When Judges around the country cite the novel, 1984, as legal precedent maybe that's a sign that Big Brother is alive and well and quietly monitoring everything we do. The issue is the GPS features in cell phones, and the Fourth Ammendment's promise of protection against Government invasion of our privacy. A recent NY Times article gives a litany of court cases involving GPS devices, GPS features of cell phones, and the repeated invocation of a novel, 1984, as legal precedent.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/08/cellsite.pdf: Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn denied a government request for over 3 months of "location data from cellphone towers" calling it an “Orwellian intrusion” and asking whether the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”
Today we routinely carry devices that track our every move (cell phones, cars, toll collection passes, etc) and those devices give us valuable information we use in our lives. For example I frequently whip out my iPhone or iPad and use the Map feature to figure out where i am and how to get to a location. That Map feature determines my location using both GPS circuits and interpolated location information from cellphone towers.
I'm planning to get into writing books using e-Book Publishing as the means to get published. Modern technology and the Internet have given us a very interesting opportunity for authors to have more freedom and ownership over their work in a way that hasn't been possible ever in the history of book publishing. At the same time these modern gizmos (Kindle's, Nooks, iPad's, etc) contain buried within them an implementation which endangers the freedom of information and the accepted norms we have as book consumers. Richard Stallman recently released a one page PDF outlining the freedom concerns related to electronic books as currently implemented, and calling for a different implementation that preserves the existing freedom model around printed books. I've embedded the document below and have a long list of thoughts about this.
I think the first topic to cover is the question: Why should we pay attention to this guy? Who is he? To me Richard Stallman is something of a hero who inspired legions of software engineers with software freedom ideology. He might cringe at the phrase but Open Source Software owes a lot to the thinking he did around the ideology of Free Software. Lest you wonder what Open Source Software is about, most of the websites you visit (like this one) are built using open source (or free) software, and so are most of the web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and to an extent Safari) as are the Linux or FreeBSD or Mac OS X operating systems built either entirely or in-part with open source (free) software.
He makes a distinction about Free Software as being different from Open Source, where Free Software is distributed under terms with baked-in guarantee of preserved freedom. Free Software isn't about the cost but about the Freedom.
While his career has been about applying this ideology of freedom to software, the same ideology can be applied in other areas, and the document he posted attempts to apply it to books.
The context is - as he puts it - business dominates government and writes the laws, so it shouldn't be surprising that the result is a weak government whose laws benefit businesses over the needs of we the people. In that context technology is being developed as businesses develop new products to dazzle us with, and time and again the products are being developed to chain us in bonds of enslavement rather than granting us freedom.
It may be difficult to look at an iPad or Kindle and see it as chains of enslavement, but the chains are there nonetheless.
He first describes the current book publishing and distributing system as having a lot of freedom. I've uploaded the document to scribd.com to enable embedding it and hopefully it's visible below, or you can download the PDF directly from his website (linked below). I find myself almost entirely agreeing with his claims:
buy anonymously with cash: Go to any bookstore where they sell printed books and quaint as it may seem today they do take cash. Buying with cash means your transaction is completely anonymous. This freedom is especially important in a time when the police state is for example routinely demanding to see records of book borrowing from libraries, or book purchases.
you own it: Here is one claim where Stallman is off base. I know he understands the word Copyright and would have to agree that when you buy a printed book you're not ending up with ownership of the words on the paper to do with as you wish. You've bought a pile of paper with ink printed on it, and because of Copyright the real owner of the book is the publishing house that printed the ink on the paper. I'm in the middle of writing a book myself and the contract I signed with the publisher includes turning over copyright over the material I'm writing.
not required to sign a license to use the book: Again, there is a Copyright on the book and while you don't sign a license agreement there is an implied pseudo click-through license.
known format, nothing proprietary to read it: Well this is true unless the book is written in a language you do not understand.
freedom to scan and copy the book: Here he's showing some disingenuousity regarding copyright. Copyright law generally prohibits wholesale scanning or copying of books.
Nobody has the power to destroy your book: Maybe he's forgotten about book burnings? While book burning is in the past, I think the religious right when/if they establish the Theocracy they want for America plan to hold massive book burnings of anything that doesn't agree with their brand of Christian Ideology.
The existing printed book system isn't quite as open and free as he puts it. Yes there's a lot of actual freedom such as the whole industry of used bookstores and the ability to trade books with your friends etc. But the main problem with printed book system is the control over who is allowed to be a book author. Publishers are in charge and act strongly to prohibit who can or cannot become published by dint of owning the printing press.
Electronic books offer authors quite a lot of newfound freedom. It's now possible for an author to just put together a document with their word processor, and go to any of several service bureaus to get books into the electronic book marketplaces. It's opened up opportunity galore for authors to become published.
At the same time, as he says, the existing electronic book system does erase the freedoms book consumers have enjoyed over the years. It's impossible to share an electronic book after you "buy" it, impossible to sell it on the used book market, impossible to return it to the store for a refund, etc. Further some electronic book market owners have used back door access to electronic book readers to change or delete books after they were purchased.
He's quite right in raising an alarm about the freedom our society has to access to information as it currently exists. I'm quite concerned by the situation of electronic books. At the same time I'm relishing the thought of much easier access to the marketplace as an author. It's a mixed set of freedoms and constraints.
America's robot army covers the growing number of robotic equipment being deployed or developed for use by the American Military.
The scenario being developed is where Robots replace infrantry troops, where networked surveillance equipment is able to track everything moving in whole cities, etc. Rather than place flesh and blood troops at risk, it will be the machines instead.
One thing that strikes me is this is an utter violation of Azimov's Rules of Robotics. Okay, Azimov was a science fiction writer, so maybe that doesn't give his opinions a lot of weight. But he was prescient enough to see the possibility of self directed robots. As computer power grows, so does the processing capabilities that can be built into a robot, and the greater degree of self autonomy can be programmed into that robot.
At what point does that robot become so autonomous that you can simply shout an order to the robot "Kill the enemy" and the robot is in charge of determining just who the enemy is? We humans have a tough enough time determining who the "enemy" is, that is determining which people on the battlefield should die or live. That's what "collateral damage" is, a failure of adequately determining the proper enemy.
What hope do we have of adequately programming a robot to do this well?
The article also discusses surveillance equipment of scary proportions. Under development is a whole range of small video devices, for example, that can be scattered throughout a city to blanket the city with surveillance. Once a city is blanketed with surveillance equipment, every movement is visible and trackable. Then, Human ID At A Distance is a project which would allow identification of people from that surveillance (HIAAD was part of the Total Information Awareness project).
The article discusses its use in war zones. Suppose it is deployed in the home grown war zone? American cities, that is.
Technology is technology, and it is a matter of the humans who deploy the technology to determine its use.
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?
