b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
Recently
Three Strikes for Freedom
Civil Forfeiture Pressures Police to be Extortionists
DMCA Not Needed to Stop Theft
The Danger of the Surveillance State
DMCA Thwarts Author of X-Box Book
Civics Lesson
Powerline Distribution Laws
Looting with Iraq
Loon-fest in Augusta
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Oligopoly Watch
Author Steve Hannaford has been a consultant and business analyst for a long time. I don't know how long, but I remember him writing business columns for MacWeek more than a decade ago, when getting on their "free" subscription list was still a big deal. Over the years he's published a variety of management newsletters and written a couple of books which are classic texts in the graphic arts industry.Steve and I have been friends for a long time too, and I've encouraged him to start a weblog. For the last few years he's been following the seismic shifts wrought in the business world by the Internet, technology, and globalization and he has some interesting things to say about business, markets, and the effects of global conglomerates.
Now Steve's decided to take the plunge and launch a Radio weblog, Oligopoly Watch, as a precursor to a book he's writing on the same topic. He takes a look at current news items and provides some interesting insight into what they really mean. If you're interested in what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite multi-national check it out. You might be surprised at what you find.
Three Strikes for Freedom
There is a pattern forming here. We have the US Department of Justice lifting its accuracy requirement that ensures the FBI criminal database records are timely and accurate.Next we have USA Today reporting that the Bush Administration is seeking a broad expansion of the Federal DNA database, including not only juveniles but also those who have been arrested but never convicted.
White House seeks to expand DNA databaseBy Richard Willing, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON DNA profiles from juvenile offenders and from adults who have been arrested but not convicted would be added to the FBI's national DNA database under a Bush administration proposal.
Under current law, only DNA from adults convicted of crimes can be placed in the national database, which is used to compare those samples with biological evidence from the scenes of unsolved crimes. As of January, there were about 1.3 million DNA samples in the database, U.S. officials say.
Adding profiles from thousands of adult arrestees and juvenile offenders would greatly expand the DNA system's worth by increasing the number of potential matches, administration officials say. Justice Department officials have discussed potential changes in federal DNA law with key members of Congress and are pushing for legislation this year. [...] [USA Today]
Finally, we have the Associated Press reporting that the FBI Crime Lab is under investigation, again, for falsifying evidence.
New allegations cast a shadow on FBI crime labBy John Solomon, Associated Press, 4/16/2003
WASHINGTON -- Reorganized after controversy in the mid-1990s, the FBI crime lab is dealing with new allegations of wrongdoing by employees that have opened the door for challenges of the lab's science in scores of cases involving DNA and bullet analysis, internal documents show.
An FBI lab scientist, who connected suspects to bullets through lead analysis, has been indicted after admitting she gave false testimony, and a technician has resigned while under investigation for alleged improper testing of more than 100 DNA samples, according to records and interviews.
In addition, one of the lab's retired metallurgists is challenging the bureau's science on bullet analysis, prompting the FBI to ask the National Academy of Sciences to review its methodology, the records obtained by the Associated Press show.[...] [Boston Globe]
Words cannot express how safe I feel knowing our fearless leaders are working night and day to protect us from....well, something.
Law enforcement is sort of like public education. I know some good folks who are on the streets doing police and detective work. They try hard, use the system as best they can, and want to do a dangerous job to the best of their ability. But the law enforcement bureaucracy is another matter -- populated by egomaniacal, power-mongering, self-serving bureaucrats who get real jollies wielding power over everyday citizens. The reality of law enforcement and criminal investigation is nothing like CSI Miami, any more than your local high school runs like Boston Public.
We need to be very vigilant about how this administration changes the rules of law enforcement and alters the balance between liberty and security. It is far easier to give away liberty than to get it back.
Civil Forfeiture Pressures Police to be Extortionists
An interesting article on how civil forfeiture laws are affecting PayPal.
PayPal meets the Patriot ActCEI
by Solveig Singleton"It would be one thing if the law served consumers, or targeted dangerous criminals. But as long as prosecutors and police are tempted by forfeiture laws, law enforcement will remain divorced from ordinary concepts of individual responsibility and the civil servant's duty to the public. And it will begin to look a lot more like legalized extortion." (4/15/03)
DMCA Not Needed to Stop Theft
A Georgia State court issued a temorary restraining order, based on evidence that presentation materials were gained via methods that violated state and federal anti-hacking and trade secret laws, against a student presentation at InterZ0ne II.As reported Sunday, Blackboard, Inc. was seeking to stop a presentation by two students at the Atlanta hackers conference where the two claimed they would show how to link any device to a Blackboard network.
According to the article, an initial Cease and Desist letter made reference to DMCA violations, but the actual complaint made no such reference. This points out two things:
-
We don't now, and never did, need the DMCA to prevent the outright theft of legitimate trade secrets and copyrighted works
State laws are, in many cases, much more restrictive than federal laws.
The reason the recording and film industries wanted the DMCA was to bypass the government bureaucracy that often gets in their way when pursuing such cases, and to avoid having to deal with 50 different sets of IP laws at the state level. In short, to make their lives easier at our expense.
But as we have now seen, the MPAA and the RIAA have already begun lobbying state governments to promote Super-DMCA bills that strip even more rights from users. Thankfully, the technology and user communities are awake this time around, and we can expect the recording industry to have increasing difficulty passing laws of convenience.
Court blocks security conference talkBy John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 15, 2003, 1:13 AM PTA pair of students were blocked by a state court from presenting information at a Georgia security and hackers' conference on how to break into and modify a university electronic transactions system.
Washington D.C.-based education software company Blackboard successfully convinced a Georgia state court to block the students' presentation, which was scheduled to be given at the Interz0ne conference in Atlanta last weekend. [...]
Although an initial cease and desist letter sent to the Interz0ne conference organizers hinted that the students may have violated the DMCA, the complaint that resulted in the temporary restraining order did not touch on that copyright law.
Instead, the restraining order was grounded largely in federal and Georgia state antihacking laws and a state trade secrets act. [...] [C/Net News]
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
The Danger of the Surveillance State
Bruce Schneier, one of America's foremost authorities on secure systems and digital safeguards, examines both the danger and the ludicrous nature of recent changes in the US Dept. of (In)Justice policy toward accurate data. Following Schneier's examples below, it's easy to see how systems without strong accuracy requirements can run amok. Yet the DoJ has done away with requirements that the FBI ensure its data is timely and accurate. But it gets worse. According to Schneier:
[...] This kind of thing is already happening. There are 13 million people on the FBI's terrorist watch list. That's ridiculous, it's simply inconceivable that a number of people equal to 4.5% of the population of the United States are terrorists. There are far more innocents on that list than there are guilty people not on that list. And these innocents are regularly harassed by police trying to do their job. And in any case, any watch list with 13 million people is basically useless. How many resources can anyone afford to spend watching about one-twentieth of the population, anyway? [...]
The very notion that there are 13 million terrorists is absurd. It's highly suspect that even 10%, or 1.3 million, of the listed people are terrorists by any rational definition. No, what we have here is something entirely different -- a group of powerful, paranoid, infomaniacal officials covering their ass without regard to the consequences or impact of their actions on American citizens or their constitutional rights.
According to Schneier, over 80,000 law enforcement agencies have access to this database. On average, there are 2.8 million transactions processed each day. Just think about your local deputy, or court clerk, or minimum wage secretarial assistant entering your data into one of these systems and hitting the wrong key. Think it matters? Think you can get it fixed? Just ask Mike Hawash.
Terrorism databases and the fallacy of the false positive. Schneier runs down the statistical problems of keeping terrorist-suspect databases:
To see this, let's walk through an example. Assume a simple database -- name and a single code indicating "innocent" or "guilty." When a policeman encounters someone, he looks that person up in the database, and then arrests him if the database says "guilty."[Boing Boing Blog]Example 1: Assume the database is 100% accurate. If that is the case, there won't be any false arrests because of bad data. It works perfectly.
Example 2: Assume a 0.0001% error rate: one error in a million. (An error is defined as a person having an "innocent" code when he is guilty, or a "guilty" code when he is innocent.) Furthermore, assume that one in 10,000 people are guilty. In this case, for every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies it will mistakenly identify one innocent person as guilty (because of an error). And the number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is tiny: one in a million.
Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate -- one in a hundred -- and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100.
DMCA Thwarts Author of X-Box Book
This C/Net news article on Andrew Huang's attempts to publish a book on Microsoft's X-Box is a chilling example of the economic sledgehammer effect the DMCA has on small business. By writing on a controversial subject -- not an illegal subject, mind you, but a controversial one -- Huang has lost both a publishing contract with Wiley and been refused service by an e-Commerce company.Here again we have companies bolting from projects on the simple fear that they will be accused under the DMCA, because the law is so badly written, and the costs of defending against it so high, that the economic incentive to pursue even mildly questionable projects is gone.
[...] I get a lot of e-mail from a lot of people, and sometimes you see the subject line and freeze for a moment, thinking, "This is it, they're coming to get me." And then it just turns out to be an innocent question. But the fact that Americart felt it had to reject my book shows how jittery people are. [...]
The DMCA may well be the most economically damaging piece of legislation of the last century, and only now are we beginning to see the unintended consequences of letting media conglomerates write laws for their own benefit. But the public outcry is having some effect. As the article points out highly public DMCA attacks, such as the Wal-Mart case, have raised substantial negative publicity for the plaintiffs. What we are seeing now are more subtle effects of having a legal bludgeon wielded against individuals and small businesses, in discrete efforts that try to insulate major players from public stigma.
In short, the DMCA is rapidly turning into a tool to oppress and monopolize markets at the expense of small business and individuals. The law was never intended to "protect the artists and creators", it was intended to establish legal monopolies. Of course, had any of our Congressmen been doing their jobs in 1997 and 1998 they would have held some modicum of debate on the issue, and maybe even discovered just how badly they were being snookered. But they didn't. They took the money from lobbyists and signed the bill without a comment. Now we are left to clean up their mess.
Xbox hacking book aborted by the DMCA. Bunnie Huang, the MIT grad student who hacked the Xbox, has had his publishing deal with Hungry Minds for a book on hacking the Xbox killed because the publisher is scared that MSFT will come after them with the DMCA. So he decided to self-publish the book, but the shopping-cart service he used also got scared off by the DMCA.
"The thing I have to emphasize is that the book itself is not criminal," Huang said. "It'd be like saying that breaking and entering is illegal, so you can't write a book on how locks work."[Boing Boing Blog]
Monday, April 14, 2003
Civics Lesson
A recent Columbia Law School survey found that only 31% of adult Americans were sure that Karl Marx didn't help write the U.S. Constitution. I wonder how this happened?
[...] This lack of proficiency [in civics] leads to some serious misconceptions, as a recent Columbia Law School survey showed. Although the Founding Fathers wrote the U.S. Constitution to protect individual rights and property, one-third of adult Americans think the document contains the Karl Marx maxim that negates all rights to property: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Only 31 percent of respondents were sure Marxs words werent in the Constitution, while the remaining third didnt know. [...] [The Heartland Institute]
Powerline Distribution Laws
C/Net News is reporting that FCC Chairman Michael Powell is showing some enthusiasm for powerline-based Internet services. As Jeremy points out, powerline distribution combined with wireless gives us four legitimate connectivity options -- two of which have almost nothing to do with Telcos. One upside to the powerline model -- power utilities are highly unlikely to get into the content business and therefore have little incentive to restrict access or connectivity to pre-determined "consumer" uses.Personally, I would love to get a hi-speed Net connection from my local electrical coop. It's a member-owned organization that provides a perfect model for how bandwidth should be distributed. Hope this little experiment gets rolled out to other areas.
Powell on Powerline."This is within striking distance of being the third major broadband pipe into the home," Powell said. "I'm a little bummed it's not (available) in my area."
I think he means the forth major broadband pipe, as fixed and unlicensed wireless will be right in there too. But, it's great to see Powell pushing Powerline.
[Jeremy Allaire's Radio]
Looting with Iraq
It's tax time, that time of year when we all celebrate the privilege of American citizenship by opening our wallets and giving deeply. But this year we have a war to distract us from the annual rite. (Any of you conspiracy theorists out there claiming the timing of the Iraqi incursion was fixed to keep our minds off Tax Day?) At any rate, here's a little Iraqi conflict list of looters -- a list of "riders" attached by patriotic congressmen to the $80 billion war finance bill -- courtesy of your friendly Libertarian watchdogs:
[...] According to an estimate by Rep. Ron Paul, R-TX, the bill contains $20 billion in "wartime pork," or spending that has no connection with the war in Iraq or the battle against terrorism.[...] One especially egregious example: Republican Sen. Thad Cochran inserted language that would funnel $250 million to Southern catfish farmers, many of them in his home state of Mississippi, under the guise of providing drought relief for livestock producers.
Other "war-time pork" includes:
- $69 million to fund a "Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust," named after the former Missouri Congressman.
- A measure intended to prevent a German company, DHL Worldwide Express, from competing with Federal Express and United Parcel Service in the delivery of military cargo. During the 2002 election cycle, UPS gave $1.5 million to Democratic and Republican candidates and $300,000 to the Republican National Committee, Neale noted.
- $98 million for an agricultural research lab in Iowa, and $250 million in other Agriculture Department grants.
- $3.2 billion to extend unemployment benefits for airline employees.
- $11 million for Congressional salaries and expenses.
- A total of $12.4 million for the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office and the U.S. Court of International Trade.
- $8 billion in foreign aid for nations that are supposedly helping the fight against terrorism, including Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and Djibouti. [...] [Libertarian Party Announcements]
Loon-fest in Augusta
Here are just some of the wackos represented at the off-site protest over the Augusta National Golf Club. The protest, started by professional fem-wack Martha Burk, turned into a non-event but still drew a cast of characters:- The Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition (Jackson said he'd be a no-show)
- Todd Manzi of Tampa, Fla., Burk's self-appointed nemesis
- Joseph J. Harper of Cordele, Ga., the leader of a Ku Klux Klan splinter group
- Dave Walker of Atlanta, a one-man pro-war rally whose baseball cap says "Give War a Chance"
- An anti-Jackson group called Brotherhood of a New Destiny
- A few locals calling themselves People Against Ridiculous Protests, who planned to make their point by protesting in absentia. Leader Deke Wiggins said he intended to plant a banner in the field, then leave.
If you have a cause, and the best you can do is gather 50-100 loons like those above, and you even have to bus those in from somewhere else, shouldn't you, maybe, find a better way to spend your time?
Has anyone ever seen Hootie Johnson? Ever met a woman who would want to hang out with Hootie? Smoke a few stogies, maybe have a shot or two of scotch? Yeah, that's the life. I can see golf babes signing up for that one. A better cause celebre' would be getting more female sales clerks in the power tools section at Lowe's.
Burk Rallies Against Masters. 11 Alive Apr 12 2003 1:02PM ET [Moreover - Atlanta news]
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