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Lessig Predicts Cyber 9/11 Event, Restrictive Laws - Via Slashdot: Your Rights Online:
A number of readers are sending in links to a video from the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last month, in which Lawrence Lessig recounts a conversation over dinner with Richard Clarke, the former government counter-terrorism czar. Remembering that the Patriot Act was dropped on Congress just 20 days after 9/11 — the Department of Justice had had it sitting in a drawer for years — Lessig asked Clarke if DoJ had a similar proposed law, an "i-Patriot Act," to drop in the event of a "cyber-9/11." Clarke responded, "Of course they do. And Vint Cerf won't like it." Lessig's anecdote begins at about 4:30 in the video.
Essay - If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know? - Via NYTimes.com :
Want to vet a baby sitter? Need to peek into the background of a prospective employee? Curious about the past of a potential date?
Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.
Academics have a term for the old inaccessibility of records like those for criminal convictions: “practical obscurity.” Once upon a time, people in search of this data had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks. In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.
Well, not anymore. The information on CriminalSearches.com is available to all comers. “Do you really know who people are?” the site blares in large script at the top of the page. read more »
DEFCON 16 - Real Time Social Networking for Ninjas :
DEFCON 16: August 8-10, 2008 at the Riviera Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas
Well folks, the time for the 16th installment of the hacking convention known as DEFCON draws near, and this year promises to be a great one! We've got more content than ever, including 5 full tracks of talks, demos, workshops, new contests, a new Hardware Hacking Village, and even a new EFF fundraiser to replace the dunk tank!
ABA Judges Get an Earful About RIAA Litigations - Via Slashdot: Your Rights Online:
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "I was afforded the opportunity to write for a slightly different audience — the judges who belong to the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association. I was invited by the The Judges Journal, their quarterly publication, to do a piece on the RIAA litigations for the ABA's Summer 2008 'Equal Access to Justice' issue. What I came up with was 'Large Recording Companies vs. The Defenseless: Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations,' in which I describe the unfairness of these cases and make 15 suggestions as to how the courts could level the playing field. I'm hoping the judges mod my article '+5 Insightful,' but I'd settle for '+3 Informative.' Here is the actual article (PDF). (If anyone out there can send me a decent HTML version of it, I'll run that one up the flagpole as well.)" --- Wired is helping to spread the word on Ray's article.
In Memoriam: Ed Foster, 1949-2008 - Via EFF.org Updates:
Ed Foster, the journalist and consumer advocate behind InfoWorld's GripeLine column and GripeLog blog, died of a heart attack this weekend. He was 59.
It's no exaggeration to say that Ed was one of the preeminent consumer rights activists of the digital age. During his more than 20 years as a "reader advocate" at InfoWorld, he was far ahead of his time, recognizing that in a world increasingly dominated by software and online services, the digital consumer needed a champion when squaring off against the likes of Microsoft, Adobe or AutoDesk. Following in the traditions of the best consumer reporters before him, Ed exposed software vendors and online service providers that treated their customers shabbily.
But it was in his tireless work against "sneakwraps" -- those "end user license agreements" (EULAs) and "terms of service" (TOS) that require our "agreement" -- that Ed was without peer. read more »
Fair Use Prevails Over Michael Savage's Copyright Claims - Via EFF.org Updates:
On Friday, a U.S. District Court granted the motion for judgment on the pleadings we filed in a copyright infringement suit brought by talk show host Michael Savage against the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Savage had sued CAIR back in December 2007, alleging that CAIR infringed the copyright in his show when it posted on its web site brief excerpts from Savage's radio program in order to criticize Savage's remarks. Savage also added a federal racketeering claim stemming from that alleged copyright infringement.
Judge Susan Illston recognized that CAIR's use of four minutes from one of Savage's two hour radio programs to criticize Savage is protected under the fair use doctrine. read more »
Spam King and Family Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide - Via Threat Level:
Edward Davidson, who was known as the "spam king" (although the moniker has been given to nearly every spammer who has ever been caught) has been found dead in Colorado, along with his wife and 3-year-old child, apparently in a murder-suicide. Another child approximately 7 months old was found unhurt, and a teenage daughter had been shot in the neck with a bullet but managed to run away.
Davidson had escaped from a minimum-security facility on Sunday -- essentially a work camp -- allegedly with help from his wife. read more »
Listen Online To Last HOPE Conference - Via Slashdot:
Radio Statler! writes "This weekend marks 2600's last Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. For those of you that can't make it this weekend, Radio Statler! will be streaming live from the event the whole weekend. There will be simulcasted talks, interviews with speakers and important guests, and music 24 hours a day for the duration of the con. Listeners can request music or submit questions by phone or IRC."
The conference schedule (PDF) is available if you're curious about a particular seminar, though not all of them will be broadcast. CNet will be running some related stories about presentations from the conference. So far, they've written about a hacking how-to presentation. We briefly discussed the seventh and final HOPE conference last month.
(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)
How to Fight Name Scraping Scammers? - Via Ask Slashdot:
CurtMonash writes "I was ego-surfing the other day, and was surprised to discover that I was listed as a member of the an on-line dating service. It turns out these scamsters generate web pages for lots of (FirstName, LastName) combos, each claiming that the named individual is a member of their service. I posted about this, and discovered other people were upset, at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member, and so on. I've since followed up with lessons learned, a big one being that everybody should have a visible web presence. But frankly, the ideas I've come up with for fighting this kind of reputation scam seem fairly weak. Do Slashdotters have any better ideas?"
(Read Original Article - Via Ask Slashdot.)
Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech - Via Threat Level:
Editor: Interesting graphic removed. Go to original site for that [...]
An online campaign to scuttle a deal giving retroactive amnesty to telecoms that helped the government warrantlessly wiretap Americans is growing in strength, catching Senator Barack Obama between the Netroots that helped vaunt him to the nomination and a presidential campaign desire to seem strong on national security.
Last year, Obama won accolades from the netroots by vowing to fight against any bill that granted retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that helped the government warrantlessly spy on Americans.
But last week, portions of the netroots revolted when Obama changed his stance regarding the current version of the bill, saying that while he would fight against amnesty, he would vote for the final bill regardless because exanding the spying powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was necessary for national security.
Obama credied the netroots for improving the bill.
"By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act," Obama said in a written statement last week. read more »
Baldwin stands up for Constitution - Via The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) :
There is an inclination, perhaps especially at the approach each year of the Fourth of July holiday, to believe the great struggles for freedom are a part of our history rather than the stuff of a current affairs quiz. But the Bush administration's attempt to rewrite the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in a manner that attacks our Fourth Amendment privacy rights confirms that the wisdom of Sam Adams remains as timeless as the promise of the American experiment.
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks," the old revolutionary warned at the inception of our national endeavor. "We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
What is to be celebrated with the greatest enthusiasm this Fourth of July is not the past, but the present. read more »
John Yoo's ongoing falsehoods in service of limitless government power - Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald:
(updated below)
One of the most reliable methods for knowing that a position is unsustainable is that its advocates must employ outright falsehoods in order to support it. In a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today, John Yoo defends the right of the Bush administration to imprison people at Guantanamo indefinitely with no judicial review and condemns last week's Supreme Court habeas corpus ruling as "judicial imperialism of the highest order." To do so, Yoo asserts what have become the now-standard though still-blatant falsehoods on this issue.
Yoo, for instance, claims that the Supreme Court in Boumediene allows "an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention." But huge numbers of detainees in U.S. custody weren't "captured fighting against the U.S." at all. Many were taken from their homes. Others were just snatched off the street while engaged in the most mundane activities. Still others were abducted while in airports or at work. read more »
McCain's Ties To Telecoms Questioned After Wiretapping Flip-Flop - Via Threat Level:
If you've been wondering where all the telecom lobbyists went to lick their wounds after the House rejected retroactive immunity for wiretapping, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says it's found a bunch of them smack dab in the middle of John McCain's presidential campaign organization.
The group suggested Friday that the swell of current and former telecom lobbyists
in the McCain camp might have something to do with the candidate's recent reversal on the legality of warrantless wiretapping. His most recent position "reads a
lot like the talking points that a telecom lobbyist might employ," writes EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl.
McCain has long supported amnesty for telecoms who cooperated with Bush's warrantless domestic spying, but until recently questioned the legality of the program. After zig-zagging on the issue over the last few weeks, he eventually settled on a position nearly identical to President Bush's -- that presidential war-making powers trump the law when it comes to warrantless wiretapping.
That position further bolsters the phone companies' arguments for amnesty, since they could argue that they only helped out in a completely lawful surveillance. read more »
Leading Intellectual Property Attorney Joins EFF - Via EFF.org Updates:
San Francisco - Michael Kwun has joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as a new Senior Intellectual Property Staff Attorney, bringing years of copyright, trademark, and patent litigation experience to EFF's legal team.
Kwun comes to EFF from Google. As the company's Managing Counsel, Litigation, he was responsible for defending Google in copyright cases about YouTube, Google Book Search, and Google Image Search; trademark cases about Google AdWords; and patent cases in connection with a wide variety of Google products. read more »
Voting Machine Company Salesman Becomes Election Director in Texas - Via Threat Level:
A former software sales manager for Election Systems & Software, the largest voting machine company in the country, has been named county elections administrator for Fort Bend County in Texas.
According to a local news report, John Oldham had been regional sales manager, account manager and Illinois state manager for ES&S, which is based in Nebraska. More recently he had been an independent contractor for both ES&S and various election jurisdictions. read more »
My other commitment has just been completed and now i should able to head over to the CFP08 - Computers Freedom & Privacy conference in New Haven. It would be great to meet some of my readers. From what I've heard at least a few of you should be there. Assuming that they have wireless available, I think I'll try and setup a time and place where I can be found. If you have any suggestions, just reply to this post.
I think I'm going to try and get some sleep now, since my train will leave in approximately 3 hours. Hope to see some of you there. Its to late to think straight, but I think I might be wearing a brown Drupal NYC t-shirt, so say hello
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