Preventive Detention in American Theory and Practice

It is something of an article of faith in public and academic discourse that preventive detention runs counter to American values and law. This meme has become standard fare among human rights groups and in a great deal of legal scholarship. It treats the past nine years of extra-criminal detention of terrorism suspects as an extraordinary aberration from a strong American constitutional norm, under which government locks up citizens pursuant only to criminal punishment, not because of mere fear of their future acts. This argument further asserts that any statutory counterterrorism administrative detention regime would be a radical departure from this norm, an institutionalization of the aberration that the detention practices of the Bush and Obama years have represented. The more careful commentators acknowledge that the rule has exceptions – sometimes even many of them. But they describe these exceptions as narrow and limited, deviations from a generally strong rule that the American system tolerates to accommodate exceptional circumstances. The trouble with such civic mythology is that it is, ultimately, an inaccurate description of past practice, and thus a misleading indicator of the theory on which such practice rested. Our purpose in this paper is to describe just how mythological this particular civic myth is – indeed, to show that nearly every aspect of it is false: Preventive detention is not prohibited by U.S. law or especially frowned upon in tradition or practice. The circumstances in which it arises are not isolated exceptions to a strong rule against it; rather, they are relatively frequent. The federal government and all 50 states together possess a wide range of statutory preventive detention regimes that are frequently used, many of which provoke little social or legal controversy

Dawinder S. Sidhu on Hate Crimes, Terrorism, and Sikhs

Dawinder S. Sidhu of the University of New Mexico School of Law writes in with the following comments on the fallout from the shooting at the Sikh Temple at Oak Creek, Wisconsin

The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans Section 230 Immunity

What do a revenge pornographer, gossip-site curator, and platform pairing predators with young people in one-on-one chats have in common? Blanket immunity from liability, thanks to lower courts’ interpretation of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) beyond what the text, context, and purpose support. The CDA was part of a campaign — rather ironically in retrospect — to restrict access to sexually explicit material online. Lawmakers thought they were devising a safe harbor for online providers engaged in self-regulation. The CDA’s origins in the censorship of “offensive” material are inconsistent with outlandishly broad interpretations that have served to immunize from liability platforms dedicated to abuse and or those that deliberately tolerate illegality. In contrast to a strike-oriented view of the CDA’s safe harbor, its modest revision will not break the “Internet.” Whether this would have been true at the time of its passage two decades ago, it would not be true today. Conditioning immunity from liability on reasonable efforts to address unlawful activity would not end innovation or free expression as we know it. The current environment of perfect impunity for platforms deliberately facilitating online abuse is not a win for free speech because harassers speak unhindered while the harassed withdraw from online interactions. With modest adjustments to section 230, either through judicial interpretation or legislation, we can have a robust culture of free speech online without shielding from liability platforms designed to host illegality or who deliberately host illegal content

Determination of the gas-flow patterns inside the hot-wire chemical vapor deposition system, using computational fluids dynamics software (fluent)

Magister Scientiae - MScComputational Fluid Dynamics is the analysis of a system involving fluid flow, heat transfer and associated phenomena such as chemical reactions by means of a computer-based simulation. The simulations in this study are performed using (CFD) software package FLUENT. The mixture of two gases (Silane gas (SiH4) and Hydrogen gas (H2)) are delivered into the hot-wire chemical vapor deposition system (HWCVD) with the two deposited substrates (glass and Silicon). This process is performed by the solar cells group of the Physics department at the University of the Western Cape. In this thesis, the simulation is done using a CFD software package FLUENT, to model the gas-flow patterns inside the HWCVD system. This will show how the gas-flow patterns are affected by the varying temperature of the heater in each simulation performed in this study under a constant pressure of 60μBar of the system.South Afric

Sextortion: How Big a Problem Is It?

The word “sextortion” is a prosecutorial slang for a new kind of cybersecurity problem: the extortion of sexual conduct online by victims—often a great many of them—by means of threatening the release of sexually explicit images. A recent Brookings study reveals that sextortion is remarkably prevalent. We identified a large number of cases nationwide encompassing many thousands of victims. The justice department has identified sextortion as the most important and fastest-growing cyber threat to children, but many victims are also adult women. A discussion of recent research into a little-discussed cybersecurity threat: The ability to conduct sexual coercion at scale against very large numbers of victims and across state and international borders

Risk factors for heart failure in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and stage 4 chronic kidney disease treated with bardoxolone methyl

Background: A phase 3 randomized clinical trial was designed to test whether bardoxolone methyl, a nuclear factor erythroid-2–related factor 2 (Nrf2) activator, slows progression to end-stage renal disease in patients with stage 4 chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The trial was terminated because of an increase in heart failure in the bardoxolone methyl group; many of the events were clinically associated with fluid retention.<p></p> Methods and Results: We randomized 2,185 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and stage 4 chronic kidney disease (CKD) (estimated glomerular filtration rate 15 to <30 mL min−1 1.73 m−2) to once-daily bardoxolone methyl (20 mg) or placebo. We used classification and regression tree analysis to identify baseline factors predictive of heart failure or fluid overload events. Elevated baseline B-type natriuretic peptide and previous hospitalization for heart failure were identified as predictors of heart failure events; bardoxolone methyl increased the risk of heart failure by 60% in patients with these risk factors. For patients without these baseline characteristics, the risk for heart failure events among bardoxolone methyl– and placebo-treated patients was similar (2%). The same risk factors were also identified as predictors of fluid overload and appeared to be related to other serious adverse events.<p></p> Conclusions: Bardoxolone methyl contributed to events related to heart failure and/or fluid overload in a subpopulation of susceptible patients with an increased risk for heart failure at baseline. Careful selection of participants and vigilant monitoring of the study drug will be required in any future trials of bardoxolone methyl to mitigate the risk of heart failure and other serious adverse events.<p></p&gt