Bayosphere

San Francisco Chronicle: Jurors say they were duped. Just four days after they had found Rosenthal guilty, the jurors said they felt misled by the judge’s refusal to let them hear that Rosenthal’s motivation for growing marijuana was to supply medical patients.

The sheer meanness of the Bush administration’s generals in the War on (Some) Drugs has never been clearer than in their pursuit of Ed Rosenthal. This man was working under the auspices of the city of Oakland, dispensing medical marijuana to severely ill people.

The judge’s refusal even to let the jury know that Rosenthal was working for the city is just outrageous. How could this not be relevant? What kind of legal system gives a defendant no way to offer a defense? The same one, perhaps, that now allows the feds to imprison Americans indefinitely without access even to a lawyer.

Rosenthal is no criminal. He’s an example of enlightened policy and caring. To the feds, he’s an example to be made — that you don’t challenge Uncle Sam’s right to set all policy, period, and the hell the the alleged rights of states that in other contexts Bush and his cronies find so vital.

Today, Secretary of State Colin Powell is appearing at the United Nations to make a case that we have to take out the monstrous Saddam Hussein. He’d have more moral authority if the government he represented was less contemptuous of human rights at home.

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Joi Ito has posted this first draft of an essay offering informed opinions about why Japan is in such trouble today, and what might be done about it. Scary stuff in many ways.

Mitch Ratcliffe says Joi’s points are the same ones we’ll be arguing about in the United States fairly soon. That’s even scarier.

There’s something hilarious, in a sick kind of way, about Credit Suisse First Boston’s move to put on leave Frank Quattrone (Mercury News), the supernova investment banker who brought so many riches to the bank and himself over the past few years. This outfit has been defending its man to the hilt, but the odor around him may be getting too strong.

The smell now includes possible obstruction of justice. Did Quattrone try to get his staff to get rid of documents after he knew CSFB was under investigation?

As the Wall Street Journal reported (paid registration required) today:

“The inquiry, by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, focuses on whether Mr. Quattrone knew of regulatory investigations into CSFB’s handling of hot new stock offerings when he forwarded a December 2000 e-mail urging his investment-banking staff to purge drafts of notes and other documents from their files.”

Here’s how the New York Daily News covered the story this morning, less delicately:

According to E-mails obtained by the Daily News, Quattrone, a superstar banker who took scores of high-flying dot-coms public, told members of his banking unit to destroy potentially incriminating records.

Quattrone’s suggestion came just days after he had learned from CSFB general counsel David Brodsky that a federal investigation, possibly involving his group, was heating up, according to people familiar with the situation.

The spin we’re getting from Quattrone’s side is that a) he did nothing wrong; and b) there’s an innocent explanation for everything. Okie dokie.

Quattrone’s hot water was already warm enough. He’d been told by regulators that they were getting ready to file a civil suit (Mercury News) against him for securities misdeeds.

But his character was never in much doubt in my mind, not after the way he got to CSFB. In case you’ve forgotten, let me remind you what happened.

In mid-1998, Quattrone, then head of Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.’s technology group, quit to join CSFB. Just weeks earlier, responding to rumors that he was job-hunting, he told his clients in a letter: ”We are here to stay. Please trust us.”

Later that summer, explaining his move, he told Upside magazine that one reason for his jump was that Deutsche Bank was looking for loopholes in their contract in order to not pay out so much to the technology group. But as I noted at the time, Quattrone wasn’t shy about using loopholes, either.

He told Upside: “We’d put out voice mail to all employees announcing our resignations. They were shocked. We explained that subject to a contractual restriction, we were barred from recruiting them. But they could talk to Credit Suisse.” Wink, wink.

The odor surrounding Quattrone has been growing for years. Consider his notorious stock-spinning operation, known as “Friends of Frank” (part of a detailed Fortune magazine story). True, everyone was doing it at the time, another example of how insiders enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else during the bubble. But Quattrone’s tech group at CSFB took things even further.

Earlier this year CSFB paid $100 million to settle a kickback case. The bank wasn’t happy enough with its already huge fees generated from technology public offerings, especially in the era when prices would soar the first day of trading. So CSFB allocated IPO shares to some hedge funds on the condition that they kick back outrageously large commissions on their trades, according to documents filed with the SEC settlement. Let’s see. Make billions, pay a hundred million in fines. Sounds like good business to me.

I find myself agreeing with Adam Lashinsky’s commentary this morning, in which he says Quattrone’s troubles are “the beginning of the end of these scandal-ridden times. That’s because Quattrone is bigger than Blodget. And he’s bigger than Grubman. Symbolically, he’s the big fish, as big to this era’s story as Michael Milken was to his.”

Big fish, scum-covered pond.

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Mark Frauenfelder posts this warning about an apparent scam aimed at eBay customers. BE CAREFUL.

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Readers keep sending more examples of work that appears to show SBC’s patents on framing and other Web technology are questionable.

Here are their observations.

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Will Femia is showing the MSNBC weblogs he has been instrumental in creating. I’m posting this from the stage at a conference organized by the Newspaper Association of America, as a quick demonstration of the technology.

Will just cautioned about the perils of chat rooms and other online postings, noting that the bloggers tend to keep an eye on each other and have a running conversation.

David Reed from the Arizona Daily Star in Tuscon describes the blogs his staff has been creating. One experiment has been live blogging from university basketball games. Smartly, the Star sends out an RSS feed of its headlines.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Web form you can fill out to help the Librarian of Congress come up with needed exceptions to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (The law needs outright repeal, but let’s do this one step at a time.)

Here’s the page with instructions.

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I’m on my way to Orlando for the Newspaper Association of America conference called “Connections,” where I”ll be speaking on a panel about weblogs. I hope to convince newspaper executives that this is part of their future.

But I won’t be watching the Stupid Bowl, which is my name for the football extravaganza that almost everyone else in America, it seems, holds in such fascination. Unfortunately, I’ll miss a party today that a friend is having. He’s going to record the game on his TiVo, and fast forward through the football, slowing down to real-time speed only to watch the commercials. Now that makes some sense.

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If the CDMA technology ends up at the heart of all wireless communication one of these days, and it might, Qualcomm will have what you might call an unbeatable business model.

More in my Sunday column.

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New York Times: Senate votes to head off security sweeps. The Senate has voted to bar deployment of a Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies in the United States and abroad.

The U.S. Senate has found its spine, or part of it, by questioning an especially big-brotherish Bush administration project.

The initiative, with the Orwellian name of Total Information Awareness (TIA), is a Pentagon-sponsored assimilation of just about every database, public and private, containing information on all of us — everything from financial, medical, travel and other kinds of stored records. TIA was only the latest Bush assault on our basic freedoms, but it promised to the most invasive yet.

The Senate’s action wasn’t as strong as it might have been, but it was a welcome walk back from the brink. If the Pentagon can’t explain why TIA is vital and how it would work — and Bush officials have stonewalled just about everyone on these core questions — then funding would stop.

Of course, the lawmakers used some weasel words. If Bush says it’s essential for national security, further research on TIA could continue — but in any event Congress would have to specifically approve the deployment and comprehensive use of the system.

The chances that this ban will become law, meanwhile, aren’t all that great. First of all, we can assume that there will be more terrorist attacks in the U.S., and when they occur, the Congress will undoubtedly stampede to remove what’s left of our civil liberties.

Second, the Senate vote has to be echoed by the House of Representatives. This is far from certain. And if the proposed ban goes to a conference committee, you can guess that it won’t stay in the final bill.

Still, let’s celebrate the Senate action. Maybe it’s the start of something more promising — such as genuine oversight by Congress, and some modest attention to that quaint notion called liberty.

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