Franz Kafka strikes again

In a case seemingly from the pen of the late Czech writer Franz Kafka, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has ruled against terrorism suspect Adel Daoud, saying that he and his attorneys cannot access the evidence gathered against him.

Daoud, an American citizen, was arrested in a FBI sting operation in Chicago, for attempting to bomb a bar.

When Daoud’s lawyers discovered that this case involved secret evidence that they had not been privy to, they eventually asked the court to notify them if any evidence gathered had been done so under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order.

I commend the FBI for catching idiots like this, but this is not how the justice system is supposed to work. Secret trials are a ridiculous perversion.

Comments

PCB Mill

PCB Mill Kit My latest toy is a small PCB Mill, a CNC 3018 Pro, there are many available from Ali Express for the enormous sum of 285 Dirhams or so, which is about 70 Euro. I thought that even if it didn't work at all, it would not be a big loss. Assembled CNC 3018 Kit It will help if you have a little previous workshop experience, but these machines are so simple and relatively slow moving, that any radio-geek can safely experiment. Carving With a V-bit in a Puddle of Oil Of course I can have boards made in China by Dirty PCBs , but what is the fun in that? The problem with making PCB antennas, is that you need to experiment to change the design 1 mm this way or that, to tune it just so and just such and having to wait 2 weeks for each experiment doesn't work. A few hours playing with a router is more practical. It turned out to be a pretty nice little kit, made from aluminium and 1/4 inch Bakelite (paper reinforced phenol formaldehyde). This Pre...

Yagi Antenna for 900 MHz ISM Band

I like tinkering with wire antenna designs, since they are simple and cheap to make. Mr Yagi invented his antenna about 100 years ago, but there are still some things left to learn about it. 900 MHz ISM Band Yagi The 900 MHz ISM band ranges from 902 to 928 MHz. Covering the whole band with a single Yagi antenna is difficult, since they are inherently narrow band devices. Consequently some tweaking is required and the result below is a desensitized design that can be built and replicated quite easily, but you need a network analyzer - "To Measure, is to Know!" A Yagi generally consists of a Reflector, Radiator and one or more Director elements, arranged on a boom. For a small Yagi, a wooden ruler works a treat, since one can easily mark the position of the wires. The wire elements are fastened to the bottom of the ruler with hot glue. The wire elements are made from straightened out jumbo size paper clips. The balun, is tw...

OpenEMS with Octave and SciLAB

I wanted to do some advanced RF antenna development work and needed an electromagnetic field solver that is a bit more up to date than NEC2 . Commercial solvers from Matlab , Ansys and others are hideously expensive (in the order of $20,000 to $50,000) and do not fit in the wallet of a hobbyist or a small consulting company. Recently, openEMS became available and it fills the niche with a capable free tool. In general, openEMS is a solver - a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) numerical engine. You interact with it through Octave , which is almost identical to Matlab . You can watch a good video by Thorsten Liebig here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ThMLf0d5gaE Getting it to work is a little painful, but it is free, so bear with it - then save a backup clone, or a zipped copy of the whole virtual machine directory and NEVER update it, to ensure that it keeps going and doesn't get broken by future updates, right when you are ...

Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

Search This Blog