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Cybercrime Treaty to Be Signed
texchanchan writes: "Yahoo reports that "Interior ministers and law enforcement officials from Europe, South Africa, Canada, the United States and Japan will sign the milestone cyber-crime convention.... [because] computer criminals... have moved on from ``innocent'' hacking to fraud, embezzlement and life-threatening felonies."" Feel the spin in that article, from the anonymous "official". We've posted about this treaty before; read the final draft and note it well, particularly the extradition provisions, mutual assistance (some other country gets your country to tap your phones, and send them the data) and the requirements to disclose passwords.
Here's another one.
Honestly, are we more afraid of terrorists, or
our own governments?
George II says that Terrorists hate freedom, and want to take my freedom away. That isn't true.
Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom.
Sickman's spinfusor catches Anonymous Coward by surprise.
Improve security. Seperate important systems like landing lights from the internet. Don't just sue people.
I thought fraud, embezzlement, and life-threatening felonies were already against the law on these countries!
If there is something life threatening about a computer being hacked, then perhaps the computer shouldn't be hooked up to the Internet.
//m
Of course, we feel it's all great to battle "child pornography" while we defend race-hatred, while non-Americans (who often have very different ages of consent) consider that an infringement of their free speech. So are we implicitly trading the right to different types of censorship?
Attention! Now that this treaty has been signed into law, keep in mind that it is very important that you never forget your passwords. If you forget your password, and it is required for a terrorist investigation, you can be arrested for failure to disclose your password. Please be extremely careful with all your passwords, never EVER forget them.
Specfically:
- If you have Alzheimers, do not use any computer system that requires a password.
- If you write software, make sure that any time you ask a user to create a password, you inform them that they could be imprisoned for life in a foreign country if they forget it.
- If you have to remember multiple passwords, repeat them to yourself 100 times every night, before you go to sleep.
Please follow these tips to keep everyone safe & free from terrorism!
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
. . . that under the provisions of the United States Constitution, "Interior ministers and law enforcement officials" can sign whatever the hell they want, but only the US Senate can actually approve a treaty with another nation. And until they do, it's not law.
Also note that treaties cannot alter the Constitution itself, nor can they implement anything that violates it.
Oh, he'll sign it, but that doesn't matter, because the 50 states can safely ignore it. Really, they can, because Federal treaties are not binding on the states! This is according to George W. Bush himself: "Texas did not sign the Vienna Convention, so why should we be subject to it?" Statement from the office of Texas Governor George W. Bush
So please write your state Attorney General and ask that they please ignore this treaty.
Also, and more importantly, write your Senators and ask that they not ratify it in the first place.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
This is the time to prove Lessig wrong. I don't know how to get a congresscritter's attention any more. They only used to pay attention to postal mail, which they are afraid to open now. But between telephone, fax, e-mail, and watching out for him when he comes into town, I intend to let my congresscritters know not just how much I despise this crock, but why.
It's time for a call to arms. Slashdotters can take down almost any web site, because there's lots of us and we're not too lazy to click on a few buttons. But if we want to avoid the tremendous pitfall this treaty will engender, it's time to slashdot Congress. I doubt there will be 10,000 phone calls, pieces of mail, etc., the entire Congress will get because of newspaper, radio, or TV coverage. If we're not too lazy, we can generate a normal ./ volume in faxes, phone calls, and so forth, we can make ourselves heard.
The alternative is to whimper, roll over, and cringe.
Every country that signs onto this treaty currently has citizens who can use encryption. The legalities are changing, it seems since the various governments realized that the cat is already out of the bag, wrt encryption. The bad guys got it, and the good guys need to get it now. Witness in fact, direct from the treaty:
So, it's simple. Make yourself a key, and begin to encrypt things you send. If you dont know what it means to make a key, then go read any PGP site, including the one (still) at MIT.
If you really want to oppose this at the level where it matters, then encrypt. Dont write your senator, dont address the fine folks in Brussels. Encrypt.
Remember, encryption makes the internet a cozy bedside chat. Use it with your lovers, and use it with your friends.
Fear only the One who can factor large primes in his head, and never let them put a key on your head or your hand. Simple. Easy. Fun. Have fun. Love God. Love your neighbor. And have a Great Thanksgiving, America.
Actually, banning hate speech causes more problems than you seem to think, mostly because different people will consider different things hate speech.
Suppose that I say that all blacks should die. This may qualify as hate speech to you (as it would to me also), but would sound somehow reasonable for a white supremacist.
How about if I say that Americans are terrorists, kill people and that their government should be destroyed. That would probably be considered hate speech as well, but not so by say, the Taliban.
How about if I say that the Taliban are terrorists, kill people and that their government should be destroyed. Surely this is hate speech as well, if we are to hold everyone to the same standard?
So therein lies the problem: different people, different points of view, which ends with the stronger one censoring the marginal one through the "hate speech" label.
For another example, the Church of Scientology saying already says its critics engage in religious hate-speech in an attempt to quench criticism. Surely having a ban on hate speech at hand would please them and other criticized organisations greatly...
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
Section 9.2.c: ... realistic images representing a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct."
"child pornography shall include pornographic material that visually depicts
Rendered images will be deemed illegal. (Also note that section 9.2.b says you can't take pronographic pictures of someone that "appears" to be a minor)
And no, I am not a fan of child pornography, but section 9.2.c seems to be making new clarifications to current pornography law, and 9.2.b is just very poorly worded.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Don't take a law that's designed to stop malicious people and extrapolate it into something that's going to take ones and zeros and make them illegal.
I'm sure this statement would've been much comfort to Dmitry Skylarov as he spent weeks in jail. Obviously he's one of those malicious people that laws are supposed to go after. Just because a law isn't intended to do one thing doesn't it mean it won't be used anyway.
Simply talking about hacking or trying to figure out how things work isn't going to land you in prison.
Sure thing. I'm sure that Steve Jackson will back this one all the way.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
So now we can't talk about religion, sex, etc. for fear that someone will take offense and call it "hate speech"? How insanely stupid. This is the problem with curtailing ANY speech. This is the path that leads to. This is why SMART people in the US through court cases have said that prior constraint of speech is to be avoided at all costs and only allowed where DIRECT and DAMAGING results will occur.
Besides, YOU think the speech of the white supremecists is false garbage. Who made YOU arbiter of the universe? YOU might think that the DMCA is beautiful and those who oppose it are spouting false garbage as well. Maybe it's "hate speech" to denounce the DMCA as the evil piece of $hit it is. Down this path leads madness.
The German government thinks the Scientologists are spouting false garbage, but the Scientologists say they are just practicing their religion. Who's right?
Let people hear it for themselves and make their own opinion. That is "openness". That is "Freedom". Freedom is protecting ALL speech. That doesn't mean that SOME speech can't have consequences, but it should only be speech where it can be proven to be DIRECT and DAMAGING.
Besides, the eventual end of this "don't discriminate" stuff being applied everywhere is where we have Arab terrorists killing 5000 people and the police unable to question Arabs because they are Arab and came from Afganistan/Saudi Arabia, etc., even though there is a high probability they know something about the attacks.
No one should be discriminated against unfairly, but we shouldn't let political correctness lead us to stupidity either.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
Someone switches off the landing lights via the computer systems.
As a pilot who has experienced this sort of thing (through other causes) I can say with certainty that any competent pilot can either switch the runway lights back on or go missed (or both if their not comfortable with the situation). Most airports, even the large ones, have pilot controlled lighting (key the mike n times on the CTAF/Tower Frequency). If the pilot is already in the flair then s/he can already see the runway with the plane's landing/taxi lights, and unless visibility is really, really bad (in which case they can go missed) they can land at that point without the runway lights being on at all.
If there really aren't options (like a blackout due to thunderstorm, terrorist bomb, or luser system cracker), then the pilot can do a missed approach and enter a holding pattern (if on instruments) until the situation is resolved or s/he is diverted to another airport, or if flying VFR simply go around and either try the approach again or find an alternate airport. Even in the worst case scenerio turning off the runway lights, even on short final, is hardly life threatening. Hell, its happened to me simply because the lights had been turned on 15 minutes earlier by another landing pilot and the timer shut the lights off with the threshold about fifty feet away from my descending aircraft. Seven quick clicks on the mike and I completed the landing without even a raise in pulse. This sort of thing happens all the time in non-computerized systems, and I will repeat again, it is not life threatening. Adding a computer to the situation doesn't change that, in the least.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Perhaps it is time for the geeks of the world to declare the internt a soverign country, with and end user licenses agrement that says something like the folowing:
/. could declare soverinty along with other places that would work better too. I suppose my long rant ends with a summary. I don't reacall the citizens of the internet having a say, that is bad.
ATTENTION by connecting your computer to the internet you agree that
1) Everyone has the right to say whatever they $^&# 'ign want and you can choose to listen or not.
2) you realize that the internet might be insecure, like walking down a street, Provide secruity for yourself.
3) We wil not take down a page you find offencive, someone wanted to say that.
4) We don't care about treaties you all signed, they are not ours.
5)By conneting your machine to our network you agree that you have read this agreement, even if you are a government this applies to you.
6) I said that we don't care if you are #$%'ing offended you controll where you browse.
7)Don't look to us to solve your internal network problems, it is YOUR fault they were not secure.
To governments:
we know your country has laws, so do we, we don't care what someone in another country did, it was not in your country. If you are so afraid of content perhaps you are closed minded or if you dislike content perhaps your citizens shouldn't be here.
Perhaps someone a little bit better should draft the deleration of indpendence for the net, But Hey the whole internet dosen't need to be indepented, Perhaps
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master"-Unknowen
I guess I shouldn't call bullshit without doing my research first, but interestingly, this story has some details:
In March [1999], Department of Justice computer crime chief Scott Charney regaled a gathering of bankers with the story of a 1997 hacker who crashed a telephone switch, resulting in the landing lights at a Massachusetts airport going black.
Regular readers of this column will recall my conversation with the airport administrator, who assured me that his runway lights never even flickered.
Another report adds :
This incident was benign
But authorities said the outage had in fact caused no danger and little or no disruption at the airport, which sees a half-dozen flights a day.
"I don't have any reason to believe
In other words, the landing lights were not turned out, not least because it happened during the day. The Euro official's statement may not be complete bullshit as I claimed, but it's misleading at least. According to this piece on media hacking, the story is false. Yet this government site repeats the story and even claims that planes were diverted.
Whatever the truth of what really happened, there's clearly large dollops of myth in with the facts and it's no wonder my bullshit detector went off...
When asked, one must suply his/her password, right? So how does this work with doctors, lawyers (e.a.) and non-disclosure agreements with third parties? How will this law relate to other trust-relations which are also integrated within law?
Before a file is decrypted, it is impossible to tell whether it is part of such relation, or if it in fact contains illegal data, so how will this work out?
--Black holes are where God divided by zero--
Can someone please give me an example of *ONE* "life-threatening [felony]"
l ep ld.htm
Here is one..
In 1997 a Massachusetts teenager broke into and disabled telecommunications at Worchester airport, disabling the control tower for 6 hours.
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/juveni
I am sure there others.