ECJ blocks EU-US airline passenger data transfer

The BBC are reporting that the European Court of justice has ruled in favour of European Data Protection Supervisor and the EU Parliament in their challenge to the EU-US agreement requiring airlines to transfer passenger data to the US authorities. The EU Commission's chief spokesman, Johannes Laitenberger, has said that the Court ruled against them on a legal technicality and that there was nothing wrong with requiring EU airlines to supply this data. Now the EU parliament, the EU Data Protection Supervisor, countless legal experts and civil liberties groups and public officials behind closed doors have all said that this activity is illegal under the EU data protection regime. The ECJ now agrees and Commission and the UK Home Office have both come out in response to the ruling saying there's nothing to worry about, it's a legal techicality and implying that they will try some other mere technical process to legitimise the activity.

This is the first time the European Data Protection Supervisor has ever mounted such a challenge to the Council and the Commission as far as I know. That he should have raised the challenge through the courts is an indication that we are dealing with a potentially serious breach of the law here. That his complaint should be upheld by the ECJ is a solid vindication of his actions. That the Commission respond by saying ok we'll continue doing what we're doing but try and find an official, usable excuse is a further indictment of the Commission's and the Council's lack of respect for the legal process. The ECJ concluded:

"the Court (Grand Chamber) hereby:

1. Annuls Council Decision 2004/496/EC of 17 May 2004 on the conclusion of an Agreement between the European Community and the United States of America on the processing and transfer of PNR data by Air Carriers to the United States Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Customs and Border Protection and Commission Decision 2004/535/EC of 14 May 2004 on the adequate protection of personal data contained in the Passenger Name Record of air passengers transferred to the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection;

2. Preserves the effect of Decision 2004/535 until 30 September 2006, but not beyond the date upon which that Agreement comes to an end;

3. Orders the Council of the European Union to pay the costs in Case C-317/04;

4. Orders the Commission of the European Communities to pay the costs in Case C-318/04;

5. Orders the Commission of the European Communities to bear its own costs in Case C-317/04;

6. Orders the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the European Data Protection Supervisor to bear their own costs."

The ruling follows the recommendation of the Adocate General Leger in the case made in November last year who stated that:

"I propose that the Court should:

– in Case C?318/04, annul Commission Decision 2004/535/EC of 14 May 2004 on the adequate protection of personal data contained in the Passenger Name Record of air passengers transferred to the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection;

– in Case C-317/04, annul Council Decision 2004/496/EC of 17 May 2004 on the conclusion of an Agreement between the European Community and the United States of America on the processing and transfer of PNR data by Air Carriers to the United States Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Customs and Border Protection."

The reponse of the EU authorities and the UK Home Office at the time was similarly dismissive.

Update: I've just been though the decision (Case C-317/04 Judgment 2006-05-30) quickly and the Court essentially orders the Commission and the Council to terminate the agreement with the US to hand over passenger data by 30 September 2006. The Parliament and the EDPS had challenged the Commission on six grounds and the Council on four. The court looked at the first point of dispute in each case and said that was good enough for them. No need to consider the others.

As usual it is a shame that it is only legal and technical geeks who will be really interested in this decision as the wide implications for privacy in the digital age are really quite profound, just as it is the case with the NSA surveillance and ID cards. But the mass surveillance monster rolls on undeterred, damaging both the potential of the security services to do their job more effectively and society more generally.

Update 2: Some EU officials are concerned about the ruling or possibly just spinning it by predicting chaos for air pasengers and the end of the EU "open skies" policy. Privacy Intenational and the ACLU recently raised concerns about the US apparent breach of the agreement with the EU whereby teh Dept for Homeland Security had reached an agreement to to share airline passenger data with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thanks to Ian for these links.

Update 3: Comment from EU law blog: "First, the grounds of annulment are very narrow and the reasoning given is brief to the point of being terse. The European Parliament raised a whole series of pleas (on proportionality, breach of fundamental rights etc) which the Court of Justice did not examine. So it is difficult to guess what will be the next practical step taken by the Council and Commission.
Second, the Court, aware of the practical difficulties in relation to transatlantic flights that the annulment will cause has limited the effect of the annulment in time: The current arrangements can continue in force until September 30th 2006 by which time the Council and Commission must have taken steps to comply with the judgment. That's the date the arrangements between the EU and US expire anyway. As a result, there is no need to interrupt the transfer of the data to the US authorities with all the unfortunate consequences that would entail.
Third - and this is the really odd thing - the Court does not refer to Article 13 of the Directive. "

IPKat says
"Given the choice, the IPKat would prefer to know his flight was terrorist-free,even if it meant him ending up on a mailing list which delivered him unwanted advertisements." That smart folks like IPKat should swallow the line that handing flight data to the US authorities automatically makes the flight safer concerns me. But then it is only the tech and legal/privacy geeks that are interested in this... though in fairness to Jeremy he does take a step back from this in the comments.

Update 4: Spy Blog has the list of data items that the airlines provide to the US authorities.

This pernicious mix of big business and busybodies

Henry Porter was spot on as usual about the government's ID card scheme in the Observer on Sunday.

"The British state presents a menace to individual privacy in the 21st century in two ways, as the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, demonstrates in his commendably clear report, 'What Price Privacy?'. The first is that under Tony Blair's 'transformational government', the Civil Service is moving to merge all its databases into one network with single entry points, so that someone with the right access could, for example, surf between the tax and customs database, criminal records, vehicle registrations and health and education records in their search for information on an individual.

If you add to this unified system the new National Identity Register (NIR) which, as Thomas points out, will include 'identifying information, residential status, personal reference numbers, registration and ID card history, as well as records of when, what and to whom information from the register has been provided', we will end up with an awesome apparatus of control and surveillance...

The threat of illicit use is as nothing compared to the misuse that it will offer government agencies. For one thing, there will be no knowing when and by whom your personal records are being inspected, so intrusion by the state is likely to become the norm. The other big problem is the phenomenal incompetence of the government when it comes to databases. Remember the fiascos in the Child Support Agency, the immigration service records, the old passport agency and with the benefits card. Only last week, the Criminal Records Bureau admitted that it had wrongly labelled 1,500 innocent people as pornographers, thieves and violent criminals. As a result, some failed in their job applications, which must surely mean they have a very good claim for damages against the government, based on the loss of reputation and earnings.

The Home Office refused to apologise and, instead, excused itself by saying that it had erred on the side of caution when making the checks against criminal records. That reaction is not good enough and it underlines the lack of accountability in government and the arrogance of officialdom when it comes to the reputations of ordinary people. It also raises the question of what might happen if a similar error were to infect the unified system...

I find myself wishing a hearty damnation to Courtney and her business plans, to the unified database of 'transformational government', to the incompetence and arrogance of the Home Office, to any bureaucrat who seeks to define an individual's identity with compulsory biometric measurement backed up by threats. If one thing has become clear in the last few weeks, it is that the government is not fit to be trusted with either setting up the National Identity Register or running it."

(Katherine Courtney is head of business development at the new Identity and Passport Service and was previously head of the ID card programme. She is a US citizen though the UK government have not been prepared to say whether she has taken out UK citizenship).

US support R&D in areas of public health priority

James Love is giving credit where it is due to the Bush administration.

"Something very good happened today, at a UN agency, and much of the credit goes to the Bush Administration.

The World Health Organization's main governing body just approved a resolution that will set in motion an ambitious new effort to stimulate R&D in areas of public health priority, with access to new medical inventions.

This has been a highly controversial topic. Pfizer and other big pharmaceutical companies lobbied very aggressively against any move by the WHO to create global norms for setting R&D priorities, to identify mechanisms for sustainable funding for R&D, or to design R&D mechanisms that don't create barriers for access. The pharmaceutical industry wants US trade negotiators to focus only on measures the raise drug prices.

Public health groups (including my own), scientists, and a number of others have been arguing that we need something else for globalization -- we need treaties or trade agreements that focus on funding R&D, and we need new R&D incentive mechanisms that are not tied to high drug prices.

Until this week, big PhRMA could count on the Bush Administration to block serious global discussions to consider this new paradigm. But the Bush Administration flipped this week, and backed an ambitious and serious effort to create a new global framework to support R&D in areas of priority...

The feeling here today is somewhat magical."

That's won't be the end of the battle as there are too many powerful interests, the big drug companies prime amongst them, rallying against this initiative, but it does indicate the battle can be won. There are huge numbers of smart, highly dedicated people engaged in public services all over the world, including in the much criticised Bush administration. Those people are prepared to listen if people with powerful arguments, like the lack of market focus on devastating but neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and sleeping sickness, can get a hearing in the complex, messy environments that constitute these public officials professional lives. It's a pity the European Commission officials showed up with a position drafted by the pharmaceutical industry and its a pity the industry should feel the need to oppose such an initiative but congratulations to all of those involved in ensuring this first small step has been taken.

Apple lost to Does, EFF and the 1st Amendment

Apple have lost their fight to unmask online reporters who leaked product information in advance of a company launch. The court was very clear on the constitutional position

"A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.

The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.

In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news," the opinion states. "Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment." "

It's worth repeating that: "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment."

There are way too many "this is the Internet so it's different" excuses made by the courts. There is no such thing as e-speech, e-commerce, e-learning or e-anything else and in time most people will come to realise that just as the telephone, car, radio and all kinds of other technologies have been absorbed by society, the Net will be too. It's a fantastic tool that can be exploited for good and ill and it's down to those of us with the good fortune to have access to it to ensure the former pursuit far outstrips the latter. Free speech online is one of the key foundation stones in that endeavour.

Amnesty launch digital rights campaign

Amnesty International and the Observer have launched a campaign to defend freedom of expression on the Net.

"The campaign, which Amnesty has called irrepressible.info, demands freedom of expression over the internet. People are continuing to be persecuted - sometimes thrown in prison for years on end - for having a political opinion. But this time the method of communication is online. The campaign calls for governments to stop censoring websites, blocking emails and shutting down blogs - and for big corporations to stop helping them.

In an article to launch the campaign, Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International, criticises technology companies for allowing censorship and providing information to governments used to convict political dissidents."

Getting the point across

Susan Crawford is lamenting the geek community's lack of communication skills when it comes to connecting with Jo Public.

"Many geeks, policy wonks, and policy geeks (the geeks who care about policy and wish they could be wonks) just aren't capable of persuading non-geek/non-wonks that the details of the issues they care about are important. If you took your average cyber-utopian and plunked him down in a bar in Milwaukee and told him to get everyone excited about net neutrality, he'd be lucky to get out of there unscathed. (Possible reality show?)"

This fact of geek life is a frustrating one. You can count up all the lies told by the telcos, you can tick off all the world-changing benefits of the internet, you can be amazed by the serendipity of online life, but you cannot convince the guy in the middle seat flying with you from Atlanta to Chicago that his elected representative is going the wrong way when it comes to giving telcos control over the internet...

She's right. It's a big problem and one of the reasons I started on the book - as John puts it, we've got to get these kinds of ideas into the bloodstream of society. It's also one of the reasons I've just spent a frustrating week trying to polish off Chapter 5 on risk, uncertainty and large scale government information systems (like ID cards). I've done dozens if not hundreds of posts here about these things and should be able to nail it without even thinking by now but it just hasn't been coming out right or at least in a way that Ms/Mr Public would find engaging. I had a sleepless night last night when I finally thought I had grasped the right shape and form but it was just beyond reach again today. Time to just write what comes and then knock it into shape with the help of critical readers.

Back to the Future

C.E. Petit's been thinking along similar lines to the kind of thing I've been saying in my book about intellectual property. (I go back a little further to begin my story with the Battle of the Book in Ireland in the 6th century but it's basically the same theme)

"Four hundred years ago, almost precisely.

In the early part of the seventeenth century, a debate over ownership of written works raged in Parliament...

Two incompatible paradigms struggled for supremacy. On the one hand, the monopolists and their allies...

On the other hand, a puzzlingly diverse set of philosophers, scholars, and others...

In the end, the second group "won" the battle, resulting in the Statute of Anne and, not quite two centuries after that, the IP Clause in the US Constitution. There have been many, many battles over the years since, such as the yet-unsettled battle over whether copyright is a natural right or a statutory right.1 Those battles continue today...

How ironic that we can now see many of the same monopolistic effects railed against in Parliament four hundred years ago… and that this time the monopolists justify their rents with not just their financial and technological prowess, but with twisted interpretations of copyright (particularly work for hire) and commercial law. "

Commission proposes new EU plan to halt biodiversity loss

Commission proposes new EU plan to halt biodiversity loss

Rights renewed, 'Eyes on the Prize' returns

Rights renewed, 'Eyes on the Prize' returns

"The series tells the story of the civil rights movement from the point of view of leaders and ordinary citizens alike, using material from more than 80 footage sources and 95 still archives. One hundred songs were also used.

The clearance rights for the astounding amount of material, which had originally been negotiated to be used for varying periods of time by Blackside, gradually expired.

It took four or five years to raise $915,000 for research, rights clearance, and post-production costs, said Sandra Forman, Blackside attorney and director of the ``Eyes on the Prize" Renewal Project."

Thanks to Furdlog for the pointer.

Shock: most young people not delinquent

Shock: most young people not delinquent shouts the ironic headline of this ARCH post.

"A new report slipped out from the Home Office yesterday: ‘delinquent youth groups and offending behaviour’. Using figures from the British Crime Survey, the researchers have studied the features of what they describe as ‘delinquent’ groups using the following criteria:

* Young people who spend time in groups of three or more (including themselves).
* The group spend a lot of time in public places.
* The group has existed for three months or more.
* The group has engaged in delinquent or criminal behaviour together in the last year.
* The group has at least one structural feature (a name, an area, a leader, or rules).

We’re not sure what ‘delinquent’ means if it’s used as a separate category from ‘criminal’, but that aside, if you read the papers you’ll already know that young people are generally a walking crime wave that terrorises decent, respectable citizens, right? Well, actually, no.

Using the criteria above, the researchers found that just 6% of young people belong to a ‘DYG’ (cool acronym, eh?). And if you’ve ever shrunk against the wall when a group of hoodie-clad black teenagers shuffles past, you’re wasting your energy: less than 1 in 500 ‘DYGs’ consists of black children. By far the most common offence committed by ‘DYGers’ was taking drugs (51%)."

SOCA saves UK high-tech crime unit - offline

John Lettice reports

"Concerns that the work of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) could be lost in the transfer process to SOCA, the newly formed Serious Organised Crime Agency, are clearly misplaced, if an answer to a Parliamentary question earlier this week is to be believed...

we can sleep soundly in our beds, secure in the knowledge that, somewhere on a USB drive (do look after it, chaps) resides the contents of the NHCTU web site,* ready for redeployment just as soon as we figure out where the blazes to put it. e-Government in action, part 94."

Enron Chiefs found guilty

"The former Enron bosses Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were yesterday convicted on fraud charges stemming from one of the most infamous scandals in corporate history."

Home Office accused of still burying bad news

From the Guardian,

"The Home Office has again released all of its statistical reports for the month at the same time, aggravating claims that it is placing reporters under "intolerable pressure" and "burying bad news".

Despite pleas from a group of home affairs correspondents, the Home Office has continued the practice, dubbed "research Thursday", of releasing all its reports on one day."

22 reporters have written to the Home Office Director of Communications:

"When a large number of documents were issued on the first 'research Thursday' after the general election, we were assured it was a one-off incident to clear a backlog generated by election purdah," the letter read.

"This is clearly not the case and this week's repetition leads many of us to fear that the practice has been instituted deliberately to 'bury bad news'. "If this is, indeed, the case such dishonourable tactics could only serve to damage the relationship between the home affairs correspondents and the Home Office press office."

I'm not sure what's worse, the Home Office's transparent tactics or the reporters' crying that they can't possibly report all the bad news on the one day. This need for the instant soundbite of the day on the part of the media, rather than in depth sustained research and reporting, contributes significantly to creating the kinds of politicians we have today. Here's a radical notion - maybe the reporters could take the time to study the documents and report on them over the course of the month they'll have to wait for the next Home Office news dump.. er.. research Thursday. We might even end up with some original and intelligent news reports.

A corrupt Congress is shocked to discover a lawless Executive

Jack Balkan is angry over the congressional closing of ranks after the FBI has apparently caught a member of congress engaged in corruption.

"The Bush Administration has, over the past six years, detained American citizens without any of the protections of the Bill of Rights, engaged in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, imposed new forms of secrecy to insulate itself from oversight both by the Press and by Congress, used the state secrets privilege to shut down any investigation into its mistreatment of detainees, hid and prevaricated about the evidence justifying, the reasons for, and the cost of Iraqi war, and begun a massive spying program on American citizens. Throughout all of these events, the United States Congress has been essentially supine, unable or unwilling to lift a finger to oppose an executive branch that was simultaneously incompetent, arrogant and out of control. And now, when the FBI catches redhanded a Congressman engaged in the most egregious act of corruption, *now* members of Congress are upset that the Executive is asserting too much authority.

They have their nerve.

Quite frankly, I find the bipartisan closing of ranks over this issue disgusting. If Congressmen are interested in Executive overreaching, they should start demanding that the President justify his NSA program; instead they doing everything they can to paper over its illegalities. They should hold hearings on how the Executive misused and manipulated intelligence reports, hearings that have repeatedly been promised and have repeatedly been postponed. They should hold hearings on the Administrations's policies of no-bid contracts in Iraq and elsewhere, and the many reports of corruption, incompetence, and war profiteering by these very same contractors who didn't have to engage in competition or oversight. They should investigate the President's decisions about torture, about rendition, about detention policies, about, well, you name it-- all the incompetent and corrupt activities of this most incompetent and corrupt Administration.

Instead of being upset about the President spying on Americans without a warrant, and in violation of federal law, the members of the U.S. Congress are upset about the FBI searching a Congressman's office with a legal warrant. Instead of being upset about the cruel, inhuman and degrading tactics of the CIA and military interrogators, members of the U.S. Congress are upset that a corrupt Congressman's office has been disturbed. Instead of being upset about abuses of government contracting and incompetence that have cost the tax payers countless sums of money and sapped resources from our troops overseas, members of Congress are busy protecting corruption in the halls of Congress itself...

The American Constitution is premised on the idea that any Executive overreaching that might take us on the path to tyranny and dictatorship would be met with Congressional objection and Congressional oversight. For six years we have been subjected to an arrogant, self-righteous, and incompetent Administration, which has grabbed for power and avoided accountability in every way it could, chipping away at Americans' proud traditions of freedom, harming our country's interests around the world and undermining the deliberative processes that produce sound policy and good governance. It is an Administration blinded by smug self-righteousness, devoted not to the development of competent and sound policies for the governance of our country, but to the concentration and perpetuation of its own power. But at the moment that we need the Congress most, it is feckless, corrupt, and venal, offering no resistance to mounting evidence of this Administration's illegality and incompetence. If Congress now finds that Executive power is encroaching a bit too close for comfort, it is poetic justice, for this Congress has thoroughly abdicated its constitutional responsibilities to protect the American people from Executive overreaching."

Rap artists accised of copyright infringement of "like that"

A couple of rap artists, who had a hit with a song called "Stand Up" are being accused of copyright infringement by a group called "It's Our Family".

"The specific accusation seems to be that "Stand Up" repeats many time the phrase "just like that" while the song "Straight Like That" repeats the phrase "straight like that." I guess the accusation is that "It's Our Family" owns the rights to the words "like that" at least if it is repeated enough times."

Stick with it - I had to read that three times before I stopped mixing up the group names, song titles and phrases. ;-)

RyanAir want court to order identification of online pilot critics

TJ McIntyre is reporting that RyanAir have been back in the High Court in Ireland seeking an order to identify some of their pilots who have been anonymously criticising the company online. This case has been going on for over a year.

CPTech promote A2K bill

The Consumer Project on Technology are seeking support for an access to knowledge bill in the US sponsored by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT).

Patients' needs are what must drive drug research

Patients' needs, not profits, are what must drive drug research say Rowan Gillies and Ellen T Hoen of Médecins Sans Frontières in today's FT.

"Médecins Sans Frontières' experience in our field programmes shows how neglected diseases continue to wreak their deadly toll. In the absence of a reliable and suitable test for tuberculosis, patients continue to go undetected and die. Those who are diagnosed are treated with a lengthy and increasingly inefficient regimen dating from the 1950s and 1960s. The most common treatments for sleeping sickness and the parasitic disease kala-azar both rely on drugs with potentially lethal toxic side-effects. Even Aids is a neglected disease - we still have no suitable diagnostic tool for infants and no appropriate medicines for children.

This is because the system that drives research and development today steers investment towards areas of guaranteed profitability. It is a system in which governments fail to set the priorities for medical research. It is a system in which there is no attempt to find a balance between global medical need and resource allocation. And it is a system entrenched in intellectual property regulation and trade agreements, which a World Health Organisation commission concluded in April show no evidence of boosting R&D in pharmaceuticals for diseases affecting developing countries.

But patients in rich countries are losing out, too. For this is also a system in which those doing the R&D are rewarded more for developing a drug that will sell than one that will meet unaddressed health needs...

It is high time for the WHO to address this problem. As health ministers gather in Geneva for the World Health Assembly this week, they will discuss a resolution proposed by Kenya and Brazil for a "global framework for essential health R&D". The resolution calls on governments to establish mechanisms that ensure medical research addresses the health needs of patients and not commercial dictates; that it delivers affordable products; and that it attracts sustainable long-term funding that is equitably shared among countries. When the system is broken, you fix it - now is the chance for governments and the WHO finally to do so."

There are a range of studies all over the world which suggest that of the thousands of 'new' drugs developed by the pharmaceutical industry over the past twenty five or thirty years, most of them haven't really brought anything new in the way of treatment. Pharmaceutical companies are profit driven and will therefore focus on drugs that make money. That's the nature of business. They have no incentive to invest in R&D to produce treatments for neglected diseases because the people and communities suffering from those diseases largely don't have the means to contribute sufficiently to the drug industries' bottom lines. When the market fails in an area of overwhelming public interest, it is time, as Gillies and Hoen say, for governments to step in.

The Consumer Project on Technology have some further details on the draft resolution proposed by Kenya and Brazil for a "global framework for essential health R&D" is available anywhere but

Can the NSA really find meaningful patterns in phone records?

Can the NSA really find meaningful patterns in phone records?

"There's a lot we still don't know -- and may never know -- about the National Security Agency's surveillance of Americans' phone calls. But one striking tidbit has emerged: that the agency is mining phone records for patterns of terrorist activity.

USA Today reported May 11 that the NSA was performing ``social network analysis'' to detect patterns of terrorist activity in its database of U.S. call records. In defending the program, Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., confirmed that the White House had told him the NSA was probing calling patterns to ``detect and track suspected terrorist activity.''

But is that really possible?

The ``tracking'' part makes sense. Assuming that intelligence had sussed out suspected terrorists, certainly the vast database could be used to track whom those people had called.

The ``detecting'' part, however, is another story. Can terrorists be spotted simply by analyzing who calls whom and when -- without any other leads? There's reason to be skeptical."

4 Mayors challenge NSA and telcos

Furdlog reports that Massachusetts Mayors have entering the NSA wiretap fray.

"Four Massachusetts mayors are filing a complaint with the state department that oversees telecommunications companies, part of a national campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union to demand information on whether the nation's largest security agency has gained access to private phone records.

[…] Massachusetts will play a prominent role in the campaign, because it is believed to be the only state where mayors can file complaints that require public hearings before the state Department of Telecommunications and Energy, said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

The mayors of Newton, Somerville, Northampton, and Chicopee are requesting a public hearing with the department to question whether the companies violated the law. The ACLU has asked that the Federal Communications Commission and 20 state public utilities commissions take action. "

21st century wiretapping storing data

Ed Felten's latest post in his series about 21st century wiretapping is up.

"Suppose the government gathered information about all phone calls, including the calling and called numbers and the duration of the call, and then stored that information in a giant database, in the hope that it might prove useful later in criminal investigations or foreign intelligence. Unlike the recently disclosed NSA call database, which is apparently data-mined, we’ll assume that the data isn’t used immediately but is only stored until it might be needed. Under what circumstances should this be allowed?

We can start by observing that government should not have free rein to store any data it likes, because storing data, even if it is not supposed to be accessed, still imposes some privacy harm on citizens...

It follows that, before storing such data, government should have to make some kind of showing that the expected value of storing the data outweighs the harms, and that there should be some kind of plan for minimizing the harms, for example by storing the data securely (even against rogue insiders) and discarding the data after some predefined time interval.

The most important safeguard would be an enforceable promise by government not to use the data without getting further permission (and showing sufficient cause)...

Part of the required showing, I think, would have to be an argument that there is not some way to store much less data and still get nearly the same benefit. An alternative to storing data on everybody is to store data only about people who are suspected of being bad guys and therefore are more likely to be targets of future investigations."

The Social Life Of Books

The Social Life Of Books

XM Radio Fans Can Record It if They Hear It

From the NYT XM Radio Fans Can Record It if They Hear It

"TO be filed under Best Ideas of the Year: Imagine a tiny music player, smaller than an iPod, that's also an XM satellite radio receiver. When you hear a song you like — even if it's halfway over — one press of a button records it from the beginning.

Meet the Samsung Helix (and its twin, the Pioneer Inno): a tiny, well-designed $400 radio that not only lets you enjoy satellite radio in the car, at home or when you're jogging, but also plays back your own MP3 files and up to 750 songs that you've recorded from the satellites...

Now, not everybody is happy about this feature of the Helix and its Pioneer sibling. XM, which was largely responsible for the design of both players, has been sued by the increasingly busy lawyers of the Recording Industry Association of America. They're calling the design of these players "a tool for copyright infringement."

Truth is, on the pure silliness scale, the association's case ranks right up there with Monty Python. You've already paid to listen to these XM songs; all the Helix adds is the ability to time-shift and replay them, just as people have done with audiocassettes for decades. Once you record a song to the Helix's memory, that's where it stays. You can't burn it to a CD or transfer it to a computer; you can't move, copy or distribute it in any way."

Lib Dems mass passport renewal

From the Guardian,

"A team of Liberal Democrat MPs today renewed their passports en masse - in protest at the government's plans for a compulsory identity database.

Nick Clegg and the home affairs team of the party prematurely renewed their passports in a stunt at Westminster passport office to highlight the looming deadline for those wishing to avoid enrolling on the national identity register."

German Constitutional Court outlaws preventive data screening

From EDRI-gram, the German Constitutional Court has outlawed preventive data screening.

"On 22 May the German Constitutional Court has declared illegal under the German Constitution the practice of screening data across several private and public databases in order to find potential terrorists ("sleepers"). Several federal states will now have to change their police laws. The decision does not make data screening ("Rasterfahndung", literally: "grid investigation", usual transliterations: "dragnet investigation" or "data trawl") completely illegal, but binds it to very narrow conditions."

Also from EDRI-gram, it looks as though there could be significant and growing support in Germany for a challenge to the EU data retention directive through the European Court of Justice. The recent controversy in the US over the legality of the President Bush-authorised NSA collection of large quantities of telecommunications data, seems to have galvanised German political and public support for such a challenge.

Democrats would be worse?

Glenn Greenwald, author of How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, is not a big fan of George W. Bush or the collective members of the Senate and the House who have failed to challenge some of his more controversial actions. But he actually believes that Democratic success in the elections later in the year could lead to even less controls.

"Democrats are afraid to challenge the President due to their fear -- always due to their fear -- that they will be depicted as mean, obstructionist and weak on national security. And so, even with an unbelievable weakened President, and even with regard to the most consequential issues -- and can one doubt that installing Gen. Hayden as CIA Director is consequential? -- Democrats back away from fights, take no clear position, divide against each other, and stand up for exactly nothing...

I've written before that, at least to me, the principal if not exclusive benefit of the Democrats taking over one or both of the Congressional houses in November is that it will impose some checks and limitations on the behavior of the administration and, specifically, will finally result in meaningful investigations into what has happened in our country and to our government over the last five years. But I have serious doubts about whether that would really happen...

I think Congressional Democrats will be more cautious and passive, not less so, if they take over one of the Congressional houses in 2006. People who operate from a place of fear and excess caution become even more timid and fearful when they have something to lose."

And the something they have to lose is the control of the Senate or House and the White House in 2008. So perhaps President Bush doesn't need to be quite so worried about the calls for his impeachment, even if there is a change in the balance of power after the elections.

James Joyce Copyright FAQ

The International James Joyce Foundation have produced a helpful JAMES JOYCE: COPYRIGHT, FAIR USE, AND PERMISSIONS FAQ "to acquaint scholars, performers, and adaptors of James Joyce’s work with the principles of copyright protection and users’ rights and to help them to productive interactions with the Estate of James Joyce in the event they choose to seek permissions to quote from, perform, or adapt Joyce’s work, and also to enable them to know better when copyright permissions are not legally necessary."

Europa change web address

As is the way with these things, Europa have changed their web address to include .eu, without maintaining the links to the documents posted under their original urls. So the dozens or perhaps even in the hundreds of links I've made here to EU documents over the past four years will now find a page unobtainable error.

I'm not alone in being irritated. Unlike EU Law blog, however, I'm not considering updating the links in old posts. Life is too short. Can I suggest to frustrated readers looking at broken links that you modify the first part of the url to read http://europa.eu/ in the first instance and failing sucess through that route, try the Europa search engine (I know - not the most user friendly of the breed) with the precise title of the document you're looking for.

It's the inevitable consequence of the all too common "I've got a great idea, now Y has happened, let's do X with our big information system", without remotely considering the knock on effects. Can somebody please remind them that a system is an assembly of components connected together in an organised way. It they want to change a key component, can they please try to think about the knock on effects and the system's users? It's really not a lot to ask.

The Democrats, Bush and the NSA domestic spying

Marty Lederman wonders why the Democrats are not making more of the allegedly illegal NSA mass domestic phone surveillance authorised by the Bush administration.

"So, why aren't the Senate Democrats making more of a fuss about the fact that the Attorney General and Michael Hayden determined to ignore FISA on the theory that the President has the constitutional power to violate such statutes? If Hayden's testimony is any indication, there appear to be two reasons:

First, it appears that Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, and Bob Graham were repeatedly briefed on the program. The Democrats have not yet come up with an adequate explanation of why their leaders did not object...

Second, if Hayden is to be believed, the members of Congress who were briefed agreed with the Administration that: (i) The program was useful but in violation of FISA; (ii) The best way to deal with the program of FISA's obsolescence was to amend FISA to accommodate the program; but (iii) To amend FISA in such a way would risk public revelation of NSA methods that had to remain secret...

assume what might well be the case: that the Administration (and possibly some in Congress) did not wish to amend FISA to make the NSA program lawful because there is a genuine and distinct tactical advantage in having our enemies think that we are abiding by the rule of law declared in the U.S. Code, when in fact we are not doing so.

So here's the question: Is it acceptable in a liberal democracy for a nation's positive law to announce to the world that Conduct X is unlawful, but for the government to secretly engage in such conduct nonetheless?"

Actually I don't think it is acceptable but the more important issue from a security perspective is that the enemy, say some terrorist organisation, is not going to rely on that liberal democracy following its own laws. You cannot manage the perception of the terrorist either by explicitly following or just pretending to follow your own laws. In the latter case it is a secret that is extremely brittle and quickly exposed in the shape of leaks like the USA Today or Wired stories and the terrorists' encounters with that state. It is therefore of little or no value from a security perspective.

Wanadoo in customer data security breach

The Guardian reports "Wanadoo, which has 2 million internet subscribers in Britain, admitted that a technical mistake led to swaths of customer account information - including their real names and passwords - being published online."

Personal data of US veterans stolen

The Washington Post reports that "As many as 26.5 million veterans were placed at risk of identity theft after an intruder stole an electronic data file this month containing their names, birth dates and Social Security numbers from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee"

German eDonkey users face criminal charges

In news to delight the hearts of the most hard-bitten music industry executives, "German police have filed criminal charges against 3,500 people accused of using the eDonkey file-sharing network to share copyrighted music illegally"

Getting the authorities to fund the fight against copyright infringement has been the dream of the music industry for so long that they'll be dancing with glee in the executive suites of the big four and their trade groups, the BPI, RIAA and IFPI. If their net catches some large scale commercial infringers then by all means prosecute them but I sincerely hope this does not end up with naive teenagers going to jail just to 'send a message.'

Veteran war reporter blasts Rumsfeld

Veteran US war reporter, Joe Galloway, has let fly in a series of email exchanges with US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's press secretary, Larry Darita. It's absolutely remarkable to see Galloway's deeply passionate attempts to knock some sense of reality into the Rumsfeld sounding board bouncing away without any chance of being heard. How would you respond to this:

"i like to think that is what i am doing also, and it is a struggle that grows out of my obligation to and love for america's warriors going back 41 years as of last month. there are many things we all could wish had happened. i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, "You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don't quit now..." Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty. i could wish for so much. i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time. i could wish that Jackson's widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl. those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war. someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry."

Darita's reply was:

"I appreciate what you are saying but your continued implication that rumsfeld does not understand all that is at stake is wrong and offensive."

I'm speechless.

AG Gonzales says reporters will be prosecuted

US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, in the wake of the revelations about the telcos handing call data to NSA, and the admission that the data on journalists' calls would be closely scrutinised, has now said explicitly that reporters telephone calls will be tracked and reporters will be prosecuted where necessary because the adminstration has an "obligation to ensure that our national security is protected." He cushioned this somewhat by saying it would not be done routinely or randomly.

Does that mean that the journalists and publications who published the identity of a CIA employee, the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, would be prosecuted under this standard, as well as or instead of the officials who leaked her name?

Update: Prof. Geoffrey Stone, a well known constitutional scholar at Chicago Law School, has published an excerpt from a memo he submitted to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on the press's publication of unauthorized disclosures of classified information. He basically says what Gonzales is proposing is a bad idea. Stone published a great book a couple of years ago, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism

Student asked for DNA after posting murder fiction on the Net

The University of Florida police have allegedly repeatedly attempted to pressurise a student into giving his fingerprints and DNA after he wrote a short piece of murder fiction which he then posted on the Net.

"The university police at Gainesville's University of Florida have targeted a graduate student in the English program over his publication of a piece of horror fiction on his LiveJournal. The police have repeatedly visited the student and demanded that he submit his fingerprints and DNA to them so that they can compare the fictional murder he described in his story to evidence from any similar unsolved murders."

Educating the lay public about science

Peter Suber believes that open access has an important role to play in improving the lay public's understanding of science

"My question is, What role can open access play in this? I'm not so optimistic as to think that simply making primary science easily available online will do much to foster scientific literacy and scientific knowledge among non-scientists, let alone convert creationists to evolutionists. Easy access completes the puzzle when there is antecedent interest and background, and we need help from teachers, journalists, and politicians to create that interest and background. For the same reason, however, I'm not so pessimistic as to think that OA will make no difference.

There are two mistakes to avoid here. One is to think that OA has no role to play in helping non-scientists understand science. We can call this the Royal Society mistake, after the RS's recent report on educating lay readers about science that doesn't even mention OA. The other mistake is to think that the overriding purpose of OA is to educate lay readers. No OA advocates believe this, but some publisher-opponents of OA either believe it or pretend to believe it in order set it up as a straw man and knock it down. (The most recent example is the American Society of Human Genetics, as quoted in the NYTimes for May 8.) To avoid both mistakes we have to accept that the problem and solution are both complicated. OA will play a role in public education about science --it's neither irrelevant nor sufficient-- and the size of that role is up to all of us."

Absolutely.

IBM RESEARCHER SLAMS UK IDENTITY CARD SCHEME

Kim Cameron notes that an IBM researcher has come to the same conclusions on the UK Id card scheme as he himself did. Kim says:

"My central “aha” in studying the British government’s proposal was that the natural contextual specialization of everyday life is healthy and protective of the structure of our social systems, and this should be reflected in our technical systems. A technology proposal that aims to eliminate compartmentalization rejects one of the fundamental protective mechanisms society has evolved. The resulting central database, where everything is connected and visible to everything else, is as vulnerable as a steel ship with no compartments - one perforation, and the whole thing goes down.

The starting point for a security thinker is that there will be perforations. In low value systems, the breach will come from neglect. In a high value system, there will be conscious attacks mounted both from without and within, and one must assume that one of these will succeed.

Our art consists in reducing the frequency of such perforations, and - once a breach occurs - minimizing the damage that is done. The current British proposal masterfully maximizes such damage, like a fire extinguisher full of gasoline. "

The IBM man, Michael Osborne "slated the UK government’s ID cards scheme on the grounds of cost, over-centralisation, and being the wrong tool for the job."

Update: John Lettice has been examining the prime minister's faith in the ability of technology - in the form of eBorders and ID cards - to solve the immigration problem

"Blair, under severe pressure from opposition leader David Cameron, appropriately enough described an e-Borders and ID card based Fortress Britain as the ultimate fix for illegal immigration...

But we shouldn't be too hard on Tony here; yes, he's placing an absurd amount of faith in technology which cannot supply a solution, but he's not alone there, just maybe a bit further out on a limb than the rest of Western Europe, all of which, to a greater or lesser extent, is in denial."

Champion privacy if you've nothing to hide

Bruce Schneier writing in Wired gets right to the heart of the the surveillance and privacy story.

"The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect...

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide."

William Heath wants to get Bruce to talk to some senior government "officials of good character and intellect who are grappling with this stuff." I wish him luck with that venture and have long suggested it would be a good idea. At the very least we should put a copy of Bruce's book, Beyond Fear, in the hands of those officials and insist they read it. It'll be the best half day education on these issues that they will ever have.

Update: Daniel Solove wonders if there can be a compelling response with widespread appeal to the 'nothing to hide' argument.

Religious hatred part of Saudi school curriculum

Nick Shea in the Washington Post claims that teaching children to hate non muslims is part of the school curriculum in Saudi Arabia, in spite of the claims to the contrary of the Saudi Ambassador to the US recently.

Richard Dawkins won't be surprised.

CRB database errors

The exposure of the errors on the Criminal Records Bureau database and the effects on the lives of ordinary people is a classic example of the damage that "false positives" generated by this kind of system can do. Nearly 3000 people were affected, some turned down for jobs and the like. And the CRB system is only a tiny fraction of the size of the proposed national identity register.

Add to that the serious questions raised by the case of former police officer,Shirley McKie, demonstrating the way in which things can go wrong in the processing and analysis of fingerprints.

Two important parts of the national ID card system involve maintaining complex accurate records of personal details and fingerprints. They are just two amongst many, however. Now how confident can we really be that the Home Office are capable of managing those two parts let alone the rest of the system?

(BTW for the ID geeks - I know it's not as simple as separating just two items out like that but I'm just trying to illustrate the point)

The music genome project

Here's an interesting idea:

"On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.

We hope you enjoy the journey.

Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project"

Anti-GPL lawsuit fails again

Daniel Wallace, who believes that free and open source software are anti-competitive, or at least has been prepared to go to court (twice so far) to try and get a legal declaration to that effect, has lost again. That he has lost would seem to strike a blow for sanity at least at one intersection where technology meets the law. His argument has been that the price of free and open source software is so low that it makes it difficult for him to enter the market with more expensive software.

No seriously - that's his beef - and if we examine the Microsoft campaigns against open source and the content industry's campaigns against new technologies, their messages are pretty similar - 'OS is a virus,' 'you can't compete with pirates offering free content' etc. - it's just that Microsoft and the content industries have much more sophisticated PR operations than Mr Wallace. And they are much more effective at getting us to believe that white is black or vice versa.

In any case it is good to know that at least two judges seem to believe that selling decent software at low prices is not anti-competitive.

Forget about targets - and decide what really matters

Simon Caulkin sets his sights on targets in his Observer column today. Basically setting simplistic targets for complex systems is a recipe for disaster.

"Well, I was right about targets and foreign criminals. According to a Panorama special aired last week, the reason so many villains with exotic accents have vanished unhindered into the countryside at the end of their prison sentences is that, until last month, officials at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate weren't answering prison officers' phone calls asking what to do with them - they were too busy working out how to fulfil the Prime Minister's party conference pledge to deport more failed asylum seekers than were applying to stay...

Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result was a definition of insanity. That's what the obsession with targets is. Whether in business or public service, misuse of targets is the single most important reason for public cynicism, rock-bottom employee morale and failed improvement efforts. Targets wreck systems, driving up costs and making things worse...

Some targets do work- and that's one of their biggest problems. Because they are products of one world view applied to another - reductive mechanical measures applied to non-mechanical systems - targets have unpredictable and quickly ramifying consequences. To cut waiting lists hospitals do easier, rather than more urgent, operations; to meet exam pass rates schools exclude difficult students or encourage them into easier subjects; and to hit City earnings targets companies overstate profits or cut advertising or R&D budgets. Enron was the most target-driven company on earth, and to meet its targets it tore itself apart. The reply to ministers' repeated refrain that 'the private sector has targets' is: look at Enron."

Read the whole thing.

Bar the Door. TV Ads Want Your TiVo.

Bar the Door. TV Ads Want Your TiVo. NYT on TiVo-proof ads.

Short net neutrality video

Public Knowledge have posted a neat video on the practical importance of Net neutrality at YouTube.

Universal sue Sony over Da Vinci CD

I find his quite funny. Universal, who have just released the Da Vinci Code film and associated soundtrack on CD, are suing Sony who have just released a CD called Music Inspired By Da Vinci. The Sony folks spotted a marketing opportunity and Universal are not happy. Now if the boot was on the other foot and Sony were on the receiving end of such entrepreneurial initiative by say a lessor known company or individual, I wonder who would be shouting about villainy on the high seas?

Update: IPKat says they have, sadly, settled out of court.

Blair's values

AC Grayling at the Guardian doesn't believe Tony Blair's values are British values.

"Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm...

Yes, the government should be active and do its best to safeguard the populace, but consistently with the truth that life is risky, and that freedoms are more precious than safety.

Mr Blair should be fiercely protecting our liberties against the intended effect - the intended effect, note - of the assaults of fanatics whose conception of the good society is Taliban Afghanistan. The intended effect is to make us lock doors and hide away.

On 7/7 Mr Blair said "these atrocities will not force us to change our way of life." He then proceeded to change our way of life by making us all numbered conscripts in society instead of free citizens - for that is what ID cards do. Instead of protecting our liberties he is busy giving them up in the vain, in fact ridiculous, hope that doing so will keep us safe. It will not: to put 60 million citizens under permanent police surveillance to catch 60 or even 600 disgusting criminal lunatics is both a crime against freedom and an utterly futile act.

Does Mr Blair hope that what he thinks of as the Britishness of the British will make them accept this nonsense meekly? I suppose one has to accept that if he is right on this point, we deserve him."

Not a Blair fan.

P2PNet owner sued by Sharman Networks

Kazaa owner Sharman Networks has decided to sue Jon Newton, owner of the pro P2P site, P2PNet, for libel.

Summary of the ARCH Children's Databases Masterclass

Action on Rights for Children have provided a terrific summary of the Masterclass in children's databases in the UK they have been posting on the Web over the past three weeks.

Essential reading for anyone interested in issues like ID cards or the surveillance state.

"There is a range of databases holding information about children and young people, and a corresponding range of legislation that allows this information to be shared between education, social care, health, youth justice and law enforcement agencies

Many systems are concerned with a ‘predictive’ agenda – identifying children from an early age whom agencies believe may commit criminal offences in the future...

This predictive agenda has now been extended to identify children who have what are described as ‘low-level’ welfare problems...

A new in-depth personal assessment tool (the Common Assessment Framework) that captures information about the child, and the competence of his/her parents, has been designed to be used by any agency if a practitioner believes the child needs more services than that particular agency can provide...

Social Services are moving over to an electronic record system (ESCR) to be developed along the lines of the NHS information system, and planned links between the two are under discussion.

A central index of all children from birth is currently being established to hold each child’s basic details, plus contact information for each practitioner working with the child... Consideration is being given to linking this Children’s Index to the National Identity Register in order to create a single national population register.

Although the Children’s Index was initially promoted as a child protection measure in the wake of the Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie... It is envisaged that everyone - child or adult - will eventually have a central file that acts as a ‘hub’ for government services.

The green paper ‘Every Child Matters’ changed the definition of the phrase ‘at risk’. Until now, when applied to a child, this has been taken to mean at risk of 'significant harm' from abuse or neglect. It now means at risk of social exclusion, of missing out on services or education, or of committing crime...

The legislation that establishes the Children’s Index allows information to be collected and shared without the knowledge or consent of child and parents...

There is considerable confusion around the issue of consent to the sharing of information between agencies...

it will be up to each area ‘Local Safeguarding Children Board’ to develop its own information-sharing agreement.

At the moment, pilots are being conducted in order to decide what data should be put on the Children’s Index."

Many thanks to the folks at ARCH who have gone to considerable trouble recently to outline the situation with these databases in an accessible way. Hopefully their efforts will be widely read and understood.

Immigration rules lead to death of young mother

The Independent has a desparately sad story on its front page today about the death of a young mother on Monday. Ese Elizabeth Alabi fell ill on a visit to the UK, so ill that she was unable to return home to Nigeria before her visa ran out. She needed a heart transplant.

Typically the tabloid press, notably the Daily Mail according to the Independent story, maliciously spun the story recently with large headlines accusing Ms Alabi of being a "health tourist." Rules brought in by the government last year meant that the young mother was not eligible to go on the transplant list because she was effectively classified as a health tourist not entitled to NHS treatment. Last minute appeals to the High Court were denied and though there was no gaurantee that she would have got a transplant even if she had been on the list, she was denied that possibility.

Ms Alabi had regularly travelled to the UK to be with her partner, Abiodun Abe, who has indefinite leave to stay here. She never overstayed her visa terms, until this time when her inability to travel due to her illness meant she fell into the illegal immigrant category, complicating the challenge in the High Court.

My sympathies go out to Ms Alabi's family.

Jon Stewart on NSA domestic surveillance

This extract from the Daily Show on the NSA domestic phone surveillance controversy is hilarious. Jon Stewart starts on the NSA story about 1min 20 secs into the clip. Highlights are when he interprets President Bush, saying the president didn't exactly lie, "President Bush did not have sex with that NSA program, Miss Lewinsky" and "are you for the terrorists or do you want your phone tapped, you can't have it both ways."

Also when he blows a hole in the government's defence claiming they're not actually listening in to everyone's calls just collecting data about the calls by demonstrating how much personal information that apparently limited amount of data could potentially disclose.

Brilliant.

Inno the new Rio?

In the mid 1990s Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at the Frauenhofer Institute in Germany invented the MP3 digital audio standard. In the late 1990s the US music industry sued to get a little MP3 player called the Rio banned. The Rio was the forerunner of the iPod and played other audio files as well as MP3s. In the end the RIAA only lost the case on a legal technicality in the Appeal Court. The Rio survived, Napster, Grokster and other P2P services took hold, the music industry went berserk and iTunes evolved.

Now the music labels are suing XM Satellite Radio "over its new iPod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music", so the wheel has, sort of, come full circle again. This has been on the cards ever since digital radio came on the scene. I'm surprised it has taken them so long really. This time, though, rather than seeking an injunction banning the sales of these devices, the labels are merely looking for a slice of the revenues.

"XM Satellite said Tuesday it will fight the lawsuit and accused the labels of using the courts as leverage during business negotiations.

``These are legal devices that allow consumers to listen to and record radio just as the law has allowed for decades,'' the company said in a statement. ``The music labels are trying to stifle innovation, limit consumer choice and roll back consumers' rights to record content for their personal use.''...

``Yahoo!, Rhapsody, iTunes and Napster all have licenses,'' said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America. ``There's no reason XM shouldn't as well.''"

Clever bit of PR by Bainwol, though he does neglect to mention that the radio company already pay performance licences.

Update: the EFF have more details.

Good Luck to the Gunners

Good luck to Arsene Wenger and the Arsenal team in Paris this evening, at the club's first ever appearance in the European Cup Final.

The signs are that the manager is going to take a cautious approach which would be a shame. I don't think I could take the tension of the semi final second leg again! (not to mention last year's FA Cup final). It worked but bred a level of anxiety amongst the players that killed any hope of them producing the open, flowing, artistic football they are so capable of.

Fabregas, Henry, Ljungberg, Hleb, Gilberto and Reyes/Pires in full flow, with a cameo for Berkamp, against the might of the Catalans, could be quite something to watch. I just hope they do themselves justice.

Latest excuse for an ID card: those missing ex-offenders

The new Home Secretary John Reid has come up with another excuse for ID cards, in response to a planted parliamentary question: keeping track of ex-offenders, like that thousand or so that got Charles Clarke the sack.

"My hon. friend is absolutely correct. One of the many problems that we face is that at no stage of the whole process — through investigation, arrest, inquiry, interview, trial, sentencing, consideration, custodial sentence and release — as far as I have been able to determine in the limited time that has been available to me, is there any legal requirement on anyone to be responsible for discovering a nationality, or indeed, on anyone else, to volunteer their nationality. That is a not inconsiderable problem when it comes to dealing with foreign nationals. As my hon. friend says, this is one of the areas in which identity cards would be a huge boon."

John Lettice can't contain himself

"Police throughout the UK will no doubt be relieved to hear from the Home Secretary that they are in point of fact under no obligation to find out who it is they've just nicked, but we feel sure that, perversely, they will continue to see doing so as one of their top ten tasks after an arrest. Breaks the day up for them, we suppose...

The problem here is not that the system doesn't know who they've got and who they should be monitoring or deporting on release, because the system does know this - it's that the system can't even share the information adequately with itself.

The system, up until the day before it releases the prisoner without considering deporting them, even has the subject's address. Might we propose some kind of prisoner identity register as a kind of alpha test prior to the really big cockup, er, national register?"

Read the whole piece. It's hilarious.

Human Rights Act to be amended by minister's order?

In the wake of Tony Blair's metaphorical table thumping about the Human Rights Act only protecting those terrible badies at the expense of us unfortunate goodies, an amendment to the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill has been quietly dropped in the midst of the complicated report stage of the bill. The amendment, which was to be the new clause 26, read:

"An order under this Part may not make provision amending or repealing any provision of—

(a) this Part; or

(b) the Human Rights Act 1998 (c. 42)."

So there was to be no bypassing of the parliamentary process to change the Human Rights Act. Now the clause has been dropped, though, once the Leg. & Reg. bill passes, the HRA can be changed by ministerial order or the order of any other approved official.

Now Mr Blair is spoiling for another - can't lose - public relations battle, we can't have unreasonable barriers like parliament and the law getting in the way of demonstrating how he can be tough on the HRA and tough on the causes of the HRA, can we?

[PS Marina Hyde is quite funny about Mr Blair apparently shedding a tear in the rose garden when telling Charles Clarke he was sacking him recently
"Now, I do not dispute the import of this moment. But if I found my lachrymose self taking refuge in the shrubbery to hide my anguish at having to lose an overpromoted, incompetent bully like Charles Clarke, I feel sure I would suddenly, in a moment quite blinding in its profundity, be struck with the sense that it would not be long before my political (and probably psychological) number was up, and I would be shunted off to the great borrowed villa in the sky."]

Extraordinary Rendition: complicity and its consequences

Phillipe Sands QC gave the JUSTICE International Rule of Law Lecture 2006, yesterday on

Extraordinary Rendition: complicity and its consequences

and he was highly critical of the UK and US governments. Tony Blair in particular, the dissection of whom is the focus of most of the speech, gets analytically vilified.

"we do know that the Prime Minister has a somewhat semi-detached relationship to the rule of law. He was willing to bend the rules in respect of the use of force in Iraq, and to manipulate the presentation of the legal advice he had been given. This past week he has not hesitated to attack the judgment of an English court (in the case of the hijacked Afghan plane) in a manner and with a tone that raises serious constitutional concerns.

20. The Prime MinisterÂ?s discontent with the law and the judges, and his less than fulsome commitment to international human rights standards, dates back to well before 9/11. One example suffices to illustrate, the case of Youseff v The Home Office. Although Mr Justice FieldÂ?s judgment was given in July 2004, all the material facts date back to the spring and summer of 1999. Even then the Prime Minister was looking to find ways to get around the rules of international human rights law which limited the circumstances in which Britain could return Hani Youssef and three other Egyptians to their homeland...

The way around the problem would be to obtain written assurances from the Egyptian government for the safety and well-being of Youseff. The Foreign Office sought assurances on nine grounds...

the Egyptian Government declined to give the assurances...

In response to the FCO'?s view that the Egyptian assurances were inadequate the Prime Minister wrote across the top of this letter: "This isn'?t good enough. I don'?t believe we shld (sic) be doing this. Speak to me." The contempt for human rights concerns is clear."

When the Home Office then decided the risk of torture was too high and not to deport the four, the PM's Private Secretary writes:

"[T]he Prime Minister is not content simply to accept that we have no option but to release the four individuals. He believes that we should use whatever assurances the Egyptians are willing to offer, to build a case to initiate the deportation procedure and to take our chance in the courts. If the courts rule that the assurances we have are inadequate, then at least it would be the courts, not the government, who would be responsible for releasing the four from detention...

23. The Prime Minister'?s direct intervention indicates the rather direct and personal involvement of No 10 in the affairs of different government departments. It suggests that the overriding objective is not to act consistently with applicable rules, or ensure that fundamental human rights of individuals are protected, but to gauge and then pander to public opinion: hence the strategy of shifting the blame for Youssef'?s release away from government and onto the courts...

the Prime Minister'?s concern with his legacy is driven by the fear that he is fundamentally misunderstood, and that those who seek to challenge him are out of touch... Yet it is the Prime Minister who displays these characteristics... he says that his approach reflects "?a genuine desire to protect our way of life from those who would destroy it". But our "?way of life"? includes our system of values, and our system of values includes a commitment to the rule of law. Returning foreigners to near-certain torture is not consistent with our "?way of life"? or our values. Aiding and abetting the transfer of British nationals and residents to Guantanamo - if that is established to have occurred -? would not be consistent with our "?way of life"? or our values. Turning a blind eye to extraordinary rendition - if that is established -? falls within the same category. The Prime Minister's logic leads inexorably in one direction only. "?Whose civil liberties?"?, he asks. Everyone'?s, we should respond."

Why don't we share the toys

Jonathan Rowe has been teaching his three year old son to share his toys.

"The kids’ eyes fixed right away on the trucks; Filipino kids don’t have many toys, and they prize them in a way most American kids can’t They made gestures to join my son in play, which he did not welcome. He became agitated, and concocted a rule, as he tends to do in such situations. Those toys were only for kids who were three, he said, by which he meant himself. He said this over and over. The kids didn’t understand the words, but they got the drift. They retreated, bruised...

the look on those kids’ faces made me writhe inside. Would they henceforth think of Americans as people with a lot of toys they would not share? While it isn’t fair to load that on my son, it comes awfully close to my own concerns about the nation of which I am a part. Josh and I went into another room and had a chat. I tried to articulate for him, once again, why he needs to share. We made a new rule – okay, I made the rule. If he can’t share it then he can’t keep it. What he won’t share we will give away, to that child or to someone else. Then I started reflecting on something I have observed about life in America: how riches often make people less inclined to share rather than more so; and how the version of childhood we have invented – more precisely, that the corporate market has invented – might contribute to this...

The Philippines are a very poor nation, materially. The U.S. is very rich. So what is the Bush Administration's priority in the Philippines? Enforcement of intellectual property laws, so that poor Filipinos will have to pay more -- often to us -- for cd's, auto parts, and most egregiously, prescription drugs...

This proclivity is not new in human nature. But America’s corporate economy has cultivated it, especially the greed side; and as I suggested up top, it begins with childhood, and kids.

In the Philippines childhood is still a commons, defined by the play children share rather than by the things they have. You see few toys in the homes, certainly not the clutter you find often in America. You see instead things that kids make for themselves – tops made from nails in pieces of wood, for example, and slingshots carved from tree branches with slings from old inner tubes. On the farm we saw kids using these to fell beetle nuts from trees...

these games were in shared childhood space – common space. They make childhood a place of abundance for kids who, in many cases, have little besides the clothes they wear. Sharing is natural because the sharing, in the form of play, is the substance of the wealth. In America, by contrast, kids inhabit a culture of possession and enclosure, and feel chronic lack despite – or perhaps, because of -- all the stuff they have...

To reduce good to a commodity by definition limits it and makes it scarce. A market, economists tell us, is a mechanism for allocating scarce resources. The corollary, which they don’t often mention, is that in order to be so allocated, the resource in question must first be made scarce. Childhood must be reduced to something material and finite. Play must become a thing – that is, something that can be fought over, instead of participated in."

Supreme court rule in favour of eBay

The Supreme Court have ruled in favour of eBay in their patent dispute with MercExchange setting aside (12 page pdf) an Appeal Court injunction.

"The high court unanimously reversed an appeals court ruling in favor of MercExchange, a developer of e-commerce technology that sued eBay for patent infringement, saying an appeals court had failed to apply the proper legal test in deciding whether MercExchange should be granted an injunction barring eBay from using its technology.

However, the justices also rejected a crucial argument advanced by eBay, and embraced by a U.S. District Court that handled the case, that companies lose some of their right to an injunction if they have agreed to license out their technology or are not using it to make a product themselves."

Scotusblog has more details.

Update: Randy Picker at Chicago Law School offers his perspective. The court was split on some of the key underlying issues but "The simple version is that the Court unanimously holds, in an opinion by Justice Thomas, that the “well-established principles of equity” for granting a permanent injunction apply to disputes arising under the Patent Act. The Court won’t “lightly” imply exceptions to general equitable practice, and after wrestling briefly with a couple of sections in the Patent Act, concludes that the standard off-the-rack rules for permanent injunctions should apply to patent cases. Neither lower court did that, so reversed and remanded to the district court for a first crack at the problem."

Aussies spinning in ID cards debate

William Heath has just come back form Australia where the top official on their proposed "Access Card" (aka ID card) scheme has resigned. It seems he wanted to raise some of the practical problems at the outset and the government collectively rolled into a foetal position and yelled 'not listening, not listening.'

"The UK Home Office's reputation may be in tatters domestically, but authoritarians around the world seem to take heart and want to emulate its ID card policy. The issues around single-identifier projects are global: risk, cost, business case, phoney pretexts. Above all a lack of engagement between those who understand the technology and those who feel the need to be seen to be decisive. The dominant analogy while I was out there is railway gauges, as in why use different identifiers which dont interoperate - surely we should get together and use the same gauge...

Deep, long-lasting political decisions about technical architectures are being by people who can only talk about it indirectly via metaphor and analogy: are we standardising railway gauges here, or is this a Swiss Army knife? Should we put all our eggs in one basket? The very cards themselves, call them ID cards, Entitlementment Cards, Access Cards, other-euphemism cards, are just a metaphor for the real issue - the panoptical-database state."

Attackers make security hard by being adaptable

Bruce Schneier points to a nice cartoon illustrating an important point about security. One of the reasons it is difficult is that attackers are adapable.

Scan this book

Kevin Kelly in the NYT on the Google book project.

"There are dozens of excellent reasons that books should quickly be made part of the emerging Web. But so far they have not been, at least not in great numbers. And there is only one reason: the hegemony of the copy...

In preindustrial times, exact copies of a work were rare for a simple reason: it was much easier to make your own version of a creation than to duplicate someone else's exactly. The amount of energy and attention needed to copy a scroll exactly, word for word, or to replicate a painting stroke by stroke exceeded the cost of paraphrasing it in your own style. So most works were altered, and often improved, by the borrower before they were passed on. Fairy tales evolved mythic depth as many different authors worked on them and as they migrated from spoken tales to other media (theater, music, painting). This system worked well for audiences and performers, but the only way for most creators to earn a living from their works was through the support of patrons.

That ancient economics of creation was overturned at the dawn of the industrial age by the technologies of mass production. Suddenly, the cost of duplication was lower than the cost of appropriation. With the advent of the printing press, it was now cheaper to print thousands of exact copies of a manuscript than to alter one by hand. Copy makers could profit more than creators. This imbalance led to the technology of copyright, which established a new order. Copyright bestowed upon the creator of a work a temporary monopoly — for 14 years, in the United States — over any copies of the work. The idea was to encourage authors and artists to create yet more works that could be cheaply copied and thus fill the culture with public works.

Not coincidentally, public libraries first began to flourish with the advent of cheap copies. Before the industrial age, libraries were primarily the property of the wealthy elite. With mass production, every small town could afford to put duplicates of the greatest works of humanity on wooden shelves in the village square. Mass access to public-library books inspired scholarship, reviewing and education, activities exempted in part from the monopoly of copyright in the United States because they moved creative works toward the public commons sooner, weaving them into the fabric of common culture while still remaining under the author's copyright. These are now known as "fair uses."

This wonderful balance was undone by good intentions. The first was a new copyright law passed by Congress in 1976. According to the new law, creators no longer had to register or renew copyright; the simple act of creating something bestowed it with instant and automatic rights. By default, each new work was born under private ownership rather than in the public commons. At first, this reversal seemed to serve the culture of creation well. All works that could be copied gained instant and deep ownership, and artists and authors were happy. But the 1976 law, and various revisions and extensions that followed it, made it extremely difficult to move a work into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and were originally intended to reside. As more intellectual property became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back, technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is a long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright an additional 70 years beyond the life span of a creator — to a point where it could not possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep that creator working — it was obvious to all that copyright now existed primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress at the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing copyrights, nothing — no published creative works of any type — will fall out of protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost everything created today will not return to the commons until the next century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can improve (think "A Thousand and One Nights" or "Amazing Grace" or "Beauty and the Beast") will largely dry up.

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn't find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn't know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world's libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark...

Having searchable works is good for culture. It is so good, in fact, that we can now state a new covenant: Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange for public protection of a work's copies (what we call copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to be searched. No search, no copyright. As a song, movie, novel or poem is searched, the potential connections it radiates seep into society in a much deeper way than the simple publication of a duplicated copy ever could.

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another...

The reign of the copy is no match for the bias of technology. All new works will be born digital, and they will flow into the universal library as you might add more words to a long story. The great continent of orphan works, the 25 million older books born analog and caught between the law and users, will be scanned. Whether this vast mountain of dark books is scanned by Google, the Library of Congress, the Chinese or by readers themselves, it will be scanned well before its legal status is resolved simply because technology makes it so easy to do and so valuable when done. In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail. On this screen, now visible to one billion people on earth, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge."

It's a long piece for a newspaper but worth the effort.

Warners and BitTorrent: a beginner's guide

John has a nice beginner's guide to Warner Bros embrace of BitTorrent for film distribution.

"if you told a movie industry executive you used BitTorrent, she or he would make the sign of the cross and flee, pausing only to collect cloves of garlic and phone a lawyer...

So you can see why the news that Warner Brothers has apparently seen the light makes your columnist sit up. Could this herald the Beginning of Wisdom in the movie industry? Having inspected their plans, I'm not so sure...

For example, the Torrented movies are priced the same as a shrink-wrapped DVD, yet encumbered with robust copy protection that allows them to be viewed only on the computer to which they are downloaded...

Trust Hollywood, as one Silicon Valley wag put it, 'to "embrace" peer-to-peer distribution and all the economies and efficiencies that go along with it and then ruin it by using it to peddle an inferior and overpriced product'. Nothing changes."

7/7 reports press shouldn't be so naive

Henry Porter thinks the press are being naive about the 7/7 reports and the job of the intelligence services. With limited resources it is not possible for the intelligence folks to follow up every lead and it is not sensible to believe we can be protected from every possible attack or attacker. That's not how security works. The press in the wake of the Butler report clearing Tony Blair over any responsibility for David Kelly's death basically accepted intelligence information could never be perfect but now condemn imperfect intelligence. (Of course the BBC was a major target in the WMD story and as Bruce Schneier always says you can't evaluate security without understanding the agendas of the players.)

"The press is having it both ways: it must be illogical in one set of circumstances to condemn the credulity of intelligence officers while in another to attack them for not acting on every piece of information received, however peripheral it seems. Having sat through the inquiry into David Kelly's death and read Lord's Hutton's report with disbelief, I am disposed to a sceptical line on government reports.

But the two accounts of the 7 July bombings and the intelligence failure do not have the glare of whitewash, nor the slightest glimmer of it. They seem to provide an accurate picture of what happened and the difficulties faced by the security services and Special Branch. What Siddique Khan and his three companions planned was essentially unknowable. MI5 might conceivably have got closer to the bombers, but, given the enormous number of leads it has to follow up and its finite resources, it would have been extremely lucky to have frustrated this attack as well as three subsequent plots, all of which are now sub judice"

Rove indicted?

There's a story doing the rounds that Karl Rove has been indicted for perjury and lying to investigators in the investigation into the Bush administration's leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.