The Citizen Participation Act of 2009: Federal Legislation as Effective Defense Against SLAPPs

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution expressly guarantees the right of citizens to petition the government. Citizen efforts have been particularly crucial to the process of creating, shaping, and enforcing environmental laws. Nevertheless, citizen participants in government can often find themselves facing retaliation in the form of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). SLAPPs are lawsuits brought to interfere with a party\u27s exercise of its right to petition the government, typically by draining the party\u27s time and resources. Although many states have adopted anti-SLAPP protections, similar protections are lacking at the federal level. Because so many federal environmental statutes allow for citizen participation, the threat of a SLAPP is especially high. This Note argues that current federal anti-SLAPP protections are inadequate, and that legislation proposed in 2009 would better protect the right of citizens to petition the government

Directed Energy Planetary Defense

Asteroids and comets that cross Earth’s orbit pose a credible risk of impact, with potentially severe disturbances to Earth and society. Numerous risk mitigation strategies have been described, most involving dedicated missions to a threatening object. We propose an orbital planetary defense system capable of heating the surface of potentially hazardous objects to the vaporization point as a feasible approach to impact risk mitigation. We call the system DE-STAR for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation. DE-STAR is a modular phased array of kilowatt class lasers powered by photovoltaic\u27s. Modular design allows for incremental development, test, and initial deployment, lowering cost, minimizing risk, and allowing for technological co-development, leading eventually to an orbiting structure that would be developed in stages with both technological and target milestones. The main objective of DE-STAR is to use the focused directed energy to raise the surface spot temperature to ~3,000K, allowing direct vaporization of all known substances. In the process of heating the surface ejecting evaporated material a large reaction force would alter the asteroid’s orbit. The baseline system is a DE-STAR 3 or 4 (1-10km array) depending on the degree of protection desired. A DE-STAR 4 allows for asteroid engagement starting beyond 1AU with a spot temperature sufficient to completely evaporate up to 500-m diameter asteroids in one year. Small asteroids and comets can be diverted/evaporated with a DESTAR 2 (100m) while space debris is vaporized with a DE-STAR 1 (10m)