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 03 • Secret Email Searches
style situation, once I was told she had actually died the news didn’t have that shock factor Jaikumar Vijayan
you usually experience with the death of those closest to you.
07 • Gina Rannali - Mother Puncher
I continue to think back of the panicked ride to the hospital I had the afternoon before for Mickey Z.
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 09 • I Own a Van
more time I spent in the hospital the angrier I got. Not at the fact that she was dieing, but David Brooks
the way in which it was happening.
12 • Anarchy in Your Head
The first Saturday she was in the hospital I walk in and with my own way of dealing with Dale Everett
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
13 • Sun, Sea, Sand... and Terrorism
for some time, hearing her say that she was ready made it that much easier to deal with. The Pleb
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. 16 • Triztoons
Of course she will be missed, but happily remembered. Bill Trzcinski

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 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 Amend-
ment requires the U.S. government to
obtain warrants based on reasonable cause
before it can compel e-mail service provid-
ers 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 Cincinnati-
based company called Berkeley Premium
Nutraceuticals Inc., which marketed, dis-
tributed and sold herbal supplements. The
conviction followed an FBI probe that be-
gan 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 Com-
munications Inc. and Yahoo Inc. -- War-
shak’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 govern-
ment 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 War-
shak 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 stat-
ute 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 pre-
liminary 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 en-
join 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.
August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 04
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 be-
fore the courts know how they will arise is
not the way we typically handle constitu-
tional 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 90-
day period expired was a clear violation
of the Stored Communication Act that
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 deg-
radation 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 is-
sues, 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 commu-
nicate everything from family photos and
personal thoughts to health information
and corporate data. The varied uses dem-
onstrate 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 e-
mail 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-of-
the-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 ex-
ample, some agreements might say that a
service provider will not read or disclose a
subscriber’s e-mail to anyone except autho-
rized 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 hu-
man 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 “mon-
key 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 writ-
ings 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 exam-
ple. 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 ti-
tle and the book itself. I haven’t heard any-
thing 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
August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 08
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 cur-
rently 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 com-
plete 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 jour-
nal, 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
I Own a Van completely covered in patches. This takes
about 30 years to do.

I have since been to

3 more truck-ins,
one including the
David Brooks 36th Van Nation-
als. Vanning is
I own a van. It’s not not what it once
was. As far as
full of ice cream or
attendance, Van field and are judged by categories based
pluming tools. It’s got
events have upon make, year, and how custom the van
blue shag fur on the
always been is. Friday and Saturday nights there is live
inside, a CB radio,
private, van only music, usually beer pong, and some kind
and a functioning
events, as opposed of shooter bar. Van runs are the kind of
tape deck. I bought
to car shows, that are place where you can expect to make new
it this past December
open to the public. The friends quickly and party your ass off.
because I’m in a band
3rd Van nationals in Bowl-
we needed a bigger
ing Green, Kentucky had nearly So you’re probably saying to yourself are
vehicle to haul our stuff
7000 vans in attendance. This years there still a bunch of wicked ass murals?
around in on trips for comfort.
Van Nationals or “The Nats’ as they are Yes. I’ve seen lots of murals, Amazon
I knew that when I bought the van
called, only had 500 vans in attendance. women, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mr. Bill,
that I was going to customize the inside
Harley Davidson. The list goes on and on.
to separate where our equipment went and
where we would sit. What really ended up
What to expect at a van run?
Van runs are usually three days long. They Vanners in a nutshell are a big family
happening is that I was introduced to a new
Most Van Clubs host a “Truck-In” or are hosted at camp grounds, and you set up who know how to party. You don’t have to
lifestyle: Vanning.
“Van run” or “eVant” every year. It just a tent or sleep in your van. Friday is usually have a custom van to be a Vanner you just
so happened that the club I was joining the first night of a run and it’s generally have to own a van. If you want to find a
I started looking for Van web sites on the
(Bluegrass Vanners) were hosting their a good party. Saturday around noon, kids van club near you I suggest you check out
internet and I found Vannin.com which is
run a month after I joined. This meant I games begin, followed by horse shoes, Vannin.com. If you’re from Louisville and
where almost the entire online vanning
was to be voted in at the van run. At your cornhole, and any- you have a van or
community presides. Through that site I
first truck-in you’re considered to be a thing else the host you want to get
found bluegrass vanners and asked to join.
“Puppy Trucker” and this usually involves club comes up with. one and join our
The rules for joining were as follows:
some sort of one time public humiliation. Around 3 p.m. or so club please visit
1. Attend 3 club meetings
I carried a rock around (about the size of the Show and Shine Bluegrassvanners.
2. Attend one club social function
a football) for about 3 hours. The stipula- begins where all the com. We meet
3. Bring a bottle of whiskey to your fourth
tion of this rock was that I put it down guys with show vans every first Sunday
meeting when you will be voted on.
and someone saw me, they could give me park their vans in a of the month.
a bigger rock to carry. It became a very
popular and sought after item for a few
hours.

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 remain-
ing 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 any-
thing someone takes a
disliking to, or as in
Joseph Heller’s “Catch
22” it’ll get used as the
trump card in any argu-
ment, like “National
Security!” or “We’re
fighting Communism!”.
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.
If you answered A, brace yourself I have
something to tell you about Santa Claus!
If you answered B, well done, you are cor-
rect. If you answered C, if you’re in Miami,
that may also be correct.
Here’s the nasty little history:
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 “Re-
lationship to the U.S.” in 1976…then sorry,
the document is still massively censored.
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.
Cuban billboard demanding justice for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in October, 1976.
Should Luis go to trial on the charge of After serving a whopping 4 months of his
blowing up an airliner??? sentence, Colin Powell negotiated his early
release with an outgoing Panamanian
Well the UN Charter forbids providing President. Posada surfaced in Miami, and
safe haven to a terrorist, and the Montreal after some legal shenanigans is now living
Convention on Aviation states that in such freely. I’d like to pose a question:
a case he must either be extradited for trial
or tried in the U.S. So far both options have Just what would Luis Posada Carriles have to
been disregarded. Cuba and Venezuela do in order to qualify as a Terrorist, and stand
have demanded he be extradited. trial accordingly?
So how did Posada end up in Miami?
Well after a little 1997 bombing spree of Visit www.theplebsite.com for cartoons, poetry
hotels (he told a journalist he was in- and other random creativity.
volved), 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 ar-
rested and the car full of explosives seized.

13 LattitudeZine.com August/September 2008 • LATT!TUDE 14

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