Constitutional Law

Amusing event

Governent stages a cyber-terrorism drill ... and finds the players can't resist the tempation to hack the computer.

Reminds me of an event at Interior. Energy was running a drill called, if I remember, Bright Star. Bunch of folks assemble in the Nevada desert, they'd actually light a junker plane on fire, and the drill was that it was a bigger plane, carrying plutonium, which was burning and becoming a deadly smoke cloud moving toward towns and cities. Each branch of Interior's legal shop had to devise six situations to be fed to the drill legal staff, as if they were real legal problems. Yup, they'd expect to have a legal staff on site as part of the first responders.

On Fish and Wildlife Branch, we asked who, in that emergency, would give a hoot about wildlife laws? We were told to come up with six questions, so we made them the most obscure and difficult ones we could.

But the championship went to Indian Affairs. One of theirs was your MP stops an Indian on this road, and tells him it's closed off. He explains that he a member of (I forget) tribe and is obsessed with the treaty of Ft. Bridger. He produces a copy of the treaty, which he always keeps in his glove compartment... [gist was that the tribe got two reservations, and the gov't committed that it would guarantee absolutely their right to travel between the two].

Another (based on an actual case) was you receive a letter on tribal president's letterhead, signed by one person, authorizing you to enter the reservation. You receive another letter on the same letterhead, forbidding you to enter. You make inquiry, and are told that the last election was disputed, and to avoid acrimony the tribe treats both members as president.

Energy never again asked Interior to submit legal problems....

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on January 31, 2008 (boomark / email).