U.S. District Judge David Hittner gave one college student, Kelsey Gloston a civics lesson that she will not soon forget.

Gloston, a pre-nursing student, apparently hung up on the courthouse clerks who contacted her regarding jury duty. Big mistake.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by JOE MARINARO

The Houston Chronicle reports that Judge Hittner ordered federal marshals to “haul her in chains from school to court to explain why she shirked jury duty.”  You can read the Chronicle’s full story here.

If you are appearing before Judge Hittner anytime soon, y’all better be on your best behavior.

Rediscover the Library of Congress

At Fastcase, we are big fans of the Library of Congress (and being information nerds, we admit that we are a little biased in this regard).  But even if you are not the type to salivate over well-organized card catalog, we think you will agree that the LOC is a truly amazing public resource, dare we say, public treasure.

While you might be familiar with the grand images of the LOC’s main reading room, we bet you will be pleasantly surprised by the breadth and depth of the LOC’s digital and online resources.  There is so much to read, see, hear, and watch all from the comfort of your own computer screen.  Here just a few of our favorites:

The LOC is archiving Twitter.  We are really excited about this one.  The LOC is partnering with Twitter to digitally archive every public tweet ever tweeted, from the historic to the mundane.

The LOC is already archiving all kinds of web sites.  Among the topics covered are the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections, September 11^th, and the 2005 Papal transition.  To access this collection, click here.

An eye-popping  collection of digital images including WPA Posters from 1936-1946, tons of historical maps and historic newspapers and photographs.  You really have to see this to believe it, so we have selected a few interesting tidbits for your viewing pleasure below.

The LOC has its own Flickr photostream chock full of images from historic newspaper images and photos.  Explore history visually by browsing the LOC’s well curated collection of historical images.  The LOC even encourages visitors to contribute by tagging and commenting images with additional information.

An eye-popping rare book and special collection including priceless items like the Lincoln bible.  You might have known that you can view the book in the LOC’s reading room, but did you know that you can also leaf through 1292 high quality images documenting the book online ?

A vast online database of federal legislative history.  Justice Scalia may not be interested in legislative history, but for those of us who are, there is THOMAS.  Use THOMAS to research nearly any aspect of the legislative process.

Crowdsourcing Early Earthquake Warnings

We recently heard about a fantastic research project headed up by geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California, Riverside.  Her project called, Quake-Catcher Network, harnesses the power of a little device that resides in most new laptops called an “accelerometer.”

cc licensed flickr photo shared by the_tahoe_guy

The accelerometer is a type of motion sensor that is intended to help protect laptops by detecting when the machine has been dropped and turning off the hard drive.  When Cochran learned that these devices were being placed in laptops, she came up with the idea of using them to create a network that could record earthquakes.

So with some help from Stanford geophysics professor Jesse Lawrence, Quake-Catcher Network was born.  The concept is simple:  members of the public can download a free software program that runs silently in the background of their laptops detecting tremors and collecting data from the accelerometer in their machine.  The data that is collected is transmitted to researchers who can analyze it and use it to (hopefully) predict an earthquake.

For more information on the project, click here.

(As awesome as this project is, it is almost begging for an iPhone app. Smartphones have accelerometers too! We were not able to find any solid information on a mobile app related to the project, but let us know if you do).

It probably will not surprise most people to learn that in today’s wired world, usage of “snail mail” is going the way of the carrier pigeon. According to the USPS’s 2009 Annual report, mail volume dropped dramatically from 203 billion of pieces of mail in 2008 to about 177 billion pieces in 2009. While 177 billion pieces is still a huge number, it is hard to ignore a 26 billion drop.

So with hundreds of millions of people re-directing their communications to electronic media, and in particular web-hosted e-mail like Gmail, it may surprise you to learn that under current laws, you have a far greater expectation of privacy in your regular mail than you do in your e-mail.

If you have any type of web-based e-mail account, the Stored Wired and Electronic Communications and Transactions Records Access Act (ECPA), 18 U.S.C. § 2701, despite the long and boring sounding title, is a statute worth getting to know. Enacted in 1986, the ECPA was actually quite forward-thinking in addressing governmental access to electronically stored information. Nevertheless, to some, recent case law interpreting the statute – such as the Central District of Illinois’s 2009 decision in U.S. v. Weaver, 636 F. Supp.2d 769 (C.D. Ill. 2009) – signal a need for legislative reform.

At issue in the Weaver case, was whether law enforcement officers could gain access to the contents of the defendant’s (accused of child pornography charges) Microsoft/MSN Hotmail account with a trial subpoena rather than a search warrant.

Why does it matter whether the government is required to obtain a search warrant as opposed to a trial subpoena? It matters because search warrants are much more difficult to get. To obtain a search warrant, the government must demonstrate probable cause and this requires the approval of a judicial officer. By contrast, a trial subpoena can be obtained by making the much less demanding showing that the requested materials are likely to contain relevant and admissible evidence – subpoenas can be issued by a court clerk or in some jurisdictions, the attorney herself.

So back to the outcome of the decision: the court reasoned that under the current statute, “for emails less than 181 days old, the question of whether a warrant is necessary turns on whether the emails are in ‘electronic storage’ or are ‘held or maintained . . . solely for the purpose of provided storage or computer processing services to [the] subscriber or user.’”

Somewhat counter-intuitively, “if [the emails] are held or maintained solely to provide the customer storage or computer processing services” then a subpoena would suffice. Significantly, the court’s decision turned on its finding that because Hotmail is a “web-based” and “remote” e-mail system, the messages stored in the defendant’s Hotmail account were maintained “solely for the purpose of providing storage or computer processing services” to him – and not for backup purposes. Click here for a copy of the decision.

If you find this discussion a somewhat odd way to think about the privacy issues related to e-mail, you are not alone. A interesting and diverse group of advocacy groups, technology companies, think tanks, attorneys and law professors have banded together to form Digital Due Process, a coalition in support of reforming the ECPA. For more information on Digital Due Process, click here.

While legislative reform may well be on the horizon, in the mean time, you might be able to improve your expectation of privacy in your e-mail by backing up what you need locally and taking what you don’t need off the web (it certainly can’t hurt). Here are some resources to help you accomplish this:

http://lifehacker.com/5335553/free-tools-to-back-up-your-online-accounts

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34030

http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2008/01/how-to-back-u-1.html

Plus: Just this past week, Google (a member of the Digital Due Process coalition) has broken with the trend by treating the issue of government requests for data with remarkable transparency. Indeed, Google has an entire webpage devoted to the issue (click here) – complete with a nifty map showing where the requests come from, country by country.