Slashdot Mirror

YES:

The government has not only been intercepting international communications — they've also been intercepting communications that begin and end inside the USA. Even if you've never phoned or emailed outside the US, it's likely that communications you've made have been intercepted by the Bush administration under this program.

We know this through a careful technical analysis of the evidence provided to EFF by whistleblower and former AT&T employee Mark Klein. (You can read the analysis [PDF] and see the evidence [PDF] for yourself.) A March 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal confirmed the program's domestic focus.

Folks, call Congress, it's not too late!

=Tim=
EFF

YES:

The government has not only been intercepting international communications — they've also been intercepting communications that begin and end inside the USA. Even if you've never phoned or emailed outside the US, it's likely that communications you've made have been intercepted by the Bush administration under this program.

We know this through a careful technical analysis of the evidence provided to EFF by whistleblower and former AT&T employee Mark Klein. (You can read the analysis [PDF] and see the evidence [PDF] for yourself.) A March 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal confirmed the program's domestic focus.

Folks, call Congress, it's not too late!

=Tim=
EFF

EFF running story on 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that email and text messages should be considered private, subscribers cannot get the ISPs to release without user consent or a warrant. At least in the U.S. email at work, as long as its 3rd party, cannot be released to your boss. Not entirely on point, but as far as privacy is concerned, this is at least a step in the right direction. http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/new-ninth-circuit-case-protects-text-message-priva

Even earlier, the concept of a world-spanning network of thought had previously been developed by other thinkers predominantly known in the French-speaking world as well (most notably dissident cleric Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) under the name of noosphere - the field of mind(s).

It never seemed to have made much of an impact in English until famously picked up and popularized by Eric S. Raymond (and in another variant referred to by John Perry Barlow as "Cyberspace, the new home of Mind"), recognizing the importance in retrospect when The Net was young.

We operate internationally, including in Canada -- see http://www.eff.org/issues/international . A large number of EFF members live outside the US and our work reflects that (there are three of us who work on these topics full time, plus three interns currently:I'm British, our international legal director is Australian; we work at groups like WIPO and arenas like the European Parliament).

As an aside, if there are any digital rights issues in your country that you think should get wider coverage, or need advice on how to tackle, or technical and logistical support, get in touch with me, danny@eff.org or mail info@eff.org. It really helps us to get feedback and news from our supporters.

Well, for one, it's a copyright case. So federal courts only, no state courts. This part is well-settled law; you can't bring a copyright case in state court because federal law preempts it.

That said, for acts done online, jurisdiction is insane. The rules were written back before the internet, so things go haywire with the internet involved. You need to be a lawyer to understand it all, but the general takeaway I have is that so long as you have "availed" yourself of any jurisdiction, you can probably be sued there, plus or minus some crazy rules wrangling and whatever standards there are in the FRCP for motions asking that the case be removed to a more convenient venue.

So they can probably pick your state, their state, or the state any of the computers involved in the alleged infringement. It's worse when you're publishing something allegedly defamatory; they might be able to pick any of the states you had *readers* in. Who knows? With BitTorrent, they could probably sue you anywhere one of the *peers* is.

That said, in practice, the MAFIAA has nothing whatsoever to gain from forum shopping, so they don't bother. I guess they're barred from bringing multi-party Doe suits in Texas, but to my knowledge, they haven't tried getting around it by forum shopping.

Anyhow, get a real lawyer if you have a case, because I'm trying to gloss over a huge mass of complex rules that could very well have changed since I learned about them. The rules can even vary with the type of case!

Patent courts are the only place I usually hear about forum shopping, because they have a rule that when two cases are brought over the same patent, you go with the first one, and that any change of venue is pretty much at the court's discretion. This means that the patent troll attacks first, sues in Marshall, Texas, and the justice there doesn't bother with transfer motions much, and that's that. Even so, I reported on a case a while back where they might limit that discretion, so who knows?

IANAL, but this is why people pay lawyers to figure this crap out for them and why you should, too, if you go to court :)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

"If" ??

Why don't you donate?

Seriously, if you live in the US and you care at all about electronic freedom, then you should really do your part by helping the EFF fight the good fight. Discussing/complaining on Slashdot is great and all, but if we ever want things to change, we have to actually do something... or at least fund people who are doing something.

I donate to the EFF yearly. You should consider doing the same.

> And there is no double jeopardy rules in civil cases. They're allowed to bring the case to court as many times as they can find venues.

Umm, no they're not. The FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) generally limits you to bringing the same case twice. After that, you're through. You're not allowed to sue someone and withdraw the minute you appear to be losing over and over, it simply isn't fair. You ARE correct in the fact that it's not "double jeopardy" because it's a civil case, though, but the FRCP does have rules covering this!

Now, there are probably crazy procedural gotchas here, like whether it's the "same" case or whether they can do something inventive, but that's the general rule. They'll probably say that they're retrying to Does case again instead of the case vs. a named party and that they're somehow legally "different" this time. I hope that the Court doesn't buy that, though, because it's total BS in my opinion. But IANAL, so they might be able to get away with it.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

I'm afraid that one course wasn't so... electronic, nor was it part of my major. In fact, we didn't discuss copyright law or the RIAA at all (it was taken before all that). Heck, I should be glad to remember anything given how long ago I took it...

I learned plenty about how the appeals process works, though! Most of the class was focused on how a case could get shuffled around the court system, if there were some hypothetical case in state court that was appealed to the state court of appeals, then the state supreme court. Or maybe it was removed to federal court, went through the federal appeals court and then to the Supreme Court.

Or maybe it was one of those rare types of cases listed in the Constitution where the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction because it had to do with a treaty or something.

And of course, there are all the special courts, like divorce court, or patent courts or tax courts and that.

So it won't be too useful vs. the RIAA unless they actually appeal cases instead of fleeing from them :)

Well, okay, I guess I know that the federal courts have original jurisdiction over copyright claims, so you can't sue for those in state court. And I know a little bit about how you decide if someone has enough contacts with a state to be sued there (though cases over things done online seem nearly to offer the plaintiff their choice of venue under some current case law I've seen!).

And I guess I know the difference between a ruling being vacated and reversed...

This means I'm overqualified to play lawyer on Slashdot, though, right? I think I need more +5, Funnys for that... :-)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> Nope, that's impossible. If you're uploading at a faster rate than you're downloading, you would be uploading data you have not yet downloaded.

Wrong. I'd be sending the same bits of the file to more than one computer.

If you have one lone, slow, seed with lots of peers trying to download from it and you have a decent connection, you can easily have a ratio greater than one while waiting for the seed to finish seeding a complete copy. This scenario is common enough, in fact, is the entire reason for the "initial seeding" mode found in some torrent clients.

While you're correct that many lines are asymmetric, that still doesn't come into play unless you're downloading faster than you're uploading. You may be used to large torrents where you can peg your connection (and those certainly do exist), but with small ones, you won't be able to download anything all that fast. It's perfectly possible to get stuck with a slow download when there's just one seed. If there are enough peers, your upload should be more than enough to outmatch whatever pathetic connection the lone, slow seed has.

In other words, I know that you are incorrect from experience, because I have done this.

Finally, I should point out that while you download random, comparatively rare blocks with BitTorrent, your computer is very capable of knowing where the pieces fit together. You often get the entire block from just one source, and blocks are contiguous. That is, the bits inside them are one solid piece, rather than being randomly distributed throughout the file. If they weren't, it would take a lot more data to know where to put those bits and nobody wants to add overhead like that.

> Show me one case that holds the sharing 32 seconds of a song constitutes infringement and I'll agree

I can do better. Here's a finding of infringement for a few notes:
Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd., 420 F.Supp. 177 (1976)

Silence has also been copyrighted. You can't make this stuff up. The laws are so bad, I don't put anything past the courts these days.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> Thank you for the additional info on bittorrent - i just note that in some P2P systems, such as emule, it is certainly possible to get provable small chunks from a user - even as small as a few bytes in theory - much smaller than the bittorrent effective minimum.

Well, I think it's true that if you got something small enough, it might be difficult to prosecute. Though I believe that you'd have to offer some kind of alternate explanation for why your computer transmitted those bytes to satisfy the jury, given what we saw in that $222k judgment case (which the judge is wisely reconsidering).

But I don't think it will matter too much in practice, because they don't usually bother to download anything at all (!?!) before sending DMCA notices over BitTorrented material. That's right, they just DMCA all the IPs they get from the tracker, as was proven in a recent story.

I don't know that they take those cases to court, however, so they might not bother because they have no intention of going to court on those cases. Who knows? I do know that we won't really know anything unless their processes are examined during discovery, though. I don't trust their code even one tiny bit.

That said, if you can get a jury to rule against someone with no copyrighted information on their HD, just based on the reports of a secret program that may or may not be more complex than perl -e "print 'Infringement detected!\n';" I don't have much confidence that they can't prosecute BitTorrent users. Especially not when the protocol ensures the integrity of the data like BitTorrent does.

Mind you, I say this as someone who is not a lawyer and who strongly believes that our laws need to be made more sensible. I just don't want people thinking that they can get away with infringement via some clever scheme, when I'm reasonably sure that most judges would use any such scheme as evidence that you intentionally infringed upon copyrights and throw the book at you.

If a jury found an innocent woman responsible for infringement, what hope do the guilty have? This is why we need to reform the law.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> And because you're sharing with numerous people, that random non-sequential data is going to become even less recognizable as a song because it was spread out to different computers.

Torrents have hashes. They're split into 256 KiB pieces, by default, each one of which has its own hash.

Unless you never share a whole block with someone, you can easily prove it wasn't just random data that someone sent you. Instead, there are hashes of each block (typically 256KiB, I've never seen one using 10KiB blocks), as well as a hash for the whole thing.

Given the mathematics of hash collisions, if you can prove that you got the entire block from a single source and you can prove what the contents of the entire torrent are (e.g. you've downloaded the whole thing), you can be sure that they were sharing pieces of a given work.

And even if you don't share a whole block, I can get that block from someone else, then I can prove that you sent me X bits out of that block and that they match the one in the torrent's hash (e.g. they're not random bits from nowhere). And outsider to the torrent might not be able to figure that out (especially for encrypted torrents), but if you're uploading to my machine I damn well know what you just sent!

After all, there's a reason for this! The RIAA & MPAA hire people to 'poison' torrents by seeding random, bad data. Their fake seeds get banned by clients who are smart enough to kick out everyone who has too many hash failures. Because torrent users need to be able to tell fake data from real data for integrity purposes, the MAFIAA will be able to figure out that they actually downloaded real data from some random person in the torrent.

Given a limited pool of seeds and peers in most real world cases, you're not going to see people transfer just a few bytes to each other, either. A 3 MiB song will only get split into 12 pieces by default. You'll have a hard time finding a torrent with 3,145,728 seeds so that you can download a single byte from each one (and I don't know if you can even convince the seeds that you only want one byte). There aren't that many torrents with even 10,000+ seeds, after all, though such things do exist.

That said, I think you're right that we have to worry about RIAA shenanigans. But I don't think that any court which understand BitTorrent is going to say that it's not infringement to share copyrighted works over the protocol simply because you only transmit bits and pieces. I don't know how the courts will justify it, mind you, but I'm sure they'll make one up if they have to. If I had to guess, they'd use civil conspiracy laws or something crazy like that, because the Feds like to use criminal conspiracy charges against pirates. But that's just this non-lawyer's guess.

Mind you, I wish we'd find a more sensible way to deal with piracy, but I don't expect too much sense out of the courts when our laws are this far out of whack. The judges are right not to want to make law, even though Congress is far too incompetent to make IP laws properly.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> Yeah but it was probably this one, with the cool syllabus.

Alas, it was nothing that useful :) Nice links, though. I read through that information and it's interesting. Probably shows why they want IP cops now, though. Frankly, that scares me.

But I did learn the difference between "void" and "voidable" contracts (which might be more useful to know if I was one of those emancipated minors used in almost every example), the meaning of original jurisdiction, writ of certiorari, and how to figure out who you can appeal a case to.

Whatever I know about copyright law I pieced together from reading USC 17, case law, Groklaw, and what you and other lawyers have written. Speaking of which, I take it that I got the explanation mostly right that time? I didn't notice any corrections.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> How is that even possible? Is someone suddenly not a criminal when you find out who they are? I'm terribly ignorant of the law, but I was always under the impression that criminal suits had to be brought by a DA, and even then it was rare for a case to be suddenly dropped unless new information was brought to light.

I don't know what you mean about someone "suddenly" no longer being a criminal, but one thing in civil law is that you can't keep suing someone, then drop the case. If you withdraw, you can bring the same case ONCE more. If you drop the same case twice, that's it. You don't get to keep suing them and dropping the case.

The RIAA works by suing first to get your identity from your ISP. They may or may not have the correct person, but they don't really care. You're not a part of this case, because you probably don't even find out that there WAS a case until it's over. Then they send you to their own "settlement center" unless you refuse and go to court.

But yeah, these aren't criminal lawsuits, they're civil (the RIAA can't bring a criminal lawsuit to begin with). So double jeopardy and all that doesn't apply, but civil rules about withdrawing from cases and such DO apply. Read the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) if you want more information.

But please note, IANAL. Get one before engaging or deciding to engage in any litigation, because I can't give you legal advice! And if NYCL comes in to correct me, listen to him. I had exactly one law class and it didn't cover this. Given how sharp the MAFIAA's practice is, I don't doubt that they will at least try to find loopholes in my line of reasoning.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

http://www.truecrypt.org/
http://w2.eff.org/patent/
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
http://www.wikileaks.org/
http://www.cryptome.org/
http://www.torproject.org/
http://freenetproject.org/

Apparently there is some more information and a form letter you can send to your senators on the EFF website: https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=383

Somewhat offtopic, but related to your post. The EFF maintains a mailing list for technologists who would be willing to assist as witnesses or in other ways for cases such as this. When an attorney needs an expert witness for, say, a defense case against the RIAA, the EFF happily forwards it to this list. http://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/volunteer

> McCain says he is going to be consistent with the Constitution, so that means he supports warrantless surveillance?

In context in the article, it clearly means he supports Bush's reading of Article II, because nothing else would make sense. I guess I didn't summarize that very well, though. He's also voted for Telecom Immunity, though, so I think that shows where he stands on the issue. Worse, it casts his call for hearings in a bad light. If he doesn't know what they did, how can he vote for Telecom Immunity?

He's also gone back and forth on whether he really supports it or not, but this is the first time McCain has endorsed Bush's reasoning, though I guess the linked article makes that point better than I could in a Slashdot summary.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> That's an absurd argument -- "McCain says he'll follow the Constitution." "You mean, the same Constitution that President Bush says gives him the right to abuse small farm animals? Why McCain must want to abuse small farm animals too!"

The argument that Article II gives a president unlimited powers during wartime is absurd. I wouldn't call that "following the Constitution" any more than torture was.

> There isn't much question that tapping *international* calls is within the government's power. (At least I haven't heard any major Democrats argue with this). There just isn't enough information in this post to know if this is what McCain is talking about, or if it's domestic surveillance.

It's clear that they're using it for domestic surveillance. So you're left saying either that McCain doesn't know what the telecoms are doing (but voted for immunity for them anyhow) or that he knowingly supports it. Do you really think that EITHER of those is a good thing?

> You should leave the political hack jobs to the professionals.

I linked to several accounts. I don't think it's just me noticing this, it's pretty much all of the tech press. But you can call that a 'hack job' if you want. If I wanted it to be more of a 'hack job', I'd have mentioned that Obama is against telecom immunity and the rest of this crap (and has voted that way).

If you want more sources, try this. It's not just me thinking this.

Go back to the linked Slashdot story on the original bill; even back to then, he supported it (read the comments: McCain for immunity, Hillary abstained, Obama against). McCain has even sent out advisers who said things that made him sound like he was backing away from that (e.g. the linked story on Wired's Threat Level), then retracted those. If that's not flip-flopping, what the hell is it?

It's not like it's just that he learned from old mistakes or something (that'd be _GOOD_, IMHO, and I wouldn't call him out on that). It's this schizophrenic nonsense coming from his campaign where he can't decide if he's a real Republican or a "maverick" and he wants to be different things to different people. It's phony and I don't like it.

I mean, first he was against torture, then he was for it (but in limited circumstances) because he didn't want to look "weak on terror" or something. He supports lawful limits, but he'd ignore them if it protected us from terrorists. He doesn't seem to think that Bush did anything wrong, unless you count criticizing Katrina several YEARS after the fact... it took THAT long to realize things went wrong!?!

I once thought McCain was a decent man. I voted for McCain in the past. But I don't know who the hell he is any more. But go ahead. Call this a 'hack job'. It's not like anybody could wonder what happened to the more decent McCain of 2000, right?

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Well, that's one way to look at it. I personally can't think of a lot of web sites that have been shut down 'by the government' although there have certainly been a handful of good examples. Mostly raids where internet equipment was confiscated, and such equipment seems to have a poor track record of getting back into the hands of its owners (if at all!) The most important might have been the raids around the 'E911' document which included storming the game company Steve Jackson Games and lead to the creation of the EFF which still operates today.

You can look over the EFF case history on their site to find a nice list of cases, some more dubious than others, where internet sites were shut down and/or censored. Of course, what you (hopefully!) won't find in their case history are perfectly legitimate shut downs of sites engaged in dully prosecuted criminal acts.

So, this might just be liberal fear mongering. It might also be an attempt to highlight the good work of watch dog groups who publish messages the government might not want released, even if such groups aren't in real danger of being shut down. Considering the size and scope of the /. crowd, it might even just be an attempt to highlight cool web sites, with the 'shut down by the government' meme part of our wacky hacker humor.

Or, it might just be an attempt to scare up some web hits by trying to tap into some internet controversy among geeks. Hanlon's razor, etc.

The EFF's Patent Busing Project.

Or has it been shut down already?

they are told to hurry in order to implement the schemes to control the internet : http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/05/microsofts-masters-whose-rules-does-your-media-cen

There are several tools that attempt to directly measure things like forged reset packets, but I am not sure if there is a tools that tries to measure network throttling in general.

Here are some of the ones I found:

http://www.nnsquad.org/agent

http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=aznetmon

I have no news as yet whether the fourth country that planned to file an appeal has decided not to do so, missed the deadline, or sent its letter only to ISO (Peter reports that an ISO spokesman declined to confirm how many appeals it has received at this time. The deadline date is a matter of some confusion, as some National Bodies were under the impression that the deadline was June 2, so it remains possible that a fourth appeal will (or already has been) received.

In other technicality news, the IEC spokesman noted that the Brazil letter had been improperly addressed - duplicate copies should have been sent to the CEOs of both the IEC and ISO - but that this technical irregularity would be waived [Jonathan Buck, the IEC spokesman, inaccurately stated to Peter that the Indian appeal, rather than the Brazilian appeal, had been improperly addressed; the IDG story will be corrected shortly]

yum install pcapdiff on Fedora. http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/

I could be wrong, but don't they send the people letters about the ex parte hearing (which usually don't arrive in time)?

So it's like they sorta/kinda try to give people notice, but they also try to high tail it out of court LONG before those people can DO anything with the letters.

But I thought they usually send them anyhow? Or am I confusing that with the letters they try to get universities to send? I do remember reading in your FAQ of how their litigation works that the first thing most people read is a letter saying something about a judgment against them...?

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

You're probably right that it was wrong when it was written, but it's correct now because they've finally, actually appealed instead of just protesting:

Source:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080529202924937
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080529150227123

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

> 'Ex parte' does not really mean without notice.

Normally, no. In RIAA 'expedited discovery' cases, however, it _does_! They grab the discovery against twenty or so people and withdraw from the case immediately afterwards.

If you knew anything about our submitter, you'd know that he's a lawyer and that when the RIAA runs things, they go for "expedited" motions so that things really do happen without reasonable notice for the parties in question.

While you're correct about what ex parte (usually) means, in RIAA cases, I will defer to NYCL. He is, after all, an attorney who has been directly involved in cases opposing them and who has a nice FAQ on his website. It tells you exactly how they run these cases and why they habitually withdraw from the case once they get discovery in the ex parte suit and send people to their "settlement center" after that, making the entire process something most parties only find out about after the fact.

So no, he didn't include the words "ex parte" just because he thought they sounded cool.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

That's why I linked to the original story showing how weak practices like that at one store lead to compromise at the main office.

Like too many operations, they appear to have a thin candy shell of security around a soft, chewy center.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Um, Bush has effectively nullified the Fourth Amendment.

Administration Asserts No Fourth Amendment for Domestic Military Operations

Parent post says exactly what I wanted to, only better.

Naturally, I have no conflict, but the submitter has to choose what's most important to them: property rights or freedom?

The rest follows from there, and there's not much middle ground if you ever want IP rights to be enforceable. Smart businesses turn IP into a service of some kind (radio, WoW, etc. to borrow another post's examples).

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Please don't misunderstand. I don't support Bush or the Republican party in the slightest. While it was inaccurate to call this a first, I don't think this could have been prosecuted without the NET Act, which Bill Clinton signed with lots of support from Republicans.

That said, I don't think that we can look at this as a partisan problem. There are corrupt Democrats and corrupt Republicans, with only a few good ones in between (who are mostly Democrats, from those I can remember, BTW).

So it may have been a mistake on my part to inject politics into this, but it's still not irrelevant. I've read Hillary's positions and she would certainly continue Bill's work in terms of copyright restrictions. McCain would, too, for that matter.

Obama is the best of the lot among those likely to be elected, but it's not saying a lot. He at least acknowledges patent reform and net neutrality, though I have serious questions about his copyright policies. But, like I said, the others are FAR worse, especially with McCain supporting telecom immunity (he voted for immunity) and Hillary not wanting to touch the issue (she abstained, while Obama voted against immunity).

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), and other key "patent busters" need to write open letters in support of this action. We need visibility here.

How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF (US), Open Rights Group (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative, Digital Rights Ireland, Free Software Foundation or other civil liberties/human rights groups. Just an idea.

I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.

You are correct and I don't blame you for missing my correction, which is still at zero as of this writing :)

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

SN 2007uy's collapse caused an X-ray burst of about 10^39 joules, most likely due to the 'shock break out' when the energy of the core's collapse finally reached the neutron star's surface."

Don't forget people, Blizzard is evil.

They were one of the early abusers of the DMCA hammer, and they used it to shut down reverse engineering of the server protocol that would have allowed widespread modifications of the Diablo 2 engine.

Blizzard does not allow mods like Valve does.

Ars Technica had this story weeks ago. EFF has filed a motion to quash (EFF site currently overloaded), and they'll probably win.

As Ars Technica points out, the effect of this lawsuit is to widely disseminate the information that this little-known literary agency is a dud.

http://uniset.ca/terr/news/lat_fbibreakin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP
http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/sr=8-1/qid=1172469926/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3962904-3664448?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://code.google.com/p/torchat/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah's_Men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/iron.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Rule_Book
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_prohibition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writeprint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/COPLINK/
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/research/coplink/authorship.htm
http://www.coplink.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/
http://packetstormsecurity.nl/filedesc/Practical_Onion_Hacking.pdf.html
http://www.williamson-labs.com/laser-mic.htm
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/privacy-sigir2006.pdf
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html#Anonymous_20communication
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html

> From reading the material, the case they were complaining about was about explicitly punitive damages. The section cut out from the PROIP act was about treating individual copyright infringements rather than as compilation infringement (which, in itself, makes total sense). Two completely different things.

The statutory damages are essentially punitive in measure. How else can someone say that $150,000 per act of infringement is reasonable? Yes, their purpose is to free the plaintiff from having to justify dollar amounts (which would be expensive to prove in court and require experts, etc.), but I really can't find many copyrighted works that sell for $750, which leads me to believe that it is, at least in part, a punitive measure. ($750 per work is the statutory LOWER bound, for those wondering.)

Moreover, the section of the PRO-IP Act was cut because, when questioned, no one could provide any evidence that courts had ever given too low an award in any copyright cases.

I really don't think the damage types are as different as you make them out to be, and it's also true that there were no reports of disappointment from media companies when that section was cut.

At least, none I saw. But I've only been following the story and reporting on it the whole time ...

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Does it matter what I think?

Whether the activation was accidental or not, you have to believe that they'll treat this as a test case for whether or not people are ready to put up with it.

Anyhow, that's why I put my bias out in the open. I make no claim to being "fair and balanced" nor any other such thing. And you're free to call me wrong, but I don't intend to apologize for having an opinion.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

I think you just made-up some BS. If they did design TVs like that, how would people playback their old SVHS-C, Hi8, or miniDV home movies from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s? Nobody would buy such a TV that refused to show their old wedding and baby videos. It would die a quick death.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/04/aacs-key-revocation-future-drm

They did design TVs like that. The technology is in every modern computer processor, every modern television, every set top box. This isn't just about preventing recording. You can use this to revoke playback rights after something has been recorded. Like a news program that leaks information embarrassing to the government, for example.

Oh, and those TVs that you'd rather buy? The ones that don't have this technology? They're illegal to manufacture and illegal to sell. You'll have to build your own or smuggle them into the country if you want one.

I'm pretty sure the legislation mandating compliance with the broadcast flag never passed. (yet?)

http://w2.eff.org/IP/broadcastflag/

• Download something popular
• Call your ISP
• Read their terms of service
• Glasnost
• pcapdiff
• Vuze plugin.

• Enable protocol encryption.
• Change the port number to something other than 6881.
• Tunnel through TOR or some other commercial VPN.