I'm currently looking to get a law degree and the education requirements are... silly. I've done a significant amount of law-and-law-accessories work over the past ten years and have had a nice career in sysadmin/sre/devops/ops work. Yet I need a(ny) bachelors to even get started and I don't even have an associates.
It truly feels like the only way forward is to waste several years of my life and exhaust myself to the bone to get a degree.
But more honestly, it comes from reflecting about the ways that knowledge gaps affect FOIA litigation/conversation/interpretation and the criminal litigation reporting/research/investigations I've done/beenapartof. A lot of law-and-law-accessories is learnable within context-and-scope, especially with attorneys to help interpret, but I would like to get past that point. It helps that it's all very interesting.. and people keep asking me when I'm going to become a lawyer, so, ope.
"Captcha" doesn't refer to any specific type of puzzle, but a class of methods for verifying human users. Some older-style captchas are broken, but some newer ones are not.
I'm aware. But I'm also aware that breaking these sorts of systems is quite fun for a lot of nerds. So don't expect anything like that to last for any meaningful amount of time.
Since before LLMs were even an issue, there have been services that use overseas workers to solve them, with the going rate about $0.002 per captcha. (and they solve several different types)
This is both true and misleading. It implies captchas aren’t effective due to these services. In practice, though, a good captcha cuts a ton of garbage traffic even though a motivated opponent can pay for circumvention.
True, cameras can be taken away or smashed after the fact destroying evidence.
With my phone I can stream video to a cloud so that it can't be deleted. The ACLU used to have an app specifically for this but it seems to have been discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_Mobile_Justice
If you are ok with the low quality, you could use a radio to transmit fast scan TV to a nearby receiver. Use a repeater if you need to get some real distance.
FPV drones often use this and could be a good source of parts. Or encode the feed and send through a small portable ham radio if you want a challenge. https://irrational.net/2014/03/02/digital-atv/
I program without syntax highlighting. Comes from a combination of learning shell scripts within vi (not vim) and the bloatedness of syntax highlighting and autocomplete nonsense. Coding without it all is a nice way to ensure that everything can be encapsulated within your brain. Leads to different abstractions and such. It's fun and I highly recommend it.
Also, the comments in here are really strangely negative. Let people have their preferences, weirdos.
Also also: so much of syntax highlighting and such is designed by people without color blindness. So a lot of syntax highlighting just doesn't work for me. It's wild to me that color blind people still have to be vocal about it.
I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there.
Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently.
FOIA: IL Judicial system isn't FOIAable. There's a "data request" process that you can go down, but last time I tried by requesting through the chief judge of Cook County, they told me to request the data from the Clerk of Courts. The Clerk of Courts told me I need to speak to the chief judge's office. That went on for 6 months. The docket-level data I've seen from them is... beyond indecipherable. Literally never seen a dataset so indecipherable in my life -- a combination of esoteric codes, hidden encoding schemes, and length-delimited lines.
Court docs: Gotta go downtown if you're not a lawyer or if you're not a "criminal justice partner" to get any, then you have to print them (don't print past 4 or you'll get yelled at). Some journalists have access, but the IL Supreme Court's policies disallow journalists from getting it. So we have a system where only some journalists get access to court documents and fuck everyone else, I guess.
Civil Asset Forfeiture cases: the courts and state's attorneys do everything in their part to separate it from the initiating criminal case. So peoples' cars are being taken by the cops under dubious constitutional grounds and they can't get it back until the criminal case is over. And I've yet to find a consistent way to figure out the initiating criminal case tied to a civil asset forfeiture. I've yet to find anything like a policy doc that says it's intentional to obfuscate the criminal case from the civil case, but I can't think of any reason why it would be like this if it wasn't intentional. FOIA through the State's Attorney? Nah, they don't respond, or they give nonsense denials that require litigation.
I could go on, but. Fuck. It's bad out there and it hides so much suffering. I highly encourage folk to give court watching a try. You'll be shocked how much you'll learn.
Consider reaching out to https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/ if any headway can be made legally on these scenarios. They are aggressive, highly recommend. If the legal scaffolding exists to enable FOIA requests, https://www.muckrock.com/ can then do the rest.
Reclaim the Records and I do a loooot of the same work but it's separate enough that we don't really interact much. But I'm a big, big fan of their work and have had a couple light chats with the founder a couple times. She's great and yeah, wonderfully aggressive. Her work's the sort of foundational work that enables so much.
Muckrock and I go back quite a long way! Sending about 200 requests through them later this month :)
I'll tip my hand a bit, I suggested Reclaim the Records because while I am time poor, if they take up fighting anything you suggested, I can send a directed donation towards that work. If you have someone else in mind who will take on these legal challenges in Illinois, I am interested.
Family court is even worse. You can't even know what's illegal for your kid to do because the civil standards on things like 'neglect' are incredibly nebulous and left for agencies like CPS and family law judges to review, so to find out how they're actually interpreted you would need to see cases and how they played out. Those are ~all wrapped up in secret court hearings.
So basically you have no fucking idea what the law actually is, how it's being enforced, what will happen to you if you don't follow their interpretation, and god forbid you wind up there they can use a lot of methods to keep you from talking about it.
I've been frustrated by this stuff for many years, and come to the sad conclusion that corruption in American public life is simply endemic. Lawmakers could and should prioritize the public availability of public legislative and judicial proceedings, but habitually choose not to, preferring obfuscation over clarity.
I buy into Plato's concept (sometimes attributed to Tactitus) that 'the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.'
> Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently.
Is this because a person has to literally transcribe the stenographer's notes into plain English? Is it expensive because it is labor intensive?
Yes and yes. I'm sure there's historical or possibly ethical reasons for it being this way, but I don't understand why it's not the clerk of court's job. Something to figure out!
Over here in Sweden they justify the fees for printed cases by the paper cost. Cheaper than the number you mentioned but still quite costly if you want all nontrivial verdicts. And quite silly when they deliver pdfs..
Then every single case needs to have all PII redacted before it is made searchable, but that is a different story.
I assume there's some reason you can't, but it'd be nice if one could simply declare that the civil forfeiture case is invalid when no criminal case exists, and place the burden of proof back where it belongs.
You seem to have faith in the courts still. It was not a bribe. Here's a short exchange between me and the court reporter who did indeed sent me the transcripts after payment:
"Out of curiosity, is it normal to pay court reporters over venmo like this? To be honest I was pretty surprised when I heard this. And funny enough when I asked folk on twitter, a scammer tried to "help out" with some "scam recovery" service for $500."
"That's hilarious! Since the pandemic, it really took off because we were working remotely, and some of the Cook County judges and reporters remain remote to this day and may be permanently working on Zoom. I work at 26th Street so we've worked through most of the pandemic in person, but the courthouse was not open to the public. Zelle is a way you can get payment to us quickly to get your transcript faster.
Most private attorneys use Zelle now because they want the reporter to start transcription sooner rather than later, but we also accept checks or if you prefer to send a check in the mail, you can do that. Very rarely does an attorney come into our office these days.
It's just a matter of preference."
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