The latest from Legal Blog Watch
- One More Consequence of Being a 'Nonessential' Government Employee: Surrender Your BlackBerry in a Shutdown
- Urine Sample Collector Will Be 'Directly Observing the Urine Coming Straight Out of Your Body,' Thank You Very Much
| One More Consequence of Being a 'Nonessential' Government Employee: Surrender Your BlackBerry in a Shutdown | Top |
| The Washington Post reports that an unexpected casualty of any government shutdown may be the BlackBerrys and other PDAs of "nonessential" government workers. Under the Anti-Deficiency Act, it is illegal for nonessential federal employees to voluntarily work during a shutdown. According to the Post, "in the modern era, that means they can't use e-mail or voice mail." Plans to make sure the government complies with this act are still up in the air, but a senior administration official told the Post that "one plan under consideration would require nonessential executive-branch workers to surrender their government-issued BlackBerrys and other electronic devices on the way out the door." In what would be the first shutdown in the PDA era, the rules for PDAs are likely to be "haphazard." For example, some members of Congress have reportedly told their staffs that they may "read but not write" on their PDAs. One group that should be well-prepared for the sudden loss of their PDAs is the SEC Union (National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 293). As I wrote here last year, when SEC leadership issued hundreds of BlackBerrys last year to employees so they could have "all the tools they need whenever they're called upon... | |
| Urine Sample Collector Will Be 'Directly Observing the Urine Coming Straight Out of Your Body,' Thank You Very Much | Top |
| There are some times that a man simply does not want to have a stranger "directly observe the urine coming straight out of his body." Am I right, men? Is it really necessary to require a guy to provide a urine sample in a fashion that allows the "collector" of this test to have constant "visibility of the participant's genitalia?" [Sidenote: It now occurs to me that the following conversation has probably taken place at some point in history: Q: What do you do for a living? A: I'm a collector. Q: What do you collect? A: Urine samples.] Moving on. Via How Appealing I see that on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that if a urine sample collection company wants to have a rule that its collectors shall directly observe the urine coming straight out of a man's body, with visibility of that man's genitalia, well, that is just fine with the 6th Circuit. Was this "direct observation" an overly intrusive, unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment? No sir, the 6th Circuit held, because the appellant had agreed to undergo drug testing and [t]he government had a strong-indeed, a compelling-interest in... | |
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