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freedom and technology

archive : 2003-04

NY concedes error over protest blockade
Excerpt: NY Times says New York City Hall has tacitly acknowledged it erred in preventing an anti-war rally on February 15. Instead of permitting a march, the city insisted on a "stationary rally," with...

RIAA IM spam to p2p users
Excerpt: The RIAA has reportedly begun spamming IM users with warning messages over file sharing. Tapping into the chat functions built into software programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, the Recording...

Italy to prosecute buyers of illegal CDs
Excerpt: A new Italian copyright crackdown will levy fines against buyers of illegal CDs as well as vendors. Which could make for some interesting scenes, given that even music stores sometimes can't...

NT announces new police powers
Excerpt: Australia's Northern Territory has joined Victoria and NSW in proposing a suite of new anti-terrorism powers for police, including extended search and detention powers. The Terrorism...

Quick links: Belgium, Iraq copyright, Hawash and DNA
Excerpt: Belgium begins taxing blank CD-RW discs: CNet . More questions over FBI DNA lab procedures: AP . RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen involved in drafting new Iraqi copyright legislation: The Register ....

Arguments in Nike free speech case
Excerpt:Missed this last week: Reuters reports on the Nike advertising free speech case. Nike argues that no one has tried to prove any harm resulting either from their actions, or from the published...

Beijing quarantine 'victimising' patients
Excerpt: Guardian reports on compulsory quarantine rules in Beijing, which the WHO says are being used unnecessarily. Some potential SARS victims are reportedly hiding in order to avoid the quarantine....

Web site publishers drug user photographs
Excerpt: BBC reports on a web site that publishes pictures of drug dealers and users taken on the streets of Camden, photographed by a frustrated neighbour. Mr Messiter, 37, has begun photographing...

Catching up: Grokster, Verizon, Serebryany, GTA
Excerpt: Some stories that may have made it to Vigilant TV over the weekend had your humble editor not been (a) distracted by the sudden popularity of invisiblog , and (b) rained on while camping in the...

Invisiblog: anonymous weblog publishing
Excerpt: The cat having prematurely scampered out of the bag 12 or so hours ago, I might as well announce Invisiblog . From the FAQ: invisiblog.com is a free weblog hosting service that lets you...

Kazaa VC sued for facilitating copyright infringement
Excerpt: Contributory infringement gains another level of abstraction: not content with suing Kazaa for contributing to copyright infringement by users of its services, the RIAA is now suing a Kazaa VC...

Cisco responds to criticism over eavesdropping features
Excerpt: Declan McCullagh interviews Fred Baker from Cisco over the recent proposal to embed wiretapping facilities into routers and switches. Slashdot's abuzz with condemnation of Cisco's new...

CDT seeks Pennsylvania web site blacklist
Excerpt: Declan McCullagh reports on the CDT's fight to obtain the list of web sites blocked under Pennsylvania's controversial internet child pornography law . CDT says the blacklist is based on IP...

Video game poster said to incite violence
Excerpt: A UK advertising watchdog has ordered the removal of a video game poster from circulation on the grounds that it "incites violence". The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that a...

321 DMCA case begins Friday
Excerpt: Wired reports on the DMCA challenge 321 Studios , which makes DVD copying software. They argue that the DMCA wrongly criminalizes behaviour that does not infringe copyright. The studios...

Couple charged with child porn for breastfeeding photo
Excerpt: The Dallas Observer reports on a Texas couple indicted on child pornography charges for taking photographs of their son breastfeeding. They were reported to police by the photo lab that developed...

US Supreme Court to hear Miranda case
Excerpt: The US Supreme Court will hear an appeal over a lower court ruling about evidence found by federal agents as a result of questioning without reading a suspect his rights. The ruling could have...

DoJ sides with RIAA in Verizon suit
Excerpt: The US DoJ has apparently sided with the RIAA in its attempt to force Verizon to hand over the name of a subscriber who is accused of copyright infringement. The DoJ brief somehow manages to...

Scottish police blame mobile phones for extortion rise
Excerpt: BBC says Scottish police blame mobile phone text messages for a large increase in threats and extorition. The figures don't say how many of those attempts were pranks or hoaxes. A Scottish...

Zimbabwe opposition member tortured to death
Excerpt: A Zimbabwean opposition member has apparently been tortured to death by police, after he was arrested on charges related to the recent national strike. The opposition says 600 of their members...

More details on jailed Cuban dissidents
Excerpt: Washington Times has some details on the charges against the 75 dissidents and journalists jailed earlier this month. "Dissidents were imprisoned for writing 'counterrevolutionary...

13 million names on US govt watchlists?
Excerpt: Business Week says US government terrorist watchlists now include 13 million names. The TSA says error rates will be reduced by building wider-reaching data mining systems; but, as Bruce Schneier...

Iranian journalist arrested over interviews, weblog
Excerpt: Journalist and blogger Sina Motallebi has been arrested by Iranian police, apparently for giving interviews to foreign media. Via Hossein Derakhshan . Sina Motallebi was taken to jail after...

UK plan to charge for mandatory ID cards
Excerpt: UK Home Secretary David Blunkett has proposed levying a £25 fee on all Britons to pay for their compulsory identification cards. Current story is that the cards will include iris biometrics, but...

Journalist appeals to UN over Victorian defamation law
Excerpt: US journalist William Alpert has reportedly appealed to the UN Human Rights Commissioner over the Joseph Gutnick defamation ruling. Mr Alpert claims the High Court ruling that opened the way...

Re-code accused of incitement
Excerpt:The operators of Re-code.com , a web site that offers substitute UPC bar codes, have received a cease-and-desist letter from Wal Mart accusing Re-code of inciting theft. The letter is available...

DoJ withholds information on Patriot Act
Excerpt: The US House Judiciary Chairman says the DoJ is withholding information about its use of Patriot Act powers, making it difficult for lawmakers to judge whether the Act should be extended in...

Australian govt proposes anti-spam laws
Excerpt: The Australian government has released a report recommending the introduction of anti-spam legislation. Of course it'll do little more than waste money chasing the spammers offshore where...

Diffie and Rivest on Palladium
Excerpt:EE Times has a few sound bites from Whit Diffie and Ron Rivest on Palladium at the RSA conference in San Fransisco. The Microsoft approach "lends itself to market domination, lock out, and not...

New watermark DRM scheme surfaces
Excerpt: Looks like watermark DRM has surfaced again, this time shilled by Markoff in the NY Times. Watermark schemes are certainly less intrusive and less harmful than active DRM measures, but in the...

EFF attorney proposes file sharing tax
Excerpt: EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann argues that ISPs should be forced to collect taxes from users in order to pay fixed licensing fees to musicians. We certainly agree with Lohmann's points that...

Super-DMCA laws prohibit research
Excerpt: EFA has posted a good backgrounder on the recent "super-DMCA" bills which are in varying degrees of progress through state legislatures in a dozen US states. The super-DMCA bills would...

Schneier on data mining pseudoscience
Excerpt:Bruce Schneier's latest Crypto-Gram has some good analysis of false negatives and false positives in law enforcement data mining. He points out that for applications such as anti-terrorism, where...

SA considers total smoking ban
Excerpt: A South Australian government report recommends a total ban on smoking in hotels, bars and other public venues, with the Adelaide Casino the only exception. The exception suggests there is indeed...

US forces prevent journalists from covering protest
Excerpt: US troops in Iraq have tried to prevent journalists from covering protests outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, according to Reuters. Up to 300 Iraqis gathered outside the Palestine Hotel...

More on Mike Hawash, material witnesses
Excerpt: Declan McCullagh has a piece on the material witness laws being used to hold Mike Hawash and at least 44 others without charge or trial. Hawash is being held as a "material witness" under a...

Judge orders security researchers to cancel seminar
Excerpt: Via Politech , lawyers for Blackboard, a company that makes mag-stripe ID cards for universities, have obtained a preliminary junction preventing a seminar from being presented on flaws in the...

TIA is bad science
Excerpt: An interesting comment from David P. Reed at SATN.org points out that TIA's data mining efforts are based on unreviewed pseudoscience; much like the ESP research of the 1970s and 80s, the...

Calls for government control of Google
Excerpt: A BBC opinion piece suggests search engines should be regulated by a government department. The article breathlessly repeats many of the claims made by Google Watch, which were neatly refuted...

US, UK child porn databases growing
Excerpt: The Register reports on different technical methods used by UK and US police to keep databases of child pornography for investigative purposes. UK police apparently store checksums only, while US...

UK police considering new polygraph technology
Excerpt:BBC says Liverpool University researchers are trying to sell their new polygraph device to police in England's North West. We're reported on this one before ; interesting that their claimed...

Iraqi torture, intimidation of journalists went unreported
Excerpt:The has been widely reported elsewhere, but deserves a mention: CNN Chief News Executive Eason Jordan lists some of the atrocities committed by the Iraqi government over the past decade or so that...

NYPD kept anti-war database
Excerpt: New York police have admitted to keeping a database on anti-war protesters since early this year. A "debriefing form" was used by detectives to record information on hundreds of people arrested...

Cuban journalists evade censorship with web publishing
Excerpt: Wired has some more details on the Cuban journalists who were amongst the dissidents charged with collaborating with US diplomat James Cason. Colleagues of some of the journalists, who were...

EasyInternet settles out of court on customer CD copying charge
Excerpt: UK internet cafe chain EasyInternet has settled out of court with the British Phonographic Industry, agreeing to pay £210,000 for failing to prevent its customers from downloading and copying...

EU/US law enforcement agreements on extradition, surveillance
Excerpt: Statewatch has a long piece on a draft EU/USA law enforcement agreement that includes mutual extradition and surveillance provisions. The proposal allows for the extradition of anyone suspected...

US judge declines reverse-engineering request
Excerpt: A US judge has thrown out a request by the ACLU on behalf of Ben Edelman to grant permission for him to reverse-engineer the N2H2 censorware package for research purposes. He needs permission...

German torture followup
Excerpt: A German judge has declined a request to dismiss charges against a kidnapping suspect, despite his confession being extracted under threat of torture . One interesting detail: German law...

.iq domain operator facing terrorism charges
Excerpt: A lengthy article from The Register says the US-based operator of Iraq's .iq country domain is awaiting trial on charges of funding terrorist groups. The company is closely related to InfoCom ,...

Pennsylvania liquor store ID scanners keep records for police
Excerpt: Via Politech , driver's license scanners used at Pennsylvania liquor stores have apparently been relaying records to a government database, and subsequently monitored by police. Every liquor...

TSA blacklists cause mistaken identity problems
Excerpt: The trouble with watchlists: Wired reports on some of the problems caused by TSA air travel blacklists, as unearthed by EPIC . But Asif Iqbal, the suspected terrorist, is eight years younger...

Permanent Patriot Act proposed
Excerpt: US Senator Orrin Hatch has proposed a bill removing the sunset clause from the Patriot Act, making its increased surveillance and detention powers permanent. The landmark legislation expanded...

WA corruption commission bugs 60,000 phone calls, emails, SMS
Excerpt: The West Australian Anti-Corruption Commission has wiretapped more than 60,000 phone calls in six months, not counting emails, faxes and SMS messages. The Commission was recently accused of...

US committee announces new child pornography bill
Excerpt: US Republicans have come up with yet another virtual child pornography bill, to replace the one struck down a year ago as unconstitutional . Rather than ban the pornography itself, this...

Australian government wins 'stupid security' award
Excerpt:Privacy International has awarded the Australian government with a "Most Egregiously Stupid Award" in its 'Stupid Security' contest, primarily for the terrorism booklet issued to all households...

Iraq used broken British crypto?
Excerpt:Via Tim May on the Cypherpunks list, it appears Fox News let something slip about the air strike on the al-Saa restaurant in Bagdhad: the intelliegence that indicated Saddam Hussein was at the...

Columbian journalist killed
Excerpt: A columbian radio journalist has been murdered, possibly by FARC rebels. Police say they have no suspects. Juan Emeterio Rivas, known for his controversial programs on a station in the...

Reuters journalist killed in Baghdad; NY Times alters story?
Excerpt:One Reuters journalist has been killed and another three injured, apparently by a US tank that fired on a hotel in Baghdad. The Palestine Hotel is one of two major Baghdad hotels frequented by...

War against tobacco illegal?
Excerpt: An interesting piece at mises.org argues that that US state and federal actions against tobacco corporations are unconstitutional. Using RICO, the government contends that in 1953, tobacco...

Al Jazeera Baghdad offices bombed
Excerpt:One journalist has been killed and several reporters wounded by a bomb that hit the offices of Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV in Baghdad. Some Al Jazeera staff are saying they were deliberately...

EPIC publishes TSA blacklist memos
Excerpt: EPIC has obtained some TSA documents under the FOI Act that describe some of the passenger blacklists and watchlists in effect for air travel. The information is incomplete; in particular, it's...

Cuban opposition leader, journalist jailed
Excerpt:The first of the trials against the 80 Cuban dissidents arrested last week have completed, with an opposition party leader and a journalist given 25 and 20 year sentences respectively. They were...

Virginia cross burning law upheld
Excerpt: The US Supreme Court has ruled that burning a cross is not considered constitutionally protected speech, upholding a 50-year-old Virginia prohibition. An interesting detail: the court ruled 5-4...

Hidden al Qaeda web site?
Excerpt: A strange report from Wired says the purported al Qaeda web site Al Neda - formerly alneda.com - is being hidden amongst unsuspecting web hosts. Perhaps more interesting is that the site content...

California libraries shred records
Excerpt:Californian librarians have cottoned on to the fact that retaining records is a liability due to increasing law enforcement scrutiny under the Patriot Act, so they've begun shredding unnecessary...

FBI wants VoIP wiretapping
Excerpt: AP says the FBI is pushing for mandatory wiretapping capabilities in voice-over-IP networks. Note to bad guys: encrypt. The FBI wants regulators to affirm that such [VoIP] services fall under...

RIAA sues student for $97 billion
Excerpt: Detroit Free Press does the math on a recent RIAA lawsuit against file trading college students: the RIAA is seeking $97.8 billion in damages [not trillion, as Slashdot notes ]. This amounts to...

Australia to place SARS on quarantine list
Excerpt: The Australian government plans to deem SARS a quarantinable disease, potentially allowing the forcible detention and treatment of anyone who displays symptons of the disease. It will be the...

Lawyer urges privacy advocates to butt out of government surveillance
Excerpt: A Manhattan Institute lawyer has urged privacy advocates to "butt out" and let the government proceed with its domestic surveillance plans. The speech, delivered at the CFP conference in...

Oregon proposes 25 year sentences for protesters
Excerpt: A proposed Oregon law would impose 25 year sentences on protesters who disrupt traffic. Even the police oppose this one; legislators say it has little chance of passing. Dubbed Senate Bill...

7 arrested over 'all your base' posters
Excerpt: Police in Sturgis, Michigan, have arrested 7 people as potential terrorists for placing "All your base are belong to us" posters on shopfronts. Sturgis police say no further Engrish will be...

RSF criticizes Iraq on journalists
Excerpt: RSF has criticized the Iraqi government's treatment of journalists, saying they are being used to distribute propaganda. The Iraqi authorities monitor reports by journalists working in...

Cuba begins sedition trials
Excerpt: Cuba has begun trials of more than 80 dissidents rounded up in a recent crackdown on political opponents and journalists. At least 12 face life sentences. AP says the accused have been...

Hong Kong uses SMS to broadcast SARS message
Excerpt: The Guardian says the Hong Kong governemnt sent 6 million SMS text messages to cellphone users in a bid to quash a rumour started by a web page that the city was to be quarantined. This raises...

Free Mike Hawash
Excerpt: Wired reports on the campaign to free ex-Intel employee Mike Hawash, who has been detained without charge as a material witness, probably because of a donation 3 years ago to Global Relief ....

Tonga charges five for discussing newspaper ban
Excerpt: Three Tongan human rights campaigners, a journalist and a television station manager have apparently been charged with contempt of court following a TV panel discussion about the recent newspaper...

Imprisoned journalists describe Iraqi prison
Excerpt: Four journalists detained for 8 days describe their experience in an Iraqi prison. The group including Newsday photographer Moises Saman; Molly Bingham, 34, a free-lance...

Iraq bans satellite phones
Excerpt:The Iraqi government has joined the US in banning satellite phones. While the US ban was due to concerns - perhaps misplaced - that the phones could reveal troop locations , the Iraqi government...

NSW police seize $2m assets - no charges required
Excerpt: NSW police have announced plans to seize cash and $2 million in property deemed as proceeds of drug crime - before the owners have even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted....

Google Watch debunked
Excerpt: A lengthy article at Search Engine Watch critiques Google Watch's accusations that Google is a privacy nightmare. Search engines make juicy targets for lawyers and law enforcement, of course,...

DVD Jon's court date set
Excerpt: The court date for Jon Johansen 's retrial has been set. Johansen's attorney, Halvor Manshaus, told Reuters yesterday that Norway's Borgarting appeals court had scheduled a hearing beginning...

Iraq internet offline
Excerpt: Coalition bombing has knocked Iraq's public internet offline. Some state news sites are still available. Presumably this means Salam Pax is no longer able to post. The attacks, which...

Texas overturns drug charges by lying police officer
Excerpt: Texas prosecutors have overturned drug convictions of 38 people arrested by a police officer who apparently evidence and statements. In a stunning reversal, the state agreed with defense...

US authorizes civilian detentions in Iraq
Excerpt: The Pentagon has authorized US troops in Iraq to detain civilians for up to 30 days. They will be held under similar rules as POWs. "Civilian noncombatants are protected persons" under the...

NZ terror bill introduced: surveillance, tracking, seizures
Excerpt: New Zealand's Justice Minister has introduced a new anti-terrorism bill to parliament. The bill extends police powers to use tracking devices, electronic surveillance, and asset seizures....

Hong Kong arrests 14yo over SARS rumour site
Excerpt: A 14 year old boy has been arrested for publishing a rumour of a Hong Kong quarantine, on a web page imitating the Ming Pao news site. He has not yet been charged. The fake story sent...

ABA calls for wi-fi regulation, DRM
Excerpt: Via Boing Boing , an American Bar Association newsletter frets over the lack of regulation and meatspace identification in wireless networks. One of its proposed "solutions" - a kind of DRM flag...

Intel engineer detained over charity donation
Excerpt:The Register says an Intel engineer has been detained without charge or trial as a "material witness", over donations to Islamic charity Global Relief Fund. We've reported on Global Relief a few...

Zimbabwe opposition deputy arrested
Excerpt: The deputy leader of Zimbabwe's opposition MDC party has been arrested on charges of violating the Public Order and Security Act by organizing last month's strike. Police held [Gibson] Sibanda...

RSF on mistreatment of journalists, Malaysian govt funded reporting
Excerpt: RSF claims the US military is harassing non-"embedded" journalists in Iraq, and in some instances refusing to allow them into the country. The story follows up this earlier article about claims...

US lawmakers urge French boycott despite anti-boycott laws
Excerpt: Several US lawmakers are calling for a boycott of French wine over their position on the Iraq war. Rep. Bruce Chandler, a Republican, has sponsored a measure asking the people of Washington...

Iraq detains western journalists
Excerpt: BBC says as many as 10 journalists are being held by the Iraqi government. Two journalists from the US newspaper Newsday have not been heard from for a week, while seven Italian journalists who...

PayPal accused of violating Patriot Act
Excerpt: PayPal has been accused of violating the Patriot Act by allowing payments to gambling services in 2001 and 2002, according to Dow Jones. A neat example of scope creep: a law ostensibly aimed at...

US deports journalist for reporting location
Excerpt: The ABC says a reported expelled from Iraq by US forces for reporting his location was not an "embedded" journalist, and had not made any agreements to withhold information. "We're about 100...

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