Podcasting was supposed to be controlled by the little guy

The Internet and Podcasting was supposed to create a widely level playing ground. Anybody with an ability to record and produce digital audio or video could set up shop as a podcaster. Armed with a small set of digital media production tools, and a web site, one could produce their own equivalent to a radio program, air their own ideas, and stand on their own virtual soapbox and tell the world whatever is on their mind. The iTunes service makes it real easy at the consumer end of the spectrum. Inside iTunes you have access to a vast directory of podcasts, in addition to the audio books or music or TV shows that you can buy through the iTunes Music Store. It's a wonderful world, but what if Apple decides they don't like your content?

Apple's flip-floppy stance on sex Podcasts continues: Discusses Apple's problem with SEX. Maybe thinking differently stops when you get into the bedroom?

When iTunes sprouted the ability to automatically collect podcasts, Steven Jobs apparently said: that pretty much every topic was fair game except "you know, we're not—we're not allowing any pornography." ... except, in practice the iTunes Music Store has been indexing some sex-oriented shows, making the producers label them with an "EXPLICIT" tag. Except, as the article linked above discusses, some producers of EXPLICIT shows have had their shows summarily dropped from the iTunes Music Store.

Of course, once dropped from the music store the listenership to the shows drops precipitously.

I hadn't realized this but the iTunes service probably redistributes the podcast's RSS feed rather than directly subscribing to it. By having iTunes redistribute the RSS feed, they are able to determine the popularity of different feeds. But at the same time that leaves the podcasters, and the listeners, in a lurch should Apple decide to drop some podcast from their directory.

So, at issue is the ability for one entity to determine what we can or cannot watch or listen to.

In this case it is Apple. Through selecting what appears in the iTunes Music Store podcast directory, they determine the content we can easily listen to. Yes, we can eaily browse web sites and directly subscribe to the feed published by the web site. In iTunes when one finds a podcast RSS feed they can get the URL of the feed and using a choice in the Advanced menu make a subscription to that feed. But, in reality, how many people do so? Isn't it a lot easier to click on the music store, browse to the podcast section, and search around in there?

It's not just Apple that has this role. For example when Google decides to drop a web site from its search engine that site generally sees traffic fall dramatically. On my web site statistics over half the traffic comes through search results in Google.

There are certain services that act as gatekeepers. If these services decide to not list some web site, then nobody will know about it. If Apple doesn't list your podcast in the music store, how will people hear of you? Similarly if Google doesn't list you in their directory, then how will people hear of you?

Okay, there are alternative avenues .. there are other search engines besides Google, and there are other podcast directories besides iTunes. However the fact is that the vast majority of traffic goes through Google for general search results, and through iTunes for podcasting.

The Internet was supposed to create a level playing field where everybody has the ability to open up a web site and publish to a global audience. This picture is outside the control of Big Media and Big Corporations, supposedly. As individuals we can decide to spend the $5 per month for a website hosting fee, and set up a web site. No Big Corporation is involved in approving our web site, and it's very liberating for the little guy to have such an ability to speak to the world.

But we have Big Corporations, the like of Apple and Google, deciding who is listed in the commonly used directories and search engines. It is they who are determining what we can or cannot read or listen to.

Today the Prudes are telling them to go after SEX-related web sites. Okay, you probably can't find a lot of people who would defend the SEX-related web sites. But there's that story which sprung from WW II, first they went after the Jews and I am not a Jew so I didn't speak up, etc, until finally they came after me and there was nobody left to speak up for me.

In the U.S. freedom of speach is a core principle.

This picture is one of ... you can shout all you want, but if nobody can hear you then all you'll do is get a hoarse throat and zero effect.

The last thought I want to discuss is the Dirty Old Mens Association International. Quit giggling, it is a real organization with a very interesting set of ideals. The concept is that there is great beauty in the feminine form and one should be free to, if not obligated to, enjoy that beauty wherever and whenever you find it. The site features pictures of naked women, but I challenge you to call it pornography. Artists throughout the ages have depicted naked women in their art, and that's the tradition followed on this site. Celebrating beauty through the feminine form.

A few days ago on their front page was a notice how DOMAI was no longer able to accept payments through PayPal. This is because PayPal's acceptable use agreement prohibits payments for nudity. Okay, fine, here again we have a large corporation deciding what is fit and appropriate for others to view. Interestingly at the same time eBay, PayPal's corporate parent, has a large section of sex-related merchandise listed for sale.

There is a huge difference between the typical images in the sex/porn industry, and the images on the DOMAI web site as well as the high-art images that also pictorialize nude women.

Does nudity automatically mean SEX? No! Nudity can very well be an enjoyment and appreciation for beauty. But the typical images from the sex/porn industry are not geared to appreciate beauty, but instead seem intended to inspire raunch and even a degradation of women.

The laws seem to convey an idea that nudity does mean SEX. But clearly that's not the case. And in any case does discussion of SEX automatically mean that something bad is going to happen?

Bush Administration proposes labeling for web sites with sexually explicit content

Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.

See Gonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law and U.S. attorney general calls for 'reasonable' data retention

This kind of discussion is not new, and the articles above give a history of the previous efforts along these lines. The big bugaboo that has people scared, of course, is will their children accidentally stumble across these sites. I've looked at some of those sites, and the raunch people engage in and look at it simply astonishing. Some of that stuff is clearly not for children, and it's quite possible to stumble across it.

e.g. "A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs."

One issue mentioned in the article is concerns by search engines. For example the government might decide to make a law requiring that search engines correctly index sexually explicit sites, and then correctly return results based on the sexually explicitness of the query. But, as the search engines pointed out, it's rather difficult to determine whether something is sexually explicit or not. And, in some cases, the raunchy crowd will reuse innocent words to have raunchy meanings.

The whole issue raises a whole range of freedom of speech considerations.

The people who publish and read/view the raunchy material certainly have a right to do so. That's called freedom of speech, but there's a principle I heard a few years ago that's very apropos. Your freedom to swing your fists stops at my nose.

Should their freedom to publish raunch stop somewhere before it reaches childrens eyes?

But, wait, there's more ..

For example, how can this preserve the right of medical researchers to discuss Breast Cancer?

For example, the Dirty Old Mens Association Intermational (DOMAI) exists to publish photographs of naked women. You might think, oh, they'll fall directly into this sexually explicit category. But, I challenge you to look through their site and find sexual explicitness. The purpose for that site is the celebration of beauty, specifically the beauty of the feminine form. They don't publish sexual pictures, but instead the pictures are of naked women in their beauty. Often the sexually explicit pictures are, to my eye, very degrading as it presents a naked woman purely as a sexual object. On the DOMAI site their pictures are very affirming of beauty and femininity.

I will say the proposed law is interesting by explicitly naming the kind of content which must be labeled.

In the past there was always a question over whether something is, or is not, pornographic. Like I said about the DOMAI site, there's a long tradition of non-pornographic artwork depicting naked women as beauty.

They are borrowing definitions from existing federal law: sexual intercourse of all types; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person. Clearly those categories are easy to verify and enforce, unlike prior standards which.

The second article linked above is a little more chilling. It concerns requirements proposed to be placed on "internet service providers" requiring that "data" be retained for 90 days. They are claiming that the "failure" of ISP's to retain data is hampering investigations into criminal activity, including "gruesome sex crimes".

This may be very innocent and above board, but it also may be coming from the existing government plans to create a ubiquitous spying apparatus akin to Big Brother.

Again, there is a privacy consideration. In this case the "data" is our activities on various web sites, email we send and receive, even chatroom transcripts. The requirement is for that "data" to be retained, so that it can be handed over to government investigators.

Hurm...

Utopia? Maybe...

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

The guy is a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also happens to oversee a blog, a music label and a microbrewery. He's written a book An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which I haven't read. But I am living what he's talking about, so with that let me write a few things.

In the NPR piece the situation is described thusly.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans did most things on a small scale. A few people running a farm, or running a mill, etc. These were very human scaled organizations, he claims.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the scale of organizations had to expand dramatically. A cost effective factory for that time was huge, and employed thousands of people. To go along with it was the rise of huge corporations.

But, today, technology has come full circle to being able to enable individuals to work on small scale organizations.

An example is what I do with my web sites. I have a "day job" in a large corporation, but I also am a web site publisher and earn a tidy side income at that. Additionally I see a way to totally divorce myself from the large corporation, and instead operate several small operations each of which would provide part of my income.

In the interview they gave some more examples.

For example all the people making a living (partial or not) via sales through eBay.COM. He exemplified eBay as a wave of future business style. Another example was someone making custom guitars at home, and he uses eMachineShop.com for parts production.

The way eBay makes their money is through taking advantage of others doing what they want to do. This is drastically different from the large corporate style organization, where the organization exists to tell thousands of people what to do. There are dozens of companies making money through enabling others to do what they want. Google, for example, makes a lot of money from individuals like me who run AdSense advertising on their web sites.

I think, though, he's selling a bit of a pipe dream.

These individuals making their small organizations are riding on the back of some very large organizations. An individual selling stuff through eBay is absolutely dependant on eBay, as well as the package delivery industry (FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc). These are all very large companies who operate in the top-down style of telling their employees what to do.

Let's take another example. Suppose you have a great salsa recipe and you want to make and sell salsa. Go to any farmers market and you'll find several people living a similar dream. It's relatively simple, you need to pass health inspections, be able to operate a healthy kitchen and production facility, find FDA certified packaging, get a FDA certified label made showing the ingredients, etc. One could launch a salsa business with a small group of people, and then go to farmers markets or local Whole Foods stores to sell your product. If you keep working at it, you might eventually have national distribution and so on.

But, let's get back to the beginning. Where does your packaging come from? Are you going to make the packaging, or are you going to buy that? How big is the company who makes the packaging? Where do you buy the ingredients? The local farmer, or from an agribusiness?

What I'm getting at is that this utopia Glenn Reynolds holds out in front of us won't be there for all of us. Some of us will have to work in large organizations like UPS so that others of us can run our humanely-sized home businesses. And that's probably okay, because not everybody is inspired to do this. Many people seem content to go to work and be told what to do with their lives. If that's what they want to do, then more power to them.

Our right to privacy, killed by the Bush administration? Or was it inevitable?

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

No longer can the right of privacy be expected in any walk of life -- an editorial in a local newspaper in Hagerstown Maryland.

Invasion of privacy must stop -- An editorial in a local newspaper in India

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data - A New York Times article by John Markoff

The first two take the opinion that we have a "right to privacy". As the Hagerstown editorial mentions, a right to privacy wasn't written into the U.S. Constitution, but that was because the Founders assumed privacy was such an obvious right as "breathing" or "eating" that they didn't bother to discuss it. But little did they have a clue of the sort of technology which would be developed.

The article from India is interesting because of the expression of fear which comes up just with a hint that any of our phone conversations could be tapped.

The NY Times article just demonstrates how the government is continuing to look for more and more surveillance and privacy-destroying tools. It discusses an NSA visit to Silicon Valley looking for data mining tools. Which just makes me think of the Total Information Awareness project.

Data mining is widely used by corporations. For example credit card companies data-mine transactions looking for possibly fraudulent activity. In the article they discuss a prison which used data mining of telephone call records to discover a drug smuggling ring.

The point is technology creates new possibilities. The digitization of "everything" makes privacy invasion so much easier to do. Which gets to the inevitability.

Even if it's inevitable, that doesn't mean "we the people" should just allow it to happen without protest.

Encrypted file systems, terrorism, personal privacy, oh my

Here's an interesting question ... suppose police capture a terrorists laptop and they want to get into the laptop to extract plans and other documents? Suppose the laptop is rigged so the file system is encrypted meaning the police can't get through the encryption? Suppose there's a ticking bomb, and the plans for the bomb are in the laptop?

That's the scenario posed here: UK holds Microsoft security talks (By Ollie Stone-Lee, BBC News political reporter) Microsoft is apparently in talks with the British Government to install a backdoor allowing Police to snoop into otherwise encrypted hard disks.

Hmmm... One glaring fault leaps to mind. Any backdoor installed for Police use could also be used by "hackers" to sneak through the same back door. And, for that matter, what if the Police (or someone) were to come up with a stealthy virus, that didn't announce itself, and simply sneaked through the backdoor and retrieve any interesting data? The utility of the backdoor of course depends on the implementation. But since the backdoor is targeted to be used by Police departments, that means the details are going to be widely dissemenated and hard to keep secret. There's an adage that security through secrecy just does not work.

The article makes this out to be a new problem brought about by Windows Vista. It's actually older, since on some operating systems you can make encrypted disk images that require a password to open. The easiest to use implementation is on Mac OS X, one simply makes a disk image file (using Disk Utility) and specifies options including read/write and encryption. When you want to fiddle with sensitive files, just open the encrypted disk image and fiddle away. Make sure to unmount it when you're done.

Suppose your computer is stolen, would you want the thief to have easy access to all that data? Wouldn't you breath easier knowing the data on your computer was safe because the thief didn't have your password?

And, why does the article only talk about the need to thwart terrorists? "Terrorists" have become the big bugaboo under which all sorts of threats to civil liberties have been enacted. Shouldn't the same concern also be aimed at ordinary criminals?

Would this backdoor only be documented for nice police departments? Or would it also be made available for other police departments, e.g. in totalitarian states? Another current events story is China gaining some success at their dissident crackdowns through working with the tech companies. Clearly a tech company like Microsoft would be obeying Chinese law by helping the Chinese government in understanding the backdoor into Windows Vista. And, then what?

Would China then have greater success in cracking down on their dissidents? Whom, from western eyes, are freedom fighters?

And, for that matter, it's well known that the majority of cyber attacks are coming from China. What if the backdoor Microsoft discloses to the Chinese government is also something they can use in the cyber attacks, which then threaten American computer security?

U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Consider: US plans massive data sweep Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far? (Christian Science Monitor, February 09, 2006)

The article describes a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio.

The project it describes is very similar to the process of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. It's to scoop up a vast amount of data from the Internet and to draw out extra information from it. The technical phrase is "data mining" which is a practice of taking one data source, and putting it to a different use. Data mining is widely performed in businesses.

For example credit card companies perform data mining to detect fraudulent use of credit cards. e.g. they might look for your card being used to make an abnormally large purchase, or a purchase made far from your normal area of activity. And if they see it, they could give you a phone call saying "we noticed suspicious activity, did you make purchase X on date Y".

So long as the ADVISE system is collecting publicly available data, is there a problem?

The difference here between the government activity and what, e.g. Google, would do with it is: The government is looking for "terrorists", and the government has people with guns who are known to use those guns to kill people.

The problem with the government's hunt for terrorists, is they've got a rather loose definition and they make mistakes. For example in the Extraordinary Rendition stories, one was a German tourist who the U.S. agents identified as Al Qaeda linked, they kidnapped him, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured him for months, eventually realized they mistakenly identified him, and dropped him off penniless in Kosovo. And for loose definitions of terrorism, we can think of the people arrested for "ecoterrorism" where they are taking their protests of e.g. logging activities to doing property damage and whatnot. Sure, commiting property damage is illegal and they should be punished, but labeling them as terrorists is going too far.

In other words, I think it's legal to collect data that's publicly available (e.g. published on a web site) and to make secondary uses of it. If it's good enough for Google or Technorati, then it's good enough for the U.S. Government. But there needs to be oversight and measurement to ensure they don't overstep themselves.

For example, what if they made a deal with Google or other search engines to capture some of the private search query data which the search engines have on hand. That is, each time you make a search engine query, the company running your preferred search engine receives your IP address, your web browser, your operating system, etc, along with the query terms. If you've registered with the search engine (e.g. signed into your "mail" account) then the search engine can know exactly who you are.

Now, that's private data which the search engine collects. One way they use it is to further tailor your search results based on past queries you've made. But what if they began handing that data over to the government, which the government would than incorporate into this ADVISE system?

Would you get a knock on the door just because you had a hankering to learn about terrorists and did a lot of google searches about activities done by terrorists? Or you wanted to see for yourself just how easy (or not) it is to get information on making nuclear bombs?

I want to close by reminding the reader of the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is/was a Department of Defense project to that acted as an umbrella over several inter-related projects, some of which would use data mining techniques of the kind described in the CS Monitor article. While a couple minor TIA projects were shut down, it's clear the bulk of them went forward, and that the intent of the Government for several years has been to create a technologically advanced system that can effectively track every action and look for "dangerous" patterns.

The TIA existed before the September 11, 2001 events which "changed everything". The TIA existed before the Bush administration. This is just an ongoing desire by government agencies to vastly step up their capabilities to spy on everyone.

Susan Pynchon: Diebold in Florida

There's been big questions from the 2000 and 2004 elections about whether the election system is rigged. In the 2004 elections a big sideshow formed around electronic voting machines, especially those from Diebold. The electronic voting systems (a.k.a. touchscreen voting) was supposed to fix the glaring problem with the 2000 election fiasco, which centered on the punch card system. But that's presuming touchscreen voting is the only alternative, which it is not.

"I Saw It Hacked": Diebold in Florida by Susan Pynchon relates a test performed in Leon County Florida of the Diebold voting system installed there. This test has become rather infamous as the "Harri Hursti Hack".

What she describes is a staged test. They ran a small mock election in which Harri Hursti demonstrated a vulnerability with the Diebold voting software.

Her article contains this very powerful paragraph:

And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.

Okay, so she managed to put together a powerful paragraph, but I don't see her report demonstrating what she claims. Nowhere in her report is this claim substantiated:

However, the Hursti hack is individually significant because the flaw it exposed is a planned vulnerability in the system, not something that is accidentally there. It had to be PUT there (programmed) on purpose.

I work with software and software quality in my job. I know very well that every piece of software has bugs in it. The existance of a bug doesn't constitute proof that the author purposely put that bug there.

She has not demonstrated that Hursti's hack is anything more than a bug in Diebold's software.

It's easy to point a finger at the Diebold corporation and claim they're evil. Their CEO was widely quoted before the 2004 election as boasting about how GW Bush would win the election. And of course it's easy to think, that might not have been bravado, but knowing that he can go in and twiddle the election results and ensure that GW Bush would win the election.

I agree with her theory -- it's very possible for Diebold or any other election hardware vendor to be selling machines which contain backdoors allowing elections to be rigged. For our democracy to succeed we have to ensure that's not the case, and that has to involve independant auditing of the voting machines. The secrecy surrounding the election hardware is troubling as it impedes the public from independantly verifying the voting machines are trustworthy. Unless the people can trust the voting machines, how can the people trust that our representatives were properly elected?

But that's just a theory until you can prove the assertion. In her story she brushes over the proof, jumping from describing the test to concluding that therefore Diebold purposely implanted the backdoor which Hursti walked through.

Search engines cooperating with the police

Microsoft Confirms Turning Over Search Data to Feds: This covers not just Microsoft but the other search engines as well. The story is there's an obscure court proceeding going on, under which the Department of Justice (DoJ) has subpoenad records from the search engines as to search terms. MSN, Yahoo and AOL have apparently cooperated with the request, while Google has refused to cooperate.

Let me bring into the conversation this: Re: Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ? In that case some organization is organizing a move to require "Internet Companies" to impede cooperation with repressive regimes who want to surveil what their citizens are doing. But with this request from the DoJ, I wonder just how you want to define "repressive regime"?

And then we have Microsoft's side: Privacy and MSN Search posted by the MSN Web Search general manager.

As the eWeek article suggests, this is a very worrisome privacy issue. Suppose the government surveillance system were to know about every search query you were to make? It's easy to think you're just searching around the Internet, and the search results are very ephemeral and disappear very quickly. But when you're Googling or MSN'ing or Yahoo'ing, the search engine is able to make a record of your searches. The search engine might even remember searches you did before, the items you clicked on before, and helpfully rank the results based on what you searched for previously. This is information the search engines already collect.

It's important to note that the search engines are unable to identify YOU. Instead they know specific IP addresses, and are able to track which IP address did what. Or, in some cases the search engine installs a long-lived cookie, and with data in the cookie is able to correlate activity you do from day to day even if your ISP gives you a different IP address each day.

The MSN general manager says all they turned over was IP addresses and search queries. No personal identifying data.

It would be up to the government surveillance system to correlate IP addresses with people. This isn't easy, but is doable. For example my ISP assigns me a fixed IP address, and therefore the governmnet surveillance system might have an arrangement to query my ISP to retrieve the identity of people to which specific IP addresses are assigned.

Police store DNA records of 24,000 innocent kids

Police store DNA records of 24,000 innocent kids provides an alarming overview of police surveillance activity in the UK. As the article says "Britain already has the largest network of CCTV cameras in the world", and they intend to go further. The main issue in the article is DNA profiling, where it's known the police have DNA records of 24,000 young people who have never been even accused of anything. Where there's great room for concern, the article claims "most people are already resigned to the whole population having its DNA held in police and government databases". SIGH

The article details several projects which, taken together, amount to the same end goal as the Total Information Awareness System (TIA). Since that's in the UK, this would be the British equivalent to TIA. And perhaps since some aspects of British and American government are joined at the hip, maybe MI5/6 and the NSA/CIA/DOD are working together to implement TIA?

You, the reader, may have believed the TIA project was shut down. What happened is that one of the sub-projects in TIA (it was either FutureMap or Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment) was unveiled to the public, and it offended officialdom, and enough of them went on a harumphing storm that the DoD made a show of shutting down TIA. But it's obvious that most of the subprojects to TIA continued on being funded, as they would be very useful to a surveillance system.

Now, let's go through the projects reported by The Register and align them with the TIA projects which I recorded back in 2002.

DNA Profiling: There isn't a direct analogue to a TIA project. One problem with DNA profiling, however, is the expense of doing DNA testing. Doing a full sequencing of the DNA in a tissue sample currently costs many thousands of dollars. Perhaps forensic DNA testing doesn't do full sequencing, but it still isn't going to be cheap. Be aware, though, that the government is funding research to decrease the cost of DNA testing.

The currently understood methods of DNA testing involve tissue culturing steps. For example, they take a tissue sample, grow a tissue culture in a laboratory, then kill the tissue sample, and study it under microscopes. That means identifying someone from DNA in a tissue sample will take several days.

The Bio-Surveillance project in TIA is very different from any DNA profiling system.

CCTV cameras on the roads and streets: Associated with this is number plate recognition, and face recognition. This is clearly associated with Human ID at a Distance with the addition of number plate recognition.

Implementation involves installing closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV) in desired areas. The more cameras, the more intrusive and comprehensive is the monitoring system. You might think "oh, monitoring TV is manual, there's going to be a human looking at every video feed". No, if you have a city full of video cameras, there's no way a staff of humans can effectively scan them all. The cameras might be ignored most of the time, and only used when a call arives in the neighborhood of a given camera.

But what's possible is for the video feeds from these cameras to be analyzed by computers. That's what the Human ID at a Distance project is intended to be doing. And face recognition systems have been under test for several years. For example a public test was performed at a Super Bowl game a couple years ago, but apparently the test results were very disappointing.

The technique is to use image analysis to look for patterns that let the computer software zero in on the information of interest. The problem is computers are rather dumb. Human bodies have zillions of years of evolution to our image recognition hardware, and we recognize such things very readily. But computers have only 60 years of development (or so) behind them, and all they can deal with are numbers. It may look like they deal with words, and pictures, and sounds, and movies, and whatnot, but the software developers have to invent ways to turn all that into streams of numbers, because computers only know how to deal with numbers. This makes image analysis tricky.

Take face recognition. There's probably some pattern of pixels that usually indicate a human face. There's a small range of skin pigmentations, and then the shape of a face is generally the same with two eyes, nose, mouth, etc. It's made tricky because faces have a lot of variability, even when there's a lot of similarity. Recognizing license plates (number plates, as the British call them) would be simpler. There's a fairly well known set of colors to look for, and you know ahead of time what shape the license plate will have, and its location on a car.

Once you've got software that can reliably recognize what you're looking for ... car license plates ... you connect a fleet of computers to the CCTV cameras. They'd constantly be looking for motion, when they see motion the software looks for a license plate, and records whatever it sees. Assuming reliable software the computers can register all cars that pass by a CCTV camera.

The next step is to install multiple cameras throughout the city. Each camera gets connected to the computers. The computers register each car that passes by each camera. Or, if reliable face recognition software exists, the computers can also register each pedestrian as they pass by each camera. Hence, these computers could easily track the movement of every car or every pedestrian where-ever they (we) go in the city.

Re: Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ?

Reporters sans Frontiers has made a call for action/change about Internet companies that do business with repressive countries. Do Internet companies need to be regulated to ensure they respect free expression ? They cite several cases of Internet and Technology companies cooperating with repressive countries, for example Google and Yahoo filter search results based on blacklists provided by the countries in question.

In case you don't grasp the significance of this ... In the 1930's and 1940's IBM gave a lot of help to Hitlers government in Nazi Germany. They used the just-developed punched card machines (not quite computers, but close) to record and track information about Jews, so that they could more efficiently perform the Holocaust.

Todays computer equipment and technology are far more efficient and capable than the crude toys IBM used to help Nazi Germany commit the Holocaust. And, of course, that means any country that deploys their technology for repressive purposes, will be able to do so much more effectively than did Nazi Germany.

In a sense this is very simple. If these companies want to do business in those countries -- e.g. China is among these repressive countries, and China is a huge and burgeoning market which any technology company would be foolish to ignore -- then they have to do so within the laws of the country in question. In particular, under what justification would some company have the right to ignore the laws of some country in which they do business? None. Countries are supposed to trump companies.

But RSF makes a very interesting point. They cite several instances where technology companies cooperated with repressive countries, and claim those are violations of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed by the United Nations when it was founded and which is supposed to apply to everyone, including business corporations.

They offer several proposals that would limit "U.S. Companies" in what they can do inside a repressive country. For example

No US company would be allowed to host e-mail servers within a repressive country*. So, if the authorities of a repressive country want personal information about the user of a US company’s e-mail service, they would have to request it under a procedure supervised by US.

The activities seem geared to keeping equipment and services outside the repressive countries, so that repressive countries have to abide by U.S. law in order to take certain repressive actions. And, they say the list of repressive countries will be defined by the U.S. State Department.

I think they're pissing into the wind, but you have to admire the integrity with which they are approaching this.

However, as a practical matter, how can we trust the U.S. State Department to be a fair arbiter of repressive governments? We, the U.S., are actively engaged with China as a business partner, for example. And there is the matter of Indonesia where the U.S. actively helped them in repressing the East Timor peoples.

Also discussed by:

Dan Gillmor: A Dangerous Question and Smart Mobs: Regulate internet companies to make them respect freedom of speech: Reporters Without Borders

Blogging may be hazardous to your job - The Clarion-Ledger

If blogging can be hazardous to your job (as this article says: Blogging may be hazardous to your job By Amy Rosewater, The Baltimore Sun) just how is that so? And, don't we have freedom of speech engraved in the U.S. Constitution?

What the article talks about is bitching about co-workers etc on the blog. That people get fired over that.

Well... okay...

A lot of people feel irritated etc over their job. No doubt bitching about your boss or coworkers has happened throughout history. Maybe that's why Judas turned Jesus in to the authorities?

Seriously, what's important is to consider how you handle the inevitable irritation you have over co-workers and your boss. For example, therapy? There's a zillion ways of working through emotional duress that don't involve bitching in public.

When you're writing a blog it may seem you're in private. Maybe you've locked the door to the room, it's late at night, etc and nobody is around and you can pour out your deepest thoughts. But, really, who is your audience? Once that blog posting hits the web, it's public.

If you want to use writing as therapy, get one of those blank journaling books.

Do you really want to post your therapeutic writing for the whole world to see?