This Could Be Brilliant

The American Prospect directed me to a clever new site called ToS;DR, for Terms of Service; Didn't Read.

It refers to the many, many (many) pages of dense legal language that define our relationships with online services like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Steam, etc. The site states,

 “I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.

Good idea! Because, yeah, I admit I click to indicate my understanding of and agreement to terms that I haven't actually read. I mean, how can you read that stuff? Does anyone read all their terms of service in full?

We should, yeah, but...so long...eyelids getting heavy...ooh, look, something shiny somewhere else on the web! Yeah, yeah, I have read and agree, sure.

ToS;DR rates terms of service for various companies/services from A to E, with A being the best, and puts nifty little icons next to specific aspects of the terms, like a thumbs-up symbol for a "Promise to inform about data requests" or a red X for "No Right to leave the service."

 A lot of the ratings are still in progress, with "no class yet," but you can view the positives and negatives that are listed.

ToS;DR invites user input in developing its ratings, so if you have read and understood your terms of service, you might want to send them a note listing good and bad points for them to add to their lists.

If You Want to Bring Up Logic...

I've never liked the Pascal's Wager argument, and Greta Christina nicely explains its logical flaws.

I like this point:

When you're lining up at the gates to the afterlife and God is looking deep into your soul -- and when he sees that your belief consisted of, "Hey, why not believe, it's not like I've got anything to lose, and I've got a whole afterlife of good times to gain, so sure, I 'believe' in God, wink wink" -- do you really think God's going to be impressed? Do you really think he's going to say, "Oo, that's sly, that's some ingenious dodging of the question you got there, we just love a slippery weasel here in Heaven, come on in"?

Ha. Heaven loves a slippery weasel.

The Wager is a very rules-lawyer kind of thing. If you can find a loophole, exploit it!--and all will be well.

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Trial by Not Trial

Well, my time on the Justice Squadron was uneventful. I didn't even get lost on the way to the courthouse.

Once there and gathered with the rest of my cell-phoneless team, we were addressed by a judge, watched a video about the Massachusetts jury system (potential jurors are required to serve no more than "one day, or one trial" every three years), and then sat reading magazines and otherwise amusing ourselves (one guy brought a laptop--I can only assume that since phones aren't allowed, there was also no wireless internet available) until the judge returned to announce that all the cases of the day had been resolved without recourse to trial, and we could go about our business.

So I went to work to be terribly perturbed by a car alarm that wouldn't stop going off. How I hate car alarms. Many's the time I've wished someone would break into a car to make one stop.

Anyway, that was my brush with the justice system. It was orderly and well-managed, even if I didn't get to serve on a jury and do my part to objectively discern the truth of some matter.

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Joining the Justice Squadron

I have jury duty tomorrow. The instructions say to show up in "proper dress" and that no cell phones are allowed in the courthouse. I mean, the Municipal Fortress of Vengeance.

Gee, why don't they just paint a business suit on me and gag me at the door?

They suggested leaving cell phones in the car, but what about those of us who don't take cars to the courthouse? I have to leave my phone at home?! So no cell phone all day? That's inhumane!

Ha. It wasn't that long ago that I went out without a phone all the time.

It is kind of inconvenient now, though, since if I want to give people at work an update on when I'm going to be back in, I'll have to find a pay phone (and those are hard to find these days) or shout really loudly, or follow some other potential juror back to their car and beg to borrow their cell.

Oh well. I suppose moment-by-moment updates aren't crucial.

I'm totally awesome and phenomenal and stupendous, but things will probably stagger along without me for a day.

Now if I somehow wind up on a jury for a trial that lasts multiple days, I can't make any promises.

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Drink Up! Very Carefully

Here's an interesting article on Slate about how, during Prohibition, industrial alcohol (frequently stolen, redistilled, and sold for consumption) was intentionally made lethally poisonous by government regulation in order to discourage people from drinking.

And how well did that work out?

"[B]y the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people."

That's some effective federal poisoning. Nicely done! We like a government program that gets results, right?

Oh, wait. The goal was to discourage drinking of alcohol, not specifically to kill people.

Well, the article doesn't investigate whether or not there are estimates of how many people were discouraged from drinking, but someone probably was.

So I guess in the logic of the moment, it all worked out.

Prohibition is a weird thing. I mean, it was against the law to drink alcohol, so people shouldn't have been doing it. Did they deserve whatever they got?

But people really hated that law and felt that it interfered with personal freedoms and their right to do what they wanted. Did general dislike mean it was OK to ignore the law, and that people had a legitimate right to be annoyed when the government poisoned the alcohol on purpose?

As far as I'm concerned, you always have to think about the real world. In the real world, it was known that people were drinking, regardless of the law (and regardless of the poison!).

So if you know people are going to drink your poison and die from it, even if you tell them not to, you're basically killing them (even though it's technically their fault, so you can feel OK about yourself).

So yeah, the poisoning was still pretty bad.

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No Games for the Wicked

I should mention the news, pointed out to me by a colleague, that the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has rejected a challenge to a ban on possessing materials for playing Dungeons and Dragons in prison.

The ban is based on concerns that the game might “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” as quoted in the New York Times, which then dryly observes,

The court, which is based in Chicago, acknowledged that there was no evidence of marauding gangs spurred to their acts of destruction by swinging imaginary mauls, but it ruled nonetheless that the prison’s decision was “rationally related” to legitimate goals of prison administration.

See, I would think that time spent fighting imaginary orcs would be time not spent planning real-world mischief, and thus potentially to be encouraged--but of course I must admit I know next to nothing about prison administration.

It's also demonstrably true that time spent fighting imaginary orcs does not mean there is no time available for other things, such as work, school, socializing, shopping, reading blogs, and most likely planning real-world mischief, so I'm not saying D&D would be the answer to all problems.

It's a start, though!

My first thought, hearing the concern about D&D gangs, was to scoff and say "why don't they just come right out and say that they're banning it because they think this guy doesn't deserve to have any fun?"*

This post at Above The Law, discussing the case with much more legal knowledge than I possess, kind of bears me up. (Also watch out for the classic "only pathetic losers who can't get laid play D&D" lines!--no mention of this topic would be complete without them.)


*My second thought was "when did BADD start running prisons in Wisconsin?"

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Learning Something New

Two posts on learning things previously not known strike me today.

Elisa at HealthyConcerns finds that you can use Flexible Spending Account money (those pre-tax dollars you can set aside to pay for healthcare needs) not only for things like doctor's office co-pays and prescriptions and glasses, but also for basic household health stuff like cough medicine and adhesive bandages.

I myself have been known to stock up on this sort of thing near the end of the year when I have money left over...and will have to do so soon. It then occurred to me that if I could only think of some way to present bandages and aspirin as appropriate holiday gifts, I could be in great shape!

Who do I know who wants a pack of cough drops?


And Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check reveals that the North Carolina Constitution basically bars atheists (and arguably people practicing non-Abrahamic religions, though I suppose that would come down to how you define 'Almighty God') from holding public office.

As quoted from Article 6, Section 8:

“The following persons shall be disqualified for office:

First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.”

Wow. That's pretty definite.

Article 6 goes on to also bar:

Second, with respect to any office that is filled by election by the people, any person who is not qualified to vote in an election for that office.

That one sounds reasonable.

Third, any person who has been adjudged guilty of treason or any other felony against this State or the United States, or any person who has been adjudged guilty of a felony in another state that also would be a felony if it had been committed in this State, or any person who has been adjudged guilty of corruption or malpractice in any office, or any person who has been removed by impeachment from any office, and who has not been restored to the rights of citizenship in the manner prescribed by law.

Yeah, OK, that makes sense too.

But obviously the most important thing is that you attend the right place of worship. Treason is also bad, but denying Almighty God, well, that's one step away from selling state secrets to the highest bidder anyway, right?

There is, naturally, some discussion on whether or not this is binding law given that the U.S. Constitution prohibits requiring a religious test as qualification for office (another Article 6).

Interesting.

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No, I Can't Prove That's Me

Interesting Blog of Rights post on Real ID, the proposed national ID card that's been bandied about for years now.

I was a little fuzzy on the details of this plan (I remember reading about it years ago when it was first bandied, and then, like many of us, I kind of forgot about it when no major changes to my immediate state ID were forthcoming).

For example, I had forgotten that if your state's acceptable forms of identification don't comply with Real ID, you're supposedly not allowed to use said ID when going through airport security. As the post explains, states were not happy about this (there were numerous objections based on privacy concerns, and it would also cost a lot to implement Real ID requirements):

[A]lmost half [of the states] passed statutes or resolutions saying that they would not participate in the program. Every state was supposed to be compliant by May of 2008; none of them were.

This left the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with an unpalatable choice. They could effectively shut down air travel in the U.S., or issue blanket exemptions to all 50 states.

After choosing option B and giving the states exemptions and a new deadline of December 2009, we find that here in December 2009, Real ID is still not in our wallets.

I guess sometimes ignoring things (or, more actively, passing statutes or resolutions against them) is the way to go.

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Ruling the Internet

Yowch. The Distant Librarian has news about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which I have to confess I was really not paying attention to, but which apparently could have a lot to say about copyright.

It's a treaty and is still in negotiations, so all information must be rumors at this point, but it doesn't sound great.

One of the leaks around ACTA suggests that there's a provision which will require ISPs around the globe to monitor and adhere to takedown notices upon mere accusation of copyright infringement, as well as a three-strikes and you're off the internet forever.

I should probably pay more attention.

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Not the Music!

This post on the Blog of Rights made me think--it tells how "a group of musicians, including REM, Pearl Jam and The Roots filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out whether their music was played at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay."

I've heard of music being used to harass people, of course (probably I remember it first from when the U.S. was going after Manual Noriega in Panama, way back in 1989). This article by Suzanne Cusick has an overview of the history and use of music as torture, including that instance. It seems to be in many cases as much about volume as about the specific tunes/notes of the music, which makes sense. Any sound can become just painful noise if it's too loud, so even if you liked the music in question it would be hard to handle if you couldn't even think through the din.

And there were those jokes about playing such-and-such music, pretty much anything one finds annoying, as torture. "Elevator tunes, now that would make me surrender!"

I never really thought about how someone who makes music might think about this concept, though. Especially someone who made a piece that was actually used in this way.

Really, wouldn't it be incredibly strange to hear that your work was used to torture someone? And by 'strange,' I mean really disturbing and unpleasant, although of course that's my own take, and it's certainly possible that some people would be pleased at the notion that their work had been put to such a use.

Even if you're in general pro-music-torture, though, I would imagine it would have to be odd to hear that your own music was used that way. You might make music you know a lot of people won't enjoy--you might proudly make music only a worthy few will appreciate, and relish the thought of the incomprehension and distaste of those who just don't get it. Heck with 'em!

But even then, you probably don't make music with the idea that it will be intentionally used to cause distress to someone. So even if you're pretty OK with it in general, that must be weird.

And, too, this brings up other interesting questions that start to look like ideas about intellectual property rights. Even if I do hate the fact that you use my music to torment prisoners, does that mean I have any say in it? If you legally paid for a copy of my song (and if torturing people with music is also considered acceptable, which is a giant bit of the story that I haven't even looked at), isn't it totally fine for you to do whatever you want with it, as long as you're not making money off it without getting my permission/giving me a cut?

Is this fair use?

I guess I'm really not going anywhere specific with this, it was just an interesting train of thought for me. If it were my music, I would be really unhappy to hear that it had been used like this, so good luck to all the musicians with their lawsuit, and I hope they get some clarification. Whether or not they have any legal ability to control the use of their music this way, they certainly have every right to express an opinion on the matter.

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Aw, Darn It

I missed a momentous occasion today, as noted on Alas! A Blog with the descriptively titled missive Posted at 12:34:56 07/08/09.

Maybe I can get it together to publish a post at 09:09:09 09/09/09. I haven't missed that one yet, and it's just as cool.

I have to admit I'm not very good with special dates, though. I'll probably think of it the next day.

But I'm also holding out for 11:11:11 11/11/11, which is arguably even more awesome since...only one can be the coolest date of all.

Hahahahaha!

Also, on a completely unrelated matter*, look at us here in Massachusetts, kicking up dust in federal court!

It was only a matter of time until DOMA got challenged from somewhere, and I reckon this state is a fitting candidate on account of our general fondness for riling things up on the marriage front.

I myself got married in another state, but I assure you it was riling-ly unconventional. My dress was blue! People were fainting all over. (You can trust my notoriously unreliable brain to remember this one correctly. I would never make something like that up for the sake of a feeble joke.)

Anyway, it will certainly be interesting to see how this shakes out.

*In terms of numbers. In terms of momentous occasions, we can just pretend I totally meant to have that connection in there rather than thinking of it minutes later.

Sorry, CSI-Watchers

I just got called for jury duty (although due to a reschedule, not until April, which is far enough away to not actually exist), so I'm intrigued by court-related things at the moment.

I found this interesting article in Annual Reviews (subscription required) on Failed Forensics: How Forensic Science Lost Its Way and How It Might Yet Find It.

It talks about the "nonscience forensic sciences" that underlie a lot of the evidence presented in court cases, explaining that techniques of 'individualization' (or precisely determining that a single finger, bullet, shoe, set of teeth, etc. and no other in the world was responsible for a mark) are not actually very closely related to the testable, falsifiable theories that we think of as science.

The article more than once links forensic techniques with religious ritual, as well as with discredited sciences like phrenology. It seems that handwriting identification and other forensic techniques are based on subjective judgments and personal interpretations more than on any testable theories, and are admitted in court more because they have been admitted in the past than because they are objectively good sources of information.

It says that forensic fields often claim the possibility of providing an error rate of zero; that there is no chance that the results could be mistaken. Obviously we want to keep the chance of mistaken identification as low as possible, but I don't know, claiming infallibility seems a little bold.

The article talks about how the science of forensic identification has been shaped by the needs of the courts, as well as by the objective attempt to narrow down a pool of potential suspects. Plaintiffs need doubt, and prosecutors need certainty, and everyone is interested in convicting criminals, so there's a lot of interesting potential for pressure.

Another concern is that lawyers and judges, like many of us, are not particularly well versed in the scientific method, and lack the understanding of statistics, error rates, and other things that would allow them to distinguish science from impressive nonscience. It's therefore easy to see how things might be allowed as evidence despite not actually being well grounded in the scientific method.

I don't have any say over what's admitted as evidence, but I'll try to remember that things like fingerprint analysis, which we tend to assume are pretty soundly scientific, may not be as ironclad as we think.


Failed Forensics: How Forensic Science Lost Its Way and How It Might Yet Find It
Annual Review of Law and Social Science
Vol. 4: 149-171 (Volume publication date December 2008)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.4.110707.172303)
First published online as a Review in Advance on July 8, 2008

Dibs on the Red Hair Gene

Interesting story in the New York Times of a lawsuit challenging a patent on a gene.

The case is specifically about BRCA1 and BRCA2, but could have bearing on future questions related to whether or not it's possible to own, and to control the use of, this kind of information.

As the NYT explains,

The decision to allow gene patents was controversial from the start; patents are normally not granted for products of nature or laws of nature. The companies successfully argued that they had done something that made the genes more than nature’s work: they had isolated and purified the DNA, and thus had patented something they had created — even though it corresponded to the sequence of an actual gene.

The lawsuit argues that ownership of a gene sequence can inhibit research (since working with the gene risks patent infringement). There also seems to be a sort of reflexive distaste for the idea that a company can own the legal rights to something that is a component of someone's body.

Which, I must say, I completely understand. It just seems weird, doesn't it?

I'll be interested to see how this works out, although it will no doubt be some time before there's any conclusion.

Speaking of Justice and Brains

Daylight Atheism has a post on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

As many of us have no doubt read previously, the average person's memory for events is actually not that great. We tend to add things, adjust things, assign pieces of memory to other personal storylines, make things up entirely. In short, our brains are filthy liars. I knew it!

I find this fascinating for some reason. How do we even know that we know something if our lying brains are all we have to go by?

And yet, clearly we know enough to get by, most of the time. We remember enough things accurately enough that we don't constantly mistake people we know for people we don't know, or misremember who we married. Mistaking the details of the story isn't, usually, that big a deal.

So I remember us mentioning The Complete Textbook of Awesome at the first book purchasing meeting, while you don't recall it coming up until the third. As long as we eventually got it on the shelves for our eager students, does it really matter?

Clearly it's a different matter if we're picking people out of a line up to be charged with a crime. Sadly, we're apparently just not that good at it.

Our memory for Simpsons quotes, on the other hand, is excellent.

Avoiding Spoilers in Justice

I've never been on a jury, but I have a general idea that you're supposed to keep your mind a willful blank slate about any information not presented in the course of the trial.

You're supposed to base your decision on only the admissible evidence presented and allowed, lest details outside that line prejudice your opinions. It's sort of like setting up double-blind experiments in science, trying to ensure that personal bias doesn't affect results.

Well, on second thought maybe it's not very much like that, but there's a similarity in the way an attempt is made to create a controlled environment in which only certain very specific things are considered, and to prevent the particular quirks of any participant from skewing the outcome. Right?

Staring at Empty Pages has some better-informed musing about why this control is important, while discussing an interesting NY Times story about the increasing risk of mistrials and overturned judgements due to jurors looking up outside information on the internet, Twittering about cases, etc. 

If the whole trial system is set up on the assumption that impartial juries without prejudicial outside information can make a just decision, than we pretty much have to try to uphold the rules, but I imagine it's hard to keep that blank slate blank when you've got access to the web in your pocket for any seemingly harmless question that might come up.

It's such a habit for a lot of us these days. If you have a question, look it up! Instantly! 

Once again, technology interacts in unexpected ways with old systems.

Animal Type: Eat/Not Eat

4&20 Blackbirds has news about a proposal to allow facilities for slaughter and processing of horses for meat in Montana.

I remember we had a proposal to ban slaughter of horses for human consumption in Massachusetts back in 2002. I honestly don't remember how I voted on it, because I couldn't really figure out what I thought about it. Also, I thought, is consumption of horses really a big issue in Massachusetts right now?

It turns out most horses killed for meat are destined for consumption overseas, so, no, it's not a big issue in Massachusetts, specifically, but it happens elsewhere.

The ban failed here (likely in part due to voter fraud allegations around an unrelated bill), so technically I could buy a horse, kill it in my backyard, and eat it anytime I wanted! OK, probably not. I'm pretty sure there are still all kinds of regulations around the slaughter of animals in general. Also, the management of my apartment complex would certainly have a problem with it.

Now, I'm pretty much with 4&20 on the concerns around the Montana bill. The post raises good points about regulation, responsibilities of animal ownership, and more; it goes well beyond the "ew, this is gross and wrong!" reaction that a lot of the anti-horse-eating arguments seem to come down to.

But this is a weird question, I think. I mean, I'm not rah-rah for eating horses.* I like horses. We had horses on and off when I was a kid. Horses are cool, and they look gorgeous with their tresses blowing in the wind. But...

A lot of the sites opposing horse slaughter stress how cruel the slaughter process is, and how noble horses are, and so forth. The "ew gross wrong!" argument.

And I don't doubt the slaughter process is brutal, but the arguments seem a little hypocritical to me, unless they're also made in opposition to the brutal slaughter of cows, pigs, sheep, etc. It's not as if the facilities that handle those slaughters are renowned for their super kind and gentle treatment of the animals, or as if cows just mind death less.

Yes, I know horses aren't among the animals we typically eat in this country, but that's really all you can say about it: it's not typical. And yes, horses are beautiful, cool, admirable animals--but they're animals. If you eat animals, especially large four-legged grazing animals, well...they're all kin, aren't they?

If you're OK with the slaughter of cows (which can also be strong, beautiful animals) and pigs (which are smart and sociable animals, if not what I personally consider beautiful), your arguments against the cruel slaughter of horses are kind of just backed up by personal preference. Or so it seems to me.

Of course, I'm sure some of the people opposed to horse slaughter are firmly opposed to animal cruelty in other forms, and don't eat any animals from slaughterhouses, and I salute the consistency of that position.

But I bet some people are (truly and sincerely) horrified by the thought of horses being slaughtered and eaten, but don't see anything wrong with having a hamburger or a pork roast.

Again, I'm not saying we should all start eating horses tomorrow. I don't plan to, certainly. I'm not saying I'm all for slaughtering horses and shipping the meat overseas.

I'm just saying there's something about getting upset about eating one kind of animal and merrily chowing down on another that makes me start to think we have some sort of mental disconnect at work. 

*Although I should perhaps note that I have actually eaten horse, long ago. It was...meat.

The Law of the Blog

Have you recently been threatened with a lawsuit because of something you posted on your blog?

I haven't. Obviously I am failing to be properly provocative here, and am just going to have to get to work and libel more powerful, litigious figures. People aren't going to slander themselves, you know!

Once I get on that project, I will be pleased to be acquainted with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's overview of online defamation law.

As crudely summarized by me, it holds that in order for legal defamation to have occurred: 

• I need to publish my statements to an audience beyond the person defamed (calling someone names to their face with no one else around doesn't count); 
  
• I need to have made up (or copied from the untruths of another) the defamatory statements -- that is, facts about the person, however unflattering, are not defamatory; 
• the statements must be broadly understood to be about the person (a claim of "I wasn't talking about you" must be unpersuasive), and to actually damage his or her reputation ("so-and-so seems to have been dressed by half-trained monkeys" is not defamatory).
  

Also, if the person is a public figure, he or she must prove I was acting maliciously, rather than just trying to be funny or something. Public figures have to deal with people saying obnoxious stuff about them. 

Which, from my point of view, means it might be more work to actually defame a public figure, so I'd better go after my relatively unknown next door neighbor instead. 

It's on my 'to do' list. 

In the meantime, I am indebted to Feminist SF - The Blog! for the introduction to EFF, which has all sorts of other handy tidbits about law and blogs in their Blogger's Legal Guide. As they say,

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

OK, yeah, I'm not doing any of those things. That's probably why I have yet to be sued. Some helpful tips for those who plan to be, though.

Seriously? Wikipedia in Court Cases?

Well, huh.

Feminocracy points out this post at Feminist Law Professors about an article (yes, it's a long chain of referrals) exploring the extent to which Wikipedia has been cited in U.S. court cases.

According to the abstract (full text is not available), as of last month, Wikipedia had been cited nearly 300 times. The abstract further explains:

Courts cite Wikipedia for a wide range of purposes. Some citations are merely mundane references to everyday facts well known by the general public. In other opinions Wikipedia is cited as a basis for the court's reasoning or to support a conclusion about an adjudicative fact at issue in the case. In a notable recent case, Badasa, v. Mukasey, 2008 WL 3981817 (8th. Cir. 2008), The Eighth Circuit remanded a Board of Immigration Appeals decision because it upheld a lower court's finding based on information obtained from Wikipedia.

Now where I work our official position is that Wikipedia is not an irredeemable tool of the devil, but it's also not your go-to source for stuff that really matters. 

You know: look at Wikipedia, but if it's really important (as perhaps might be true when using information "as a basis for the court's reasoning or to support a conclusion about an adjudicative fact at issue in the case"), double-check with another source. 

One that has identifiable authors, and can't be edited at a whim by random passers-by.

I'm no legal scholar, so it may be that this is perfectly reasonable in some way that's not evident to me, but I have to say, I find it at least interesting that this particular resource (which certainly has clear strengths as well as weaknesses), is considered to be so reliable.

Maybe we've misjudged poor Wikipedia.

Posting Photos: Buildings are Fair Game

Since many, including myself, have wondered about the legal implications of posting photos online if they show people at library events (do we need permission from every person depicted? permission of parents for minors? should we just stick to pictures of plants and landscapes?), I must note this helpful article that LibrarianInBlack uncovered in Marketing Library Services.

Titled "Laws for Using Photos You Take at Your Library," it concisely addresses the legal rights of publicity and privacy, how to write a consent form, and how long to keep the consent forms.

And yes, the general rule seems to be that you need permission from identifiable persons if you're going to post pictures of them. 

This is why I only take photos of people wearing furry animal masks. It keeps things simple. 

Although a follow-up question would be, what if someone was wearing a really unique, handmade mask that everyone who knew them would immediately recognize as theirs? What if you took a crowd shot with no visible faces, but someone had a really identifiable back? (Say they had a dramatic neck tattoo.)

Clearly this question is not entirely settled, but I think we can safely say that caution is warranted. And when in doubt, just take pictures of flowers, buildings, attractive landscapes, and people in mass-produced furry animal masks. 

Taking Overdue Books Seriously

It apparently does not do to disregard your library fines in Grafton, WI. 

A woman was arrested after disregarding the library's communications. That sounds a little extreme, but on the other hand, she also ignored a notice to appear in court. 

At that point, I imagine you're being arrested not so much for the original offense, as for failing to obey the legal summons. 

And while I'm not necessarily all about arresting people for failing to pay their overdue fines (although I am all about returning your books on time, and if you don't, just suck it up and pay the fine already), but we can't really go around encouraging people to cavalierly dismiss the requests of the justice system, right? 

If people can just do that without repercussion, the whole thing falls apart! Anarchy and zombies are the only logical result!

So I guess the take-away lesson is, pay your library fines on time, but especially, don't mess with the courts.