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!
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'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.
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.
... 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.
the government has no such right. the people determine the rights of the government. all rights not expressly given to the government are the people's and the institutions to which those people wish to grant rights.
government has no property it is not given by the people.
(this is true even in non democratic/republican forms of government. see Gandhi's writing on non-violent resistance for an interesting object lesson in this fact).
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.
Yes. I'm sorry; yes, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I cherish my freedom, as you apparently cherish your anonymity. The price of having freedom is allowing other people to have it, too. You apparently believe that freedom is really just the freedom for all of us to be exactly like you. If we don't want to do anything that you don't like, we'll do fine. Because so many people are fucking morons, that means letting them have the freedom to saturate the airwaves with the Backstreet Boys, or the freedom to learn about explosives. We have to accept these dangers as simply the cost of doing business.
Just as my right to privacy is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives, my right to due process and a fair trial is important enough to justify the fact that due process and fair trials will end up allowing dome "detainees" to go free.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
It's not an ideal solution, since libraries should be in the practice of lending books for free, but it would work.
Problem. If all parties who have a reasonable chance of winning are willing to invade our privacy, then no matter who you vote for, you're going to wind up in the shit. This is especially true if you have a system which effectively consists of 2 parties.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
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
Public Libraries are _public_ places, owned by the _people_. The people have a right to peacebly educate themselves, assemble, and petition government for greviences. They have a right to perform these activities anonymously, else they could be subject to harrassment by those individuals who currently control the government.
Remember in the turn of the century when black people had the right to vote, but had to do so publicly so that their owners knew how they voted and what they were up to at all times? This is called opression and we are quicly headed back to this stage... only this time it won't just be along ratial boundaries.
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"
It's not Flamebait; it's Unintelligent.
My town thinks a library is an important thing to have, so we tax ourselves to fund one. I haven't seen any money filtering its way down from Washington to buy our books. Let Ashcroft search for borrowing records and browsing habits in the Library of Congress. That's the library owned by that government. He can stay out of my library, because my town owns it.
Where are you pulling this radar gun thing from?
_However_, when it comes to the FBI demanding book histories from stores like Borders, they can bugger off until they get a warrant.
You actually have less of a leg to stand on with book stores. They don't need a warrant, or even a subpoena. They could just ask. They could just walk in and seize it, claiming it's a terrorist related investigation. You don't own the bookstore, and if you signed up for their card club, you're asking them to collect information on you. It's their data, and they can sell it to anyone they want or give it to the FBI. They could sell it to the FBI. I hope you didn't buy a felafel cookbook, because then you're going to get detained. At least with your local library you can get the town to resist handing the info over to them. Borders probably made money selling you out.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
I wonder how long it will be before it will be illegal to lend or sell books without ID and records kept!
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
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.
They're innocuous right now. Wait until your favorite author publicly supports something unpopular. Wait until these records become even more public; you'll be looking for a job and the interviewer won't like your taste in books. You could get turned down for a mortgage because the bank sees you return books late sometimes.
I don't go to the library- I buy a lot of used books. My borrowing habits are about as innocuous as you can get, not being on their records. I've still got outrage enough to spare. Wake up and muster some yourself.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
... 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?
_However_, when it comes to the FBI demanding book histories from stores like Borders, they can bugger off until they get a warrant.
How ironic, bookstores such as Borders are more likely to keep exactly the type of records, the FBI thinks it needs. Libraries, by way of contrast, really have no need to keep copious customer data profiles, and might even consider it unethical to do so.
The FBI can piss off. They don't need warrants to view reading records. They don't need to prosecute individuals based on their choice of reading material.
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.
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?
Given the general interest among US citizens about Islam, terrorism, and methods of terroism that has been shown through the packed classes on all three at colleges and the huge amount of hits that such websites are getting, I seriously doubt that we can say that that privacy WILL be used to take lives. What the Justice Department is doing here is policing the freedom of information and stifling an interest in the unknown and relevant. If there's a piece of evidence that will prove that someone is a terrorist, it won't be found in what books they checked out or what website they went to in the local library. And if such evidence were admissable in court, then a whole lot of curious, middle class white Americans would be heading for the slammer.
You make some good points, but you are naive if you think the people have power to vote in who they want. I'm not a Republican or a Democrat nor do I believe in any of the other parties. Yet under the current system, I am forced to choose between them because of how the electoral college is run.
Originally, the electoral college meant that everyone voted for a person they thought was honorable, and that person would represent everyone by voting for who he/she thought was a good candidate for the office. Now they make it so everyone votes for a party in the college, and that party gets elected. The party chooses who to offer for the primaries. The politicians are just as answerable to their party as they are to the voters. Not to mention the fact that only the top two parties even have a decent chance at being elected.
The electoral college was meant to be a system which filters out extremists from entering office. Now it's being used to filter out non-Biparty members.
Yes, go out and vote, however realize that you aren't given many choices of who to vote for.
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.
That's exactly the point. As someone posting anonymously, you should understand the value people place on freedoms. I'm anonymous here, too- just try to email me- you can't.
I want to be able to act freely, to do as I please without cops looking over my shoulder all day, without every store I go to collecting data on me to be used against me by marketers, cops or people who just don't like me. Wanting to live and let live involves accepting the risk that some peoples' actions will be perfectly legal up until they unload a gun in a subway car or a fast food joint.
I'll live with that. The only way you can live a life of perfect safety is pretty damn boring. Government spying and "detaining" doesn't allow any of us much of a life.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
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...
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.
The wasted vote argument is tired.
You know, the surrealist film movement that took place in the early part of the 20th century in France spent a good deal of time focusing on the idea of revolutionary failure. One of their premises was that in any power struggle situation, the weaker side (practically, not ideologically) would have its strongest arguments assimilated by their oppposition. The effect was one where the side with more might could lay claim (and thus control)to the most persuasive arguments levied against them.
Yes, the "wasted votes" point is tired - but who tired it out? Who robbed the claim "the votes of the citizens *doesn't matter*, and somebody other than the public pulls the strings in a public election" of its impact?
I'll vote for who I believe in when a man I believe in can be voted for.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
If enough people do this then it would be impossible for TPTB to know whether you really borrowed (and read) that book or just selected it randomly.
Similar techniques are used for making survey responses anonymous.
80N
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?
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.
Again, not necessarily. The Feds have even LESS right to tell the states what to do than the states. State governments are sovereign entities, except as delimited by the constitution - a document you are apparently unfamiliar with.
I agree with your analysis of the traditional view and the US Constitution. However, states have repeatedly ceded their authority to the Federal Government. I blame the Federal Income tax. My state taxes are roughly one half that of my federal taxes. If the situation were reversed, the federal gov't wouldn't have nearly as much power over the state governments.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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.
Hell no.
Note what I said about the system becoming whimsical.
Also, I believe in public education and government regulation. So libretarians isn't the answer.
Neither is arbitrarily choosing third party candidates.
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.
Your milage may vary depending on your country's constitution, but in the U.S., there is no generalized right for cops to go fishing for criminals. They have to have "probable cause." Radar is still somewhat controversial on those grounds, and it is one reason speeding is not a misdemeanor but a civil infraction.
Indeed, as you point out, a warrant is required for accessing most records, and a warrant has to be based on credible testimony, and a judge has to sign his name to it (a standard that is often enough abused, but...).
So a library simply being property of a municipality or charitable foundation is not enough to enable a completely free hand in records access.
I wrote parts of this stuff
yes, it does matter.
you should expect political candidates to try to use checkout records to stir up controvesry over their rivals.
you should expect this information to be used against you if you are ever on trial, if for nothing else than to attempt to discredit your "character".
you should expect the govt to use it to determine the appropriate benefit amount for various programs (the same way insurance companies rate your lifestyle before determining policy rates).
you should expect the govt to track your every move, if you check out books that fall on their List.
if you're a minor, you should expect your parents to be notified if you are checking out books that aren't approved.
it's a rare occassion where the govt does not seek to excercise as much power as it can get.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
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.
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
During the turn of which century did black people have both 1.) the right to vote, and 2.) owners?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
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!
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.
Why don't you delete it as soon as the book is returned?
As for any information stored on the public
access computers-- there is no way to tell who
used what computer on the client end.
Is there from the server end? If so, why?
Again, the usage records are all centralized and
secure.
Not against the FBI. For them the centralization is just an added convenience.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
Knoppix is what you need.
You are sure confident in my (and my cohorts)
lack of ability.
I have no confidence at all in the willingness of the average librarian to risk a prison sentence for the sake of my privacy.
It only takes about 3 keystrokes to misplace a
log file. And we've been having alot of problems
with those back up tapes lately.
It's easy to say that now, but what will you do when you have four large, extremely aggressive men with guns standing over you?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No, he's talking about the other turn of the century (the 2000 election in Florida).
(Sorry, bad joke.)
My state taxes are roughly one half that of my federal taxes. If the situation were reversed, the federal gov't wouldn't have nearly as much power over the state governments.
Be careful what you wish for: your state may take you at your word and quadruple its taxes.
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...
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.
Terrorists, child molesters, identity thieves and countless others use our PUBLIC computers to commit their crimes. Make the bastards have to buy their own computers.
By this same logic we could stop murder by putting a tax on knives and guns. Criminals use whatever means are available to do what they want to do. If you want to battle terror, your best bet is to start addressing where the motivation for it comes from (which is actually a complicated issue and could take you a lot of research). You won't get anywhere by changing library policy.
This sounds somewhat similar to the situation in the US (although the mechanics are no doubt different). Large federal tax, small local tax (and in case of debt, the federal government gets money first). In order to fund roads, schools, etc. the state(s) must get various and sundry federal grants and loans. In turn, the states must follow all matter of federal laws and regulations. I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is that road money is MY money. The money of a citizen of this state. The rules are those of Pennsylvania, California, New York (just picking big states and using as example).
Anyway, I think the politics and idea sound very similar to what you have in Austrailia. Although from your description, it sounds like you just pay one tax bill to the federal government, not two separate ones?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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.