b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Marvin Gaye and Steve Jobs
Patriot Act Faces Opposition
No Sunset for Patriot Act
Oligopoly Watch
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
Thursday, April 17, 2003
The Buffalo Theory
I'm gonna go have a six-pack.
The Buffalo TheoryAs explained by Cliff Clavin, of Cheers. One afternoon at Cheers, Cliff Clavin was explaining the Buffalo Theory to his buddy Norm. Here's how it went:
"Well ya see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and Weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. "In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks The slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the Brain a faster and more efficient machine. That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers."
[347.com || Andy's World] [Ye Olde Phart]
Marvin Gaye and Steve Jobs
Cringely on Jobs, Gates, and Universal Music.Personally, I think Bill Gates would love to be as cool Steve Jobs. I don't think he obsesses over it the way Jobs does, but I do think it bugs him. I mean, doesn't every geek want to have their own reality-distortion zone? There are some things money can't buy, and Steve Jobs has one of them. And Cringely is right about one thing -- it's all a game.
04/17/03: Whats Going On. What does Marvin Gaye have to do with Apple buying Universal Music? Bob explains all.[...] Steve Jobs is envious of Bill Gates power and wealth, while Bill Gates is envious of Steve Jobs charisma and vision. All interactions between the two are dominated by Steve, both because he has the greater need to dominate and because Bill is just too busy being fascinated watching Steve to bother taking charge. [...] [I, Cringely @ PBS Online]
Patriot Act Faces Opposition
An interesting story being reported by AP via FoxNews on House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner's objections to the secrecy and tactics of the DoJ regarding the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner has apparently sent a list of over 100 questions to the Bush Administration regarding the use and expansion of the Patriot Act but is still waiting for a response -- noting that virtually everything regarding the Act has been classified Top Secret and therefore off-limits to Congress.
[...] Sensenbrenner maintains that because the department refuses to be forthcoming, it is losing the public relation battle needed to extend the law beyond its October 2005 expiration, much less expand it. [...]
Toward the end of the article there is a quote from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, regarding his desire to see the Act's limited sunset provisions removed.
[...] "It seems to me to be ridiculous to take away the best law enforcement tool against terrorism before we get rid of terrorism," said Hatch, R-Utah. "This bill has helped us protect ourselves from terrorism both inside and outside the country. It's a tough bill, but it's constitutional and it works." [...]As noted in my previous post, this quote indicates Hatch's view that any open review of the Act will lead to its death, since Americans are historically intolerant of abusive laws.
There is no way to know how this will shape up, but there is clearly a battle brewing over the extent and duration of the Patriot Act. The proper approach is for the Administration to be straightforward and forthcoming about exactly what they're doing, how they're doing it, and precisely what costs are being exacted in American liberty.
If this law been, as Hatch suggests, wildly successful in protecting us then the DoJ should be more than willing to show just how Patriot made possible what other laws could not, and how any mistakes have been corrected and compensated.
It is up to the people of America to choose the proper balance between Liberty and Security, not unelected bureaucrats in the DoJ. An open debate about the Act, its consequences and ramifications, and its innocent victims is the best way to make that choice. And Senator Hatch would be well advised to keep that in mind.
Terry Frazier at 7:54 PM
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No Sunset for Patriot Act
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, wants to remove the sunset provisions from the USA Patriot Act, according to this article at Montana forum.com. (Thanks to Ed Cone for the pointer.)The Patriot Act already has fairly weak sunset provisions, as significant portions of the law are not open to review -- in particular, provisions regarding new electronic surveillance measures. You can read more about what does, and does not, sunset in this Electronic Frontier Foundation review. Note the numerous sections of the bill labeled DOES NOT SUNSET.
But Hatch seemingly wants to remove any review of the bill, no doubt recognizing Americans' past intolerance of such abusive laws once the immediate need for them has passed. It is a shame we have anyone in our Government who would consider such a review unnecessary, given the sweeping new powers created by Patriot, and Hatch should be roundly rebuked by his constituents at the next election.
[...] Once in a while, you have to thank goodness for the extremists or at least those people with steady, definable values.Last year, when the moderates of both political parties were falling all over themselves to hand sweeping new police powers to the federal government, a coalition of leftwingers and rightwingers in the House objected. These representatives were unable to stop the so-called Patriot Act, but they did succeed in attaching a sunset provision to the law. That means that unless the full Congress reviews the act and decides it must be continued, it will expire in 2005.
Now, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants to get rid of the sunset provision and make the Patriot Act permanent. [...] [Montana forum]
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]
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