Posted on 10/31/2011 11:58:08 AM PDT by Danae
On Friday October 21, 2011, this column exposed the scrubbing of Supreme Court Cases from legal research website Justia.com. On the following Monday October 24th, Justia founder and CEO Tim Stanley gave a very short response to Declan McCullagh at cnet.com about this scandal. (CNET is a tech heavy website dedicated to developers more so than the legal community.)
There Stanley asserted that citations in the 25 relevant cases (and more) were “mangled” due to a coding error. The code in question is called Regular Expressions, Regex for short. This code is essentially a filter. It is simple in that it will include or exclude specific characters from a result. A result would be what you see on an internet browser. Pure data is filtered through Regex code and put into its correct positions on a webpage in a template format.
The code error Stanley attributes the missing data to is a “ .* ” instead of a “ \s ”.
"In this case, Stanley said, what happened is that Justia's programmers typed in ".*" (which matches any character) when creating a regex. It's now an "\s" (which matches only spaces),". - Declan McCullagh
This column investigates Tim Stanley’s statements to cnet with regard to the plausibility of them by consulting a professional familiar with Regex. Dr. David Hansen PhD. is a current University Professor in Computer Science and he explains what those two bits of code do.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
You are not very observant. Leo posted all 25 the the day I first published on it on the 21st. Not only that, I saw the live pages. We sent the links to other members of the press so we know, other journalists know what was live, before Justia blocked the wayback machine. Leo predicted they would. He was right, and Justia did the exact same thing in Aug 2011.
Your rock is there to the left. Its missing you.
“Leo posted all 25 the the day I first published on it on the 21st.”
Excellent. I browsed through them quickly, and already noticed that ‘Breedlove’ had the same thing happen to an old case called “Hylton v. US”, and that ‘N.Y. Ex Rel. Bryant’ had a couple of pre-1875 cases screwed up, including one named “Bartemeyer.” Both had the case name and pre-1875 citation disappear, and both were replaced with a hyperlinked post-1875 citation.
In fact, the ‘N.Y. Ex Rel. Bryant’ decision ought to be a great test case. In looking at the current Justia site, Footnotes 1-6 have a bunch of pre-1875 cases mixed in among a lot of post-1875 cases. I don’t know what those cases are about, but if my hypothesis is right, we ought to see some funny stuff happening with those pre-1875 cases, but not so much the others. So where are your full screengrabs for the decisions? Or did you just print-to-PDF for everything?
Sargon, your point is not only well taken, it was discussed at length by one of the legal authorities on the topic, Professer Robert Berring at another “Law.gov” conference, here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuiytrzxFsE&feature=player_embedded during which you can hear Tim Stanley, perhaps a bit worried after Berring described an assignment for Boalt Law students wherein the student retrieves the same citation from Lexis, then Westlaw, then Findlaw (free) and Justia(free) and one other. He is very concerned with the veracity of the free archives.
Donofrio pointed to a lecture given by Stanley at the “Center for American Progress”, a Soros operation, for those who don't know, which is a marketing pitch for the value of making case law transparent. He doesn't, of course, elaborate on the possibilities of hiding laws which might interfere with Soros/Obama’s objectives to permanently change the society. One cannot know Stanley's objective. Soros and other groups have a path to government grants. You don't think he is just spending "his own" money? Perhaps this one little misdirection got him a big pot of venture money. In Silicon Valley, when a technology is not unique, "cashing out" is the goal. Would Google have purchased Justia, allowing Stanley and Stern to sell their overpriced valley mansion and retire to Monte Carlo, or a castle in Spain?
The attempts to technically understand how the text could have been changed accidentally are surely inspiring, or have inspired, some competent, albeit politically or financially motivated programmers who have access to the entire justia archive to produce a perfectly explainable result, which Justia will later make available to the public after offering the design rules they are creating as we speak as the explanation for their result. Denying access to justia archives is tantamount to a confession of their complicity, but the right judge may not see it that way. If I were Stanley's council I'd look for Judge Carter, the spineless former Marine.
We don't know how much Leo was able to download, but you can bet Justia does, and will use that fact to thwart any legal investigation. They'll know what he does and doesn't have, and use what he doesn't have to thwart even discovery. Leo has seen this before, and probably wouldn't venture to trust the federal courts again. They are bought and paid for.
Justia and its partners, Oyez, Soros, perhaps even Kirkland and Ellis, who defended McCain and sponsored legal briefs attacking Article II (Sarah Herlihy), have skillfully hidden the trail which leads to the positive legal definition of who is a natural born citizen. They all knew the truth, and probably so do must Republicans, since they ignored the hundreds of constituents who asked Congress to vet Obama, an Obama who had already told us he was born a subject of the British Commonwealth.
I agree, someone should start another open legal reference source, one which permits hyperlinks, because justia.com should be finished. Trust is an essential component both within the legal community and for the public. The Soros/Obama experience has seriously tarnished the ethical reputation of the legal community, and we will all suffer if they don't clean up their act. When the phrase "equal justice under the law" is taken as sarcasm, a society is left, as Andy Stern put it, "With the pursuasion of force."
“Stanley says that what happened was due to “errors”. He is calling this deliberate act an error.”
No, he’s calling it an error, and you’re calling it a deliberate act. You’ve put forth a conspiracy theory, and I’ve put forth a testable hypothesis that I believe is consistent with the evidence and with Stanley’s explanation.
Actually, it might be possible to test yours a bit. You seem to have suggested that the reason for the non-Minor cases being changed was because they dealt with citizenship. So what post-1875 cases on citizenship were consistently messed with? Any?
“If nothing else, people who depended on that resource for information for schoolwork, or research, or legal cases might have missed or otherwise incorrect cases need to know if their work was affected.”
I understand the ‘coming clean and admit how many cases were affected’ part of this. But how does blocking the Wayback Machine negatively affect students or researchers? If someone DID get incorrect information from Justia (and don’t forget that in the overwhelming number of these changes, a working citation still remained), how would searching cases on the Wayback Machine help them now?
I will look into your hypothesis as I research this story and bring myself up-to-speed. I haven’t paid significant attention to it from the very beginning and so can’t speak intelligently about the screenshots and previous claims.
However, in deciding whether or not you have an agenda and intend to waste my valuable time, I discovered that you have never, not once, posted a comment at FR on anything other than the eligibility issue. Your sole purpose here thus far is to refute birther claims.
Let’s establish that now before we move forward in any discussion. Fair enough?
check out Leo's blog and look for this one of the 25 cases:
Kepner v. U.S., 195 U.S. 100 (1904)
In his 2006 snapshot, the following non Minor/Slaughterhouse pre-1875 case (Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163) shows NON ALTERED, it reads...
“In this court, it was said by Mr. Justice Miller, in Ex parte Lange, 18 Wall. 163:”
Both live and old snapshots are identical. There were no changes here. They are the same type of references (pre-1875) that would require the same treatment by the Regex code. But in this case, it did not happen. I had my doubts when you brought up your hypothesis, but what I just showed above further strengthens the argument that the alteration was deliberate in nature.
But yes, B.T., you have probably found a "ringer".
Where are your screenshots proving such?
Sheesh...
You and vick are still trying to come from the perspective that this was an error. It wasn’t. How do we know that, because it did not happen across the board. It was specific. And not just specific to Minor v Happersett and other case names. Or to case citations, there was text removed, parts of the cases themselves. Parts that include sentances like (paraphrasing here) ‘Natural Born Citizenship which is important only when determining eligiblity for president of the United States,’. Yea a sentance like that got erased.
You and Vick are welcome to continue to believe it was an accident. I strongly disagree. It is too deliberate, too specific, and every coder I have spoken to (and that includes a PhD) has literally laughed when this was shown to them. Its stupid crazy to try and asert that it was an error, or an accident. It had to be done specifically. With deliberate choice and information behind it which helped to identify what needed to be removed and why.
It’s no accident.
...I understand the ‘coming clean and admit how many cases were affected’ part of this. But how does blocking the Wayback Machine negatively affect students or researchers? If someone DID get incorrect information from Justia (and don’t forget that in the overwhelming number of these changes, a working citation still remained), how would searching cases on the Wayback Machine help them now?...
are you serious?
Go read Leo’s work Vickery, I am not going to carry your water for you.
I repest, this was specific, the text removed related to citizenship and removed only specific text leaving the rest. That does not happen on accident with Regex. It really is as simple as that.
So to go after the facts, and deviate from opinions a bit,I read Vicks explanation and from the pattern recognition perspective, it made sense to me so I went through Leo's snapshots and I found one case that debunked Vick's hypothesis, I just needed one case to prove it, see my previous post.
So no, I am not trying to come from the other side or have a specific agenda in mind. I was just trying to make sense of the pattern and analyze Vick's statement
That makes sense to me. My husband is an architect and builds enterprise applications. He did the same thing when I showed him the images... and laughed. :)
obumpa
(Revisiting thread) Thanks to every poster/researcher/technician/investigator/educator. Fascinating.
Not every post. In fact, my very first post was in a thread about “Ulsterman”, where I linked to a blog that proved he was a BS-artist. But otherwise I suppose I have posted mostly about Birther stuff, because most of my internet posts are in response to something I disagree with, or when I see someone saying something incorrect. So I respond to Birthers because, frankly, they get stuff incorrect a lot.
Good catch. Now we have an opportunity to test my hypothesis in a different way. So the question we have to ask is: is there a REASON that the Regex code wouldn’t affect the citation to Ex parte Lange? For instance, the citation has the name linked, but doesn’t include the US Reports number at all. If that’s what the case already looked like back in 2006, with a hyperlink, then would the Regex code affect it in the same way as it would affect the unlinked citation to Minor? Alternatively, is there anything else in the code for Lange that would cause it to be affected differently than Minor?
Do we have an original screenshot of the Kepner case? One that shows what it looked like BEFORE the name ‘Minor v Happersett’ disappeared? I do know Leo said that he has the HTML code for old pages.
“Where are your screenshots proving such?”
Leo’s blog. Just like you said.
What was that you were saying about being observant?
“are you serious?”
Absolutely. Under what circumstances would a person say ‘I wrote a research paper in 2008 and relied on Justia, and now I find out that Justia’s information might have been corrupted. So I need the Wayback Machine to look at what Justia pages used to look like.’ The best response to that situation would be to turn to another source to check the references.
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