You're not likely to hear how who was affected by this, for the same reason that it's been almost unknown to the consumers buying your printers for the last decade: it's been convenient to keep this "feature" of their purchases secret. Or do you think that if the US government and manufacturers had publicly announced their agreement, there would have been a calm acceptance by Americans of the importance of paying for a system to invisibly watermark their own printouts?
I'm glad that your primary concern is large companies and government institutions. As I wrote in the EFF Deeplink, our concern includes dissidents working in authoritarian regimes who remain ignorant about this feature of the technology they use to spread their work, and the authoritarian governments intent on tracing and suppressing their citizen's literature and information sources -- who are not so ignorant.
Do you think the printer companies would proudly mention if their tracking technology was used to catch these undesirables?
Sigh. Okay, let me rephrase that. If Apple's lawyers were really rooting through his personal details to threaten to take him out, and offering him $500,000 with threats and menaces to pay him off, yeah, we'd get involved. Oh boy, would we get involved like a shot.
But the key thing here, and the really important matter to note, is that NONE OF THIS REALLY HAPPENED. And at the EFF, we do always endeavor to take cases where at least one of the litigants exists in our temporal reality.
Dude, it's a joke. We'd never say that. We'd probably not take the case, either, because there's really nothing there that would affect online rights or set precedents in general. But we'd at least try and point him in the right direction for finding out his rights, and maybe seek out an affordable lawyer for him. We might even gently ping the lawyers at Apple to explain what a costly publicity nightmare this would be for them.
Speaking personally, I do prefer Daniel Lyons when he's writing fiction like this, to when he's acting as a journalist and penning articles talking about the dangers of anonymous blogs, and how you should shut them up by using the DMCA or by suing them. That wasn't funny advice to give to businesses, and could have got them in non-fictional legal trouble real fast.
No: if the government tells you to do something that is against the law, you refuse. The President is no more able to break the law or force you to break the law as anyone else.
The nation is built upon the rule of law, not the rule of men.
The Democrats are rushing this through because they were shocked by the reaction to their passing the Protect America Act last session -- everyone slammed them for giving new surveillance powers to the White House, and so they're scrabbling to fix matters with a new bill.
But they're making the same mistake again. They think no-one cares about immunity. They think it's just a business-as-usual deal.
Please call Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and let them know that you're angry at the idea of giving retroactive immunity to the telcos, and by extension, participating in a cover-up of the warrantless wiretapping project. It's not that they're wedded to this idea, it's that they don't think their base or independents care about telco immunity.
Call Rep. Nancy Pelosi -- 202-225-4965 Call Sen. Harry Reid -- 202-224-3542
A couple more notes, for those who like the grubby details. The telcos are pushing for complete retroactive immunity, or alternatively "substitition", by which the government takes the place of the telcos as the defendant in the case. The government has a lot more power to evade the cases by dint of its own in-built immunity to some kinds of prosecution and thus end the cases. A few other groups are suggesting financial caps of penalties, so that the cases could go forward, but if the courts found the telcos guilty, they wouldn't suffer the "crushing liability" they say the cases would cause. (Note that the only way the telcos would *actually* be fined a large amount of money by our case would be if they were guilty of blanket, system-wide surveillance of all their subscribers.)
The thing is, even when you're told to by the NSA -- *especially* when you're told to by the NSA -- you need to check the law. These are global companies, with good legal counsel, and an excellent understanding of the privacy laws they are liable under. Qwest refused to comply with the program unless the government came back with the right paperwork, and so should AT&T.
"Come back with a warrant" isn't just a way of defending yourself, it's a way of ensuring that our system works for everyone.
Here's an interview we conducted with Rush Holt, the congressman who has been pushing for this bill for years. It's about twelve minutes long, but a little more meaty than usual for a politician: Holt has a Physics Ph.D., so he has something of a scientific background, and walks through many of the problems with e-voting the proposal tries to solve (and is also fairly candid about why his bill took a while to catch on). We recorded it just before the last election.
First, these aren't pro-bono lawyers. Wendy was, and Jason is, part of our legal staff. That's some of what an EFF donation pays for: having lawyers available to protect vulnerable groups that might not otherwise be able to afford one. I imagine you'll now claim that they're no good, or somesuch. I'll just point people to the recent announcement that one of them, Kurt Opsahl, just won the California Attorney of the Year award for his work winning against Apple. Two of our other lawyers won the award in previous years. You can check all of their track records here.
Second, you seem very against people seeking out free legal advice. I recall you weren't quite that reticent a few years back, when you mailed me while I was editor of NTK for some free legal advice on work you were involved in. I wasn't working for the EFF then, and you and I were both based in Europe, but the first thing I did - like thousands of others - was contact EFF. They were incredibly friendly, explained that they couldn't advise on EU law, but gave me some useful pointers, which I believe I passed on.
I know you think it's funny to keep trying to troll about our work on slashdot, but when you deal with as many people who are in genuine trouble as we do, and see as many of them as is possible getting the same careful treatment as EFF gave me when I presented your problems to them, I find it less than high-larious when all you can do is spread FUD and claim it's a joke when people call you on it.
I know funny, and I know troll. Modwise, QuantumG, you're going *down*.
No, it's not true, although there was a fake new story that put out this idea a few years ago. These days, it sounds like QuantumG is the only person that still believes it, given that the last time I corrected a Slashdot posting about it, it was posted by him too.
Admittedly, the list in that correction is out of date: since then we've busted a ClearChannel patent, revealed (after three years of research) a plan to introduce a broadcast flag copy controls in Europe, and made a DMCA abuser publicly apologise to the Net. Did I mention that EFF did that *this week*? Check the archives for previous stuff.
Also, for the record, Wendy is a great lawyer, and a fine hacker of MythTV. I fully expect she'll kick the NFL's asses , then watch the action replay without ads later.
There was no incentive from broadcasters or government to introduce the broadcast flag in the US either: over-the-air digital TV is free in the US, too, and the government wasn't involved.
This new DRM will be part of the DVB standard common interface, so it would be introduced by virtue of the hardware upgrade cycle (all devices after a certain date would require DRM, or be out of spec with the current version of the standard).
Manufacturers are required by EU regulation to implement the DVB common interface. Changing the standard changes that mandate.
The DMCA reform bill Boucher has proposed in previous years is the The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA). FAIR USE is a different bill, with a different target for reform: removing statutory damages, encoding some temporary DMCA exemptions into permanent statute, and ensuring that dual-use technologies (that have non-infringing uses as well as being used for infringement) are legal.
Which is why I gave the Wikipedia list too. It's pretty comprehensive; I'm sure there are omissions, but it should give you an idea of the ratio of successes -- something that the original piece didn't even attempt. If somebody wrote a piece claiming that it was obvious your uncle was a bad gambler, and included bets he hadn't made, and some he didn't lose, wouldn't you be suspicious of the conclusion?
Sigh. Is that old "Bonhomie Snoutintroff" canard still kicking around? A story that gave as its warped reasoning for the idea that "EFF always loses" two cases that EFF didn't actually conduct (Eldred v. Ashcroft and Gilmore v. Gonzales), and one that we actually won: ("They defended two amateur online journos against Apple's ham-fisted effort to silence criticism, and got beat down severely: another bad precedent." - odd, that's not quite what the Appeals Court decided when the California state appeals court upheld our defence, and held that our clients were protected by California's reporter's shield law and the constitutional privilege against disclosure of confidential sources: http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/ ).
And as to the Snoutintroff claim we somehow "persuaded" Ed Felten to withdraw from a talk as a media stunt, it's worth reading what Felten himself had to say about that period. Chilled speech, baseless legal threats, people losing jobs because they stand up for their right to reveal security flaws. That's what EFF fights.
It's worth spending time reading EFF's actual track record - either from our list of victories, or from the Wikipedia list.
(Or hell, just read our press releases from the last week where we were filing an amicus brief to defend constitutional protection for stored email, began a case to investigate and correct some 18,000 missing votes in an apparent e-voting mess-up in a Florida seat that was won by less than 400 votes, and filing an FOIA request to uncover the details of EU passenger records being handed over to the US government. And that's what we did on a Thanksgiving week - with a staff of around 30, and a budget that's a fiftieth of the size of the ACLU, and a twentieth of what the MPAA spend on Washington lobbying alone. And consider becoming a member if you're impressed - you have no idea how much every extra membership helps, nor how much there is left to do.)
The latest version of Steven's telecom reform bill has the broadcast flag, the RIAA's audio flag, and compulsory web labelling for US adult sites. The bill is currently unpopular among some senators because there's no network neutrality provisions -- but there's a lot more in there that stinks.
Well, to be accurate, I didn't call it the world's worst Internet law in my EFF piece, either. The piece was titled "The World's Worst Internet Laws Sneaking Through the Senate", and was meant to convey the key problem with treaty: that this isn't just one bad bill, but a convention that would provide a route for importing many different problematic cybercrime statutes into U.S. (and exporting many of America's worst laws outward too: the Convention also requires all signatories to criminalize "commercial scale" Internet copyright infringement, for example).
Quoted fragments like this are often like chinese whispers online: every time they get repeated, they wander a little further from the original meaning.
Our areas of work don't really distract resources from each other. We have separate expert lawyers to cover privacy, free speech, evoting, international and IPissues. The AT&T case is also supported by several external teams working pro bono.
(In fact, I'd say the AT&T class action incidentally helps highlight other issues because of the wider coverage we receive as a result. This AP story is a good example: journalists come to write about the AT&T case, and stay to hear about the wider concerns. It's a lot easier to brief journalists on the subtler aspects of government-mandated DRM when they already know about work in contexts they understand.)
What the media covers also doesn't represent the balance of what we do. Our allocation of resources isn't related to the number of headlines you see. For instance, the press concentrates on call records, but a lot of our work on this case is concerned - and started - from concerns about illegal surveillance of AT&T Worldnet users.
The precedent of dragnet warrantless surveillance is increasingly dangerous in a environment where more of your life takes place over the wires. While the press boils the story down to telephony because that's the part that's familiar, we approach it from the other side. As voice and IP merge, the last thing we want is for the unjust precedent to be set on the voice side, and then spread into the even more intrusive world of net surveillance.
Sadly, that's an everpresent trend in much of the privacy work we do -- from the spread of CALEA into VoIP and net services by the FCC, to the seamless move from call record data to calls for mobile telephone geodata, to the recent announcement that mail attachments will be checked at ISPs against a hash database of suspect content. By standing against those threats at strategic points, we can defend the core networks - and civil liberties - better. Others see telephony datamining as the payoff to the story, we worry that it is just the beginning.
(Incidentally, as a supporter, you should know that you can mail us any time with your worries or suggestions - what you say does get heard, and I can address what you want a lot more specifically there.)
> > At this point, it looks like they're going to be tenacious enough with this thing that it'll pass eventually. >
Well, bear in mind that the lobbyists have been trying to get this into the books for years, and still haven't succeeded. And there is a time limit for the broadcast flag law. If they can't get it passed before the analog cut-off date (or the point at which a large number of voters have broadcast flag non-compliant digital TV technology), there's simply no point in continuing to lobby for it.
In general, the longer time goes on, the harder it is to get a bill passed. You're not the only one thinking "My god, are they trying to get this through again?". Staffers in Washington feel the same way. If they can't get this through this year, in the words of one knowledgeable Washington commentator, "it'll be postponed until next year. Which is to say, never".
There's also the question of opportunity cost. The more effort the entertainment industry has to spend on each of the laws it tries to pass, the less it has to pass other, draconian bills. If the broadcast flag had passed on one of the other occasions that it was attempted, the MPAA would be free to throw all its weight on analog hole legislation by now. Politicians are waking up to the fact that these regulations are unreasonable -- and that there's more political capital lost to appearing to kowtow to special interests than they thought.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not likely to hear how who was affected by this, for the same reason that it's been almost unknown to the consumers buying your printers for the last decade: it's been convenient to keep this "feature" of their purchases secret. Or do you think that if the US government and manufacturers had publicly announced their agreement, there would have been a calm acceptance by Americans of the importance of paying for a system to invisibly watermark their own printouts?
I'm glad that your primary concern is large companies and government institutions. As I wrote in the EFF Deeplink, our concern includes dissidents working in authoritarian regimes who remain ignorant about this feature of the technology they use to spread their work, and the authoritarian governments intent on tracing and suppressing their citizen's literature and information sources -- who are not so ignorant.
Do you think the printer companies would proudly mention if their tracking technology was used to catch these undesirables?
It's probably not there yet for you, but you might want to keep an eye on AllMyData's Tahoe project.
Sigh. Okay, let me rephrase that. If Apple's lawyers were really rooting through his personal details to threaten to take him out, and offering him $500,000 with threats and menaces to pay him off, yeah, we'd get involved. Oh boy, would we get involved like a shot.
But the key thing here, and the really important matter to note, is that NONE OF THIS REALLY HAPPENED. And at the EFF, we do always endeavor to take cases where at least one of the litigants exists in our temporal reality.
Namaste!
Dude, it's a joke. We'd never say that. We'd probably not take the case, either, because there's really nothing there that would affect online rights or set precedents in general. But we'd at least try and point him in the right direction for finding out his rights, and maybe seek out an affordable lawyer for him. We might even gently ping the lawyers at Apple to explain what a costly publicity nightmare this would be for them.
Speaking personally, I do prefer Daniel Lyons when he's writing fiction like this, to when he's acting as a journalist and penning articles talking about the dangers of anonymous blogs, and how you should shut them up by using the DMCA or by suing them. That wasn't funny advice to give to businesses, and could have got them in non-fictional legal trouble real fast.
AC --
Could you call us again? Call +1 415 436 9333 and ask to speak to Matt Zimmermann. We'd like to speak to you about this.
d.
danny@eff.org
You can check out the original subpoena here, to see what information they are attempting to find out from Google. It's not a single bit.
More information here:
http://www.eff.org/cases/manalapan-v-moskovitz
Hey, speaking as the EFF's International Coordinator, I protest! We sponsor Online Rights Canada,and don't you recall Sam Bulte (ex-MP) ranting about "EFF members" ruining her day?
No: if the government tells you to do something that is against the law, you refuse. The President is no more able to break the law or force you to break the law as anyone else.
The nation is built upon the rule of law, not the rule of men.
The Democrats are rushing this through because they were shocked by the reaction to their passing the Protect America Act last session -- everyone slammed them for giving new surveillance powers to the White House, and so they're scrabbling to fix matters with a new bill.
But they're making the same mistake again. They think no-one cares about immunity. They think it's just a business-as-usual deal.
Please call Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and let them know that you're angry at the idea of giving retroactive immunity to the telcos, and by extension, participating in a cover-up of the warrantless wiretapping project. It's not that they're wedded to this idea, it's that they don't think their base or independents care about telco immunity.
Call Rep. Nancy Pelosi -- 202-225-4965
Call Sen. Harry Reid -- 202-224-3542
If you want more facts and arguments, EFF has them here.
A couple more notes, for those who like the grubby details. The telcos are pushing for complete retroactive immunity, or alternatively "substitition", by which the government takes the place of the telcos as the defendant in the case. The government has a lot more power to evade the cases by dint of its own in-built immunity to some kinds of prosecution and thus end the cases. A few other groups are suggesting financial caps of penalties, so that the cases could go forward, but if the courts found the telcos guilty, they wouldn't suffer the "crushing liability" they say the cases would cause. (Note that the only way the telcos would *actually* be fined a large amount of money by our case would be if they were guilty of blanket, system-wide surveillance of all their subscribers.)
Thanks.
The thing is, even when you're told to by the NSA -- *especially* when you're told to by the NSA -- you need to check the law. These are global companies, with good legal counsel, and an excellent understanding of the privacy laws they are liable under. Qwest refused to comply with the program unless the government came back with the right paperwork, and so should AT&T.
"Come back with a warrant" isn't just a way of defending yourself, it's a way of ensuring that our system works for everyone.
Here's an interview we conducted with Rush Holt, the congressman who has been pushing for this bill for years. It's about twelve minutes long, but a little more meaty than usual for a politician: Holt has a Physics Ph.D., so he has something of a scientific background, and walks through many of the problems with e-voting the proposal tries to solve (and is also fairly candid about why his bill took a while to catch on). We recorded it just before the last election.
Hey QuantumG,
First, these aren't pro-bono lawyers. Wendy was, and Jason is, part of our legal staff. That's some of what an EFF donation pays for: having lawyers available to protect vulnerable groups that might not otherwise be able to afford one. I imagine you'll now claim that they're no good, or somesuch. I'll just point people to the recent announcement that one of them, Kurt Opsahl, just won the California Attorney of the Year award for his work winning against Apple. Two of our other lawyers won the award in previous years. You can check all of their track records here.
Second, you seem very against people seeking out free legal advice. I recall you weren't quite that reticent a few years back, when you mailed me while I was editor of NTK for some free legal advice on work you were involved in. I wasn't working for the EFF then, and you and I were both based in Europe, but the first thing I did - like thousands of others - was contact EFF. They were incredibly friendly, explained that they couldn't advise on EU law, but gave me some useful pointers, which I believe I passed on.
I know you think it's funny to keep trying to troll about our work on slashdot, but when you deal with as many people who are in genuine trouble as we do, and see as many of them as is possible getting the same careful treatment as EFF gave me when I presented your problems to them, I find it less than high-larious when all you can do is spread FUD and claim it's a joke when people call you on it.
I know funny, and I know troll. Modwise, QuantumG, you're going *down*.
No, it's not true, although there was a fake new story that put out this idea a few years ago. These days, it sounds like QuantumG is the only person that still believes it, given that the last time I corrected a Slashdot posting about it, it was posted by him too.
Admittedly, the list in that correction is out of date: since then we've busted a ClearChannel patent, revealed (after three years of research) a plan to introduce a broadcast flag copy controls in Europe, and made a DMCA abuser publicly apologise to the Net. Did I mention that EFF did that *this week*? Check the archives for previous stuff.
Also, for the record, Wendy is a great lawyer, and a fine hacker of MythTV. I fully expect she'll kick the NFL's asses , then watch the action replay without ads later.
There was no incentive from broadcasters or government to introduce the broadcast flag in the US either: over-the-air digital TV is free in the US, too, and the government wasn't involved.
This new DRM will be part of the DVB standard common interface, so it would be introduced by virtue of the hardware upgrade cycle (all devices after a certain date would require DRM, or be out of spec with the current version of the standard).
Manufacturers are required by EU regulation to implement the DVB common interface. Changing the standard changes that mandate.
This *is* over here. DVB is the European standard for digital terrestrial broadcast. It's that digibox they're aiming at.
d.
The DMCA reform bill Boucher has proposed in previous years is the The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA). FAIR USE is a different bill, with a different target for reform: removing statutory damages, encoding some temporary DMCA exemptions into permanent statute, and ensuring that dual-use technologies (that have non-infringing uses as well as being used for infringement) are legal.
Of course - what a perfectly reasonable and logically grounded conclusion to draw. Thanks for your input.
Which is why I gave the Wikipedia list too. It's pretty comprehensive; I'm sure there are omissions, but it should give you an idea of the ratio of successes -- something that the original piece didn't even attempt. If somebody wrote a piece claiming that it was obvious your uncle was a bad gambler, and included bets he hadn't made, and some he didn't lose, wouldn't you be suspicious of the conclusion?
Sigh. Is that old "Bonhomie Snoutintroff" canard still kicking around? A story that gave as its warped reasoning for the idea that "EFF always loses" two cases that EFF didn't actually conduct (Eldred v. Ashcroft and Gilmore v. Gonzales), and one that we actually won: ("They defended two amateur online journos against Apple's ham-fisted effort to silence criticism, and got beat down severely: another bad precedent." - odd, that's not quite what the Appeals Court decided when the California state appeals court upheld our defence, and held that our clients were protected by California's reporter's shield law and the constitutional privilege against disclosure of confidential sources: http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/ ).
And as to the Snoutintroff claim we somehow "persuaded" Ed Felten to withdraw from a talk as a media stunt, it's worth reading what Felten himself had to say about that period. Chilled speech, baseless legal threats, people losing jobs because they stand up for their right to reveal security flaws. That's what EFF fights.
It's worth spending time reading EFF's actual track record - either from our list of victories, or from the Wikipedia list.
(Or hell, just read our press releases from the last week where we were filing an amicus brief to defend constitutional protection for stored email, began a case to investigate and correct some 18,000 missing votes in an apparent e-voting mess-up in a Florida seat that was won by less than 400 votes, and filing an FOIA request to uncover the details of EU passenger records being handed over to the US government. And that's what we did on a Thanksgiving week - with a staff of around 30, and a budget that's a fiftieth of the size of the ACLU, and a twentieth of what the MPAA spend on Washington lobbying alone. And consider becoming a member if you're impressed - you have no idea how much every extra membership helps, nor how much there is left to do.)
The latest version of Steven's telecom reform bill has the broadcast flag, the RIAA's audio flag, and compulsory web labelling for US adult sites. The bill is currently unpopular among some senators because there's no network neutrality provisions -- but there's a lot more in there that stinks.
More information at the EFF. Please write to your senator, and tell them to stand against Steven's bill.
We win.
Well, to be accurate, I didn't call it the world's worst Internet law in my EFF piece, either. The piece was titled "The World's Worst Internet Laws Sneaking Through the Senate", and was meant to convey the key problem with treaty: that this isn't just one bad bill, but a convention that would provide a route for importing many different problematic cybercrime statutes into U.S. (and exporting many of America's worst laws outward too: the Convention also requires all signatories to criminalize "commercial scale" Internet copyright infringement, for example).
Quoted fragments like this are often like chinese whispers online: every time they get repeated, they wander a little further from the original meaning.
Our areas of work don't really distract resources from each other. We have separate expert lawyers to cover privacy, free speech, evoting, international and IP issues. The AT&T case is also supported by several external teams working pro bono.
(In fact, I'd say the AT&T class action incidentally helps highlight other issues because of the wider coverage we receive as a result. This AP story is a good example: journalists come to write about the AT&T case, and stay to hear about the wider concerns. It's a lot easier to brief journalists on the subtler aspects of government-mandated DRM when they already know about work in contexts they understand.)
What the media covers also doesn't represent the balance of what we do. Our allocation of resources isn't related to the number of headlines you see. For instance, the press concentrates on call records, but a lot of our work on this case is concerned - and started - from concerns about illegal surveillance of AT&T Worldnet users.
The precedent of dragnet warrantless surveillance is increasingly dangerous in a environment where more of your life takes place over the wires. While the press boils the story down to telephony because that's the part that's familiar, we approach it from the other side. As voice and IP merge, the last thing we want is for the unjust precedent to be set on the voice side, and then spread into the even more intrusive world of net surveillance.
Sadly, that's an everpresent trend in much of the privacy work we do -- from the spread of CALEA into VoIP and net services by the FCC, to the seamless move from call record data to calls for mobile telephone geodata, to the recent announcement that mail attachments will be checked at ISPs against a hash database of suspect content. By standing against those threats at strategic points, we can defend the core networks - and civil liberties - better. Others see telephony datamining as the payoff to the story, we worry that it is just the beginning.
(Incidentally, as a supporter, you should know that you can mail us any time with your worries or suggestions - what you say does get heard, and I can address what you want a lot more specifically there.)
>
> At this point, it looks like they're going to be tenacious enough with this thing that it'll pass eventually.
>
Well, bear in mind that the lobbyists have been trying to get this into the books for years, and still haven't succeeded. And there is a time limit for the broadcast flag law. If they can't get it passed before the analog cut-off date (or the point at which a large number of voters have broadcast flag non-compliant digital TV technology), there's simply no point in continuing to lobby for it.
In general, the longer time goes on, the harder it is to get a bill passed. You're not the only one thinking "My god, are they trying to get this through again?". Staffers in Washington feel the same way. If they can't get this through this year, in the words of one knowledgeable Washington commentator, "it'll be postponed until next year. Which is to say, never".
There's also the question of opportunity cost. The more effort the entertainment industry has to spend on each of the laws it tries to pass, the less it has to pass other, draconian bills. If the broadcast flag had passed on one of the other occasions that it was attempted, the MPAA would be free to throw all its weight on analog hole legislation by now. Politicians are waking up to the fact that these regulations are unreasonable -- and that there's more political capital lost to appearing to kowtow to special interests than they thought.
Hey, Danny from the EFF here. In this case, you should call them, as a message or email probably won't reach them in time for the Thursday vote.