Tag: United States

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Here’s Why the Government Thinks It Can Kill You Overseas:

Holder left several aspects of his argument unexplained. He did not define the terms “senior operational leader” of al-Qaida, nor what it means to be an “affiliate” of the amorphous group. The attorney general only referred to the drones through the euphemism “stealth or technologically advanced weapons.” Holder did not explain why U.S. forces could not have captured Awlaki instead of killing him, nor what its criteria are for determining on future missions that suspected U.S. citizen terrorists must be killed, rather than captured. Holder did not explain why Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, whom a missile strike killed two weeks after his father’s death, was a lawful target. Holder did not explain how a missile strike represents due process, or what the standards for due process the government must meet when killing a U.S. citizen abroad. Holder did not explain why the government can only target U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism for death overseas and not domestically.

In which the United States government asserts, in all seriousness, that it’s perfectly okay (appropriate, even) for the President to order the killing of an American citizen without any due process of law whatever. The Constitution? Not a barrier anymore, apparently.

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Quotations

2012.2.27

The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves. The enemy is not evil. The enemy is well dressed.

Larry Lessig, from Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop it.
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Videos

Lessig Interviews Abramoff

Curious about the inner workings of Congressional and Senate corruption? Then set some time aside and watch this video. It’s a bit long – it goes for about 90 minutes – but is well worth your time.

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Sign the petition: Respect the privacy of cell phone customers

ACLU:

Thanks to a nationwide ACLU campaign to learn how our cell phones are being used to monitor us, we now know that cell phone service providers keep a staggering amount of data about their customers:

  • Call records up to seven years.
  • Contact information of who you’ve exchanged text messages for up to seven years.
  • Cell tower history — which helps track the movement of your cell phone: all data from July 2008 onward.
  • Copies of paid bills for up to seven years.
  • IP addresses assigned to your device for up to one year.

Tell your cell phone service provider that you demand an explanation of the information that is kept about your account, when and how it is shared with third parties, and an easy way to control how long your private information is kept. Additionally, tell them you demand to be notified if this information is ever lost in a data breach or demanded by the government or anyone else.

If you use AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon, this affects you.

Some of the reasons behind this data aggregation stems from law enforcement demands/expectations. Some stems from the low amount of storage all of this data (effectively) amounts to. Some stems from a need to plot out use patterns and predict growth rates. Some stems from a belief that more data is good data.

Regardless, the ACLU is right: customers should be demanding to know exactly why this data is being retained, the purposes the data is used for, and the parties that the data is shared with. Remember: if it isn’t collected or stored, it can’t be used against you in commercial, civil, or governmental practices.

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Aside Links

American Internet Imperialism

Think about this for a second: you are a good, law abiding citizen, and thus break no local laws. Your state has no reason to bring criminal charges against you. Your actions, however, are provisionally criminal in another jurisdiction. As a result, despite your actions being perfectly legal in your home nation you are threatened with extradition. This is not a theoretical concern:

TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing – but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O’Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times – with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK. [Emphasis added]

The implications for extradition would be significant: UK citizens could be extradited to certain countries for actions that are legal within their own nations, on the basis that they violate the laws of other countries. It is precisely this kind of process that can stifle innovation, speech, and association online. It narrows the range of speech actions whilst demanding that – prior to speaking or acting or creating – individuals consult with counsel as the first part of any serious online behaviour.

Such an approach – lawyers, then speech – is directly contradictory with basic rights that form the bedrock of our Western democracies.

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How to Interpret the 5th Amendment?

Declan McCullagh has an article on an important case in the US, where a federal judge has demanded a defendant decrypt a PGP-encrypted drive for the authorities. Case law in the area of decryption is unsettled, as McCullagh notes:

The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for at least the last 15 years arguing the merits of either approach. (A U.S. Justice Department attorney wrote an article in 1996, for instance, titled “Compelled Production of Plaintext and Keys.”)

Much of the discussion has been about what analogy comes closest. Prosecutors tend to view PGP passphrases as akin to someone possessing a key to a safe filled with incriminating documents. That person can, in general, be legally compelled to hand over the key. Other examples include the U.S. Supreme Court saying that defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood samples, or voice recordings.

On the other hand are civil libertarians citing other Supreme Court cases that conclude Americans can’t be forced to give “compelled testimonial communications” and extending the legal shield of the Fifth Amendment to encryption passphrases. Courts already have ruled that that such protection extends to the contents of a defendant’s minds, the argument goes, so why shouldn’t a passphrase be shielded as well?

Eventually the case law around encryption has to be addressed by SCOTUS. There are too many differing positions at the moment; clarity is needed both for users of encryption in the US, and for counsel seeking to prosecute and defence clients.

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Links Writing

American Copyright Gone Power Mad

The fact that American copyright holders basically govern an arm of the US government that can, and is, shutting down website URLs at the TLD root is terrifying. That degree of power, however, looks like nothing compared to what happened in the recent MegaUpload takedowns. Consider the following:

The width and breadth of the global police action are simply massive, and are, quite justly, being painted as a massive over-reach. The full indictment goes so far as to mention Canadian bandwidth provider Cogent, whose headquarter employees were even held and questioned during the raids this week. Indeed, anybody who provided bandwidth, rack space or Internet services appears to have been held, questioned, and/or pressured in the global raids.

The policy of seizing domains and hardware first, without any adversarial court process, limits every person’s ability to contest American efforts to silence free speech. Moreover, the maneuvers taken impose American understandings of American law upon all people living around the world. Such actions not only makes associating with certain others, and certain behaviours, legally dangerous but given a willingness to even threaten major ISPs’ employees it suggests that even third-party data transit providers are at risk. America is (rapidly) developing a policy process and technically-informed system capable of censoring any communication, any speech, any uploaded data that its rights holders believe might damage those corporations’ economic interests.

In the 30s and 40s there was a name for this kind of behaviour: fascism. We’re now witnessing the final stages of what was intended to be the greatest republic in the world go the way of Italy. All that stands between the RIAA and running considerable elements of American law enforcement are the courts.

God save us all.

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Links Writing

How the US pressured Spain to adopt unpopular Web blocking law

Nate Anderson writes, in reference to Spain’s new web blocking law:

 Resistance from locals was fierce. The US embassy, which enthusiastically supported the Sinde law, noted that “serious challenges” lay ahead, that the law was opposed by Internet groups and lawyers, and that “the outcome is uncertain.”

Still, the government didn’t think much of the opposition. Carlos Guervos, Deputy Director for Intellectual Property at the Ministry of Culture, told the US ambassador that “the dogs bark but the caravan moves on” and that the law would be passed.

The dogs put up a good fight, though. As the BBC noted, “Last year hacktivist group Anonymous organised a protest at the Goya Awards—Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars—which saw several hundred people in Guy Fawkes masks booing the minister of culture while applauding Alex de la Iglesia, then-president of the Spanish Film Academy. The movie director had previously voiced opposition to the Sinde law on Twitter and later resigned over the issue.”

Then in late 2010, opposition parties managed to halt the bill in parliament. On December 21, the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared victory and said that a committee had “just stripped the website shut-down provision from the Sustainable Economy Bill”—in part due to the revelations about US pressure.

But the government found a way to bypass the barking mutts, leaving the law for the incoming administration to handle after November 2011. (The law was so unpopular that the former administration elected not approve it after huge levels of animosity surfaced on social networking sites.) The new government did so quickly, passing a modified version of the Sinde law—judges will now have to issue the actual blacklist order, for instance.

…

Whatever you think of the resulting legislation, the process was grotesque: the Spanish film industry got one of its officials into power, then promoted a tough new law backed by the threats (and even active lobbying) of the US government—though the US didn’t take the same measures itself.

This is yet another demonstration of American content industries’ ability (and willingness) to exert political pressure through the State Department to affect legislative changes around the world. It’s absolutely absurd that such a small segment of the American economy can wield such incredible power. The Web, and Internet, is larger in economic, political, and cultural importance than any particular group of rights holders; copyright should not trump the laws governing the next generation of content generation and dissemination. As a content producer – with items in print – it’s absolutely reprehensible that any rights holder would actively attempt to undermine the principles of open and free exchange of knowledge that the Web is based upon.

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The credit card that may stop, or at least hinder, on- and offline fraud

From the article:

If someone steals your card, they won’t be able to use it without your code unlocking the number and coding the strip. Since the credit card number is generated fresh for each transaction, there is no data to be stolen in the case of a hack. Citibank is now using the cards in small pilot programs, and the company is hoping to see more banks and cities using the technology.

The dynamic nature of the magnetic strip opens up a number of other applications. I saw a card that had two numbers, so you can keep your business and personal accounts on the same card. You hit a flat button next to each number to select it; a light shines showing you which account is active, and the magnetic strip is coded with that number. Change accounts, and the magnetic strip is instantly reprogrammed. Each card comes with a battery that should last three years.

Of course, this technology is being developed because the US has been so bloody slow adopting the Chip + PIN system that most other nations are adopting. While there are certainly problems with Chip + PIN it makes a lot more sense to work on, and try to resolve, those problems instead of inventing convoluted new technologies to address known-bad systems. Curious about the payment card fiascos? Check out the comments of the Ars article, you might learn a lot.