On a Tuesday night two weeks ago, the letter showed up in the mail. It is included below, so you can see for yourself the kind of verbal mastery it takes to make a legal document sound like Keillor’s forlorn nostalgic prose.
Let’s quickly review the situation: Garrison Keillor — a liberal comedian! — is threatening to sue MNspeak — some blog! — that uses a t-shirt to poke fun of his mega-gigantic media empire. You’d think we shot Guy Noir or something.
via Glenn
After 10 years in the business, Anonymizer has two million active users. The US government pays it to promote the service in China and Iran in order to help promote free speech.
But these programs are becoming popular in the West too.
The software encrypts all your requests for webpages. Anonymizer’s servers then automatically gather the content on your behalf and send it back to you.
No humans are involved and the company does not keep records of who requests what.
However, there is some censorship. Anonymizer does not support anonymous uploading to the web, and it blocks access to material that would be illegal under US law.
Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel created a very useful short film on the oxymoron “Trusted Computing”.
BBC:
“MI5 has recently let it be known that it is in favour of making telephone intercept evidence admissible in court. Previously the intelligence and security services had expressed concern such that evidence might reveal operational details. Meanwhile, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has been calling for EU states to keep mobile phone and e-mail records for longer, to help fight terrorism and crime.”
According to Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders), Information supplied by Yahoo! helped Chinese journalist Shi Tao get 10 years in prison
The text of the verdict in the case of journalist Shi Tao – sentenced in April to 10 years in prison for “divulging state secrets abroad” – shows that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided China’s state security authorities with details that helped to identify and convict him. It reveals that the company provided the Chinese investigating organs with detailed information that apparently enabled them to link Shi’s personal e-mail account (on the Chinese Yahoo! service at yahoo.com.cn) and the specific message containing information treated as a “state secret” to the IP address of his computer. More details from RSF here.
Shi Tao was jailed because he e-mailed sensitive political information to be posted on dissident websites hosted outside China. His case is a cautionary tale to bloggers around the world: If you are publicizing information and views that your government doesn’t want exposed – even if you believe you have the right to do so under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – companies like Yahoo! will not shield you from your government.
Click here for the full text in both Chinese and English of the Shi Tao verdict (PDF document) courtesy of the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based non-governmental organization.
www.opengovernment.org (PDF):
The government is withholding more information than ever from the public and expanding ways of shrouding data. Last year, federal agencies spent a record $148 creating and storing new secrets for each $1 spent declassifying old secrets, a coalition of watchdog groups reported Saturday. That’s a $28 jump from 2003 when $120 was spent to keep secrets for every $1 spent revealing them.
Slashdot discussion
The State of Massachusetts is moving its workers away from Microsoft Office toward open source tools.
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.
In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.
Bruce Schneier on “Trusted” Computing:
The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an industry consortium that is trying to build more secure computers. They have a lot of members, although the board of directors consists of Microsoft, Sony, AMD, Intel, IBM, SUN, HP, and two smaller companies who are voted on in a rotating basis.
The basic idea is that you build a computer from the ground up securely, with a core hardware “root of trust” called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Applications can run securely on the computer, can communicate with other applications and their owners securely, and can be sure that no untrusted applications have access to their data or code.
This sounds great, but it’s a double-edged sword. The same system that prevents worms and viruses from running on your computer might also stop you from using any legitimate software that your hardware or operating system vendor simply doesn’t like. The same system that protects spyware from accessing your data files might also stop you from copying audio and video files. The same system that ensures that all the patches you download are legitimate might also prevent you from, well, doing pretty much anything.
James Cook left on a business trip to Florida, and his wife Paula went to Oklahoma to care for her sick mother. When the two returned to Frisco, Texas, several days later, their keys didn’t work. The locks on the house had been changed.They spent their first night back sleeping in a walk-in closet, with a steel pipe ready to cold-cock any intruders. The next day, they met the man who thought he owned their house, because he had put a US$12,000 down payment to someone named Carlos Ramirez. The Cooks went to the Denton County Courthouse and checked their title. Someone had forged Paula Cook’s maiden name, Paula Smart, and transferred the deed to Carlos Ramirez. Paula’s identity was not only stolen, but the thief also stole her house. Even the police said they’ve never seen a case like this one, but suspect the criminal was able to steal the identity and the house with just Mrs. Cook’s Social Security number, driver’s license number and a copy of her signature.
Via Bruce Schneier who points out that the National ID card (supported by our good Senators Feingold & Kohl) won’t solve this problem:
This is a perfect example of the sort of fraud issue that a national ID card won’t solve. The problem is not that identity credentials are too easy to forge. The problem is that the criminal needed nothing more than “Mrs. Cook’s Social Security number, driver’s license number and a copy of her signature.” And the solution isn’t a harder-to-forge card; the solution is to make the procedure for transferring real-estate ownership more onerous. If the Denton County Courthouse had better transaction authentication procedures, the particulars of identity authentication — a national ID, a state driver’s license, biometrics, or whatever — wouldn’t matter.
If we are ever going to solve identity theft, we need to think about it properly. The problem isn’t misused identity information; the problem is fraudulent transactions.