Hello everyone. I hope this week finds you and your family safe and healthy. I know it is getting increasingly more difficult to be home and stay focused.
Try to get fresh air every day (except today) and stick to a routine. Try not to sleep all day and stay up all night.
this week is a catch-up week. Please use the week the catch up on work. the quarter ends Friday April 17th
Extra Credit:
if you are all caught up here is an extra credit assignment (this assignment is only for those who have handed in work during the past few weeks)
go to the website below.
1. choose a topic
2. watch the 2 videos on the topic.
3. once done click discussion questions and answer the questions in a word document and email it to me. You may pick 2 topics. Each topic has 2 short videos.
I hope you are all doing well and managing week 4 of quarantine. if you are behind please try to catch up and complete some work from weeks 1,2 and 3.
Read Carefully: This week was suppose to be your spring break. However; the Governor canceled all spring breaks and mandated distance learning continue.
I am aware that Thursday begins Passover in the Jewish faith and Holy Week in the Christian faith. So I will not not collect any work until Monday April 13th. I am available for any questions you may have but I will not hold any meetings Thursday and Friday as they are religious days. Week 4 assignments:
I will keep the comment section of the current events open this week so you may finish those.
please choose 4 of the following questions to answer. All answers should be a minimum of 1 page per question response. Please make your responses thoughtful and have evidence to back up your statements. All questions should be typed and emailed. If that is not possible and you need to handwrite it please send a picture. you can have your response typed in the body of your email So total of 4 pages. 1 page per question. if you want to complete more you can for extra credit 1. should education be free for everyone? (be sure to think of the consequences of such a program and how it would be funded)
2. Do you think the current epidemic will change the culture of the US? How? what will our new normal look like?
3. As a whole, is there justice for everyone? (think about what justice means and how would justice for all apply to our society)
4. Should we have universal healthcare? (what does universal healthcare mean, what does it look like? again think of the financial, the social impact of this decision. think of our current situation and how it would be different, better or worse, if we had universal healthcare)
5. Is censorship on the internet necessary (how would that work? what are the benefits and dangers of internet censorship)
6. Should men receive paternity leave? (this a policy that would give men paid time off when their child is born )
7.should women have to sign up for the draft? (mandatory military service during a time of war 8. Should a person have the right to choose when they die?
Remember to comment on at least 2 the more you comment ill give extra credit. I will keep comments open so take your time. If you cannot post on the blog send me your responses in an email.
hope you are all healthy and safe
Health
Alone no more: People are turning to dogs, cats and chickens to cope with self-isolation
Since local governments have asked people to stay inside to reduce the spread of coronavirus, animal shelters across the country have seen more pet adoptions than usual. Photo: Marek Szturc/Unsplash
By Kim Kavin and Heather Kelly, Washington Post
On a normal Sunday at the PetSmart in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Lucky Dog Animal Rescue would hold an adoption event and find homes for about 15 dogs.
But as coronavirus news started to spread this past week, the waiting list skyrocketed from 10 to 40 would-be adopters. "And we had 30 adoptions in three hours at that event alone," said Mirah Horowitz, the rescue's executive director.
Forget, toilet paper, milk and hand sanitizer: there's now a rush to stock up on real necessities, such as cats and dogs. And rabbits and fish, even a couple of chickens.
As millions of people across the United States work from home and schools close, the promise of companionship even in a time of isolation is prompting some to take in animals. Many say they finally have the time to properly train and care for a new pet. Animal rescuers across the country say they are seeing spiking interest in adoption and fostering, as well as offers to help everywhere from open-admission shelters to smaller nonprofit groups.
In California — where 40 million residents were ordered on the night of March 19 to stay home except for essential jobs or trips, like getting groceries — Governor Gavin Newsom (D) noted an important exemption.
"You can still walk your dog," he said.
That was part of the appeal for Kathy Shield, a University of California, Berkeley graduate student. After years of wanting a dog, Shield on March 19 adopted a 2-year-old brown and white dog from the Milo Foundation shelter in Point Richmond, California and named him Atom.
"I'm a nuclear scientist so it's very on brand," said Shield.
The timing was ideal because Shield is working from home and can help Atom adjust to his new environment. She's also excited to have someone to talk to, even if he doesn't have much to say back.
Plus, it will help keep her on schedule. "Having a dog is going to force me to get up early in the morning because at an absolute minimum, I have to let it out to pee," Shield said.
The decision to adopt pets flies in the face of some conventional wisdom that discourages adding a new animal to a household during a stressful or busy time of the year, like the holidays. But the novel coronavirus has created an almost parental leave-like situation for many people. Instead of a sleepless newborn, though, they're teaching a dachshund puppy not to chew on the ottoman.
"There's no question that animals provide incredible comfort and companionship, especially during times of crisis — and they certainly appreciate the attention — so we encourage people to continue to adopt or temporarily foster animals in need," said Matt Bershadker, president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in an email.
Shelters need the help. Some animal rescues in big cities are closing their doors to help prevent the spread of coronavirus between people, but the animals still need to be cared for. Many organizations are hoping to find foster homes for their remaining charges and are still processing requests and handing off animals while closed to the public.
Animal Care Centers of NYC — an open-intake shelter that received about 21,000 animals last year — put out a call for additional foster homes on March 13.
"We thought we'd get 50," said Katy Hansen, ACC's director of marketing and communications. "We got 2,000 people who filled out the application." The vast majority, Hansen says, are millennials who live with a roommate, have no kids, and are either working from home or suddenly out of a job.
"They most likely have a job that makes them work 14 hours a day; people don't come to New York City to start a family," she says. "They come to kick-start their careers. Now, they're home, and they still have that super drive and super ambition. Now, they're just pointing it toward helping animals."
The ASPCA says it's seen an increase in people interested in fostering and adopting animals in recent weeks, and has managed to find temporary foster homes for most of its animals.
2DaRescue, a nonprofit in Mesa, Arizona, has experienced a 30-percent increase in adoptions and a 100-percent increase in fosters since the coronavirus crisis began. In San Francisco, where residents have been ordered to shelter in place since March 17, Muttville Senior Dog Rescue has adopted out 10 dogs already this week, and all the dogs found foster homes when it closed.
The Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, California found 51 dogs, cats, puppies and kittens a new home last weekend, up from a typical 33.
"We were all saying, 'Oh my gosh, what a weekend,'" says Jessica Gercke, director of communications. Most of the applicants, she said, worked at schools in the area, which had been closed.
At St. Hubert's Animal Welfare Center in Madison, New Jersey, chief executive Lisa LaFontaine said thoughts have turned to the center's 90 partners that transport homeless dogs up north from crowded shelters in at least 15 southern states. Her group is helping some create foster programs as northern shelters are less able to help.
Fostering also works well for those who can only help out during this uncertain period.
Maya Dangerfield knows her job as a video producer is usually too busy to accommodate a pet, so she and her husband decided to foster a dog while working from home in Astoria, Queens instead. They picked up the poodle-mix named JWoww from Hearts & Bones Animal Rescue on the evening of March 19, and will be able to watch her as long as they have to stay home - at least another two-and-a-half-weeks.
"I'm not getting sick of my husband yet, but it's nice to have a little doggy. Just someone to hang out with," said Dangerfield.
It isn't just dogs. People are bringing home all kinds of living creatures for companionship during an unprecedented time of social isolation, and they're sharing photos on social media to provide a break from darker news.
Pets can also entertain younger family members at home. Kenneth Lynch and Lauren Wakefield bought a blue and silver betta fish for their two young children to help instill a sense of responsibility with feeding it and cleaning the tank. His name is Freddy.
This will help their son "occupy some of his time in a more healthy manner" while he's home from school, Lynch texted.
Some people are getting animals for more practical reasons.
"We're kind of stuck at home, grocery stores are empty, and now we have these chickens that are laying eggs for us," said Kelly Bordas, a physical therapist, stay-at-home parent and new chicken owner in Oviedo, Florida.
Bordas and her husband purchased their first two chickens recently and named them Daisy Duck and Mabel, though they're not always sure which is which. They live in a coop on the family's three acres of land, and have been a source of entertainment as much as food (they only lay one small egg a day each). Their young daughter helps take care of the new arrivals.
"She loves them, she always goes out there and she wants to pet them. She wants them to be her best friends," said Bordas.
For Julianna Caplan, the coronavirus scare became the perfect time to finally give her 13-year-old twin daughters the dog they'd been begging for. The whole family is home from work and school, so on March 22, they went to the Homeward Trails Adoption Center in Fairfax Station, Virginia. Within hours, the family adopted a 30-pound, 2-year-old blue heeler.
They named the dog Pepper Corona for her gray and white patches of fur, and for her entrance into their lives during this moment in history.
"It feels good to adopt, and the kids are happy. It feels like the right thing to do now on a psychological level," Caplan says. "I look at this dog and say to her, 'I don't know what your past has been, but your future is about to be awesome.'"
I hope this post finds you all well. I miss you all very much, I will be sending messages through remind so we can meet up on teams.
Here are the assignments you need to complete this week.
Place all your answers in a word document or google doc whichever you have access to and email me all work by Sunday 4/5. Remember we are on Spring Break starting Saturday 4/4 so this will be the l ast assignments until 4/12
1. Take the following test and see which party you most align with. Make sure you write down what party the test says you align with and write a few sentences as to whether you agree with these results or not.
The police want your phone data. Here’s what they can get — and what they can’t.
Phones hold gigabytes of potential evidence, but the government’s ability to access them depends on a patchwork of court decisions and laws that predate the technology.
Our lives are in our phones, making them a likely source of evidence if police suspect you’ve committed a crime. But as we’ve seen in recentcases of suspected terrorists with passcode-protected iPhones that Apple refused to help the FBI unlock, it’s not always as simple as getting a warrant and breaking down a metaphorical door.
When the key to unlock your phone is in your own mind or on the tip of your finger, it becomes a legal question that judges have to rely on decades-old, pre-modern-technology precedent to answer. And in many places, this question hasn’t yet been answered.
Here are some of the main ways the government can get information off of your phone, including why they’re allowed and how they’d do it.
Law enforcement wants access to third-party data on your phone. What can it get?
Short answer: Whatever it wants (with the right court order).
Long answer: Depending on what law enforcement is looking for, it may not need physical possession of your device at all. A lot of information on your phone is also stored elsewhere. For example, if you back up your iPhone to Apple’s iCloud, the government can get it from Apple. If it needs to see whose DMs you slid into, law enforcement can contact Twitter. As long as they go through the proper and established legal channels to get it, cops can get their hands on pretty much anything you’ve stored outside of your device.
You do have some rights here. The Fourth Amendment protects you from illegal search and seizure, and a provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) dictates what law enforcement must obtain in order to get the information. It might be a subpoena, court order, or warrant, depending on what it’s looking for. (WhatsApp actually does a good job of explaining this in its FAQ.) A section of the ECPA, known as the Stored Communications Act, says that service providers must have those orders before they can give the requested information to law enforcement.
But, assuming the government has the right paperwork, your information is very obtainable.
“Basically, anything that a provider has that it can decode, law enforcement is getting it,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the ACLU’s speech, privacy, and technology project, told Recode.
Note that this only covers service providers. If law enforcement wants to get WhatsApp messages you exchanged with a friend from your friend’s phone, it doesn’t need a warrant as long as your friend is willing to hand the information over.
“You don’t have a Fourth Amendment interest in messages that have been received by someone else,” Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Recode.
If your friend refuses to willingly hand over what the police want, they can still get it — they just have to get a warrant first.
Law enforcement wants access to personal data on your phone. Can they do that?
Short answer: If your phone is protected by a passcode or biometric unlocking features, there’s a chance cops can’t gain access to your personal data. But that’s not guaranteed.
Long answer: In addition to data hosted by a third party, there’s a lot of information that can only be gained from access to your phone. For example, the data in iCloud backups is only as recent as the last time you uploaded it and it only includes what you choose to give it — assuming you back your phone up at all. Encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp don’t store messages on their servers or keep track of who is sending them to whom, so the only way for police to access them is through either the sender or receiver’s devices. And as we’ve explained above, the government can get WhatsApp messages from the person you’re communicating with, but it can do so only if they know who it is in the first place.
So how exactly would someone other than you — cops, for instance — get access to that data? If your phone doesn’t have a password or law enforcement is able to access it using specialized passcode cracking tools like Cellebrite or GrayKey — and they have the necessary search warrant to do so — then it’s all theirs. But if your phone is locked with a passcode and law enforcement can’t hack into it, the Fifth Amendment may be your friend.
Essentially, the Fifth Amendment says you can’t be compelled to give self-incriminating testimony. (This amendment is perhaps known best to you as that dramatic moment on Law & Order when the person on the stand says, “I plead the Fifth.”) Testimony, in this case, is defined as revealing the contents of your own mind. Therefore, civil rights advocates say, the government can’t force you to tell them your phone’s password.
Most courts seem to agree with this, but that’s not always enough. There is what is known as the foregone conclusion exception. That is, a defendant’s testimony is not self-incriminating if it reveals something the government already knew, and the government can prove that prior knowledge. In this case, the defendant’s testimony is a foregone conclusion — a predictable outcome.
So, for phone passwords, the government can and does argue that revealing the password only shows that the phone belongs to the defendant. If the government has enough proof to establish the phone’s ownership, that’s a foregone conclusion that the defendant would also know its password. Some courts have interpreted this to require the government also to show it has knowledge of the specific pieces of evidence that it expects to find on the device.
This exception comes from a 1976 US Supreme Court ruling. In Fisher v. United States, someone being investigated for tax fraud gave documents prepared by his accountant to his lawyer. The IRS wanted those documents; the defendant said that producing them would be self-incriminating and therefore was protected by the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court sided with the IRS, ruling that since the existence and location of the tax documents was a “foregone conclusion,” the act of producing them didn’t tell the government anything it didn’t already know.
Obviously, a 44-year-old decision over tax papers doesn’t take into account how information can be stored today, nor how much.
“The EFF’s position is that the foregone conclusion exception is very narrow and should never apply in these passcode cases,” Crocker said.
But without further guidance from the Supreme Court, it’s largely been left up to interpretation by lower courts, with state courts considering their state constitution’s provisions as well as the federal. The result, Crocker says, is “a total patchwork of [decisions from] state Supreme Courts and federal courts.”
For example, in 2019, Massachusetts’ highest court forced a defendant to reveal his phone’s passcode while Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled that a defendant could not be compelled to unlock his computer. Indiana’s and New Jersey’s highest courts are both considering compelled passcode disclosure cases. On the federal side, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a defendant could be compelled to unlock multiple password-protected devices, even though the defendant claimed he couldn’t remember his passwords. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, on the other hand, ruled the other way in a different case.
“It’s very much in flux,” Crocker said. “Eventually, the US Supreme Court could get involved and resolve this.”
There are other ways to protect your phone. Some phones can use fingerprints, facial recognition, and iris scanners to unlock instead of passwords. Law enforcement is allowed to use people’s bodies as evidence against them, for instance by compelling them to participate in suspect lineups or provide their DNA. So, if the police can take your fingerprints, can’t they use them to unlock your phone? Again, courts are all over the map on this.
“The issue with biometrics is, is it testimonial?” Granick said. “The courts have not entirely decided that, but there have been a couple courts recently that said biometrics is basically the modern technological equivalent of your passcode.”
Crocker says courts should consider that the evidence police can get from your fingerprint is much more restricted and known than what they can get when your fingerprint unlocks a phone. So far, though, he says, courts have been more likely to rule that the Fifth Amendment does not apply to biometrics than they are that it applies to passcodes.
Yet another factor to consider here is that, while it’s impossible for police to read your mind and get your passcode, they can hold a phone up to your face or press your finger on it to bypass the biometric lock. And while your lawyer can (and should) argue that any evidence found this way was illegally obtained and should be suppressed, there’s no guarantee they’ll win.
“It’s fair to say that invoking one’s rights not to turn over evidence is stronger than trying to have the evidence suppressed after the fact,” Crocker said.
So, all things considered, if you’re worried about law enforcement getting access to your phone, your safest bet is to just use a passcode.
Sadly, I have died. Law enforcement wants to unlock my phone but they can’t get my password due to my aforementioned death. What happens now?
Short answer: Your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights generally end when you do. But other parties have rights, too, and those might be enough to keep the government out of your phone.
Long answer: That brings us to Apple’s fight with the Feds. This isn’t about your Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights anymore; for the most part, you lost those when you died. (That said, law enforcement might have to get the right paperwork if they were looking for evidence against someone else on your phone — after all, their Fourth Amendment rights are still intact). If law enforcement can’t get into your device on its own, it may well be the phone’s manufacturer’s rights that come into question.
Attorney General Bill Barr claimed last month that the only way the FBI could access a dead suspected terrorist’s phones is if Apple unlocked those phones. The government has made this argument before. In 2016, the United States tried to use the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789, to force Apple to create a “back door” that would give the FBI access to the San Bernardino shooter’s locked phone. Apple refused, saying the government could not force it to create “a crippled and insecure product” that it would not have built otherwise. But there was no resolution here, as the FBI was able to access the phone through other means and dropped its case before a court could rule on it. We might get more clarity on the issue, however, if Barr follows through on his threats and tries to compel Apple to unlock the two phones owned by the gunman in the December 2019 shooting at a Pensacola, Florida, naval air station.
You may have noticed by now that, while many of the cases concerning phones and passcodes are recent — some are even still making their way through the legal system — the cases cited to make legal arguments are decades or even centuries old. The wheels of justice turn slowly, and judges are often forced to use decisions about access to pieces of paper to inform their rulings about access to devices that hold tremendous amounts of personal information: who we talk to, when, and about what; where we were yesterday, last month, or three years ago; what we spent money on or got money for; our calendars, photos, emails, and contacts. These devices hold tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of data on almost everything about us.
You may not be able to control what law enforcement can get from someone else or what they do with your phone once you’re dead. But, with so much uncertainty surrounding what the government can force you to do with it when you’re alive, it’s a good idea to check out your legal options before handing over that passcode.
