Possible Sovereign Citizen Elected to Australian Senate

Just when you thought that this blog was now solely focused on the legal intricacies of Pokemon Go...

Through my Google Alert for "sovereign citizen" I learned about an unusual story out of Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

One of Australia's new senators, One Nation's Malcolm Roberts, sent a bizarre affidavit to then prime minister Julia Gillard in 2011 demanding to be exempt from the carbon tax and using language consistent with the "sovereign citizen" movement.

. . .

Anti-government, self-identified "sovereign citizens" claim to exist outside the country's legal and taxation systems and frequently believe the government uses grammar to enslave its citizens. 

NSW Police say such people "should be considered a potential terrorist threat". 

. . .

In the document, Mr Roberts demanded to be exempted from the carbon tax and compensated to the tune of $280,000 if Ms Gillard did not provide "full and accurate disclosure" in relation to 28 points explaining why he should not be liable for the tax.
Mr Roberts addressed the affidavit to "The Woman, Julia-Eileen: Gillard., acting as The Honourable JULIA EILEEN GILLARD" and presented her with a detailed contract he expected her to sign.

Here is the "affidavit."

Roberts denies ties to the sovereign citizen movement, despite writing his name as: "Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts.," referring repeatedly to himself as a "living soul," labeling the government as a corporation (but not a corporation listed in the United States of America securities exchange), and noticing his "non-acceptance," of being subject to various taxes. All of these features of the letter are flags for the sovereign citizen movement, particularly the unusual focus on contract law.

More coverage of Roberts denying affiliation with the sovereign citizen movement can be found here and here. It should be noted that Roberts also thinks that a "small cabal" of banks (and the United Nations) are behind the view global warming exists. His party, One Nation, espouses nationalism, opposes multiculturalism, and condemns immigration.

I do not find Roberts's denial plausible. I can imagine a situation where one espouses views in a letter or blog post that incidentally overlap with a person, political party, or organization that one does not agree with. But Roberts's letter contains very specific language, punctuation, and fixations on contracts that are trademarks of the sovereign citizen movement. Roberts admitted that he wrote the letter. And Roberts (to my knowledge) has not yet explained why he used the peculiar phrasing in the letter.

Possibly the best evidence that Roberts is not a sovereign citizen is the fact that he now holds elected office in a government that most sovereign citizens would claim lacks any legitimacy whatsoever. I hope that Roberts is pressed with more specific questions on his letter and sovereign citizen affiliations, and I will be watching his career with great interest.

De Zwart and Richards on Graduate School Isolation

Melissa De Zwart and Bernadette Richards have recently published an article in the QUT Law Review. The title is, Wi-fi in the Ivory tower: Reducing Isolation of the Law PhD Student Through Social Media Networks. A complete, non-paywalled version of the article can be directly downloaded by clicking on this link. Here is the abstract:

Research students no longer need to spend long hours on campus under the gaze of their supervisors. Ubiquitous access to online databases and communication tools means that many PhD students operate in splendid isolation, away from the bustle and distractions of campus life. But this freedom may also bring with it strong feelings of isolation from academic community and peer support. The authors of this study have commenced an inquiry into whether the connectivity and interactivity of social media can provide a vital social lifeline for research students (particularly law students who work largely independently and are not frequently part of large research teams) in order to address these feelings of isolation. The role of social media in shaping academic identity and voice is also addressed. It considers a number of significant UK studies of higher degree by research students and their relevance for Australia and outlines the results of a small pilot survey conducted in an Australian law school.

My initial response to this abstract was that this article presented a solution to a non-problem. The abstract sets up the problem of isolation as being caused by students opting to stay away from campus due to online resources. My reaction: students can solve this problem of isolation by simply venturing onto campus.

Readers of the article should not be necessarily deterred by this abstract, however, since the authors make a much stronger claim for the problem of isolation as the article unfolds. They note that law PhD students tend to be parts of smaller programs, and therefore may have fewer contacts on campus who can provide in-depth feedback on their work. My thoughts on this would be that students could avoid this isolation by choosing a program that has faculty whose research interests are similar to the student's interests -- but I could see how this could be a problem for a student's whose dissertation subject evolves.

I am not familiar with how law PhD programs operate in Australia, but this article provides an interesting perspective. Law programs in the United States generally seem quite extensive, which I think would safeguard against student isolation, since schools will probably have at least several professors whose interests align with most students' scholarly pursuits.

Then again, students who develop interests in specialized areas of law may find that they are at a law school without sufficient faculty resources. For example, I have heard through anecdotal evidence that while UCLA has notably strong Indian law resources, many other law schools may have one or fewer faculty members specializing in the area. Students at those other schools who wish to produce scholarship on Indian law may find that they are isolated in their interests and may need to seek out an alternate academic community.

For US law students who find themselves pursuing specialized scholarly questions, De Zwart and Richards's advice to Australian PhD students might end up being quite useful.

The Implications of the Vague Revelations of Eavesdropping on Attorney Communications

The New York Times reports:

A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.

The government of Indonesia had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, according to the February 2013 document. It reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information.

The BBC reports on the story here. The NSA "provided clear guidance," says the Times, but nothing more is specified. Orin Kerr notes that this story does not appear to implicate the NSA in any notably invasive behavior:

As I understand it, the Times story is based on a short entry in an NSA internal bulletin celebrating the liaison office’s accomplishment. It reports that the liaison helped clear up a legal issue, and that it all ended well, as the Australians ended up giving useful intel to the U.S. But because it’s just an internal bulletin, it doesn’t tell us what we want to know: What advice was provided, and whether the intel was related to the legal issue. Without that information, it’s hard to know if there’s a significant story here.

The story is still interesting, given the implications for attorneys who are dealing with foreign clients. The Times reports:

Andrew M. Perlman, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and technology issues, said the growth of surveillance was troubling for lawyers. He helped create the bar association’s ethics code revisions that require lawyers to try to avoid being overheard by eavesdroppers. 

“You run out of options very quickly to communicate with someone overseas,” he said. “Given the difficulty of finding anything that is 100 percent secure, lawyers are in a difficult spot to ensure that all of the information remains in confidence.”

While the story does not reveal very much about the NSA's role in this chain of events, or the particular information that was being monitored, it is a good reminder that attorneys who are working with foreign clients should be aware that their conversations may not be completely private.

Christopher Soghoian notes that there is something notable in this story, albeit, something that is buried and not necessarily related to invasive NSA behavior:

Last para of NYT story is nuts: Australian intel agency "obtained" crypto keys (Ki) for 1.8 mil Indonesian SIM cards. http://t.co/a2MHr4CXaD
— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) February 16, 2014

Here are the last two paragraphs from the Times' story:

The Americans and the Australians secretly share broad access to the Indonesian telecommunications system, the documents show. The N.S.A. has given the Australians access to bulk call data from Indosat, an Indonesian telecommunications provider, according to a 2012 agency document. That includes data on Indonesian government officials in various ministries, the document states. 

The Australians have obtained nearly 1.8 million encrypted master keys, which are used to protect private communications, from the Telkomsel mobile telephone network in Indonesia, and developed a way to decrypt almost all of them, according to a 2013 N.S.A. document.

Soghoian is correct to point out that these final paragraphs indicate that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that this story does not explicitly illustrate. It will be interesting to see if more information is released regarding how the NSA obtained access to the data from Indosat and how the Australians obtained the keys to the Telkomsel network.

Dog on Death Row in Australia Gets Temporary Reprieve

The Age reports:

The owner of a dog held on death row for more than a year has won a Supreme Court appeal which could save the animal's life.

Kerser was 10 months old when he was seized by Monash Council officers in December last year after being identified as an unregistered American pit bull, a restricted breed dog banned under dangerous dog laws, and was scheduled to be put down.

Under the Dangerous Animals Act 2004, a "restricted breed dog" is one of five specified breeds including "American pit bull terrier (or pit bull terrier)".
. . .

In June, the council gave Kerser a last-minute reprieve when Ms Applebee indicated that she would appeal her dog's case to the Supreme Court's common law division, judicial review and appeals list.

The case was heard before Justice Michael Croucher who then overturned the decision by Supreme Court associate judge Rita Zammit not to allow Ms Applebee to appeal the tribunal's original finding.

In his judgment handed down on Tuesday, Justice Croucher said Kerser had been seized by council officers on December 4 last year. The council gave notice to Ms Applebee a week later that Kerser had been declared an American pit bull terrier and had to be destroyed.

He said Justice Zammit erred in saying there were no grounds for appeal because the deputy president of the tribunal had decided Kerser was an American pit bull on the basis of "an overall impression" after viewing the dog.

The article goes through some of the details of Croucher's decision, noting that a general impression of the dog fell short because it did not involve "precise measurements."  Meanwhile, the Monash City Council, steamed at its legal costs, is calling for reform in dog laws, describing the existing laws as "sloppy and unworkable."  One proposed fix will put the burden of proof on the dog owner to show that the dog is not a restricted dog breed, and will limit the time for the owner to appeal a ruling that the dog is of an illegal breed.