The View From North Central Idaho

The tepid response by Missouri to this episode is frankly appalling. If no record of who produced and approved this trash exists, then the entire leadership who was working at MIAC at the time of this report being drafted and issued should be fired and barred from future law enforcement service.

Bill Wilson
President Americans for Limited Government
October 15, 2009
ALG Blasts Missouri Information Analysis Center For Retaining No Records of Erroneous MIAC “Modern Militia Movement” Report
[H/T to Dave Hardy.

Remember the "Modern Militia Movement" document that came out last February? Well via a Freedom of Information act request they say the don't know who wrote it or approved it. They don't even have anything but a draft version of that document.

Typical. I have FOIA requests to Pacific Northwest National Labs that were supposed to be answered within 20 days and it's been, what, 2+ years and they haven't done anything but acknowledge receipt of the requests. Then there was the one request I involved my congressman, a lawyer, and the DOE on and documents that I originally wrote which were completely open suddenly became For Official Use Only. But in order to tell my lawyer that they revealed material that was classified as Secret -- without telling him it was classified.--Joe]

Phil Pulver has been involved in a lawsuit against Battelle since 1995. Phil contacted me when I was doing battle against Battelle/PNNL and we talk on the phone every once in a while. Here are some of the more interesting points:

Via a DOE grant for $42,128 some software was developed and Pulver given exclusive rights to it. Battelle then delivered a non-working version to Pulver (Battelle disputes this point). Battelle then continued to work on it and used the software for a project for Homeland Security. They then applied for a patent on software that looks nearly identical and claim it was something completely unrelated to Pulvers.

Pulver has spent ~$300K on legal fees. The DOE pays Battelle's legal fees but Battelle gets to call the shots in the legal case. So far Battelle has spent nearly $750K in taxpayer money.

Your government in action.

See Pulvers website for more details than you probably want to know.

The other guy? John Trumbo is the reporter at the paper who wrote the article. I had lunch with him once and he wrote an couple articles on my battle with Battelle as well. I referred Pulver to Trumbo.

One of the first things I learned as a prosecutor is that ethics required me to seek justice, not merely convictions. The actions of the prosecutor in this case plainly violate that rule. It is because of unethical violations like this that I finally resigned from the bar in disgust.

PCV-Scott
May 13, 2009
US prosecutor admits error, hopes for 2d chance
[The prosecutor admitted the "error" of withholding evidence from the defense attorney but the judge says the entire Boston office has a "dismal history of intentional and inadvertent violations". In my fight with PNNL my ignorant belief that lawyers would behave ethically was quickly smashed. Even my lawyer, with over a decade of law practice, was surprised at some of the stuff they did. In the Weaver/Harris case the prosecutors withheld and tampered with evidence and the jurors believed they destroyed evidence. This is in addition to telling Weaver the court date was a month later than it was actually scheduled. But they were caught at least twice in that case and the defendants were found not guilty. Who knows how many times they got away with it in that case and others? We know that a tremendous amount of evidence was deliberately destroyed in the Waco case. David has more comments on the Boston case and other examples of prosecutor misconduct. And I, like him, will now shut up before I say something I would regret.--Joe]

Via Ry. Post Zumbo, post Cooper. How many more are there out there than need to get their asses kicked for supporting Obama in this election? Gentlemen, we can out them. We have the technology. We have the capability to spend our dollars only with those gun companies that support our specific, enumerated, individual right to keep and bear arms.

So, lets do it.

My web site about my "adventure" with Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory recently yielded contact with another victim of theirs.

I often thought it odd they would treat me so poorly with my expertise with explosives and firearms. Why not ease me out rather than treat me crap and not even allow me to defend myself against the allegations? Internal email and testimony during my lawsuit after I was fired revealed there were people on the inside that were quite concerned about that too. They had one or more meetings on how they might deal with "getting sniped at from 800 yards away".

My latest contact who joined the club of being fired unjustly with any opportunity to defend themselves against allegations of wrongdoing by Battelle has expertise with botulinum toxin, ricin, Yersinia pestis, as well as all of the major chemical warfare agents, such as mustard gas, Sarin and VX.

Of course you knew PayPal won't handle transactions for "certain firearms, firearm parts or accessories, ammunition, weapons or knives", right?

You probably knew Google has issues with guns too.

Here is a story I don't think I have told here before:

Years ago, when I first created Modern Ballistics, I tried to get a merchant account for processing credit cards. I had one a few years earlier when was selling software to software developers instead of gun owners and I figured it wouldn't be a problem. I sent in my application and to my surprise they turned me down. At first they wouldn't tell me why. But after much calling and pestering them they finally told me it was because of my product. I carefully read through all their fine print and couldn't find where there was anything wrong with my product according to their published rules. I told them I didn't understand, what is wrong with my product? The most I could get out of them was that I could submit my application again if I wanted but it probably wouldn't make any difference.

Now via Sebastian and NSSF I find out:

Citi Merchant Services and First Data Corp. are refusing to process any credit card transactions between federally licensed firearms retailers, distributors and manufacturers -- a move which will severely limit available inventory of firearms and ammunition to military, law enforcement and law-abiding Americans.

The first company to be affected by this decision appears to be firearms distributor CDNN Sports Inc.

"We were contacted recently by First Data/Citi Merchant Services by a June Rivera-Mantilla stating that we were terminated and funds were being seized for selling firearms in a non-face-to-face transaction," said Charlie Crawford, president of CDNN Sports Inc. "Although perfectly legal, we were also informed that no transactions would be processed in the future, even for non-firearms. I find this very frightening."

To voice your concern to Citi Merchant Services and First Data Corp., please contact June Rivera-Mantilla at 631-683-7734 or her supervisor Robert Tenenbaum at 631-683-6570.

Read the letter, they claim a violation of the law but yet apparently don't bother to turn them into law enforcement. Just like some experiences I have had (above and with PNNL) if they want to get rid of you they will just make stuff up that is at best half true. They don't need or want to know the truth, they just want to get rid of you. It's very tough to win against people like that. Just like literacy tests for voting, when tested none of the blacks could read the daily newspaper, hence they failed the state approved test. Never mind the newspaper given to them was printed in Chinese. Technically they can get away with it but it's still not right.

If they were refusing to do business with people with a certain skin color, sexual orientation, or religion this would be on the front page of all the newspapers. But it isn't. And its because we are just "gun-ni**ers" and it is socially acceptable to the elites to treat us like this.

I tried to post this as a comment to Kevin's post but it was automatically rejected with the explanation of having too many links. No matter, I was going to make a post out of it anyway. I'll provide a link to here from Kevin's comment section. I won't object to comments here but please consider whether the comment really should go on Kevin's blog.

Bilgeman wrote:

I ask you...what would you say of the manufacturers of crematoria, the producers of Zyklon-B, and the merchants of barbed wire who actively sought, and jealously protected, their government contracts with the 3^rd Reich?

To a lesser degree businesses that sell to many government entities in the U.S. today are no different. But Barrett rifles and others have refused to do business with certain government organizations because of the laws that infringe on the civil rights of the people.

What I would say to those businesses is that I understand their reluctance to refuse to participate (in part, I was fired from my job because of this). I also read Hitler's Willing Executioners and understand how an entire culture can go "sour" and make it difficult for people/business to stand up to the thugs in power. How many individuals/businesses refuse to sell products that aid in the war on some drugs? Or bite their tongue even though they know the war on people that smoke cigarettes is morally wrong but personally convenient? It’s very difficult to draw a line and say, “This is the limit, I will tolerate this, and beyond that I will cease to be a part of it or even actively fight it.” And it is very, very difficult to find and adhere to the line drawn beyond which you will disobey the law and endure the threat of government violence against you and/or your family. It is because of this that I wrote my essay on Civil Disobedience (see also this effort of mine).

I wrote my essay before I became a NRA certified firearms instructor in personal protection and was only a little surprised we were told to teach the importance of setting a limit and knowing what action you will take if that limit is crossed. This “drawing of the line in the sand” is very, very important. One instructor put it to me this way, “It’s far more important to know when to draw than how fast you can draw.” This lesson is applicable to far more things that most people know. Understanding this could eliminate all the “frog in the boiling water” scenarios. Governments grow out of control because people haven’t set a limit and said, “If these conditions are violated then the system has crashed and it’s time to press the reset button.” In a somewhat obscure way our Bill of Rights is such a line in the sand but the critical second portion of the rule wasn't put in place. That second portion is what action you will take if that limit is crossed. If I could go back in time to the time of the writing of our constitution and influence it's development I would insist provisions for this second portion was just as critical as enumerated powers and guarantees of rights.

This lesson is something I believe should be taught in our schools. And it’s not just because of the personal protection and “out of control government” issues. "Knowing when to hold them and when to fold them” is another way to say the same thing and perhaps enables people to see far more applications of this vital tool. The more widespread the application of this lesson the more likely it will be applied in the more difficult situations.

Draw your lines in the sand early when you have the time and a cool head. Your life or even the lives of millions may depend on it.

The jerks at PNNL I used to work for report back to Battelle headquarters in Columbus Ohio. It appears I just had a visit from them:

Domain Name		rr.com ? (Commercial)
IP Address		65.24.154.# (Road Runner)
ISP		Road Runner
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Ohio City  :  Columbus Lat/Long  :  39.9968, -82.9882 (Map) Distance  :  1,755 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinNT
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Media Center PC 5.0)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1280 x 800 Color Depth  :  16 bits
Time of Visit		Sep 22 2007 12:53:04 pm
Last Page View		Sep 22 2007 1:10:13 pm
Visit Length		17 minutes 9 seconds
Page Views		9
Referring URL		http://search.live.c...uffman.org&FORM=USNO
Search Engine		search.live.com
Search Words		blog.joehuffman.org
Visit Entry Page		http://cc.msnscache....lang=en-US&FORM=CVRE
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...w,category,PNNL.aspx
Out Click		a story which was published today http://www.tri-cityh...58717p-9075291c.html
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Sep 22 2007 3:53:04 pm
Visit Number		193,489

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

Ronald Reagan
[The difference I saw between working on government contracts as a "Senior Research Scientist II" at PNNL (I was once told I would be considered a "god" if I had a PhD) and working at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer was like teaching high school Freshman versus earning my MSEE. But you don't need to be an engineer to see the truth of Reagan's statement. Just look an some of our government agencies, like the TSA. This is just part of the reason why government should be limited; they are too stupid to spend our money wisely.--Joe]

Heather and Jon were married twenty six years and four days after Barb and I. Heather is the origin of the word "dooced". She now blogs full time successfully enough to support her husband and child.

This week I received my first performance review after going to work full time at Microsoft last year. I was shocked to discover the size of the bonuses and stock grants (James called me up immediately after his review and reported similar shock, "That is a lot of money!"). Even counting the lost pay after being dooced myself (I still need to finish writing up the full story--lots of interesting details about what really happened) in about four or five years I will be financially better off that I would have been had I stayed at the lab. I would rather do the work (for the most part) I was doing at the lab but financially I can't complain.

I got in trouble with PNNL because someone thought my daughter might have had access to "Official Use Only" material. The material in question was marked OUO but was never OUO. We managed to get evidence of that after filing a motion to compel with the judge but legally it just didn't matter. Someone saw the markings, didn't bother to check to see if the markings were valid, see if Xenia actually had access, and acted accordingly--I lost my job. Here is another document marked OUO: I Found Ted Kennedy's Safe! (nice demonstration video of .50 BMG capabilities). I reported the OUO material from the TSA about three weeks ago.

What's interesting to me is that you find quite a lot of stuff if you do a search for "Official Use Only" on Live Search (142,637 items) or Google (about 815,000 items). Most of that is not actually government OUO material but some of it is and was put on websites and indexed when it really shouldn't have been. And then there is the stuff marked as OUO for political purposes. And even some of the material marked and protected as OUO is still available under the Freedom of Information Act:

The For Official Use Only designation is also used by CIA and a number of other federal agencies, but each agency is responsible for determining how it shall be used. The categories of protected information may be quite different from one agency to another, although in every case the protected information must be covered by one of the nine categories of information that are exempt from public release under FOIA.

Some agencies use different terminology for the same types of information. For example, Department of Energy uses Official Use Only (OUO). Department of State uses Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU), formerly called Limited Official Use (LOU). The Drug Enforcement Administration uses DEA Sensitive. In all cases the designations refer to unclassified, sensitive information that is or may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The fact that information is marked FOUO does not mean it is automatically exempt from public release under FOIA. If a request for the information is received, it must be reviewed to see if it meets the FOIA dual test: (1) It fits into one of the nine FOIA exemption categories, and (2) There is a legitimate government purpose served by withholding the information. On the other hand, the absence of the FOUO or other marking does not automatically mean the information must be released in response to a FOIA request.

Part of why I'm doing all the FOIA requests is to demonstrate that the material Xenia supposedly had access to, which was a major component the supposed reason I was fired, is in fact available to anyone that asks for it. This doesn't matter in a legal sense in terms of a wrongful termination lawsuit--they could make up a rule that says people can't trim their nose hair or some such thing and fire people that do. Of course this is all rather embarrassing to PNNL and they are just ignoring the FOIA requests--because they think the law doesn't apply to them. The person that said "See this badge?  This means the law doesn't apply to us." was Newton Brown, who instigated the investigation against me.

More details on the entire story of what happened to me at PNNL including how they let unauthorized people, perhaps including foreign nationals, have access to hundreds of computers with OUO material on them, some other time--I want to reload some ammo this morning before I have lunch with Barb.

Some of my FOIA requests to PNNL are over two years old. And even after I won an appeal from an early denial they still are refusing to send me the data. We'll, not exactly refusing. Every week when my lawyer calls them up asks what the status is they say, "I'll have to get back to you on that." And, of course, they don't. Repeat the next week.

In another case, in response to a FOIA request, they deleted a bunch of material (I found out via a late night anonymous phone call) and told me they did a "thorough search" and no such documents were found. My lawyer reworded the request and resubmitted it. They ignored both it and my congress critter's repeated requests to comply.

Remember the batch of requests I made almost seven weeks ago? They had 20 business days to respond and I've not received even a "go pound sand" response. Like I have said before they think the law doesn't apply to them.

This may make it easier for me to change their tune:

The Senate on Friday unanimously approved a measure that would extend the open-government requirements of the Freedom of Information Act to private contractors and increase penalties for federal agencies that do not comply.

[...]

Sens. Patrick Leahy and John Cornyn, R-Texas, sponsored the legislation to speed agency responses and compel the government to more accurately track pending requests. The legislation was blocked from a floor vote for months because Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and the Justice Department objected to several provisions.

One would have allowed requesters who file lawsuits to recover their attorney fees. Under the compromise, a requester would be able to recover the fees unless the claim is found to be "wholly insubstantial."

[...]

Other provisions would extend FOIA compliance to private contractors who keep records on government work and would protect fee waivers for "legitimate journalists, regardless of institutional association." That means waivers would apply to bloggers and others based on the Internet.

I sent an email to the reporter I had talked to a few times about my difficulties with PNNL with a link to my post saying I was dropping my lawsuit against the lab. He wrote a story which was published today.

Even with that post as a written reference the paper still managed to get a few things wrong.

• The paper says, "Rather than argue about excessive personal use of lab computers, he chose to back down." Apparently the reporter doesn't understand that if the lab did an investigation that concluded I had 13 gazillion terabytes of child porn on my work computer (they did not, but they did claim this picture was "adult content") and my computer was actually squeaky clean I would not have a case unless the motive for the false report was for something like me being of the wrong race, religion, etc. They could be as incompetent as a retarded monkey taking a calculus exam (pretty good analogy to what actually happened) and I would not have had a case. No law or court demands they be competent in their investigation.
• The paper says, "A former cyber security analyst...". My actual title was "Senior Research Scientist II".

Oh well. What do you expect?

I've been sending email around to people I knew wouldn't really wait to know what happened with PNNL yesterday.  Here's the basics of what happened. I'll do the complete time-line with documentation later...

They finally gave us enough evidence that we could reasonably conclude they were incompetent rather than bigoted. It took a motion to compel before they finally gave us some of the information and then doing depositions on some people. I don't understand why they didn't turn this information over when we asked for it in our first interrogatory. It would have saved everyone a lot of time and money.

Some of the most basic unchallenged facts I had believed were false. I was told by Gina, on two different occasions, that both she and no one she knew on our team knew anything at all about the investigation. If this was true then the truth or falsity of my claim that I had not posted sensitive information was irrelevant to the investigators and the decision makers. It turns out that Newton, Wayne, and she had actually started the investigation. That Gina and Wayne knew anything at all about it was news to me yesterday. I didn't know Newton had anything to do with it until my deposition in April of 2007. They should have told us all of this in their first response as we requested. I don’t know why they hid it and required us to go to the judge with a motion to compel to turn it over. Legally they had absolutely nothing to fear from releasing the information--it invalidated my theory of the case.

My lawyer said I could possibly still win the case--but for the wrong reason. Witnesses, Newton in particular, were extremely evasive (for example, refusing to agree, even in principle, to answer yes or no questions with a yes or no rather than a nod of the head and always quibbling about words such as “that depends on what your definition of ‘complain’ is”). Newton and others even gave testimony under oath that I had hard proof was false--all stuff that would look bad to the judge and jury. And Newton even had his own personal file he kept on me which sounds extremely suspicious. The court recorder thought we were joking we told her to pack up because we were done. She thought things were going very well for us. But the bottom line is that all the strange stuff, once we had the truthful critical information, didn’t matter in the big picture so I dropped it. Even if I would have pushed on, which my lawyer almost for certain would not have done had I be so inclined, and won simply because Newton appeared to be hiding information on nearly every response it would have been a hollow victory. Battelle/PNNL would have been screwed because Newton doesn't know how or perhaps is even unable to be candid and believable. I believed him on the parts that were most important to me because I knew Newton was paranoid even when there wasn't anything to be paranoid about. And the critical information he provided fit in with other information that that until that point didn't make any sense.

We are pretty sure this is what happened:

Newton thought maybe I had posted classified (national security type) information on my blog. He talked to Wayne about it--what do we say to Joe? How do we approach him about this? But if it was classified they couldn't just handle it in private--it would have to be reported. They asked Greg about it. He didn't know so they went to Chris. Chris, Wayne and Newton debated it and decided just to be safe they should report it and the investigation expanded. It turned out it was not classified, as I knew--but they never asked me. Newton and Wayne were essentially out of the picture now. The bigger investigation which, only initially required Gina's input, turned up things that looked suspicious and everyone assumed the worst and the process continued to snowball. Finally they fired me without ever asking me except in the most vague terms to which I responded in a somewhat defiant manner. They didn’t even ask people that would have known the truth about the suspicious things they found. They just assumed, perhaps willfully, if it looked bad it was bad. Just three examples:

1. I was accused of “excessive personal Internet use” because I averaged about 2600 firewall transactions a month to things they believed were not work related – no one bothered to compare it to what other people did. It turned out company average was about 8000 non-work related transactions per month.
2. They assumed anything gun or explosives related web browsing was not work—which was false. I was bringing my expertise from my hobbies to my work and the investigators didn’t know this.
3. They found a complete copy of my website, JoeHuffman.org, on the government laptop computer and assumed I was hosting the site from there. Wrong and it doesn't even make sense--the website would go down when I was traveling with the laptop if that were the case. What really happened was I hosted, at the request of Wayne, a bunch of PNNL project material on my own personal website, JoeHuffman.org for a few days when some material need to go on-line on such short notice that we didn't have time to go through the usual paperwork to get it on the corporate site. I integrated the PNNL material with my website on the government laptop computer to make sure the cascading style sheets didn't interfere with each other (I didn't really understand CSS very well and needed to make sure things were working right together). I had lots of free disk space on the laptop and didn't bother to delete it afterward.

These and lots of other cascading failures occurred during their investigation process and were completely out of my control and knowledge until the lawsuit and some the information only showed up yesterday. I was "walking on the fence" with my blogging and knew it. They couldn't quite figure out if I had crossed over or not and Bryan McMillan, my supervisor, "built a new fence" and told me not to cross over that one... so I started "walking on his new fence" with my blogging instead of being submissive. That almost for certain pissed him and others off. That doesn't really make sense to me with my world view. When I would tell one of our kids to clean their room and when they announced it was clean and I went to inspect found the room clean but the hallway three feet deep in their dirty clothes I couldn't hold back my smirk--and I would require they help me put their dirty clothes in the laundry room. Then the next time I told them to clean their room I would make sure the requirement included getting all the dirty clothes all the way to the laundry room. I would be pleased that I had such a clever child, but then I'm not normal...

McMillan, Hevland, and others may have in fact "walked on the fence" in terms of Battelle policy during the termination procedure but unless that was due to an actionable item such as a race, gender, age, etc. and possibly gun ownership issue of some sort it just doesn't matter in a legal sense. They could get away with it.

In regards to all the evidence from my web logs--such as indications they weren’t looking for information I blogged about work but instead about my political activism and that I was a firearms instructor--we explored that. All indications appear the investigation started for other reasons, invalid (some other day with the data to back it up--Newton was "walking a fence" in his testimony) but not legally actionable. The people that may have had a bias against my activism and gun activities apparently didn’t pass that bias on to the decision makers.

PNNL screwed up by not doing a good investigation and I got screwed, in part because I was in essence mocking them, but them being incompetent investigators isn’t actionable in a legal sense so I dropped the case.

Another way to look at it that is probably fair was this statement by someone familiar with nearly all the details but wishes to remain anonymous, "Joe, I see why they fired you now. You are so in control you are out of control. Until people get to know you scare them. They thought you were a loose cannon and were a risk."

It took me a lot of time to understand what "You are so in control you are out of control" really meant. It means I parsed the rules very carefully. It was all very clear to me--simplifying some, there were four types of information, Classified, Official Use Only, Business Sensitive, and everything else which was Open. The first three were carefully defined which made Open well defined. Open stuff is subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests--which means anyone can get access if they ask for it. I was very much in control of what I said and chose my words carefully. But I said things in ways that made them more "interesting" than Battelle/PNNL was comfortable with. I was in control but appeared out of control.

There was, in essence, an unstated policy that they did not wish to honor FOIA. FOIA was a problem for them because it was so much easier to work on things that were in the open that they, and their customers preferred that operating environment. But even though it was technically open they preferred it remain "in the dark". I honored the spirit of that but unless it were truly "not Open" I didn't keep it as in the dark as "not Open" material were required to be kept. I think this pissed them off too--I was "Walking the Fence" again by not keeping FOIA-able material as dark as OUO material.

As I said here when I first found out about the investigation, my Push the Envelope Policy has it's hazards.

As I talked to people about the results from yesterday I had one person tell me they couldn't be like me but they were glad there were people like me out there. Extremists are usually right because they care about the issue and understand it. The moderates don't care because they don't know the issue. And if you are going to push the envelope you have to accept the risk and know that sometimes you are going to have to pay a price. You paid a heavy price. I hope it was worth it for you. I wouldn't have been willing to pay that price."

I don't know the answer...I'm still thinking on it.

So the quote about never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity is appropriate here.

James Huffman-Scott
July 18, 2007
[This was after I told him I had dropped the lawsuit against PNNL and why I had dropped it. I'll write up a report on it this weekend. I've been running on four and five hours sleep for the last week preparing for the depositions that were to be today, tomorrow and the next. We did three of the four depositions scheduled and we had enough answers we could put the rest of the puzzle together on our own. I need to sleep tonight and the rest of the week I need to get a bunch of things done I felt guilty leaving undone at work. The basics are that what James said above overstates things just a little bit but its close enough. I got screwed but it wasn't for any reason that is actionable. There are still unanswered questions but even if they were answered in the most favorable manner possible to me it just wouldn't matter from a legal standpoint.--Joe]

Never do your enemy a minor injury.

Machiavelli
[At least it is attributed by some to be Machiavelli. I haven't been able to verify it. I like it regardless of who proper credit belongs to. Especially today since I am preparing for the depositions of my enemies, the felons, at PNNL. They did me a relatively minor injury over two years ago. My intentions for them are more than a minor injury. By this time next week they will be painfully aware of how much "injury" I am capable of delivering.--Joe]

If you read far enough into Schneier's essay I quoted yesterday you would have found this:

Subjects were divided into two groups. One group was given the choice of these two alternatives:

• Alternative A: A sure gain of $500.
• Alternative B: A 50% chance of gaining $1,000.

The other group was given the choice of:

• Alternative C: A sure loss of $500.
• Alternative D: A 50% chance of losing $1,000.

These two trade-offs aren't the same, but they're very similar. And traditional economics predicts that the difference doesn't make a difference.

...

But experimental results contradict this. When faced with a gain, most people (84%) chose Alternative A (the sure gain) of $500 over Alternative B (the risky gain). But when faced with a loss, most people (70%) chose Alternative D (the risky loss) over Alternative C (the sure loss).

Interesting. But even before I read the results I felt myself drawn to alternatives A and D even though I knew it was illogical. And today I got real world confirmation of this phenomena in a very similar "test" of the felons at Battelle/PNNL when I got a look at their response to our second interrogatory. They had a choice. They could answer our questions which almost for certain would result in their losing the case and perhaps ultimately leading to felony convictions or they could refuse to answer the question and risk discovery abuse as well as losing the case and risking the felony convictions. But by refusing answer the questions they have a chance of escaping entirely. I don't think they will escape and actually I'm pleased they made the choice they did. It increases the total penalties that I may be able to inflict upon them and removes all guilt I might have for making things difficult on the innocents at the lab. But I have to hand it to them, they have a lot of chutzpah.

One of the requests we made was for an email the proves one of the projects I briefly mentioned on my blog only had a very small portion (which I did not mention) of data that was restricted. The rest of the project was completely open and this email said it was acceptable that I publish papers on it as well as file for a patent and license the technology to a university. This blog posting of mine was used as evidence against me when they were discussing my possible termination. The email would have proved there was nothing wrong with me posting that information on my blog. In response to our request for that email they responded with:

Object: This request is beyond the scope of permissible discovery and not calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.

Another request of ours was "Please produce a copy of the email containing a link to the web page http://www.joehuffman.org/Freedom/ScreeningFails.htm which was clicked on by Una Carriera on Friday May 6, 2005 at 18:34:07 GMT." We believe this email (and others we requested) would show they were interested in my gun rights activism.

Their response:

Object: This request is beyond the scope of permissible discovery and not calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. Furthermore, this request requests information that is unduly burdensome to produce.

This type of answer was a favorite of theirs and they used it for almost every response. They refused to give us "comparators" for how they did or did not discipline others that had "adult content" on their computers or people who let non employees use a company laptop (the one thing I did do wrong) for a few hours.

Basically I only obtained two new pieces of evidence out of 16 new interrogatory questions and 12 new requests for production. Those bits of information were SPEEDY was Marty Peterson and PUCK (the main investigator of the websites) was Cullen Tollbom.

I felt no qualms whatsoever when I clicked the button that yielded this:

And I didn't feel any qualms when I did that repeatedly. I was hoping to avoid causing certain innocent people to do extra work. But they have had over two years to find new jobs or push out the felons from the inside. I now regard them as part of the problem. This quote comes to mind:

The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Edmond Burke

I'm doing something. The people inside the lab could be doing something too but to the best of my knowledge they have not and are not. You can do something as well. Make a donation to my legal fund by clicking on the button near the top of this page.

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are a huge issue for our forces in the sandbox. Because I have some experience in making improvised explosives this was one of the areas where I was trying to contribute when I worked at PNNL. Unfortunately that didn't work out and I was involuntarily sidelined in that effort. Here is some tantalizing information on how the battle against IEDs is going:

There may be an unlimited supply of explosives in Iraq, but there is not an unlimited supply of people who know how to wire the detonators. In 2004, CIA operatives in Iraq believed they had identified the signatures of 11 different bomb-makers. They proposed a diabolical - but potentially effective - sabotage program that would have flooded Iraq with booby-trapped detonators designed to explode in the bomb-makers' hands. But the CIA's general counsel's office said no. The lawyers claimed the agency lacked authority for such an operation, one source recalled.

Aside from the aneurysm inducing restriction imposed by the lawyers this is very interesting information. There are a very limited number of people in the Islamic extremist community with the technical skills to connect a remote garage door opener, walkie-talkie, or cell phone ringer, to the two wires of a blasting cap. This is an incredibly foreign concept to me. On the farm I was working with explosives when I was 10 years old and making electronic projects (and yes, some of them used vacuum tubes which means my son will claim it was in prehistoric times) by the time I was 12 or so. I don't remember how much before that I was doing simple things with electric circuits -- which is all the expertise you need to connect detonators.

I expect this is some sort of cultural difference. They think entirely different than we do, some say it may be more different that we can think. And apparently the reverse is true as well. Something that I could do as a child before my voice changed is a rare skill in their culture. So if we can't remove those rare individuals from their society with sabotaged detonators how else can we take advantage of their lack of people with technical skills above that of a 12 year-old?

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is managed by Battelle. It was these people that wrongfully, and feloniously, terminated my employment there just over two years ago. Apparently they had an issue with me exercising my First Amendment rights in advocating for the right to keep and bear arms. I am now in the middle of a lawsuit against these bigots. Increasing their vulnerability is Battelle's contract to manage the lab is about to expire:

The future for about one-tenth of the Department of Energy lab is in limbo as the federal government looks for a way to call for bids on operating the lab.

At issue are $65 million to $80 million in private contract work out of PNNL's overall annual $750 million budget. $52 million to $60 million of that private work would be lost if the Department of Energy decides not to allow private work under a new lab operations contract. The rest could be converted to government research projects.

Battelle spokesman Greg Koller said "significant job losses at PNNL, probably in the 300 to 400 range" are possible if the private work is not somehow preserved in DOE's call for competitive bids.

Battelle has operated the lab under contract with DOE for 42 years. But DOE officials announced in January 2006 that there would be a competitive bid for running the lab after Battelle's current contract expires at the end of September.

That they have a problem with people exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights and see fit to keep felons on their payroll might be a point of interest for certain people as a new contract is being considered.

Not because they committed criminal acts but simply because the lab didn't have enough work for them

Nearly 60 employees at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have left their jobs in recent months mainly because of the "ebb and flow" of federal funding.

About 40 of the employees received involuntary layoff notices, said Greg Koller, spokesman for the lab run by Battelle for the Department of Energy.

I haven't checked with my sources but almost for certain it didn't include the people that should be facing felony charges. That will have to come later after I do some more work on the problem.

The short story is here. Despite some coincidences I do not believe it had anything to do with PNNL/Battelle. Here is the slightly longer story I told my web hosting company:

I believe I have the answer as to why there was high CPU usage. The blogging software I'm using (dasBlog) has some very inefficient code for dealing with what it calls "Comment Views". When viewing a single post without the comments, for the same CPU usage, the number of views is over 100 times faster than when viewing with the comments.

I did some code and configuration tuning and was able to improve the performance by a factor of 2 to 3 depending on how I was testing it. There are still lots of room for improvement and I decided to just turn off the comments until the performance is more comparable to the performance without the comments. This eliminates the CPU intensive view type entirely.

This CPU expensive view mode probably normally isn't a problem except with the robots come visiting. They view the posts in all their view modes.

Would you please enable my site again?

Thank you.

I was up until 4:30 this morning getting it ready to go back online in crippled form (comments are disabled). I still have work to do to get comment views more efficient and then I'll turn the comments back on.

I need to get to work now but I'll update the story here by tonight sometime. I'll fill in the Quote of the day posts tonight sometime too.

The PNNL/Battelle lawyers must be desperate, have dirty minds, or else are just fishing around for the pleasure of more billing hours. Since Battelle isn't paying the bill (U.S. taxpayers probably are) what do Battelle executives care?

Interrogatory 4: Do you operate a website that is a bedroom cam website or similar type website? If the answer is affirmative, please describe in detail the contents of the website whether a person must pay to view the website and the approximate number of people per year that view the website.

The answer is no. Never have. Almost for certain never will.

What they may be fishing for is that while I lived in Richland I had a cam in my room which showed the table where I used my computer and part of the bed. Primarily this was for my wife and kids to check to see if I was awake before they called me at odd hours of the day or night.

I also used it for security as I had a gun safe and sometimes left the company laptop there and wanted to be able to see if my roommates (or anyone else) ever came into my room when I wasn't there. I know the PNNL "investigators" repeatedly viewed that cam.

Other questions include the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all marital counselors Barb and I have ever visited.

On the other side of things it's also clearly apparent they either deleted or withheld email that we requested in our interrogatories. Yeah it's a crime, but it's a lesser crime than the felonies they have already committed so you can understand their motives.

 These guys are "real pieces of work". I'm looking forward to attending their sentencing hearings.

But as yet no substitute has ever been found for cross-examination as a means of separating truth from falsehood, and of reducing exaggerated statements to their true dimensions.

Francis L. Wellman
The Art of Cross-Examination
[I have lots of falsehood and exaggerated statements to wade through in the PNNL case. There is so much of it that there won't be anything of substance left when I'm done with their so-called "evidence". I disposed of probably half of it during my deposition. The rest will tossed in the trash during the course of discovery. It's a very, very "target rich environment".--Joe]

No mercy. No quarter.

James Huffman-Scott
[After hearing of the unethical and illegal behaviors of PNNL in my lawsuit. I have substantial evidence they did not begin to comply with our interrogatory. My blogging will be light until I have taken them down. The trial is scheduled for the end of January.--Joe]

He can tell a lie more convincingly than I can tell the truth.

Doug Huffman
[Doug wasn't talking about the lawyers I saw in court yesterday afternoon but he could have been.--Joe]

My Quote of the Day for yesterday was Sean wishing me "good hunting" in the deposition. That was very nice and even encouraging. But either Sean was unaware of the roles being played or he was supremely confident of my abilities. I was being asked questions for hours. I was the hunted, I was not the hunter. I'm certain that is how the PNNL lawyer saw the game being played. I viewed it as just a swamp I had to cross to get to the meadow on the other side when we can start doing our own hunting.

In a book I read about employment law and wrongful termination lawsuits the author, a lawyer specializing in employment law, said dispositions were the worst part. You are made to feel like crap. It's the job of the opposing lawyer to do that. It's distasteful and he couldn't imagine anyone feeling good about things when it was over. My lawyer wasn't that negative about it. He said I should be myself. I should tell the truth not only because it is legally required of me but because of the impression one makes when they try to be something other than what they really are.

When my lawyer told me this I doubted that he knew what that really meant to me. But I smiled and said I would do that. This advice was consistent with what my friend Eric Engstrom told me. Eric testified for Microsoft in one the anti-trust lawsuits the DOJ brought against them. Exec after exec testified and one by one the DOJ lawyer tore them to shreds. While Eric waited his turn to testify he made numerous trips to the bathroom and vomited. When Eric got on the stand he didn't hold back. He didn't try to conceal, give partial answers, or put a spin on things. He was blunt, he was outrageous, he was Eric Engstrom in his most candid and natural form. The same Eric Engstrom who once said to me, "I will consider myself rich when I'm standing on the moon with the sunlight reflecting off my visor as I'm looking at my initials carved into the soil. They will be big enough and deep enough that when people on the earth look up they can see I was there."

The day after Eric's testimony the newspaper articles told of Eric being the "white knight" that rode to the rescue. Eric told me that after the first couple of questions he had fun. It was something like "Whoo hooo! Can we do that again?" And they would. The lawyer who had littered the landscape with the bodies of Microsoft executives keep pitching what he thought were hardball questions to only have Eric do a line drive with them straight into the lawyers forehead. The court audience was laughing, the judge was laughing. Everyone, except the DOJ, was laughing.

Eric has a multiple IQ point advantage on me. In private we are probably both equally outrageous. In public Eric keeps it much more under wraps than I do. I, almost for certain, had a larger attack surface for my opponent to work with than Eric did. But my lawyer opponent isn't the DOJ's finest either.

I think it went well. As Barb and I lay in bed tonight and she went to sleep I keep going over and over in my mind how things went. Good, I think. Maybe even very good. There was that one time when I knowingly told a fib (by my definition, probably not in the legal sense). I just wasn't sure how else to handle it. I'll explain. Ignore the following techno babble unless you are a geek or one of PNNL's lawyers who needs to read my blog as part of his or her job.

I was asked how I deleted the images of the PNNL hard disk I created on my own computer with the DVDs they gave us. They later demanded we give the DVDs back and delete any copies made. I told them I used a DOS prompt and typed "rd /s <directory name>", waited until it had finished removing all the files and all the subdirectories, I then ran a disk-wipe program that wrote zeros over the entire empty space on the hard disk. This latter step would assure that even a sector-by-sector read of where the original information would come up zeros. My opponent asked something to the effect, "So is there anyway that information could be recovered?" He asked an absolute question, my lawyer told me to interpret the questions literally, I was in full literal mode. I said, "It's virtually impossible." I had blurted out the truth and I knew he would jump on it before I finished saying it. Perhaps I could have said it differently, but I didn't take the time to think about it. My mistake. I was also told to take my time before answering. He came back with "VIRTUALLY impossible? So it could be recovered in some way?" I then had to explain. I believed that the NSA has the equipment and skills to still recover the data. Perhaps some other agencies. It requires going down to the analog signal level and recovering the entire waveform of the magnetic field. It supposedly is possible to recover the lower level signal of the original data for some time after it has been overwritten. He asked if I had the capability to do that. I told him no. It was beyond my capability. That true answer depends on your definition of "capability". I had some choices in answering that question. I could ask him for his definition of capability. Did he mean technical capability given a year or two of time and a couple $100K in equipment, racing against the time when the original signal on the hard disk would be completely faded into the noise? Given the ramp up time on my analog signal processing skills (I already have a MSEE but it would take some time to get back up to speed) and the required equipment did I think I had the capability to win the race? The most truthful answer is "Maybe". It would be tough, but there is a non-zero chance I could do that given the procedure I had followed in the deletion. If you definition "capability" as me currently having the skills, the time, and the equipment to recover the data then the answer I gave is correct. I decided that I would take the risk--I would define "capability" in the manner that would put an end to this line of pointless questioning rather than prolong it without benefiting anyone except the lawyers sitting there getting paid by the hour.

As I lay in bed mulling the above issue over I realized that though I thought I was being somewhat evasive at the time I probably was actually telling the truth. I had forgotten that every Friday night my hard disk is automatically defragmented. During the week there are lots of additional files created and deleted as I compile programs, work on my websites, edit pictures, RIP music, download new audio books, etc. The new files and the deletions of files causes fragmentation. The defragmentation every Friday night physically moves data around on the disk. It temporarily moves parts of files to distant places on the disk to make room for a complete file in the now open spot. It move the temporary parts back into a position where it is contiguous with the rest of the file. The original magnetic image of their precious hard disks has already been at least partially overwritten with unknown and unknowable data. It has been scrambled far worse than I what I originally did. Each week more of it gets overwritten and more scrambled. I don't believe I could recover it even if I had all the equipment right now. I certainly couldn't recover all of it.

Other than worrying some over the above issue it was a fine day. No real surprises for me. He asked a lot of questions that I thought were pointless. In essence there was a lot of me saying "Yes, I did that, so what?" and "Yes, I wrote that, and your point is?" I suspect my opponent was surprised a time or two. But it's tough for me to read people so I don't want to claim I won any "points" unless he actually concedes them--which he did not. He was doing his job and I think he did as good a job as he could given the material he had to work with. I didn't really notice my own stress until meal time. My appetite wasn't quite normal. Not nearly as bad as putting on a Boomershoot, but it was noticeable.

Although it will be a while before I get to actually hunt, I should be able to acquire my hunting license by tonight.

It's been very busy for me recently. Lots of prep for Boomershoot, the lawsuit, and... something else... oh yeah! Work has been busy too. As they say however... there's lots of time to sleep when you are dead.

I'm on my way to Yakima to give my deposition in the lawsuit against the bigots and felons at PNNL. Then on Friday we argue before the judge about access to the hard disk images. I'll keep you posted as best I can.

Currently I'm not at liberty to go into great detail on what is happening with the return of the DVDs constituting 99+% of the information we obtained in discovery. That will soon be fought in court and I can probably talk more about it then. What I can say is that PNNL claimed the information on those DVDs was "extremely sensitive" information and hence my lawyer and I were required to return it. The judge agreed without giving us an opportunity to refute that claim. This is acceptable in certain extraordinary circumstances which PNNL/Battelle claimed were present.

I thought people would be interested in knowing what PNNL defines as "sensitive". This is from their public website (IIRC PNWD stands for Pacific NorthWest Division):

sensitive information

At PNWD, information is considered sensitive if any of the following criteria are met: information is protected under the Privacy Act information for which Battelle would be liable if released to unauthorized individuals information for which Battelle is legally responsible information of which corruption or loss would substantially delay a project or impact the completion of a mission or goal information that cannot be reproduced or that would be unreasonably expensive to reproduce information that could profit an employee or outsider through unauthorized use, modification, or disclosure; or information that could be harmful to DOE, Battelle, or cause unfavorable publicity (e.g., financial, technical, or supply data) data identified by DOE as unclassified controlled nuclear information (UCNI) or data identified as export controlled information.

Bold emphasis added by me.

Needless to say we are challenging the validity of this as being sufficient reason to withhold discovery data. These guys are slime-balls and know that public disclosure is not good for their future.

I can understand their motives. Being rented out to their fellow inmate bidding the most cigarettes is something to be postponed as long as possible.

All warfare is based on deception.

Sun Tzu Wu
From The Art of War
[PNNL will love seeing this one today.--Joe]

In a way I'm relieved they took back the DVDs with all the data I was going through. It had been a gold mine of useful information but this weekend I can let the caffiene circulatory system revert back to blood and get some sleep. It was wonderful to refresh my memory on so many things and be much better prepared to ask questions but I really needed some rest. The battle over the DVDs will be fought by the lawyers and either way Battelle comes out looking like a bunch of clowns and/or jerks.

The depositions and even the close of discovery may be delayed because of this. It's hard to imagine the fight over the DVDs will be over in time to keep on schedule. We'll see...

Yesterday I was talking about the current state of things with one of my primary financial backers. He congratulated me on hiding my true intentions on this blog. He said early on he was concerned about me being able to do that but that he was completely sucked in by my disinformation campaign. Cool! But what was so hard about it?

This case just gets more and more interesting.

Matthew Bean
March 29, 2007
[Bean is my lawyer in the PNNL case. Today the bad guys got a court order to demand we return 17 DVD's (and destroy all the copies) we had obtained as part of discovery. A lot of the information they gave us last week were printouts of my blog, nothing new for me to find there. Subtract that and the portions of the personnel file I already had and they took back more than 99% of the information they supplied to us. I had to leave work and get them to the lawyers office as quickly as I could. They sent someone to pick them up. Like I said before, I was shocked they hadn't destroyed some of the stuff they gave me. They might now. Fortunately for me the more data of theirs they suppress or destroy the more of the total evidence consists of my log files. Yes, they are backed up in numerous safe places and I'm adding another location tomorrow. I was right to go into full overdrive mode to get through as much data as quickly as I could. As I told Barb today, they can't legally delete my mind.--Joe]

Hope you get a good laugh out of this. According to the felons at PNNL/Battelle the picture below constitutes "adult content". In the big picture of things this might not even be brought up later on. It's just a minor example of the egregious nature of the pretexts they used to justify firing me.

This picture was taken by my daughter Xenia at a public fair in Moscow, Idaho on April 30, 2005. I had viewed her Live Journal post believing PNNL's "reasonable use" policy for company computers would include such material. The image was cached by the web browser and their scan of the hard disk revealed it. I wouldn't have guessed that it would run afoul of their "adult content" policy or imagine someone would have the gall to use such a picture as a pretext to fire me. Perhaps my daughter's friend should have been wearing a burqa.

Update: Perhaps that picture is more "interesting" than I thought. PNNL investigators viewed that picture on Xenia's Live Journal five times. "PUCK" viewed it four times and "WD31448" (Una Carriera) viewed it once as well:

• 2005-05-09 15:54:38 (PUCK)
• 2005-05-17 17:25:32 (PUCK)
• 2005-05-17 17:36:36 (WD31448)
• 2005-05-19 23:18:20 (PUCK)
• 2005-05-23 17:20:52 (PUCK)

Very, very interesting...

You should never sell out your principles for less money than you would require to live out the rest of your life in comfort.

Ry Jones
March 26, 2007
[Regarding the possible terms of a settlement, should one be offered, by PNNL/Battelle.--Joe]

On Friday I was hot on the chase. Over the weekend Xenia's sharp eyes picked up something odd looking in the bushes I had overlooked even though I had looked in the same area several times. Last night Ry pointed out an opportunity was not being fully exploited. I was up until after 3:00 AM as I caught up with and latched onto the haunches of my prey. I went to sleep easily for the first time in days. I woke up at 7:30 this morning again excited and with the taste of blood in my mouth. After another hour of working my fangs into my prey I can hear and feel the bones cracking.

This animal is going down. I can't imagine it going any other way.

I'm looking forward to the feeding.

If you were fired for the stated reasons, I wouldn't be pissed that they made a low-quality argument. It just gets you closer to a settlement.

Ry Jones
March 25, 2007
[Good point. It's a good thing when they did something really stupid and documented it. After all, they probably were just doing their job as best they could with the resources they had available.--Joe]

Ry talks about The Thrill of the Chase. How true. I woke up at 7:00 this morning raring to go again. I reviewed a bunch more material and fired off two more long emails to my lawyer and still made it to work on time.

I ended stay up with my new Christmas "toy" and just now sent off a full Office Word sized page of stuff to my lawyer. Maybe I can sleep now knowing that I just gave PNNL/Battelle some more heartburn.

I'm sure my memory has faded of some of the Christmas's of 40+ years ago to the point that I can't really compare them on an equal basis with this Christmas. That aside today was a really, really happy day. I could barely sleep last night then after making arrangement in the morning to meet my lawyer this afternoon I had difficultly paying attention in during parts of meetings that didn't affect me.

When I arrived at the lawyer's office I asked if he had looked at any of the stuff from the felons at PNNL/Battelle yet and he said, "No, I figured I'd let you open the box. This is probably just like Christmas for you." He was so right. The package didn't have any pretty paper on it but that didn't matter. I opened it up and did a high level scan of the material. They sent stuff I was certain they would have destroyed and then didn't send stuff that I thought they would give up easily.

We then got down into the details of some of the stuff and we laughed and rolled our eyes. I dug around looking for things and then would laugh and laugh when I found it or find they are trying to avoid sending it. I had so much fun with it. So much like a bunch of new toys to play with on Christmas Day.

They admit to monitoring my blog and web sites until at least mid May of 2006--I was fired in June of 2005. You would think they would have had real work to do. But that's your tax dollars at work there. There weren't any terrorists to catch those months I guess.

Finally my lawyer said that I need to take my toys away and play with them on my own for a few days. He told me how it needs to be organized and what we need to do next.

I left his office, dropped most of it off at Kinkos to be copied so we have the original and a "working copy". I then went back to my room and started going through the CD's and DVD's. More laughter and I had to share. I saw a friend on-line and started chatting with him about it. We finally agreed to meet for dinner and just as I was about to leave Kinkos called back and said my copy job was done. All 1,101 pages of it. Wonderful! We changed our dinner location to be across the street from Kinkos and I picked up my "working copy" to take to dinner with me.

My friend laughed at me as my hands couldn't seem to make up their mind over which to pick up; the new toys or the menu. He said in a whiny little boy voice, "But I don't want to eat breakfast, I want to open presents."

I barely ate as I dug through the pages and showed my friend page after page that kept us laughing; "They think this is important?" Finally when my bladder and his butt could no longer take sitting there we left and now I'm back at my room. I should be going to sleep but my new toys are calling my name...

Today I received an email from my lawyer in the PNNL/Battelle case:

A big box just arrived for you here.   When do you want to come and open it?

I've been trying to get this material for 21 months now. Soon, very soon...

This will not be over quickly. It will be painful. You will not enjoy this.

Queen Gorgo
From the movie 300.
[As if people who have seen 300 and knew I was going to see it wouldn't have seen this QOTD coming. I'm hoping similar things can be said to the felons at PNNL and the anti-gun bigots currently wailing about the Parker v. D.C. case.--Joe]

I just got a call from my lawyer. He said the felons at PNNL/Battelle will ship their interrogatories to us on Monday. We should get them Tuesday or Wednesday.

Depositions start on April 12th.

I'm really looking forward to seeing their responses. Things are looking good at this point.

According to my calculations PNNL/Battelle was due to respond to our interrogatories last Saturday. My lawyer said Monday. Yesterday I asked if they had responded. I got the following response:

I gave them a 2-week extension.  Pretty standard courtesy.  I routinely ask for extensions myself.  (You are a high-end motivation client.)

I'm not surprised. In addition to being used to working on government contracts with (sarcasm alert) all the motivation that requires they know that I'm going to be turning over all the appropriate material to federal prosecutors. I'm sure it's hard to work up much passion about delivering evidence which might earn you a honeymoon in prison with a new spouse who rents you out by the quarter hour to the person with the most cigarettes.

Hey guys, you can delay it by a few weeks but you aren't going to be able to delay it past the statute of limitations. Bend over and take it like a man.

Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority and a couple of other guys put in a lot of time trying to talk sense into some bigots over the last couple of days. I just lurked until today. I finally posted my Just One Question--which of course went unanswered.

Then the bigots attacked a gun owner that reported an instance where he felt he was about to be attacked by a couple of young men. He put his hand on his gun and without drawing it faced the young men down. They went away without incident. Then the bigots claimed the incident never occurred or that if it did the young men were just probably "asking if you want to buy a ticket to a school's charity event." That pissed me off. My response:

I find it quite interesting that someone that was not a witness to the alleged event concludes the event did not occur without producing any facts of their own or pointing out any inconsistency in the reporting of the event. Apparently they believe they have some sort of ESP that allows them to remotely view the event in the past without knowing the exact location or time of the event. Very impressive...

Or perhaps it's just another bigoted statement against a gun owner. Dismissing their statements out of hand simply because they reported facts that are uncomfortable to the bigot.

Gun owners are the niggers/gays/Jews/pick-your-minority of the 21st century. What would your reaction be if the some politician demanded you be registered because of the color of your skin, your choice of sexual partners, or your religion? What if you were not allowed to freely associate with others of your kind without reporting it to the government (gun show laws present in some states)? What if you were subject to special investigation and discrimination in your employment if you spoke up about these infringements of your rights outside of work and on your own time? What if there were organizations that were openly advocating your extinction from society despite clear constitutional and statutory protection? What if the courts ignored the constitution and the laws supposedly protecting these minority? What if the bigoted politicians that, by law (check out 18 USC 242), should go to jail are instead regarded as “progressive” and “innovative” and are reelected again and again? What if people said you "are all empty scrotum shriveled dick creeps who need guns to bolster some sad sense of masculinity"?

That's what it's like to be a gun owner today. That is why we are so sensitive and why we are so dedicated. It's because our culture is being threatened with permanent extinction by bigots who don't care what the facts are. Bigots who can't answer Just One Question.

It's a waste of my time. It's jousting with windmills, so to speak, but it made me feel better.

Battelle (PNNL) has 40 days from the day we served them to respond to our interrogatories. If I did my day counting correctly that means we are due the materials this Saturday. I'm quite anxious to see what they are going to deliver.

Ry pointed this out to me. Absolutely applicable to my situation with PNNL. A ruling that appears to be exactly what we want. It covers what we regarded as the weakest point of our case:

A federal district court has just applied this principle to hold that Ohioans — even ones employed by private employers — are presumptively protected from being fired for off-employer-property (and presumably off-duty and lawful) possession of guns. The case is Plona v. UPS, 2007 WL 509747 (N.D. Ohio Feb. 13)

Update: I posted a comment on the blog the above was posting on. I received this very interesting comment:

A. Zarkov (mail):

Joe Huffman:

Very interesting but not at all surprising. The national labs, including Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge, Berkeley, Brookhaven etc have been notorious for trampling on their employees. Don’t trust them on discovery. One of those labs got caught red-handed destroying documents they were supposed to turn over as part of discovery. While it hurt their court case, they got away with it.

When, in the mid 1990s, PNNL (operated by Battelle Memorial Institute) defrauded the government, fired the whistle blower, and then got caught they had to pay triple damages. Not just the original amount of fraud:

The Department of Justice announced today that Battelle Memorial Institute has agreed to pay the United States $330,000 to settle allegations it used government-owned equipment to service commercial customers in violation of a federal contract.

...

After the DOE Office of the Inspector General began an investigation in 1992, Battelle reimbursed the government $110,000 for unauthorized use of certain spectrometry equipment from 1988 through 1992.

...

The False Claims Act provides for the recovery of treble damages suffered by the government and penalties for each false claim submitted.

I had original believed they just paid back the amount of the false claims.

I'm hoping they soon become very tired of hearing the phrase "treble damages".

Do you know why prisoners can escape? Because they have more time.

You have the time, the motivation, and the smarts to devote to this case. The other side is at a disadvantage.

Matthew J. Bean, P.S.
February 7, 2007
Regarding Joe Huffman versus Battelle (PNNL).
[This was after he expressed some surprise at my level of preparation in the case and I said I had been thinking about these things for over a year and a half and have been looking forward to the day when I could execute on them.--Joe]

Battelle is the company that manages PNNL (technically, I'm suing Battelle, not PNNL) and several other DOE national laboratories. One of those labs is Oak Ridge. It doesn't sound like Battelle is in the middle of it, just on the edge, but there are some people being prosecuted for fraud in connection with contracts administered by Battelle.

I got some interesting information from my lawyer today. I turned over the interrogatories I had been working on. Interesting quote from my lawyer, "Interrogatories are the punishment you get for filing a lawsuit." I didn't see it that way. I actually enjoyed it. Apparently it showed. My response was composed of 12 CDROMs (about 250,000 files) and over 300 pages of paper. He said he expects it will be one of the best responses the PNNL lawyers have ever seen. We reviewed some of the CD content and he got this big smile on his face. "Their lawyers would be able to retire on the billings they could charge for this." My lawyer said he will not be able to retire on his billings because I did all the work.

He saw the PayPal donation button on my PNNL.info site and with a big smile said, "I wonder if they (the PNNL lawyers) will donate to your case? Let's see, if we donate $10,000 that could result in $250,000 in additional billings..." I wonder if that would be considered unethical?

Yes, I know, it's taxpayer money that will be used to pay the lawyers and any settlement that might be reached. But I got a call from someone today that has been working on that issue and believes he may be able to turn off that spigot. I'm not convinced he can but I'm working with him on it.

I managed to find a letter I thought I had lost from a different lawyer that contained some information which shut off an escape route for the felons. I gave this lawyer a copy and explained the significance.  He laughed and said that it might be very useful.

We talked quite a bit about the lawyer they chose; Jerome R. Aiken of Meyer, Fluegge & Tenney. What's most interesting about this guy is that his claimed areas of practice are:

• Agricultural Law
• Appeals
• Consumer Protection
• Product Liability Law

My lawyer only does employment law and has been doing it for 13 years.

On the felony issue--the PNNL felons (not all on this list were involved and some that were are not on the list) could refuse to testify on points that could incriminate them. But that refusal to testify can be used against PNNL. My lawyer would love to have them "take the fifth". If they don't refuse to testify then that gives them two other options. They can tell the truth and risk the criminal charges from their confessions and still damage PNNL's case, or they can lie. Barb is betting they will lie. But they might be surprised what an experienced trial lawyer can do to a liar. And if we can prove perjury, in addition to the penalties imposed by the court, they could lose their security clearances.

A long time ago I read The Art of Cross Examination and loved it. I can't find my copy so I ordered another one tonight. I need to get through it before the depositions start in April. I also downloaded an audio version of Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail---Every Place, Every Time.

I wonder if Mr. Jerome R. Aiken will read Being underestimated by the enemy. It's a little unlikely, even though it is one of those 250,000 files on one of those 12 CDROMs he will be receiving in a day or two. But one thing he probably will read, because it was on one of the 300 pages of paper, is this:

One of Huffman's co-workers, who must remain anonymous (for fear of retribution from PNNL), knew Joe Huffman far better than McMillan and Hevland. In a meeting a few days after the firing, he told Huffman, "They haven't got a clue as to what they stepped into."

I'd love to see his face as he reads that.

Two last bits of sweetness... 1) my attorney's female receptionist has a Concealed Pistol Permit and 2) my lawyer wants me to teach him to shoot.

Once I had all the log files organized and added the new ones I received from my web host I did a little more looking just for the fun of it. And right off the bat I found something that gave me the giggles. The main website investigator (probably Michael Sutherland) for PNNL used the machine "puck.pnl.gov" as he or she committed their felony. My search in a friend's 2005 log files resulted in this little gem:

Machine name: puck.pnl.gov 
Date: 6/22/2005 
Time (UTC): 20:18:50 
IP Address: 130.20.128.81  
Referral URL: http://www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGcres.jsp?id=IBdHb4UNDrsJ&su=http%3A//www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGweb.jsp%3Ffr%3D20%26searchfor%3Djoe+huffman+sorry%26ptnrS%3DZSzeb001%26st%3Dbar%26nsa%3D0&u=http%3A//www.kennedysailor.com/faq.htm&searchfor=joe+huffman+sorry

This visit took place early on the afternoon of June 22, 2005 about two and half weeks after I was fired. The funny part is the search string they used: "joe huffman sorry".

It's a little bit ambiguous what they were looking for. Were they to see if I said something about being sorry for my contribution to what had happened? Or were they sending me a subtle message that they were sorry?

I was never sorry for anything I did. I wasn't the one committing a felony. And if they were "sorry" that was a pretty sorry attempt at apologizing and it doesn't cut it. I'll believe they are sorry after they have spent a few months being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates to the guy with the most cigarettes.

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Lord Acton
[PNNL has a problem with this. They have defied every Freedom of Information Act request I have made--in some cases blatantly lying say, "No such document exists." when I created the documents and knew they must still exist. Someday someone will punish them for their illegal acts. When that happens I, and many others, will be there helping to make sure that punishment makes up for all the times they got away with it.--Joe] 

...each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less.

U.S. Department of Justice
Departmental Ethics Office
Justice Management Division
[If they are required to have a loyalty to the Constitution then how do they get away with working for agencies such as the ATF that are enforcing blatantly unconstitutional laws? Oh, that's right, the constitution and law doesn't apply to them unless they want it to.--Joe]

Search engines are a wonderful thing. I'm sure the felons at PNNL thought they were great and wonderful as they went searching for information on me (see for example the use of Google on this day).

But search engines are double edged swords. For example doing a Google search for Battelle fraud (Battelle is the contractor that manages Pacific Northwest National Laboratory--PNNL) yielded these pages (E835 and E836) in the Congressional Record:

• Dr. Laul is a nuclear chemist and a nuclear engineer, with a Ph.D. from Purdue University. He spent 15 years at Hanford working on nuclear waste and environmental cleanup problems, analyzing whether that site was suitable for permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste.

• Dr. Laul is also a whistleblower, and a friend of the taxpayers, who put his career on the line when he blew the whistle on fraud and mismanagement by Batelle, Inc., a DOE contractor. Five days after disclosing that Batelle inappropriately and illegally used equipment paid for by the Government, Batelle fired Dr. Laul, saying he had improperly disposed of a hazardous waste--a violation DOE later said Batelle used as an excuse to lay him off and silence him.

• After losing his job, Dr. Laul brought a False Claims Act suit against Batelle and won, resulting in Batelle reimbursing DOE $330,000. Today I submit for the Record an article describing the case and reporting on Dr. Laul's vindication, and thank him for the important and honest work he did on behalf of this country. Dr. Laul lost his job because he had the nerve to stand up for what was right.

You might say that's all well and good for the taxpayers. But if you read further you might have cause to change your mind about that:

U.S. government investigators agreed that scientist Jagdish C. Laul was fired for turning in his managers for fraud.

A federal appeals court agreed Laul could sue the Hanford contractor for whom he worked for wrongful termination.

The government made the contractor, Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pay back $330,000 for double-billing lab equipment--and even recommended Battelle managers be criminally prosecuted for fraud.

But who picked up the $750,000 tab for defending Battelle against Laul's lawsuit?

U.S. taxpayers.

Laul's case is the most recent example of a system that allows private nuclear contractors to rack up huge legal bills fighting whistleblowers--even when the contractor's in the wrong.

Battelle settled with Laul in January to head off a federal jury trial in Spokane.

The cost of his case to taxpayers includes the $250,000 settlement paid to Laul; $400,000 in legal fees to Battelle's outside law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine of Seattle; and about $100,000 in legal work and other Battelle costs to fight Laul.

If Laul had won at trial, taxpayers would have paid that bill, too. That's because of a Cold War agreement in which the U.S. government promised to pay all legal costs of its nuclear weapons contractors when they agreed to run the government's weapons plants.

The agreement, called indemnification, is still in effect today. It applies to Battelle, which works on Hanford cleanup and other government nuclear programs.

Isn't that nice? Battelle paid $330,000 for the fraud which sounds like was the amount they had illegally charged the government to begin with. And the Federal government has to pay all the legal costs of Battelle's defense. So... assuming Battelle decides to engage in some illegal activity to increase their bottom line the worst case scenario is that Battelle comes out even in the end because the Feds are required to pay the legal bills. Best case is they get away with it.

In my case the Feds will, assuming I win, pay Battelle's legal bill and any settlement I get from them. Battelle is held financially harmless by the Federal government. Just so you know. Perhaps your congress critters would like to know that as well.

Continuing the search engine exploration... So what happens if we do a search for Battelle whistleblower? That was interesting... We end up with this story which with a little more searching results in this and digging a little deeper yielded this (UT-B means the partnership between the University of Tennessee and Battelle that manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL]):

In my settlement, I made sure that DOE and UT-B explicitly agreed that I had won the case. There were two reasons for this. One was that I did not want UT-B to be able to claim that I "dropped the case" or any such thing. But the other was that back in 1995 at PNNL, following a settlement in which Battelle paid their fired former employee J. C. Laul a sizeable amount for a whistleblower case that Laul was very likely to win if it had played out to the last act (legally speaking), PNNL head and later ORNL head Madia characterized the payout as "a straightforward business decision with the best interest of the US taxpayer in mind". But as a Government Accountability Project lawyer pointed out, Battelle spent over $400,000 of taxpayer money defending against Laul's whistleblower action, plus the $330,000 it had to return to the government for the fraudulent action that Laul (accurately) reported. Madia stated that the message of the settlement was "Don't sue us [Battelle]", but of course the true message was "We will get away with whatever we can".

So what our search engines report for us with just a little looking is that Battelle has a history of making stuff up and firing people. I was telling Barb this new information and she said, "You would think they would learn." Well yes, but there wasn't much to learn and it's a different lesson than the one we want them to learn. They have learned they can commit criminal acts and the worst that will happen is they come out even in the end--guaranteed by the contract they have with the Federal government. There are more amazingly great terms in their contract that I'll save for another day. I wouldn't want you to burst a vessel from a blood pressure spike.

Here are some of the lessons being taught to Battelle. This is right after being dinged for the first fraud case I mentioned above:

Battelle is expecting to receive an "outstanding" rating for fiscal year 1999 from the Department of Energy for its performance in operating Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

The rating is to become final and be announced in late December.

Last year, Battelle also received an outstanding rating. Even though its 1998 score fell just barely shy of the number needed for the top rating, DOE awarded the outstanding rating because of Battelle's strong efforts in key areas.

This year, Battelle expects to be well above the minimum score needed for an outstanding rating, based in part on the lab's self-assessment, outgoing lab Director Bill Madia said Wednesday during a meeting with the Tri-City Herald editorial board.

The real problem here is that Battelle/PNNL has no incentive to be responsible for their actions. It's like a child that gets in trouble at school and the parents intervene in such a way the child is totally protected from any punishment. There is no downside for their misbehavior--there is only upside. That's one of the ways criminals are created. After sufficient criminal activity they eventually get caught and then they go to prison. Which is has been my end goal from the beginning in then case. The PNNL felons need to spend some time being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates bidding the most cigarettes for a few years and perhaps then the behavior of their previous co-workers will improve.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. Battelle has other "skeletons in it's closet" that are most likely to come tumbling out soon. I don't have enough details to really be comfortable in talking about it even if I was at liberty to discuss it. I have been assured that I will be among the first to know when the details become public.

I'll keep you posted.

Update: A reader pointed out one of my links was broken. That is fixed now.

Also worthy of update is another source that is more readable and has the potential to be less biased is the actual ruling of the DOE in Westbrook's case:

There is evidence in the record that suggests that the RIF sheets, which contained the objective information on which the termination selections were to be made, were not given serious attention, and were drawn up to favor a pre-selected individual. I have reviewed the criteria set out on the RIF sheets and find troubling inaccuracies and manipulation.

...

In my view, the Company’s use of this criterion [transferability of skills] to assess whether an employee is flexible enough to “satisfy” or “get along with” customers is so strained that it suggests a manipulation of the system to reach a predetermined result. .... That leads me to believe its use was an afterthought, one designed to downgrade Westbrook and target her for termination. As such, it detracts from Battelle’s position that the RIF was performed impartially with respect to Westbrook.

I received an email from my lawyer today about my lawsuit against Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:

We do have service on Battelle. It was served on 1/22/07.

Whoo hooo!! Full speed ahead!

Of course that is in "legal time" rather than in "Internet time" like what I'm used to.

I also received a phone call yesterday from someone that heard about my case. They had lots of interesting information about other illegal activities Battelle has been involved with. He is sufficiently upset about it that he is taking it up with some government officials. I shared what I could with him. I'm not sure his information will be that useful to me but I hope to soon be posting some of it here or on my PNNL.info website. He claims some pretty egregious and illegal stuff.

It's not too surprising I guess. I did have a guy at the lab tell me and another fairly new employee, "See this badge? This means the law doesn't apply to us." That same "fairly new employee" recently sent me email saying, "I can definitely atest to a pattern of illegal and unethical activities at the lab" and "I do think it is my obligation as a citizen to see justice prevail."

The guy I received a phone call from had first called over two weeks ago. I put him in touch with "fairly new employee" and that contributed to the update yesterday about his plans to talk to the GAO, Congressional oversight committees, and the DOJ in the near future.

I have some hints that my previous plans to avoid getting former co-workers involved may not be possible. Now might be a good time for some of my friends that still work there to get new jobs (hint, hint). Things will be much more comfortable for them if they don't have to worry about getting fired for reporting information that is embarrassing to Battelle after being deposed. Also I've been hearing rumors of business being a little tight for them right now. If certain government agencies become displeased with all the illegal activities Battelle has been engaged in then business could get much worse soon.

I've been working for several days on the log files requested in the interrogatories for the PNNL lawsuit (no, I'm not converting them to EBCDIC although I gave it a few seconds of thought just for the amusement value). I only had a subset of the logs they wanted in a reasonably well organized manner. They wanted more than what I had organized, some of which I didn't have, lots of logs weren't in my preferred organization, many of the websites were hosted simultaneously on two different servers at the same time for a while, and the logs came from at least four different servers. It's been a lot of work but I'm nearly done with that part of it.

I obtained more log files from my old web-hosting provider last night and although there will be a few tweaks to the numbers the following is pretty close:

• Websites: ~30
• Directories: ~170
• Files: ~170,000
• Size: ~6 Gbytes

I realize they asked for this mostly to cause me pain, almost for certain they won't bother to do their own analysis, their own internal email and testimony will make this irrelevant, but I have been wanting to organize this stuff for several years anyway. I want to finish my web log analysis program (NoDooce) and this data set will be very useful for both development and testing. And besides, being the Aspergers type, I actually enjoy this type of work. I hope they find some expert witness to look at everything, pay him outrageous amounts of money, and he has as much fun as I have had with the data.

This is just the log files. There are also hundreds of pages of notes, documents I have obtained, and emails. I can't wait to start digging into the stuff they have to supply to me.

In the process of organizing my log files and complying with the Interrogatories I came across what appears to be the home IP address of one of the PNNL investigators or someone they reported the results of the investigation from the previous day (see also the first day of investigation).

Tracing it through various websites reveals more evidence the whole thing was about guns. Among the evidence is they had a lot of interest in a picture of me with a holstered gun on my hip and interest in Boomershoot.

My former supervisor, the felon Bryan McMillan, at PNNL has a lawyer who requested a "huge number" (my lawyer's phrase) of items in their response to my lawsuit. The conclusion we may be able to draw from this is they don't plan to challenge the point of law about it being a wrongful termination to firing someone because they are a gun owner. The have chosen to go the route to try and make it cost me as much money as possible. Pursuant to that tactic they have requested a lot of financial data from me. With this data they can better judge what my ability is to sustain the legal battle. What they will find out is that our house mortgage payment is lower than most people's rent, we have no other debt, and Barb and I have very high paying jobs. In essence we can, with minor life style changes, sustain the battle until we retire ten or fifteen years from now. And that doesn't include all the donations I have received (click on the Make a Donation button here).

Assuming I win I'm paying everyone back with interest but we can't count on that so you should assume it's a donation. With a big thanks to some people from the Gun Club at Microsoft donations have covered about half of the legal expenses so far with promises of more as the bills come in. So for other side to try and make it too expensive for me to fight is going to be a losing tactic. All they can do is maybe slow down the inevitable and it actually improves the possibility for me to reach the desired end goal. I don't have the time right now to explain why that is but the basics are that as long as I win this particular legal battle the more money it costs both sides during the process the better chance I have of seeing the felons actually getting convicted.

Anyway... To prove the point that their game plan is to just drive up the costs, which ironically help me achieve my final goal, here is the list of requests (complete with typos) from the other side:

INTERROGATORY 1:  State your age, birth date, birth place, height, weight, sex, and Social Security Number. 

INTERROGATORY 2:  Have you gone under any other name or different spelling of said name?  If so, what name or different spelling?

INTERROGATORY 3:  List the addresses, with the dates, where you have resided during the past ten (10) years.

INTERROGATORY 4:  State the month and year you last attended any school, the highest grade or year completed, and the name and location of said school.

INTERROGATORY 5:  If you are married, please state your spouse's name and the date and place of your marriage.  If have been married more than once, state the names and addresses of previous spouse or spouses, if living, and the date and place of their death or your divorce.

INTERROGATORY 6:  State the names, addresses, and ages of your children, if any.

INTERROGATORY 7:  Set forth the amount of your earnings during each of the past five (5) years and your earnings to date during the current year. 

INTERROGATORY 8:  Are you claiming damages for lost earning capacity, lost wages or benefits?  If so, please state, with specificity:

a. The total amount of claimed damages;
b. How you calculated your damages;
c. All employers relevant to your claim and their addresses and phone numbers; and
d. All dates on which you were unemployed.

INTERROGATORY 9: If you have ever been self-employed, state each period of self-employment and the net monthly earnings of said periods.

INTERROGATORY 10:  Have you ever filed for bankruptcy?  If so, please state:

a. The dates and places at which any bankruptcies were filed; and
b. Whether the bankruptcy proceedings are still pending or whether they have been resolved.  If they have been resolved, please state the date of the dismissal, or discharge, if any.

INTERROGATORY 11:  State where you filed your last income tax return, and the year. 

INTERROGATORY 12:  Have you ever been previously involved in a lawsuit?  If so, please state when, where, the nature of the action, the disposition of the case, and the name of the attorney who represented you.

INTERROGATORY 13:  Please advise if you have in your possession or if you have access to statements made by any party or witness to this action.  (For purposes of this interrogatory, a statement is a written statement signed or otherwise adopted or approved by the person making it or a stenographic, mechanical, electrical, or other recording or transcription thereof which is a substantially verbatim recital of an oral statement by the person making it and reasonably contemporaneously recorded.)  If you do, please identify the name of the person making it, the time and place of its taking, the names and addresses of all persons then present and the name and address of the present custodian therefor.

INTERROGATORY 14:  Have you ever been admitted to a facility or hospital for the treatment of a psychiatric or psychological problem or condition?  If so, state:

a. The name and location of said hospital or facility;
b. Whether said treatment was in-patient or out-patient;
c. The dates of said treatment inclusive;
d. The names and addresses of both treating and admitting physicians, psychologists or care givers; and
e. The type and nature of the treatment received.

INTERROGATORY 15:  Give the names, addresses and telephone numbers of any persons known to you or your attorneys having knowledge of facts pertaining to this lawsuit.   This interrogatory is intended to include all witnesses known to you or your attorney or agents.

INTERROGATORY 16:  Have you ever pled guilty to or been convicted of a crime?  If so, state the nature of the crime, the date, and the ultimate disposition of the matter.

INTERROGATORY 17: Have you and/or your spouse/former spouse ever sought marriage counseling?  If yes, please state:

a. The name and location of where counseling was provided or sought;
b. The dates of said counseling inclusive;
c. The names and addresses of persons who provided counseling; and
d. The type of nature of the counseling received.

INTERROGATORY 18: Please state the date you were Adischarged@ from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle?

INTERROGATORY 19: Please describe in detail the reasons given to you for your discharge, who gave them, and when these reasons were explained to you.

INTERROGATORY 20: Please state the name, address, and phone number of all places at which you have applied for employment since the date of the subject discharge.

INTERROGATORY 21: Please provide details of your current employment including job title, length employed, specifics regarding compensation, duties and if you have a written contract.

INTERROGATORY 22: Since the date of the subject discharge, please state approximately how many days or months you were unemployed.

INTERROGATORY 23: If the answer to the previous Interrogatory was in the affirmative, please state whether you have received any unemployment compensation.  If yes, please state the dates you received such compensation and the amount of each payment.

INTERROGATORY 24: During your employment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle, were you ever disciplined or educated as a result of what your supervisor determined to be improper conduct or deviation from the company=s policies or procedures?  If yes, please state the dates of such disciplines or educations, persons involved, and the nature and reason for the disciplines or education, persons involved, and the nature and reason for the discipline or education.

INTERROGATORY 25: For all employment held since your discharge from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle, please state:

a. The names and addresses of each employer;
b. The name of your position and a brief job description for each position held;
c. The dates of employment with each employer;
d. Your salary or hourly wage for each position held.

INTERROGATORY 26: In addition the preceding Interrogatory, please list all income, of any type, which you have received since the date of your discharge from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle.  State the source of the income, and the total income received from each source, including but not limited to, worker=s compensation benefits, unemployment benefits, Social Security benefits, income from jobs, and all income from any other source whatsoever.  If you received unemployment or worker=s compensation benefits which are the responsibility of more than one employer, state which employer is responsible for each amount of the benefit. 

INTERROGATORY 27:  Please identify by name and address each person consulted by you as an expert and whom you expect to call as an expert witness at the time of trial.  Additionally, as to such individuals so identified, state the subject matter on which the expert is expected to testify and state the substance of the facts and opinions to which the expert is expected to testify, giving a summary of the grounds for each opinion.

INTERROGATORY 28:  State whether or not you have received any reports of any kind concerning any aspect of your case.  If your answer is in the affirmative, state:

(a) What is the general subject of the report?
(b) The name, title or specialty, address and phone number of the person or expert or experts who made said report or reports.
(c) Who has custody of such report or reports?

INTERROGATORY 29:  Please describe and list each website maintained by you during the time of your employment at PNNL/Batelle and thereafter, including but not limited to the name of each website, its general subject matter, its URL, and the dates when such website was established.

INTERROGATORY 30:  Other than the websites described in your answer to Interrogatory 30, please describe and list each website where you have posted content of any kind or nature that could be viewed by other users of such website during your employment at PNNL/Batelle and thereafter, including the dates that such posts were made and the names and URLs of websites where such posts were made.

INTERROGATORY 31:  Of the websites listed in your answer to Interrogatory 31, please list specifically which websites you posted content referencing your employment at or information about PNNL/Batelle, including the dates of such posts and the name and URL of such websites.

INTERROGATORY 32:  For each post described in your answer to Interrogatory 32, please describe in detail the content of such post.

INTERROGATORY 33: While employed at PNNL/Batelle did you ever access the internet at work for a non-work related purpose?  If yes, please state the approximate dates of such access, the website you visited, its URL, and the purpose of accessing this website.

INTERROGATORY 34:  Please provide all facts to support the allegation in your Complaint that you were Acertified as a firearms instructor,@ including but not limited to the date of your certification and what agency or group granted you certification.

INTERROGATORY 35:  Please provide all facts to support that PNNL/Batelle knew that you were Acertified as a firearms instructor@ during your employment and/or that this influenced the decision to terminate you.

INTERROGATORY 36:  Please list the names of all the people present in May 17, 2005 meeting alleged in your Complaint, and describe what each person told you at this meeting, including the name and URL of the website(s) where it was asserted that you Areleased business and customer-sensitive information.@

INTERROGATORY 37:  Please list the dates and times that APNNL Investigators@ visited your Agun-related websites@ as alleged in your Complaint.

INTERROGATORY 38:  Please state the name of the AHuman Resources Specialist@ referenced in paragraph 3.9 of your Complaint, as well as the names of any others present at this meeting.

INTERROGATORY 39: Did you ever allow others to access the internet through PNNL/ Batelle owned computers?  If yes, please list the dates and times that you allowed others to access PNNL/Batelle owned computers and the name of such persons.

INTERROGATORY 40:  Please state the name of the manager referenced in paragraph 3.10 of your Complaint.

INTERROGATORY 41:  Please provide all facts to support your allegation that Afollowing [your] suspension, neither Plaintiff nor any of his co-workers, project managers, or program managers were asked any questions.@

INTERROGATORY 42:  Please describe in detail what was told to you regarding how you inappropriately and without authorization used PNNL computing resources, failed to comply with company standards, disclosed or used proprietary or confidential information without authorization, and were dishonest as stated in your Complaint at paragraph 3.14.

INTERROGATORY 43:  State the names of any others who were present at your meeting with Bryan McMillan described in paragraph 3.14 of your Complaint.

INTERROGATORY 44:  Please provide all factual support for your allegation that Athe proffered reasons for Plaintiff=s discharge are false and pretextual,@ as alleged in your complaint.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 1:  Please provide legible copies of your income tax returns for the last five (5) years.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 2:  Please provide legible copies of all transcripts or statements of any party or witness to this action.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 3:  Please provide legible copies of all diaries, notes, memoranda, photographs, records, letters, or documents of any kind pertaining to the liability or damage claims of plaintiff.  This request for production is not meant to include materials prepared in anticipation of litigation, attorney work product, or confidential attorney-client communications. 

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 4:  Please provide true and accurate copies of all job applications you have filled out and submitted since the time of the subject discharge.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 5:  Please provide legible copies of all resume or curriculum vitae which you have sent to an employer since the time of the subject discharge.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 6:  Please provide legible copies of every record or document in your possession which is connected to, relates to, or is otherwise associated with your employment with defendant.  This request for production includes, but is not limited to, correspondence from or to defendant, written reprimands, performance evaluations, and any other documents received by you which relate to your employment with defendant. 

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 7:  Please provide legible copies of all reports, of any kind, including but not limited to reports of your experts, concerning any aspect of your case. 

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION NO. 8:  For the websites listed in your answer to Interrogatory 30, please provide a hard copy of the log history of each website, from the date you began employment at PNNL/Batelle to date, showing who logged onto each website, at what time, and for how long. Please indicate on the log history, if it is not readily apparent, which entries you believe represent APNNL investigators@ and which represent you.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION NO. 9: For the websites listed in your answers to Interrogatory 30-32, please provide a hard copy of each posting made by you, from the date you began employment at PNNL/Batelle to date.  This request is intended to include posts in their original form as initially posted as well as any modifications, deletions, or additions made thereafter.  The hard copy may be from the website, from a back-up copy of the posting made by whomever maintains the server, or from any other means available to you.

Yesterday I received the interrogatories from the lawyer of my felonious former supervisor Bryan McMillan at PNNL. Among the list of things requested (according to my lawyer the 44 interrogatories and seven "requests for production" is a "huge number") was a HARD COPY of all my website log files from the day I started work at PNNL until the present. As I was organizing the log files (several Gigabytes of stuff) my hard disk died. I had back ups of all the log files up until a month or two after the termination (June 2005) but not for the last 18 months or so. I only had one copy of most of them. My email hadn't been backed up for several months either. I was up until 3:00 AM before giving up for the night.

Today I was able to recover nearly everything from the old drive with the only thing still potentially at risk was stuff I could recreate such as my website content (still up on my ISPs server). I haven't verified my email file yet but it seemed to copy just fine. Ry, his son, and I went to Fry's and bought a new hard disk and I'm now in the process of copying all my files to the new hard disk.

I'm glad I was able to recover the data. It would have been exceedingly difficult to explain a hard disk crash occurring only a few hours after getting a request for the contents.

And it's not like I don't want to comply either. It would be lots of fun actually. They want a hard copy of all the log files. I did a rough estimate and came up with over one million pages required using a normal sized font. Printed single sided that's a pile of paper over 300 feet high. And since when they lose the case they will have to pay all my legal expenses and hence will ultimately get stuck with the bill for all the paper and printing costs. And you know what would be even more funny? Driving a truck full of boxes of paper up to the door of the lawyer's office and telling them to unload it. And of course imagining them trying to find data of any use in a million pieces of paper would keep me laughing for a few weeks as well.

Unfortunately my lawyer said to just give them the data on a DVD and let them print it out if they wanted it that way. It seems my lawyer wants to spoil nearly all my fun.

My previous post resulted in some serious topic drift in my mind so I decided to make a separate post of it.

You may have noticed that I have a subtitle on this blog of "Ramblings of a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal". There are two reasons for that.

One reason is if you call yourself something worse than what your enemies can come up with you take a lot of their power away. This was pointed out to me by firearms/self-defense instructor Greg Hamilton who I am quite fond of quoting. He said when someone calls him some derogatory name in a potentially hazardous situation (as in someone trying to pick a fight) he corrects them by saying, "Nope, I'm a goat f****er." What are they going to do after that? It's tough to say anything worse than that about you and they don't have real means of escalating the situation without getting physical with you. And how can they justify that in their minds? It's pretty much "game over" unless they planned on going the physical route to begin with anyway--in which case you aren't any worse off than you were to begin with.

The second reason I do that is because it encourages my enemies to underestimate me. When they then apply their stereotypes to me and engage with their already half-empty brains in a haphazard way they are in for a rude awakening. I think this is part of what happened with PNNL. I suspect they believed I would never know the real reason they went looking for a pretense to fire me or that I would find out for certain they didn't actually have sufficient grounds to do so. On some level they believed I was stupid. Never mind that my official title there was "Senior Research Scientist II" or that I have a masters degree in Electrical Engineering. I was just a uppity gun nut who needed to be put in his place. Never mind that they put a pile of papers in front of me, told me they were printouts from from my websites, that I needed to "fix things", but then refused, multiple times, to let me see them. What did they think I was going to do? I wanted, nay needed, to see what it was they were talking about. I was a researcher in "Cyber Security". Did they think I wouldn't figure it out or wouldn't at least give it a try? They seriously underestimated me.

Of course allowing and even encouraging your enemies to underestimate you has it hazards. Had the bigots at PNNL not underestimated me they might left me alone rather than commit a felony against me. Or they could have just been smarter about things and made in nearly impossible for me to gather up the facts. One never knows how things might have been different but two thing are certain:

1. They were found out and in a big way. Not only the initial hard evidence I found in the website log files but confirmation from the inside that is overwhelming. The points of fact in this lawsuit will never be in question. This was about guns (and a little bit of explosives) and me being an advocate for gun rights.
2. Because in the general case it is so hard to prove discrimination when you do have the proof you must make the punishment much more extreme than if it were trivial to detect this sort of discrimination. It all boils down to, depending on which method of modeling is more comfortable for you, economics or risk analysis. Because of this I have an obligation to punish these bigots to the maximum extent I can. What I really want is to see them be financially ruined and go to prison. But despite talking to several lawyers none of them believe I can obtain that sort of relief from the courts. I'm not so sure, I still think it is possible, but I won't be revealing those plans, until some future date when our enemies have less opportunity to evade my goals.

I'd like to explain this second point because it's may not be obvious to everyone. Suppose, as a child, you really liked cookies and your parents rationed them out at the rate of one per day. Further suppose you could conduct one raid per day on the cookie jar, score one cookie, and get away with it nine times out of ten. If you were caught the punishment was you had to do without your cookie ration for two days. You, knowing your math well enough to compute your total cookie consumption over a ten day period with and without the raids would conclude you should continue raiding the cookie jar.

Supposing it was impractical to make it more difficult for you to conduct a successful raid your parents would have two choices to get you to obey the rules. They could either increase the probability of detecting a cookie jar raid or they could increase the cost when they did detect a raid. If you were to get away with a raid only one out of ten times the cost of conducting the raids would exceed the benefits and you would likely stop the raids. Alternatively they could raise the punishment to be ten days without your cookie ration and you again would conclude you would be better off without conducting the raids.

The same sort of thing applies to big time criminal activity. Except for certain cases like "crimes of passion" and insanity there is a weighing (perhaps at an unconscious level) of the risks and rewards. In most cases of employment discrimination against gun owners the bigots will probably go undetected. When they do get caught the chances of punishment are very near to zero. In fact, to the best of our knowledge there has never been a legal case of anti-gun owner bigotry resulting in the punishment of the bigots. That will likely be my toughest problem to solve in my battle. Because it is so rare to be detected and even when detected it is unheard of to be legally punished I really don't have a choice if I want to make a difference for anyone but me. I must go for the largest punishment I can possibly achieve. This is because in the future I cannot allow them, or others, to weigh the risks and conclude committing the crime is worth the risk.

There are certain thresholds that must not be crossed without punishment being severe and perhaps out of proportion to the crime. And yes, I agree that life, perhaps death, in prison is too harsh a punishment for the crime of anti-gun owner employment discrimination--provided the crime could be detected and punished with some regularity when it happens. That's currently not the case so we have to "make an example of them". And the example I want to make of them is, literally, to have them spend the rest of their lives in prison. This is my Biggest, Hairiest, most Audacious, Goal (BHAG) in this case. I know it's possible, just unlikely. But I want them to be aware that is what they are facing. I want them to know that is possible. And even if I can't achieve it in this case I may be able to enable others to get closer in the next case. And the closer we get to achieving that sort of BHAG the less likely the bigots are to take that kind of risk in the future. Given their conclusions about "benefits" of gun control I have serious doubts about many of these bigots being able do enough math to solve even the cookie problem above. But if we make the price of their overt bigotry a significant chance at being rented out by the quarter hour to the person with the most cigarettes they won't have to know much math to conclude they don't want to go there.

Hence by giving myself the title of "a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal" I lured the bigots into attacking me. I didn't intentionally do that but now that they have and I've had an opportunity to regroup I realize I'm in a much better position than anyone I know, or have even heard of, to do what needs to be done. Not that I consider myself on par with him but this reminds me of a Winston Churchill quote, "I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion's roar." Just as Hitler underestimated his enemies so have the anti-gun bigots in this case. And just as the only acceptable conclusion of Hitler's war was his unconditional surrender I see no reason to accept anything different in my war with the bigots at PNNL.

Update: Minor changes were made upon the advice of an attorney.

Via Wayne LaPierre:

Montana's Castle Doctrine bill also contains a provision stating that if companies forbid employees from legally and lawfully carrying a firearm, and an employee is a victim of a crime, then the employee can sue his or her employer for failing to protect him (or refusing to allow him to protect himself).

This is wonderful! We need more of this.

One of my first firearms students was a lawyer and suggested something I have never had the courage to try. His suggestion was that employees who are otherwise legally able to carry a concealed firearm but are prohibited by company policy should have their lawyer send the employer a letter. This letter would state the employee would obey the company policy. But should a situation arise where the lawful possession and use of a firearm in the work environment could have saved the life or prevented serious injury to the employee or others that the company was on notice that it would be held liable because of the company policy.

If I was ever in a position where the job just didn't matter that much I might try that as a means to change company policy. But in most situations I figure it would just result in the company putting you at the top of the list to get rid of should there be a real or imagined downturn in business.

In my list of BHAGs with the PNNL lawsuit is to make it such that having a "no guns" policy is direct evidence of an anti-gun bias. Hence if a gun owner gets fired the no guns policy lends credence to the claim it was his gun ownership that was the real reason. Just as separate bathrooms or drinking fountains for blacks would be evidence that a company had a bias against non-whites. We need to make the cost of anti-gun bigotry as high as we can and I am going to do my best to enable others to inflict a cost on other bigots.

Yesterday I was chatting with friend Sean, discussing this situation in regards to PNNL. I told him PNNL is probably trying to find the source of the leak. Sean, almost never at a loss for just the right thing to say said, "I, personally, would lay it all at the feet of Wen Ho Lee."

I would like to remind my PNNL visitors that there are laws against retaliation against whistle blowers and that I will gladly discuss my sources with law enforcement officials investigating the crimes of PNNL employees. But PNNL efforts to use me to retaliate against people who cooperate with me and/or law enforcement will be vigorously opposed.

I received a couple more hits from PNNL yesterday. Both were direct hits on Funny Stuff. This was the post where I told about two different people who just recently gave me exceedingly useful information about PNNL. Not that I didn't already have direct evidence of felonies by PNNL people, but this was further evidence of their crimes and other crimes as yet unreported. One has to wonder how the DOE is going to view it when these criminals, most of whom have security clearances, are not reported to law enforcement and dealt with appropriately.

From the nature of the hits it appears they are either typing in the URL directly or clicking on a link in email--whatever.

I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

2007 is getting off to a great start:

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.181.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Richland Lat/Long  :  46.3282, -119.3222 (Map) Distance  :  114 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1152 x 864 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 9 2007 9:50:25 am
Last Page View		Jan 9 2007 9:50:25 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm.../08/Funny Stuff.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm.../08/Funny Stuff.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 9 2007 9:50:25 am
Visit Number		125,716

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.96.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Kennewick Lat/Long  :  46.2131, -119.1682 (Map) Distance  :  109 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1280 x 960 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 9 2007 1:44:37 pm
Last Page View		Jan 9 2007 1:44:37 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm.../08/Funny Stuff.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm.../08/Funny Stuff.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 9 2007 1:44:37 pm
Visit Number		125,778

I had contact with a couple people yesterday about certain "legal problems" Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has. The first person told me they had in their possession a message that, in part, said, "I hope they don't subpoena this."

The other person told me:

I can definitely atest to a pattern of illegal and unethical activities at the lab. It's my firm belief that their practices are also detrimental to national security.

There are so many illegal things happening, I'm not sure where to start.

...

I do think it is my obligation as a citizen to see justice prevail.

This is so funny to me. It's going to be fun fighting this battle. I'm reminded of a Winston Churchill quote:

I like a man who grins when he fights.

I wonder if the PNNL felons and their lawyers will like me as I grin during this fight.

Several months ago Say Uncle (I think it was him, if it was someone else and I got them mixed up my apologies for not giving the right person credit) suggested I see how the Southern Law Poverty Center was able to take private action against people that deprived others of their rights without going through Federal prosecutors. In my case against PNNL even though I have very strong evidence some people committed felonies against me the prosecutors aren't interested in even investigating the case. Say Uncle pointed out that in what appears on the surface to be an analogous situation the SLPC took the bigots to court and got large settlements. Great point! How did they do that? Well, I found out. They utilized a different law. I had been looking at 18 USC § 241. SLPC used 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) which says:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws; or for the purpose of preventing or hindering the constituted authorities of any State or Territory from giving or securing to all persons within such State or Territory the equal protection of the laws; or if two or more persons conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President, or as a Member of Congress of the United States; or to injure any citizen in person or property on account of such support or advocacy; in any case of conspiracy set forth in this section, if one or more persons engaged therein do, or cause to be done, any act in furtherance of the object of such conspiracy, whereby another is injured in his person or property, or deprived of having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States, the party so injured or deprived may have an action for the recovery of damages occasioned by such injury or deprivation, against any one or more of the conspirators.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) came about because of Hanford--the nuclear facility where we got the nuclear components for the worlds first atomic bombs. Those scientists and engineers at Hanford were gradually put to work on other projects. The scope increased to where today there is virtually no scientific or engineering task that is off limits for the people there. Although when I was there I worked, literally, a stone's throw from the Hanford reservation I wasn't part of Hanford. The name Hanford still persists in the vocabulary of the people as a synonym for more that what is, technically, not Hanford.

With that as background I now present you with Hanford News where the top story of today (and probably for several days but I just noticed it today) is the story of my lawsuit against Battelle who has the contract to manage the laboratory.

What is just as interesting to me is how I happen to run across the story. It was all because someone at another national laboratory, Los Alamos, happen to come visiting:

Domain Name		lanl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		128.165.116.# (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
ISP		Los Alamos National Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  New Mexico City  :  Los Alamos Lat/Long  :  35.8639, -106.2953 (Map) Distance  :  931 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Macintosh MacOSX
Browser		Firefox 2.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1680 x 1050 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 3 2007 2:12:13 pm
Last Page View		Jan 3 2007 2:12:13 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.pnnl.info/
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Their Attention.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Their Attention.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-7:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 3 2007 3:12:13 pm
Visit Number		124,413

They came from my PNNL.INFO site. That's interesting! So I looked at the log files form that site and I watched, in real time, as five different people (well, five different computers anyway) from Los Alamos poked around. They found my site via a Google search (http://www.google.com/search?q=pnnl+wrongful+termination ). I did the same search and found the Hanford New story. One person did the search and the other four soon started hitting my site directly and some of them eventually visited my blog. How interesting.

I was chatting on line with my friend Sean (Sean, I told you 10 different IP addresses but there was a bug in the script that I used to count them) as I watched in real time as one person looked at my performance reviews at PNNL. Sean suggested, "Maybe he's a hiring manager." What a kick! I took Sean out to dinner after that.

What bugs me though is that the web browsing security at Los Alamos is no better than at PNNL. I was able to determine the exact computer name of each of the participants in their visit to my website. I can't do that with visits from any other company that I notice visiting me. Microsoft, for example, has proxies in place that prevent that. Even visits from private homes, such as from my family in Moscow, Idaho are impossible to resolve to a specific computer name. What is it with these, supposedly, high security facilities that they have such gaping holes in their security?

Beating Lyle to the punch line: They are government facilities. Do you expect competence?

Someone from PNNL came visiting again a few minutes ago. But not for the usual reason. Check out the "Search Words":

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.105.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Richland Lat/Long  :  46.3282, -119.3222 (Map) Distance  :  114 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1920 x 1200 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 2 2007 6:11:03 pm
Last Page View		Jan 2 2007 6:11:03 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co...shington&btnG=Search
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		kennewick brazilian wax washington
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 2 2007 6:11:03 pm
Visit Number		124,192

Apparently Google gave them a hit on this post of mine.

This is so funny. Their computer security is so lax it's pathetic. If I still had someone, anyone, there that was willing to talk to me without fear of getting fired I could find out whose computer (I already know the computer name) it was that being used to look for a Brazilian wax job in Kennewick (just to the south across the river from Richland). I'll bet she (or he) would be embarrassed to have that info posted on the Internet. If it were one of the felons at the lab I'd post the computer name. But almost for certain it's not.

The Washington State Constitution provides that individual citizens of the state have the right to bear arms to defend themselves or the state, Article I, § 24.

The Washington State Constitution further establishes that citizens have the right to freedom of speech, Article I, § 5.

The Washington State Supreme Court has recognized the tort of wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. Gardner v. Loomis Armoured, Inc., 128 Wn.2d 931 (1996); Roberts v. Dudley. 140 Wn.2d 58 (2000).

The Washington State Constitution is a primary source to determine the public policy of the state of Washington. Roberts v. Dudley, Justices Alexander and Talmadge, concurring separately.

In advocating for the responsible use of firearms, Plaintiff engaged in conduct protected by both Article I, §24 and § 5 and in furtherance of the public good.

Upon information and belief, Plaintiff was terminated for exercising his rights guaranteed to him by the Washington State Constitution, in violation of the public policy of the State of Washington.

Matthew Bean
in Joe Huffman vs. Battelle Memorial Institute
Filed October 30, 2006
Benton County Superior Court
[I would like to say "Hi" to all the people from PNNL that have been visiting my blog and my PNNL.info website recently. Nice to have you stop by. I'm sure I'll be talking to some of you in person and while you are under oath sometime in the future. Have a nice day--while you still can. To my friends still there and scared about being called to testify--I think I can avoid that in almost all cases. In one case I might have to have one person testify about something embarrassing (to them) but I'll do my best to avoid it and then make it as bearable as possible if it's a necessity. To my enemies in this encounter, wherever you are, I have a BHAG post coming up that addresses my plans for you in greater detail.--Joe]

Well... sort of. There's only one outlet that actually ran it that I know of. I like their headline: Fired PNNL worker claims gun discrimination in lawsuit.

I just wish they had linked to my website that proves the case rather than just saying I "say" or "claim" something happened.

Oh well. It's not the public that matters that much. It's the judge and jury. And I got a 600% increase in traffic on that website from the newspaper story anyway.

Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
[This has also been attributed to Harold R. McAlindon. I am unable to find any dates for the life of McAlindon and I've never heard of him before today so I'm inclined to believe Emerson was probably first. Regardless, this is my plan in the New Year for dealing with the anti-gun bigots. There is no path in the legal world where I'm headed with PNNL. I hope to leave a trail of (figuratively) bloody bodies that others will follow in our fight to reclaim our freedom against the anti-gun bigots.--Joe]

I was given a book by a friend recently. Very interesting and entirely consistent with what I have been hearing from my lawyers. The book is You Could Be Fired for Reading This Book: Protect Your Employment Rights. I have a little bit of a problem with the phrase "Employment Rights". You don't have a "right" to employment. But other than that it's a good book. Perhaps I'm nitpicking but in my case certain individuals committed a felony against me in the workplace. The employer could have investigated when they became aware of it (that email went to everyone on this list) and corrected the problem and reported the felony to Federal prosecutors. They did not. That made them a part of the crime.

Lots of things in the book were surprising to me and others I have mentioned them too. Let's take some examples (not from the book but similar):

1. Suppose one of your co-workers gets upset because you correctly predicted that their approach to a problem would fail. And to make things worse with 1/3 of the budget gone you get the project turned over to you to "go ahead and do it your way." You then succeed and get high praise from the customer. This co-worker then tells the boss that you have been barking at the full moon and molesting small animals with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction. Your boss confronts you, you deny it, and without attempting to verify the story fires you and says it's for dishonesty--making it difficult for you to get another job.
2. Suppose you have personal website praising the wonderfulness of the Partridge Family T.V. show. You boss has a personal website praising the wonderfulness of the Brady Bunch T.V. show and thinks the Partridge Family is crap. He fires you and even tells you and your co-workers why he did it.
3. Suppose your boss is married and is having a sexual affair with one of her other direct reports (not her spouse) and he is also married. This subordinate apparently likes playing the field and starts making some advances toward you. You, not knowing of the affair, mention it to your boss. Your boss makes up a reason and fires you even though her having the affair with a direct report is grounds for termination of the boss.
4. Suppose your boss put in your performance goals for the next year that you must publish five papers in public research journals and contribute to one or more conferences in person. If you don't succeed you will suffer the consequences in your next performance review. Suppose he didn't bother to get your goals written up and delivered to you until nearly half way through the year. You question how this is going to be possible because all your current research has at least some aspect that is classified and not allowed in public journals. New projects that might be entirely unclassified won't be available until next year. Not to mention that the projects you are involved in were budgeted without money allocated for publication of papers or attending conferences and there is very little time to write the research papers and get them published. He assures you that the unclassified parts are acceptable to put in the research papers and you should "give it your best effort" in spite of the time and money constraints. You give a few hints about coming papers on your personal blog. Your boss reads your blog and fires you for not keeping company information private and possibly violating national security.

Now, take a guess and tell me which of the above you think are grounds for a wrongful termination lawsuit in the United States.

The answer in nearly all states, and particularly in Washington state, is none of the above.

Wrongful termination lawsuits are very hard to even get into court. There are a very limited number of things (for example sexual, racial, age, or religious discrimination) that will get you any traction at all. And before you can even get the case into court you have to have some evidence or testimony, other than your own, to make the case it was one of "those things". You can't make your co-workers (who know they would be fired if they did) testify under oath until much later in the legal proceedings. You can't demand internal documents that might collaborate your side of things until much later either. You have to have the evidence with you the last time you went out the door--which in itself could be considered valid grounds for termination if they found it out and used that as the basis for termination. That could ruin your chances of winning in court should you get so far as to have a jury hear the case.

And even just bringing a case against a former employer can make you unemployable. Future employers will be extra cautious about hiring "a troublemaker". In short wrongful termination cases are tough and risky. I'm doing it anyway. I have the evidence to get us into courts. My lawyer and I are nearly certain we can prove the facts. We just have to prove the law supports us. More on that after PNNL gives us their response.

I've been watching my web logs pretty closely lately and I ran across this today. It's got to be my favorite visit in the past couple of months. Notice the part in RED:

68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:54:36 +0000] "GET /Report.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 22216 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22joseph+Huffman%22+pnnl&btnG=Search" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:54:36 +0000] "GET /_themes/pistol/sticharcoaltrans.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 10962 "http://www.pnnl.info/Report.htm" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:54:36 +0000] "GET /_themes/pistol/textbull.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 944 "http://www.pnnl.info/Report.htm" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:54:36 +0000] "GET /_themes/pistol/horizontal.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1110 "http://www.pnnl.info/Report.htm" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:54:37 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 287 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:55:29 +0000] "GET /joeyouradumbass.html HTTP/1.1" 404 296 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:55:29 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 287 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:55:51 +0000] "GET /joe_your_a_dumb_ass.html HTTP/1.1" 404 300 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:55:51 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 287 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:56:17 +0000] "GET /Reinforcements.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 31153 "http://www.pnnl.info/Report.htm" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:56:17 +0000] "GET /images/JoeComputer.JPG HTTP/1.1" 200 29391 "http://www.pnnl.info/Reinforcements.htm" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
68.113.0.103 - - [31/Dec/2006:02:56:17 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 287 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"

The part is red is a request for a file by the name of "joe_your_a_dumb_ass.html" which doesn't exist. It apparently was just a message for me. Further information on this person is available from http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation which yields Richland, WA. This is the home of PNNL and some of the bigots that committed the felony against me. Further information about this person is probably available from their ISP. Which nslookup shows as: 68-113-0-103.dhcp.knwk.wa.charter.com or Charter.com in Kennewick.

Probably the most telling is they are using a Macintosh computer. That narrows it down a bunch. I don't know for certain who it is, so let just call him or her "John".

John apparently has more than just a casual interest in my website. He spent the next forty three minutes reading my research notes and a bunch of other stuff. Then came back an hour and forty three minutes later to take a second look at the complaint we filed in court.

John, you probably had something to do with this or you wouldn't be so interested in my website and calling me names. As for being a dumb ass, I would like to suggest that you committing a felony was a lot more dumb than me making the details of the crime public. Time will tell who is the dumber of the two of us but it appears to me you have such a big start in the stupid department it will be difficult for me to even come close. Have a happy New Year John--while you have a chance. It's going to be tough once you start answering questions under oath. And another thing John, I know I have my share of spelling errors and typos but you should have said "you're" instead of "your".

Christmas 2006 for Joe

Notice the toothbrush in the lower left corner from Barb? That is to counteract all the candy and jam on the entire left side of the picture from all her other relatives.

James got me me the blanket underneath everything that supposedly says "blanket" in binary ASCII but I haven't verified it yet. James also got me Obsession--The Movie and America: Freedom to Facism

I'm looking forward to testing out the Roomba from Barb. It's charging now.

I got lots of new music from Barb to keep me entertained on my trips to and from Seattle. Although I'll probably have just as much fun fantasizing about my future interactions with the felony bigots at PNNL on my long drives. The lawsuit being served is probably my favorite gift--even though I paid for it myself.

I've been told the new Battlestar Galactica series I got from Barb is better than the original one. James and I will be watching that in the evenings in Seattle just as soon as we finish off the Enterprise series.

I got all six of the flashlights from our daughter Kim and her fiancée Caleb. The LED one with the crank generator in the top right corner of the picture gets my vote for the best one.

The Boris Vallejo calendar was no surprise but then Barb has been getting one of those every year for nearly thirty years now. No reason to stop anytime soon.

The mug and the plate were hand glazed by Sara and Xenia respectively. That's an image of Enterprise on a star background on the mug.

Xenia has some pictures of the other pottery stuff she did for Christmas including a better picture of the Boomershoot plate.

One of the rumors I have heard out of PNNL was that I had modified one or more of my sites to treat visitors from the lab differently and put "malware" on the labs network. This claim is totally false and I sometimes wondered if anyone actually thought that. Perhaps someone did because I found this. It's a report on my PNNL.INFO website in regards to spam, adware, and spyware. A number of the sites for which I am the webmaster and have some relationship to the PNNL conflict are shown to have been tested by McAfee SiteAdvisor. Others for which I am the webmaster have not been tested. I'm wondering if the bigots were trying to verify their claims by submitting my sites for analysis. If so, they failed. McAfee loves me.

It's a little bit of a stretch but it seems to me this is another bit of evidence the bigots were spreading falsehoods about me.

PNNL has been visiting my blog again:

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.121.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Richland Lat/Long  :  46.3282, -119.3222 (Map) Distance  :  114 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1600 x 1200 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Dec 29 2006 10:35:54 am
Last Page View		Dec 29 2006 10:44:34 am
Visit Length		8 minutes 40 seconds
Page Views		2
Referring URL		http://72.14.253.104...n&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
Search Engine		72.14.253.104
Search Words		cache:fbt0ho8yu5oj:www.pnnl.info/ pnnl.info
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Their Attention.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...16-8fef957f2701.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Dec 29 2006 10:35:54 am
Visit Number		123,275

About an hour ago I got a call from John Trumbo of the Tri City Herald. He said he had just talked to Battelle about my lawsuit (Word .DOC file). Battelle said they hadn't been served yet (not surprising) and would only say that I had worked for them between "such and such dates" and that I had worked on Internet security projects. He wanted to confirm with me, as stated in the complaint that I knew of nothing I had done wrong except for the allowing of my wife and daughter to use the company laptop to access the Internet and that it was against company policy. I confirmed that was the case. He stated it was hard to imagine anyone would try to build a case for termination based on their advocation of Second Amendment rights. I agreed but assured him I am certain that is the case. He said, "It will go out tomorrow." And "Onward and upward I guess."

We'll see how my luck (very good for the last several years) with reporters and Second Amendment issues holds up under the pressure of an adversary like Battelle.

Update: It's out. I can't complain. I'm thrilled to confirm Battelle still claims the termination was "for violating PNNL policies (involving) inappropriate and unauthorized use of PNNL computers." That would be the hosting of a personal website on a company computer as they told the Department of Energy which is totally false. And/or it could be the use of the company laptop by my wife and daughter a few times which is true but is not going to be believable as cause for termination to any jury. They are going to have a "fun time" making that case. More on the quandary they are in some other post.

Being an atheist I don't usually take much pleasure in Christmas. But this year is something very special. Last year was very tough for us after being fired from PNNL. However this year is much better. I got a good job last April. The lawsuit against PNNL and my former supervisor, Bryan McMillan, was filled October 30th. And then just in time for Christmas I received word yesterday that McMillan and his wife Torrie (community property state, in order to get full access to his assets we needed to fill against his wife too) got served with the papers.

Merry Christmas Bryan!

Sorry Torrie, but it's not my fault you married someone of such low character that he committed a felony. I'm pretty sure there will be some more unpleasant surprises for you about his character in the coming years as the lawsuit details come out.

To the people at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous that I asked not to mention the details I talked about, you are now free to blog as much as you want.

I received an email asking my opinion about this article. The important part is the following:

The death of Alexander Litvinenko by radiological poisoning points to the possibility that the former Soviet spy may have been involved with Islamic terrorists in the preparation of tactical nuclear weapons for use in the jihad against the United States and its NATO allies.

Litvenenko, a former KGB agent, died in London on November 23 after ingesting a microscopic amount of polonium-210.

...

Litvinenko, who was born an orthodox Christian, was a convert to Islam with close ties to the Chechen rebels. His last words consisted of his desire to be buried “according to Muslim tradition.”

...

The neutron source or “triggers” of the suitcase nukes are composed of beryllium-9 and polonium-210. When these two elements are combined, the alpha particle is absorbed by the nucleus of the beryllium causing it to decay by emitting a neutron. Such “triggers” were a feature of early nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles.

Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, necessitating the replacement of the triggers every six months. For this reason, the suitcase nukes are far from maintenance-free. In addition, the nuclear core of these devices emit a temperature in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit - - further exposing the weapons to oxidation and rust. Small wonder that al Qaeda operatives including Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who are spearheading “the American Hiroshima” have received extensive training in nuclear technology.

I'm a little annoyed at the article. The physics are non-sensical. Things don't "emit a temperature". They can emit radiation of various types which could include infra-red energy which could be called "heat". They might generate enough heat to maintain a temperature of 100 degrees F while stored at room temperature. And a temperature of 100F does not necessitate "further exposure to oxidation and rust". That makes me a little bit more skeptical than I normally would be.

I haven't read much more than the headlines in the spy poisoning case so I really can address the question and comment accompanying the link:

Sounds a little far fetched. Have you heard anything similar? If it is actually true, it would mean there are mushroom clouds planned for sometime in the next six months. The biggest Christian holiday is Christmas........

Something to keep in mind this holiday season.

I'm going to make sure I know where my Geiger counter is and that it's working. Lots of other safety gear to check up on as well. There's not much else I can do. We can all "thank" the bigoted felons at PNNL for taking me out of this fight.

Benton County. Case 06-2-02728-8.

More later. Some details need to be taken care of before I say much more.

Dooce is my favorite blog and it's not because her blog became the namesake of what happened to me (fired because of blogging). Most of what I read is gun and freedom related stuff and is often sort of draining. I don't read much of the lighter stuff and Heather gives me a real boost. I really, really like Heather's humor. Today she shared what is probably my favorite post yet. She and her family were interviewed for the Salt Lake Tribune about her blog and her family life:

The story ran this past Saturday, and although Matt had said it was going to be a big story, I wasn’t prepared to walk out to the driveway that morning and find my face staring back up at me from the pavement. The story was huge, the biggest thing on the front page, and inside it covered over a page and a half. I ran back inside, threw open the paper on the bed, and Jon and I stared down at these words in the second paragraph:

He runs the washcloth between her shoulder blades and then quickly circles around to rub her breasts.

OH.

MY.

GOD.

Hello, Mormons! How about some breasts with your morning prayers?

Matt was paraphrasing this entry I had written during the few days we had talked to him, and you might notice that not once did I ever use the term breasts in reference to my own. And this is the only complaint I have about the article which as a whole is the fairest, most level-headed piece of journalism ever written about me — he didn’t try to push an opinion about whether I was a self-absorbed egotist or an insignificant mommyblogger or an incredibly juvenile nitwit, although you only have to read one sentence of this website and you’d be convinced of all three.

My complaint is that when you take some of the things I write out of context they make me sound as if I am perpetually running up and down the street in the nude waving my tattooed middle finger at innocent old ladies who are cross-stitching passages of scripture as they sit in their wheelchairs on the porch. And that is so not true. I only do that on the weekends.

Her use of exaggeration sometimes makes me want to know a little more of the real side of her family. The article and this blog posting (Xenia, please read if you haven't already) by the photographer helped satisfy that urge.

Heather, thank you for sharing.

From my after dinner talk at the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous:

There are lots of places you can't exercise your right to keep and bear arms. Depending on the particular jurisdiction you can't carry your defensive tools, even if you have permit for most public places:

• On buses
• In parks
• In post offices
• Near schools
• In hospitals
• In the restaurant
• On the job
• In churches

In New Jersey a judge said, "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril."

In Utah AOL employees were fired for transferring guns from one car to another in the parking lot before going to the range. They sued and lost their case.

In Oklahoma Weyerhaeuser brought "drug sniffing" dogs into the parking lot on the first day of hunting season. The dogs were also trained to alert on guns. Employees who refused to allow searches of their vehicles after a dog alerted on them were told they would be fired on the spot. The searches that resulted in guns also resulted in people getting fired. They sued and lost their case.

A friend of mine started having "weird things" happen to her at work. In essence she was demoted and previous work from home accommodations were terminated. Things were being made very difficult for her and she didn't understand why. Independently I noticed that I was getting hits on my web sites from Google searches for her name. The visits were from people at her company. They spent a lot of time on my websites looking at her gun owner rights activities and I told her about my discovery. Ahhh haaa!!! So that is what is going on. She left the company on terms of her own choosing.

After taking a group of people to the range, where a good time was had by all, another friend was accused by some gun fearing woman of intimidating her in the hallway. My friends contract was terminated early without ever being asked his side of the story. The women later bragged about getting rid of the gun nut and was fired for dishonesty.

Chris at Anarchangel, at the next table over, has another egregious example of being fired from a job for exercising his right to keep and bear arms.

As many of you know I was fired from my job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I couldn't understand why until I looked at my log files for my websites. Someone had a problem with my being a civil rights advocate.

If I know that many people personally affected then how widespread is the problem?

A former New York prosecutor told me if you shoot someone you must prove, and rightly so, that it was self-defense. Not that the prosecutor had to prove it wasn't self defense. No part of the Bill of Rights applies if you are a gun owner.

What I want you to do now is replace "gun owner" in all those cases with 'black'. What do you have?

We are gun niggers.

They want us "in our place" and they want to exterminate us. Not our physical bodies but our culture--our "gun culture".

And what do we do? Almost all of the time when we fight we only fight to maintain our position. We fight to keep from getting another restriction, another whipping. Sometimes don't lose those fights and don't get whipped. And when we lose "The Master" tells us if we are good we won't have to get whipped again. We bow our heads and tell him how good we are going to be. The "The Master" won't ever have to worry about us again. We are going to be good from now on. We don't want to be whipped again.

We seldom win. We seldom make real progress. We occasionally defeat an anti-gun politician at the polls but his replacement isn't able or willing to undo the damage done by his or her predecessor. We only slow the cancer some. We aren't defeating it.

What we need to do is to turn the tables. But how do we do that? It's in the state of mind.

We have been downtrodden for so long we are almost unable to think straight. These people are bigots. They may think they are the elite, the wise, the educated, and the deserving of power, but they are simple, ignorant bigots. The facts don't matter to them. I've literally had people tell me, "Statistics don't mean anything to me. You can prove anything with statistics." And, "I don't believe your facts." They don't have facts of their own. They only have their bigoted beliefs. When my Just One Question got put on the Democratic Underground the best they could some up with for a response was, "What color is orange? True or false?"

We must put these people in their proper place. The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, and all their associated organizations are the 21st Century equivalents of the KKK. And the majority of the public needs to know that. There were members of the KKK that were tried and sent to jail decades after their crimes because of the change in public opinion in the intervening years. Keep that as our final goal as you suffer through the "whippings" we take near every day. I know you cringe as you remove your gun and leave it behind when you go to work, or as you walk defenseless through the nearly empty parking garage to the hospital to visit a friend. We may be able to hold these people that impose these degradations and "whippings" upon us accountable years from now just as the KKK crimes were punished years after the crimes occurred.

I'll bet the first question that comes to mind is, "Even if it were possible to make that much progress, wouldn't that be Ex Post Facto that you complained about being applied to us?" No. The laws already exists. It just isn't enforced because we are gun niggers. 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242 is what I want them doing time for violating. I want to see mayors Daley and Bloomberg, senators Schumer and Feinstein handcuffed and dragged off to jail. I want to see major newspapers and news networks detailing their crimes which resulted in the deaths of thousands and rapes of tens of thousands because of all the victims they disarmed. I want to see them pay restitution and spend the rest of their lives behinds bars for their crimes against humanity. I want to see company diversity training include a section on being sensitive to the rights of gun owners. I want to see making a disparaging remark about gun owners in the workplace be cause for disciplinary action.

You can help do this. It's going to be much easier than some of the other battles we have fought because we don't need new laws. We just need existing law enforced.

When you post on a gun rights issues, when you write your letter to the editor, your congressman, or your senator you have to have the proper state of mind. Never forget that the anti-gun bigots are the KKK of the 21st Century. Look for opportunities to make that point. Make belonging to the Brady Campaign the equivalent of a membership in the KKK because it's true.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a government laboratory managed by Battelle for the Department Of Energy.

I just (as in about seven minutes ago) got a hit from the DOE on my PNNL site. It turns out that their search terms on Google resulted in my site being listed number 1.

Cool.

Jeff reports on new modification to Firefox but it comes out too late to help the felons at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They got caught because of their sloppy browsing habits.

Long before they committed their crimes I tried to tell them they had a security leak in their browsing. But in a supreme irony they didn't listen and when they committed their crime they left behind more than enough information for me to catch them.

I'll have more news on this front soon.

I arrived at 8:00 this morning and didn't leave until 22:00 except for about 10 minutes to get a slice of pizza from the cafeteria. The brought supper to us which we ate in a conference room. It was a long tiring day but I got the last of my stuff checked in before Barb and I leave on vacation next week. This gives me two days to deal with whatever might blow up when my stuff starts getting executed in the daily build.

As I left work were still dozens of cars in the parking garage which reminded me of one time I had commented about how different it was at PNNL. I had made some causal remark about how my car would be nearly the only one in the parking lot when I left at 19:00 and how different this was than at Microsoft. I blogged about this once too. Some of my PNNL co-workers got indignant about that comment. My comment was accurate. It must have been there was some guilt on their conscience.

On my website I mention the lax security at PNNL and how it can be used by people hostile to the U.S. No one seemed to care.

Here is another example of the type of information leakage that is happening.

Remember the old joke?

A republican is a democrat who has been mugged.

A democrat is a republican who has been arrested.

After my experience with PNNL I lost my faith in the system. Even with my current job being apparently secure I nearly constantly worry that someone may take a disliking to me because of my hobbies, skin color or some other non job issue and cause me harm. I couldn't have imagined being in this constant state of fear prior to my own experience. Now I can.

This came up because Benjamin is on the verge of his own conversion.

There has been some interesting research on the correlation between lawyers and gun owner rights. Here is the conclusion:

Lawyers contribute primarily to candidates who vote against gun rights. Most of this money ends up in the pockets of Democrats, who exhibit a heavy bias against gun rights. Interestingly enough, the Democrat party is the one that claims to represent the little guy, while a special interest group comprised of economically-elite professionals encourages Democrats to pass more laws limiting the right of self-defense for people who cannot afford private security guards. It’s time for those who believe in traditional Democrat values to take a closer look at their party.

My own research on a closely related topic supports this conclusion. I'll post the details on my research at a later date.

Does this seem at all familiar, Joe?

Professor Thomas Klocek a Roman Catholic…was dismissed by DePaul University for allegedly offending Muslim students when discussing Christian interests in Israel, disputing that Israeli treatment of Palestinians was akin to the Nazi treatment of the Jews and then terminating the discussion when it appeared that the students were more interested in Israel-bashing than discussing the issues.

It is our understanding that Prof. Klocek alleges:

1) He was never allowed to meet with his accusers.

2) He was never presented with a written list of the complaints or charges against him.

3) He was suspended by the Dean of the School for New Learning in clear violation of the University's own stated Faculty Handbook procedures.

4) He was never given a hearing.

5) A vote by the DePaul Faculty Council affirmed that the same rules that apply for a formal academic hearing apply to all professors, full-time and adjuncts alike.

Read more here http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/display_petitions.cgi?ID=3

How interesting! Just yesterday I was just explaining to a lawyer how information is leaked in your search terms when you search the web. One of my blog visitors from the General Services Administration did a search for "nuke medina".

It probably was just some individual with free time on their hands as opposed to true government interest. But it's amusing all the same:

Domain Name		gsa.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		159.142.227.# (GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION)
ISP		GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.8933, -77.0146 (Map) Distance  :  2,072 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft Win2000
Browser		Mozilla 1.6 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jul 26 2006 12:44:00 pm
Last Page View		Jul 26 2006 12:44:00 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://search.yahoo....earch&ei=UTF-8&x=wrt
Search Engine		search.yahoo.com
Search Words		nuke medina
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Them Into Glass.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Them Into Glass.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Jul 26 2006 3:44:00 pm
Visit Number		91,300

Ry has put up a video documenting some people with their first experience. They seem to like it. I know I do. It's safe for work in all but the most bigoted of work environments.

Hey PNNL felons!

Remember the email you sent to the Department of Energy?  The one where you said I used government computers for hosting personal websites?  You might want to read this.  Plus I know another lie too--a much bigger and more blatant lie by one of your felonious coworkers.  I'm just not telling you the details of what I know about it right now.

The felons at PNNL didn't allow me to see the evidence against me, confront my accusers, or present a defense of any sort but I didn't know such things existed in criminal courts of law of modern countries.  So this, from Ireland, really surprised me:

His lawyers had sought to have his conviction quashed after the Supreme Court last week overturned a 1935 law that made it an indefensible crime for any man to have sex with a girl under the age of 15.

I can see the point but one should always be allowed to defend themselves.  They could have been framed for example.  Their DNA could have been planted by someone else, the pictures could have been edited, whatever evidence is used should be subject to question.

Something like this even happens in the U.S. under certain circumstances.  The freedoms we take for granted are not as secure as you might think.

I haven't update the general public on the battle with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in a long time.  I needed to keep things quiet for a while.  I can give out a few hints now.

I grew up on a farm and we had a few head of cattle at various times.  And sometimes I helped my nearby uncles with there many head of cattle.  When you are herding them often they don't want to go where you want them to go.  You could be herding them to the corral for branding, castration, and slaughter.  Or you could just be herding them to greener pastures.  Most of the time they don't know what your intentions are but sometimes you are pretty sure they know it isn't greener pastures because they really resist going where you want them too.  In these cases you have to give them some "encouragement" in the form of a dog nipping at their heels, a switch, or even just yelling at them.  It's rare that anything more than this is necessary.  It's pretty amazing when you think about it.  You can yell at them and they will willingly walk into the corral where they have no escape from your branding iron and your knife.  They simply can't think that far ahead.  The short term discomfort of dealing with a dog nipping at their heels or the sting of a switch on their rump is sufficient to persuade them to commit to their own undoing.

It was just over 11 months ago that I began the journey that I knew then would last years.  I didn't really know how or if I would reach my desired destination and to a certain extent I still don't.  What I do know is that they just stepped into my corral.  It two weeks ago, just before Boomershoot, that I picked up the first of the letters from one of my attorneys from my P.O. Box.  I picked up the second one last Sunday.  And then yesterday I discovered some information that nearly made me go dancing in the street (this is from someone that despises most dancing).  If you were to read the letters you would think there was no good news about my quest for justice in those letters but you would be wrong in thinking that.  Just as you would be wrong if you thought the cow I just tried hit with my switch jumped and ran away, toward the corral, without my switch touching her escaped my intentions.  Yes, using the metaphor, repeatedly switching the felons at PNNL would bring a certain amount of pleasure.  But that's not the real goal--I want them branded, castrated, and slaughtered.  They might still break out of the corral, but their lawyers, dancing out of the reach of my switch, put them within reach of my branding iron and knife.  It will be different lawyers of theirs that will have to deal with my branding iron and knife and that will curse the lawyers just doing their job who only knew about the sharp teeth of the snapping dog and the sting of my switch.  The new lawyers didn't get involved until the corral gate was shut behind them.

In an abstract sort of way I feel sorry for someone that could have gotten away if they only had played their game a little differently. If only they could have seen far enough ahead and had communicated better with others.  If only they had known I wasn't their ordinary adversary and they hadn't been so careless in their felonious assault against me they almost for certain would have gotten away with it.

It may be that I have a mild form of Aspergers Syndrome and this probably contributed to my downfall at PNNL but it also gives me the incredible focus, persistence, and intensity they, almost for certain, have never dealt with before.  This isn't something abstract for me and I don't feel genuine pity about them not getting away with their crimes.  It's not only very personal but it has tremendous potential to affect the entire gun rights movement.  This isn't just about compensation for the nearly catastrophic impact on my life and my family.  If I play my game correctly it could easily affect every gun owner in the state of Washington and possibly every gun owner in the U.S.  Thinking they were striking a blow against one gun owner, political activist, and N.R.A. firearms instructor they may have given us an opportunity to make unimaginable gains.

There are still years of work ahead of me in this roundup but I can now start heating my branding iron and sharping my knife.  In my minds eye I can now see the smoke and steam boiling off my branding iron as it sears their flesh, I can see their bloody testicles in my bucket, and I can see their hides drying on the wall of the barn.  All just as I did so many years ago when helping my uncles with their cattle.

I'm sleeping better than I have in a long time.

After I put up the site about Pacific Northwest National Laboratories they blocked access of their employees to my websites.  Apparently this has changed:

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.177.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Richland Lat/Long  :  46.282, -119.4917 (Map)
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1280 x 1024 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Apr 17 2006 7:58:56 am
Last Page View		Apr 17 2006 7:58:56 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co...zilla:en-US:official
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		pnnl email
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...w,category,PNNL.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...w,category,PNNL.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Apr 17 2006 10:58:56 am
Visit Number		73,506

Now if they would just turn in the evidence to Federal prosecutors for the felony some of their bigoted employees committed against me.

I hope this goes well:

A scholar known for his work on guns and crime filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the best-seller "Freakonomics." John Lott Jr. of Virginia, a former U. of C. visiting professor, alleges that Levitt defamed him in the book by claiming that other scholars had tried and failed to confirm Lott's conclusion that allowing people to carry concealed weapons reduces crime.

...

The lawsuit alleges that Levitt and his publisher, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., made the statements with reckless disregard for whether they were true and that the book damaged Lott's reputation.

I don't know about the details of Lott's lawsuit but in some states there are a lot of exceptions for this sort of thing.  You can knowingly lie about someone, cause them great damage, and be untouchable by a lawsuit.  I was told by a Hindu friend those sort of people will be reincarnated as a lower life form--perhaps as manure eating flies. I confess to having urges to accelerate certain slime-balls toward their destiny.

I got an email from someone that works at the Hanford site for an organization other than Pacific Northwest National Laboratory which has close ties to Hanford as well.  He said Boomershoot.org is blocked from his work.  Interesting....  I must have quite a reputation.  Or else I just flatter myself.  I'm not sure which. 

I know it is blocked from Xenia's school.  I don't know the reason there. 

A friend who works at Cingular told me, "The website was blocked because of relating to Violence..."  I'm insulted by that. 

Although I forget who it was someone told me it was blocked from their work access because of related to criminal activities or some such thing.  Now that I am really insulted about.

I like to think these things are, as I suggest in the FAQ, because some Puritan is afraid that someone, someplace, is having fun.

I got a call from a recruiter for one of the jobs I interviewed for this week.  She said both groups want me.  The company policy is that the two groups won't compete for me.  I have to choose which job I want and then that group will make me an offer.  "Most people would kill to be in your position" she said. 

One of my fellow contractor co-workers is all bubbly and just gushing over the situation vicariously.  She can't figure out why I'm not jumping up and down in excitement.  I'm not entirely sure why I'm not.  It's not really my personality type.  Although there have been events which got me pretty excited when my goals were realized (the audio of one is here the background is here).  And other thing is that I have to make a choice and disappoint someone.  Maybe it's not that big of a deal in the big scheme of things but it's important to me.  I told both groups I wanted the job, which is true, but I have to tell one of them that I want another group more than them.  I'm "rejecting someone".  That's not pleasant for me even though I know "the company" is not the same as a person and holds zero compassion toward individuals in the cases where the situation is reversed.  It's not really rational but it's the way it is.  Barb and I have talked about similar things before.  As we learned again with the bigots at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory we have too often given our employers more loyalty and more of ourselves than they deserve.  I expect this will happen, at least to a certain extent again here.  I'm hoping to stay here until I retire but I had similar plans at PNNL before I found out the depth of their bigotry extended to them being willing to commit felonies against me.  I have friends at this company and it will be easy to settle in and be at ease but I'll try not to give so much of myself that it will not be so incredibly painful if I have to move on for some reason.

Another issue is that I probably don't have the doubts some people do about whether they are "good enough".  I was pretty sure I had what it took.  I just needed a chance where people could overlook my age and my history with PNNL.  I'm climbing back up the ladder and getting in a position to deal with the bigots.  I have the drive, the smarts, and strength of will to deal with almost any obstacle put in my path.  Reaching this goal isn't a surprise to me.

So to sum up my late night ramblings I think the bottom line is that even though I'm not bubbling with happiness I'm content.  I wouldn't kill to be here because I knew wouldn't be necessary for me.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The mere absence of war is not peace.

John F. Kennedy

Patience and perserverence have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

John Quincy Adams
[I just got all caught up on my paperwork dealing with the bigoted felons at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.--Joe]

And that’s the difference between Mr. B and myself. He shakes his head in bafflement, I resume sharpening the M4 bayonet while crooning “Soon, soon, my precioussss...”

Kim du Toit

He's clearly nuts.

Ry Jones
December 27, 2005
[Referring to this guy thinking government regulation could prevent abuse of a mandatory Universal Biometric ID and such a system was inevitable.  See also some of the on-line clashes I have had with him.  He is also my number one suspect as to the person that gave PNNL the 'tip' to look at my blog and websites and if true is probably a conspirator in this felony.  See about half way down on this page for more details.--Joe]

I have a five hour drive to work at the beginning of the week and a five hour drive home at the end of the week.  Five hours of boredom--except my mind has lots of time to dwell on things.  This time I was focused on the bigots at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  In addition to the stress of the excess of adrenalin in my system without cruise control I found myself traveling above the speed limit numerous times and ended up cutting about 20 minutes off the usual drive time.  I wouldn't have mentioned this except after trying to sleep for a couple hours I decided to read a few blogs and immediately found Michelle Malkin has posted on something I can relate to. 

It's another example of where the law doesn't apply to certain people but it does to others.  Currently PNNL is in defiance (or has flat out lied about the existence of certain documents) of several Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests.  And they still employee the people that committed a felony against me--costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income and appears to have destroyed my career.  And that doesn't even consider the adverse impact on national security due to the negative impact of losing my contribution on certain projects.

All the anger generated while driving may not have been entirely wasted--I thought of another way to put some pressure on them.  I have some meetings arranged for talk about more traditional methods in the next few weeks but in the mean time I can start preparing a non-conventional surprise for the felons.

I recently received an email telling me they liked my little detours into security.  I haven't touch security recently for a number of reasons.  Primarily my research in that area has be temporarily thwarted by PNNL defying the Freedom of Information Act.  A FOIA request I made back in June which only required they make a duplicate of some of the files on a DVD and send it to me.  I told them who had possession of the DVD, the project name, and the markings on the DVD.  Very simple.  None of the material I requested was classified and although it was originally considered Official Use Only that restriction had been lifted before I left and the material used on a proposal for a a completely open project which we won a contract for.  They are in defiance of the law and my FOIA attorney is working on the problem but my involvement in security issues gets sidetracked by my anger over PNNL illegal activities.  Unfortunately FOIA is a law that doesn't have any enforcement teeth.  It's against the law from them to do what they are doing (or rather not doing) but there is no penalties for their illegal activity.  Sort of like making it against the law for you to steal but if you get caught nothing happens--you don't have to give back what you stole and you don't get punished for your crime.

Anyway... sidetracked by my anger again...

Alphecca posted this about Bush authorizing eavesdropping on American citizens and wondered why a lot of the people on the libertarian/conservative side of the Blogosphere quiet or indifferent about it.  I haven't read any news reports that indicated anything of real news.  From my readings (try The Puzzle Palace) and a few hints from other sources the NSA has been doing this for years if not decades.  You shouldn't act as if your electronic traffic is anymore private than if you were to have a conversation on a crowded elevator.  Encrypting your traffic might make it as private as a conversation on a city street.  I try to encrypt a fair portion of my email and encourage others to do the same.  Most of my web browsing travels, at least part way, via encrypted channels.  This is not because anything in the email or my browsing would be a problem for me if it were decrypted but because it raises the cost for the people doing the surveillance.  The more people that do that the more likely they are to concentrate their limited resources on the people that are high probability threats to our national security.  I talked about this at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 2000 (do a search for "Huffman" on that page).  If I had the time I would work on some other projects that would further consume resources and release them to the public.  Basically, as others have pointed out, you can't legislate restrictions on the government and expect them to obey the law.  Government entities rarely obey the law (see here, here, here, here, and the first paragraph of this post for example) if it's inconvenient for them to do so.  Remember the famous Henry Kissinger quote?  Of course this is the real reason for the 2nd Amendment--a last ditch resort for prevention of tyranny.  But there are other things we can do to help that are much lower cost to us and exact at least a moderate cost from the agents of tyranny.  Encrypting your electronic traffic is one of those things.  It costs them far, far more computing resources to decrypt it that it does for you to encrypt it.

I spent some time catching up on my security reading and came across this on Bruce Schneier's blog:

According to the three-page document, to preserve the openness that characterizes today's Internet, "consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement." Read the last seven words again.

What the FCC is now saying is that people cannot use encryption technology unless law enforcement has the back-door keys to it.  Of course they have to know encryption is being used before they can stop you from using it or demand you give them the keys to the back-door.  I covered that in my GRPC talk and I already distributed a tool to circumvent them to hundreds of people.  What I haven't done is tell all those hundreds of people about the hidden feature set in the tool--just the ones that paid money for the product.

I should work on some of my other tools.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and I need to pay my share of that price.  When the next tool is up and running I'll talk about it more.  In the mean time check out PGP and Thawte.  The cost to you is low and the cost to "them" is high.

I previously reported PNNL screwed up a corporate American Express account I had at PNNL by not forwarding the bills to me after my wrongful termination.  I received a bill from American Express last month then tried to call AE a couple times and had the call dropped or otherwise wasn't able to get things straightened out.  Honestly, I didn't put much effort into it.  I would get so angry over it that I just wanted to ignore it.  I got another bill on Saturday and opened it up yesterday.  Surprise!  The bill has been paid.  I presume someone at PNNL read my posting (I know some of them do read my blog) and made sure it got taken care of at that end.

Whoever you are, thank you.

In case you hadn't already heard Kim has a new blog up.  In his email he said, "I got sick of anonymity."

The new blog promises to show another side of Kim--a Kim more presentable to corporate America.  I understand the sentiment.  I have had my own problems with that.

I got a call from Xenia yesterday.  She said a big package arrived in the mail from PNNL.  I asked her to open it and tell me about the contents.  It was from Peggy Hevland who said they found some more stuff from my former office that appeared to be personal rather than work related.  It was some paperwork I had filled out related to getting my security clearance.  I didn't have Xenia go through all of it but as near as I could tell it wasn't anything important.  They appear to be just tidying things up as best they can.  Sort of like sweeping up the broken lamp and putting the furniture back in place after they broke into your house and raped you.

Barb had an interesting comment when she heard about it.  I'd repeat it here but I generally don't use that kind of language.

I wonder if they have run out of options on the FOIA and Privacy Act requests they have been defying and are trying to get things in order for the counter attack they know is coming.

Also of interest is that I suspect it's someone from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that downloads all the pages off of my pnnl.info web site every so often.   It's nice to know they are still "thinking about me."  I often think of them too.  That reminds me--I need to sharpen a couple of knives I used when I gutted and skinned my deer.

I sometimes feel sorry for myself when I think of the crimes certain bigoted PNNL employees committed against me and are currently getting away with.  But my troubles are nothing compared to what some of these people have suffered at the hands of like minded bigots.  For example:

In 1993 I accepted a misdemeanor charge of domestic violence (my atty confirmed it wouldn't affect my gun rights) in response to slapping my rebellious teenage son. A single offense, which 3 years later automatically made me a "prohibited person". Now 13 years later I'm being charged with a felony because my son's Ruger 10/22 was found in my home. I'm sorry but regardless of what several circuit courts around the US say, this is expost facto and unconstitutional. We learned that in 6th grade civics class!

I don't have any problem with laws that are made public so a person would have knowledge of the consequences. But to take ones rights away retroactively is just NOT RIGHT! Even today judges do not warn defendants in domestic violence suits that they will lose their 2nd Amendment rights for life if convicted. If I had known that, I would have requested a jury trial and spent a fortune defending myself.

I know of another old timer that paid a $5 fine for domestic violence in 1947 and lost his rights and entire gun collection in 2000 due to this law. He is still happily married to the same woman 58 years later.

Bigotry is never pretty but when it's enforced by the government it's particularly ugly.

I had planned to do the latest rifle postal match today.  Results are due by midnight tonight.  Then I got a call from someone else that is having some "unpleasant" dealings with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  We ended up talking for an hour or more.  This person knew of other cases similar to mine where Battelle (the company that manages PNNL) decided to fire someone and then found the slimmest of pretexts to do so.  Although the root of the problems we are having is very different we both had similar frustrations in getting action to be taken by the appropriate authorities.  In both cases it appears that by the letter of the law there should be people at PNNL facing fines and/or jail but in practical terms the law doesn't apply to them.  We collaborated some and shared some information and brainstormed on different approaches.  It was a useful exercise.

I got a letter from my Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) attorney.  He resubmitted the FOIA request for material which PNNL previously told me doesn't exist.  I know the material exists because I created a lot of the material.  He reworded things a little differently so maybe that will make a difference.  There really needs to be some penalties for the jerks that defy FOIA and the Privacy Act.  As near as I can tell the law says, "You must do this." but there are no consequences if they don't comply.  After all the instances of injustice and illegality in their dealings I'm surprised there haven't been some cases of heavy metal (lead comes to mind) poisoning or something at Battelle and/or PNNL.

After I had dealt with the phone call and a couple of other things that just had to be done today I was faced with doing the rifle match in both the dark and in the rain.  I've done both, but never at the same time.  I decided to pass on the match this time.  I did some rifle shooting in the last month.  I nailed a deer in the spine of the neck at 255 yards last week so I guess that will have to be sufficient for now.  I really shouldn't procrastinate so much on these things.  If I need to shoot something I should just get out there and do it.  I participated in an IPSC match ("combat pistol") yesterday so it's not like I'm completely ignoring getting some trigger time in.  I wasn't shooting all that bad but I wasn't shooting very good either.  I came in 4^th overall out of 14.  If I hadn't had the one miss I would have come in 3^rd.  More practice is needed--after I start work I should have time to hit the indoor ranges in the Seattle area.

I just got a call from American Express.  They claim I am past due on a bill.  When I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory I was (nearly) required to have a "Corporate Account" with AMEX.  The last travel I did for PNNL was in April and there were airplane tickets and a hotel room put on the card.  There was also planned travel for the end of May a few days after they suspended me.  I signed travel reports for both those trips and I thought everything was all settled.  Apparently it wasn't.  Perhaps the hotel charged for a room that wasn't canceled or something.  I don't know.  In any case the jerks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory didn't forward me the statements that came to my former work address.  The account has been turned over to collections. 

For those of you that don't quite understand why I have to pay the bill for a "company card" the way PNNL and AMEX arranged things was for the individual to be responsible for the bill. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory then paid AMEX for the charges which were legitimate company expenses.  Fair enough.  I could take my wife on a company trip, put all the expenses on the card, then pay the portion due to the extra expense of my wife at the end without having to split hotel bills, etc.  It would also put more responsibility on the individual to not abuse the card.  I didn't have a problem with it... until now.

The bottom line is that AMEX now has a valid address for me and will be sending me all the missing statements.  It's my responsibility to pay the bill, try to collect from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and get my credit reports straightened out.  A bad credit report could even affect the job offer I have in hand.  I don't think it would be possible to fully communicate the level of 'annoyance' I have for the jerks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at this moment.

I brought my favorite rifle and pistol with me to the Seattle area where I am now.  They both need to be cleaned.  Cleaning them will make me feel better.  Wish I had brought my chemistry set and had a place to play with it here.  That would help even more.

I updated my web site on the bigotry at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The changes were about the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request I mentioned in this post.  PNNL responded this week saying:

PNNL completed a diligent, thorough search for responsive documents and was unable to find identify or locate any existing records consistent with your request.

As of May of this year those "records" (computer programs actually) did exist.  I created a lot of them.  My co-workers used that code (computer program code) in other projects.  Those computer programs were delivered to numerous customers.  If what they just told me was true then they would have had to rewritten numerous computer programs, tested them, updated all their customers with the new versions, ensured those customers deleted all the old copies, and deleted large portions of their source control archives--all within two months.  Some customers were delivered source code (I did training for one customer on it), those customers would have had to also rewritten their derived works, tested the resultant programs, and deleted their source control archives.   If they were able to do that then which government contract did they charge those efforts to?  I don't believe they did any of that.  I believe PNNL chose to defy FOIA. 

Barb said (paraphrasing), "What did you expect?  They don't care what the law is.  They don't have to follow the rules."  Of course in the practical sense that is true even if technically they do have to follow the law.  I had two different lawyers tell me it looked to them that PNNL employees had committed a felony in the actions they took against me.  Those people, as near as I can determine, still work there.

From the Tri-City Herald: Suit alleges lab, Battelle sabotaged software:

A consultant for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has sued the lab and Battelle Memorial Institute, alleging they sabotaged a software program he was supposed to market, then stole his ideas on how to write a better product to peddle on their own.

[name deleted by request] claims the lab contacted him in 2001 to find potential buyers for PalmFon software.

...

[deleted name] in his 49-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Richland, alleges the software was defective from the start or made nonfunctional later so his company wouldn't be able to sell it.

His lawsuit also claims employees at Battelle Memorial Institute, which runs the lab, realized after 9/11 that they had a hot item that could make millions of dollars for the nonprofit institute without having to go through a middle-man such as [deleted name] and his company, [deleted] Inc.

...

[deleted name] alleges that when the lab couldn't get him to release his rights to the software, they gave him a final product that wouldn't work. He says PNNL then began developing its own version of a parallel program that would compete with what he was trying to deliver.

I have no inside knowledge of the validity of the claims.  I just know PNNL allowed some employees to commit felonies against me and get away with it--so far.

A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Samuel Goldwyn

Today I checked on the status of a couple of the "blunt instruments" I'm using on Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  Since I hadn't heard back on them for weeks I sort of guessed they had been dropped and I wasn't going to get anywhere with them.  I was wrong.

The first person I talked to said the issue was still VERY much alive it was just that he had been buried in stuff and was reluctant to share the work load with others.  He has a couple of hard deadlines to meet and couldn't work on it this minute.  My project had received some attention a couple days ago and would be getting more attention soon.  I felt pretty good about things.  He asked a few more good questions which I gave short answers to and then followed up with detailed email answers.

The second person I talked to said I had gone about things in the wrong manner.  No big deal--the person in the appropriate channel will be contacting me soon.  I got the feeling that it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't called back twice to find out the story.  I was very pleased with this.  I was afraid I would just be told to "go away."  That could still happen but at least I believe I will get a chance to present my findings and have a reasonable chance of convincing them to take action.

One "blunt instrument" should be in there hands by now.  That is the appeal of their denial of my Privacy Act request on all the information they have in their files, email, etc. about the "investigation" they did on me.  I hired a lawyer in D.C. that specializes in FOIA/Privacy Act requests.  They claimed the Privacy Act didn't apply to them, but both my and the lawyer's read of the Act is that it specifically says it applies to contractors that perform a government agency function--so "hand it over!"  Nothing back on the appeal yet.

And since PNNL has received the FOIA request I talked about the other day by now I might as well reveal it here.  I asked for:

---

A list of all Pacific Northwest National Laboratory computer programs that use the FlashTek software library or rely on derivations of the FlashTek software library and/or it's source code.

A list, complete with contact information, of all PNNL customers and contacts that have copies of those programs.

Most, perhaps all, of these programs will have been produced in the Cyber Security Group at PNNL.  The source code can be easily identified by a copyright notice similar to the following:

/////////////////////////
// Copyright FlashTek
// Joe Huffman
// Joe@joehuffman.org
/////////////////////////

---

In case the name "FlashTek" doesn't mean anything to you, that is the name I use for all my private business stuff.  From software to explosives FlashTek is my dba (Doing Business As) name.  To speed up development of several projects at PNNL my coworkers and I used some of my previously developed code. PNNL never bothered to obtain a written license for that and I never bothered to ask for one. The implied threat with the FOIA request is that I will now ask for a license and/or demand they and all their customers stop using my previously developed software. This is a really nasty thing to do and I don't really want to do it. If they would give me all the information I asked for via the Privacy Act request then I, almost for certain, would not bring up the software license issue.

There is one more "blunt instrument" that I haven't checked up on.  I'll just wait a while for that one.

Previous posts:

Blunt instrument number five
Case blown open--maybe
Reconsideration

I've had a couple people ask me if I had any clues what was going on with Kim duToit's site, why it was down, etc.  I also saw a lot of people visit my site via search engines with query strings about Kim.  About all I could determine without given him a call (which I was hesitant to do because I don't really know him that well) was that a connection could be made to the machine but it was refusing requests--someone had turned the site off.

AnarchAngel has the story, the essence of which is:

I have communicated briefly with Connie Du Toit, and there is a business issue requiring Kim and Connie to take the site down right now, and without any notice. They can't provide details yet but expect some information in a few days.

The last few months have had a very sobering effect on me.  Think about this:

Q: How many gun bloggers openly use their real names? 
A: Not many.

Q: What percentage of those have had "problems" of some sort because of that?
A: A lot.

Q: How many anti-freedom bloggers do you know of that have "had problems?"
A: None that I know of.  But I don't "travel in those circles."  Anyone that you know of?

If you have to "stay in the closet" to be safe then how safe are you?  Did the Jews in Nazi Germany increase their safety by "keeping their heads down"?  It's a predator/prey type situation.  If you go into hiding then you are saying, "I am the prey."  You embolden the enemies of freedom. They become the full time predators.  They are at the top of the food-chain.  If we don't bring a few of those predators down, feed on them, and scatter their sun-bleached bones on the range among our empty brass shell casing we have nothing but fear and hiding in our future.

Careful now.  Think about this.  Who are our true predators?  They aren't just someone that advocates for their own imagined safety at our expense.  The predators are those that attempt to harm us personally (socially, financially, etc. as well as physically--which is unlikely) because they do not want our voices heard in open debate.  If you were to target someone for the loss of their job just because they advocated some new restriction on firearms then you are no better than those that targeted me or Kim for our activism.  In essence you cannot initiate "force"--you can only respond when they have initiated the use of "force" against you or another innocent party.  Don't think this means you have to "play nice".  Don't just whine about things for a while.  If they initiate "force" they have given you the signal for you to transform into a ferocious predator.  You aren't done until you are napping in the sun with a full belly and the vultures are feeding on the remnants of the carcass.

Also on this topic:

The closet
CCRKBA blasts bigotry 
Fred of Fred's M14 Stocks on being on a list
Thoughts on coming out of the closet
Coming out of the closet has it's price
Coming out of the closet

I just pushed the "Send" button on another FOIA request to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  This one will probably cause some people to mess their pants and perhaps lose their jobs.  And that's even if I don't lift a finger from now on.  The unfortunate part is that the people most directly in the path of this particular "instrument" are the one's least responsible.  It could cost PNNL a lot of money to deal with the implications of this.  And that doesn't count the embarrassment, loss of confidence, and potential loss of business they will suffer with their customers.  Their best course of action at this point is to give up protecting the people that committed the felonies in the process of terminating my employment at PNNL.  Things will be much more pleasant for everyone, except the felons, if they "see the light".

I checked on the status of two of the other "blunt instruments" (there are five total now) that are working their way toward them.  I don't have anything to report yet although I expected I something before now.  This latest one I will be able to report on in no more than two weeks.

My comment on a posting over at Diary of a (Fired) Flight Attendant was approved and the Queen herself looked at the PNNL info website (I could tell from the details in my log file that it was her).  The links I left in the comment should get some more traffic.  Plus the email I sent to a reporter might generator some more interest in the case.

You have to register to read them but excerpts follow the links.

Philadelphia Daily News: Your blog could get you recruited - or fired

For businesses, blogs and other forms of personal Internet communication constitute a new frontier fraught with promise and peril. On the one hand, companies are scrambling to use them as a recruiting and marketing tool, and are encouraging some employees to blog. On the other, they are wondering how to deal with the damage that current and former employees and dissatisfied customers can do on the Web.

The result is a "mild level of social panic," Rainie said.

"The lawyers and the marketers are, in many cases, at least in covert war with each other."

Miami Herald: Delta employee fired for blogging sues airline

A former Delta Air Lines flight attendant who says she was fired weeks after she posted photos of herself in uniform on her Internet blog has filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against the airline.

Ellen Simonetti, whose job was based in Atlanta but lives in Austin, Texas, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, saying that male colleagues with potentially insensitive material on their blogs have gone unpunished.

The case could plow fresh legal ground on whether a company can take action against an employee for operating a blog. Simonetti was featured in a recent People magazine article that mentioned workers who were fired for blog content.

I really don't have much interest in suing PNNL.  It wasn't PNNL, per say, that did me wrong.  It was the individuals that used false information, such as claims I used government computers to host personal websites, that are to blame.  In fact, I've had two lawyers tell me there were probably felonies committed.  The problem is that it's difficult to get a prosecutor to take the case and a private attorney typically can't prosecute for a crime, just take civil action.  I still have lots of things to try and just thought of a new one yesterday.  It's a rather nasty thing to do and it will hurt the wrong people, as well as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and their customers, but if they don't turn over the files on the investigation under the Privacy Act Information Request (their denial is being appealed) I'll use it.

I finally got the performance reviews all scanned in and the "business sensitive" information blacked out.  You can see an overview on this page with links to the actual images.  When the images come up in your browser you may need to resize the image to be full size so the text is readable.  Here are some quotes from my most recent review, completed in January of 2005:

• "Joe is a very good engineer and innovator.  He has the ability to see through apparent complexity and find elegant solutions to difficult problems."
• "Joe is also a good leader.  He as technical credibility as well as a diplomatic disposition that allows him to direct teams to do very good work while avoiding conflicts."
• "Joe has a great future at the lab due in part to his expertise and interpersonal relationship style."
• "Joe did an excellence job on the [deleted project name] project.  The client was very happy with the end result."
• "Joe brings a (sic) unique perspective and set of experiences which allow him to make contributions to the success of a project.  Joe shows an excellent ability to plan tasks, manage scope, and lead a project team to the end goal of a project."
• "Over the last year Joe has assisted with various IED problems and has brought a number of solutions forward for discussion and evaluation, as his explosives background and personal research gives him a good feel for the issues involved."

I received "Meets Expectations" on all but one item.  That item was was "Acts with Integrity and Trust" where I received a rating of "Exceeds Expectations".

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Journals (1906), entry in 1850.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.  The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form.

Albert Einstein

I was gone all day yesterday working on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory project.  Other than spending an obscene amount of money on gas I thought it went quite well.  I won't know the results for at least a week but on the drive back home (I do a lot of thinking when driving alone) I realized what must have happened to cause them to "reconsider."  I called Barb with the news as soon as I had a good cell-phone signal.

I only was able to check out two of the four "blunt instruments" to see if they were responsible.  Both of those turned up negative.  After several hours of mulling it over I came up with a hypothesis that explained all the data I had.  It almost for certain was one particular "blunt instrument" that I implemented almost as an afterthought.  It arrived at it's destination Wednesday, Aug 31, 2005 13:57 GMT.  Less than 36 hours later I received word they had "reconsidered".  After I thought about it I realized what I had done, had it been consciously thought out, was rather brilliant.  Everyone's "hand" would have been forced by my action.  PNNL had made a mistake by putting an unnecessary sentence in an email I was able to get my hands on.  It was enough to get some "traction" and it appears to have blown the lid off of things.  I won't know for certain until I get my hands on the information they are sending me but from what I heard on the phone it sounded far better than what I imagined I would get for that particular effort.  What I think happened was they knew I was now going to get nearly everything I wanted, just from a different source.  I had not even considered my action would get me the information I wanted.  I thought that at best it would just cause them some pain.  So rather than look bad in court, by not giving it to me directly, they tried to wipe some of the crap off of their face and "reconsider".

This is sort of a security game.  It's better to be on the offense because you only have to find one crack to blow it open.  The defender has to have everything nailed down tight.  I have been probing from many different angles and almost by accident found where they made a mistake.  I probably shouldn't say, "almost".  It was essentially a whim I requested the file that had the email with the one hugely significant sentence in it.  Then it took me a couple of days to realize I could take a swing at that sentence.  And when I took the swing I didn't realize it would be such a solid hit--that took hours of bewilderment at their reaction before I put it together.  In hindsight it was stupid that it took me so long to realize the significance. 

The game isn't over but I just connected my bat on a significant portion of their ball.  My Labor Day weekend should be a lot happier than some of theirs.  I'll be fantasizing about some anti-gun owner bigots in a Federal prison spending "quality time with Bubba" and they will be thinking about the same thing.

Update: I just received the file.  Either I misunderstood or the guy I talked to on the telephone didn't understand what had been redacted.  I understood that the names of other people who were being investigated at the same time as me were redacted.  The names redacted were other people being hired at the same time as me.  All I received was what should have been in the "personnel file" I received several weeks ago.  There was only the tinist hint of the investigation in the file.  It is useless but I'll post it later today anyway.  I'll get the performance reviews and goals scanned and posted sometime today.  The battle continues.

Joe, you're the gift that just keeps on giving.

Barb Scott
September 1, 2005
On Pacific Northwest National Laboratory "reconsidering" it's initial refusal to comply with Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act requests for personnel file information on her husband, Joe Huffman.  Their "reconsideration" might have had something to do with certain "encouragement" Joe had been giving them via various "channels".

At 16:39 this afternoon I received a call from the person responsible for handling my FOIA/Privacy-Act information requests at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  He said they had "reconsidered" my request for the rest of my personal file (or "Field File" as they prefer to call it) and it will go into the mail tomorrow.

Gee, I wonder what it was that caused them to "reconsider"?  I can only think of four different "blunt instruments" they might have seen coming their way that might have caused an "attitude adjustment" on their part.  I'll be checking on three of those "blunt instruments" tomorrow to see if any of them had something to do with it.  If all goes as planned I'll be able to share most of the results with everyone here sometime next week.

Barb had a rather apropos quip when she heard the news.  It will be the quote of the day tomorrow.

As you might guess I watch at least some of my website log files pretty closely.  Yesterday and last night I started getting some hits referred from a new source.  It was Voice of the Taciturn.  He only mentioned my situation in passing:

National labs have a great way of dealing with those they perceive to be misfits and malcontents or just plain undesirable. Generally speaking, it involves getting the third degree, slapped up-side the head with policies you don’t get to read yourself so that you might try to fight back, and unemployment.

Not a big deal but interesting take on things in the greater context of his posting. 

However, there may be a big deal if things go as planned.  I believe there will be some significant news to report next week.  I've been spending a lot of time on this and I expect there will be some interest in the latest developments.  Barb says I should have sent a copy of one of the letters I sent yesterday to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  "Why?" I asked.  "To make them sweat.", she replied.  Barb isn't one to hold back when something irritates her.  I prefer to calmly sit back, perhaps go on vacation and watch as the realization of reality washes over my adversaries.  Maybe next week...

Today I received my security file from the Department of Energy.  Enclosed was the first specific allegation of wrongdoing on my part.  They claimed I used the company computer for hosting my personal websites.  This allegation is completely false and I explained this to HR on May 26th in response to their vague questions about "large quantities of personal information" on the company computers.  As I then suspected, they didn't believe me.  They could have verified my story with any number of my co-workers, the customer, the IT department (who would be aware of any traffic of that nature on the network), by looking up the IP addresses associated with those websites, or a call to my hosting provider.  They apparently did none of those things. I know for certain they didn't talk to my co-workers and my hosting provider.  I suspect they did not talk to the customer--for reasons I can't go into here.  This explains why they claimed I was dishonest.  They didn't believe me and didn't bother to check it out.

Why did they not bother to check out my story?  I can only think of the following reasons:

• They didn't want to know the truth--they needed an excuse to fire me for being "a gun nut".
• They were/are incompetent.

Am I missing something?

If you work for or are considering working for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory keep in mind they play little word games in an attempt to avoid complying with the law.

At 11:24:36 today I got a call from Mr. Mike Talbot (see page 2 of the FOIA and Privacy Act request).  I had called him last Thursday after getting his response to my requests of July 21.  The letter said I already had my personnel file and therefore they weren't sending it to me again.  When I called last Thursday I told him the file I had received didn't contain my performance reviews and goals.  He said he would look into it.  The call from him today was the followup on that conversation.  He said, as I found out after I had talked to him, that my performance reviews and other information I was requesting was in my "Field File", not the "Personnel File". And because it was in the "Field File" it did not fall under the Privacy Act as per the contract Battelle has with the Department of Energy.

I don't care about the details of their contract, I don't care what they call the file, and I don't really care if it's the Privacy Act or Washington State Law that covers it.  I just know they are supposed to give me the information in those files.  Here is the applicable Washington State Law:

RCW 49.12.240
Employee inspection of personnel file.

Every employer shall, at least annually, upon the request of an employee, permit that employee to inspect any or all of his or her own personnel file(s).

RCW 49.12.250

Employee inspection of personnel file -- Erroneous or disputed information.

(1) Each employer shall make such file(s) available locally within a reasonable period of time after the employee requests the file(s).

(2) An employee annually may petition that the employer review all information in the employee's personnel file(s) that are regularly maintained by the employer as a part of his business records or are subject to reference for information given to persons outside of the company. The employer shall determine if there is any irrelevant or erroneous information in the file(s), and shall remove all such information from the file(s). If an employee does not agree with the employer's determination, the employee may at his or her request have placed in the employee's personnel file a statement containing the employee's rebuttal or correction. Nothing in this subsection prevents the employer from removing information more frequently.

(3) A former employee shall retain the right of rebuttal or correction for a period not to exceed two years.

I scanned in the letter (page 1 and page 2) I received today.  Basically they said, "You have all the documents you are going to get."  But they did give me a link to a website with at least some of the Policies and Procedures Manual.  This was a big help.  It explains a couple of things.  It includes list of things that can result in First Offense Termination.  It includes "dishonesty" and "unauthorized disclosure, access, or use of information that is proprietary or confidential to PNNL or its clients".  Both of those items were in my termination letter and were totally unexpected and unjustified.  I was completely taken aback they said such things about me--particularly since they never confronted me and asked for any explanation about any such allegations.  It was only be including those things that they could justify a first offense termination.

It was also by going through this Policies and Procedures website that I was able to find out how they justified not sending my performance reviews.  I asked for my "Personnel File."  They did send me my "Personnel File."  What I was interested in was in my "Field File."  I see...

I'll post more as I learn more.  See also the new section at the bottom of the main page of the PNNL info site.

I had a chat with Don Kates yesterday.  Although he lives in Washington State he isn't licensed to practice there.  He suggested another "very gun friendly" lawyer to talk to for help on my case.

As most readers will already know the NRA has called for a boycott on ConocoPhillips regarding their filing of Federal lawsuit against a state law prohibiting companies from firing employees who keep guns in their locked cars on company property.  In many circles this creates some mixed feelings.  Shouldn't property owners (the company/stockholders/whoever) have the right to ditictate the conditions for the use of their property?  Good question.  An Yahoo groups email list I subscribe to (WA-CCW) had this posting from a lawyer which shed some new light on the topic:

From: wa-ccw@yahoogroups.com On Behalf Of Glenn Slate
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: [wa-ccw] Has the NRA gone too far?

So here is my not so professional thought about your questions of
competing rights.  I admit it is a little unusual and unpopular right
now, but I think we all will recognize the correctness of the following
position in time.

The biggest difference here is not property rights vs. RKBA, but human
rights versus corporate rights.  Corporations are formed by the state,
they are given almost all the rights of a person, but they are not a
person.  In a competing rights situation, the corporations rights should
usually loose, as they are granted, rather than guaranteed.

A corporation is formed by an action of the state, in WA that is an act
of the Secretary of State.  WA has a state level preemption, so the
Secretary of State cannot ban CCW.  So how can the secretary of State’s
office create an entity and grant it right that the SoS office does not
itself possess?  That is to say if the Secretary is forbidden by state
law from restricting CCW in WA, how could it create a corporation and
then empower that corporation restrict CCW?

The problem with this issue becomes even more clear when you realize
that corporations need not be owned by individuals.  There is typically
no restriction on a state agency’s owning corporate stock.  So if we
allow corporation to ban CCW, couldn’t the city of Seattle for a
corporation to say  mange all it’s parks and lease the parks to that
corporation.  If they did so, could that corporation ban CCW in parks
under a private property argument?  How about to manage leased  bridges,
roads, parks, sidewalks etc.  Of course 100% of the stock would be owned
by the city, but all action would be taken by the corporation.

So the most basic (and socially disturbing) question is where did the
corporation get it’s personal property rights from?

They were granted by the state.  If the state agency could not restrict
your CCW rights, then it should not be able to grant that authority to a
corporation it formed.
Of course all this is up in the air if that state has no preemption, or
if it has a stature allowing the formation of a corporations with all
the rights of a natural person.  There will be lots of variation state
to state.

This is an entirely untested (and totally unpopular )theory, as our
culture seems to want to build corporations rather than restrict them.
  SO I strongly advice none of you to be a test case using this theory
(or any other is you can help it).

Remember I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer and this is most
definitely not legal advice.

--
Glenn Slate  |  mail to:gslate@emarket-group.com  | 503-445-8030
Corporate Counsel / Vice President of Client Development
eMarket Group, Ltd.  <http://www.emarket-group.com/>
eMerchandise <http://www.emerchandise.com/>

The gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry.

Don Kates
Constitutional lawyer and criminologist
July 2, 1994
http://www.hoboes.com/pub/Firearms/Essays/Don%20Kates/Don%20Kates%20at%20Sacramento%20Rally

I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with a newspaper reporter this morning.  He is getting background information for the PNNL story. 

There is lots of other related stuff going on as well which I can't really talk about it at this time.  I will say this though, I recently got an email from someone at PNNL who said in part, "Stay the course. There's a lot of people behind you."

I've been watching the log for my PNNL info site and noticed there were a fair number of referrals coming in from search engines.  I did my own searches and came up with interesting results:

• Google for PNNL: my site comes in at number seven.
• MSN Search for PNNL: my site comes in at number five.
• MSN Search for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: my site comes in at number three.

The other search engines appear to be a little behind but they don't matter nearly as much.

Thanks to everyone for linking to the site as per my suggestions on this page.  That helped make the above happen.

I'm in the process of making some more changes that should boost the visibility even more.  And since I've been seeing the Google bot traverse the website recently that can only be good news.

Barb and I made it back home tonight and as I was going through my piles of email I found this gem from Alan Korwin, author of numerous books on gun laws:

18 USC 241. If two or more people conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured under the Constitution or laws of the United States, they shall be fined, or imprisoned up to ten years, or both.

I wonder... Does firing someone from their job meet the legal definition of "injure" or "oppress"?  I'm not sure--but you can be certain I will be finding out soon.

A few days ago I posted that a magazine wanted to interview me about being fired as a result of my blogging.  The email was sent on Sunday morning and I didn't receive it until very late on Sunday night when I came into civilization and an Internet connection.  It turns out I didn't get back in touch with them in time to meet their deadline--so no interview.

It was People Magazine.

Kim du Toit posted about both his and my adverse experiences because of our websites.  Kim made a comment about PNNL being "a company of skunks".  I posted a comment in response and I think the same posting here is justified.  I fixed a few typos and grammar errors but otherwise the following posting is the same as my comment there:

My "model" for what happened to me was that there were a few people that had big anti-gun biases and no checks and balances for the power they held.  None of my co-workers, my project manager, nor none of the people in the projects I managed were ever asked anything about me.  Some of them first found out I had been fired, after not being able to make contact with me for a couple weeks, by reading my blog!  I suspect "Safeguards and Security" gets raises based on how many people they get fired or disciplined.  In that situation they look for whoever has the highest "profile"--me in this case.  And the process apparently doesn't allow for presentation of the evidence to the accused and a chance for the accused to present evidence or witnesses in their favor.  For example: They asked me if there was any Official Use Only (OUO) material on a laptop when my wife and daughter used it.  I said no, I didn't think so.  A few days later I remembered there were some documents that were marked OUO.  But those documents were old.  All the OUO restrictions had been removed but the documents on the computer had not been updated and the OUO markings removed.  They did not ask me or any one that might have known that.  I suspect, but can't say for certain, that is one instance of how they claimed I violated policy.  There were numerous other things that I suspect they may have discovered that at first glance looked bad but had innocent or even praiseworthy justification.  They never asked anyone who would have known the truth.

So... my summation of the situation is: The Process is Broken.  For the most part I believe the lab and the people there are doing a decent job and are decent people.  Some of the projects really should be done in the private sector rather than on taxpayer money but that isn't the fault of the lab.  That is the fault of our congress critters.

In my particular case management is in a tough position.  A couple of jerks screwed me over.  I suspect management has done their own investigation by now and know my case has at least some merit.  Now what do they do?  Their main function is the make the company money.  If they fire the jerks, as they should be, then I can use that against them in my wrongful termination suit--costing the company money.  If they come to me and say, "We have a couple of bad eggs and a bad process, we want to make it right with you."  then they put themselves in the position of giving away money they didn't have to.   What they have to do, in my opinion, is wait for me to file my lawsuit then evaluate their chances of winning and the cost of doing so versus settling with me.  Throw in the bad publicity they will have to deal with while the event is going on and afterwords, if I win, and come up what gives them the best odds financially.  One cannot expect them to "do the right thing".  It would be unethical from the standpoint of the company finances.   They must be forced to do the right thing.

So... I tend to disagree with Kim's assessment.

My "job" at this point is to help them realize the truth coming out will be more financially painful than fixing the problems a bad process and a couple of "bad eggs" created.  The FOIA requests, the Privacy Act Information Requests, and the publicity around my experience will be a festering boil for them.  The lawsuit will just be the lance that forces it to drain and heal with as little scaring as possible--for everyone except the couple of jerks.  Those people need to be held personally responsible and there is a fair chance I may be able to accomplish that.

I got a call from daughter Xenia this afternoon.  A letter from Battelle came in the mail today.  She said, "It looks like a report card."  What she meant was that each side had to be ripped off before you could open it.  "Oh, I'll bet it's my last paycheck", I said.  I didn't expect one because I just had two days of vacation left and they had paid me for two days that I was suspended without pay.  I asked Xenia to open it.  It was a check.  A check for $0.00.

I laughed for quite a while about that.  I have my speculation as to why it would show up over two months after my last day on the job and why they bothered to send me a check for $0.00.  I think it has something (and I have my suspicions about the exact reason) to do with the new website about bigotry at PNNL (PNNL is operated by Battelle who issues the paychecks) I put up last weekend.

I think I'll frame that check--although I will always wonder what the bank would have said if I deposited it.

Update: By popular demand:

Click on the image for a high resolution version.

Every once in a while I have doubt.  Maybe I did do something wrong.  Maybe I did step over the line and deserve to get fired.  When I was in the first meeting I thought maybe there was something that I got carried away with.  The next day I reviewed everything I could find on my blog.  There was nothing that should have been a problem.  I felt better in some ways but things still didn't make sense.  Why were they making it into a problem?

I was required to talk with the HR people and I thought it went really well.  They asked factual questions that were not judgment calls.  "Did you know this was a rule?"  "Yes."  "Did you ever break this rule?"  "No."  Almost all the questions were easy stuff.  Virtually nothing was ambiguous--which was a problem for me with the first meeting.  Immediately after the meeting I was suspended without pay--which was a shock.  As I drove home the doubt crept in.  What had I done that was so bad?  Maybe I had done something but couldn't remember it.  I had time to think about things and to try and make sense of it.  They weren't giving me any more information but I had another source--my web access log files.  I did a quick scan of them and I could see a pattern.  And I could see they had lied to me in that first meeting.  Why lie?  What in the world did they have to gain by that lie?  And they were still looking HARD for stuff in my websites during and after the HR meeting.  I felt better.  There were people out to get me and if there was something I had actually done they should have found it by now and they wouldn't have to lie about little things.

When I got the call and was told I was fired I was certain.  There had not been any further questions of me.  I knew there was stuff that looked bad but had completely innocent explanations.  They didn't ask about anything so I knew they weren't interested in the truth about me.  My web access logs were my only real hope of learning the truth about them.  More reviewing of the logs seemed consistent with my first impression.  But as I continued looking and annotating the logs I began to have doubts.  Maybe it was just a random search through things and it just happened that the firearms stuff was what they looked at first and last.  Then I looked at the times when PUCK would have been preparing for the first meeting.  I was enraged. And I had no doubt.

In the last few days I came to doubt again.  I would look at the preparation time and wonder if maybe there was another explanation.  It's easy to believe what you want to believe.  Then last night I got a call from someone.  A completely independent source confirmed something I had suspected.  It's not a "smoking gun".  It's not something that is irrefutable proof on it's own.  It's like "fingerprints at the crime scene" and there is no contraindicating evidence.  I have no doubt.

While I am still many hundreds of miles away from home (are the black helicopters gone yet?) I do have a reliable Internet connection now.  I'll be staying here until tomorrow morning and hope to be home by the weekend.  Since we are driving that means I many not get connected again until I get home.

I have spent the last several hours reviewing the referrals to my www.pnnl.info site, doing an interview with a gun rights organization, and making terse comments on numerous gun forums and blog sites.  There are just so many that I can't begin to keep up.  I am running a report generator on the log file but I expect it will take a several hours.  I'll post an update here with a link to the report when it's done.

I have enough donations now that I was able to pay off the previous visits to the lawyers.  More news on that front when it is appropriate to do so.

Thanks so much to everyone for all they work they put in.  I just don't have enough time to thank everyone individually.  But some deserve special recognition--in particular "S" has been a huge help.  Ry of course has contributed time and ideas and offered to contribute a lot more work.  My daughter Xenia took care of the Quote of the Day for the last several days while I was going in and out of Internet connectivity.

All the bloggers that have linked and commented have contributed a great deal as well.  Michelle Malkin's post in particular was a huge boost.

Here are some interesting things Ry has to say about what is going on:

• PNNL has blocked email from me to them.
• Links that he has found
• Blog Search Engine Bake Off

Update: Here is the log report on referrals.  Lots of people talking about the PNNL Bigotry website.

• CCRKBA blasts bigotry
• Fred of Fred's M14 Stocks on being on a list
• Coming out of the closet
• Coming out of the closet has it's price
• Thoughts on coming out of the closet

You've got to be kidding. They said Joe was dishonest? Joe is the most honest person I know.

Nancy Amos

As predicted there was no repsonse from PNNL.  They (both Richland and Battelle in Columbus) spent a lot of time reviewing the site but in the end they did not have any factual corrections to make.

Check out http://www.pnnl.info.  There is a link on the main page to What You Should Do.  Check it out.

Barb and I are going hiking now.  Internet and cellphone access again tonight sometime.

I sent an email to the NRA about their recent article and got back a response directing me to their "General Counsels Office".  I sent them a link to my Terminate Report website.

I love it when the timing of things works out just as if you had actually planned it that way.

Barb and I got back into civilization tonight and found, after some difficulty, an Internet connection.  Much to my surprise I found this email waiting for me (magazine and writer name deleted for now):

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2005 6:21 AM
To: JoeH@boomershoot.org
Subject: an interview with XXXX magazine

My name is XXXX XXXX and I am a freelance writer for XXXX magazine.
We are working on a story about people who got fired for blogging. If
you were fired for blogging (it was unclear from the one post I saw on
another website) would you be interested in doing an interview? If so,
email me back with your name, age, where you live, what you wrote that
got you fired and where you got fired from.

Thanks.

This is a national magazine everyone with two or more functional brain cells has heard of.  I wrote them back saying I would be glad to be interviewed and will send them the news release when it goes out tomorrow afternoon.  I also put my previous employer on the Bcc: line.

Joe dishonest? <snort> Joe is so honest, it gets him in trouble.

Dow Scott

A few minute ago the last of the FOIA requests went out and I sent the following email to my former employer:

---

Subject: Corrections?

 

I have created a new website, XXXX, that might be of interest to you.  Before the news releases are sent out on Monday afternoon I am giving you an opportunity to make any factual corrections.

Please send all corrections, complete with documentation, to XXXX before 12:00 PM PDT Monday July 25th.  Only email to that address will be accepted.  All responses will be posted on the web site.

 

And since the picture below seemed to play a significant role in the investigation that lead to my termination I am including a copy:

 

----
Joe Huffman

---

A few people have seen a preview of the site.  Here are some of their comments:

I'm shaking with rage. Bastards.

-Kim du Toit-

Jesus H. Christ.

-Neaderpundit-

I thought PNNL's mission was to support the Constitution--not destroy the lives of those who exercise the rights it guarantees.

-Lyle Keeney-

 

You can get canned for practicing free speech in support of one’s right to self-defense. What’s next? Get canned for blogging about the war? Gay marriage? Religious freedom?

-Stephanie Sailor-

New Jersey gun rights activist

 

This is the point in the story where the audience comes to understand, if not condone, the antagonist turning into a mad scientist.

-Sean Flynn-

And then head off on vacation. Good move. Pay cash. Watch out for Black Helicopters.

-Sean Flynn-

 

Does your life insurance cover getting knocked off by your former bosses?

-Lyle Keeney-

 

Be careful. Don't get shot in some dark alley.

-James Huffman-Scott-

 

They honestly had no clue that you are so fastidious in your operation. This kind of evidence is very clear and easy for even a layman to understand.

-Permission Pending-

Computers and the internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual.

Eric Engstrom
October 2003

According to these guys I imagine I exhibited all the symptoms of someone about to go postal, except for one.  The one missing was supplied by PNNL--by firing me.  How many other civil rights activists exhibit the same "symptoms"? 

Some type of obsession, e.g., weapons, other acts of violence, romantic/sexual, zealot (political, religious, racial), the job itself, neatness and order

Performance Problems, including problems with attendance or tardiness [I am a night person and I, and others, would arrive late and leave late]

Access to and familiarity with weapons

Being fired, laid off or suspended; passed over for promotion

As I read this web page I and others who advocate for the rights of gun owners, should never be hired in the first place.  There is a word for this--bigotry.

I got a call from a fellow shooter about an hour ago.  He asked if had read the latest American Rifleman magazine.  "How recent?" I asked.  "I just got it in the mail today."  "Definitely not.  What's up?"  He told me and I ran out to the mailbox to find my copy of the magazine.

The article is titled "If You Hunt or Own a Gun... You're Fired!"

The URL associated with this article http://www.nra.org/URfired is broken.  Does anyone have a URL that works?

Update: Here is a scanned version of the article:

Click on the picture to see the full sized article.

Update2: The related info just keeps coming in.  I just got an email with a link to this:

Guns in the Workplace:
State Laws v. Employer's Rights
Duration: 3 hours
Cost: $169

Changes in state concealed weapon laws have created additional burdens on employers. Workplace shootings nearly doubled from 2002 to 2003, increasing from 25 to 45 incidents. The number of employees killed in these shootings rose from 33 to 69. A recent study found that workplaces with policies that permitted guns were five times more likely to experience homicides than those that prohibited weapons.

Get the information and resource you need to ensure a safe and weapon free workplace. Learn why your workplace needs to address weapons in the workplace, changes in state concealed weapon laws, model policy and guidelines and best practices for enforcement.

Update3: An email from a friend:

I seriously question this assertion;

"A recent study found that workplaces with policies that permitted guns were five times more likely to experience homicides than those that prohibited weapons." Where can that be verified?

Kim du Toit says, "I’m starting to feel just like I used to feel back in South Africa." and says he will stop blogging until further notice.  Og wonders if it's time to press the reset button (see this also).  And Kevin at Smallest Minority has similar opinions about our current political situation.  My blogging about gun rights resulted in me getting fired (PNNL refused to say exactly why but examination of my web logs indicates that was a big component).  So is it time for the villains to acquire acute cases of "lead poisoning"?  Francis at Eternity Road says no.  If you haven't read it yet then read my essay on this topic from (I think) 1997.  Basically I'm on the no side as well.

That does not mean that I think one should just "take it".  In fact I am of the opinion you should never just "take it".  You must always make the enemies of freedom pay a price for their transgressions or you embolden them.  When Hitler took Poland without consequences the stage was set for further evil to occur.  That doesn't mean you need to fight your battles immediately or on their turf.  The Russian took a terrible initial blow from Germany but then defeated the aggression by using the harsh Russian winters to their advantage.  As one of the comments to Og's post explains, use cunning.  And we have lots of legal means at our disposal to inflict damage on our enemies.

Many years ago Symantec and I had a disagreement about a contract.  According to their filings with the SEC a company they just bought out (Zortech) owed me between $20K and $50K.  I requested an audit as per the terms of my contract.  They said, literally, "It's too much work.  We refuse.  Go ahead and sue.  You cannot win because we will drag out in court 'forever'."  My lawyer said, "It will cost you a minimum of $100K to see this through to the end with no guarantees that even if you do win you will get attorneys fees awarded.  Think long and hard before going down that path."  Of course I didn't go down that path.  But I didn't let it stand either.  In the end I legally (barely) helped (they made lots of enemies) inflict about $30 MILLION in damages on them by doing battle on turf (in time and space) of my chosing.  I had sources inside Symantec that said discussions went to the 'highest level' about what to do about me and they did nothing because any action they would have taken would have increased their losses.  I paid a price for fighting that battle but they paid a much, much, heavier price than if they had honored the contract.

The racist laws of the South were overcome primarily via non-violent actions.  The British were thrown out of India through non-violent actions. Compare our present situation to the situations of those people!  What is our status compared to what theirs was?  And some people think it's time to start shooting?  If you think so then you are someone only has a hammer in you toolbox and thinks every problem to be solved is a nail.  Think a little smarter.  You are much smarter than a sucide bomber so don't act like one.  And especially remember these words from Abby Hoffman, "The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it."

I unpacked all the boxes I received from PNNL the other day.  Almost everything appears to be there. They even returned an almost empty shampoo bottle and an empty baby food jar that once upon a time had some change in it.  The first box I opened had the following items in it which I figured would be a high priority item to retain "for evidence" or something.  A 100 yard target and a 500 yard target:

Click here for a high resolution version.

500 yard target.  Click here for a high resolution version.

100 yard target.  Click here for a high resolution version.

The second box I opened had the items I most wanted right away--my Boomershoot hat and HP-48 calculator.  And shortly thereafter I found my collection of books on improvised explosives such as Ragnar's Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives which I also thought might be something they would want to hold on to. 

It's possible there is something I have forgotten about but right now the only thing I didn't find was some paperwork for applying to Oregon for a Concealed Carry License.  That was in the filing cabinet they claimed they didn't have a key for.  If I don't get it it's not a big deal.  I think I have copies here anyway.

Now I have several garbage sacks filled with Styrofoam peanuts to give to UltiMAK.

I received my personal belongs from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory yesterday.  I haven't opened everything up yet--I've been way to busy with other stuff.  But it's clear they really don't like me.

In addition to taking three weeks to ship me my stuff they overloaded two of the boxes and they were falling apart on receipt.  Add in they didn't send me my performance reviews (and some other favorable material) it's pretty obvious they don't want me to be having any happy days anytime soon.

One more post then I'm going off to the range soon to put some holes in some cardboad of my own.

See also:

I was fired yesterday
Update on being fired
Termination report delayed
What did I expect?
No performance reviews

Update: It doesn't appear anything was damaged by the poor packing.

I looked through every single page of the “personnel file” PNNL sent me.  No performance reviews to be found.  So they don't want me to be able to show the good stuff about my time there to anyone?  What else could be the motivation?

They did apologize for not sending my personal belongings in a timely fashion.  They said it was because they couldn't find the key to a filing cabinet and they were “awaiting a locksmith“ (for three weeks?).  I gave the key to my boss when they suspended me and told him what it was for.  And I told him that inside the filing cabinet are keys to “everything else“ which includes some computers and cupboards.  [heavy sigh]  I guess I shouldn't expect competence from them.

I was sent a travel report to sign so I can get $175 back in out of pocket expenses for the trip I took to Albuquerque back in April.  I was thinking I might have to complain about that.  But they caught it on their own--after three weeks.

I received a FedEx package from PNNL today.  It purported to contain my personnel file.  But neither Barb nor I could find any of my performance reviews in it.  The one thing I really wanted.  I'll look again tomorrow when I have some more time.  Barb said, “So what did you expect?  Did you really think they would give you what you wanted?“ 

As far as the policy and procedures manual they said one doesn't really exist.  It's on line and “access is limited“.  How convenient.  They say, “You didn't follow the rules.  You're fired.“  I ask, “What were the rules?“  They answer, “We aren't telling.“

I had a very, very busy day today.  Daughter Kim was having a convergence of crisis's and I spent nearly the entire day helping with her problems.  Things are mostly under control now.  She really needs to find better friends.

I got tagged by reasonablenut who in tagging me said , “Joe of Boomershoot fame, just because I'm dying to know what kind of shit that guy reads”.

Hmmm... Okay.  I'm not sure it's all that interesting but here it is:

1. Total Number of Books I Own.  [groan]  The book shelf behind me is full.  The bookshelf to my left is full and overflowing.  The bookshelf were I used to work is full (they still haven't sent these books to me).  There are boxes in the garage with books in them.  There are books in boxes in my van which I brought back from Richland a few days ago.  There is a stack of books on the nightstand next to our bed.  I have no idea.  Hundreds?  Maybe a thousand?

2. Last Book I Bought.  It's been a while because I'm so far behind on my book reading.  I think it was a big pile at a used book store.  It included several books on explosives including a couple on detonation theory and practice (which are at my old office at PNNL), American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us,  Dresden : Tuesday, February 13, 1945,  Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and probably some others which I forget at the moment.

3. Last Book I Read. The last couple books I completed were probably some on explosives detonation.  I'm currently in the middle of That's Not What I Meant! (a book on how conversational style makes or breaks relationships),  Emotional Intelligence : Why It Can Matter More Than IQ and the germs book from above.

 4. 5 Books That Meant a Lot to Me.  How about seven?  In no particular order: Stranger in a Strange Land, Atlas Shrugged (this is my son's favorite book), Atheism the Case Against God, Gun Control: Gateway to Tyranny,  Death by "Gun Control", The Rape of Nanking, and Unintended Consequences.

 5. Tag 5 People.  Musings of the Commando Kumquat, Silens Refero Lamentari, Periodic Journal of my wanderings, and Mindless Bit Spew. Yeah, I'm wimping out with only four.

I was going to release my report on the investigation which lead to my recent termination at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) but a friend suggested it might be to my advantage to wait.  They had some very good points so I am holding off for a while.  Also the report isn't really complete without my personnel file.  I have requested that and will include it before I release the report.  All of you who have the URL to the current report please continue to keep it private, hold off on the letters to your congress critters, the press releases, etc.  The end result will be better for everyone if things are done correctly.  That will take some more time.  How much time is an interesting question...

It turns out although it's been two weeks since I was terminated they still haven't sent my personal belongings from my old office.  One has to wonder what the reason for that is.  Is it because it just isn't very high on their list of priorities?  They are very short on office space so it's not like they don't have at least some motivation to clear it out.  One amusing possibility which crossed my mind is that they fear it is booby-trapped (it's not--or at least not that I know of).  The only thing I really want out of there right away is my Boomershoot hat and even that isn't that big of a deal.

Another thing I requested in my letter to PNNL was a copy of the policy and procedures manual.  Someone recently paraphrased Ayn Rand's famous quote and told me they viewed PNNL's policies in the same light--something to be enforced as desired to crack down on people they wanted to get rid of.  I don't remember it being quite that bad although I remember discussing things with others that just didn't make sense, things that you couldn't really avoid doing if you wanted to do your job in an effective manner.  I'll have to wait and see if they will even send it to me.  It is my understanding they are required to send me my personnel file but I'm not so sure about the policies and procedures manual.  And in any case there may not be any requirement on how long they wait before they send anything to me.  If my personal belongings are any indication it could be weeks.

Maryland just initiated a state program to license retired police officers to carry concealed handguns, making Maryland one of the first states to implement new federal laws expanding gun rights for retired and off-duty officers.  Idaho (YEAH!) and Arizona were ahead of them as might be expected.  The governor, Robert Ehrlich, was a supporter of the change and said this:

 "This is good public policy that will make a safer state, which is why I am very proud Maryland has led."

But a barking moonbat gun control advocate had this to say:

     Leah Barrett, executive director of the gun-control group CeaseFire Maryland Inc., said allowing officers to carry a gun anywhere at any time is "essentially dangerous."
    "We have too many guns in this country and too many people carrying them," she said. "Accidents happen."

While cleaning out my room in Richland yesterday (I'm all moved back to Idaho now) I found my copy of the JPFO booklet Do Gun Prohibitionists Have a Mental Problem?  Of course Ms. Barrett is a walking, talking example of a mental problem but I'll post a few items from the booklet later today to help you identify the specific problems you see in these fruitcakes.

A friend invited me over for dinner last night.  It's been nearly a year since I was last there.  The timing was excellent after the bad day I had yesterday (which my friend was unaware of until I arrived).  My future at PNNL is on hold/in-question because of my blogging and I needed a distraction.  I wasn't really hungry even though I didn't eat lunch.  I did eat and enjoyed the meal before we retired to the living room.  Mostly we talked about kids, movies, computers, and technology.  It was 2:00 AM before we both ran out of steam and I came back to my room.  I answered a couple emails and tried to go to sleep.  It wasn't possible.  I couldn't think about anything but the situation at work.  Sometime after 5:00 AM I finally fell asleep for a couple hours.  I woke again and lay in bed where I still am.  Barb called a couple times to check on me.  I'm okay.  No appetite and I haven't eaten anything since dinner last night.  I'm just not interested.  She doesn't have an appetite either and jokingly said it was a good way to lose weight.

I finished deleting and editing all my blog postings that were causing the problems.  I suppose it's possible I missed something but unless they give me a list I can't really know for sure.

I'm going to start looking for a new job.  This is a very unpleasant position to be in and I don't want a repeat of some sort in the future even if this episode turns out okay.  Barb's employer has wanted her to work full time for years and the recently asked her again.  So even if I take a big cut in pay Barb can take up a lot of the slack.

Yesterday was a very long day for me.  I woke up at 3:30 but didn't have to get up until 4:15 (Mountain Time) to catch the 6:00 AM flight out of Albuquerque.  Martin (co-worker from PNNL) and I had dinner and then talked for four hours the night before so I didn't get much sleep that night.  Then the airport security was all screwed up (they should just get rid of passenger screening) and no one but law enforcement and TSA was allowed in the 'sterile' area (gate area) of the airport when I arrived.  Even flight crews had to wait while the dogs and people searched the area.  Some TSA person had left a door unlocked Friday night and they had to search for people, explosives, and weapons.  Our plane left the gate about 40 minutes late, and touched down in Salt Lake City just as our connecting flight to Pasco was scheduled to leave the gate.  They didn't hold it for us and we sat in the terminal for over three hours for the next flight.  Not as bad as it could have been, but it took another hunk out of my precious weekend time at home.  By the time I drove home it was after 15:00.

Barb, Xenia, and I picked up James about 16:30 to go to dinner and a movie in Pullman.  While waiting for our food to arrive he realized he had forgotten to sign up for classes the night before.  He barely had an appetite.  He was very concerned he wouldn't be able to get some of the classes he wanted.  After dinner we did some war driving for a bit but didn't find anything open and finally went home to get Internet access.  James signed up for classes and things looked good for the most part. He didn't get one instructor he wanted but everything else looked good.  We had cake and icecream and James opened his presents.  Then we went to see Sahara since we had missed the start of Phantom of the Opera. I liked the movie. It stretched your credibility a bit much in places but it was okay.

Happy 21st birthday James.

I didn't get to bed until 23:00 or so (Pacific Time) but I slept well and didn't get up until after 9:00 this morning.  I feel so much better now.

I worked late to get in a few extra hours and when I left work at 20:00, I could only count seven cars in the entire parking lot (probably 500 or so workers use the lot each day).  I was thinking how different “government work“ is from when I worked at Microsoft.  There I would see the lot a quarter full at midnight and probably 10% full at 2:00 AM.  When I got in the rental car (the van is at the repair shop) I discovered the power locks didn't work.  Odd... maybe I need to have the key on.  Nope.  The engine needs to be started?  The engine won't start--the battery was dead.  Stupid me.  I had left the headlights on.  What are my chances of finding one of those seven car owners someplace in the 500 offices and has jumper cables?  Not good.  Probably some of those cars were left there overnight with the owners on travel or otherwise not within miles of the parking lot.  I called Jason's cell phone.  Jason lives about 15 minutes away.  It immediately went to voice mail.  I checked for his home phone number and realize I don't have it on my cell phone.  I go back to my office and look it up.  Jason was far more cheerful than I have any right to deserve.  It's probably a good thing Jason answered rather than his wife Jennifer.  Jennifer is home all day with four small kids and I'm sure she values adult company and Jason's help with the kids.  I'm stealing him away from her.

Jason showed up, gave my rental car a jump, and I drove back to the house.  I should just go to bed before something else goes wrong today.

The Liberty Committee just sent out an alert.  Anymore it is rare for me to urge people to send letter and contact their congress critters or other low life people, with power over them.  However this issue is one I am very passionate (and I believe rational) about.  Please read the alert and decide for yourself whether you want a national ID card and database.  Then do the appropriate thing.  The following was my confirmation and letter from my efforts on this.  Please also consider the contents of my web page on this issue.

Thank you for using The Liberty Committee Mail System

Message sent to the following recipients:
Mr. Otter
Message text follows:

Joe Huffman
[snip]
Moscow, ID 83843

October 22, 2004

[recipient address was inserted here]

Dear [recipient name was inserted here],

Please work to have the House-Senate conference committee remove the
provisions that will create a master database on every American (H.R. 10,
section 2173) and the provision that will "standardize" or nationalize the
issuing of state driver's licenses -- an action which takes the final step
in creation a national ID (H.R. 10, section 3052).

I am a senior research scientist for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
with a very high level security clearance [deleted on May 18, 2005 in an
attempt to please PNNL management].  I recognize the threat we are
facing from the Muslim extremists, but giving up these freedoms does not
make us safer in the long run.  Please do what you can to kill this
national ID proposal.  Please also see the web page I have created
addressing this threat to our freedoms.

http://www.joehuffman.org/Freedom/IDCardFlaws.htm

Sincerely,

Joe Huffman
208-301-4254

Technically speaking, I'm part of the “intelligence community” in this country.  My involvement is very minimal and I really don't know how the reorganization recommended by the 9-11 commission would affect “our“ effectiveness from an insider viewpoint.  However, [Deleted on May 18, 2005 in an attempt to please PNNL management] a friend running for U.S. Congress asked me for my thoughts on the issue so I'm going to do my best.  My “position” inside the intelligence community contributes essentially zero to this.  My position would be the same even if I were still working on the “outside”.  [Deleted on May 18, 2005 in an attempt to please PNNL management]

The specific questions I was asked were:

• Would you favor consolidating intelligence-gathering into an agency independent of the Pentagon?
• Do you believe the chief of any such agency should also be independent of the White House?
• What one measure most needs to be enacted to make our nation more secure?

The U.S. intelligence agencies are tasked (and rightly so) with invading the privacy of people and countries who might wish to do us harm.  Information is a very powerful thing and extreme power needs to be carefully controlled.  The U.S. military is the primary consumer of the information because they are tasked with preventing harm to us.  So having them control the intelligence agencies seems to me to be a good idea.  Furthermore the U.S. military is specifically forbidden from acting against U.S. citizens (the National Guard is under the authority of the individual states) .  This is a very good thing.  Many other countries do not have this restriction on their military and this has lead to some very serious problems (genocide). 

But what about gathering information on people that are in our country already and wish to do us harm?  The FBI and other law enforcement people have to “jump through hoops” to gather information -- probable cause for search warrants signed by judges, that sort of thing.  The NSA and the CIA don't bother with such niceties (although I suspect they have their own internal controls).  As severe as I think the threat from terrorists is I still fear our own government more.  A look at history will show that more innocent, non-combatant, people have been killed by their own government that by the governments of others.  And the terrorists that confront us now do not have the capacity to kill millions (as much as they would like to).  I believe the wall between the law enforcement and intelligence agencies is a long term good thing even though short term is it seen as a hindrance to security.  The wall doesn't need to be complete, there should be information shared but it must exist and having the military in control of the intelligence side of the house is a good way (in my mind) to help keep an appropriate wall in place.

As to “What one measure most needs to be enacted to make our nation more secure?“ Security might be enhanced by deporting anyone professing Islamic faith.  But that would be a violation of the 1st amendment.  Security might be enhanced by eavesdropping on all electronic communication but that would violate the 4th amendment.  But the one thing we can do that will not infringe on anyone's inalienable rights is to enable preventive measures that would have stopped the 9-11 attacks and have stopped the attack on the school children of Russia the other day.  Enforce the restriction imposed by the Second Amendment on the states, cities, and agencies of the U.S. government.  The 2nd amendment says “... the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”  The 14th Amendment says the states, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...“  The States and government regulations that prohibit adults from carrying firearms and other defensive tools in schools and on airplanes should be immediately abolished.  We don't want any more commercial airplanes used as guided missiles or our schools used as killing fields.  Allow people to defend themselves and the lives of other innocent people.  Enforce the 2nd amendment through the use of the 16th amendment.  Any government employee who violates the 2nd amendment rights of a citizen under the color of law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

So.... to answer the questions:

• No.  I am not in favor of consolidating the agencies independent of the Pentagon.
• If such a consolidation were to occur I would want it to be independent of direct political control.  I think we learned that lesson with Richard Nixon.  If he had an first class intelligence agency rather than second rate burglars to spy on his political opponents he would have violated the rights of a lot more people and probably gotten away with it.
• Abolish all gun laws against law abiding adult citizens.