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>> You obviously vote Republican.

You obviously have no idea as to what the political position is of anyone in office. Democrats are just as "guilty" of poorly thought-out legistlation as Republicans. Members of both parties are given to rash, ill-advised, and hasty decisions made in the name of "National Security." A little education might be in order before you go making such blanket statements as the one above. I suggest you start here, here or here.

And how you got modded as Informative and not as a Troll is beyond me. Makes me wish that I hadn't burned up my mod points yesterday.

> but I'd like to avoid having data about me being gathered and correlated unnecessarily.

Well, that's is why there is the European Union Privacy Directive, which regulates what kind of data may be stored and processed, and what other rights you have on your data.
Here is a summary from the US point of view.

You're absolutely right; the LEAs DO have to jump through hoops to do legitimate, legal wiretaps. I don't see anything wrong with that, but it's really beside the point.

Because, you see, we're not talking about legitimate, legal wiretaps. It's all about the wiretaps that are being done by, say, the LAPD as parts of massive, unconstitutional cash grabs.

Gee, maybe there needs to be better protection against such abuse? Maybe the CALEA system needs to be secured?

As for the point of my post, I'd like to note that I was referring to the Clinton Administration's attempts to enforce key escrow. Seven prominent cryptographers and security experts stated that key escrow carried this sort of risk. Are they just ignorant? Was key escrow demonized by the media, too?

Pal, I take the Fourth Amendment seriously. I do my best to educate myself about topics like CALEA and key escrow, and I'm careful about who I trust for information. CALEA is the fucking mess that the cipherpunks and other civil liberties organizations claimed it would be-- period. Key escrow, thank God, didn't become mandatory, so it died. I'm just drawing a fuckign parallel.

Evidence has shown that email harvesters don't even *try* to parse even the simplest email obfuscation techniques (kevin at fury dot com, or changing the @ to an html entity).

These are widespread practices and yet spammers don't care about spending the effort to reach that 5% who so adamantly don't want to be reached.

Unless greymail is used by more than a quarter of *all* email readers, history has shown that the spammers just won't care.

Companies today don't give a rat's ass about you. All they want is a bunch of robots paying them as little as possible. Everyone is replaceable. If you understand that and embrace it, you can always have the last laugh. Before you leave make sure you have something lined up to go to. As soon as you start at your new job, decide how long you want to stay there (3,4,5 years), and what kind of position you would want at that time. Never stay at a company for more than 6 years. During the time you're at the new job, study,read, and learn what it takes to be able to perform that new position. If the company offers training, great, but don't rely on them 100%. It's your responsibility to improve yourself. Once the time limit has been reached, if you haven't been promoted to the position you've been planning , go on a job hunt again. I once made the mistake of staying 8 years with a company. In the end, the company screwed me over, and I had to take a pay cut and a lower position just to get a new job.

Also, become more active politically. Write to your congressman about getting these excemptions to the labor laws reversed.Join organizations like (http://www.cdt.org/),(http://www.acm.org),(http:/ /www.cpsr.org),(http://www.eff.org) . Laws against us have been passed because we aren't political enough. Look at UCITA. Vendors tried to screw us over one more time. We became organized, and now we are in a stalemate. It's not dead yet, but its certaintly not being enacted on a grand scale.

Unions are not an answer. They have their own adgendas and they kill and calcify whole industries once they take hold.

its the spam that comes from it that has people complaining. See recently slashdotted article: click here

Some german going by the name Tels has made an in-depth study of his spam levels going back to Oct. 1998. The daily graph is most interesting. In the last six months his daily total has been growing faster than his average total, indicating that he is receiving spam at an increasingly faster rate. Of course, his experience is completely anecdotal, but it does jibe nicely with what the MS-AOL-Disney folks are saying, and it provides a nice visual. If their word is to be believed, and I think it is in this case, then the problem is getting worse faster and faster. Tels' data certainly suggests that it is.

I also found a good study by the Center for Democrocy & Technology. They created several hundred email accounts and used them in ways that would reveal how spammers discover them. They found that the most common method spammers used to discover valid email addresses is eploying spiders to crawl the web for them.

This suggests a simple measure that could be immediately effective in the short run if it were widely implemented. The CDT suggests that when you would like to post your email address to a website you should post it using HTML numeric entities. Webmasters can go even further. Encode the email addresses for your users before saving them to the database or a file. This is easy to do and will, in some small part, save your patrons from email hell.

Apparently, the vast majority of email harvesters use a plain text search for parsing web pages and do not evaluate html entities. This is why the above method can only work in the short term. If websites start implementing the above method en masse, the spiders will start parsing for HTML entities and the method will no longer work. Same with human readable forms that the study mentioned.

This is why we must have legislation to deal with spam. Technical solutions just won't work effectively in an environment as open as the Internet. It will inevitably be an arms race between the spammers and the spam fighters, resulting in an internet that may be more secure, but less usable. Therefore, we must look in another direction. If our nation were to legislate effective deterrents for spammers operating in the U.S., other countries would follow suit. As it becomes increasingly difficult for spammers to hide overseas, it becomes increasingly viable to sanction governments that allow spammers to operate within their borders. Cutting them off at the net-block level also becomes increasingly viable as the number of net blocks that harbor spammers decreases.

Why didn't this get a mention in Slashback as well? I haven't seen any sign of this facinating story on slashdot yet. I'm sure everyone would find it to be of interest.

By far the most spam was sent to addresses harvested from web pages. Postings to Usenet newsgroups came in a distant second. On Usenet, posters to groups like alt.sex.erotica will receive vastly more spam than those posting to misc.industry.insurance.

Even the most simple sort of address obfuscation ("lwn at lwn.net") appears to be highly effective.

Dictionary attacks (simply trying login names from a list) result in a significant amount of delivered spam. Short account names are more likely to receive this sort of spam than longer ones.

Contrary to expectations, the WHOIS domain name database is not a big source of spam.

Most web sites honor their promises regarding unsolicited email - but you do have to be careful about making your wishes clear.

The ACLU has a good summary of what you're asking for here: http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID =12263&c=206

The EFF has their analysis here: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_ militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html.

And the Center for Democracy & Technology has a long list of links here: http://www.cdt.org/security/usapatriot/analysis.sh tml

Now go read at least one of these links before making anymore comments on how you don't think the Patriot act isn't bad for your freedom. EnkiduEOT

The ACLU has a good summary of what you're asking for here: http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID =12263&c=206

The EFF has their analysis here: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_ militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html.

And the Center for Democracy & Technology has a long list of links here: http://www.cdt.org/security/usapatriot/analysis.sh tml

Now go read at least one of these links before making anymore comments on how you don't think the Patriot act isn't bad for your freedom. EnkiduEOT

The CDT report - entitled "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" - analyzes a 2002 Pennsylvania law that forces ISPs to block access to any web site deemed "child pornography" without notice to the site's publisher and without any opportunity to challenge the determination. ISPs are required to block the sites even if they do not host the content and have no relationship whatsoever with the publishers of the content. The Pennsylvania Attorney General has since gone even further, bypassing the law's inadequate court procedures to simply demand by letter that sites be blocked.

CDT.org

More News

I have posted an HTML version of the report at http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.sh tml . Thanks for your interesting comments, I am collecting them for ideas for future research projects. Mike

Why so touchy on the subject of 'Microsoft Bashing'? The ability to thumb our noses at monopolies and bad government is an american pass-time (there is plenty of prior art if you look in the history books).

Could it be you own large amounts of Microsoft stock? Do you work at the company? Or, are you just ignorant of the findings in the antitrust case?

Feel free to bash the open source community, Apple Computing, Sun, HP, IBM, or anyone else you find loathsome. Don't tell me how to regulate my expression (only CowboyNeal and the gang can do that here).

(this almost begs a new discussion on how the supreme court views freedom of expression online - you probably wouldn't like what they have to say about it)

Interestingly monitoring internet activity may not even rise to the level of being a wiretap. Wiretap are relatively carefully regulated thanks to President Nixon (in an indirect way!) but methods analogous to the old fashioned pen register and mistakenly thought less dangerous may be applicable to the internet.

And if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) comes into play, watch out.

Analogies are a risky thing, so legislation explicitly addressing internet privacy would seem be a prudent step. Maybe after we win the war on terrorism. Maybe.

For those highly interested, CDT released a study [pdf] today on the Penn. law that is the subject of this Salon article.

We argue that the law is unconstitutional and unwise. The statute has been used hundreds of times in recent months to force Pennsylvania ISPs to block access to web sites deemed child pornography, but without any notice to the users who are blocked or any meaningful chance to challenge the determinations.

The law raises interesting constitutional and technical problems. Because ISPs respond to the Penn. orders by blocking access to an IP address, they inevitably block any innocent domains with the same address. Also, this approach -- now being considered by other states -- scales very poorly (~400 notices from Pennsylvania in six months, multiply that by a couple of years and 50 states and dozens of countries and you're looking at a lot of routing table exceptions to maintain.)

Ben Edelman at Harvard's Berkman Center released a related report this week. Ben has found that two-thirds of all .com, .net, and .org sites are hosted on web servers with 50 or more domain names - meaning that many sites might be vulnerable to this form of IP address blocking. "Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance" is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/ip-sha ring/

More info about the Penn. law and CDT's report "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" can be found at http://www.cdt.org/speech/

For those highly interested, CDT released a study [pdf] today on the Penn. law that is the subject of this Salon article.

We argue that the law is unconstitutional and unwise. The statute has been used hundreds of times in recent months to force Pennsylvania ISPs to block access to web sites deemed child pornography, but without any notice to the users who are blocked or any meaningful chance to challenge the determinations.

The law raises interesting constitutional and technical problems. Because ISPs respond to the Penn. orders by blocking access to an IP address, they inevitably block any innocent domains with the same address. Also, this approach -- now being considered by other states -- scales very poorly (~400 notices from Pennsylvania in six months, multiply that by a couple of years and 50 states and dozens of countries and you're looking at a lot of routing table exceptions to maintain.)

Ben Edelman at Harvard's Berkman Center released a related report this week. Ben has found that two-thirds of all .com, .net, and .org sites are hosted on web servers with 50 or more domain names - meaning that many sites might be vulnerable to this form of IP address blocking. "Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance" is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/ip-sha ring/

More info about the Penn. law and CDT's report "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" can be found at http://www.cdt.org/speech/

I think the "kids under 13" rule is in order to comply with the COPPA which forbids collecting information online from children under 13. But then again, this is slashdot so you can safely assume I'm talking out of my ass.

by Adam C. Engst <ace@tidbits.com>

Much has been written about what's wrong with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After all, it's been used to jail programmers, threaten professors, and censor publications, and because of it, foreign scientists have avoided traveling to the U.S. and prominent researchers have withheld their work. In a white paper about the unintended consequences of the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the DMCA chills free expression and scientific research, jeopardizes fair use, and impedes competition and innovation. In short, this is a law that only the companies who paid for it could love.

<http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_conseq uences.html >
<http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html>
<http://anti-dmca.org/>

Just who are we talking about here? Primarily the large movie studios and record labels, who own the copyrights on vast quantities of content and who have been working with one another and via their industry associations, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), to control how we are allowed to interact with that content. Their unity of purpose and storm-trooper tactics have led some to dub them the Content Cartel.

<http://www.riaa.org/>
<http://www.mpaa.org/>

However, the DMCA is merely one link in a chain that's being used by the Content Cartel and many others to restrict access to the shared cultural heritage of the world, and in the process, extract money from our pockets, stifle innovation and competition, and protect entrenched interests.

DMCA and Trusted Systems -- I recently attended a talk by Professor Tarleton Gillespie <tlg28@cornell.edu> of Cornell University in which he made a compelling argument for how the Content Cartel is using the legal force of the DMCA to direct us down a path where content cannot exist outside of a trusted system, which is a set of hardware, software, and file formats that all agree on what the user is allowed to do with a piece of content. (The trust here is between the pieces of the system, because the content owners don't trust their customers at all.) The trusted system's goals are simple - to eliminate all unauthorized uses and create a situation where we pay more for the content we consume.

A trusted system could prevent you not only from copying a CD or DVD, but also from listening to the CD more than a certain number of times in a day or skipping commercials on a DVD or on broadcast television. Along with requiring us to buy new hardware to play such content and buy new protected versions of the content we already own, a trusted system could have another ill effect. That's because it could prevent us from working with content we would create, using tools such as those Apple kindly provides in iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto. In the worst case scenario, Apple could lose not just the Mac's current digital media advantage in the marketplace, but the ability to work with digital media at all. See Cory Doctorow's article on the broadcast flag in TidBITS-642 for more on this disturbing possibility.

< http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06901>

Professor Gillespie illustrated how this could happen with a discussion of the awkwardly named Content Scramble System (CSS), used to prevent people from copying DVDs, and the DeCSS software created by a Norwegian teenager with help from others on the Internet to build a Linux DVD player.

(A brief aside: DeCSS violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, which ban devices or services that are designed primarily to circumvent copy prevention technologies, that have only limited commercially significant purpose other than circumvention, or that are marketed for circumvention. The DMCA was signed into law in large part to bring the U.S. into compliance with a pair of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties that require anti-circumvention protections in the copyright law of signatory nations. You might think Norway would be included among the nations signing these WIPO treaties, but in fact, only 37 countries have signed on, including the U.S. and Japan, along with the likes of Kyrgyzstan, Gabon, and Paraguay. We're not talking about full international support here, especially in contrast to the 149 signatories to the more general and long-standing Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.)

<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/ip/wct/>
<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/ip/berne/>

In particular, Professor Gillespie focused on three defenses used in the court case filed against Eric Corley, publisher of the hacker magazine 2600, by eight movie studios to prevent 2600 from publishing the DeCSS software. Although Eric Corley didn't create DeCSS, he made it available on the 2600 Web site. His lawyers' defenses focused on ways DeCSS might escape the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA, which was the law under which the case was being tried.

Let's look at these defenses, all of which the court eventually dismissed in ruling for the movie studios and enjoining 2600 magazine from posting the DeCSS code. A subsequent appeal also failed, and the defendants chose not to appeal again to the Supreme Court (probably a wise move - this particular case struck me as fairly weak).

<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/2000 0830_ny_amended_opinion.pdf>
<http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/200111 28_ny_appeal_decision.html>

Create a Linux Player -- The primary defense that Eric Corley's legal team, funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), advanced was that CSS was reverse engineered and DeCSS written to further the development of a DVD player for Linux, which allegedly had no way of playing DVDs at the time (four players are available now; see the Linux Journal review linked below for details). Unfortunately, the judge deemed the defense utterly irrelevant because the DMCA offers no relief based on motivation. In short, if a technology violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, the purpose for which that technology was created simply doesn't matter. The judge also wasn't impressed with the fact that DeCSS is actually a Windows program, so although it could be argued that it was a necessary step in the creation of a Linux DVD player, it's a weak argument.

<http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=564 4>

The obstacle that actually lies in the way of creating a DVD player is the lack of a key to decrypt the CSS encryption used on DVDs. The only way to come by such a key is to sign a contract licensing CSS from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA), a group made up of companies representing the movie studios, consumer electronics companies, and the computer industry. At $15,500, the licensing cost is not usurious, but the contract effectively prevents individuals and small organizations from licensing CSS. For instance, in the event of a material breach of contract, the licensee is liable for $1 million, and damages can grow to a maximum of $8 million. In addition, the contract prevents licensees from reverse engineering CSS or working in any way counter to the goal of CSS's protection of DVDs.

Put simply, the CSS license is the sort of thing only large companies can reasonably sign, so it's clear that the effect of the DVD CCA contract is to keep newcomers out of the cozy little club. Perhaps that wasn't a likely concern before the age of the Internet, but the rise of Linux and the open source movement shows that small, informal groups organized over the Internet can produce software that threatens the largest of companies.

The end result here is that innovation is stifled. Companies that license CSS cannot, even if they wanted to, produce products that consumers might like to buy, such as DVD recorders that could copy a DVD. That keeps new companies, niche players, or even independent programmers from competing with the consumer electronics giants with innovative features that in any way run afoul of CSS. So although the consumer electronics companies might not have minded consumers copying DVDs, since they would sell the equipment to make that happen, it's worthwhile for them to abide by CSS to eliminates potential competition.

Equally as problematic is that the CSS license's numerous requirements force the consumer electronics firms to be technologically responsible for regulating our movie viewing and copying behaviors for the studios. Signing this draconian contract is an all-or-nothing deal, so the movie studios have cleverly managed to pass off the dirty work of technological regulation on everyone else (they just produce the content; the DVD and player manufacturers must implement CSS). It's a big step toward a trusted system in which all the parties are bound by the CSS contract.

(As an aside, another effect of the CSS contracts is also to move the entire issue from the world of copyright law, where there is at least some presumption of needing to benefit the public, into the world of contract law, which doesn't give a damn about the public good. If this continues to the logical extreme, the concept of copyright, and unauthorized access to any content, could be locked up forever in simple contracts that lie underneath a trusted system's technologies, all backed up by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.)

Perform Encryption Research -- Another defense that Eric Corley's lawyers put forth was that DeCSS was created as research into the CSS encryption method, since the DMCA does allow copy-prevention technologies to be circumvented for encryption research. However, the DMCA specifically requires that the encrypted copy be obtained lawfully and that the person performing the research make a good faith effort to obtain authorization in advance. In addition, the decryption tools from such research may be shared only with collaborators for good faith research purposes - in other words, distributing these tools publicly isn't kosher.

Note the words good faith above. In determining whether encryption research is good faith, the judge said the court must determine whether the results are disseminated in a way that advances the state of knowledge of encryption technology, whether the person is engaged in legitimate study of work in encryption, and whether the results are communicated to the copyright owner in a timely fashion. Deciding that none of these tests were true of Eric Corley, the judge dismissed out of hand the claims that DeCSS had protection under the encryption research exception to the DMCA.

Looking past the specifics of this case, consider the ways in which encryption research is considered to be in good faith. You must be a legitimate researcher, have a goal of advancing the state of knowledge, and have at least made an effort to get authorization from the copyright owner. Now think about how these requirements completely disenfranchise the interested individuals and the Internet technical geek community. What does it take to be considered a legitimate researcher - a white coat, thick glasses, and a job with a university, corporation, or government body?

What we're seeing here is how the DMCA in essence props up the status quo, denying that legitimate research could be done outside the halls of academia or a company's R&D department. Left on the outside are the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers... oh hell, go read the rest of Here's to the crazy ones from Apple's Think Different ad campaign for yourself. Whether we're talking about Apple's target audience or the open source community that has had Microsoft running scared is immaterial. The point is that the DMCA, supported by this court ruling, prevents that sort of person from doing anything that's not sanctioned.

<http://www.apple.com/thinkdifferent/>

Report as a Journalist -- A third defense that Eric Corley's lawyers offered was that posting DeCSS was protected by the First Amendment's protection of the press, and by the First Amendment in general. It took the judge significantly longer to dispose of this defense, since free speech issues are notoriously tricky, but in the end, he concluded that the speech in this case is content-neutral due to the functional nature of the DeCSS code. He then went on to note that regulation of content-neutral speech is acceptable if it advances the government's interests and that preventing the copying of digital works is a government interest due to the existence of the Copyright Clause in the U.S. Constitution and the importance to the U.S. economy of exporting copyrighted materials.

If you haven't looked at the Constitution recently, the Copyright Clause reads, To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Personally, I come down on the side of copyright existing to benefit society through the progress of science and the useful arts, and only secondarily to give authors and inventors exclusive rights. By my reading, the government interest thus lies in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, and there's no question that the DMCA eliminates progress.

<http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constit ution.articlei.html>

But I digress. The final result of the case was that Eric Corley and 2600 may not post DeCSS on their Web site or knowingly link their Web site to any other site on which DeCSS is posted. The decision was worded carefully so that linking in general would not be affected by the DMCA, but only in cases where those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

In other words, it's acceptable to link to DeCSS if your intent is not to disseminate DeCSS, but merely to report on its availability, a fact I proved to my satisfaction with a trivial Google search on download DeCSS that provided over 17,000 hits, many of them still functional. You can verify this for yourself; just remember that DeCSS is only for Windows.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=download+DeCSS>

Here's where Professor Gillespie's argument becomes a bit more speculative. Although the court went no further in this case, he suggested that in any future cases in which the legitimacy of linking was called into question, he felt that the court would include in its deliberation the nature of the publication in question. For example, if the New York Times chose to link to DeCSS or some other technology that violated the DMCA (as in fact the San Jose Mercury News and Wired News have, in making the point that a ban on linking is seriously problematic), he felt that the court would have little trouble accepting the journalistic intent of the link. On the other hand, if some silly little electronic newsletter aimed at Macintosh and Internet users were to perform the same action, he was concerned that it would be more difficult to make the same defense. And if TidBITS wouldn't match up to the journalistic level of the New York Times in the eyes of a theoretical court, what about a blogger?

The end result would be that this court's interpretation of the DMCA could have the same effect of stabilizing the large news organizations in favor of the small newsletters and bloggers who are redefining what journalism means in today's Internet-enabled world. Speaking as someone who has done some of that redefining over the last 12 years, that worries me.

Regime of Arrangement -- In the end, Professor Gillespie argues that the true power of the DMCA is not so much related to its effect on copyright but these ways it weaves established organizations like large manufacturing corporations, research universities, and media conglomerates into what Professor Gillespie calls a regime of arrangement.

Don't assume that these established institutions are necessarily being co-opted against their will. Apple's Think Different campaign reads like a manifesto for the very people who are disenfranchised under this regime of arrangement, and yet Apple is a member of the DVD CCA, and, obviously, a licensee of CSS for the DVD hardware and software that comes with the Mac. The open source community has proved the power of teams of independent programmers as an alternative to the traditional software development model, not to mention the ivory towers of research institutions. Distance education hints at the decline of the traditional university, and entrenched media organizations have struggled for years with the way the Internet lets anyone be a publisher.

If there's one theme we take into the 21st century, it's decentralization, and you can see it everywhere. The PC overtaking the mainframe, Napster changing the face of music distribution despite the recording industry's best efforts, DeCSS causing the movie studios conniptions, Linux successfully challenging the mighty Microsoft's server operating systems, even the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - all are examples of the power of decentralization and the ever-increasing clash between these forces of decentralization and the centralized power structures that control everything about our world. I have no answers here, but I'd note that despite the awesome power of both systems, I'm seeing the forces of decentralization making significant inroads.

What Can We Do? I've been attending a number of talks on copyright and intellectual property issues at Cornell over the last year. Almost without exception, the talks are warnings of dark times ahead (obviously, most are slanted toward the academic and library worlds), but at the same time, none have offered any suggestions for how we can work to reverse the efforts on the part of the Content Cartel to lock up our cultural heritage and stifle innovation for the future.

At a recent talk by Alan Davidson of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), I chatted with Alan afterwards about this problem, and he agreed it was a concern, but had no silver bullet to prevent the hordes of well-funded Content Cartel lobbyists from having their way with our elected representatives. I, too, have trouble knowing what will be effective, but I offer these possibilities.

<http://www.cdt.org/>

• Spread the word to everyone you know. In most cases, the best argument is probably that the entire situation is a move on the part of big business to make everyone buy new consumer electronics and new copies of all of their content. If the Content Cartel gets their way, it will cost you. In some situations, making the intellectual commons argument - that our culture needs access to its cultural heritage to grow - can be effective, though it's generally too abstract. Try to avoid sounding like a zealot (I know it's hard: every time I hear of the latest attempt on the part of these companies to criminalize their customers, it makes me want to spit.)

• Support civil liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and CDT that are working to protect our rights. As you'll see in the PayBITS block at the end of this article, I plan to donate all the proceeds from this article to the EFF to help do my part.

<http://www.eff.org/>

• Between 19-Nov-02 and 18-Dec-02, write to the Library of Congress with any evidence you can provide on whether non-infringing uses of certain types of copyrighted materials are likely to be adversely affected by the DMCA's anti-circumvention mechanisms. To get an idea of what they're looking for, I highly recommend reading Dan Bricklin's Copy Protection Robs the Future essay, in which he talks about his efforts to post an original copy of VisiCalc, the ground-breaking spreadsheet program he created.

<http://www.copyright.gov/1201/comment_forms/>
<http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm>

• Express your concerns to your elected representatives whenever appropriate. EFF maintains an action center that makes it extremely easy to write your appropriate representatives. While you're at it, you might ask how it is that an entire industry is allowed to create a restrictive technology like CSS, require highly limiting contracts, and influence legislation (the DMCA). One of the industry witnesses in the Corley case testified that this three-pronged approach was exactly what the movie studios aimed at creating. Ironically, given that the end goal is a trusted system, this sounds a whole lot like the legal definition of a trust, which is a combination of corporations for the purpose of reducing competition and controlling prices throughout an industry.

<http://action.eff.org/>

I have to admit, I'm worried that none of this will be enough. The Content Cartel has the aura of celebrity on their side - they're protecting the rock stars and movie stars who sit at the pinnacle of today's society. They're the cool kids, whereas the people who campaign for civil liberties are often considered dull and overly earnest. My main ray of hope is that the reason most of the software industry voluntarily gave up copy protection technologies - primarily that consumers hated copy protection - will rise again, but unless we speak out now, all of our content may be locked up in a trusted system protected by the DMCA.

Some related items: there are rumblings of possible alternatives and here is a paper presented by the Centre for Democracy and Technology to the Shanghai conference yesterday, which outlines a few suggestions as to how things might be improved.

Some related items: there are rumblings of possible alternatives and here is a paper presented by the Centre for Democracy and Technology to the Shanghai conference yesterday, which outlines a few suggestions as to how things might be improved.

This bill is not new news (see Wired article) and was introduced so late in the session of the 107th Congressthat it has no chance of passing (introduced on Oct 10 with only 6 working days left). Basically, it is a feel good measure for chest-thumping politicians with no real expectation of the bills passage. Neither Kyl or Wyden are up for re-election this year but opposing "repressive regimes" and supporting the "free world" always makes good sound bites.

If you based "repressive" on the laws passed, we would qualify... CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act - 106th H.R.4577 - law 106-554), COPA (Child Online Protection Act - 105th H.R.4328 - law 105-277), CPPA (The Child Pornography Protection Act - 104th H.R.3610 - law 104-208), CDA (Communications Decency Act - 104th S.652 - law 104-104), USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism - 107th H.R.3162 - law 107-056),

You can go look at the Center for Democracy and Technology legislative reports and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center and the proliferation of groups like the Center for Digital Democracy, Digital Speech Project, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse to understand that these are not isolated examples.

This bill is not new news (see Wired article) and was introduced so late in the session of the 107th Congressthat it has no chance of passing (introduced on Oct 10 with only 6 working days left). Basically, it is a feel good measure for chest-thumping politicians with no real expectation of the bills passage. Neither Kyl or Wyden are up for re-election this year but opposing "repressive regimes" and supporting the "free world" always makes good sound bites.

If you based "repressive" on the laws passed, we would qualify... CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act - 106th H.R.4577 - law 106-554), COPA (Child Online Protection Act - 105th H.R.4328 - law 105-277), CPPA (The Child Pornography Protection Act - 104th H.R.3610 - law 104-208), CDA (Communications Decency Act - 104th S.652 - law 104-104), USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism - 107th H.R.3162 - law 107-056),

You can go look at the Center for Democracy and Technology legislative reports and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center and the proliferation of groups like the Center for Digital Democracy, Digital Speech Project, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse to understand that these are not isolated examples.

...no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized..., ie a distributed denial of service. Wow. I didn't know thase were legal....

A *real* digital demonstration would be if a group of people each went home, wrote emails to their congresspersons, and sent them off. This would be legal, safe, open, and... probably not so effective. Dead trees are just harder to ignore than emails, and take more work to filter. This is all the more true if those emails are part of a DDOS attack.

In terms of resistance to government tampering, Publius or Free Haven would be a better way to get your ideas around if people would use them, which many people do.

The end user may trust some companies more than others (just like banks). Where would you put your money: Bank of America or Banco Commercial de Buenos Aires?

We can imagine a system where the user simply specifies the degree of trust and the information gets mapped to storage servers transparently. We can even imagine using architectures like Publius or FreeHaven to split the data into slices and have slices spread all over the network.

• Try out different open source packages for various applications. Run through them and find bugs. Check the project's website and report those bugs.
• If you're proficient at programming, contribute code to an open source project.
• Encourage people to run other OSes. For the non-techies, try Lycoris or Elx.
• Find out which congresspersons are sympathetic to this issue and write to them. Find out which one's aren't and write to them, too. Find out which one's are on the fence and write to them as well.
• Contribute money, time, or both to some organization like the EFF, CDT, GNU/FSF, or by purchasing or donating to your favorite open source application and/or linux distro.
• If you are in a tech position at a company or government agency, point out the benefits of going to an open source platform for your organization.
• Put plugs on your personal websites.
• Actively boycott companies who violate these principals. (Note: This does NOT mean companies who sell software. This means companies who try to monopolize the market [Microsoft] or support the DMCA [Adobe].)
• Don't let the bastards wear you down.

Any other ideas?

Not quite. Multiple phone requests for the same person doesn't usually get through, from what I have heard. The big problem is the more phones you tap, the bigger the chance of getting unintended "non-targets" in the mix -- which results in a big problem.

The law states that when a judge authorizes a wiretap, they are also supposed to monitor the way in which things are done. This would create a major paperwork problem, and end up with a lot of info thrown out due to "non-target" intercepts.

BUT, all that is conjecture as I can't find the articles/stats I've seen to back it up. What CAN I document...

PER CAPITA intercepts

1988 = 738 wiretap requests (Reagan 2nd term starts)
1998 = 1,329 wiretap requests (Clinton 2nd term)

Using your number of 20 Million more people -- only 'cause I'm too lazy to look up the exact figure -- that would be a population increase of about 8-9%.

A 738 + 9% = 804, which is a FAR CRY from 1,329. That is a 55% increase, if my math is correct.

Check out this site for a good summary. It also has links to an "authoritative" site -- the U.S. Court System webpage and the officially published stats.

What you smell isn't B.S. "hysterical" stats, it is the B.S. spread telling you Big Brother is doing this for our own good -- stop questioning the gov't.

Okay.

The source for current information is the U.S. Courts website on wiretaps. This covers 1997-2001. Archival information (pre-1997) is available through the U.S. Gov't Printing Office.

What the FBI is allowed to do is summarized on the FBi Website FAQ. I quote the relavant question:

Q. Are FBI Special Agents permitted to install wiretaps at their own discretion?

A. No. Wiretapping is one of the FBI's most sensitive techniques and is strictly controlled by federal statutes. It is used infrequently and then only to combat the most serious crimes and terrorism. Title 18, United States Code, Section 2516, contains the protocol requiring all law enforcement officers to establish probable cause that the wiretaps may provide evidence of a felony violation of federal law. After determining if a sufficient showing of probable cause has been made, impartial federal judges approve or disapprove wiretaps. The approving judge then must continue to monitor how the wiretap is being conducted. Wiretapping without meeting these stringent requirements and obtaining the necessary court orders is a serious felony under the law.

Finally, this site is a good jumping off point for further information on wiretaps and Judicial oversight.

Cites/sites? Sure. Enjoy.

American Civil Liberties Union:
http://www.aclu.org/congress/patriot_chart.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_ militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html

Center for Democracy and Technology:
http://www.cdt.org/security/010911response.shtml

http://www.cdt.org/wiretap/020530guidelines.shtml

Molly Ivans (political columnist):
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12250

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12489


Robert Scheer (political columnist):
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12246

Need more? I've got 'em.

Cites/sites? Sure. Enjoy.

American Civil Liberties Union:
http://www.aclu.org/congress/patriot_chart.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_ militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html

Center for Democracy and Technology:
http://www.cdt.org/security/010911response.shtml

http://www.cdt.org/wiretap/020530guidelines.shtml

Molly Ivans (political columnist):
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12250

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12489


Robert Scheer (political columnist):
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid =12246

Need more? I've got 'em.

Everyone knows ICANN is scum. See also this and this.

And of course the UDRP is dreadful.

However, this proposal reads to me less like a solution to ICANN's well documented track records of cronyism and broken promises, and more like a US powergrab, orchestrated by Republicans who oppose international institutions on principle - a position which has certain merits but which ought to be promoted honestly. Of course, I may be jumping to conclusions since no specifics of the bill are yet available.

For all u eurotrash: In the US, instead of Eurosceptics, we have Republicans, who, instead of hating the EU, hate the UN. American leftists generally support the UN and oppose the WTO. We don't have an international umbrella organisation for both ends of the political spectrum to despise (unless you count the federal guvmint.)

Apparently the bill "directs that the chip [on the license] be capable of accepting software for other applications, including those of private companies".

This isn't about security, it's a taxpayer-funded giveaway of your privacy to big corporations. It'll save them a few bucks lost to fraud and make this even more of an electronic nanny state.

Luckily the EFF spokesman pointed out that "The real thrust... is so that the ID card or driver's license will be even more useful to commercial entities in terms of tracking consumers, doing consumer profiling, telemarketing -- all those kinds of things that people currently consider to be an invasion of privacy."

And the Center for Democracy and Technology calls it a "honeypot".

This has to be fought on the retail level. Hopefully Joe and Jane Public have enough love of freedom left to be skeptical of the government fingerprinting them at the DMV. If it turns out they don't, I'm ashamed of-- and afraid for-- my country.

I am concerned about the fractured effort. Lobbying Congress takes not only a lot of money, but also a lot of focus.

Carnivore sniffs all traffic that passes on the link it is connected to. However, it only stores the data that meets the search criteria that is setup in advance. That search criteria is supposed to match what is contained in the warrant. However, if you read the report that IITRI wrote on Carniovre (of which I am co-author), there is no guarantee that the search criteria is setup correctly. There is no accountability for who setup the search. There is also no chain of custody to prove that the captured data has not been tampered with.

Long before September 11 and last year's virus-like attacks over the Internet, the United States government announced plans to train an elite corps of computer security experts [...]
Oh come on, do you really beleive that?

Sure, this ruling can be used as a reference for cases in the US or UK, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

The real question that you were asking is will anyone in a US court (or elsewhere) listen.

That is far less likely. Especially in the US. Elsewhere in the world, courts are more likely to look at examples of how other countries have grappled with a legal issue and craft laws carefully to ensure the same or a different result. But this happens very seldom in the US.

You *can* cite to international precedent in a US court, just like in court in Kansas you *can* cite examples of what courts in California did under similar circumstances or with similar laws. And if you are really in new ground and the laws really are similar, they might decide to do the same thing. Or they might decide that Those People Over There have nothing to do with Us so who cares what they did or think?

What will also be interesting is to watch how this case and its international implications and developments compare to the Yahoo/LICRA case moving forward in parallel in France and in California.

Liza

COPPA

The original poster's interpretation of the COPPA seems to be badly off.

Don't think it doesn't happen.

Don't think it doesn't happen.

Is it just me or has the EFF proven themselves incompetent? I don't think it's just me. I've seen comments here before pointing to the EFFs lack of real knowledge of issues and the way they've bungled cases. People have pointed to the Center for Democracy and Technology as the people we should throw our support behind.

In my opinion, the article is extremely badly written. Also, it is nonsense, as is easily proven by giving a link to another operating system:

Open BSD: Four years without a remote hole in the default install!

If the Open BSD team can make a secure operating system as volunteers, Microsoft, with a reported $33 billion in the bank, could take one of those billions and clean up their code.

Microsoft's security problems come partly from feeling that they don't have to care, apparently.

Also, maybe there is some secret U.S. government surveillance agency that requires that Microsoft operating systems not be secure. For years the U.S. government tried to prevent cryptography. For example, see these notes from the Center for Democracy and Technology: An overview of Clinton Administration Encryption Policy Initiatives. The notes say, "The long-standing goal of every major encryption plan by the [U.S. government] has been to guarantee government access to all encrypted communications and stored data."

It is not impossible that software insecurity is secret U.S. government policy. The U.S. government is involved in many hidden activities, as this collection of links and explanation shows: What should be the Response to Violence?

The CDT's opt-out resource might be what you're looking for.

Copyright © 2001 Michael D. Crawford. Permission is granted to reproduce this document provided it is copied verbatim, in its entirety and that this copyright statement is preserved.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.

Something must be done about this.

There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.

Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.

When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.

During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.

So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.

I fear what America has become.

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...

The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.

The truth is the first victim of war.

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.

But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.

Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.

You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.

Read about it in Propaganda Wars.

Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.

If you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.

In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.

Among the ways you can speak out

• Participate in online communities
• Send email to people you know
• Write web pages like this one and post the URL around
• Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers
• Staple leaflets to bulletin boards in your community
• Pass out leaflets in public places
• Call in to talk radio shows

Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.

• Volunteer for political candidates you believe in
• Get a bunch of voter registration cards and stand in a public place to register voters
• Donate money to political candidates and parties who respect civil liberties
• Vote
• Write letters to your elected representatives. While you can send email, Congress gets so much spam that they pretty much ignore email these days. Instead, you can find your Congressperson's postal address at www.congress.org - write them a paper letter.

Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.

You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.

Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.

Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.

Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:

• The American Civil Liberties Union - Join Here
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Join Here - the EFF works to protect our civil liberties in the online world, including working to ensure that the work of computer programmers is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring you access to software that guards your security and privacy.
• The Center for Democracy and Technology - Get Involved - working "to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age"
• The Electronic Privacy Information Center - Donate Here - "established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.

And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.

As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):

What must underlie petitioners' (nb. - George W. Bush') entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.

November 12, 2001

Copyright © 2001 Michael D. Crawford. Permission is granted to reproduce this document provided it is copied verbatim, in its entirety and that this copyright statement is preserved.

I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged with the burden of protecting them.

I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat - my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United States Constitution.

In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta, Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield. Each day when we started school we sang patriotic songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood for freedom and democracy and justice.

I loved America for what it stood for.

I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would never again happen in America.

But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it is brought to you by the United States Government.

I am not proud to be an American today. I understand well why people in many other countries hate America. I love America, but I despise what it is rapidly becoming.

Something must be done about this.

There are many things that move me to write this, but what moved to me write this right now is that a member of a registered political party was singled out for harassment, first by American Airlines and then by the United States National Guard because of the opinions she holds.

Nancy Oden, one of the U.S. Green Party's top officials, was traveling to a Green Party national meeting from her hometown airport in Bangor, Maine. She had published a statement that calls for Universal Health Care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to the bombing of Afghanistan.

When she got to the American Airlines ticket counter she was told that there was a record in AA's computer indicating that she should be searched anytime she tried to fly.

During the search, she tried to help the security agent with a stuck zipper. The agent grabbed her arm and she pulled it away. The National Guard instructed the airline not to let her fly. The airline told all the other airlines not to let her fly. She was unable to attend the Green Party meeting.

So an official of a registered political party in the supposedly democratic United States was prevented from participating in the political process because her name had been recorded in a computer as someone who should be treated with suspicion.

I fear what America has become.

Also upsetting to me is the recent decision of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to allow eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations as well as opening of their mail. Read the ACLU press release opposing this.

From the Washington Post article U.S. Will Monitor Calls to Lawyers:

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft approved the eavesdropping rule on an emergency basis last week, without the usual waiting period for public comment. It went into effect immediately, permitting the government to monitor conversations and intercept mail between people in custody and their attorneys for up to a year at a time.

The right to a vigorous legal defense is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is one of the bulwarks that comes between official repression and those who are repressed, underprivileged, despised, outcast, or working for legitimate political change. You can read about the guarantee of legal representation in our Constitution:

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

I don't have a URL to link you to ( mail me one), but I read that among the hundreds of "suspects" and "material witnesses" rounded up in the days after September 11, many were held without charge and some were beaten by their jailers. Also some were held without being given access to attorneys or their families. I thought that could not happen here...

The recently signed USA PATRIOT act is an assault on our civil liberties the likes of which have not been seen in decades.

Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis of USA PATRIOT Act, which largely discusses the law's impact on online activities - did you know that the government can now spy on the key words you search for at search engines like Google and AltaVista? Because computer cracking is now considered terrorism, searching for exploitz can result in your lengthy imprisonment.

The truth is the first victim of war.

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, President Bush said something to the effect that the reason the U.S. was attacked was because the terrorists hated our freedom, and that we must fight the terrorists in order to preserve it.

But Osama bin Laden does not care either way about our freedom. He has made it very clear why he hates the U.S., and none of this has been acknowledged by any official statements that I have heard. What bin Laden objects to are the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of the holy city of Mecca, U.S. support for Israel's repression of the Palestinians, and the continued U.S. bombing of Iraq. More than anything, he feels that the presence of U.S. troops in the Islamic Holy Land is a sacrilege.

Whatever your position is on bin Laden's objections to the U.S., you must agree that it is wrong for our President to lie to us. Get informed, and work to understand the complexities behind the enmity between the Islamic and Western world. It's not as simple as our government would have us believe.

You might be interested to know what the Pentagon is doing to improve the United States' image in the Islamic world. Well, I'll tell you. It has taken out a $400,000 contract with Madison Avenue public relations firm The Rendon Group in an effort to help it "orient to the challenge of communication to a wide range of groups around the world". In addition, former advertising executive Charlotte Beers has been apointed to the post of Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, a position she qualifies for because of her previous work promoting such products as Head & Shoulders shampoo.

Read about it in Propaganda Wars.

Well, its comforting to know that we'll be winning friends in Central Asia by showing professionally produced TV commercials depicting friendly Americans in between the news reports of mutilated and starving Afghani children.

If you, like myself, feel that something is wrong with America these days, or with whatever country you find yourself in, speak out about it.

In this troubled times, speaking openly to inform others of injustice or to protest may result in a backlash against you from government officials or others. Please read this speech on the importance of speaking your mind. Have courage - it is only by having the courage to speak and to work against injustice that we can prevent it from getting a lot worse.

Among the ways you can speak out

• Participate in online communities
• Send email to people you know
• Write web pages like this one and post the URL around
• Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers
• Staple leaflets to bulletin boards in your community
• Pass out leaflets in public places
• Call in to talk radio shows

Secondly, participate in what we have left of the democratic process. Our government has at least the appearance of having been elected, and the easiest way to make a change is to vote out the ones who have brought this upon us.

• Volunteer for political candidates you believe in
• Get a bunch of voter registration cards and stand in a public place to register voters
• Donate money to political candidates and parties who respect civil liberties
• Vote
• Write letters to your elected representatives. While you can send email, Congress gets so much spam that they pretty much ignore email these days. Instead, you can find your Congressperson's postal address at www.congress.org - write them a paper letter.

Use encryption to protect your privacy. Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption as well as my letter Protect Your Rights with Encryption.

You can get encryption software for free - you can use either Pretty Good Privacy or The GNU Privacy Guard. Both offer excellent, military strength protection of your data, and the source code to each is freely available so that programmers are able to inspect it for security defects and back doors.

Teach the people you correspond with to use encryption.

Teach people who work for political change to use encryption. If you don't think political candidates and their staff need to use encryption, you're too young to remember Nixon's Plumbers getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the Democratic National Committe.

Join organizations that work to protect civil liberties. Among these are:

• The American Civil Liberties Union - Join Here
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Join Here - the EFF works to protect our civil liberties in the online world, including working to ensure that the work of computer programmers is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, thereby ensuring you access to software that guards your security and privacy.
• The Center for Democracy and Technology - Get Involved - working "to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age"
• The Electronic Privacy Information Center - Donate Here - "established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

One might think, and one certainly hopes, that the ultimate safeguard against these threats to our civil liberties lies with the Supreme Court of the United States. But I am not so certain myself. The Supreme Court has ruled against the dictates of law and the Constitution during other troubled periods in our nation's history.

And we should remember that the current President received a minority of the popular vote and was only declared to have a majority of the Electoral Vote after an obviously politically motivated ruling by the Supreme Court, a decision that has few pretenses of being based on the rule of law. Even had all the ballots been counted, enough Black Florida citizens were prevented from going to the polls that the election would clearly have gone for Gore had they been allowed to exercise their right to vote.

As said in the dissenting opinion by Justices Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer in Bush v. Gore (note - this is an Adobe Acrobat document):

What must underlie petitioners' (nb. - George W. Bush') entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

We must work together to restore the rule of law in our country - or we shall surely suffer for it. If you do not agree that Fascism can arise in the United States, take heed of the fact that Adolf Hitler was elected as the leader of his country too.

November 12, 2001

I tried submitting this story myself, but guess they didn't like my version, or he got it in first.

Anyway, here's some commentary that I included with version I wrote:

American Civil Liberties Union
Center for Democracy and Technology
Yahoo! News

The EFF makes a wonderful contribution with respect to the legal issues of interest to the technically inclined (read: Geek) comunity, and it's admirable how they spech most of their resources in these pursuits, but honestly, they should take a page from the playbook of the NRA with respect to fund raising if they want to compete with the powerful political action committees that live inside the Washington beltway.

There are also other organizations which deserve your support (financial or otherwise), such as the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Federation of American Scientists which has a number of projects that would be of interest to the /. community.

--CTH

I'd like to see Slashdot start a slashbox for each of the following organizations. The data for the slashbox can be taken directly from their home pages - they each have news headlines that a bit of PERL could pull out very easily. In addition, I'd like to see a section before the headlines labeled "top issues" that can be written by the organization themselves. It would be a space for a link to the issues they think most important.

CDT

ALCU

EFF

These organizations stand for many of the things talked about on Slashdot. Those that feel strongly about any of the issues supported by one of these organizations should join that organization!

Rudy

The RISKS of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption

Was that the Clipper document you were looking for?

This is a great report that was compiled after the whole Clipper chip fiasco by a number of people whole know WAY more about it than I do - including Bruce Schneier.

The bottomline is this - if all the public keys for all traffic in the US is locked in a single location it would become the new Fort Knox. Seriously - you hack that computer and you can open intercepted electronic bank transfers and government classified files.
Stupid, stupid, stupid idea....

=tkk

A technical and economic evaluation by eleven authorities including Ronald Rivest (the "R" in the RSA algorithm) outlining the dangers and impracticalities of key recovery schemes...

The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption