War on innocent but different

Bruce Schneier's essay War on the Unexpected in his latest Crypto-gram, should be compulsory reading for Gordon Brown, Jacqui Smith and their advisers. In fact they should be locked in a room - for 58 days if necessary - and made to read it repeatedly until they get the message.

"We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense. "If you see something, say something" is how the ads read in the New York City subways. "If you suspect something, report it" urges another ad campaign in Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a seven-minute video. Administration officials from then-attorney general John Ashcroft to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have asked us all to report any suspicious activity...

Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to -- a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant -- now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it's a false alarm, it's not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he's wrong, it'll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we're done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted...

Of course, by then it's too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim -- the person who was different in the first place -- for having the temerity to try to trick them. For some reason, governments are encouraging this kind of behavior...

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.

We need to do two things. The first is to stop urging people to report their fears. People have always come forward to tell the police when they see something genuinely suspicious, and should continue to do so. But encouraging people to raise an alarm every time they're spooked only squanders our security resources and makes no one safer.

We don't want people to never report anything. A store clerk's tip led to the unraveling of a plot to attack Fort Dix last May, and in March an alert Southern California woman foiled a kidnapping by calling the police about a suspicious man carting around a person-sized crate. But these incidents only reinforce the need to realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips...

Equally important, politicians need to stop praising and promoting the officers who get it wrong. And everyone needs to stop castigating, and prosecuting, the victims just because they embarrassed the police by their innocence.

Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun, or stray backpacks, is not evidence of doing a good job: it's evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future. We need to spend our resources on things that actually make us safer, not on chasing down and trumpeting every paranoid threat anyone can come up with.

Ad campaigns:
http://www.mta.info/mta/security/index.html
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1000/...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/...

Administration comments:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?...

Incidents:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6387857.stm
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/...
http://www.lineofduty.com/content/view/84004/128/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/...
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/826056.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/col/smith/2004/07/...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20441775/
http://www.thisisbournemouth.co.uk/...
http://alternet.org/rights/50939/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/...
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7084101?...
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/...
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/06081/674773.stm
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/...

CYA:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/...

Public campaigns:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/...
http://www.winnipegfirst.ca/article/2007/09/24/...
http://www.underwatertimes.com/print.php?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_TIPS

Law protecting tipsters:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07245/813550-37.stm

Successful tips:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/...
http://www.pe.com/localnews/publicsafety/stories/...

This essay originally appeared in Wired.com:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/...

Some links didn't make it into the original article. There's this creepy "if you see a father holding his child's hands, call the cops" campaign:
http://www.bloggernews.net/18108
There's this story of an iPod found on an airplane:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?...
There's this story of an "improvised electronics device" trying to get through airport security:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/09/...
This is a good essay on the "war on electronics."
http://www.cnet.com/surveillance-state/..."

As usual, Crypto-gram is full of gems and worth perusing in full. One victim of the UK mentality of collective panic in the wake of the 7 July bombings was a man who slipped into a diabetic coma on a bus. Police shot him twice with a Taser gun, whilst he was unconscious, because they thought he was a suicide bomber. When he came round he found himself handcuffed in the back of a police van with presumably no idea of how he'd got there. Police eventually took him to hospital when he explained he was diabetic but kept the handcuffs on whilst he was treated. When they finally accepted he was telling the truth and let him go they apparently gave him a half hearted apology claiming he looked Egyptian. Nine days later Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police who thought he was a suicide bomber.

Security through liberty

I liked Timothy Garton Ash's soundbite in the Guardian yesterday:

"What is needed is a change of paradigm: from liberty through security to security through liberty."

The most effective defense against terrorism is to be not afraid. Sadly the government
don't even say don't panic, in a corporal Jones like frenzy, they say "danger here! danger there! danger everywhere! But we'll protect you by slicing away your freedoms."

Nurse sacked over press interview

Mark Steel has a sadly unsurprising tale to tell in the Independent today, You can't go round telling people you've been sacked.

A nurse has been sacked for

• speaking to the press about 24 mental health patients being kept in 20 beds,
• for telling people, after she had been suspended, that she had been suspended
• for telling people she was innocent
• for allowing the press to print misleading statements about her case.

No you could not make it up.

You know I stood during the silence on Remembrance Day observations on Sunday and thought about the sacrifice that all those people have made for this country and others - including, only weeks ago, a young man, originally based locally, killed in Iraq, leaving behind his wife pregnant with their first child - and I asked myself if they would now consider that sacrifice worthwhile, for a country

• where mass surveillance is now routine,
• we criminalise people for reading out the names of the war dead at the Cenotaph in central London, just as the local church minister was doing on Sunday
  
• we have multitudes of fear-driven 'war-on-terror' laws and initiatives
• we operate a shoot to kill policy when there is a panic over the possibility that someone might be a terrorist, as opposed to a diabetic in a coma
  
• we pay private security firms to beat up immigrants, which it might be argued is not as bad as the US where the government pays private mercenaries to shoot innocent people
  
• we're introducing massively invasive biometric identity cards
• and huge central databases of personal data, incapable of being secured by any computer scientist anywhere in the world
• we facilitate rendition for torture
• we complain the longest detention without charge period in the Western world - 28 days - is too short
• we paint human rights legislation as an unnecessary and irritating constraint on the power of the state to "do something" about terrorism and immigration
• we fail to implement privacy legislation appropriately and still see it as an overreaching barrier to doing whatever we like with personal data
  
• shored up by the climate of fear promoted by politicians and the media, we demonise whole communities simply because of their race or religion
• the government treats privacy of personal medical data as an irritant in need of eradication
• we treat children like criminals
  
• and now nurses can get sacked for claiming they did nothing wrong

I could go on but it is way too depressing. Yet I still have to believe the sacrifice of those killed in war has to have been worth it. My younger son is really interested in the Second World War at the moment and he has concluded that war and wars "are just so stupid, dad... there were much better ways to fix those things..." My kids and their friends are a lot smarter than me and hopefully they will have the confidence, the perseverance and the strength to use those 'better ways'.

Government claim security problems with Electronic Patient Records fixed

The Government has responded to the Health Committee report on the Electronic Patient Record. It's another appalling example of how the government grinds irrationally on with the construction of white elephant information systems, in spite of all the evidence pointing towards the inevitability of the coming catastrophic failures of the system. From page 6:

"Recommendation (paragraph 121)

“Sealed envelopes” are a vital mechanism if sensitive information is to be held on the SCR. We recommend that:
• The right to break the seal protecting information in “sealed envelopes” should only be held by patients themselves, except where there is a legal requirement to override this measure; and
• Information in “sealed envelopes” should not be made available to the Secondary Uses Service under any circumstances; this will allow patients to prevent data being used for research purposes without their consent.

The Government accepts the first of these recommendations. Patient-sealed envelopes provide the mechanism whereby patients can restrict access to the parts of their SCR they consider to be particularly sensitive. Patients will be able to request that parts of their record are either ‘sealed’ or ‘sealed and locked’. These procedures form a level of access control deployed at the direction of the patient, not the NHS.

Sealed information will be recorded on the SCR and system users will be aware that some information has been sealed. However, access to the sealed information from outside of the team recording it will be obtainable only with the patient’s consent or in exceptional circumstances. Only those users with the necessary privileges will be able to gain temporary access to sealed information without the patient’s consent. A privacy officer will be alerted to the temporary access by any user and patients registered with HealthSpace will receive a notification when access permissions are changed or when temporary access is gained.

Sealed and locked information cannot be accessed outside of the team that recorded it. Users who do not have permission to access the sealed and locked information will be unaware of its presence.

The circumstances where patient-identifiable sealed and locked information may be lawfully disclosed by the clinical team that has access to it, and the circumstances where patient-identifiable information that is simply ‘sealed’ can be accessed by those outside of the team that recorded it, without the patient’s consent, are essentially the same. They are limited to circumstances where the information is required by law or where a significant public interest justification exists (for example, serious crime, child protection etc).

The Government does not accept the second of the recommendations. Patient consent to the use of anonymised or effectively pseudonymised data is not required by law and the use of such data for secondary uses, including research, is both accepted and actively promoted by the relevant professional and regulatory bodies. The Committee received strong evidence on the need for health information to be made available for research from a number of organisations. The design of the Secondary Uses Service ensures that patient confidentiality is protected."

So they reject the notion sealed envelope - confidential - medical data be kept out of the 'secondary uses service' - the database that lots of folk from civil servants to researchers have access to. The claim that "the design of the Secondary Uses Service ensures that patient confidentiality is protected" is patently false, when the data going into the secondary uses service will be neither confidential nor anonymised.

Look out for Ross Anderson's analysis which will hopefully appear at Light Blue Touchpaper soon. Ross was special adviser to the committee.

Texas evoting anomalies

BlackBoxVoting are reporting that there were some anomalies with ES&S iVotronic e-voting machines in Texas last week.

"When Wharton County, Texas citizen Jim Welch voted last Tuesday, he watched in disbelief as the voting machine changed the vote he'd entered a few moments earlier.

The machine was an ES&S iVotronic touch-screen, the same model recently subjected to a blistering Dan Rather investigative report, but what Welch witnessed does not seem explainable as a manufacturing defect or screen calibration problem like those exposed in Rather's report...

"Vote-flipping" on touch-screens has been documented before. Manufacturers claim votes show up for a different choice than that chosen by the voter sometimes, explaining that this is due to miscalibration of the computer's touch-screen...

What Welch witnessed was votes that registered CORRECTLY when he touched the screen, switching later to a different vote choice, when he was almost finished voting the full page.

Welch was stunned to see a correctly marked vote take on a life of its own, hopping over to a different spot while he voted on other items. He called an elections worker over to show him the problem. The elections worker helped him re-vote the ballot, and both men watched as the vote registered correctly, but later spontaneously altered to shift to another ballot choice...

What Welch saw was not a screen calibration problem because it registered on the screen correctly. It was not "voter error" because he literally watched the vote re-write itself to another selection, not once, but twice.

The election worker called the Wharton County elections office. Welch was astute enough to see that the suggested solution was not responsive to the real issue:

"You may continue on with this ballot if you like," said the elections worker after conferring with Wharton County elections personnel, "Or I can void this and you can start over."

This is a machine that had already demonstrated it can't be trusted. This is a machine that would fail the much-touted "Logic & Accuracy" testing purported to prove voting machines don't cheat. This is a machine that would not have passed certification tests had it performed this way for the test labs. This is a machine that has no business counting votes at all...

Jim Welch spoke with Wharton County Clerk Judy Owens about the matter, and she provided answers that were even more unrelated to the problem:

"You can go back and check your vote before casting it," she pointed out, referring to the voter's ability to page back one by one to review each panel. But if the machine can alter a vote – especially if the timing is such that this happens after you have moved to a new page – what good will that do?

"We can print each vote out," she said, but Welch astutely questioned how and when votes can be printed, They aren't printed at the same time as the voter votes, and the printouts simply re-create what the computer program records, so what good is that? "

Fox fight for fair use of 'When you wish upon a star'

Here's an interesting case, Bourne v Fox. Bourne is the sole copyright owner of the song made famous by Disney, 'When You Wish Upon a Star.' Julie Hilden explains the background at Findlaw.

"Fox's animated show "The Family Guy" is being sued for copyright violation - for the second time this year.

The plaintiff in the suit is the company that owns the rights to the song "When You Wish Upon a Star." The suit, filed October 3, alleges that the song was combined with what some have suggested were anti-Semitic lyrics. (The full lyrics can be found on page 9 of the complaint, and they refer to Jews as having "killed my Lord.")

The song, entitled "I Need a Jew" was featured in an episode called "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein." (The "Weinstein" involved is a non-famous person named "Max," though the selection of last name may well have intentionally evoked brothers Bob and Harvey, founders of Miramax, whose father was also named Max.) In the episode, the reason the singer says he "needs a Jew" is to handle his money after a financial reversal - providing some basis for claims of anti-Semitic stereotyping, at least on the character's part...

If the use of "When You Wish Upon a Star" was a commentary on the original, it was a commentary only in the very loosest possibly sense. Indeed, I believe most viewers would not deem the episode to have been "about" the song "When You Wish Upon a Star"...

That's a problem for "The Family Guy," because a parody, to be a parody, has to have an object. Moreover, it has to have the right object: If the parody's object isn't the very material that is appropriated, then there is no need to use the "recognizable sight or sound" to evoke that material. Deciding to do a parody of one particular work doesn't give you an all-purpose "license to infringe" that you can use with respect to any work you want."

Squares very nicely with threatening selected Republican presidential candidates with copyright infringement suits doesn't it.

NHS Care Record data safety fears grow

From Pulse:

"Staff from across the NHS are accessing sensitive patient-identifiable data through the controversial Secondary Uses Service, Pulse has learnt.

The revelation has sparked fresh fears over the safety of data from Summary Care Re-cords, which will be linked to the SUS when they are rolled out across England next year.

New guidance from Connecting for Health reveals three users in every organisation within the NHS have been given access to patient-identifiable information contained within Commissioning Data Sets and Payment by Results data.

The guidance admits ‘this appears to be in total contradiction to the purpose of SUS’, which was supposed to protect patient data through pseudonymisation."

Senators want Justice Department to sue P2P pirates

The latest in a long line of attempts to get the Department of Justice to pick up the entertainment industry's legal bills has been presented to the Senate. The Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007, has previously been passed by the Senate on three occasions but didn't manage to make it into law. It has been known in the past as the PIRATE act.

"A July 2002 letter from prominent politicians to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft urged the prosecution of Americans who "allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks."

But the Justice Department has been less than eager to file criminal charges against people like Jammie Thomas, who recently was found liable for $222,000 in damages in a lawsuit brought by the RIAA. Federal prosecutors have indicated that they're hesitant to target peer-to-peer pirates with criminal charges for two reasons: Imprisoning file-swapping teens on felony charges isn't the department's top priority, and it's difficult to make criminal charges stick.

The relative ease of winning civil cases compared to criminal prosecutions is one big reason why the RIAA and MPAA adore the Pirate Act, called the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act in its latest incarnation. The burden of proof is lower, and a civil defendant has far fewer rights under the law.

There are two other benefits for copyright holders. It's cheaper for copyright holders because they don't have to take the the risk of hiring expensive lawyers to sue a defendant who's judgment-proof (and can't cough up a check if found liable). And judges and juries may be more likely to side with Justice Department prosecutors, who claim they're looking out for the public interest, than law firms employed by the for-profit companies comprising the RIAA."

The FBI would also get more money to act as the entertainment industries' dedicated police force. How kind.

Update: Meanwhile the Congress folks are busy with some proposed legislation which would force colleges to police networks for copyright infringement and pay for music subscription services.

"New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

The U.S. House of Representatives bill (PDF), which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student...

According to the bill, if universities did not agree to test "technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity," all of their students--even ones who don't own a computer--would lose federal financial aid.

The prospect of losing a combined total of nearly $100 billion a year in federal financial aid, coupled with the possibility of overzealous copyright-bots limiting the sharing of legitimate content, has alarmed university officials."

2 students face 20 years in jail for hacking to change grades

Two California students are reportedly potentially facing a 20-year jail term for hacking into their university's system to change their grades.

On being in bed with Google - in defence of the Google library project

The Google library project has come in for some criticism in relation to the restrictions (and non-disclosure agreements) Google placed on the libraries taking part. Paul Courant Library chief at the University of Michigan, which is involved in the Google library project, says the critics have got it wrong.

"One of the things that surprises me most about reactions to the Google Library Project is that smart people whom I respect seem to think that the only reason that a university library would be involved with Google is because, in some combination, its leadership is stupid, evil, or at best intellectually lazy. To the contrary, although I may be proved wrong, I believe that the University of Michigan (and the other partner libraries) and Google are changing the world for the better. Four years from now, all seven million volumes in the University of Michigan Libraries will have been digitized – the largest such library digitization project in history. Google Book Search and our own MBooks collection already provide full-text access to well over a hundred thousand public domain works, and make it possible to search for keywords and phrases within hundreds of thousands more in-copyright materials. This access is altering the way that we do research. At least as important, the project is itself an experiment in the provision and use of digitized print collections in large research libraries. I do not see how we can discover the best ways to use such collections without experiments at this scale. In sum, I believe that our library is doing exactly what it should do in the best interests of scholarship and our users, now and in the future.

So I’m puzzled when people ask, “How could serious libraries be doing this? How could they abdicate their responsibilities as custodians of the world’s knowledge by offering their collections up as a sacrifice on the altar of corporate power? Why don’t they join the virtuous ranks of the Open Content Alliance partners, who pay thousands of dollars to digitize books at a rate of tens of thousands of volumes a year?” It seems like those who ask such questions have little appreciation of what Michigan and the other Google partners are actually up to.

Google is on pace to scan over 7 million volumes from U-M libraries in six years at no cost to the University. As part of our arrangement with Google, they give us copies of all the digital files, and we can keep them forever. Our only financial outlay is for storage and the cost of providing library services to our users. Anyone who searches U-M’s library catalog, Mirlyn, can access the scanned files via our MBooks interface. That’s right, anyone. (Copyright law constrains what we can display in full text, and what we can offer only for searching, but we share as much as we can consistent with prudent interpretations of the law.) For an example of an MBook, take a look at The Acquisitive Society by R. H. Tawney.

In a recent New York Times article about mass digitization projects, Brewster Kahle was quoted as saying: “Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity.”

I agree with him. I’m an economist with a particular interest in public goods, which is how I came to be involved with libraries in the first place. Libraries have a long and honorable history of preserving information and making it accessible. Moreover, even at their best, for-profit institutions cannot be expected to serve general public interests when those interests run counter to those of their shareholders. So I would be distressed if a single corporation controlled access to the collections of the great academic libraries, just as I find it troubling, on a smaller scale, that a handful of publishers control access to much of the current scientific literature.

But Google has no such control. After Google scans a book, they return the book to the library (like any other user), and they give us a copy of the digital file. Google is not the only entity controlling access to the collection – the University of Michigan and other partner libraries control access as well. Except we don’t think of it as controlling access so much as providing it."

Siva Vaidhyanathan has a response, which also includes a follow up response from Courant in the comments. Vaidhyanathan says:

"Sadly, Paul does not actually address the real-world consequences of the Google project:

• He dismisses serious search problems as temporary, yet fails to confront the problem that Google cannot and will not explain the factors and standards that put one book above another in search results.

• As users discover poorly-scanned files on the Google index, how can they alert Google to the problem? Why does nothing in the contract between Michigan and Google include quality-control standards or methods?

• How do we know this index will last for decades? What image file system is Google using and what ensures its preservation?

• How is the "library copy," that electronic file that Michigan and others receive as payment for allowing Google to exploit their treasures, NOT an audacious infringement of copyright? It violates both the copyright holder's right to copy and right to distribute. Doesn't a university library have an obligation to explain this?

• What about user confidentiality? Why have university failed to make a stand on this issue?

I look forward to responses from Paul and others. I have been waiting two years for them, of course. And all I get is the silence created by non-disclosure agreements.

BTW, should public university librarians be signing non-disclosure agreements about their core services?"

Courant is again robust in responding and it is good to see the debate getting a public airing. Thanks to Peter Suber for the link.

Give us the data and forget the shiny interface

Rufus Pollock has a crucially important point to make about data projects i.e. forget the shiny interface as it mainly gets in the way.

"One thing I find remarkable about many data projects is how much effort goes into developing a shiny front-end for the material. Now I’m not knocking shiny front-ends, they’re important for providing a way for many users to get at the material (and very useful for demonstrating to funders where all the money went). But shiny front ends (SFEs from now on) do have various drawbacks:

• They often take over completely and start acting as a restriction on the way you can get data out of the system. (A classic example of this is the Millenium Development Goals website which has lots of shiny ajax which actually make it really hard to grab all of the data out of the system — please, please just give me a plain old csv file and a plain old url).
• Even if the SFE doesn’t actually get in the way, they do take money away from the central job of getting the data out there in a simple form, and …
• They tend to date rapidly. Think what a website designed five years ago looks like today (hello css). Then think about what will happen to that nifty ajax+css work you’ve just done. By contrast ascii text, csv files and plain old sql dumps (at least if done with some respect for the ascii standard) don’t date — they remain forever in style.
• They reflect an interface centric, rather than data centric, point of view. This is wrong. Many interfaces can be written to that data (and not just a web one) and it is likely (if not certain) that a better interface will be written by someone else (albeit perhaps with some delay). Furthermore the data can be used for many other purposes than read-only access. To summarize: The data is primary, the interface secondary.
• Taking this issue further, for many projects, because the interface is taken as primary, the data does not get released until the interface has been developed. This can cause significant delay in getting access to that data.

When such points are made people often reply: “But you don’t want the data raw, in all its complexity. We need to clean it up and present it for you.” To which we should reply:

“No, we want the data raw, and we want the data now”"

I couldn't agree more, particularly in the context of open access content projects, and this message should be embedded in the dna of the folks who run or facilitate such projects.

Benkler interview

Kottke has an excellent interview with Yochai Benkler.

"JT: I first learned about your book over at the Crooked Timber blog—and thought the discussion of your book there was of exceptionally high quality. Moreover, your book has been far more often mentioned than reviewed in the press. Which poses a kind of serial question: When traditional journalists (I'm thinking specifically of Richard Schickel's rant in the L.A. Times this summer) bemoan the rise of blog culture, do they know what they're talking about? Have they looked? From your side: How did the Crooked Timber—or other blog receptions—compare to traditional media receptions?

YB: I thought the discussion on Crooked Timber was in fact excellent, as good a discussion as you would get in a thoughtful seminar, whether academic or whenever you get a collection of thoughtful people in a book club. There should be nothing surprising about this, any more than there should be anything surprising about there being blogs that are utter nonsense.

The critical shift represented by the networked information economy is that on the order of a billion people on the planet have the physical capacity to produce and communicate information, knowledge, and culture. This means, in the case of writing, millions or tens of millions of people, rather than a few thousand, get to write in ways that are publicly visible. Of necessity, there will be a wide range.

The probability that any newspaper, however well-heeled, will be able to put together the kind of legal analytic brainpower that my friend Jack Balkin has put together on his blog, Balkinization, is zero. They can't afford it. On the other hand, even the Weekly World News is tame and mainstream by comparison to the quirkiness or plain stupidity some people can exhibit. The range is simply larger. That's what it means to have a truly diverse public sphere.

If you want to find evidence of nonsense, as of course it is important to people whose sense of self-worth depends on the special role traditional mass media play in the public sphere, you will easily find it. If you want to find the opposite, that too is simple. What's left is to wait and see over time whether one overwhelms the other. As I wrote in the book, I do not think we are intellectual lemmings. I don't think we jump over the abyss of drivel, but rather that in this environment of plenty we learn to develop our own sense of which is which, and where to find what. Perfect information about all the good things, we won't have. But we don't have it now either. Instead we have new patterns of linking, filtering, recommendation, that allow us to do reasonably well in navigating a much more diverse and interesting information environment than mass media was able to deliver...

JT: The Wealth of Networks was described, I believe it was by Time magazine, as "utopian." I didn't see it that way, but rather as a book that was as full of sense as it was of hope. But it was a contingent hope: one based on things like 'Net neutrality, gift economies, open access to information, and so on. Can you leave us with your most hard-headed vision of the hope contained in—and possibly sustained by—The Wealth of Networks?

YB: I agree that The Wealth of Networks is not utopian. I think realistically we can see a large improvement in the number of people who can effectively participate in the production of information, knowledge, and culture. I think more people are creating media; more people have access to a community or site where they can speak their minds. More does not mean everyone. Disparities in access and skill continue. But there are many more, and more diversely motivated and organized voices and creative talents participating than was feasible ten years ago, much less 30 years ago.

I think there are certain well-defined threats to this model. If we end up with a proprietary communications platform, such as the one that the FCC's spectrum and broadband policies are aiming to achieve; and on that platform we will have proprietary, closed platforms like the iPhone, then much of the promise of the networked environment will be lost.

When the FCC and Congress had an opportunity to make parts of the 700MHz band an open spectrum, to which any device manufacturer could have built devices that would have created user-owned networks, on the model of WiFi but more powerful, they failed in imagination and wisdom. When they were presented by Google with a much thinner, but at least well-reasoned and positive, alternative, to make the 700MHz auction at least require purchasers to resell to anyone who wanted wholesale carriage, so that at least there could be competition, they balked at that too.

We now also see the rising tide of fear leading to a resurgence of "trusted systems"—systems that assume that the owners of computers are either incompetent or malevolent, so the machine has to be "trusted" against its owner. This too can undermine the openness, innovation, and expressive freedom of the networked environment. The threats are many. Some of them come from intentional efforts to hobble the 'Net in order to preserve incumbent business models. The interventions of the telecomms and the strong copyright lobbies fall into these categories. Some come from simple lack of appreciation for the central role that open, radically decentralized platforms are playing, and it is not necessarily a regulatory mistake as a business mistake.

I am still optimistic. It does seem that people have been opting for open systems when they have been available, and that has provided a strong market push against the efforts to close down the 'Net. Social practices, more prominently the widespread adoption of participation in peer production, social sites, and DIY media, are the strongest source of pushback. As people practice these freedoms, one hopes that they will continue to support them, politically, but most powerfully perhaps, with their buying power and the power to divert their attention to open platforms rather than closed. This, the fact that decentralized action innovates more quickly, and that people seem to crave the freedom and creativity that it gives them, is the most important force working in favor of our capturing and extending the value of an open network."

Read the whole thing, though. It's worth the effort, even if you have to go through it a few times to get it. I loved the line, "The probability that any newspaper, however well-heeled, will be able to put together the kind of legal analytic brainpower that my friend Jack Balkin has put together on his blog, Balkinization, is zero." And hope to repeat/plagiarise/paraphrase it relentlessly.

Waterboarding through the ages

Marty Lederman has gathered a series of links on the history of waterboarding.

"Who could have imagined this history lesson would ever again be necessary? Or that photographs of the Vice President and Attorney General of the United States will one day appear in such histories?

NPR

Evan Wallach

Malcolm Nance

Wikipedia

And, thanks to the Harvard Anti-Torture Coalition, here are further accounts of waterboarding during Brazil's military dictatorship, and upon a slave in antebellum Georgia."

Apparently a DOJ lawyer, Daniel Levin, was so concerned about the administration's approach to waterboarding torture in 2004 that he asked to be subjected to it himself. After the experience, not surprisingly he concluded it was torture. Then Alberto Gonzales was made attorney general and didn't like this view, leaned on him to write a memo saying it wasn't torture, then fired him. Lederman says:

"it's hard to resist the simple conclusion that Gonzales and others were engaged, not only in an effort to completely distort the proper functioning of OLC (see generally Jack Goldsmith's book), but also in a conspiracy to violate the Torture Act. When responsible, thoughtful lawyers -- loyal conservative, Republican lawyers, mind you --- told them that what they had approved was unlawful, they insisted that the lawyers change their advice, and then got rid of the lawyers and hired another willing to provide alternative advice that no one could have sincerely believed (and then rewarded the lawyer who was willing to sign his name to that advice).

I'm trying to avoid hyperbole, honest. But how is this not a huge scandal?"

New AG "wrong on torture" but still voted in

Glenn Greenwald is very eloquent on the confirmation by the US Senate of Michael Mukasey as the new US attorney general.

"four Senate Democrats running for President missed the vote, and all four had announced they oppose Mukasey's confirmation. Thus, at least 44 Senators claimed to oppose Mukasey's confirmation -- more than enough to prevent it via filibuster. So why didn't they filibuster, the way Senate Republicans have on virtually every measure this year which they wanted to defeat?

Numerous Senate Democrats delivered dramatic speeches from the floor as to why Mukasey's confirmation would be so devastating to the country. The Washington Post said the "vote came after more than four hours of impassioned floor debate."

"Torture should not be what America stands for . . . I do not vote to allow torture," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy. Russ Feingold said: "we need an attorney general who will tell the president that he cannot ignore the laws passed by Congress. And on that fundamental qualification for this office Judge Mukasey falls short." Feingold added: "If Judge Mukasey won't say the simple truth -- that this barbaric practice is torture -- how can we count on him to stand up to the White House on other issues?"

Wow -- it sounds as though there was really a lot at stake in this vote. So why would 44 Democratic Senators make a flamboyant showing of opposing confirmation without actually doing what they could to prevent it? Is it that a filibuster was not possible because a large number of these Democratic Senators were willing to symbolically oppose confirmation so they could say they did -- by casting meaningless votes in opposition knowing that confirmation was guaranteed -- but were unwilling to demonstrate the sincerity of their claimed beliefs by acting on them?

[...]

[The most amazing quote was from chief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer, who, before voting for him, said that Mukasey is "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . " Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. "

Safeguarding the legacy of a crook

From the LA Times,

"When it comes to protecting the memory of his great-uncle, Jeffrey Scalf sees himself as a lone sentinel.

Admittedly, it's not easy to defend the name of John H. Dillinger, a man once referred to as Public Enemy No. 1.

"For good or ill, this is my family's legacy and no one is going to take that away from me," says Scalf, 50, who readily admits his childhood fascination with the infamous outlaw has become a crusade.

He says he has been ripped off by the author and publisher of a Dillinger biography, who refused to pay him licensing fees. He feels burned by restaurateurs who use the 1930s bank robber's name to hawk burgers and beer, and cheated by a California video-game company that used Dillinger's digital likeness in a game about gangsters.

And don't even get Scalf started on civic leaders and festival organizers who stage public events using the notorious thief's name and exploits -- but won't pay him to use the name. It's highway robbery, he says."

So descendants of criminals should be allowed to profit from their ancestors' notoriety. I'd have thought that this would be a chance for the EFF to point the Republican right wingers at some IP sillyness and set them off. Thanks to Justine Levine at Against Monopoly for the link.

Economics Nobel prize winner says weak IP better for the Web

One of this year's winners of the Nobel prize for economics, Eric Maskin, wrote a paper a few years ago suggesting the conventional wisdom, that the only way for IP owners to protect themselves from the web was through tougher IP laws, was probably wrong. Maskin and James Besson (thanks to Besson for the pointer) developed an economic model which suggested that since the Web operated like a highly interative and dynamic community, "individual publishers and society more generally may benefit from weak intellectual property enforcement in such an environment."

They also suggest that the idea that tighter IP always increases incentives for innovation is based on a limited economic model which just does not apply to dynamic environments. The conventional model however is based on the single creative genius, the romantic author who produces works out of nothing. Yet all creativity and innovation relies on other people's outputs i.e. it is a collective enterprise and even geniuses who make amazing creative leaps, as Newton said, see farther only through standing on the shoulders of giants.

Maskin and Besson conclude by saying that "publishers will do best by recognising and encouraging the complementary contributions of others."

The paper is well worth a read - very accessible and the substantive part is only a little over 6 pages long. (They have a nice accessible version of the OLGA guitar chords site story too).

Is Real ID plan on its deathbed?

Meanwhile on the US 'Real ID' card front, CNet News reported last week that:

"The U.S. government's controversial plan to outfit all Americans with uniform electronic identification cards--officially known as Real ID--may be on its deathbed, opponents of the program charged this week.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has long said that starting as soon as May 2008, and definitely after May 2013, it will deny state citizens the right to board planes or enter federal buildings unless they show Real ID-compliant documents.

But on a recent conference call with state officials from across the country, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Richard Barth gave the impression that the agency doesn't plan to punish states that have rejected the rules, according to Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, and Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap. Barth also reportedly said Homeland Security may push back the deadline until 2015.

"To me, this signals the real end of the Real ID Act because it prevents the government from having any leverage over the states," Sparapani said in a conference call his group organized with reporters Thursday afternoon.

Homeland Security, for its part, vehemently denied any softening of its policy."

ID Card Scheme Cost Report

In accordance with section 37 of the ID card act, the ID and passport office presented a report to parliament on the costs of the scheme on the same day as the IPCC report into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes was published.

It's not very enlightening on costs but makes the same tired old false claims about ID cards preventing identity theft, curing immigration and terrorism and all the while simultaneously delivering better government services into the bargin. What a magic system! In various sections there is a get-out clause referring to the uncertainties in estimating costs for such a scheme, which the government will be able to refer back to when the thing goes massively over budget. On page 12 for example:

"There is a significant probability that the estimates will change in the light of further experience."

Groklaw interview Becky Hogge

Groklaw has a good interview with Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group on the subject of the BBC and DRM.

"The BBC is something which the British public are very proud of and very proud to support. And I think that's the basis from where everything that the Open Rights Group does. I mean, the BBC has supported in the past the spread of new technology around the UK. Arguably, the reason the UK has such a vibrant games market, games industry here in the UK is because many of the people now programming games were brought up using the BBC Micros systems they distributed back when I was growing up.

And what we want to find here is a solution for the BBC to continue innovating, both in content-making and in the way that it uses technology. And DRM is just a black hole that the BBC is going to get lost in.

If you listen to some of the Future Media and Technology team -- I'm referring again to this podcast that Ashley Highfield did for BBC Backstage -- he talks about a future technology where content can have "wrappers" which know where you're watching content, who's watching it, you know? In his sense, he wants content to behave intelligently using technology. But without buy-in from the entire value chain of video on the Internet, video online, that is just going to be another more complex and more invasive DRM system. We want the BBC to start stepping away from DRM and to look at some of the rights models that are going to allow it to release the content that the license fee payer funds for the license fee payer, without being crippled by DRM."

The 10 principles of economics explained

I liked this:

An immutable audit log

From Jeff Jonas:

"An immutable audit log is a tamper-resistant recording of how a system has been used – everything from when data arrives, changes, departs, to how users interacted with the system. Each event is recorded in an indelible manner - even the database administrator with the highest level of system privileges cannot alter the past … kinda like the paper tape on an adding machine tape, etched in stone … only more high-tech.

I think (and hope) tamper-resistant audits will become common place in settings ranging from health care patient records to government surveillance systems. The primary value being twofold:

a) Accountability. Enable policy folks charged with oversight and accountability to validate that a computer system has been used within policy and law: and,

b) Deterrence. The "chilling effect" caused by the knowledge that a tamper resistant audit log is in place – deterring a corrupt person or two from bad behavior.

Now what? What if no one wants to pay for one? Will tamper resistant audit logs need to be built-in to commercial off-the-shelf systems to reach the market? If so, will organizations actually pay for the additional disk space and processing requirements to turn such a log on? Or, will they simply turn the feature off?

This is important technology and one that really needs to see the light of day, especially in conjunction with non-transparent government systems."

Absolutely!

Lessig on the Fox v presidential candidates copyright disputes

Larry Lessig has something to say about Fox's copyright threats directed at selected (not Giuliani) Republican presidential candidates.

"When in April we launched the campaign to get the candidates and political parties to require that any network televising a presidential debate do so freely, a friend wrote, "Oh come on. Do you really think a network is going to threaten a presidential candidate over a copyright claim?" I did, though I confess I thought it was more likely a network would be the cat's paw for another candidate. The Fox network has now proven me wrong.

As reported at TPM, some in the coalition who originally made the call on the RNC and DNC to insist upon free debates are now pushing FOX to stop its copyright threats on McCain and others. Again, I had wished Senator Clinton (AWOL on this issue) would have made the call. She remains, sadly, AWOL."

Not a surprise since earlier in the year Lessig and a bunch of like-minded others called on the chairs of both main parties not to let copyright stifle public debate in the election hustings.

Larry's reaction when he first heard of Fox threats against Senator McCain is worth reading and I hope he doesn't mind me posting it here in full:

"As reported over the weekend, Fox has told John McCain to "cease and desist use of a clip from the last debate that has the Fox logo on it." Here's the clip:



McCain, to his credit, has become a freedom fighter. His campaign has refused to comply with the Fox demand But as I'm sure Fox's lawyers are telling Fox management, the romance surrounding "fair use" notwithstanding, Fox has a pretty good argument. There's no clear authority supporting the idea that taking just a bit of a television clip is "fair use"; the use here is certainly not commenting upon Fox. Senator McCain's "right" (in scare quotes because, as the extremists will lecture, fair use is a defense, not a right) to use the clip as he has is arguable at best. Under the law as it has been articulated by the highest courts, there's no guarantee the Senator's campaign would prevail.

Which is precisely why the demand we made in April was not that the RNC and DNC fund a bunch of fair use lawyers to help us litigate the "rights" of candidates and citizens to use and transform presidential debates. It was that candidates and the parties demand that any network granted the privilege of broadcasting a presidential debate do so freely -- meaning free not in the sense of free beer (they do that already), but free in the sense of free speech: free so that others can take and build upon the speech uttered in these events, freely.

Some networks whined loudly at the time. "It cost us millions," I was told by one network executive "to run a presidential debate. We need this control to make back our costs." Maybe, though I doubt Fox is launching its legal campaign against McCain to increase its revenues.

But the more fundamental point is this: As the networks who have promised to (effectively) deliver free presidential debates have shown (CNN, NBC, ABC), even when free, it is still worth it enough to at least some. And in a world with YouTubes and p2p technologies, some networks are plainly enough. If Fox demands control, presidential debates don't need Fox.

It is time that the presidential candidates from both parties stand with Senator McCain and defend his right to use this clip to advance his presidential campaign. Not because it is "fair use" (whether or not it is), but because presidential debates are precisely the sort of things that ought to be free of the insanely complex regulation of speech we call copyright law.

Indeed, as the target of the attack, and as one who has been totally AWOL on this issue from the start, it would be most appropriate if this demand were to begin with Senator Clinton. Let her defend her colleague's right to criticize her, by demanding that her party at least condition any presidential debate upon the freedom of candidates and citizens to speak."

Prince attempts to crack down on his own fan sites

Prince has decided to send his lawyers after the people who run his unauthorized non-commercial fansites.

"In an extraordinary, but not unfamiliar move, the rock legend Prince is using an army of lawyers to launch attacks on his own fans. Several of the largest web communities dedicated to the artist have received notices to cease and desist all use of photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to Prince's likeness. It is our belief that these threats are not made in an attempt to enforce valid copyright as Prince alleges in his threats, rather we believe they are attempts to stifle all critical commentary about Prince. We strongly believe that such actions are in violation of the freedom of speech and should not be allowed. Prince claims that fansites are not allowed to present any artwork with Prince's likeness, to the extreme that he has demanded removal of fan's own photographs of their Prince inspired tattoos and their vehicles displaying Prince inspired license plates. Prince's representatives have requested that the fansites provide them with "substantive details of the means by which you [the fansites] propose to compensate our clients [Paisley Park Enterprises, NPG Records and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG)] for damages..."

The owners of the three largest fansites supporting Prince: www.housequake.com, www.princefams.com and www.prince.org supporting Prince have come together to fight back to what amounts to an injustice to the fansites and the very fans who have supported Prince's career, many since the very beginning nearly thirty years ago."

You can see the cease and desist letters here. The fans are looking for a lawyer to represent them pro bono.

Open publishing - The opposite of open is DRM

Thanks to Kevin Marks via ORG for the reminder of Suw Charman's post earlier in the year on Open publishing - The opposite of open is DRM

"For many publishers, the thought of publishing books under a Creative Commons licence is anathema, but yet they don't want to pass up on the opportunity to distribute their material digitally online. Instead of experimenting with open publishing, they try to find a middle way and frequently they think that middle way is to use DRM to lock up their ebooks and audiobooks.

As you can tell from my tone, I'm none too keen on DRM. It's something I've done a lot of work on with the Open Rights Group, where I was until recently Executive Director. Rather than rehash all the arguments here as to why I believe DRM is bad, I'm going to give you a nice list of links:

• Cory Doctorow's Microsoft Research DRM talk (also as a text file with links to other versions)
• Cory Doctorow's Hewlett Packard Research DRM talk
• The Open Rights Group wiki page on the Government's DRM public inquiry with lots and lots of links to evidence submitted by various other groups on both side of the debate. Obviously, I'd suggest reading ORG's submission
• My write up of the Government's DRM public inquiry hearing, pay particular attention to the submission from the RNIB/Share the Vision (no. 4) and Audible/SNOCAP (no. 7)
• Notes from the Guardian's Changing Media 2006 conference DRM session with Dr Ian Brown

The problem with DRM is that it's a fundamentally flawed technology which erodes our rights and favours contract law over copyright law. It prevents users exercising their fair dealing rights (called fair use in the US), restricts access to those with disabilities, and does nothing to benefit the consumer."

Proposed German telecoms data retention law and freedom of the the press

Also via EDRI-gram, Spielel Online International reports concerns that a proposed new German telecoms data retention law would underine the freedom of the press.

"It may soon no longer be a good idea to tell a journalist something confidential over the phone in Germany. It would also perhaps be prudent to avoid sending e-mails, faxes or text messages. In the future, sources might be better off furtively intercepting reporters on their way home, writing letters, or sending smoke signals.

As of Jan. 1, 2008, this kind of cautious behavior may be advisable -- that is if the German parliament, the Bundestag, approves a bill next week that would effectively remove all protection of journalists' sources when it comes to telecom and Internet communications...

At issue here is a fairly unwieldy piece of draft legislation, namely an amendment to Germany's law on telecommunications surveillance. The government proposal submitted by Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries calls for telecom providers to retain all communications data from their customers, all landline and mobile calls, faxes, text messages and e-mails. This would mean that all electronic communications in Germany would be recorded, whether the parties concerned are under investigation or not.

Germany's surveillance mania concerns everyone in the country, but when it comes to journalists it concerns the way they do their job. Data protection advocates call mandatory data retention an excessive and constitutionally dubious measure. Critics say that it would violate the principle of communications secrecy and the right to privacy in the information age."

The article is a decent general introduction to data retention in the EU, how the directive was passed last year with a typical piece of political game-playing to avoid procedures that would have blocked it, and the implications at member state level. It mentions that Ireland is challenging the directive through the European courts though fails to mention that that is because the Irish govenrment wants longer data retention than that mandated by the directive. And the German justice minister thinks she's being badly mistreated in the press because it's not her fault that Germany has to implement an EU directive... do the words 'laundering' and 'policy' come to mind, not necessarily in that order? (In fairness the Germans, as I recall, did make a superficial show of opposing the directive but they could easily have killed it if they really wanted to. The fact that they didn't actually do so speaks volumes)

Security in online social networks

Under Edri-gram's recommended reading comes the European Network and Information Security Agency's position paper number 1, "Security Issues and Recommendations for Online Social Networks"

Judge forces telcos to retain data in NSA spy case

From Ars Technica:

"In a victory for the EFF, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled today that AT&T, Verizon, Cingular (now part of AT&T), Sprint, and BellSouth (also part of AT&T now) must all maintain any data or papers related to the NSA spying case that Walker is overseeing in California. The EFF had requested the ruling out of concern that documents would be destroyed as part of routine data deletion practices before the case could even progress to discovery.

The move was opposed not only by the telcos but also by the federal government, which has repeatedly pursued the claim that the case involves "state secrets" and should not proceed."

Feds Fight Ruling on Security Letters

Also via Michael Geist: Feds Fight Ruling on Security Letters

"The U.S. government on Monday appealed a ruling that the government shouldn't be able to get personal phone, e-mail and financial records without a judge's approval.

The USA Patriot Act prevents Internet service providers from telling their customers — here or abroad, citizens or not — if the government has demanded private information from them.

The government's decision to appeal the September ruling by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to put out a release quoting the unidentified plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Identified only as the president of a small Internet service provider who has faced a gag order for more than three years, the plaintiff complained that the statutes in the act "give the government far too much power and that the secrecy surrounding the statutes is excessive.""

Geist: the Net on cable turning into the Net as cable

Michael Geist: How the Internet On Cable Became the Internet as Cable

P2P for ID theft

Also from Findlaw (via AP):

"A man charged with using online file-sharing programs such as LimeWire to commit identity theft pleaded guilty Monday in federal court.

Gregory Kopiloff, 35, pleaded guilty to mail fraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Click here to find out more!

He acknowledged using file-sharing programs to invade the computers of victims nationwide to get access to their personal information in tax returns, credit reports, bank statements and student financial aid applications. He then used that information to open credit lines and shop online."

Second life legal disputes hit the real world

From Eric Sinrod at Findlaw: Virtual Legal Chickens Come Home To Roost In Real Courts, commentary on how Second Life disputes are increasingly finding their way into real world courtrooms.

Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net

From the NYT: Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net

London mayor vote uses 'fiasco' e-system

Via Glyn at ORG: London mayor vote uses 'fiasco' e-system

"With missing votes and massively delayed results, the electronic count during the Breckland elections this year was hardly an unbridled success.

But just months after the election fiasco - which saw the council abandon the unreliable “e-count” in favour of a traditional manual one - it has been announced that the same system will be used in the London mayoral and assembly elections next year."

EU want data on US passengers

In a reversal of the long standing trend, from CAPPS to Secure Flight, the EU has now decided to collect personal data on US airline passengers.

"American travelers' personal data would for the first time be exported to all European Union states by airline carriers flying to Europe under a proposal to be announced this week.

The data, including names, telephone numbers, credit card information and travel itinerary, would be sent to E.U. member states so they could assess passenger risk for counterterrorism purposes, according to a draft copy obtained by The Washington Post. The European Commission proposal would allow the data to be kept for 13 years or longer if used in criminal investigations and intelligence operations. It would cover all passengers flying into and out of Europe, not just Americans."

Free/libre knowledge resources

I had the pleasure of meeting Kim Tucker at the OpenLearn conference last week. Kim has long campaigned on the concept of free/libre knowledge as the most effective way to bridge the knowledge divide. I highly recommend his essay,'Say "Libre" for Knowledge and Learning Resources', something of a manifesto calling for widespread freedom of access to information and knowledge.

"

Abstract

In response to discussions among members of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement about whether to describe learning resources as "free", "libre" or "open", this essay clarifies the position of the "libre" camp and outlines the rationale for referring to knowledge and learning resources as "libre" or "free" rather than "open". We start by building on a decade of debate and experience in the world of free/libre and open source software. Substantial sections of Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software and other essays of opinion Richard Stallman have been copied and adapted with permission. We generalise from free software to free knowledge, and indicate the importance of the semantics in building community and shaping the future - towards a broad vision for a libre knowledge society.

Introduction

When we call a knowledge resource “libre”, or "free", we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to use the work for any purpose, to study its mechanisms to be able to modify and adapt it to their own needs, to make and distribute copies in whole or in part, and to enhance or extend the work and share the results freely. Free knowledge requires use of free software to access and manipulate the resources which should be stored in free file formats. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as more and more of our culture and life activities are digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, words, other digital resources and electronic social interactions, free software and libre knowledge resources become increasingly equated with freedom in general.

Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software and libre knowledge resources; schools in regions of India, Spain and southern Africa now teach learners to use the free GNU/Linux operating system, and share free knowledge resources such as Wikipedia for Schools and GCompris, while implicitly free knowledge policies are becoming common in prominent OER, Open Access and other educational initiatives (e.g. PLoS, WikiEducator, WikiVersity, Connexions, Le Mill, Kewl, etc.).

In the case of software, most users seldom think about the ethical reasons for which these systems and communities have been built, because today the systems and communities are more often referred to as “open", rather than "free" or "libre", and are attributed to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.

Within the open knowledge and education communities, attention tends to be more on the authors' copyright and ownership of resources than the learners' freedom to use them and to engage with the community. This detracts from the intent of most of these initiatives, and leaves them open to threats which could severely undermine the entire movement.

The primary plea of this article is for the "open" initiatives to assess their degree of alignment with the vision for libre knowledge expressed here, and to consider adjusting their terminology to match.

Vision

Education and life-long learning are about sharing and generating knowledge. The libre knowledge vision has been expressed as follows:

Knowledge for all, freedom to learn, towards collective wisdom enabling people to empower themselves with knowledge and to share it for community benefit

When knowledge is shared electronically, the freedom to use, modify (localise), enhance, mix and share, is essential for effective knowledge transfer. Localisation is almost always required.

If you feel some resonance with this vision, and an affinity with the associated culture of cooperation and sharing, then please read on, as it is under threat. A collaborative effort is required to ensure such a free Internet culture."

Used evoting machine sales

I liked this:



Thanks to Kommer Kleijn via the European e-voting list for the pointer.

NPfIT went ahead after Prime Minister had 10-minute briefing

Computer Weekly reported last week that the multi-billion pound NHS IT programme was approved by the then prime minsiter, Tony Blair, after a 10 minute briefing

"A former Whitehall official has revealed that he and his colleagues were given 10 minutes to make the case to the Prime Minister over what became the world’s biggest civil IT-based modernisation programme.

The disclosure was made by Sir John Pattison who was headquarters director of research and e-champion at the Department of Health. He was speaking on BBC Radio 4’s “Wiring the NHS” documentary on the £12.4bn National Programme for IT [NPfIT], to which Computer Weekly contributed...

After the 10-minute presentation to Tony Blair, Sir John Pattison was asked to produce an outline implementation plan. And he was given three months to produce a document that laid down the standards, "or such standards and specifications and governance issues" as was possible at that time."

Given the nature of the decision making processes in the Blair government, this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It should be a concern, however, as I say in my book, that decisions about the creation and deployment of massive, society-changing, information systems infrastructures are made on the whim of a small number of people with no understanding of the technologies involved or the clear purposes (political expediency, generating headlines and dreams of going down in history excluded) for which they are being constructed.

C.P. Snow said, in 1960, "Some of the most important choices about a nation's physical health are made... by men who normally are not able to comprehend the arguments in depth." So the process is not unique to the Blair/Brown government. Nu Labour has, however, refined it to the level of a fine art, driven always by the obsession to be seen to be doing big things in reaction to today's and in order to capture tomorrow's headlines.

State AG blocks RIAA bandwagon

For the first time, it seems, a state Attorney General has stepped in front of the RIAA lawsuit bandwagon and said no, they are not entitled to the identities of students suspected of music file sharing just because they want to know them.

"In Arista v. Does 1-17, a new ex parte case to get discovery from the University of Oregon about the identities of its students, the Oregon Department of Justice has made a motion, on behalf of the University of Oregon, to quash the subpoena obtained by the RIAA.

This is the first such motion of which we are aware that has been made by the university itself, rather than by the students.

It is also the first instance of which we are aware of a State Attorney General bringing a motion to quash an RIAA subpoena.

The motion papers of the Attorney General argue that it is impossible to identify the alleged infringers from the information the RIAA has presented"

Fox News target another presidential candidate for copyright infringement

Mitt Romey's presidential campaign is like the McCain camp getting involved in a copyright dispute with Fox News. Wouldn't it be fun to see this one go to court.

Attorney Licensed Patents To Be Used Against His Own Firm's Clients

From TechDirt: Patent Troll Attorney Licensed Patents To Be Used Against His Own Firm's Clients

Why a rights Robocop will never work

Cory on why a rights robcop will never work.

"It's all the rage these days: crackpot proposals to automatically police the internet for copyright violations, stopping them even before they occur.

From YouTube's promise to find and stamp out copyright infringing uploads to the counterproposal from the motion picture studios and Microsoft to find and stamp out infringing uploads, everyone is getting in on the act.

The problem is, it's all lies, wishful thinking and irresponsible promises.

Look at it this way: for this system to work, you'd have to write a piece of software that had a thorough understanding of "all the copyrighted works" (keep in mind that every creative work is copyrighted from the instant it's created), and it would have to be able to spot every transformation, re-encoding, downsampling, and re-edit of those works in order to stem the tide...

It would also have to be nearly perfect in regards to false positives - every time it misidentified a home movie of your kids' first steps or your gran's 85th birthday as Police Academy 29 or Star Wars: Episode 0, Jedi Teen Academy, your own right to use the Internet to communicate with your friends and family would be compromised - likewise unacceptable.

Even worse: what happens when your video of a corrupt politician rigging an election is flagged as an infringement, and by the time the mess is sorted out, the election is already over?

And no matter what, it would be an incredible invasion of privacy...

Remaking the internet to invade privacy and silence our conversations is a crummy idea, but even worse is the fact that it won't actually stop or even slow infringement. But for so long as there are technology companies with magic beans to sell - and desperate, ageing entertainment execs willing to buy them - we'll have to keep fighting."

Rowling sues to block book version of Harry Potter fan site

From AP via Findlaw:

"Author J.K. Rowling and the maker of the "Harry Potter" films are suing a small publisher in the United States over its plans to release a book version of a popular Web site dedicated to the boy wizard.

The suit, filed Wednesday by the author and Warner Bros. in federal court in Manhattan, claims that RDR Books of Michigan will infringe on Rowling's intellectual property rights if it goes ahead with its plan to publish the 400-page "Harry Potter Lexicon" on Nov. 28.

According to the publisher, the book contains much of the same material already found on http://www.hp-lexicon.org, a fan-created collection of essays and encyclopedic material on the Harry Potter universe, including lists of spells and potions found in the books, a catalog of magical creatures, and even a "who's who in the wizarding world."

In the past, Rowling has expressed support for such fan-driven efforts and has singled out the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site and its editor, Steve Vander Ark, for high praise.

But in the lawsuit, Rowling claimed that the print version of the Lexicon would improperly interfere with her plans to write her own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia, one that would include new material not in the novels."

Why do I get the feeling that this one is being driven by the lawyers and accountants rather than J.K. Rowling herself?

Lords accuse government of head in sand attitude over e-crime

From the BBC:

"An influential group of peers has accused the government of putting its "head in the sand" after it rejected their ideas for dealing with e-crime.

The Lords Science and Technology Committee report found the internet was "the playground of criminals".

But the government did not agree with its suggestion that lawlessness "was rife" on the internet. "

FAST want P2P suspects banned from the Net

It seems that John Lovelock, the head of the Federation Against Software Theft, wants people suspected of using P2P networks for copyright infringement to be banned from the Net.

iPlayer DRM

Ben Laurie is not impressed at the BBC's complaints about criticism of the iPlayer.

"An interesting podcast with Ashley Highfield, Director Future Media & Technology.

We’re not doing enough [about open source] and it is something I want to turn up the heat on

Well, that’s a good start, but he then goes on to say

The problem at the moment, there is no open source DRM. It’s almost a contradiction in terms, if you have DRM how can you have it open source? Because open source people will be able to find out how it works and get round it.

Oh, dear. Because, of course, no-one will work out how the Microsoft DRM works, just like they haven’t worked out all the other DRMs out there. Not.

In any case, this entirely misses the point: there is no DRM on the broadcast signal, nor was there on old-fashioned video tapes. Why are downloads different? Why is it not sufficient to rely on the law, as has always happened in the past? Why not assume that your users are mostly honest rather than treat them like criminals?"

Well said Ben.

Not surpisingly Cory has something to say about this as well.

"Ashley Highfield, the BBC's Director Future Media & Technology, has done an interview with the BBC Backstage podcast about the BBC's new DRM-based net-delivery system, iPlayer, which delivers a slim fraction of the functionality available to people who watch their TV over the air.

Highfield defends the company's DRM in an incoherent way, attacking straw-men ("The rightsholders need DRM to protect their rights" and "we need open source DRM, but that may be a contradiction in terms," "Rightsholders are scary," "We need a fictional technology that will let us insert ads but only when American eyeballs are present") but without addressing the really meaty questions.

The BBC broadcasts the entirety of its programming at the speed of light, in digital form, without DRM, to every corner of the UK. The net is flooded with every single show the BBC transmits. The BBC has previously stood up to rightsholders who insisted DRM (removing DRM from its satellite feeds, despite an entertainment industry boycott that lasted a year). Adding DRM to its downloads just makes the downloads suck, traps Britons into using Microsoft OSes, shuts out one in four license-paying households who don't have the right combination, bans open source -- but it has nothing to do with stopping infringing downloads...

I like Highfield -- I know him personally and think he's smarter than this. I'd love to see him interviewed by someone who actually walked him through the real implications of what he's proposing here."

Music score library takedown a huge dent in the security of the public domain

Michael Geist considers the recent threats against and subsequent closure of the International Music Score Library Project website a hugely important case for the future of the public domain.

"In February 2006, a part-time Canadian music student established a modest, non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools, such as those used by Wikipedia, to create an online library of public domain musical scores. Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured over 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada.

Nineteen months later - without any funding, sponsorship or promotion - the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the Internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.

Ten days ago, the IMSLP disappeared from the Internet. Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, retained a Toronto law firm to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe. The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada fifty years after a composer’s death, Europe's copyright term is twenty years longer.

The legal demand led to many sleepless nights as the student struggled with the prospect of liability for activity that is perfectly lawful in Canada. The site had been very careful about copyright compliance, establishing a review system by experienced administrators who would only post new music scores that were clearly in the Canadian public domain.

Notwithstanding those efforts, on October 19th, the law firm's stated deadline, the student took the world's best public domain music scores site offline...

This case is enormously important from a public domain perspective. If Universal Edition is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest copyright term applying on a global basis.

Moreover, there are even broader implications for online businesses. According to Universal Edition, businesses must comply both with their local laws and with the requirements of any other jurisdiction where their site is accessible - in other words, the laws of virtually every country on earth. It is safe to say that e-commerce would grind to a halt under that standard since few organizations can realistically comply with hundreds of foreign laws.

Thousands of music aficionados are rooting for the IMSLP in this dispute. They ought to be joined by anyone with an interest in a robust public domain and a viable e-commerce marketplace. "

Absolutely.

Obama promises net neutrality laws

It seems that Barack Obama is promising to introduce net neutrality laws if elected president. His team must think that the geek vote will help to halt his sliding support though Hilary Clinton and others have made similar promises.

DJ Rupture laments the passing of Oink

DJ Rupture laments the passing of Oink.

"More than anything else this year, music & software file-sharing site Oink changed the way I thought about the music industry & BitTorrent technology. I’d heard rumors of Oink for years but hadn’t seen the members-only site until early ‘07. Oink was anal, Oink was comprehensive. The site administrators were fierce about quality — only high-quality files from original CD/vinyl rips could be posted. Many releases were even posted as FLAC (lossless) files. Oink allowed only entire releases, with complete tracklist information (uploading an incomplete album or a poorly labeled MP3 could get you kicked off). No bootlegs or concert recordings or unfinished pre-release mixes were permitted...

Oink didn’t offer solutions; it highlighted the problems of over-priced, over-controlled music elsewhere. Oink was an online paradise for music fans. The only people who could truly be mad at it were the ones directly profiting from the sale of digital or physical music. (Like myself! F%5k!)

Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7″ on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12″, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…

About a week after I shipped out orders of the first live CD-r Andy Moor & I did, it appeared on Oink. Someone who had purchased it directly from me turned around and posted it online, for free. I wasn’t mad, I was just more stunned by the reach… and usefulness of the site.

If sharing copywritten music without paying for it were legal, than Oink was the best music website in the world...

Watching Oink work helped me to understand the structural intelligence of BitTorrent architecture. Oink, like BitTorrent itself, became stronger & faster the more people used it - scalability writ large. Folks wanted to share - to maintain high share ratios. New releases were highly valued. But users kept older releases available as well (you never know when someone will want your Norwegian proto-deathmetal collection, so you keep your bandwidth open). Whether you call it distributed tape-sharing (to use an 80s term) or distributed piracy (to use a 90s industry term), Oink’s use of BitTorrent & careful quality control did it elegantly."

Politicians: the sum of their parts

I like this idea:

"Create a mathematical equation using photos of people, animals, characters or objects that are the sum of a particular politician's parts."

Example (without pictures):

Bill Clinton - George Clooney + Cold dead fish = Hilary Clinton

The Brickfish competition is restricted to US politicians but I'm sure there's some mileage in this in other areas of the world too...