I've been neglecting my blog for the last few days because of the hectic pace of my lifestyle this week, but there are a couple of things that I want to comment on.

Jose Padilla
As you have probable heard by now, the federal government has finally decided to file charges against Jose Padilla, who has been held in a military brig without charges since May 8l 2002.The Bush administration claimed that it had the authority to do this because it had designated Padilla an "enemy combatant", giving it the ability to deny him basic Constitutional rights such as the right to a trial, the right to an attorney, and (one would presume) the right to be free from torture.

This argument, of course, was simply hogwash, and remains so; there is nothing in the Constitution that allows a person to be summarily detained by the government simply because the President has declared him an enemy. If so, what would be the point of the Constitution in the first place? If a group of those pesky anti-war protestors started to become a pain in the posterior, you just declare that they are working against American interests (which the claim that many right-wingers make about anyone who questions any military move the United States makes) and have them detained in a military brig until the war is over. Sure, that violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and probably Eighth Amendments . . . but who cares? They are enemy combatants, right? They don't have any Constitutional rights.

The fact is that Jose Padilla may not be a good guy. He may, in fact, be a very, very bad guy. But he is still entitled to the same rights and protections as the rest of us. If he's not, then there's no guarantee that the rest of us will have those same protections once the government decides that we are the bad guys. So why did the Bush administration finally decide to charge him? For the same reason that they finally decided to give him access to an attorney last year as the Supreme Court was getting ready to hear his case on that issue: the government knew it was going to lose and did not want a Supreme Court decision on the record to clearly prevent it from pulling this same stunt again. In fact, this is precisely the reason the Bush administration is doing this; they want to continue to detain people without charges and in clear violation of their Constitutional rights. They are hoping that the Court will decide not to hear the case because it is now moot. This is why Padilla's attorneys are still pushing for the Supreme Court to hear his case under the doctrine of "Capable of Repetition Yet Evading Review" (the same theory under which the Court agreed to hear Roe v. Wade).

Interestingly, Bush and his cronies have accused Padilla of all sorts of nefarious plans: that he planned a "dirty bomb" attack, that he planned to sabotage natural gas line to blow up apartment buildings, and all sorts of other things. None of those things were charged in the indictment; instead, Padilla was charged with a conspiracy to "murder, maim and kidnap" people outside of the United States. Basically, my understanding of the charges is that he was trying to raise money for Al Qaeda operatives overseas. This raises questions—yet again—about the credibility of the Bush administration. It's become a habit for this administration to make all kinds of scary, dramatic claims and then not provide any sort of evidence to support them. Most often, this happens when the administration is facing a political crisis. In fact, I expect news that Al Qaeda or Iran has a nuclear weapon en route to the United States any day . . . on the basis of super-secret information that can't be revealed without the secret decoder ring and the password to the treehouse.

Much has been made about the egregiousness of this case because Padilla is a U.S. citizen. Let's be clear, though: Padilla's status as a U.S. citizen makes the case more compelling on an emotional level, but it's not even germane legally. The Constitutional protections against things like due process, unreasonable search and seizure, cruel and unusual punishment, and so on do not make distinctions between "citizens" and "non-citizens"; they refer to "people". Also sprach the U.S. Supreme Court:

Quote:

Wing Wong v. United States, 163 US 228, 238 (1896). This is important because there are still 500 people being held in Guantanamo Bay (which despite the arguments of the Bush administration is U.S. territory, since it is leased to the United States), not to mention Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari man who was yanked from the legal system (he had been arrested for credit card fraud and making false statement to the FBI in December, 2001) and put into the black hole of "enemy combatant" status. Is he a bad guy? Maybe. Was he really planning to launch attacks on the U.S.? Possibly. But should he have a chance to show that this wasn't the case, in open court, so that we—the citizens of the United States—know that our government isn't lying to us? Absofreakinlutely. (The thing that I find interesting about this case is that the government thought it was "necessary to prevent him from aiding al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States or its armed forces, other government personnel, or citizens." Huh? He was already in jail awaiting trial! What was he gonna do? Throw radioactive spitballs?)

So is this really progress? Or is it one step forward and two steps back? Only time will tell.

Microsoft Claims it Wants an Open Format
Microsoft announced on Monday that it is submitting its new Office XML format to Ecma International, a European standards body, and making it "open" for others to use. Claims Microsoft's senior director of XML architecture, Jean Paoli, "We want documents to be represented using a standardized, stable and open format so that the owners of the content can use and repurpose it in whatever way they want, independent of the software they used to create it." Claims Microsoft, "the new formats will be fully documented. Anyone will be able to get the full specs on the formats and there will be a royalty free license for anyone that wants to work with the files." They also apparently plan to submit it to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for approval.

Color me skeptical. I mean, what's the catch?

Microsoft is not known for doing anything that promotes competition. I mean, they have long engaged in a strategy of "embrace, extend, and distinguish", which can best be demonstrated by what they did with HTML: they took the HTMl standard, then designed their browser to support that standard and new tags specific to their browser without giving others the ability to incorporate those same tags into their browsers. In doing so, they undermined the very standard they claimed to embrace. They did (or attempted to do) the same thing with Java, CSS, SMB networking, C#, CLR, and so on. I don't see this new "open XML format" as anything different.

How could they do it? Well, for one, they could submit the standard, and then start adding all kinds of new proprietary things to MS Office (or even implement old things) as embedded binary files within the XML. They could start adding new proprietary tags to the standard—"extending" it—so that Office could read files from other office applications but other applications could not read Office files. And there are a hundred (or more) other ways they could employ an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy to the idea of open document standards. They can also, as pointed out by one of the advocates for open formats within Microsoft, "continue to change the Office file format at will. All it has to do is document it publicly, and license it freely." In other words, MS could do what it's done for years: dink with the format so that customers have to continuously pay to upgrade—maybe even planning the changes years in advance—and waiting until after the product has been released to document and release the code, meaning that there will be a span of months in which new documents created with Microsoft products would only be readable by Microsoft products. As Paoli himself asserts, "Yes this is proprietary and not defined by a standards body, but it can be used by and interoperable with others. They don't need Microsoft software to read and write. It is not an open standard but an open format." Which means that the rest of the world is still at Microsoft's mercy if this does become the new de facto standard, even if a more limited sort of mercy.

It's not that I have a problem with Microsoft creating an open format; it's something I'd advocated for a long time. As Adam Barr wrote, "It was perfectly fine if the format was invented by a single company, as long as it was documented and freely usable by anyone." Would it be better if the standard was a vendor-neutral, open format? Sure.

So, if this move is really genuine—if Microsoft has really decided to start playing well with others—I'll give them props and I will herald this move as a Good Thing(tm). But due to the company's past behavior, I remain a skeptic. A hopeful skeptic, but a skeptic nonetheless.

(Incidentally, Groklaw has a great article on the technical differences between the Microsoft format and OpenDocument Format that gives some details on the pros/cons of each.)