Lattitude Zine - Issue 9 - August/sept 2008

August/Sept

ember 2008

Contents As this issue was coming to completion my grandmothers life was as well. It’s strange, but being that she had been in the hospital for more than a week, and most of that in a hospice style situation, once I was told she had actually died the news didn’t have that shock factor you usually experience with the death of those closest to you.

03 • Secret Email Searches

I continue to think back of the panicked ride to the hospital I had the afternoon before for some reason. Her blood pressure was insanely high and with this news and the uncertainty we had been experiencing for days I was in a hurry to get there to say the least. Once there, it was just depressing to see her in such a state. I hadn’t seen her awake for days and the more time I spent in the hospital the angrier I got. Not at the fact that she was dieing, but the way in which it was happening.



The first Saturday she was in the hospital I walk in and with my own way of dealing with things made the smart ass comment that she’s causing too much trouble. She responded laughingly, telling me that she was ready to go. Ready to see my grandfather and uncle again. That was the best thing I could have hoped for. Although I had come to expect this for some time, hearing her say that she was ready made it that much easier to deal with. She had a long, seemingly happy life. As upsetting as it has been to lose her, it is most comforting to have known and seen the love and happiness we have all shared with her. Of course she will be missed, but happily remembered. Feel free to share your own opinions about anything you’d like - someone’s interested... [email protected] Something you may have noticed is that nine has been combined into an August/September conglomerate. This will allow us to get back on track and bring you a better and more timely October issue 10.



Jaikumar Vijayan

07 • Gina Rannali - Mother Puncher Mickey Z.

09 • I Own a Van

David Brooks

12 • Anarchy in Your Head

Dale Everett

13 • Sun, Sea, Sand... and Terrorism

The Pleb

16 • Triztoons

Bill Trzcinski

Contribute... This could be your space, or take any other page you

Thanks for reading, jimmy

like. Write, draw or take a photo. We are always looking for any and all contributions regardless of Lattitude Zine is published 12X a year, monthly give or take, in Louisville, KY. Lattitude is collectively written and designed with subjects and style that will vary from one issue to the next. The reader base is the staff essentially. There is no formal organization at work. Visit us at LattitudeZine.com for more information.

Don’t be scared, we’re all friends here right?

Contributions to: info@LattitudeZ ine.com

Befriend us at: myspace.com/lattitudezine Contributions and correspondence to: [email protected] Advertising information to: [email protected] Distribution requests to: [email protected]

which side of the proverbial fence you may be on.

Please Recycle

Court dismisses case challenging warrantless, secret e-mail searches But the underlying issue of Fourth Amendment protections was not addressed

Jaikumar Vijayan from Computerworld 17/07/2008 The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last week dismissed on procedural grounds a case involving the constitutionality of warrantless no-notice searches of e-mail messages stored by an Internet service provider. In doing so, the court left unanswered the question of whether the Fourth Amendment requires the U.S. government to obtain warrants based on reasonable cause before it can compel e-mail service providers to secretly turn over a person’s email records. The case involves an Ohio man, Steven Warshak, who in February was convicted by a jury on 93 counts of mail and wire fraud, money laundering, and other federal offenses. Warshak ran a Cincinnatibased company called Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals Inc., which marketed, distributed and sold herbal supplements. The conviction followed an FBI probe that began in 2005, when Warshak’s company was suspected of making false and misleading advertising claims, misrepresentation and various other fraudulent practices. As part of the probe into the company’s activities, the FBI compelled NuVox Communications Inc. and Yahoo Inc. -- Warshak’s Internet service providers -- to turn over all of the contents, log files and back-

03 LattitudeZine.com

up data related to his e-mails -- including those that had been stored for more than 181 days. The statute allowing the government to see Warshak’s e-mails -- and the rationale provided by the government -required investigators to inform Warshak about the action within 90 days. But the government didn’t notify Warshak about its behind-the-scenes efforts for nearly a year after it first sought the e-mail information. Warshak filed suit in June 2006, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, claiming that the forced disclosure of his e-mails violated his Fourth Amendment rights. He also argued that the government’s failure to tell him what it was doing violated the Stored Communications Act, the statute used to obtain his records. When his lawyers failed to get an assurance from the government that it wouldn’t continue such searches in future, Warshak asked for a preliminary injunction prohibiting the practice. An Ohio District Court granted the preliminary injunction, noting that e-mails held by an Internet service provider “were roughly analogous to sealed letters, in which the sender maintains an expectation of privacy.” That court also agreed to enjoin additional seizures of e-mails from the

Internet accounts of any resident of the Southern District of Ohio without notice to the account holder. When prosecutors appealed the decision, a three-judge panel at the Sixth Circuit Court initially upheld the preliminary injunction, saying it was needed to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Warshak and others who might be in his position. But the full Sixth Circuit court overturned that decision last week, formally lifting the preliminary injunction that had been in place since June 2006. The most recent decision, however, did not touch upon the issue of the government’s right to conduct warrantless, secret email searches.

Writing for the majority, Judge Jeffrey Sutton said the case was not fit for judicial review because the court has no idea whether the government plans to conduct warrantless searches of Warshak’s e-mail in future. He said Warshak’s complaint was based on “contingent future events” that might not occur. “Answering difficult legal questions before they arise and before the courts know how they will arise is not the way we typically handle constitutional litigation,” he wrote. Circuit Judge Martin Boyce, who wrote for the five dissenting judges in the case, said that the government’s failure to tell Warshak about the searches after the 90day period expired was a clear violation of the Stored Communication Act that

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 04

continued from page 4

the majority on the court had overlooked. The ruling gives “unwarranted deferential treatment to the government,” Boyce said. “It is but another step in the ongoing degradation of civil rights in the courts of this country,” he noted in his dissent. The ruling was greeted with dismay by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of several civil rights groups that had filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Warshak. In a post on its Web site, Kevin Bankston -- who drafted the group’s brief -- said the court’s refusal to address the Fourth Amendment issue was a “shame.” “Without clear legal rulings on such issues, we face continued uncertainty about how the Constitution protects our private Internet communications, uncertainty that the government will continue to exploit,” Bankston wrote. The EFF in its brief had earlier argued that e-mail is used in myriad ways to communicate everything from family photos and personal thoughts to health information and corporate data. The varied uses demonstrate society’s expectations that e-mail sent and received over the Internet is as “private as a sealed letter, a telephone call or even papers that are kept in the home.” As such, secret, warrantless searches of email violates the Fourth Amendment, the organization said. “It is an important decision because it vacates a case that had established strong Fourth Amendment protections for e-mails,” said Gregory Nojeim, director of freedom, security and technology at the

05 LattitudeZine.com

Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a Washington-based rights group that participated with EFF in the friend-ofthe-court brief. Fourth Amendment protections related to stored e-mail generally require the government to notify an individual of an e-mail search -- unless a probably cause warrant for the search was granted. With its ruling last week, “the court did not say that e-mail isn’t protected by the Fourth Amendment,” Nojeim said. “It just said the case was not yet ready for court review.” The ruling means Internet users need to pay attention to the terms of service they agree to when signing up with an e-mail provider, he said. The degree to which a person allows information to be shared with law enforcement officials can have a legal impact later. Nojeim pointed to several examples of the differences in terms of service offered by various providers that were cited in the Sixth Circuit’s majority opinion. For example, some agreements might say that a service provider will not read or disclose a subscriber’s e-mail to anyone except authorized users; another might say that it “will not intentionally disclose” e-mail except as required by law; and a third might say that the provider will not intentionally monitor private e-mail messages, while reserving the right to do so. Jaikumar Vijayan, currently senior editor of ComputerWorld, is known as one of the senior-most South Asian technology journalists.

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE

Mother Puncher Mickey Z. Upon first contact with Gina Ranalli, it

was instantly clear that we were kindred spirits. Gina is a prolific writer with a punk rocker’s soul and an activist’s heart. She’s a vegan, a feminist, and a wiseass rebel who has written books known as “Bizarro,” sold over 100 paintings, raised hell in punk bands, and just loves her 1977 Fender Strat. Gina’s latest novella is Mother Puncher and the lead character, well, punches mothers. Specifically, he punches mothers just after they give birth… ostensibly to teach them a lesson. Ranalli’s brilliant dystopian vision never strays too far from what passes for reality today—and that’s where Mother Puncher delivers the knockout blow (sorry, couldn’t resist). She holds up a mirror to a clueless culture on a collision course with oblivion. Here is my e-mail conversation with Gina Ranalli:

Mickey Z: Noam Chomsky once said: “It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” What can Mother Puncher teach us about “human life and human personality”? Gina Ranalli: I think Mother Puncher draws a very clear portrait and points out, very blatantly, how as a species we tend to look to our leaders and just blindly swallow

07 LattitudeZine.com

whatever it is they happen to be feeding us that day. Human beings are very “monkey see, monkey do” regardless of how preposterous something might be. People are taught from a very early age not to think for themselves. We’re told what to buy, what to eat, who to vote for, who to hate, who to love, which God we need to believe in. It’s never ending and it’s both sad and scary that so few people pause and say, “Hold up a second. I think FILL IN THE BLANK is untrue or unfair or that’s not what I believe.” The book takes all that blind following to the next level. But it also shows the “rebels” in the society, who disregard the laws, but they do so basically at the expense of the rest of the world. There just are no easy answers. MZ: Your protagonist, Ed Means, is a Mother Puncher… and he spends an awful lot of time trying to justify and rationalize how he makes a living, where he lives, and how he lives. For me, his “banality” echoed Hannah Arendt’s writings on Adolph Eichmann. She discussed a “new type of criminal,” who “commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” How did the character of Ed Means come to be?

GR: Ed really wasn’t a hard character to come up with. We all know people like him. And I do think that at his core, he’s an okay guy, in a bizarre kind of way. He thinks, probably rightly so, that there are hundreds of other guys that would take his job in a heartbeat, simply because they’d enjoy popping a woman in the face and knowing that there would be no repercussions for those actions. Hell, they would be paid to do it. He considers his job unsavory, but necessary. He doesn’t enjoy having to do it but realizes that these people are better off in his hands, so to speak, instead of in the hands of a militant misogynist, for example. So, in his mind, he’s actually protecting them. MZ: Ah yes, lesser evilism. A very familiar concept in an election year. I imagine you will take some heat for the title Mother Puncher and the fact that it’s literal. Do you think it’s easier for a woman to create such a concept? What I mean is that you won’t have to deal with the accusations of sexism and can focus more on the social realities you touch on in the book (e.g. class, patriarchy, reproductive rights, etc.)? GR: Yeah, I figured I’d take heat for the title and the book itself. I haven’t heard anything too bad yet, but I won’t be surprised when/if it happens. It might be easier for a woman to “get away with it.” But maybe not. It could just as easily go the other way and in fact I just assumed it would be feminists and women in general who’d be calling for my head on a stick. But, who knows. I recently wrote a short story told from the perspective of a child molester and the editor told me that a bunch of his initial readers were not only unsure of whether to publish it, but also went as far

as to say, “If this had been written by a man, we’d never touch it.” So, I think the whole issue of gender is a roll of the dice when it comes to what readers will accept. Or maybe they don’t care at all. We’ll just have to wait and see.” MZ: Gender issues notwithstanding, your writing is usually described as “Bizarro.” Can you explain? GR: Sure thing. Bizarro is, for lack of a better term, the genre of fiction that I currently write in. It’s weird, it’s surreal, it’s bizarre. It’s distorted, absurd and twisted. It’s David Lynch on paper. There are no boundaries, really. For a better, more complete definition of exactly what bizarro is, I would highly recommend checking out the website BizarroCentral.com. It answers every question anyone could have about the genre, in addition to a catalog of bizarro books, articles, author bios and an active forum where you can chat with the authors and other fans. It’s the best jumping off spot for anyone interested in checking out bizarro as a whole. MZ: Where can you be found on the Web? A: I can be found on the web in several places. I have a MySpace page (www. myspace.com/ginaranalli), an online journal, and of course anyone can check me out and chat with me at BizarroCentral. com. I always love meeting readers, other vegans/vegetarians, and kindred spirits. Mickey Z. is the author of the recently released novel, CPR for Dummies, and can be found on the web at MickeyZ.net as well as YouTube.com

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 08

I Own a Van David Brooks

I own a van. It’s not

full of ice cream or pluming tools. It’s got blue shag fur on the inside, a CB radio, and a functioning tape deck. I bought it this past December because I’m in a band we needed a bigger vehicle to haul our stuff around in on trips for comfort. I knew that when I bought the van that I was going to customize the inside to separate where our equipment went and where we would sit. What really ended up happening is that I was introduced to a new lifestyle: Vanning. I started looking for Van web sites on the internet and I found Vannin.com which is where almost the entire online vanning community presides. Through that site I found bluegrass vanners and asked to join. The rules for joining were as follows: 1. Attend 3 club meetings 2. Attend one club social function 3. Bring a bottle of whiskey to your fourth meeting when you will be voted on.

completely covered in patches. This takes about 30 years to do. I have since been to 3 more truck-ins, one including the 36th Van Nationals. Vanning is not what it once was. As far as attendance, Van events have always been private, van only events, as opposed to car shows, that are open to the public. The 3rd Van nationals in Bowling Green, Kentucky had nearly 7000 vans in attendance. This years Van Nationals or “The Nats’ as they are called, only had 500 vans in attendance.

What to expect at a van run? Most Van Clubs host a “Truck-In” or “Van run” or “eVant” every year. It just so happened that the club I was joining (Bluegrass Vanners) were hosting their run a month after I joined. This meant I was to be voted in at the van run. At your first truck-in you’re considered to be a “Puppy Trucker” and this usually involves some sort of one time public humiliation. I carried a rock around (about the size of a football) for about 3 hours. The stipulation of this rock was that I put it down and someone saw me, they could give me a bigger rock to carry. It became a very popular and sought after item for a few hours.

Van runs are usually three days long. They are hosted at camp grounds, and you set up a tent or sleep in your van. Friday is usually the first night of a run and it’s generally a good party. Saturday around noon, kids games begin, followed by horse shoes, cornhole, and anything else the host club comes up with. Around 3 p.m. or so the Show and Shine begins where all the guys with show vans park their vans in a

field and are judged by categories based upon make, year, and how custom the van is. Friday and Saturday nights there is live music, usually beer pong, and some kind of shooter bar. Van runs are the kind of place where you can expect to make new friends quickly and party your ass off. So you’re probably saying to yourself are there still a bunch of wicked ass murals? Yes. I’ve seen lots of murals, Amazon women, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mr. Bill, Harley Davidson. The list goes on and on. Vanners in a nutshell are a big family who know how to party. You don’t have to have a custom van to be a Vanner you just have to own a van. If you want to find a van club near you I suggest you check out Vannin.com. If you’re from Louisville and you have a van or you want to get one and join our club please visit Bluegrassvanners. com. We meet every first Sunday of the month.

After being voted in I was allowed to wear my club jacket which featured the Club logo on the back. At every truck in you can buy a patch for the event and then you put that on your jacket. Some vanners have long white butchers coats that are

09 LattitudeZine.com

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 10

Anarchy in Your Head Dale Everett

I Aim to Misbehave

check www.anarchyinyourhead.com for additional lighthearted chaos

Lauren Canario is an early mover of the Free State Project (FSP) and one of my personal heroes. The first official Anarchy In Your Head comic strip was about her. She’s known for non-cooperation with authority figures. She abhors violence and her acts of remaining passive in the face of aggression are meant to demonstrate to the world where violence really originates. I’ve been known to say that I’d much rather have 20 more Laurens participating in the FSP than 20,000 more political activists, keeping in mind that I do not place myself in the same category. I don’t have her courage… yet.

LattitudeZine.com

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 12

Sun, Sea, Sand… and Terrorism The Pleb

Just what constitutes a terrorist these days?

Sometimes it seems that the term gets thrown around at anything someone takes a disliking to, or as in Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” it’ll get used as the trump card in any argument, like “National Security!” or “We’re fighting Communism!”.

Here’s the nasty little history:

On October 6th 1976 a Cubana airliner, with 73 passengers and crew aboard exploded in midair, there were no survivors. The FBI files state that a man by the name of Luis Posada Carriles was “up to his eyes” in planning the operation, so where do you think a man like Posada would be today? A) in prison. B) a free man. C) that guy walking past me in the street.

A CIA file (dated 18/10/76) quotes Luis Posada as saying “We are going to hit a Cuban airliner”. But what would the CIA know about Luis? Trained in explosives, and a trainee of the infamous Fort Benning, in 1966 Luis was being paid $300 a month by the CIA, previously he’d helped recruit people for what became known as the Bay of Pigs. If you want to know about his “Relationship to the U.S.” in 1976…then sorry, the document is still massively censored.

If you answered A, brace yourself I have something to tell you about Santa Claus! If you answered B, well done, you are correct. If you answered C, if you’re in Miami, that may also be correct.

13 LattitudeZine.com

Cuban billboard demanding justice for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in October, 1976.

In 1985 Luis was actually in the process of being tried for the airliner bombing in a Venezuelan Court (Hernan Ricardo Lozano who put the bomb on the plane was an employee of Posada). After escaping from prison, he went off to help with CIA gun running operations to the Contras.

Should Luis go to trial on the charge of blowing up an airliner???

Well the UN Charter forbids providing safe haven to a terrorist, and the Montreal Convention on Aviation states that in such a case he must either be extradited for trial or tried in the U.S. So far both options have been disregarded. Cuba and Venezuela have demanded he be extradited. So how did Posada end up in Miami? Well after a little 1997 bombing spree of hotels (he told a journalist he was involved), he turned up in Panama in 2000. Now going to a University is usually a good thing, to study and learn, but Posada was up to his old tricks. Luckily, before Posada could blow the building (and their target Fidel Castro) sky-high, he was arrested and the car full of explosives seized.

After serving a whopping 4 months of his sentence, Colin Powell negotiated his early release with an outgoing Panamanian President. Posada surfaced in Miami, and after some legal shenanigans is now living freely. I’d like to pose a question: Just what would Luis Posada Carriles have to do in order to qualify as a Terrorist, and stand trial accordingly?

Visit www.theplebsite.com for cartoons, poetry and other random creativity.

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 14

[email protected] LattitudeZine.com

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 16

Help keep Lattitude Zine alive... advertise, subscribe or donate

LattitudeZine.com LattitudeZine.com

August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE