Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS - Government's over-reaching surveillance system

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.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho&shofile=10-1473_002.pdf: Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote about GPS-based surveillance saying “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.”

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08-30385.pdf: Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.”

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.”

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org: In November the Supreme Court will hear United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259 which will "will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"

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.

The Supreme Court case is itself an appeal of an earlier decision by a 3 judge Appeals Court panel ruling that the government is seeking too much information.  http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1046181.html

 

Source: Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS

New FTC guidelines on advertising affects bloggers

The U.S. Fair Trade Commission has recently released new rules on advertising that appears in the form of endorsements and testimonials. This is one of those "the times they are a changing" moments given that these guidelines were last updated in 1980, my how the world has changed since then. There are many ways endorsements & testimonials show up which aren't so clearly ethical and the new technologies being developed offer new ways for us to communicate with each other. If the FTC were to remain limited by the old rules written before the Web was invented how would the FTC be able to regulate this new medium?

Let's think a moment about bloggers and endorsements.

Obviously some bloggers spend their blogging time writing about products and either tracking product press releases or doing reviews about products. There's nothing new about that and many magazines revolve around a similar vein of writing.

For decades there has been concern about slanted magazine reviews. That's why the original FTC guidelines came into being, right?

If the principle is "Caveat Emptor" it is up to the customer to decide whether or not to believe a given product review, right? But if payments or freebies provided by the manufacturer are not disclosed then how is the customer to know whether to take the review with a grain of salt? Requiring the reviewer to disclose stuff provided by the manufacturer makes for transparency.

For bloggers the FTC press release has this to say:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.

Some examples about online payola:-

Belkin’s Online Review Payola Plot Thickens: "A Belkin employee was recently busted offering payment for positive reviews of a Belkin network router—whether or not the reviewer had even seen one"

NBC Analyst Admits Receiving Tech Payola: About a 2005 "payola scheme by NBC tech analyst Cory Greenberg surfaced Wednesday, in which he was receiving upwards of $15,000 a piece from technology companies to positively promote their products on NBC's Today Show."

Links: 

FTC to bloggers: Fess up or pay up

Links: 

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

Links: 

FTC Plans to Monitor ‘Blogger Payola’

Links: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

Eavesdropping through your cell phone

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool discusses a federal court case that has scary implications. In a recent court case it was disclosed the FBI has developed a new form of eavesdropping: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. Further the eavesdropping works even if the phone is turned off, because some phones do not turn fully off unless you remove the battery. That's because some phones have an alarm feature that wakes the phone even if it's turned off.

This was disclosed in a court case against two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso. Further details are in an opinion written by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. The judge ruled this was legal under U.S. Code TITLE 18, PART I, CHAPTER 119, section 2518. And they did get proper wiretapping approval from the judge.

The ruling doesn't state how the "roving bug" got installed, simply that it was. Hover the CNET article refers to a Financial Times article, Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect and brother describes several privacy vulnerabilities which were exploited by European law enforcement in a different case.

First, cell phone operators are able to track the location of a phone to within 2-3 meters (about 5-10 feet for American readers). They do this through triangulating based on signals from three or more cell towers. Law enforcement can request tracking of a cell phone, and tracking is done in real time.

Second, cell phone operators can tap any phone call.

Third, cell phone operators can remotely install software into a handset, without the knowledge of the owner of that cell phone.

While it's nice and interesting that law enforcement can do this, this has to be a vulnerability that nefarious third parties can also exploit. This is because the mechanisms the cell phone operator uses are probably not secured well enough to prevent others from also using those mechanisms. As one of the experts quoted in the Financial Times article says:

"We have inadvertently started carrying our own trackable ID card in the form of the mobile phone," said Sandra Bell, head of the homeland security department at the Royal United Services Institute.

The CNET article gives some convincing evidence that the case they're reporting on must have relied on remotely turning on the cell phone. For example the Mafioso involved in this case were already suspicious of being tailed, so any attempt to physically borrow their cell phone to implant a physical "bug" would have been doubly suspicious.

This BBC article, 'This goes no further...', discusses routine use of remote monitoring through a cell phone. It has even been used to listen to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's conversations through his cell phone. There is no way anybody had an approved wiretap order to legally listen through his cell phone.

Americas coming robotic army

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.

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.

A meditation on the speed limit

Who was it that sang "I can't drive 55"? A Meditation On the Speed Limit is a project launched by a group of college students who wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous speed limit.

I like this because I myself do the same thing, which is to drive the speed limit regardless of what speed the nutballs behind me want to drive. They are in Atlanta, and did this on the perimeter highway, getting four cars together to cooperatively drive the speed limit. And by cooperatively driving the speed limit, they could block all lanes and keep everybody at the speed limit. And, they filmed everything posting the result to the web.

They wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous limit, but for me I think highway speeds are ridiculously fast. My thought is that at highway speeds death can come very quickly. Which just shows I'm in a different place than they are.

What was astonishing (well, not really) is the offensive reaction they got and the dangerous driving others got into. Apparently american drivers are addicted to driving fast on the highway. Watch the video for more details.

Employee free speech, and a VA nurse being investigated for Sedition

In September 2005 a pair of hurricanes hit New Orleans and the surrounding land. As a result much of New Orleans has effectively been destroyed. The government response to help the people of New Orleans and the surrounding land has been egregiously bad.

Shortly after the hurricane, a VA nurse in Albuquerque wrote a letter to her local newspaper complaining of the bad government response to the hurricane. Immediately afterward she was referred to the FBI and since then has come under investigation by the FBI for "sedition". Sedition being the legal word for advocating the forceful, violent overthrow of the government.

The story is here: V.A. Nurse Accused of Sedition After Publishing Letter Critical of Bush on Katrina, Iraq (as presented on Democracy Now)

The story is astonishing and alarming. The nurse, Laura Berg, acted under belief she was protected by the First Ammendment gaurantee of freedom of speech. In the interview she reiterates her claim of first ammendment gaurantees of freedom of speech.

The government is threatening her with years of jail time, the sentence for "Sedition". But how could her letter to the editor be taken as advocating violent overthrow of the government? This is the U.S. and we have a long history of the right of citizens to criticize their government.

As she says:

LAURA BERG: Amy, I did not sign away my First Amendment rights as a citizen, you know, by choosing to serve in the federal government and choosing to serve veterans and care for people that have been wounded like this, you know. And this letter sounds like something from a totalitarian regime, you know, that we are supposedly going in and share our democracy. This is way out of line. This was way out line. I have a right to speak my opinion. I have a right to say I'm a V.A. nurse. I do not speak for the V.A. I speak as a public citizen....

In my mind the case is open and shut, but for one thing.

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

Should your company have a corporate blogging policy?

FOX Sics its Dogs on "Un-American" Professors

The general principle in the articles I've linked is -- employers have the right and ability to restrict the speech of their employees.

How so? For example, what is proprietary information? It's information a corporation wants to keep secret, that gives the corporation competitive advantage, and if an employee is caught revealing proprietary information the employee can very likely be fired for having done so.

That's just one example of many sorts of ways an employer can limit what an employee says.

There have been instances of people being fired for blogging about aspects of their job, even when doing that blogging from home on their own computer onto their own blogging account. For example a teacher with DeVry was fired over comments she blogged about her students. Someone else, who worked in a customer support job, was fired for derogatory comments she wrote on a blog talking about the people who came to her for support were dweebs etc.

The issue with Laura Berg is that her employer is the U.S. government. Specifically, the Veterans Administration. The U.S. government has more options at its disposal for threatening its employees. e.g. trumping up charges of Sedition.

With the tradition of employers being able to control the speech of their employees, what happens when that employer is the U.S. government?

And, I think the bigger question is, why is there such a blanket acceptance of employers controlling the speech of employees? Clearly it represents a huge blanket of suppressed rights to free speech.

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?

Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII

arsTechnica has an interesting overview of government spying on U.S. Citizens. Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII It refers to a Christian Science Monitor article I discussed here: U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet as well as other information.

The overall context for this story is the Total Information Awareness system which had been under development by the DoD, been exposed to the public, which caused a stink, resulting in the supposed cancelation of the project.

What actually happened is one sub-project was canceled, and the remnants has continued on. As the arsTechnica article says:

When Total Information Awareness (TIA) was shot down by Congress amid a storm of public controversy, it seem pretty clear that the government would keep trying, and trying, and trying until it got something that was very much like TIA. The promise of the Big Database in the Sky, the database that knows everything about everyone and can tell who's been naughty and who's been nice, is just too tempting for The Powers That Be to pass up. As it turns out, there's more than one program going on at the moment that's designed to implement such a database,

They discuss two (known) projects that are obviously implementing the same goal. The first, Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), is discussed by the Christian Science Monitor article. The other is Topsail, which is the actual successor to the TIA project (minus the futures market).

Topsail is discussed in this Newsweek article: Wanted: Competent Big Brothers As the Senate frets over whether the NSA has violated the outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, no one is paying attention to the real issue: proficiency. by Michael Hirsh

There's an interesting question here between the different views in these articles.

On the one hand we, Americans anyway, are very opposed to massive government surveillance. I say this because of the nearly universal abhorent reaction to 1984 (the book). Just say Big Brother and watch the heebie jeebies crawl up peoples spine.

On the other hand Michael Hirsh makes some interesting points. His article is very positive to these developments. His article claims the NSA is stuck in old technology, and old ways of conducting its business of watching communications. His article repeats the claim that the spy agencies had enough facts about the terrorist attack, but didn't have the technology required to connect the dots.

As Hirsh says "data mining", when used well, can connect facts together to let one see the bigger picture. Given that there are, clearly, some people out there who want to cause damage to society, it makes some sense to use advanced technology to try and find their tracks.

A part of this story is that the capabilities of technology are advancing. As we make more powerful computers, the spooks can do more stuff.

The spooks clearly want to create a system that can track a large portion of the transactions that happen every day. By connecting together disparate transactions, they might detect an attack before it happens.

For example ... take the Oklohoma City bombing. The story is the bomb was made from fertilizer and kerosene, and they used a rental truck as a "car bomb". This means the conspirators will have bought certain supplies before making their attack. Since the area has a lot of farming, a large fertilizer sale wouldn't be too strange by itself, but when connected by data mining to other purchases that together could create a bomb. Well, that's tantalizing the spooks, I'm sure.

But, I think, what about when they make mistakes? As the arsTechnica article alludes, they don't know what patterns to look for.

In the Newsweek article, Hirsh relies on perfect hindsight. It's easy to say the attackers used some specific weapon, and if only we'd known what to look for ahead of time we could have stopped the attack. But, in truth how can one know what to look for ahead of time? That is, until someone makes a weapon how do you know what form their attack will take?

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.

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country"

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country.." - G.W. Bush in the wake of an unexpected landslide victory by Hamas in the latest Palestinian elections. Hamas has been a bloody terrorist organization, but has recently turned to political action and has now won the elections in the Palestinian territories.

It seems the U.S. is two-faced about wanting democracy. We say we want democracy, but then when democracy turns up an unwanted result then there's only complaints. In this case the election chose Hamas, but no sooner than the results were in than the complaints began. President Bush, I label you HYPOCRIT.

In case it's not obvious -- what's really galling about the above quote is that GW Bush himself laid out a call for the destruction of another government. Which? Iraq's government under Saddam Hussein. That's what the phrase regime change means, the destruction of another government. Further the NEOCON strategy for the middle east is to destroy not just the Iraqi government, but also that of Syria and Iran.

Oh, and apparently the U.S. government was meddling in the Palestinian election by giving huge funding to Hamas opponents:

Palestinian Groups Accuse U.S. of Meddling in Elections: And in the Occupied Territories, the Bush administration is being accused of meddling in this week's Palestinian parliamentary elections. On Sunday the Washington Post reported the U.S. has clandestinely funneled $2 million into public service projects ahead of the elections in an effort to increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority and its governing Fatah party. Officials from Hamas have questioned whether the aid violates rules barring Palestinian political parties from receiving funds from foreign sources. Independent candidate Mustafa Barghouti warned the Bush administration's efforts could backfire and end up helping Hamas in the elections. Barghouti said, "Every time the United States says it doesn't want Hamas, they boost Hamas. Let us do our elections entirely on our own. These interventions run counter to our efforts, and they hurt the Palestinian people. This effort was completely counterproductive." -- Democracy Now, Jan 24, 2006

But the Bush administration has demonstrated anti-democracy tendencies in the past. For example all the actions taken to undermine Hugo Chavez's rule in Venezeula, including a U.S.-backed coup attempt against the Venezuela government. For example the U.S. backed coup that tossed Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti. In both cases it's a democratically elected government that wasn't to U.S. liking. But this isn't new to the Bush administration, as the U.S. government has been toppling democratically elected governments for decades.

Bush sees vote proving 'power of democracy' But he urges Abbas to stay in chief post (Boston Globe, By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff, January 27, 2006)

Hamas invited to form government (BBC, Jan 27, 2006)

Hamas’ victory upends Israeli politics Opposition politicians blast government for failing to stop group's ascent (By Scott Wilson, The Washington Post Updated: 5:29 a.m. ET Jan. 27, 2006)

Hamas victory explodes Middle East peace plans (theage.com.au)

Voters did not elect Hamas because its charter commits it to the destruction of Israel; indeed, that goal was dropped from its election platform, an implicit acknowledgement of public opinion by an increasingly pragmatic political force. Hamas has observed a ceasefire for the past year, after carrying out about 60 suicide bombings since the second intifada began in 2000. Only a minority of Palestinians subscribe to its hardline Islamic ideology; instead, they rejected Fatah because of its divided and ineffective administration and its entrenched corruption. Hamas has quietly attended to the practical side of community politics, providing services to the poor and building a reputation for discipline, efficiency and integrity. Its officials in Gaza, where Hamas first won municipal elections, have even co-operated with Israel on administrative matters, out of necessity. Hamas has sent out mixed signals on broader co-operation, and even the taboo matter of peace talks, which it may decide to let President Abbas pursue, as this was the platform on which he was elected.

All politics is local, eh?

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.

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

Hyped up panic on Jeremy Hermanns dot org about Alaska Flight #536 - Rapid De-Pressurization and Panic at 30K Feet

Boy what a mountain formed out of this mole-hill. Jeremy Hermans was on an Alaska Airlines flight that experienced sudden cabin depressurization shortly after takeoff and made an emergency landing safely without anybody being hurt. But what made this emergency different is that Jeremy took a few pictures and wrote about it on his blog. His blog posting is full of emotion we who weren't there can only guess at. If we haven't been through something similar, how can we gauge the validity of his emotions? In any case a stir of controversy is swirling around this blog posting, and a couple professional advisors of business blogging have weighed in.

From Dave Taylor we have: Alaska Airlines and the death of truth and from Teresa Valdez Klein we have: Alaska Airlines Attacked by Blog Mob with Pitchforks and Torches ... the two of them seem to be their own mini-echo-chamber.

What I see in the responses by Dave Taylor and Teresa Klein is a nutty attempt to corral bloggers into a journalistic mold. Say what? Blogging is an individual thing and is practiced by each blogger in their own way. Blogging does not have to be a journalistic endeavor, but someone can certainly approach blogging in that way.

For example they talk about fact checking. You expect professional journalists to do fact checking, but that's too much to expect of bloggers. If there's any commonality to the practice of blogging, it's that a blog posting is very much about what's known in the present moment. One of the commenters to Dave Taylors posting said it very well:

Debbie seems to be suggesting that bloggers have some sort of obligation to contact companies to get their side of the story, but I don't think that flys very far in the blogosphere. For most of us, Blogging is 110% about expressing our *own* opinions. If we *happen* to mention a few odd facts interspersed in our opinions, then of course we should do a diligent job of verifying facts, to the extent that it is easily within our means. But if time or other constraints preclude a thorough vetting on facts vs. suspicions, we do the best we can. That's a key difference between blogging and journalism, regardless of whether you consider either to be a professional or amaeur activity.

Another meme being tossed around is about "the credibility of the blogosphere is lowered a couple of notches". That's treating the "blogosphere" as one whole, and expecting all bloggers to be tarnished or polished the same way. But blogging is practiced (generally) by individuals acting on their own. Each individual blogger has their own reputation and approach to truth. How can there be a "credibility of the blogosphere" when it's a mass of individuals?

An example rumbling in my head is one which Dave is going to be very aware of. I know of Dave from his Usenet background (especially on soc.singles) and have met him once many years ago at a soc.singles event in the Bay Area. The point is I know that Dave is very intimately familiar with Usenet history, if only because he had a big role in making part of that history.

Jeremy's blog posting just reminds me of the same kind of rambling threads of discussion. One persons posting might somehow incite a long thread of followups, debating fine points of the truth of the original posting, devolving into name calling, or nitpicking over spelling, or accusing each other of being a shill, etc. It was typical of Usenet, and it is very interesting seeing it all distilled into one page like this. In a way Blogs are to this Internet era what Usenet was to the 80's version of the Internet.

Having lived through the 80's and some of the 90's on Usenet (I used to be in the Usenet backbone committee), I'm sure there's something about human psychological processes that make this kind of discussion thread. To wish that the public would act in a more truth-centered fact-checking mode is like pissing into the wind, or like that apocryphal story of the old King of Norway (Canute?) yelling at the ocean waves to be quiet.

Dave Taylor, with your Usenet history, you should know better. But maybe you were one of those who always took the fact-checking-demander-of-citations side of the argument?

One of the frequent debate techniques on Usenet was for someone to demand "what is the citation that justifies the assertion you made"? Usenet, like blogging, is more akin to people chatting in the hallway. Since when do people chatting in the hallway give citations?

On the other hand some bloggers clearly try to be journalists. Again, we all approach our blogging in different ways.