Slashdot Mirror
Building Anonymous-Friendly Computer Libraries?
H310iSe writes "Listening to NPR today and caught a story on All Things Considered about how the FBI has demanded information on borrowing and browsing habits, including computer seizures, from 85 libraries since Sept. 11 (utilizing their new-found powers from the PATRIOT act). Similar stories (which don't require RealAudio) are here and here. The American Librarian Association is providing information for librarians to help deal with this, and it seems heavily tilted towards supporting individuals' rights to privacy. It seems like the Slashdot crowd could come up with a great library computer setup that would protect anonymity (I'm thinking about things like creating a RAM disk and loading the OS onto it). How about ways to enable people to borrow books anonymously without opening the door to large-scale theft? I bet if we offered a packaged, free, easy to install Safe Browsing computer or Anonymous Checkout program, libraries across the U.S. would enthusiastically embrace it." According to the articles, these checks can be made for any reason, not just for suspected terrorism. It seems that if the American people are going to protect their rights, they are going to have to do so actively. Is the idea presented above, feasible? How would you improve upon it?
hmm i agree that the users rights should be protected. but maybe the RAM disk is a little bit of over kill. i think potentially it could be solved at a software level rather than having to reload the OS into a new location. theoretically, browsing habits can be covered easily at the software level with many programs available on the internet. i sure wish the CoDC would come up with something for this. :)
[ check out my ruby book @ http://ww
WHY on EARTH would you want to hide from Big Br... er, Our Benevolant Government? You must be guilty of something! Stuff him and cuff him, boys!
Does anyone really think that the privacy to look up whatever info you want is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives?
The people who built the propane bombs that thankfully didn't kill anyone at Columbine got their info off the internet. Kevin Mitnick was able to escape justice by using anonymous chat rooms. No doubt there are terrorists using it to communicate as we speak. I just don't think that your paranoia about what someone might find out about your computer habits justifies the risks that have to be taken.
Why not just accept that what you look at might be known by someone else? If you aren't trying to make bombs or Anthrax or anything, you'll be fine. To do otherwise is to put your own wants above the lives of others.
This may very well be taken as Flamebait or Offtopic, but I can't resist sticking my nose in here.
Public Libraries are _public_ places, owned by the _government_. The government has a right to collect information from the library. It is not a private citizen's business or residence. It's almost like your telling the government not to use sonar guns to catch people on the roads.
_However_, when it comes to the FBI demanding book histories from stores like Borders, they can bugger off until they get a warrant.
This statement is false.
... but the library could have a service where they download a book into your eBook or other reader, set to expire when the book is "due".
If their software doesn't keep records -- which they won't have to, as "overdue" downloads remove themselves -- there is nothing to subpoena.
That said, my borrowing habits are innocuous enough that I'm having trouble mustering a lot of outrage over this whole business.
now if only we could build an anonymous-friendly slashdot, that doesn't place posts at 0.
It helped them nab Kevin Spacey in Seven, didn't it?
Perhaps the information on the reader could be encrypted with some sort of "dead man's switch", except that it is triggered to release the information to the library in the event that the book is not returned in a timely fashion. At this point, the encrypted record is purged from the system.
Maybe I'm not sure what exactly the submitter means by Anonymous Checkout, but if they don't know who checked out a book, why would anyone ever return it? I guess I'm just confused about that issue of this idea, they have to maintain some records so that they can fine people that don't return books, right?
It seems to me that the quickest way to stop this is to turn all public libraries into private libraries which would function almost the same way.
It's my understanding that a lot of libraries don't keep any records of who has checked out a book in the past. The only records kept are who currently has the book and any info pertaining to fines. The same could essentially be done with computer usage. The records of who was using a computer need not be kept past the end of a day, and the hard drive could then be synced to some disk image (I know some places already do this too, just to keep the machines working properly). I'm not sure any fancy technical solution is really necessary. If libraries are really interested in protecting privacy they can do it.
Ben
..the Feds will complain and Congress will simply mandate that any US library that receives any federal aid (ie, all of them) use a browse/borrow system that can supply exactly this kind of information.
Patriot Act, indeed. If you want to be a patriot these days, go vote in November and boot these current idiots out of power.
If you dont like laws such as the patriot act that give such broad powers to the FBI... you should have voted in the various elections. If you did.. congratulations .. if you didn't then you have absolutely no right to talk about your sense of privacy. Voting really is alot more powerful then people think it is. Granted we run on a republic. But even then we still have the power to change legislation. If the government starts thinking... "crap.. the people don't want this and I'm not going to get reelected next term" .. guess what the members of the government will do :)
Point is.. I don't want to sound racist or anything but take a look at how the US intervenes with Isreal and Palenstine. Two countries with not much significance to us in the US (I am grossly simplifying and I honestly don't care about the justification that comes with "but we're a superpower and we should look after the world").. however the jewish population has one of the strongest turnouts when it comes to vote. In NY for instance pretty much 100% of the jewish population votes. Compared to like a measley what 10-40% of hispanics and asians?
Anyhow this country is built on the vote. If you don't like a legislation find out who supports such legislation and put up a website to try and convince people not to vote for that person come reelection.
Respect for the anonymity of the library patron (at a minimum) needs to be codified in law. Otherwise, at any point the government can stop funding libraries that don't track patrons (like McCain's initiative that flew through Congress mandating web surfing filters) or worse.
If all these conditions are met, then if the libraries refused to use proxy logs or anything of the sort, and set up network PCs that ghosted themselves from a server (preferably with Linux) every time a patron logs out to fight trojan loaders and such, then things would go pretty well. But I don't think that it's the technology that's at issue.
Our librarian is pretty cool about these things, by the way, and probably would go for setting up something along these lines if she thought it'd be worth the investment. It wouldn't be, however, because there's still a lot of other variables that prevent such a setup from presenting anything other than a false sense of security.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
A borrower could get an anonymous ID number (anytime) and leave a deposit, refundable upon return, for the replacement cost of each book checked out.
The only problem I see with this is that some people might not be able to come up with the deposit -- they could use the old, non-anonymous system.
If you ask most any librarian, he or she will tell you that they do NOT give out information regarding borrowing histories without a warrant from an official and will not give out to anyone else for ANY reason. Most libraries in colleges and universities purge all those records as soon as possible if they know what is good for them. Public libraries aren't so good at that, but still don't like keeping that information longer than they have to.
My mother has been a librarin for over thirty years at various places of business, including private corporations, public libraries and at colleges and universities and from listening to her, I believe it is the general sentiment of the ALA to protect their reader's privacy. If you all take a moment to recall, it was the librarians who fought the most against COPPA because of they inherent censorship created by the requirements.
What does happen, however, is libraries will outsource their searching services because they don't have enough money or manpower to handle the computer equipment themselves. When that happens, the business they outsource to may not have the same ideas in their head concerning privacy and censorship and will start storing this. Unless libraries get more funding, it's likely that outsourcing will continue and records will be saved.
Besides, I'm not sure whether we can install software of uour choice. It would be easy for Federal agencies to cite "terrorism" and mandate some universal monitoring software for all libraries. This looks bleak.
... Privacy is extremely important to us. We allow not only Web browsing but also offer full the full MS Office package on several hundred computers so that people can work on their projects as they conduct their research.
While not completely secure, we clear the web browser cache and history each time the browser loads (and it closes itself after 10 minutes of inactivity o further help this along).
We also remove the contents of "My Documents" and then the Recycling Bin each morning before the library opens. This is all done via scripts of course.
Granted this isn't the best solution, as the info could still be retrieved, but between not requiring login's (there-fore not knowning where anyone that comes into the library was sitting) and deleting as much as we can, as often as we can it should help.
You must have some pretty good crack in your pipe today. Anonymous Checkout? Sure! I'll just anonymously check out a few expensive books I've always wanted, and just keep them. Since it's anonymous, they'll never know who has them, so they can't bill me for them or come looking for them. The only way you're going to keep theft out of the equation is to keep tabs on who has what, but throw away that data the minute the book is returned. No amount of encryption is ever going to make anonymous checkouts work, since you must always be able to tell who has what.
As for running your entire OS in a ramdisk...yea...sure...that's...great. I don't know about you, but I sure as hell wouldn't pass any mileage that simply wanted to put 3GB of ram in every public computer. All so that the entire OS can run in a RAM disk so that we can have a false sense of anonymity on those machines. If the FBI wants to see where a computer has been, they will find out. Yes, if they turn off the machine, everything is lost. But this will only get them once or twice. They aren't fucking idiots. They will catch on, and start going to the library's isp instead and plugging a nifty little black box between the library and the internet. "Wow, look! I can see every packet going in or out of that building. How nice!"
Three words: Waste of money.
If you don't want to be hooked by some large data-mining net you can always read the book in the library and take handwritten notes.
Says the article poster:
Of course you have to be active about protecting your rights. If you let someone else "protect" your rights for you, you let that third party decide which right you have (i.e. which rights that someone will defend for you).
Methinks that instead of looking for technological solutions that will take a while to implement, we would be better off making a big deal of this issue. The more the general public knows about how FBI snoops into library records (about other things), the more stringent the public outcry.
I am not saying drop the search for a technical solution, I am saying a lot of policies can be balanced through social means rather than actively fought through some kind of enforcement tool (e.g., technology).
You need to install an RTFM interface.
This is nothing more than slashdot ego-stroking. Give me a fucking break.
/.'ers offered a packaged Safe Browsing computer or Anonymous Checkout program, libraries across the U.S. would actively avoid such a convoluted mess of impractical hardware and software.
I bet if
-mnemonic
This is a wonderful oppertunity to use Knoppix or another similar, customized Linux-On-CD. Just lock the cd drive (or have the main case behind the librarian's desk) and you're good to go. an external floppy or zip would take care of any need to save information. It'd protect anonyomity and eliminate any records to search, as the OS reloads from CD every time it is booted. No hard drive is even needed. Just a little time for the initial setup.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
It's not an ideal solution, since libraries should be in the practice of lending books for free, but it would work.
I agree. I'm still not quite sure why people are so hung up on this level of privacy if they're going to be using a public place. If it's that important to you, I'm thinking your head's not screwed on straight for thinking a public library is a good place to do sensitive research in complete anonymity.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I am reminded of a public service ad which demonstrated how lucky Americans are that reading activities at libraries are kept private. Ads, such as this, were produced after 9/11 to show an appreciation of individual rights.
Ironically, the new government policies for our libraries seem to have, now, deteriorated our privacy. And the ad is, now, an excellent demonstration of how the current administration has run amok.
PSA's ad, "Library" is in realmedia format. And, no. America is no longer America.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
What OS do you run that requires 3GB of space?
Linux w/ X could easily run in 128mb ram, possibly 96 or 64 if you fit things right and get rid of everything absolutely not needed.
Might you have an alternative idea?
By all means, do share.
I hope you aren't dellusioned into believing that creating a hypothetical and unrealistic situation then proving it wrong is helpful.
But the University of Illinois conducted a survey of 1,020 public libraries in January and February...
.testers!)
The UofI can't even build a friggin' web searchable library system. WTF are they doing conducting surveys? (Hi
This works wonderfully. You open up a "creidt" and can borrow books up to your credit allowance. You'd have to give out some credit to dis-advantaged people... once.
While a bootable Linux/*BSD CDRom is feasable as an semi-anonymous browsing device, a anonymous checkout system would not. The problem with checking out a book or any other material that a library might offer is how they track and recover a forgotten book. How many times have you missed a due date? Almost everyone has missed a due date once. Compared to this, theft is a minor problem.
Lets roleplay for a moment. We are a librarian and John Dole has forgotten a book. Lets look up his record and remind him that his book is late. What information do we need? A contact. That means an adress or an phone number. Email? Forget it as an unreliable medium which a majority change addresses often and don't check often enough to be effective. Plus, email from the masses can be traced with little effort.
The only way to make library checkouts anonymous is to make communication completly anonymous, and as of right now that seems to be quite some time into the future.
Possibly all of them.
Moot website
no sig.
That said, I still think a RAMdisk based system is a good one, the computers could be booted from a boot image on the network or even from a locked CD drive and then run completely from RAM. While it offers no protection from Carnivore, it does protect people's information from other people who come to the computer later and snoop for e-mail addresses, account information, and the like. Lets not forget to try to get libraries to close this door just because the shadow government can still get our private information.
The NPR story made claims that the government could somehow link information between a user's sessions. The reference was to someone who looked up information about atomic energy and then came back later and looked up something about the Koran. Unless they have logs of who used the terminal and when, how can they make such a link? Do they just assume that the person doing the Koran lookup must be the same evil doer as the person who previously committed the heinous deed of reading about atomic energy?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
>I bet if we offered a packaged, free, easy to
>install Safe Browsing computer or Anonymous Checkout
>program, libraries across the U.S. would
>enthusiastically embrace it
bwhahaha! Now that's funny.. in a naive sort of way.
Considering that terrorists and the like usually have many aliases and false identities I think these folks already have the anonymity they need. What is the privacy advocate afraid of if the FBI has access to public library records? I'm not trying to troll but I just don't see it. As for bookstores and purchased books I can see the argument. The buyer and seller are both private entities and their transaction should be a private manner. A libary is however a public entity and I don't really see a problem with records being public for that matter.
'Same speed C but faster'
... not requiring login's (there-fore not knowning where anyone that comes into the library was sitting) You see, that's the part that annoys me. Yes, protect the privacy of what they were searching for, but dammit, keep track of who they are and where they were working. Crackers aren't idiots, they know damn well where the anonymous computers are. We have this trouble with library labs all the damn time. I don't care if they were reading info on HIV, downloading insurrectionist pamphlets, or searching any number of embarrasing topics, but when ebay shows up at our door step with proof of credit card fraud coming from that pc, I damn well want you to be able to tell me who was sitting there...
A technological solution to any problem posed on Slashdot is always the community's first response. As we've seen from the history of encryption, any realistic and practical method of protecting data is eventually going to be broken.
Legislation is the answer. Not happy with a law? Last I heard America was a Democracy of sorts -- let's get out there and use the classic techniques for creating change. Vote. Write. Talk. Protest. Rage.
Or has the wealth we enjoy in North America made us too complacent?
If you've got a Knoppix CD with you, just boot from it and cast your fears aside about locally installed software snooping on you.
I don't take pride in this, but there is one big reason I don't vote.
I don't know enough about the issues or the candidates.
I try to be informed, but I don't subscribe to a newspaper...I did once, but the newspaper's went unread because I really didn't have the time to read them (yet, I have time to post to slashdot, go figure).
I've picked up books from my college library, one about israel and palestine. It seemed like a good book introducing some of the issues that are happening over there. But I honestly never got beyond the first chapter. The book was kind of dense for someone with the typical American knowledge on foreign affairs.
And I've heard arguments such as yours, that democracy requires a lot more people voting. But it almost seems to me that having uninformed people vote doesn't make the system more democratic. It just makes the system more arbitrary and more whimsical.
And the politics really gets in the way. For instance, trying to find political information online is difficult, since you can never really trust the source of information. Especially as we got closer to voting time, everyone starts putting up articles supporting their own personal political agendas, and people like me are the worse off, since the uninformed are not going to know much difference between truth and outright lie anyway.
The solution, of course, is to get information from a variety of sources. But then we are back to the same problem of lack of time. Especially with the vast number of candidates and issues we have to decide upon come voting time.
Another thing I've finally figured out. I've tried watching CNN or FoxNews for a while, so that hopefully I would get some insight into what is happening. It took me a while to figure out that I'm not just dumb, but the television station doesn't actually tell you enough of what is happening, and certainly provide almost no context of the issue. And the biggest waste of time are them talk shows where they have a number of "analysts" debating a certain topic. Usually the person hosting the show (who usually gets the most time speaking), either (a) doesn't under the issues anymore than I do or (b) has some political agenda of their own. And given that these shows are on most of the time, television is practically useless for getting information.
So it seems to me that voting isn't just something you do once every two years. Its almost a part time job to keep up with the issues, and then research your candidates. Maybe I'm exagerating. But without spending a good amount of time on this, many of us couldn't tell the difference between one candidate and the other.
It would be great if someone could post where they get thier information from. Is there an unbiased MiddleEast for Dummies book somewhere? Where do we get information about the various political candidates that doesn't come from the candidates themselves?
So I may not be voting this November either. Maybe the best way would be for me to get information on the local politics, and then vote for the local candidates. But I'll have to see.
Security measures such as firewalls and anonymous browsing would still be needed, but I'm sure that much more educated individuals could point you toward good solutions for that. I just wanted to bring up the idea of an OS on a CD-ROM. It leaves no records and viruses and worms cannot be installed on it, because it cannot be written to. It's a security solution for both Big Brother and the stupid, worm-downloading idiots that he watches over.
I think this should be solved at the government level in stead of at the software or hardware level.
that means w'll have to vote, instead of code.
> could come up with a great library computer setup that would protect anonymity
Install bootable PCs. Bring your CD-ROM/Floppy - boot - do what you will. Post IP connect info at the machine. Provide pre-configured CD-ROMs for any that want one.
> How about ways to enable people to borrow books anonymously without opening the door to large-scale theft?
Think Swiss numbered escrow accounts. You plunk down $X dollars into a numbered account, where $X would cover the cost of the books. You get an AC card with only an account number on it. You borrow books. Don't return them, the account is charged. Return the books, hand in the card, get back the balance. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Can't afford the deposit? Well, get the Government to back off of their manditory record keeping laws -- then don't keep records a minute longer than needed to clear the account. Yea, Not likely.
You can run an entire OS from RAM. Miniature Linux installations are available for free download on the WWW. They require under 50Mb of HD space, so what makes you think that it wouldn't fit in RAM? You don't need a power installation - just a GUI, a database, and a network connection to ghost the machine.
"If the FBI wants to see where a computer has been, they will find out. Yes, if they turn off the machine, everything is lost. But this will only get them once or twice. They aren't fucking idiots."
Whether you're an idiot or not, you can't just magically extract all the data from some RAM after it's been turned off. It's physical law. It's math. It's not an issue of IQ points.
"They will catch on, and start going to the library's isp instead and plugging a nifty little black box between the library and the internet."
Libraries do not need an Internet connection to look up databases for books. This can be done across an intranet, with no access to an ISP or the outside world whatsoever. To break into that and run a packet sniffer, the FBI agent would have to be sitting on the premises, where they could easily be seen.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
As far as I see it, anonymous checkout won't work in a free library. OTOH, if you require the library patron to deposit the value of the book before they can check out the book, that would work. You might be able to decrease the deposit amount to a percentage, depending on the honesty of the patrons, but I wouldn't count on it. Put money into the equation, and dishonesty increases.
Another method would be to give a "library card voucher" to every new resident, and allow them to obtain a card with the voucher, using some sort of random hat draw or something. Have some type of card trading system in the library, where people can trade cards, reliably knowing that each card has no books on it. (Scan cards, it tells you, "No books are checked out." You then randomly decide whether or not to exchange cards.) Of course, if you lose your card, you're screwed. This method would require a bit more honesty than today's libraries. IOW, it's susceptible to many of the same no-return attacks as modern libraries, (Borrow books, and never use the card again. Not much they can do about that either way.) But the fact that it can be traced back to you seems to encourage honesty, regardless of the library enforcing returns with external mechanisms. IOW, being anonymous increases dishonesty.
The best method seems to be to delete the records of a patron's borrowed books as soon as they are returned.
Because you're not thinking straight. Knowing that, at any moment, the gov't could walk into the library and demand a list of everything everyone has been reading, or searching on the internet, is incredibly chilling to people's willingness to read, or search, materials that aren't "popular."
It's our responsibility as citizens to remain informed, that's the point of the whole "Informed Democracy" thing. Nowadays, we have the govt regularly telling us "You don't need to know these things, we'll know them for you."
Lets take the current anti-terrorism campaigns. If you oppose the way the detainments and trials (or lack thereof) are going on, then it behooves you to do research to be sure you know all the facts. But wait, our own presidents press secretary has been more than hinting that asking those kinds of questions is unamerican "in this time of war". So the feds raid your library and add you to the list. Next thing you know a friendly FBI team comes by your house, or place of employement because "they have concerns about your reading habits."
As another example, there are plenty of reasons to read up on bomb making, other then planning on actually making one. I'll ignore completely the concept that you might actually be hoping to get into a job involving pyrotechnics, or might be taking a class in it. But I've heard some extraordinary things come out of the mouths of officials about what a particular device built by someone could have done or not done. If I had no idea what the facts were, I'd have to take their word for it, and allow my opinion to be shaped by my own lack of knowledge.
Also, who says the Feds will protect that information right? What if a loved one is HIV positive, and you're researching it for them. Now the FBI has that you've been reading on that topic, and eventually that slips out, and eventually your insurance company gets hold of a 4th hand database, that implies you're hiding that you're hiv positive, and finds an excuse to cancel *your* insurance... Then just the concept that you might be dieing gets to the credit agencies, and all your creditors cancel your credit. Just because you read a book in the library.
Read John Varley's "Press Enter" for a view of a world taking to the logical end of this nibbling away by the "well, if you don't have anything to hide, why do you care?" folks...
It has nothing to do with "sensitive" research. We shouldn't be forced to scurry into our holes like so many mice, there is supposed to be a presumption of innocence in this country.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Why? Is there established precedent that makes you personally or the library institutionally liable? Wouldn't your life be much simpler if you could tell them you honestly don't know?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
Great, maybe you can join the TIPS program, or CitizenWatch, or just annoy the hell out of your local police by calling them whenever anyone uses a computer in your lab.
It's Ebay's problem, not yours. You're already wildly underpaid, do you really feel it's your responsibility to protect Ebay's credit card accounting? It's not.
Criminal stuff is happening all around you, all the time. If you can prevent it, or assist in prosecuting the perpetrators, great. But when your "assistance" means *assuming that everyone will commit a crime* and recording their identities *before the crime is committed*, well, now you are, in my mind, much worse than the Ebay hacker.
He's only ripping off Ebay, you're assuming that every library patron is a criminal.
I've come to the conclusion that privacy activists are fighting the wrong battle.
There seems to be two main assumptions when dealing with privacy:
1) X can't be trusted. With X being any group other than the privacy group advocating something.
2) X needs to insure our privacy.
In all honesty, these two beliefs are mutally exclusive. If you can't trust the government or the corporations or anyone else (and I'll agree that you probably can't), then stop looking for a method for them to insure your privacy.
The only solution to insure your privacy is to insure than no external entity is capable of tracking you. In the case of libraries, this means NOT checking books out. It means paying with cash everywhere. It means no phone service, credit cards, charge cards, discount cards, banking accounts, driver's license, car, or anything else that involves filling out an application or showing any form of identification.
And even that isn't a safe bet. You have to also not allow your face to be seen in public, where a camera can record you in a specific location at a specific time.
It's simply too easy to track data. Giving outside agencies method to quit tracking your data only works if you trust those agencies.
Maybe a better solution is to make all, or at least as much of the data as possible, public. After all, the problem is the ability of someone to use data about you in a method you don't approve of. Another solution to that is to level the playing field. When spammers and telemarketers can't hide behind a wall of anonymity any more than you, when goverment officials have all their dirty little secrets made public, then perhaps we'll see a change in behavior.
But as long as some groups have access to information that everyone else doesn't have, you'll have the same problem over and over. Either you need to insure your privacy yourself of you need to insure that they have no pricacy either.
No Zen is good zen
Having the OS on something that is loaded clean at each boot would be a good idea for other reasons.
If the browser history were filled with porn, if the computer were infected with a virus, or if a keystroke logger were installed, everything could be cleaned up with just a reboot. (The keystroke logging thing happens more often than you would think on public machines.)
An OS that boots from read-only media (like some CD-based Linux distros) would accomplish the same thing.
Run for a seat on your local library board. I can almost guarantee you that you won't see much competition, and heck there might even be an open seat that you can run for uncontested.
Libraries are not run or operated by the Federal Government, at least in the United States. They are run by local government, paid for my the local library district's taxpayers.
Show up to the library board meetings, bring your friends with you. Ask them what they think about these issues, and what they are doing to keep a balance between needed record keeping and just letting Project TIPS or the Homeland Security department grep through records for "nuclear weapon" or "anthrax."
You can make a difference! Most people it seems lately take no interested in local / town / area governments, but that is where the normal citizen can make the MOST difference!
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
I wasn't bringing up the "wasted vote argument". I was saying that the voting process needs to be restored to the proper electoral college. The forced Biparty system only works for corrupt politicians and factional groups.
Actually, until very recently, all of the public 'net access via the county library system here was done via dumb terminals and some sort of *nix. Browser was lynx, mail client (if you were registered) was pine. I'm thinking a bare system using stuff like this could easily fit into and run in 256mb or less. Wait a minute! It can! My 486sx33 latop has 12mb of ram, 40mb swap, is running a bare install of Slack 8.1 - 120mb of disk used (plus swap), and I installed a ton of extra crap I'm not going to use. And it certainly runs lynx/links, pine, etc. just fine. So to make it very anonymous, use "diskless" kiosk machines that just boot from whatever CD is put into them. And right next to the machine, have a stack of premade business card sized CDs with just enough *nix to boot, get an address via dhcp, and run a basic wrapper program that will pass off calls to links/lynx, pine, etc. Heck, go GUI and get something like Peanut Linux to run directly off CD - KDE3, etc.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Don't worry about thinking about candidates etc. Just fill out the form and mark the box for every Libertarian there. If there are no Libertarians then mark the box for the Green Party. If no Green Party mark the box for the Constitution Party. No thought needed, skip any box that doesn't have one of those parties listed. Surefire way to avoid crap like the patriot act.
She gets paid large sums of money to spew questionable advice about dealing with your pet based on her 'communications' with them... This is stupid? Nah, that is genius... The people who bring their pets to her, on the other hand....
No, if you'd get your head out of your ass, and read the actual post, instead of just deciding what it said, your post would have been far more useful. And no, my job isn't to protect ebay. But my job *is* to cooperate with legal authorities tracking actual wrongdoing. If crimes are commited with services we provide, and we don't have any clue who was doing it, we start getting smeared with liability. Given I have *plenty* of evidence of the number of events that come from public labs (be they libraries or what) I have *plenty* of justification for my stance, despite your pathetic knee jerk response to it. Over 80% of crap that we deal with comes from those labs. I'm not assuming everyone will be committing a crime. If the criminals would register at the door, I'd leave the rest alone. But I am assuming that those 1% that are need to be tracked. As I clearly stated, I don't care *what* they were doing, and I don't want to be logging that. But, if it turns out that they were doing something illegal at the time, and it's tracked back to a particular PC, I want to know who was sitting there at the time.
I work for an academic library (state university). I'm not a librarian, I exclusively do computer "stuff" for them. So I am familiar with these issues.
We do not save historical checkout information. Our feeling is that there is no reason for us to save that information. The only way that we could know what books a person had checked out and returned would be if they returned them late and have unpaid fines. Once the fines are paid, they go away. So be sure to pay your library fines ;).
For anonymous browsing we are currently using a product called Centurion Guard. It keeps files from being written to the hard disk permanently. Once the computer is rebooted, the browser cache, history, EVERYTHING is reset to the state it was in when I installed it.
The reason for doing these things was not anonymity initially. We didn't want to waste a hard disk on the automation system logging user's browsing habits. The Centurion Guard is really to keep users from breaking systems, but has the nice side-benefit of hiding user's identities.
I have talked about this a little with our Dean and he staunchly supports the patron's right to privacy, so I don't see us changing any of this any time soon. Which makes me happy.
Don't think that libraries are ignoring privacy and freedom issues. Some of the most fierce freedom of information advocates I have ever met, I have met in the library setting. ALA is one of the best freinds that we have right now.
No. We're only protected if we innocently didn't realize it was an issue. If we *knew* people were doing things from there, and do nothing to stop it, we open ourselves up to cival liability.
Secondly, some of those attacks are against our own systems - people trying to crack admin systems, or just own systems, and the "oops, we can't track that" gets very old...
If it was an environment where I knew that kind of crap *couldn't* come from the boxes, but they were still useful for what they were intended for, I wouldn't worry.
So you do impliment this whole privacy thing and the feds come in and raid the place, guess what happens to you? You get thrown in jail for obstruction of justice.
Those towelheads down in cuba could only be so lucky. They get everything they need to live absolutely free and the quality of life is better than in afghanistan. Why don't you look at how some of our POW's were treated in vietnam?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I am posting this from Konq on Knoppix right now. It is a live-cd version of Debian running KDE. Very, very user-friendly and by default it does not touch the hard-drive at all. All modifications are on a ramdisk.
really are....It must be tracked...
....world economy.
Information and who's accessing it....
So as many may be trying to rationalize invasion of privacy by thinking only of terrorism excuses, perhaps there is the other side of the coin as to what the feds may be looking for......like those assessing information in order to see the truth:
take a look at this: World Meters
Take a good look at the different meters! Then look at this: What the World Wants
We have the technology and we have the funds to make good things happen.
So why is it not happening? You want to fight about it?
Assuming you don't want to fight about it, that fighting is not the goal or main desire of people, then there must be something else, something bigger that is the problem. You know, considering annual world military spending is $780 billion dollars (US) and to solve the major world humanitarian problems only needs 1/3 of that....
The problem has to be more than something under a trillion dollars.
A CIA Fact Sheet on Indonesia -- see the religion percentages (88% muslim).
OK, (given the above muslim population of indonesia): from the pbs trillion dollar bet article:
"In the summer of 1997, across Thailand, property prices plummeted. This sparked a panic that swept through Asia. As banks went bust from Japan to Indonesia, people took to the streets - events so improbable they had never been included in anyone's models."
and in Indonesia May 1998:
"Sources all over Asia tell Uscher that Asians know about local corruption but believe America is taking advantage of the situation to grab Asian markets and Asian wealth."
and (read the article!!!) another article from CNN:
"The austerity measures were a condition of the International Monetary Fund's $43 billion aid package to bail out the southeast Asian nation. "
World Bank wanted to help Indonesia out but charge interest (usery) entrapment???? Funny how China is the only country who did not participate in this stock game and are better off then the rest of us for not doing so.....
Where the US bailout was only (pbs article):
"We expect that they're going to explain to the members of this Committee why the Federal Reserve has organized the $3.5 billion bail-out for billionaires, why Americans should be worried about the gambling practices of the Wall Street elite"
And there is Something Else I have run across for that timeline as well (making the "trillion dollar bet" just icing on this cake?):
(note: overall I find information from this resource to be integratingly correct enough to be both useful and insightful, though with a touch of blind bias towards capitalism, though it does try not to be blindly biased, it is to subjective to capitalism to completely avoid it.)
"During the 1993-1999 bubble era of false economic progress, many CEOs, executives, employers, employees, even customers adopted the scams of clintonian-era politicians, lawyers, journalists, academics to become increasingly dishonest, corrupt, even criminal. The bubble-building, stock-market fraud began when Chairman Alan Greenspan clintonized the
Federal Reserve. He signaled that politicization by blatantly breaking a time-honored apolitical precedent when he sat as a special guest in the president's box during Clinton s first State-of-the-Union address. Greenspan, the former acolyte of capitalism-champion Ayn Rand, then married a socialist/clintonian journalist. His drive to create a Clinton-boosting, economic boom -- a high-tech bubble economy -- escalated from that point. He with Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton artificially increased the value of the dollar, relentlessly increased the M-3 money supply, recklessly created sloshing liquidity, and pied pipered consumers and corporations into bankrupting debt. He engineered those cancerous long-term policies to continually fuel the equity markets for baleful political ends and unearned glory.
The bubble burst in early 2000 causing losses of four-trillion dollars. After several sharp bear-market rallies, those equity losses launched a long-term economic decline -- the feared L-shaped recession or worse."
Oh yeah and this 5 year stock market link comparing the DOW with the S&P and most important the NASDAQ. Where you can tell where the money went and also know what the dot coms were all about.
Given the above
From theCBS article on the NSA (National Security Agency) total system failure:
"In January 2000, Gen. Mike Hayden, the director of the NSA, received a call from the agency's watch officer alerting him that all of its computers had crashed."
In that same article (in fact in the previous paragraph):
"A phone call intercepted by the NSA is often the first warning that a terrorist such as Osama bin Laden is planning an attack against Americans. To find that threatening phone call, email or radio transmission among the billions made daily, the NSA relies on rooms of supercomputers."
The date of this CBS article is Aug 29, 2001.
Do you really think maybe Y2K brought the systems all down? For what is supposed to be the top spy agency in the US? (they don't say what caused the three and a half day crash.)
Or do you perhaps see a simpler Truth to the matter, such as:
Stock market gamblers and Gov. screwed up the world economy so bad and especially for muslims that the NSA had damn good reason to KNOW what was going to happen and that they needed an excuse for their total inability to deal with it.
*And then there is this, how might Afghanistan participate in global* *humanitarian issues:*
And the Bill of Rights
How about now? Do you want to fight now? And if you were an Afghan Muslim, instead of a US citizen?
Targets....White House for it's political control over Pentagon military backed control over World Trade Center
We taught them how to do it, How to fight smart, how to learn what they need to know and where they can get supplies (anthrax, planes, etc..) from us to use against us....... then we lite a bon fire under their ass to motivate them into action while we turned our backs to intelligence....played ignorant......so they could more easily do it.
And Ted Turner (CNN) said something about the attack being an act of desparation. Which he later apologized for.....because of why?
I mean does it? honestly? Is it really an issue if the govt knows how often you get Monkey Spanking for Loners vol 3 out?
:-P
Just because they information is there doesn't mean they will do anything (not that there is that much you could do with library information). The govt wants access to the info for a reason - to find terrorists, peadophiles and the like. If you don't set off any flags in their search, then your data gets bypassed and life goes on.
Don't get me wrong I think there are limits and I wouldn't want to live under the watchful gaze of big brother all time.
However all this talk of big brother is always being thrown about and you are just fueling the fire. Yes the govts around the world should not have access to every aspect of information about you, but if them seeing what books you read, or if you need to carry around an id card with a chip on it that has a load of info about you (medical info would be damn handy if you got run over or something) then I think it's a small price to pay if it means the govt can get more terrorists, peadophiles, rapists, etc off our streets.
The trick isn't stopping them having info, it's controlling what info they have; and for the average citizen, most things the govt would want to know aren't going to affect your day-to-day life.
Now that I think about it, maybe you posted the topic because you have something to hide from the govt.
Now, should I be arrested? Should my Encyclopaedia, which I purchased at quite some personal cost while I was a seaman in the United States Navy, be taken from me lest I use the dangerous information it contains? Or does that only apply to electronically-conveyed information?
Roxio's GoBack 3 has an "Auto-Revert" function that automatically restores the hard disk to a pre-determined "clean" state, at a given time/event (midnight/shutdown/whatever.)
:)
They tout it as being ideal for cyber-cafes and libraries.
Unlike GoBack's normal working state, where a detailed history of the drive's activity is maintained, when Auto-Revert is enabled, no history is kept after a revert; all that's left is the "clean state."
Sounds ideal for preventing authoritarian agencies from snooping on their citizen's web surfing habits.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
- While this is often true, so what? The rest areas in national parks are also owned by the government, but that doesn't mean they have the right to put webcams in the latrines.
-
Further, it isn't always true. Lots of private universities have libraries; there are a number of privately-owned museums with libraries attatched.
-
Finally, while it is true your bog-standard municipal library is owned by `the government', it isn't owned by the federal government; it's generally a service of the municipal government, paid for by municpal ratepayers. Why exactly, again, does the FBI have the right to get any information at all from the library just because both the FBI and the municipal library are owned by `the' government?
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank and about as right-wing an organization as you can imagine, a group I seldom have occasion to agree with, published a report on these sorts of issues entitled ``Preserving our Liberties While Fighting Terrorism'', which, in discussing exactly the sort of new powers like being able to search library records with no probable cause, says:"I bet if we offered a packaged, free, easy to install Safe Browsing computer or Anonymous Checkout program, libraries across the U.S. would enthusiastically embrace it."
The fundamental problem with this is that an anonymous checkout system would mean that the library would have no way of getting their books back. Not that a lot of people are out to steal books from public libraries, but I know that if there weren't a fine for returning it late, I would probably put my borrowed books down some place and forget that they were borrowed and not mine. After two weeks of this, they usually give me a call reminding me that the books actually belong to them.
Now picture a world where they can't call me, and when I check out a book, they have no idea that I have quite a few sitting in my apartment waiting to be brought back. Multiply that by the number of people checking out books, and the nations libraries would soon be depleted.
Another thing, I know quite a few people who work in libraries, and they tend not to enthusiastically embrace anything. Especially anything that even sounds like it might require having to re-enter every book in their collection to a new database, and unfortunately they equate the people I know equate "new software" with "new database:. Of course this view is probably a little bit skewed because I'm used to pivcking around small libraries in sleepy towns in the sticks.
Some years ago, the Hampshire County Library service in the UK had two different styles of library tickets. One type was the standard cardboard wallet into which went a ticket identifying the book. On this carboard wallet, about 1.5" square, was the borrowers name and address. When you returned the book, you got the cardboard wallet back, leaving no trace of who borrowed what, and when.
The other type of ticket was the 'Fiction Token'. This was a simple, mass-produced plastic card, identical to every other plastic card, which was simply exchanged for fiction titles. You take a book, you give 'em a token. You return the book, they give you a token back, but not the same one. There's no way to track who has what.
This was all removed in the name of efficiency some years back. The current system uses barcodes in books, and barcoded member cards, tying all books to borrowers present and past. Any librarian can browse through your borrowing history, or the history of a book, almost instantaneously.
So, take a backward step for privacy. Replace your lendng libraries computer system with cardboard wallets. When a book is loaned, you do have the borrowers details, but ONLY while the borrower has the item. This allows you to chase borrowers who have not returned items. Once the item is returned, you lose the association. Simple, private, and virtually idiot-proof too. The system doesn't even need electricity. For low value items, such as paperback books, issue 'fiction tokens'. Borrowers get, say, four tokens, and if they want more, they pay the average cost of a paperback for one. Keep a log of who has how many tokens, but nothing more than that. This will catch abuses, but not provide any tracking. Librarians: You're in the library business, not the espionage business! Do your community a favour, and take a step backwards.
So, now the new thing will be for the seedier kids to hang out at the library and ambush anyone walking out. Books have a pretty high value and with this system, thieves are able to get full-face value for their loot. Hmmmm. Methinks it won't work. . .
This is a good idea to collect ideas on how to enable libraries to rpotect individual privacy in borrowing books..
we need to send this thread of ideas to people like Jenny levine at
http://www.theshiftedlibrarina.com
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Who thought "Programming Libraries".
::shakes head, sighs:: I am such a geek.
The answer to make sure they weren't spying was to create open-source ones, duuuuuh.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
At any large university there is a small problem of people stealing textbooks and selling them back. It's not an earth-shattering problem, but it exists. There's nothing you can do about it, some theft is inevitable when you have 40,000 students. That doesn't mean schools should end book buybacks.
If you want to steal things that are readily tradeable for cash, you've got a lot of options. Anything that can go to a pawn shop, for example.
First of all, regardless of whether government owns libraries or whether we the people own the libraries it does not matter. Our records are private because we have a constituional right to privacy. Just because we go to a government school or a go to a government building does not mean we are surrendering ourselves to a polygraph or a piss test or a background check.
The way to make a library system secure against violations of our privacy is simple. When a person checks out a book, a record is created, when it is returned and any fines due are paid it should be erased. The record as to what book was checked out should be erased as soon as that information is no longer pertinent to the library or the customer.
Seems nice and subversion - invokes "paternalistic".
Or, as I should say... For each user, keep a table of the number of materials s/he has along with a material code (which helps figure out the fine if something is late or not returned). DO NOT have anything about the books or other materials themselves, just a count of how many of each type.
For materials, keep track of each materials' status (in, out, lost, etc), but not who has them.
About the rest, anyone who's been in high school can figure how it would work. However, this has many flaws itself. For the most part, though, it'll keep the law people scratching their heads and nothing else.
Each book in a library traditionally has a card in it that has the due date stamped on it. How about a SEPARATE piece of paper with the borrowers info is kept with this card while the book is checked out. No book or time/date info on this second piece of paper, just the borrower's info. When the book is returned, the second paper is discarded (or shredded.)
The only books that could be tracked are ones currently checked out or overdue.
David Chaum, the inventor of the "blind" signature mechanism that is the core of most digital cash protocols, created an extended variant of this system [Chaum90] that explained how you can accomplish some rather tricky things with unlinkable identity systems. One of the examples he has used in the past a computer controlled library, the "librarian" would let you check out books with an anonymous identity and maintain policies such as "only three books out at any one time", etc. with strong security for the system and complete unlinkability among user transactions as long as they follow the rules.
This system handles the daily mechanics of such a digital library, but it needs an external hook to get a user into the system called an "isa-person" certificate (a cert that you could only get one of, probably biometric, that is a hard link to your meatspace identity) which is used as the stick to prevent people from walking away with your books. If someone checks out books and does not return them they get a negative mark on their isa-person cert that will follow them to around until it is cleared. A deposit of cash, as others have suggested, would probably serve an equivalent purpose.
If you really want a secure, anonymous digital system it is probably going to end up working something like NetFlix. You apply for an anonymous id and put down a cash deposit, the anon id lets you borrow titles with certain restrictions, when you are finished with the account you cancel your subscription and get your deposit back.
Jim
[Chaum90] David Chaum: Showing credentials without identification: Transferring signatures between unconditionally unlinkable pseudonyms; Auscrypt '90, LNCS 453, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1990, 246-264.
It seems to me, that by protecting each individual workstation, you could actually save them time
the idea of confiscating each individual workstation seems absurd to me, when they could just stick a proxy server in their way. anything short of encrypting everything isn't going to work, let's email every ServerAdmin....
Knowing that, at any moment, the gov't could walk into the library and demand a list of everything everyone has been reading, or searching on the internet, is incredibly chilling to people's willingness to read, or search, materials that aren't "popular."
I would also suggest that if the vast majority of peacable citizens could be persuaded to educate themselves about science which would prove useful militarily (they don't need to read the books dammit, just borrow them) then such people would help to preserve others' anonymity at the library.
The article tells us that since the 50's, every single state has passed laws making library records confidential. What does that tell you? Overwhelmingly, every single state in the United States is against this release of information. So how does El Presidenté Bush's opinion over-ride that of the people who elected him?
Assuming that:
1) librarians want to know how often a book is checked out and in.
2) librarians want to be able to get their books back
3) Librarians are Good People(Tm) and want to protect privacy:
The system should look like this:
3 separate databases/tables:
1) book check out/in information. contains 3 fields: Book name/barcode, date out, date in. This is written to at the same time as the other database
2) Personal holdings: the table is set up as follows: Personal ID, Date Out, Date Due.
3) personal info: name, address, etc.
The second table is checked against the current date to see if the book is overdue, if any are, it sends you a letter.
When your book is checked in, the check in date is filled in in table 1, and the record is DELETED in table 2.
Simple, easy, completely safe.
hmmmm?
> I'm still not quite sure why people are so hung up on this level of privacy if they're going to be using a public place.
So, you think a world where your personal police officer is assigned at birth, sits at the end of your driveway using heat goggles while you are in your home, and attends your every move when your are "in public" -- defines a "free" and acceptable way to live.
Get a clue.
Having once worked in a small Librariy I can say thay we could not keep track of all the books ckeked out. The server just could not handle keeping that much data,even the AIX server that ran it all. The couple of thousand books ckecked out every week would be a maintance money pit for the IS staff to keep backed-up. We keept track of fines and what is CURRENTLY checked out only and who has a library card. Anything else is too expensive for the tight budgets of any Library.
no
And, considering you don't really "own" your home, but more closely "rent" it from the Government authority, one has to wonder how long it will be before your home is deemed "a public place". At first, maybe because it has a Window. Or, with today's DMCA crap style of thinking because you may own a VCR, TV, DVD viewer, or Cable box.
You could set up a system that let the library determine a persons library ID from normal credentials (drivers license or state ID), but prevented it from going the other way.
If you ran all of the information on a driver's license through a hash function you could generate a one way library ID. Since the hash function will always generate the same result you could prevent a patron from getting more than one account (you would need to store the DL info and check to make sure the patron was not making minor changes to get a new Library ID and escape fines).
If the key were adequatly protected (hardwire it onto a stand-alone chip that only allowed hashing) there would be no way to determine a user's browsing habits without rehashing the entire database (ok, half the database on average). There is no way that FBI could require that as a regular demand.
Also, because the library ID would change with any change in DL, including just a re-issue, the gov't would have to make the request frequently to compromise privacy.
z
The 64K questions is why do they keep this information in the first place! I can see why they may want to know how many time a certain work is taken out so they can make intelligent choices in picking books that are of interest to the individuals that use their facility.
Maybe librarians are just nosey b#####ds!
If I had no idea what the facts were, I'd have to take their word for it, and allow my opinion to be shaped by my own lack of knowledge
Very true. Time after time since the whole Anthrax scare I found myself correcting people about what this or that biological agent could do, how you could spread it, etc etc. The only reason I happen to know these things is because I did a report in high school on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. It sort of makes me cringe to think that I'd probably be put in prison now for researching that report. I mean how do you protect yourself from terrorists, if you don't know how they think, or what they would do?
Carnivore is not limited to SMTP packets (if it was it would be defeated by all the web based mail readers). It can capture any and all IP traffic, so it can reconstruct anything a monitored site does on the Internet. No, it can't capture information off of a computer, but one does not go to a library to store information onto their hard drive. Anything on the hard drive of interest would have been sent over the Internet, either to or form another location: E-mail, user/passwords (even a /. login), news stories, stories about evil doers who think they are entitled to "rights" after peeking at an anti-government site, and so on.
It's been a while since I did this, but at some libraries I believe it's necessary to "unlock" a computer by somehow presenting your library card or some similar token, and so they could in fact know who was at which terminal.....
Clearly this is a needless action to take at a library. I can see the need to present your card when checking out a book, as it gives them some level of expectation that the book might be returned. But I've never had to present a library card at a library to read a book on site. I can read books in just about any public or university library in this country without a card, I just can't check them out. Why should I have to show a card to use an Internet terminal? The only reason seems to be to track people's usage. If they are doing this then we are hardly going to convince them to boot to RAM disk to protect people's privacy.
They might also look for things like what signin you used when you were checking your webmail...
And again, Carnivore will get that, a RAM disk will not provide privacy.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Libraries are not as popular as they used to be. If librarians want to keep their libraries open and funded, they need as much traffic as possible to justify their existence.
;)
If people believe their privacy will be jeopardized by visiting a library, they will stay away from libraries even moreso than they do now. Thus, a pro-privacy stance makes perfect sense from a librarian's perspective, and it is an economically rational position to take.
That isn't to say the librarians don't prefer it that way, of course. If the government said "you only get funding if you invade people's privacy" it would be economically rational to take an anti-privacy stance...but I think some would still fight it.
After all, what good is a library full of books with nobody there to read them?
At least it would be quiet.
In the 70's a friend of mine in high school and I decided to check _The_Communist_Manifesto_ out of the school library. This seemed like a rebellious thing to do, and we were feeling rebellious.
...
It turned out to be a boring read for a couple of guys in high school, so it was thrown in the back of my locker.
It came due and my homeroom received two late lists. One had my name alone. The other had the four or five other late book folks in the homeroom. We laughed about how a copy of that late book list was in a file at the FBI.
Ha Ha Ha
Information should only record that you have something checked out, but not exactly what you have in your possession. Use a one-way hash such as MD5 on the ISBN as a key. When you check out a book, only this hash is recorded. When you return the book, this information is purged from the computer.
Downside, the library can't tell how much the book is worth when it is lost. If you record the value along with the hash, it could theoretically be used to figure out the exact book. To fix this, only the value "range" is recorded, and the maximum is charged if the book is loss. For example, the book is in the "Under $10 range". If lost, you own $10 to the library, even if the book only cost $7.
Another downside, the library doesn't have a way of keeping track of which books need to be replaced. This isn't a good situation, but privacy overrides inventory tracking need. I think it's a fair trade-off. The library could implement an "inventory week". During that week, the actual ISBN is recorded when you borrow a book so they can do a proper inventory check. If you don't want that information recorded (even if purged when the book is returned), don't check anything out that week.
-- Will program for bandwidth
As the sys admin for a fairly sizable public library system, I'd considered doing an "Ask Slashdot" on this very same subject. Our library (and, I'd assume, many many others) is fiercely protective of our patrons' right to privacy. And, like many on this site, we were outraged at the passing of the PATRIOT act. (At least CIPA still isn't in effect.)
We can still do quite a bit to protect our patrons' privacy, such as not requiring log-ins, using DHCP and NAT to keep their ip addresses hopping, etc. But as for records of what people have checked out, there's another problem that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere; backups. As with any database of mission-critical information, we have to maintain at least a small amount of backup information.
Of course, once a book is returned, we wipe the transaction record from the database. But the government will still be able to see who has what currently checked out, as well as whatever is on the backup tapes. Unfortunately, I can't see much of a way around that.
Please keep this thread going! I'm kind of having to teach myself the basics of system administration at my library, and some of the ideas that have come up so far have been very interesting...
It seems that if the American people are going to protect their rights, they are going to have to do so actively.
That's always been true, not just in America but in every country. The fact that so few people seem to understand it, is the most serious long-term threat to our freedom. Politicians want power, that's why most of them became politicians. Unless constantly resisted, they will grab more and more power over our lives.
I mean how do you protect yourself from terrorists, if you don't know how they think, or what they would do?
Why, give up your rights to the government, of course. You don't need to know anything, they'll protect you. Really now, such things make me think you're one of those unpatriotic flag burning hippies. How dare you not trust your government? *end sarcasm*
Those who would give up freedom for security will get neither. (Credit to Benjamin Franklin for saying something the that effect, the wording of which I forget right now.
At Andersen, Worldcom and Enron, the technological solution to their "problems with anonymity and privacy" (document shredding) was illegal, even before there was evidence of wrongdoing. (Now I know this is slashdot, the home of the easily stretched bad analogy, so I'll right off state that I realize that their financial records are supposed to be available.)
When a planned, possibly conspiratorial crime/attack/etc. occurs, do you really want our law enforcement hobbled by an inability to unravel the methods, sources, and co-conspirators of the bad guys?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
It's just another thing to boost our false sense of security. The people who end up paying for it are law-abiding citizens. Anyone who flew in the US in the few months after 9/11 knows what I mean.
First, I am a systems librarian. I run the central "materials management" server for a public library consortium, so I believe that I can add a few things to the discussion here.
First, it is important to mention that privacy and the right to information is very important to librarians. All professional librarians have at least a master's level degree; we receive in-depth training and education in privacy laws, ethics, and technology. Yes, slashdotters, I am a professional librarian, but I am also run an E10K.
A librarian will be the last person to give any private information of any sort. We fight internet filtering just like we fight the people who want to remove those "blasphemous" Harry Potter books from the library shelves. It's just a part of our profession.
With that said, I can tell you what we are doing, and maybe calm some of the fears of the original poster. The practices that I use in my system administration are very common, and are widely used. First, all of our "private" information is stored on the central server. We do not keep any identifying data on the server past 30 days. This is a very common practice... we've done it this way since coming off the old card catalog (as do most public and academic libraries).
As for any information stored on the public access computers-- there is no way to tell who used what computer on the client end. Again, the usage records are all centralized and secure. Furthermore, I know that most of our branches do maintenance routines to clear the workstations' cache and such. Some branches even go as far as reloading the entire hard drive each night ( actually removing the partition, and starting again from scratch from a image).
So, there is no need for an "anonymous checkout system" or anything like that. We're handling this job just like we've been handling it since Egyptian times... and John Ashcroft does not scare us. Much.
You know, instead of posting this question to slashdot, you should of consulted your friendly local reference librarian, who would of consulted your local systems librarian (who is probably chained up somewhere in the server room). That is their job, afterall.
See, that's a really good point - and environment that's safe and anonymous might also be one that would make it difficult for crackers to work from. Talk to me about what things a PC should be able/not able to do to make it cracker-unfriendly.
closed minded is as closed minded does
I don't think anyone here has even a clue how huge and complex library software is -- nor how much money it costs, and the nightmares there are in maintaining it. We tried to create a GNU software system for libraries sometime ago, never got off the ground. There were quite a few volunteers, all who seemed to think this was just a simple database project, but when they took a look at what libraries actually are using and what it would take to create a whole new state of the art object oriented library system -- they all went away. Go to the SIRSI page www.sirsi.com or the Innovative Interfaces homepage if you want to see companies that have the best commercial stuff out there. And, BTW, up until now libraries didn't keep records of what you checked out -- the default setting in the software is to erase the record as soon as the book was checked back in. This was done precisely because the police and feebs had in the past tried to get that info. Librarians are not happy to be in this position, believe me.
clearly part of the system would try to limit the ability to snoop on the goings-on from the ISP - some kind of encrypted, anonymous browsing would be great (I posted above suggesting encrypted communications to an anonymous proxy (only as safe as the proxy is) like triangle boy (if I recall correctly that how it worked) or what ever happened to that IBM program 'crowds'?
I'm interested in any ideas you have on how to secure against ISP-level snooping
closed minded is as closed minded does
It is my understanding that most libraries not not keep any borrowing history. Once the book is returned, there is no record of who had it out. Perhaps backups, I suppose. Ask your local public library what info they keep.
Knoppix is what you need.
The only way that I can think to defeat ISP-based snooping is to encrypt all traffic at some level. This would work well if, in a client/server setup, both the client and the server support the same encryption scheme...unfortunatly this isn't always the case. Incidently, this is why I don't use PGP for email, because the vast majority of people I communicate with wouldn't know what to do with it :P
Meanwhile, your bank knows how and where you use your credit cards, your phone company knows who and when you use the telephone, and, if you use one of those cute little discount cards, your local grocery knows what you eat.
All this privacy threatening activity existed before the current post-9/11 focus, and would still exist absent that. It is financially driven, even in the case of libraries who want their books back.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
My Lord, that's a good point. I used to work in a library when I was 16. I would use the computer system to find the phone numbers of cute girls that came in. Of course, I would strike up conversations about the books they were reading.
Now, I feel like an idiot, and am quite embarrassed by this. I would never do anything like that now that I'm grown up. But a teenage employee can be very big privacy risk.
And no, it never resulted in any dates.
Its a republic. Democracy is a dirty word synonimous with mob rule. The word democracy apears nowhere in the constituion or related documents. Its use is merely a populist attempt to overthrow perfectly good and well thought out methods for maintaining a government.
The library is going to be required to turn over their keys legally. You can't hide the encryption from them, and you can get charged with obstructing justice if you have a librarian dead-man switch deleting files...
I've also been thinking up a system for checking out physcial books anonymously for sometime. This became especially important to me, when I realized my library was asking patrons for their SSN in order to get a library card.
So this is system I've got so far....
1) You need to get the libraries to add another field for all books in their databases: how much replacement costs are (not book costs, as those are far cheaper) for each book. This is *not* an inexpensive step for large collections. Also you need a flag for whether or not a book *can* be replaced. Many, if not most, books can't be replaced. And most books are out of print in under 5 years.
2) When checking out a book with an anonymous borrower's card, the value of the card is compared to the value of the book. If the book is less valuable than the $ on the card, then the person wishing to check out the book may check out the book. In total all the books the person wishes to check out must be less than the value on the card.
3) The person wishing to use the anonymous card, tells the checking out staff member their use-password, to confirm that they have permission to use that particular anonymous borrower card (an attempt to prevent theft of cards. It's not very effective it's still possible for the woefully underpaid staff members to fleece anonymous cards, amongst other problems). And the amount the book is worth is deducted from that anonymous card account. As per most libraries, you get a checkout printout (which is also your receipt - how much good it's gonna do you I'm not sure....)
4) There's another password, which is the refund password. That allows you to cancel the anonymous account and get your money back (minus set-up fee). Card is written off as a loss, but can be re-upped with more money later (ie: don't reuse the card numbers, or be willing to tell people their old card can't be re-used). The reason this is different than the use-password is so one person can fund an anonymous card with more than one user, or give to a child and not let them cash it out.
5) Books that are late are automatically depreciated by late fees, until their value is 0, and then the book is purchased. Otherwise, patron gets whatever value is left back into their anonymous account, when they return the late book.
6) Another large problem (like 1), is book returns. A lot of time returning a book to the library does not put it back into their availablity system, and there's no reciepts issued, and no way to prove that you did return a book on time (any library user of more than a casual amount has run into this problem). One way around this design problem is to assign another staff member to do physical check-ins and print dated reciepts, limiting anonymous people to risking their money or having set hours which they must do returns. Also, most libraries are woefully underfunded and understaffed to be able to assign a staff member to do this.
7) This system doesn't cover defacement or other problems.
Many thanks to a nameless (for fear of slashdotting) librarian news site, for covering these issues and many other that are essential to rights, and knowledge.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
> with book stores. They don't need a warrant, or
. ht ml
> even a subpoena
That's what cops would like you to think. However it is untrue. The cops thought they could do that to a guy in Colorado, they wanted to peg him as a drug dealer by using his book-buying habits against him. Cops: "buyer's identity was critical to their investigation of a methamphetamine lab and that they had no other way to prove who owned the books." -- So much for presumption of innocence, that's *all* the evidence they were going to muster against him. Even if he'd bought those books for a friend, or on a lark. With juries not being informed ( fija.org ), and physical presence of intimidating cops, they probably could have put him away too... I hope one day all these people who're saying it's no big deal are tossed in the slammer on similar evidence.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,51667,00
CO Supreme court unanimously said 1st amendment and CO constitution say people have a right to anonymously purhcase books.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
The Ad Council has made a "campaign for freedom" ad, which basically says that one of the reasons we're fighting terrorism is so that we can enjoy basic freedoms, like public library use.
:)
_ tv _library_30_rp_v2.smi?siteid=adcouncil
Which is completely ironic
http://boss.streamos.com/real/adcouncil/cff/cff
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Almost every single one of them has agreed to open up the elections process. If any one of them gets in, then (if they uphold their promises) we'll have broken out of the problem we're in (Duverger's Law).
So yes, if you can do nothing else, vote for the largest thrid party you can find. In fact, I'd recommend that anyways, as I'd rather break Duverger's Law, instead of waste time fighting amongst who's better: Libertarians, Greens, Natrual Law, Peace, Communists, etc. We need the equivicators out - there's next to no difference between the two main parties *because* they've figured out that Duverger's Law works for them, and they can both sell out as much as they want because very few people will choose a party other than them, even if they lose elections for 40 years...
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
While I like your idea in principle, it violates information physics. The idea that you can set [the book] to expire when the book is "due" is just as fallacious as the idea that you can rent a secret. "Information" isn't a block of cheese that can rot over time or a car that can be rented and returned. It isn't anything physical. It's simply the organization of discrete bits into a specific order. This requires physical material to store that order, but the information stored on the pages of a book is not the same thing as the book.
Linux is not the units of magnetic material on your hard drive that store it. A story is not ink and paper.
People fall into this way of thinking all the time because information is so closely tied to the material on which it is stored. Sure, you can rent a book, but you can't prevent someone from taking it home and scanning it in. That person wouldn't be stealing the book - she could still return it - but she would have a copy of the information represented by the order of ink blots on its pages.
When you introduce eBook readers into the equation, you mix two fundamentally incompatible areas of thinking: the old world view that can't properly distinguish between information and the physical material that contains it (book publishers), and the new world view that understands the physics of information (tech savvy people). By making easy the electronic distribution of information that is usually contained in books, it becomes easy to copy that information - much easier than scanning a page. Sure, you can have software that looks at a clock and zeros out flash memory depending on a rental table, but any technology like this, any technology that attempts to control information copying, is doing so artificially. Information does not naturally expire or resist copying.
This opens the door to widespread copying and distribution once someone hacks the eBook device. While there would be no "theft", people would have their desires satisfied (i.e. they wolud be able to read the book) without paying for it. Sure, those people could go down to the library and rent the book, but they would risk having to wait in a queue for a limited resource. Also, "renting" something is not nearly as satisfying (to most people) as "owning" it. However, it would decrease the amount of demand for that book that would be channeled into the purchasing process resulting in revenue for the book publisher and author.
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing - it doesn't detract from the quantity of stock the "owner" of the copyright has. It detracts from the market value of the stock the "owner" of the copyright has.
The term you're looking for is Duverger's Law.
And what you want (or I *think* you want) is Proportional Representation, with a cap at 2-5% of population. (experience shows that going below 2% to 1% or less, leads to huge problems)
Oh and get Instant Run-off Voting for single-seat offices. Will save you money, give you cleaner campaigns, and allow risky voting (as you won't lose your vote if you pick people you want, instead of picking people you think have a chance of winning).
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
The right to complain is embodied in 1st or 2nd amendment, depending on how you're feeling.
And those rights are non-revokable. They are inalienable.
Voting is something people should do, and when they're not *at* least doing that, I don't respect them, but they can still complain. Voting is how we try to be civil about our governance, and reasonable, and efficient. There are times when you should be reasonable, and concillatory, and willing to make compromises.
And then there are other times. When they start trampling rights you feel are inalienable, trample back. As CO Supreme court ruled, so do I. And when 1-8 (9-10 are dead letters, and I hate that fact, but they have been) of the Bill of Rights are under attack, you should begin thinking about where your line is, and what you're gonna do about it.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
It would only be obstruction if you saw feds coming and wiped what they had a warrant for, or after they asked you refused and deleted stuff in front of them.
If the system is set up that way beforehand - or you redesign it now, before a warrant or subpeona is presented you're in the clear.
At least until Congress gets tired of it, and starts mandating specific records be kept...
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
If someone builds a fantastic device that can't be tapped or logged, they will then only demand or legislate that it not be used. It's good to have that friendly solution in our back pocket, but we must confront the idiocy behind the forces that are eroding the rights we all deserve together.
We will not passively save our freedoms.
> If you were reading large numbers of books that
> would usually only be of interest to a murderer
> or terririst, I WANT some one to come round to
> your house and have a chat.
And I WANT the cops to take you down to the station, spend the night in jail, and maybe get out within 48 hours, and I hope you lose your job because of it too. Because that's what you're saying. If the cops only come to your door and ask questions, I'll blow them off. Of course my neighbors will start talking, there will be fear (are they watching me), and all types of chilling effects. I want you to have all of those fun things happen to you. I want those records entered into your credit report (yes they are), so that you can't borrow money when you lose your job.
Just becuase *you* want something doesn't make it right.
There are a number of reasons you can be reading those books, maybe you're paranoid, maybe you're researching to write a movie, or a book. Maybe you're just curious.
> The government is not interested in YOUR reading
> habits, so what are you worried about?
Umm, are you dumb?
If the government isn't interested in *my* reading habits, why're they confisticating my records? And how're they going to know that I'm reading 'large numbers of books that would usually only be of interest to a murderer or (sic) terrorist' if they don't monitor everybody's reading habits?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
> whole lot of curious, middle class white
> Americans would be heading for the slammer.
I'm concerned about all Americans, citizens *and* residents. Not just the pretty ones with a fair amount of money. Those people can take care of themselves, and do at the expense of the poor.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
But it was decided from on high to be rid of it. I don't mind being at zero, but problem is that 0's get wiped in the archives. Go back far enough in the archives, and you'll see a *lot* more AC stuff. More recently you'll see registered users responding to AC stuff, but not including it in their posts, and since the AC was wiped, completely de-refrencing it...
.1s or something. A -1 would take them down to -1, but they'd be saved when the archive comes around.
Maybe an automatic upper - if any post in a thread is above 0, any 0s further up are converted into
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
It seems a lot of people are under the impression that the library's
computer remembers everything you ever checked out. While it is
theoretically possible that there may be libraries whose automation
systems do that, it is certainly not usual. I work at a library,
and our vendor (Gaylord) produces two of the major catalog systems
on the market, Galaxy (which we use) and Polaris (which is newer
and less, erhm, mature). Neither provides even the _option_ of
storing this information.
The library _does_ of course know what books you _currently_
have checked out. That's sort of necessary for them to be able
to hold you accountable if you fail to return the item. They may
even be able to check a book that recently came back and see who
just had it out, but that information is not stored forever, either.
(On our system, it's stored either for three days, or until someone
else checks the item out and returns it, whichever is sooner.
There is no way to look it up on a per-person basis, not even
with the report-generation facilities.)
So, if you are worried that having checked out a book on bomb
making a couple of years back for a report will make you a
suspect when the next terrorist attack rolls around, set your
mind at ease.
Furthermore, it is in many states (including Ohio) illegal for
a public library to disclose to anyone outside the library
your personal information (such as what you have out or what
your phone number is) except in certain special situations,
such as at the request of a parent of a minor patron, or a
court order.
So, to summarise the risk, the feds could, with a court order,
find out what you _currently_ have out, and your address and
such. Actually, I'd be more concerned about J. Random Criminal
(or someone who decides to hold a grudge for some reason) walking
up to an unattended circ terminal while the librarian on duty
is off helping a patron in the stacks (this happens quite a bit
at smaller libraries) and quickly looking up your address, or
charging you fines, or whatever. Very little computer knowledge
would be required to do this, because library computer systems
are designed for librarians, many of whom are not geeks.
Perhaps the most interesting insight I have to offer here is
that librarians tend WAY further toward the privacy-nut view
on this issue than the typical citizen. A significant number
of patrons would prefer (some of them strongly, to the point
of being quite annoyed at our refusal) that we retain a
complete list of every item they have ever checked out, in
order to be able to inform them whether they've already read
a given book, which books we have by a given author that they
have not read, and so on. Our suggestions that they retain
such a list themselves fall on deaf ears. They don't want
to be troubled with that. They want the convenience. (I
personally am appalled that anyone could take the trouble
to read an entire book and then not remember the plot (or
the major points, or whatever), to say nothing of not even
remembering whether they've read it or not, but apparently I
am nearly alone in this view. Anytime I state it, people look
at like I've just announced I'm from Mars.) If there are
libraries that do retain such information, I'm quite sure
it's because they caved in to patron demand.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I remember growing up a classic social science experiment. A group of Boy Scouts took a modernized paraphrase of the Declaration, including the passage cited above, and circulated it at shopping malls as if it were an Initiative petition. Most people not only refused to sign the thing, but called the boys Communist sympathizers.
Yep, that democracy thing is heavy stuff...
The difference is that you have to pay for the stuff you buy in a store, and they store is paying you (indirectly, by giving a very small discount) when you use the card.
In my experience this isn't so. Around here, prices jumped 50%-100% just after the cards were introduced; those with the cards kept paying the same prices they always had.
I resisted getting a card for months, but finally settled for getting one with the name and address of our fearless leader. I make it a point to always use cash at the grocery, so there's no way to cross-reference a credit card number (maybe I'm just paranoid about that bit).
Last night, though, something interesting happened: I had forgotten to bring any cash, so I pulled out a credit card and claimed to misplace my discount card. The lady at the register pulled out hers and swiped that one! She must do this all the time, because the receipt announced that she had saved over $20,000 so far by using her discount card.
Of course, now my credit card number is associated with the purchasing habits of everyone within a ten-mile radius.
I believe the Cult of the Dead Cow's program "Peek-a-Booty" does just that...kind of an encrypted peer-to-peer internet proxy. Check out their website
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Write a note to your local library to see what their privacy is... it can't hurt to ask. Here is what I wrote:
/ 08/11/03432 22.shtml?tid=158
Good afternoon. My name is . I have been a resident of and a patron of the Library since 1995. An interesting dialog has been brought to my attention (URL below) and I was wondering what the Privacy Policy was for the Library. By extension, I am also curious as to what the policy is for the Library System - would you happen to know?
Best wishes on the current construction efforts.
Regards,
Slashdot.org ("News for Nerds") article that raised the question.
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/02
This is some information about Slashdot.org in case you are not familiar with it.
http://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml
What is the point of your ranting? That the US hasn't done enough or that the US is responsible through its actions for all that is bad?
Maybe I should feel guilty, being a US citizen and all, that we haven't solved all of the worlds problems.
I suppose the Japanese and Germans would have done a better job of things if they had won WWII. Maybe the USSR would have exported their version of a workers paradise if there was no cold war. Maybe Mao's great leap forward wouldn't have resulted in millions of dead from starvation if the US had done something or nothing (you tell me, Nostradumbass).
Maybe. But I doubt it.
So go ahead then and take out a few books on STD's or some other such sensitive, private topic. Even if you are just curious, or looking at information because of something you heard. Then allow the public to have access to that information.
"So, have you heard that John Smith has" blah, blah, blah. It may sound far-fetched, but it isn't too far off-base.
You might say, "who cares, I don't care if people think I took a book out because I am sick", well there are quite a few people in small towns or not so small towns who don't wan't others to know their business.
Much like sending post cards through the mail, it's hard to keep much private from ISP/FBI snooping.
One time pads are the obvious first choice for encryption (I don't trust that the FBI and their cohorts can't read PGP). That still can give away a lot of information, like who you are in contact with. While it might be considered an abuse of resources (no worse than most use of Usenet though), I would consider posting an encrypted private message to a binary newsgroup that I knew my contact was monitoring. One should be able to disguise it so that it looks like a stray file segment to the casual user. With a interesting subject line you should even be able to entice enough people to download it that our friends in the government who protect our rights wouldn't likely be able to find who downloaded it, even if they were monitoring all ISP (he would be lost in the crowd). Very short messages might even be stored in the file header, good luck sorting through the list of all people who downloaded those! Of course, if they see you pick up a response they would have an IP address they could backtrack on, so responses, if needed, might have to consider alternate forms of subterfuge.
Clearly there are ways, which should make it clear that Carnivore is more about snooping on honest citizens than it is about spying on terrorists who are taking precautions.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
> What is the privacy advocate afraid of if the FBI has access to public library records?
0 02May22?language=printer
h tml
Maybe being extorted by FBI agents:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60476-2
Maybe being nearly killed, and FBI throwing you in jail and not investigating the bombers (hmmm, maybe the FBI *planted* the bombs?)
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9905a/jbrevisited.
Oh yeah, you don't clear your name for 9 years.... Hope you can afford the legal bills during that time, and keep your job.
They're still doing it, all over the place. And we keep giving them new powers...
> A libary is however a public entity and I don't really see a problem with records being public.
And you see nothing wrong with every move you make to get to and from work, or purchase groceries, or visit friends being videotaped and archived either?
Most of those activities take place in public too. And by default you should not be watched in public. If you're under suspicion by a cop, then they can follow you, and I have less of a problem with it. But being able to do retroactive investigations has a chilling effect.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
> No one is forcing you to use those super-scary
> GPS equipped cell phones. If you don't like it,
> use a pay phone. No one is forcing you to use
> your platinum credit card. If you don't like it,
> use cash.
Except pay-phones (when you can find them) run about $1-$1.50/15 minutes, so if you want to make more than 5 hours worth of calls a month (local!) then if you're poor, you need to get a cell-phone. On top of that, if you don't have a cell-phone, you can't get calls. Oh, you can purchase a land-line, for about $20 a month, oh, yeah, that's the price of a cheap cell-phone... And you'd have to use pay-phones any time you're not at home, *IF* you can find them.
Sure, use cash - if the places you're at will let you. Some places sure won't, like say, my university. Or any mail-order place, or some stores... Yeah, that's easier to get around right now, but not for long.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Especially when ACs are limited to ten repsponses per day.
And I woulda included another suggestion to OS on a disk, which is the 6/4 proxy web-browsing software to be released this month. If 10 libraries in every state adopted it, we'd be home-free.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Perhaps you could set up a third party system in which you pay a regular fee or deposit that is placed in escrow with the third party. Said third party then checks out book for you. That way all that government officials would have access too would be all of the books checked out by that third party.