly have they been exploited? And on what basis could they possibly argue that those prior agreements should change now that the site has been purchased by AOL?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written for free over the years. It’s how you get a foot in the door. It has never occurred to me to go back and sue all of those publications. Come to think of it, I’ve been writing for all of you for free for the last nine years. Expect a visit from my process server soon.

Of course, if Balko is going to be a slave on Arianna Huffington’s plantation, at least he’s going to be a well paid slave.  You know, the slave in Gucci chains.  He’ll suffer.

The consideration for their “churning out content” at Huffington Plantation was the bragging rights of being part of the tribe, the fame, whether real or perceived, the ability to tell others, like me, that they wrote for Huffington Post and were, therefore, not the stark raving lunatics or village idiots they otherwise appeared to be.  This was more than enough value to make them feel that their efforts were worth it.

I was less than impressed most of the time.  That they posted their content without compensation at Arianna Huffington’s website always struck me as a fool’s play.  I knew they weren’t getting paid. I also knew that there was so much posted by so many writers that she could accommodate plenty of duds and still hold on to her eyeballs.  Some of the writers offered some incredibly banal, simplistic, even moronic content and ideas, but they remained vitally self-important by dint of their connection to greatness.

It was certainly impressive that HuffPo had a $315 million price tag. Memo to AOL: Simple Justice can be had for half the price. Call me, we’ll talk.  Writers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, do a lot of things to gain recognition or compensate for their feelings of inadequacy.  Huffington turned her website into a fortune.  Good for her.  This is America and she’s allowed to make a killing off a good idea well executed.

We all make choices in how we spend out time.  The HuffPo whiners, and that doesn’t include those writers who wear big-boy pants and aren’t complaining now that they received their compensation in full when their name appeared at the top of a post, were never slaves, but fools.  They sought fame rather than payment for their services, and they got the benefit of the bargain.  It didn’t turn out as well as they hoped?  Bummer.

The lesson here is that fame has become the coin of the realm, as predicted by Andy Warhol, but taken farther than Andy could have ever dreamed.  If someone is willing to work for fame, then the deal is struck.  When it turns out later that fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the shine of coins is brighter than the spotlight, don’t complain about it.  You chose poorly.  Suck it up and learn from it.

And no, I am not looking for guest posts from former HuffPo writers, and no, I have no plan to pay anyone for their effort.  And no, there’s no fame to be had here.

Full Disclosure:  Nobody pays me to write here.  I wouldn’t mind if someone did.  But if you want me to write for you, then we will have to reach an agreement on compensation.  I write for free for me, not for you.

According to Gawker, the top three most popular passwords are:

123456
password
12345678

Simple passwords are subject to brute-force cracking in a matter of minutes by the average desktop machine, never mind a workstation or cluster systems that a computer forensic lab will have available to crack a system.

For example, below is the time needed to crack a password consisting of 36 characters: The full alphabet, either upper or lower case (not both in this case) plus numbers.

0123456789 and either ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ or abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Password Length	Combinations	Class A	Class B	Class C	Class D	Class E	Class F
2	1,296	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant
3	46,656	4 Secs	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant
4	1.6 million	2½ Mins	16 Seconds	1 Second	Instant	Instant	Instant
5	60.4 million	1½ Hours	10 Mins	1 Min	Instant	Instant	Instant

Versus the time to crack a password that contains 96 characters: Mixed upper and lower case alphabet plus numbers and common symbols.

0123456789AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz <SP>!”#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~

Password Length	Combinations	Class A	Class B	Class C	Class D	Class E	Class F
2	9,216	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant
3	884,736	88½ Secs	9 Secs	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant
4	85 Million	2¼ Hours	14 Mins	1½ Mins	8½ Secs	Instant	Instant
5	8 Billion	9½ Days	22½ Hours	2¼ Hours	13½ Mins	1¼ Mins	8 Secs
6	782 Billion	2½ Years	90 Days	9 Days	22 Hours	2 Hours	13 Mins
7	75 Trillion	238 Years	24 Years	2½ Years	87 Days	8½ Days	20 Hours
8	7.2 Quadrillion	22,875 Years	2,287 Years	229 Years	23 Years	2¼ Years	83½ Days

Note: Class D is a typical desktop machine, or next year’s high-end smartphone.

Taken from:  Password Recovery Speeds. A full breakdown of password security is available from  Lockdown.co.uk.

So as should be painfully clear, choose a strong password.

What has become painfully clear is that there is no chance whatsoever that I will be able to remember a password that can’t be broken instantaneously.  If you can, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.  There’s also a matter of encryption, and Keith provides some suggestions for that as well.

There are three alternatives, however, worthy of consideration.  The first is to have nothing incriminating or private on your electronic device as you enter the United States, making the search and seizure nothing more than wrong and inconvenient.  The second is to continue to argue that laptop searches bear no connection to the historic bases for causeless border searches in the hope that the federal courts will eventually apply the rationale rather than the rubric and distinguish opportunistic law enforcement searches that properly fall under the ambit of the Fourth Amendment.  Good luck with that.

The third is to fundamentally undermine the scheme concocted by the government to subvert and circumvent the reasonable expectation of privacy in our papers and effects by employment of special tools designed to thwart the government’s efforts to use any excuse to delve into our secret computer life:  A pen and paper.

No, Apple doesn’t make the iPen, and you won’t need a password to use one.

Few things can be as gratifying to elected officials than the public’s general inability to connect the dots, even when they are displayed before them for all to see and are as ugly as possible.  Imagine the deep sigh of relief when they hear silence instead of the chant of the villagers approaching with torches and pitchforks. 

Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice must know that sigh well. From Newsday :

One consequence of the myriad problems at the Nassau County Police Department crime laboratory will be the retesting of at least 3,000 forensic samples, at a minimum cost of $400,000. In view of Nassau’s budget problems, this expense, stemming as it does from mismanagement and a lack of oversight at the lab, should cause an uproar.

It hasn’t, largely because when District Attorney Kathleen Rice announced the costs, she said the money would come from the police department’s forfeiture funds, “rather than sticking taxpayers with the bill.”

Despite having some of the highest taxes in the nation, Nassau County has such a massive structural deficit that it’s under the thumb of a finance authority to compel the executive and legislature to avoid renaming the courthouse after Wal-Mart.  This had nothing to do with the fact that its  crime lab has been shuttered for lying and cheating, while under the watchful eye of Rice and cops perpetually by her side.  Now they have to do it all over again, paying a competent lab for the effort, and this only goes back as far as 2005, while no one knows how far back the lying and cheating goes.

What if the cost of this incompetence meant that schools were closed, teachers fired?  What if it meant taxes went up for the nice family in the split level on the corner?  What if it meant your taxes went up.  You would be angry.  You would be very upset that massive incompetence, the sort you could put your finger on, was taking money out of your pocket.  You would make the angry sound, grrrr, and go out to the garage to look for the pitchfork.

Fortunately, you won’t have to.  As Rice announced, it won’t cost taxpayers a dime.  The cost will be paid from the “police department’s forfeiture funds.”  They way she said it, she sounds like the taxpayer’s hero.  Heroine?  That just sounds wrong, though.

This carefully crafted announcement, however, hides a few ugly things behind the great news.  First, that the police have a slush fund that nobody knows about, all while they are sucking at the public teet for money to keep cops on the street to protect the womenfolk from rapists.  Second, that this slush fund came from asset forfeitures, that shady process of civil seizures with negligible basis and even lower burden of proof, while owners are tied up with defending against criminal prosecution.

But the third bit of ugliness is that one that raised the cackles of the Newsday editorial writer, that the amount of the slush fund is itself a big secret:

They derive from taxpayer-funded law enforcement, arise from crimes committed against society and are to be used for the public good. So it’s worth asking: How much money does Nassau have in its two forfeiture funds, one federal and one state, and how much will the retesting deplete them? Are there programs that would have happened that now won’t, because this money is being used in this way?

The Nassau cops’ answer to these questions: It’s none of your business.

The “why” is about as basic a law enforcement ploy as one would expect.

Nassau police brass are refusing to release even the most general information about the funds, arguing that publicizing exactly what forfeiture money is spent on could endanger officers and operations.

Certainly we can’t let the criminals know what the cops are doing.  Just as with the secrets of the crime lab.  Except this argument is utterly nonsensical, since the amount of the slush fund tells nothing to criminals.  It also tells nothing to the elected officials who are supposed to be watching the public fisc while the cops amass their own private financing sources. 

Or the citizens, who pay the taxes necessitated by public services.  And official incompetence.  And fiscal mismanagement.  And police corruption.  All of which gets swept under the carpet when the slush fund is used to pay off the bill from the crime lab and denied the taxpayers for general use.

It should come as no surprise that this piling on of uglies, of incompetence, of mismanagement and corruption, is both happening and coming to light.  When no one is minding the cops, all sorts of bad things tend to happen.  When the public blindly accepts ridiculous rhetoric to justify the uglies, it emboldens officials to do even worse.  And Nassau County has become the posterboy for abject neglect.

The question now is whether the public will applaud Kathleen Rice’s disingenuous announcement that it won’t cost the taxpayers a dime to fix the crime lab fiasco because of the existence of a still-secret police slush fund.  The final ugly dot to be connected is how all of this happened and continues to happen while she sits at the big District Attorney’s desk and yet seems to have neither a clue, nor a responsibility, for any of it. 

After all, why give a second thought to Rice when she’s busy saving the taxpayer’s money? 

While integrity is a character trait, knowledge of the rules of ethics is something that must be taught to budding lawyers in the hope that they will know what to do when the time comes.  According to Paul Horowitz at PrawfsBlawg, this has become a challenge.

I have lately been thinking, though, that another influence on the class is the economy itself.  It would be foolish to say that a given year’s class of students is more or less “ethical” than others.  But I do think that the answers I have been receiving in class discussion for the last couple of years have been heavily influenced by the poor legal economy.  

For one thing, it can be hard to focus on the — forgive me — niceties of legal ethics when your first concern is just getting a job, any job.  More importantly, my sense is that students’ responses to ethical dilemmas are now heavily influenced by the idea that any client — even a client in a hypothetical problem — may be the last client they ever see, and that if something has to give, they would always rather keep a client than withdraw or give recommendations that risk seeing the client walk.

What duty does the potential client have, if any, to research an attorney. Yeah, the client may have been duped to some degree, but don’t they have the right to hire a lawyer of their choosing, even if you would not approve of their choice???

This shifting of blame was echoed in a subsequent post about Rakofsky.

As a result, the burden is also on the party hiring the lawyer to perform due diligence.  Says Saul Singer, senior legal ethics counsel for the D.C. Bar:  “Web sites and bar licenses don’t provide enough information.  Potential clients need to get references and check out a lawyer’s reputation.”  Singer continues:  “I don’t trust the Internet, because anybody can go on there and say anything.”

While it certainly behooves a client to “perform due diligence” rather than fall prey to a scam, the burden never falls on the client to bear the responsibility of a lawyer’s ethical failings.  How, exactly, a client should perform such diligence remains something of a mystery, as Singer correctly notes that anybody can say anything on the internet, reducing it to an inherently untrustworthy source.

This is not to suggest that either of the lawyers who questioned the clients’ role would engage in unethical conduct, but it does suggest that the line of DR 102(A)(4) isn’t clear any more.  Lawyers shouldn’t engage in “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” unless they can get away with it?  Or at least it’s not just the lawyer’s fault for being less than honest, and it’s fair to blame the victim.

As Horowitz notes, these rules are considered more “niceties” than duties, as if ethics is some archaic leftover from the days when lawyers could find jobs that paid sufficiently well to cover the debt service on student loans, keep the cupboards stocked with Cheetos and fill the leased BMW with hi-test.  The students don’t want to sit there in Legal Ethics class, and the professors, according to Horowitz, don’t want to teach it.  It’s not sexy. It’s not fun.  It’s not going to earn them money.  No lawyer can promote himself by noting that he aced legal ethics.

The internet is, most assuredly, not a trustworthy source of information for the public.  Beyond the fractious nature of blogs and websites, where specific agendas collect supporters wearing tin foil hats or blinders who assert with absolute certainty that there are good and evil sides, right and wrong trends, magic answers to troubling problems that are hidden from sight by vast conspiracies of liberals, conservatives, corporations and, yes, lawyers. 

But the existence of hungry, desperate lawyers on the internet with little concern for the niceties of the disciplinary rules provides no excuse for the lines to grow wiggly in the classroom.  It’s bad, very bad, that we are facing a crisis of integrity on the internet amongst lawyers.  Yes, a crisis.  But the job in the classroom isn’t to water down ethics, make it palatable or succumb to the demands of students to circumvent their ethical responsibility in their effort to earn enough money to repay their student loans.  The going is tough.  Ethics do not change.

Of all the required classes in law school, one pervades everything a lawyer does and will ever do when holding the trust of another person in his hands.  Especially in the age of the internet, of marketing the marketing of law, of a vision of tough times ahead and hungry mouths to feed, the need for clarity and firmness in the ethical responsibilities of lawyers is more important than ever. 

Maybe the students won’t be happy to hear it.  Maybe the students won’t love you for it, and award you happy professor of the year.  But don’t let a fear of ethics undermine what may well prove to be one of the most important thing they learn in law school.  Teach them that lawyers cannot deceive the public, no matter how hungry they are.