Discussed Today… Getting more lawyers (or, any professional) into public service Recall fever The Donnas Said…“send her home on BART” Getting more lawyers Hold the jokes, I know some lawyers and they’re not (all) money-grubbing, back-stabbing bastards (yet). The ABA came out today and said that they have discovered that fewer and fewer students choosing to take careers in public service (public defense, prosecution) versus private practice. Who can blame them? With the average year’s tuition to a private university going from 7K to 25K a year (tack on an apartment, food, etc.), is it any wonder that these people find the austere yet socially rewarding charms of public work less than exciting?

I may be pro-Separation between church and state, and I may have reconciled, to some degree, my difficulty with God (but not religion). But I think George Bush’s war on stem-cell research is cutting us off (no pun intended) from the greatest source of analgesic research ever known. It would be like stopping the genome project halfway through. http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/03/25/stem_cells/index.html

Last week news broke, via a conscientious objector, that the US government is culling metadata bout phone calls in the use en masse. On the heels of this another story broke that the government had back-doors into the servers of several big-name tech entities: Google, Facebook, et al. This was later revealed to be less of a back door and more of a web tool for gathering court-mandated data from said entities.

A week later I have to ask: Why the outrage?

As I see it there are two issues:

1. Metadata harvesting via Verizon
2. PRISM as a tool for accessing big providers’ data sources

Let me address them in reverse.