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 ...
Being observant is a little more demanding than thanx saying, “Oh, door!” As you smack into it.
Read the site Vick. Read the analysis. Its all right there.
“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.”
I disagree that it takes just one case to disprove my hypothesis. What we see in Kepner is an anomaly, yes, but it’s anomaly that could also be consistent with my hypothesis. I just don’t have the coding know-how to draw any conclusions.
Plus, if it only takes one anomaly to deflate a theory, then Leo’s theory is thoroughly punctured. His theory starts with alleging that Justia removed references to “Minor v Happersett” to, I guess, hide the significance of the case.
And then that they did the same thing to references to the Slaughterhouse Cases. And to Dred Scott. And to Osborn v US.
And to US v Babbitt. And to Hylton v US. And to Bartemeyer v Iowa.
That’s one WEIRD cover-up scheme. And even though Leo tries to hide this a little by grouping the first three together as ‘citizenship’ cases, the fact is that Osborn is primarily a BANKING case, and Dred Scott and the Slaughterhouse Cases are two of the most famous Supreme Court decisions of the 1800s. Trying to obscure their significance would be like trying to hide Brown v. Board of Education.
“Read the site Vick. Read the analysis. Its all right there.”
I’m not seeing any full grabs of the decisions; just single screenshots. Did you or Leo bother to preserve full images of the corrupted and pre-corrupted decisions, or did you only take images of these particular screens?
When your allegation is that Minor was targeted, to the supposed exclusion of other cases, then it’s not the best evidence to have only isolated screenshots without saving the rest of the decisions for comparison. A simple print-to-PDF or download of Screengrab, and whole webpages can be saved with a click.
Everything was saved. Not just screenshots. The whole pages. Those are not easy to reproduce on the web without server space. The screenshots are the most straightforward way to see precisely what Leo found. And it is completely damning.
If you want to bitch about something, go call Justia and ask why they took their site off Wayback Machine preventing folks from finding out just how much they changed. If THEY had not done that, YOU could see it too, but Justia has something to HIDE. Leo exposed it, opened things up, REAL freedom of information. Not a load of propaganda.
Leo FOUND this, he didn’t CREATE it Vick. Go attack the people who DID it, stop your bitchy nitpicking of the guy who discovered it. He isn’t to blame. THEY are.
“Everything was saved. Not just screenshots. The whole pages. Those are not easy to reproduce on the web without server space.”
Sure they are. If you already have whole pages saved, showing the before and after, simply print them to PDF. (If you don’t already have a PDF converter, I suggest CutePDF.) Then upload the PDFs to scribd.com.
It’s easy, fast, and free. No server space necessary.
“The screenshots are the most straightforward way to see precisely what Leo found.”
And full pages are the most straightforward way to evaluate his conclusions.
We have not had the time. That is in the works.
You will just have to wait until we can get to it. There is still some investigating going on. That has been the priority.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.