unintended consequences.

i've stayed quiet on the debate, making the decision not to shoot my mouth off until it was over.

the case of terry schiavo and her family has become, to me, in the words of one woman, an example of "everything that's wrong with this country," and even more so, everything that's wrong with politicized religion.

of all the things that happened in this media circus, this was the saddest to me:

Despite the Schindlers' requests that people spend Easter at home with their families, demonstrators showed up outside the hospice Sunday. Their son, Bobby Schindler, asked protesters to stop volunteering to be arrested.

people feel that making a statement that no one wants to be made is more important than spending a holiday with their families. they're knocking down their own support. how can they stand there and talk about life and family when they've abandoned their own?

as far as any other claims to christianity go, this about covers it:

"The courts didn't ask Michael Schiavo, 'What do you want to do to Terri?' They asked him, 'What do you think Terri would want you to do?"' said University of Florida research associate Barbara Noah, who lectures on medical law and bioethics. ...

Clark and other protesters have accused Michael Schiavo of violating "God's law" by withholding nourishment from his wife and by having had two children over the years with the girlfriend with whom he lives.

But the legal tradition now separating Terri Schiavo from her parents' presumed protection also has a foundation in biblical law. In Genesis 2:24, it reads: "Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."

this was a family in a sad, sad situation. a daughter struck down, parents and son-in-law fighting with each other. there was, however, never any proof offered, as the courts determined that ms. schiavo would ever recover, or that her parents had ever really thought out the life that waited before them caring for an invalid. they appeared merely to loathe her husband. they seemingly refused to accept that a woman might have conversations with her husband that she might not have with her parents. when a man says his wife told him she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially, and her parents have no concrete statement from her one way or the other, they really don't have a lot of ground to stand on from a rational, logical point of view. the fact that they were "supported" by people who were more intense, more emotional than they were themselves just says that there is a big problem in this country.

when you politicize frothing-at-the-mouth religion, you get the taliban. you don't get the united states of america, which guarantees "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." 50 years ago, she would have died. 50 years ago, so-called christians wouldn't have been screaming, crying, and tearing their clothes over it. if history goes in cycles, i fear we are entering another phase of muscular, aggressive fundamentalism, apparently all over the world. an extremist is an extremist, and the selecitve application of religious texts to effect erosion of individual rights is, in fact, in exact opposition to what christianity is about. but ignorance is required for fundamentalism and extremism to exist.

sigh. maybe i should get that M.Div (you may all run in fear now, yes ;)

bah.

sunlight notwithstanding, i'm feeling cranky and antisocial. in order to avoid doing something adolescent and embarrassing, regularily scheduled programming has been suspended and will be resumed tomorrow.

just in case you were wondering...

canada is still cold.

we saw most of the family this weekend. his uncle who had a colostomy appears to be amazingly cancer-free. i received four badly-written regency romance novels that are disappointingly bereft of any sex at all from a maiden aunt who works for harlequin. i believe they're destined for the library's book-for-a-dime sale.

saturday we ate too much but avoided the veal marsala and the squid casserole. also sunday we ate too much. there is a container of singapore noodles in my fridge. mmm...

we also played pool with two of his uncles while various other wives and daughters-in-law watched and professed ignorance of the game. eventually they went to watch the matrix which was playing in the background (2 or 3, i'm not sure...it was the one with the guys in white who disappear a lot).

saturday night we went clubbing. goa trance has come a hell of a long way from its origins. it now has a house beat, and the standard build-break-build-break-build-mix structure of other trance. so it felt kind of like hard trancy house with the 303s. but it was a lot of fun, all the same.

the ipod was pressed into service to offer techno, prog rock, lewis black, and jeff foxworthy. i'm much less impressed than he is by audio-only standup comedy. it's just not as funny without the visuals.

we've also determined that we ought to drive across the country sometime before we're too old to enjoy it. watch this space for the soapbox across america. don't hold your breath, though ;)

sigh. back to the drudgery today. at least we didn't lose an hour of sleep sunday night. we get to put that off until next week.

en vacanes.

driving up to toronto tomorrow to sped easter weekend with his family. hopefully, it will be a nice little vacation. and unlike last time, i won't be the center of attention, which is even more promising.

today is being miserable. still cold. still no sun. what season is it again? i frigging hate march.

bah.

i wanted to post something interesting today, but i walked 1.7 miles home in the cold. and snow. and sleet. did i mention sleet? sleet stings when it hits you. and my gloves leaked. and my jeans are currently melting in the tub. and now it's dark. i'm going to have more tea.

too much of a good thing.

i've been thinking a lot about wine, recently. it's been the result, i think, of having seen Sideways and then having the oppurtunity to visit Moore Bros within a couple weeks of each other.

i don't want to call myself a wine snob, but the truth is that i like good wine, the same as i like good food. i can, with some proficiency, discuss tannin, acid, structure, fruit, nose, palate, and finish. i'm not so hip to terroir yet (besides the obvious, say, chablis), but then, terroir tends to be a mystical realm at best, open to all kinds of mythologies and superstitions (i'm not kidding. there is such a thing as holistic viticulture).

however, as i introduce him into the subtler aspects of wine, i find myself having to compare things that perhaps aren't ideal. i mean, when you compare one really good bottle of cabernet sauvignon with a really good bottle of red zinfandel, there's little room to explain one's antipathy towards the mass-produced, characterless merlot that floods the market. i'm finding myself having the odd urge to hop over to the state store (for those of you unfamiliar with the structure, the pennsylvania government regulates all sales of wine and liquor and runs their own retail outlets, some of which are better than others) and pick up a $5 bottle of merlot, and maybe another one of white zin, just so i have an example of the travesties that can be wreaked ;) it has come to me that when you can compare an estate-bottled, handcrafted vintage with a blended, industrial prduct, you can better explain not only why one should drink good wine, but what the qualities of good wine in fact are. just as you won't really understand why mcdonald's sucks if you never eat there (or conversely, if it's all you eat). and, you know, it probably won't end up being poured down the drain, because these wines are vinted specifically to be smooth and unchallenging and, above all, drinkable.

i think it might be an interesting experiment.

repercussions.

i haven't thought about it in a while, but one of the things i got really into when i was in university was what i came to call "cultural reverse engineering." what it is, essentially, is taking the productions of a culture (their arts, their laws, their language and so forth) and figuring out from those remains what was or was not important to that culture.

this caught my attention today. especially some of these quotes:

Serious, adult sexuality a turn-off for movie audiences... According to studio marketers, it tends to make them (especially men) uncomfortable. "If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn't sell," producer Peter Guber says. "If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. ... Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can't portray the sexual intimacy most people crave." ... "Today's audiences aren't comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex," producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. "If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers." ... "We are a Puritan society," Press says. "We'd rather watch it at home."

what does this say about our society? more specifically, what does that say about our relations with ourselves, with our sex partners, and our conceptualizations of gender?

it's getting even more dangerous.

"I want people to start thinking critically about how these images affect black women today," said Jennings, a Spelman College alumnae and now a law student in New York. "We're telling people [black women] are bitches and hos and sluts and not worthy of respect," she said. "And that's exactly how society is treating us."

later on in the article, they quote a gentleman from Black Entertainment Television telling women not to watch if they don't like it. but let's cut the relativistic marketing naïveté and think about this critically: if you're calling youself black entertainment, this implies if you're not entertained, you're not really black. and you're also implying that blacks are entertained by and construct a culture that values women by their sexual availability. if you'll sleep with a man, you're a ho. if you don't, you're a bitch. there is no room in this structure to respect a woman, and certainly no room to think about a woman's intellectual capabilities.

to back out further, when sex comedies and violent sex are the only way to entertain people, regardless of race, you're walking a very interesting line. especially when we take into consideration that men tend to make most of the visual entertainment and men are made most uncomfortable by depictions of mature sexual relations. if people never see adult, mature sexuality, where are they going to get their information from? especially among ever-increasing calls for "abstinence-only" sex education, which doesn't even discuss anatomy or biology, parents' increasing reluctance to talk to their kids about sex, and in fact, parents' apparent reluctance to engage in mature sexuality themselves. we're slowly heading back to ignorance, because ignorance is more comfortable. if we don't have to accept the emotion, the intimacy, the vulnerability inherent in sex, we don't have to worry about it.

sometimes it's important to see things that make us uncomfortable, if for no other reason than to sit down and think "why does this make me uncomfortable?" yes, sex is uncomfortable. but it is also a part of life. and it can be beautiful and fun and subtle and joyful, all without the inclusion of violence, tension, or fart jokes. to ignore the possibilities or dilute them is to do a disservice to ourselves, to those people that we could love, and most importantly, to our children and to our children's children, who will have to combat the myths and prejudices all over again.

happy equinox, happy anniversary.

today is the first day of spring (at least up here in the northern hemisphere). it is also, unusually, the exact same date it was last year, march 20. which also happens to be exactly one year since we went to the local pet shelter and got our kitty. awww.

it was a sunny saturday afternoon, very unlike today which is cold and rainy, and i had been doing some random looking on petfinder. i noticed there was a shelter less than a mile from our apartment. and we wanted a cat. we had been forced to give up our other one when the apartment complex we moved into insisted they had a $200 non-refundable pet deposit for cats, $300 for dogs. and plus, his cat loved his parents' house and yard so much, we felt it would be cruel to take her away from that and stick her in a little 1-bedroom apartment. so we didn't have a cat.

we had decided we were going to move out at the end of that year's lease anyway, so we went down to the shelter. we filled out an application for adopting and hung out in the cat room for a while. there was one very striking grey calico kitten who was only five months old and had been given up because her owners were moving (i ask you, who gets a cat, and then gives it up almost immediately? some people make me want to get violent). but she was very stressed out, probably because she was so striking-looking, and everyone was cooing at her and trying to touch her, which you're not allowed to do because it can spread disease between the animals.

and then over on the other side of the room, there was a little grey-tabby and white stray, who, when we paused beside his cage, walked up to the door and bonked his head into it, hard. "hello!" so when they brought us to a visiting room, we asked to see both cats. the grey-and-white one sat comfortably in our arms before hopping out and confidently exploring, always with a little twitch of the question mark tail. the little grey calico kitten jumped out of his arms immediately and went and hid in a corner. so the cats basically made the decision for us :) we took home the grey-tabby and white kitty, and he's been confidently exploring ever since, even if he is a bit of a brat sometimes. luckily, we also somehow managed to avoid alerting the management company, and they never came around to demand the deposit money.

he's sitting on my lap right now. such a soft kitty. we like our kitty.

in memoriam.

Andre Norton. 1912-2005.

a consistenently good, intelligent, imaginative writer, an author not too proud to collaborate and help. one of the first sf/f authors i ever read, along with tolkein and heinlein, so i suppose it's partly her fault (along with my dad, who gave them all to me :)

i would say "she will be missed," but she's written so much that i haven't read yet, even if there's something of a sadness to knowing that she won't write anymore. so instead, i will say that i hope her influence lives on.

whoops.

apparently, i'm not paying attention. how the hell did this slip by me? sniffle.

i'm also depressed to see that PA has such a small showing.

frankly, i'm all for government transparency. when people complain that you have to give up some privacy for security, i don't bother with the apocryphal ben franklin quote, but i say that it should work both ways. if i am forced to give up personal information and privacy under some misguided addiction to data-mining (come on folks, let's call it what it is), then i should be able to see what my government, the one that i elected and pay for, is doing with that information. taking my privacy and then giving me nothing back other than some handwaving and a vague promise of "security" is not an acceptable state of things.

privacy and security.

i'm not much of a tinfoil hat person (or at least i try not to be), but i've been known to have my alarmist moments. and, of course, i work in the data security industry which gives me a nice vantage point to see what the government et al are trying, in fact, to do with some of this technology. and i have a habit of following pretty closely things like the patriot act and so forth. i do believe that one need not give up one's privacy in order to obtain security.

which is why it mildly surprises me to not be bothered by the fact that my credit card company called me last night about the purchases i had made monday and ask if someone had obtained access to my card. they had all the information about all the money we had spent, and they just wanted to, you know, make sure that everything was cool.

the reason, i think, that i don't mind it is because, while i know that they have access to my purchase record, they do not take advantage of having that information. while you just know that the government, or insurance companies, or advertising companies, or whatever would love to get their hands on your info and make up a nice little cross-referenced database entry on you, the credit card company just...watches for fraud. you can opt out of any and all "data sharing" so that they don't sell your purchasing history to advertisers (see, now if i was wearing a tinfoil hat, i'd say that that's all bullshit and it all gets reported to the government anyway, but i can't wear tinfoil to work because of the static sensitivity of the test boards). actually, my credit card company probably hates me because i did opt out, and i pay my balance in full every month, so the only money they make off me are the merchants' fees, haha.

but anyway. this is, i think, one case where the privacy/security situation has come to a nice balance. they watch my account and call me up if something doesn't fit my purchasing habits, or raises a red flag in their statistical models, and they don't sell my purchase history or deluge me with unwanted and unneeded ads. and referencing a point i made last week (i think), they didn't ask me for my social security number or my mother's maiden name, or any of that crap. just my account number. privacy and security. who would have thought.

retail therapy.

we had a horrendous weekend. it was really bad. and then yesterday wasn't so great either. a series of bad days in a row does not a happy blogger make. so last night, instead of staying at home, we went out for dinner, and then we went to Buy Stuff. i had recently found the envelope that contained my christmas bonus (only 3 months late), and instead of doing something responsible with it, we went out and purchased...

my Very First Console.

yup. i've always been a PC gamer. mostly because my parents always said, "you don't need another reason to sit in front of the tv." so after 20 years of not being allowed to have a console, i purchased a silver nintendo gamecube. it seemed fairly fitting to me that my first console would be a nintendo. and since i get bored by shooting things, i'll take a game about really frigging cute sentient plants.

~3.14

happy pi day.

(does that mean the rest of the world celebrates it on 22 July? ;)

rant.

taking a break from interesting posts because no one's commenting anyway ;)

but holy shit, could fedex's website be any less useful for finding locations? i mean, seriously. their fedex/kinko's site is great, you can search by town, state, zip code or whatever. but in order to search for any dropoff point, you need to:
a) have an exact address (great for when you have a co-worker on the phone in Reno "yeah, i know you've never been there, but can you give me the exact street address for where you are? and what's the zip code?")
b) use internet explorer only
c) not trust the results anyway (funny how 100 W Main st turns into 212 N Walnut St when you click for directions).
and, even more helpful, they don't provide any option for feedback for their website! geez, i guess they know how much it sucks.

*sigh* i'll still use them over ups any day, though.

arghargharghargh.

deep breath. deep breath. ooo, tea. forget lapsang. golden yunnan is the single malt of the black tea world. smoky and leathery and not at all like drinking an infusion of bacon. on a completely different note, new favourite site.

sorry, adrenaline makes me a little (more) absentminded (than usual).

what the fuck? - UPDATED

blogger is entirely broken. i apologize for the reposts, but i can't even delete them.

2:48pm - their server seems to be playing nicely now. duplicate posts deleted.

An open letter to President Bush

Dear Mr. President and GOP Supporters,

It may not be the best idea to tout to a generation that watched Enron, Worldcom, the dot-coms, et al blow up (not to mention the mutual fund scandals), to a generation which is already disillusioned with and distrustful of government, to a generation that is going to have to deal with the massive deficit you're leaving, that the government cut the promised retirement safety line and instead, that it should trust Wall St.

Just a suggestion.

well, duh.

so, despite the fact that this winter has been cold and snowy and icy, it hasn't been anything near what a winter at the University of Hoth inflicted on me in the past. which has made me very puzzled as to why i appeared to be suffering the cold with quite a bit less stoicism this year. was it just that i was unused to the arctic chill knifing its way through my bones? i asked myself.

and then, last night, it hit me. i don't have a hood anymore. oh duh :P

when we packed up our stuff prior to getting married, naturally some of mine ended up at my in-laws' place. and my brother-in-law, finding my heavy winter coat, appropriated it without asking about its origins, because that's what their family is like (drives me nuts sometimes :) he subsequently decided that he didn't like the hood, which was removable. so he removed it and promptly lost it. and now i have nothing to protect my ears or my head anymore.

apparently, one should never underestimate the amount of heat one loses through one's head after all o.O

i need to buy a hat.

disclaimer.

with all the adverse publicity recently around people who blog from or about work, i just felt like pointing out that even though i do both (check out my timestamps ;) i have never mentioned my company by name, nor any real identifiable information about it. i have to wonder, i suppose, if i can do it, why can't anyone else?

i guess i just don't draw any sense of identity from my job.

sideways.

saw it saturday night. it had been on my list of movies to see since i read about it, and then it won the oscar for best adapted screenplay, so we figured, what the hell.

it was a good movie, definitely. probably the most mature movie i've seen in a very long time. i think, possibly, the only problem i had with it was that it didn't really explore thomas hayden church's character (jack) fully, and it's left me with a strangely unfulfilled feeling. he's set up as a playboy; he's getting married, but is insistent that he's going to get laid multiple times while on his one last week of bachelor freedom in california's wine country. alright, that's a fairly common occurance, no one is shocked.

then, he meets this woman who he claims he's falling in love with. he goes so far as to postulate that he call his fiancee and "postpone" the wedding. even after she discovers he's getting married, he picks up another chick and goes home with her.

then, suddenly, he breaks down in a very dramatic scene, insisting he can't lose his fiancee because she's all he has and without her, he's nothing. now, you understand this is supposed to be his facade tearing away. but it just seems so...so...out of place. it's not followed up by any indication he's going to be faithful to this woman once he marries her. it's not followed up by practically anything. the main character undergoes some further development, but after that one outburst, jack is just pretty much dropped. it's just very...strange. usually after a character has his walls broken down, some sort of change is usually intimated.

did anyone else see the movie? was there something incredibly subtle that i missed?

i am not a morning person.

but damn, this was an absolutely gorgeous late winter morning. a fresh snowpack (6 inches on monday, and it hasn't got above freezing yet), a bright sun shining in a cloudless, clear blue sky. and minimal wind.

the last third or so of my walk to work takes me on a path through a park along a wide creek. it's my favorite part of the walk, no contest. and in the clear morning sunshine, assuming my ears aren't about to freeze and fall off, it never fails to cheer me up.

then, of course, i get to my windowless office with buzzing flurescent lights and all that goes out the window. but what the hell, it's nice while it lasts. it's not nearly so effective in the afternoon, when i hit the park first and the streets after. and there's something different about the quality of the light when the sun is rising and when it's setting. although at least i get to see sunset now.

the equinox approacheth.

now here's a good idea.

why don't we do this?

probably because many of our industrial farms are significantly larger in size, we have more land and more people in general. i'm not sure how something like that would translate to a larger scale.

but i do think it's definitely something we ought to look at. and hey, if people keep guying organic and so forth food like they have been, maybe it'll happen naturally without the need for legislation.

or am i being too optimistic? ;)

oscar.

there was no oscar party this year, but we watched the show anyway. well, most of it. i missed the red carpet and morgan freeman. but we saw the rest.

i have to say, it was possibly a little silly of me to watch them this year, as i had seen even less of the nominated movies than usual. although i had read a fair bit about most of them. in fact, i think i saw...The Incredibles. oh, and Shrek 2. that may have been it. i wanted to see Finding Neverland and Sideways, but somehow i never got around to it. i have a terrible history of not seeing movies. i still haven't seen Titanic. although i'm not really sure i'm missing anything, best picture oscar notwithstanding. we all know the movie that wins the best picture oscar is not always the best movie (*cough*Gladiator*cough*).

i have to say, chris rock was a remarkably uncharismatic host. i'm agreeing with the reports that his routine was essentially neutered because ABC is afraid of the FCC. but still. he was just...i don't know. lacking stage presence, i think. the contrast was made even more glaring when they had a tribute to johnny carson. bring back billy crystal, please.

(speaking of tributes, russ meyer died last year? i missed that. bowever, i also noticed that when they credited him with 2 films, they left out his most famous Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill *grin*)

and where on everyone's list of fashion foul-ups is laura linney? sure, her dress was great, but honey, you need to fire your hair and makeup artist, please. blush was way too low on the cheeks, and the hair looked like a cross between a horse mane and the crest on a helmet. and her eye makeup made her look like she'd just come from the clockwork orange reconditioning.

also, note to gwynneth paltrow: when you have a kid, your breasts tend to swell. take that in mind next time you're fitting a dress.

and poor zhang ziyi. she still can't speak english, so why make her read 2 short, practically monosyllabic sentences from the teleprompter ("oscar" is 2 syllables) and then stand there looking uncomfortable the rest of the time? i mean, ok, the oscars are all about pretty people, but i guess the lining up and shooing away of "minor" awards losers wasn't enough humiliation for them.

it was nice to see people who long deserved oscars finally get them, though (morgan freeman, cate blanchett). too bad martin scorcese can't be added to that list. he's five for five, now. and poor johnny depp, snubbed twice in a row. they'll have to be added to the list of "probable honorary oscar winners."

all in all, a moderately unimpressive oscar show, i think. we shall have to see what happens this year.

unsettling signals.

this caught my eye. it's a very long article, so i may quote some stuff here. but it's set my mind running in several different directions at once, so this will probably be a disorganized post.

the first thing i see is, there's something of a distinction between being asked to present your id to travel within the country, and being asked to present a driver's license to rent a car. you see, cars are big, expensive, heavy objects that can kill people. so naturally, we like to be assured that anyone who drives a car has reached some expected standard of skill. therefore, if you run a car rental company, you want to be sure that someone you're giving one of your cars to has attained this skill level. in this circumstance, asking to see a driver's license does not to me seem unreasonable. it's not that you're demanding identification and stashing it in a government database as with airlines, you just want to make sure that this person is not going to a) wreck your expensive machinery b) kill someone c) kill themselves. the same applies for a police officer pulling you over at a traffic stop.

if she had been smart, the gate agent would have told him that the airline has to protect themselves against people suing them when someone steals their ticket. although that still wouldn't explain the database entry.

this is a major point, though:

"Privacy discourse ends up being at one end, 'What have you got to hide?' vs. 'Mind your own business,' " Tien said.

a favorite line is "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear." well, the problem is that human history proves that that's not true. and on the other side, why should the government have to know exactly where you are at all times? i mean, really. they have a mailing address for you. if you're not committing a crime, there's no reason for the government to know where you are. what should we grant them that right? one of his strongest arguments would be that we know that the sept 11 hijackers had driver's licenses. we know what seats they were sitting in on the plane, for fuck's sake.

that's the silliest part about the whole "9/11" thing. after it happened, the government rushed around attempting the CYA trick, and instead enacted a police state for themselves. i mean, what were the major changes to air travel? 1) no more curbside check-in. the hijackers parked in the parking garage. 2) you have to show id at check-in. the terrorists had driver's licenses. 3) you can no longer idle your car outside the terminal to pick up passengers. see 1)

so all that did is inconvenience a lot of legitimate travelers, and even if those restrictions had been in place prior to the attack, they wouldn't have done anything anyway.

the social security number is another thing. there are many times when i wish i could ask someone isn't there another form of identification they could use? but organizations are lazy, and the SSN is easy.

and, you know, i'm not a millionaire. i need to feed myself and pay my mortgage and have a cellphone (what did we do before cellphones? well, as i remember, we had a much less mobile society in general). i'm not in a position to demand that my cellphone company stop using my social as my PIN. and i'm certainly not in a position to point out how utterly ridiculous it is to use the SSN as your identification for your financial credit. or medical history, of all things. those of us caught in the system can't actually do a lot in the way of fighting it. so i guess i'm posting to my blog instead of insisting my cellphone company doesn't need a government issued id to give me service, as long as i'm paying them, dammit. however, i do encourage everyone to check out and support the EFF. and maybe at least think about it the next time someone demands id, think about exactly what they're going to do with it, why they want it, and who else could get a hold of it.

To some, Gilmore's argument is redolent of the conspiracy theories from the black helicopter crowd.

"That's the problem. How it sounds," Gilmore said. He waved his hands like some Cassandra: "They have all these secret laws! The UFOs are coming! They have guards at every airport!" Yes, he said, there is a certain odd flavor to the notion that someone shouldn't have to show ID to board a plane, but with magnetometers at the gates, guards with security wands, fortified cockpit doors and sky marshals abounding, Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read.