Steve Reads

Via Slashdot: Israel has decided to suspend purchases of Microsoft software “for now.” The Finance Ministry says it was a “purely economic decision,” which suggests a) that it’s not especially principled and b) that Microsoft could get them to switch back without much effort. So this may not be huge news. But governments worldwide are switching:

Some federal agencies in France, China and Germany, as well as the city government of Munich, have opted to use Linux not just on servers but also on individual workstations. Entire national governments, including those in Britain, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia, are exploring open-source alternatives to Microsoft.

Give it 10 years — if not less — and I think we’ll see a large portion of the world switching to open source. If nothing else, it has price on its side. And as many people — among them the ever-quotable Adam — have pointed out, it’s better for nations to develop their own software that fits their needs, rather than having to buy what an American megalith produces.

I just learned via the pho list that Phish will hereafter donate all the profits from its live albums to charity (my cache). For those who are unaware, Phish puts all of its live shows on its live-music website within two days of each show. You pay a small amount for the MP3s, which come with no access controls at all. They just assume that you’ll be fair to the band and only download copies for yourself. It’s a system based on trust, which is what all music-downloading services should be.

And now they’ve added an extra bit of goodness by making no profit off their live shows. I hope more bands follow in all their footsteps.

Via Adam, I see that the state of Pennsylvania has labeled Pittsburgh a “distressed” city (my cache). The article says that to be declared “distressed,”

cities must meet at least one criterion under the act. Pittsburgh, which has a projected deficit for next year of $42 million, meets three criteria: City spending exceeded revenues for at least three years; the city had a 5 percent deficit for two successive years; and it had at least a 1 percent deficit for three years.

The punch, for me, comes when the article says that “Pittsburgh’s credit rating hit junk-bond status in October.”

This is just very sad for me. I left Pittsburgh at the end of March, 2001, after going to school there for four years and spending another year presiding over the dying embers of a doomed relationship. (It’s not really that dramatic.) The city holds all kinds of bad and good memories for me. College students’ lives are unnecessarily filled with drama, perhaps out of a lack of sleep, so those four years are somehow more intense than any four other years. Now that I’ve left, I’m glad I’m gone and I intend never to return.

Moreover, my alma mater lied to us. It tried very hard to convince us that Pittsburgh was the next Silicon Valley — that the few large research universities in Pittsburgh were going to spawn a reawakening after the steel industry’s death, and that we’d all end up with high-paying dot-com gigs upon graduation. It didn’t work out like that, and I suspect that it won’t for a long time.

But the thing is, I really wish that Pittsburgh were as great as the university wants it to be. I wish I hadn’t wanted to leave, but there was nothing left there for me. Indeed, there appears to be nothing left for most of my friends: everyone I knew from the classes of 2000 through 2003 has left Pittsburgh, save those who grew up there and probably have a stronger tie than the rest of us.

It’s just sad to have the city’s slow, painful, obvious decline made so abundantly clear.

James Grimmelmann is a funny man:

Crest has a toothpaste flavor out called “Cinnamon Rush.” While the flavor itself is fairly pleasant, the name is a bit disconcerting.

Other items presumably coming soon:

• Ritalin X-treme
• John Updike’s Rabbit is Rad
• Atomic Blast Cheddar
• Microsoft Tropical Fruit Windows
• Soothing Pastel Terror Threat Levels (sea foam, periwinkle, goldenrod, peach, and rose)
• Electric Surge Paper Towels

I just barely finished reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s wonderful book It Must’ve Been Something I Ate. It’s loads of fun to read. Imagine going out to eat with someone who is just crazy about food, knows how to cook all of it, has eaten perhaps every conceivable kind, and knows all the science behind it. He’ll explain all of it to you as you go along, and when you get home (imagine you’re crashing on his couch) he’ll keep you up for the next two years trying to achieve Platonic perfection in whatever it was you just ate — pots banging, oven exploding as he tries to get it to 800 degrees Fahrenheit (something that he did, I believe, whilst seeking the perfect roast), circuits shorting out from multiple simultaneous espresso machines.

This is a guy who will go all-out to construct the perfect steak. This is a guy who will fly to Europe to find the perfect espresso, then break down precisely what constitutes the perfect espresso. He is obsessed, and thereby completely lovable.

(more…)

A pretty well-argued claim that Kurds did not actually capture Hussein. Those who attached any weight to my earlier link to the story that Kurds had captured him will want to read this new counterargument.

Looks like voice-over-IP might be nearing the tipping point. I’m excited, particularly in view of how much I want the old telcos to disappear (via Jason Kottke’s remaindered links).

I was worried that Hussein would be tried secretly, and that someone would evade the democratic protections that would keep his prosecution totally above-board. Well, they’re starting down that road.

I meant to link to this a while ago, but for some reason I didn’t. Now today, my officemate and I got into a discussion of Scalia, Limbaugh, and Bush v. Gore, prompted by some really hilarious inconsistencies in Limbaugh’s view of the right to privacy (my cache). This reminded me of a speech by Richard Posner on Bush v. Gore (my cache). It’s a great speech, and if you have a few minutes you should check it out. Posner never dispenses an argument that is prima facie absurd, which is more than I can say for 90% of the arguments I hear on the radio, read in the paper, or read on weblogs.

A side point, while I’m at it. My officemate mentioned that some of the Supreme Court justices were clearly biased going into their hearing of Bush v. Gore. My response is that all judges are biased. All humans are. I think, implicitly anyway, that Americans tend to view the judiciary as a mindless interpreter of concrete judicial principles: they take certain amendments (axioms) and produce more or less ineluctable decisions (theorems). This is simply not the way the world works. It’s not the way any humans make any decisions, so why should we expect anything different out of judges?

And yet this view of the judiciary is precisely what Scalia tries to propound. I’d prefer the world to be more like Posner than like Scalia: be quite open about what they believe, but argue cleanly. We know what their biases are. The Devil we know is substantially safer than the Devil we don’t. The Scalias of the world are unsafe and dishonest.

Professor Brad DeLong points to a new book on the possible revolutionary implications of the open-source movement:

Ever since the invention of agriculture, human beings have had only three social-engineering tools for organizing any large-scale division of labor: markets (and the carrots of material benefits they offer), hierarchies (and the sticks of punishment they impose), and charisma (and the promises of rapture they offer). Now there is the possibility of a fourth mode of effective social organization—one that we perhaps see in embryo in the creation and maintenance of open-source software. My Berkeley colleague Steve Weber’s book is a brilliant exploration of this fascinating topic.

Professor Yochai Benkler has been making this point for a while. See his paper “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” It’s great reading. Benkler strikes me as a genius.

In response to a friend who posted a thoughtful critique of my post on the Linux “market-share argument”, I started rambling in a response to him. I wrote enough that I think it deserves its own blog post. Here ‘tis.

It seems pretty clear that more eyes will look at Linux bugs than at Windows bugs. The total number of people who could plausibly look at bugs in actual Windows source code is  . . .  the total number of Microsoft employees? I assume that there’s also some valuable feedback from downstream developers (i.e., at the software companies that make Windows software), but do those developers actually have the resources to properly debug a Windows problem? E.g., will they be able to attach a debugger to the Windows executables and jump to a particular line in the source? I doubt it, though I’m certainly open to correction. I’d assume that the only people who could do a decent debugging job on a Windows bug are people at Microsoft.

Obviously it’s different with the open-source community (and I would use ‘community’ without quotes: it’s a group of people working together toward a common goal, which is about as clear a definition of a community as I’ve seen; by that definition, I don’t think bloggers have any coherent-enough goal to be considered a community). Sure, your mother will not be debugging the Linux gcc compiler, but the pool of potential debuggers scales with the number of users. Assuming that p% of the population could do any worthwhile debugging, and that there are N users of a given piece of Linux software, the total number of available debuggers will be something like pN. That doesn’t mean all of them will, but they’re at least available. The pool is larger than the Microsoft pool.

All of that is speculation, of course. But it seems reasonable.

Then you’re wondering whether the open-source community will be likely to create innovations, or whether it can just fix bugs (if that). That’s open to debate, of course, but the proof will be in the pudding. I suspect what’s really important to desktop users is

• good UI
• coherent feel (which suggests the use of consistent UI APIs across software)
• all the features they need

That last bullet is important: I’m willing to say that most of Microsoft Office is worthless. The last Office upgrade I cared about was MS Office 6; 6 was a great version. Office 2000 adds nothing useful. I find most of XP a waste, too, other than the stability improvements. But then, maybe other people get a lot more use out of Microsoft’s built-in tools, like Outlook and the Media Player. Under Windows, I prefer Mulberry for email and Winamp or QuickTime for various media. I’ve not found a really solid reason to upgrade to XP. I actually liked 2K better.

Which is a long way of saying that from my perspective, the list of features I need isn’t so large, and I could have gotten it several versions ago in Windows. Had Windows 95 been stable enough, I would have been fine with that. I’m looking for an OS that doesn’t crash, and that makes it easy for me to

• watch movies
• rip CDs
• burn CDs
• do basic office tasks, and some not-so-basic office tasks
• do basic file operations

I know I’m missing stuff, but those are the basics.

Where’s innovation in there? What innovation do users really seek out? (This is non-rhetorical: I’m quite open to the possibility that I’ve misunderstood users.)

UI innovation is a biggie, I guess. But I don’t think Windows was an innovator there. Windows 95 is a recycled Mac. Windows 3.1 and before were not easy to use, so they’re out of the running. Windows 98 is recycled Win95 with some stability problems. Win2K and WinXP include some slight modifications to Win95/98, but they’re more or less the same thing.

As for the financial incentives for closed-source software: I think companies are more and more realizing that what’s bad for Microsoft is good for them. Apple, Sun, and IBM are all lined up behind open-source, at least in some token way. I think even the financial argument for closed-source software is going to fall away. Maybe not soon, but bit by bit.

This is all speculation, of course. It’s largely ass-talking, but at least half-informed ass-talking: I’ve used all the OSes that I’m rambling about, and I’ve seen how others use them. I’ve realized recently that my perception of how people use computers is colored by the incredibly tech-savvy people with whom I spend my time. Most people do not know how to use computers very well; most have to rely on a smart friend or an IT department to tell them how to do anything. I recently helped a very smart guy to play a different track than the one he was currently playing under Windows Media Player. I.e., I don’t think the Windows UI is all that intuitive, and I doubt its usability is all that hard a tower to knock over. And if it is, we can do it in the same way that Microsoft beat the Mac at its own game: by mimicking. There’s nothing wrong with that; everyone does it.

My parents and brother bought the same model of webcam, so that they could chat when my brother’s and Abby’s daughter is born. My bro runs a Mac laptop, and my parents run a Windows desktop. So over the weekend, they say in front of their respective machines at our house in Vermont, trying to access the Macintosh side of the webcam-software CD from the Windows machine; they would have opened it on my brother’s Mac, but he left its removable CD-ROM drive back in California.

Turns out that there is no easy way to mount the Mac side of a Windows/Mac CD from a Windows machine. I would posit that this is a Microsoft conspiracy to make it hard to switch from Windows to the Mac, but that doesn’t make much sense: from Microsoft’s perspective, the ideal would be that you could read every other OS under Windows, but not write to any other OS; similarly, you could import any file into Microsoft Office, but not export Office files to any other format. So I’m not sure why it’s so hard to mount Mac CDs.

It’s really easy to do this under Linux. The Linux mount command can mount adfs, affs, autofs, coda, cramfs, devpts, efs, ext2, ext3, hfs, hpfs, iso9660, jfs, minix, msdos, ncpfs, nfs, ntfs, proc, qnx4, reiserfs, romfs, smbfs, sysv, tmpfs, udf, ufs, umsdos, vfat, and xfs filesystems with virtually no work: you just type mount -t [fstype], where [fstype] is any one of the above.

The point, should it have gotten lost somewhere in there, is that Mac CDs — filesystem type HFS, for Hierarchical File System — are really easy to mount under Linux. I told my parents and brother that if it took any more than 5 minutes to mount the Mac CD here in Boston, I’d eat my hat. Turns out I didn’t have to: it took 30 seconds, at most, to mount the disc. I zipped up all the files from the Mac side of the disc and put it on my website for my brother to download when he got back home.

Which actually makes a good punchline, if you think about it: they had to come to Boston to do what they should have been able to do from home. Another victory for Linux.

I think it’ll take a series of small, practical victories like this — little tasks that you can do more easily under Linux than under Windows — for Linux to really take hold on the desktop.

My parents had a great gift idea: an Uninterruptible Power Supply for stevereads.com. This machine goes down fairly regularly when the power spikes in this neighborhood, so the UPS is perfect. My last one failed in a bad way: it kept cutting out, bringing my machine down at least once an hour for a few weeks. I unplugged that UPS and plugged my machine directly into the wall. Everything was going great until the neighborhood’s power cut out. Hence the new UPS. It should keep stevereads.com up as close to 24/7 as possible.

All of this is probably moot, because I think some friends and I will be moving to a colocated server presently. When that happens, bandwidth and reliability will both go up. I’m excited.

Professor Dan Drezner says that a recent comment by Howard Dean is stupid:

Then there’s Howard Dean on Osama bin Laden in an interview with the Concord Monitor:

The Monitor asked: Where should Osama bin Laden be tried if he’s caught? Dean said he didn’t think it made any difference, and if he were president he would consult with his lawyers for advice on the subject.

But wouldn’t most Americans feel strongly that bin Laden should be tried in America — and put to death?

“I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said. “I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials. So I’m sure that is the correct sentiment of most Americans, but I do think if you’re running for president, or if you are president, it’s best to say that the full range of penalties should be available. But it’s not so great to prejudge the judicial system.”

Logical question for Governor Dean — how is your support for the decision to go to war in Afghanistan not tantamount to “pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found”? [So you want to string up bin Laden the moment we get our hands on him?—ed. No, no — due process for everyone. But I can hear Karl Rove cackling with glee from this time zone.]

UPDATE: Dean released a clarifying statement on his official blog:

I share the outrage of all Americans. Osama bin Laden has admitted that he is responsible for killing 3,000 Americans as well as scores of men, women and children around the world. This is exactly the kind of case that the death penalty is meant for.

I don’t think Dean’s comments are stupid, and I said so in the comments to Drezner’s post. In fact, Dean’s views square with mine: as a democracy, we must resort to war only when the judicial process has failed or when it’s inapplicable. If it’s possible to capture each of a country’s leaders and try them with murder, then we should do that. My objection to invading Afghanistan was precisely that we had short-circuited the entire judicial process; we had even refused to turn over evidence of Osama bin Laden’s complicity in the September 11 attacks, resorting instead to a “you are with us or you are against us” stance. We made a mockery of democracy.

I’ve found few reasons not to support Dean.

A very good, very intelligent friend argued recently that Linux is not inherently more secure than Windows; it’s just that Windows has the much larger market share, he said. He claims that Windows isn’t any more vulnerable to viruses than Linux is. I disagree, but the proof is in the pudding. So I throw down the gauntlet here: if someone a) develops a Linux exploit that affects more than a few high-profile servers, or b) develops a Linux virus that spreads rapidly in the wild, then I will pay my friend $100. I can think of no other way to test the strength of his claim, or to convince either of us.

I restrict both a) and b) to servers to keep the playing field level. Linux has not yet achieved widespread adoption on the desktop, but it is deployed quite widely on servers. And I would suspect that servers are the most high-profile targets: hacking into Amazon’s or Google’s servers is worth a lot more than hacking into Joe Sixpack’s home machine — or even several thousand Joe Sixpacks’ machines.

It’s just not going to happen: Linux is a more secure OS by design, and it will resist attacks well into the future. Of this I’m quite certain.

A couple of links, and then it’s off to read a bunch more essays by Jeffrey Steingarten. First, Via The Volokh Conspiracy, a very interesting profile of the Ninth Circuit’s Judge Kozinski (my cache). Adam and I had a very well-timed conversation just a few days ago about Kozinski’s conservatism and famed irascibility, and the article more or less backed up those impressions — along with some doubts about the consistency of the man’s jurisprudence.

Next, the obscenely well-designed Ben Hammersley reports that the Clark campaign is using open-source software as a vital part of its campaign (or at least, doing its campaign cheaply):

In the continuing realisation that they can get people to work for free, the techification of the US presidential campaigns just gets geekier and geekier. Not content with Wesley Clark’s new Open Source initiative, Howard Dean’s lot have released the Dean Feeds: policy statements, press releases and the like, but also including events and FOAF feeds for all registered users.. Wow.

If you visit the Clark-campaign link above, you see that it says

The Clark TechCorps provides a framework for involving open source software developers in the Clark campaign. Through the collaborative development of open source code, developers design and implement critical Clark campaign infrastructure while extending the availability of open campaignware/electionware.

and

Democracy cannot function without openness and transparency. Internet Democracy is no different. The Clark TechCorps represents a significant commitment to both these guiding principles.

It’s a sign that perhaps the campaign really gets the connection between democracy and open-source software. It’s really a very fundamental connection, and an acid test of any campaigner in 2004 should be that he (I would say “he or she,” but Carol Moseley Braun will not be the nominee; I’m sorry if I’ve burst anyone’s bubbles) makes a commitment to open-source in government.

Then again, as Hammersley says: maybe it’s just a way for the Clark campaign to get some free labor. The last temptation may still be the greatest treason.

Every now and again it occurs to me that I should get a job involving books in some way — lexicographer, research librarian, editor, publisher, agent, reviewer, or something. But then I realize that one of the things I love most about reading books is that I’m under no pressure to do it. In high school, I just couldn’t bring myself to read any of the books I was assigned; reading a book had to be my idea. Of course, now I regret that, because I missed out on really absorbing a lot of books that I now acknowledge to be brilliant. At the same time, I probably just wasn’t ready to read them, and probably most people at that age aren’t.

If I got a job that required me to, say, read 100 incoming books by new authors and give my impressions of each, I don’t know whether my private reading life would suffer. I’d either be so tired of reading all day that I’d cultivate a solid drug habit, or I’d be so happy to choose the books I read that I’d read my own stuff at night. I’m not really sure. So I wonder whether I ought to stay away from book-reading as a career and keep that as part of my private life.

I’ve yet to find a job that takes a private joy of mine — say, technology or tech policy — and turns it into a source of income while still keeping me excited. My dream right now is that at some point in the future, I’ll combine law, technology, literature, journalism, and politics into some heady brew that’s enormous fun to do and changes the world in whatever way ends up seeming the best. (I’ve got some ideas, but nothing that I could turn into policy just yet.) I wonder whether I’m the sort of person who loses a lot of the fun of a task when he does it either formally (I couldn’t deal with ultimate frisbee beyond pickup games) or for money.

Unrelatedly, I’d like to point everyone to Jessamyn West, and in particular her weblog  . . .  er  . . .  journal. I’ve not yet met Jessamyn, but we’ve emailed quite a lot (thank you, Friendster) and spoken on the phone, and my friend James tells me that she’s the reason there are six degrees of separation between humans rather than eight. She also published a list of technically legal ways for libraries to get around the Patriot Act. She seems way cool. I can’t wait to meet her; scheduling and illness have thwarted our attempts thus far, but I have faith that we’ll meet soon.

Having finished Order Without Law yesterday morning, I’m on to a much lighter book: Vogue food columnist Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay collection It Must’ve Been Something I Ate. It’s good fun. It’s a little too precious at times, in the “in case you had forgotten, I go really far to eat good food!” vein. But it’s a fun read, especially if you like good food and enjoy drooling over people writing about it. Plus Steingarten is just a very solid writer. If you happen to have a really amazing bookstore in your neighborhood, and they’re offering the book at 20% off for Christmas, why not pick it up? (Speaking of which, a little sidenote to the Harvard Book Store: guys, I emailed you a while ago asking why you don’t have anything like the Amazon.com Associates program, where people put links to Amazon on their sites and collect a little cash when visitors click through and buy Amazon books. Get on the ball, Harvard Book Store! You should have something like this.)

While reading one of Steingarten’s essays, about the sorrows of being laid up with a broken leg for weeks, I happened upon a line that I find kind of funny: “And then, at last, my wife returns from China, bent low with culinary gifts: three bags of very fine tea; a liter of Suntory Pure Malt Whiskey  . . . ” Suntory was the whiskey Bill Murray advertised in Lost In Translation, wasn’t it? I thought it was a fake product. Murray’s signature line was something like, “For good times  . . .  [intensely] make it Suntory Time.”

All right, so maybe just I found that funny.

Finally, note that Steingarten has a detailed Q-and-A on egullet.com (via Jason Kottke’s remaindered links). This Q-and-A is especially valuable for those who’ve read Amanda Hesser’s praise of Steingarten. If you believe that Amanda Hesser (left) will eventually ditch her New Yorker-writing husband and come over to the curly-haired beast who is her destiny, then the Q-and-A is for you.

I just finished reading Robert Ellickson’s book Order Without Law, about the informal norms that control behavior even in the presence of laws to the contrary. It’s a very solid book, very tightly argued. If I were its editor, the only change I would make is to ask Ellickson to repeat himself less.

The basic premise behind the book is that, because of certain very obvious principles of social interaction, neighbors don’t need laws to tell them how to act. One such principle is that if you expect to do business with someone over and over again, you have incentives to resolve your problems amongst yourselves rather than turning to the legal system. If you mistreat that person, you can expect that he’ll pay you back later. Similarly, neighbors often keep a mental ledger: if someone has treated me well over the years, I will typically feel inclined to help him in return.

Principles like this are obvious, but Ellickson runs quite far with them. He also supplements them with empirical evidence from cattle ranchers in Shasta County, California. He found that ranchers turned to the legal system only after exhausting every other option when dealing with one another, and that they misunderstood the liabilities that the law imposed on them when they fenced off their ranges. Not only did their norms differ from the law, but they hardly took the law into consideration when deciding how to act.

Ellickson takes some nice turns into game theory, anthropology and sociology throughout his book, which makes it a refreshingly worldly view of the law. I’ve recently been reading Richard Posner’s law-and-economics works which — while fascinating — seems to be missing some humanity. Ellickson spent his career before Order Without Law working as a law-and-economics scholar, and he admits that this is one of the field’s failings; it’s so committed to a rational-choice model of the world that it sacrifices necessary complexity: the world really is a complicated place, and to think that you can describe it using that parsimonious a model is rather ludicrous. Ellickson shows that in practice, real people seem not to behave the way that Coase, Posner and others believe that they would. Empiricism is a wonderful breath of fresh air; Ellickson’s book is enjoyable to read, whereas I find myself throughout Posner thinking, “But no, that’s insane!” Granted, Posner’s a genius with a broad view, and one cannot dismiss his ideas out of hand. But reading Ellickson leaves you with a different feel than Posner — the feeling, honestly, that you’ve just read someone with more humanity.

Finally, one of the big virtues of Order Without Law is the generosity of its style. Ellickson never tears into other scholars with the abandon that a Posner does. Again, I don’t mean to demean Posner all that much — I love reading his books — but he does delight in triumphing over his intellectual sparring partners. Ellickson takes no such joy, even when he is in fact undercutting an opponent’s arguments. He’s laying out a dispassionate story in Shasta County, then building up a dispassionate theory. Again, the style is a breath of fresh air.

Anarchists will get something out of this book: they may go into it thinking that it’s an argument in favor of destroying government broadly, when it’s really no such thing; Ellickson’s model, if anything, only argues that we could do without government (or that people act as though the government weren’t there) when people with a long-term relationship interact. It never tries to argue — indeed, questions the argument — that strangers (such as victims in a car crash) could negotiate to an optimal solution without the aide of centralized authority. It may be possible to make that argument, but Ellickson is not the one to make it.

Above all, I’d recommend this book to readers in law-and-economics who are looking to soothe their stomachs after reading Posner.

I’ve not yet read the full decision in the Padilla case — refusing to allow the government to hold José Padilla without charging him with a crime or giving him access to an attorney — but it seems generally right to me. Doesn’t it just seem morally wrong to you to allow the government to hold someone for years without counsel and almost no possibility of ever being released? Shouldn’t a man’s freedom rest on more than the whim of the attorney general?

So I have very little patience for unprincipled arguments of the sort that Ruth Wedgwood is advancing (my cache). It’s fundamentally legalistic. I’ll set aside the legal question for right now, because I don’t really know whether the court acted within its rights. But from the level of principle: I’d like Professor Wedgwood to explain where she draws the line between a fascist — and I mean that strictly — mode of operating a government, and a democratic one. If we’re allowed to hold people hostage for two years with no legal protection, what’s left of the judicial system? Why should terrorism justify this sort of disgrace, and not murder? Or better yet, why foreign terrorism and not Tim McVeigh-style terrorism?

Again bearing in mind that I’ve not read the Padilla decision, Wedgwood appears to have engaged in overstatement and straw-manning:

Of course, it would be preferable to know everything that is important in life by standards of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But imagine if the intelligence dots had been replete and connected on Sept. 10, 2001. What if we knew, from out-of-court sources, the names of Qaeda operatives who were planning to hijack the jet-fueled airplanes for attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Even then, we would likely have lacked admissible criminal proof. By the logic of last week’s decision, the president could not have held the hijackers as combatants — even after they had entered the United States, even with habeas corpus review of the president’s decision, until the moment they appeared at Logan Airport with box cutters.

Has anyone insisted that we had to have evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” against Padilla before jailing him? Isn’t that a standard applied only to juries once the accused has entered a criminal trial? Padilla hasn’t even been tried yet. He hasn’t even been tried by a military tribunal. He’s just rotting in jail. The judicial system has done a reasonable job keeping this country safe from violent criminals for hundreds of years, all along without knowing the guilt of the accused before scooping them up. Why does Wedgwood assume that we would need it to grab Padilla?

All that civil libertarians ask is that the ordinary judicial protections afforded to ordinary American citizens be extended into as many corners of this “war on terror” as possible. It seems the only just thing to do while our leaders claim to be defending democracy in the rest of the world. Instead, people like Wedgwood and the Bush Administration would have us believe that these protections are passé after 9/11. I hope that their ideas fade away quickly, or I honestly don’t hold out much hope for our democracy.