Bob Gritzinger on Orwell’s 1984 paranoia made real in our cars:

Someday it?ll happen, probably when you least expect it. Just as you countersteer while drifting out of a tight corner, or after you punch the brakes hard, you?ll hear the mechanically animated female voice emanating from your car?s audio system:
?Collision detected. Calling OnStar.?
You need not be anywhere close to a collision, really. For our road test team this summer, it was just a matter of running a routine slalom in a Chevy Malibu Maxx?without so much as hitting a rubber cone?when OnStar called to check up on our driver?s health.
If you?re anything like us, it won?t be until after you?ve explained to the distant helper that you didn?t have an accident, the airbags did not deploy, and you don?t need assistance, that you?ll begin to experience an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.
How?d they know that you were driving like that? What else do they know? And who else knows?

Dan Glickman, a former politician and ag secretary from Kansas, is now running the MPAA (motion picture association of america). Glickman is kicking off his reign with a series of lawsuits against movie downloaders. Via Slashdot.

Ryan Singel:

New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual’s name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.
The State Department hopes the addition of the chips, which employ radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology, will make passports more secure and harder to forge, according to spokeswoman Kelly Shannon.
The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure,” Shannon said. “It’s yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally.”
But civil libertarians and some technologists say the chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person’s biographical information and photo from several feet away.

Cory Doctorow:

Disney’s being sued by a kids’ hospital that has the rights to the Peter Pan novels. The hospital says that the 1998 Sonny Bono term-extension (a law that Disney bought in order to ensure that its earliest cartoons didn’t enter the public domain) covers the Peter Pan stories and so Disney owes it royalties on a sequel that a publishing subsidiary put out. Disney says that the law doesn’t cover the Pan books — and that it should know, since it paid for that law! — and now they’re going to court.

Robert O’Harrow Jr:

It began as one of the Bush administration’s most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat.
The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election.
Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.
Bell’s new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd., intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and other information services. One of the first customers is information giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government system that was known until recently as the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight.

This is not a big surprise. I’m sure we’ll see more of it.

Gizmodo:

A Boston hotel called Nine Zero is using biometric iris scanning to replace room keys, allowing guests to gain access to their rooms with just a quick flash of the eyeball. Using a system from LG, first-time guests have a picture of their iris scanned, which is quickly encrypted to a hashed numeric code and the source image deleted (meaning they don’t keep a copy of your iris on file, just the results a scan of your iris would provide). Because the data can be held on to indefinitely, returning guests can make reservations and gain access to their rooms without ever talking to a clerk, booking a room by email and getting their room number in response.

Nice to see US Attorney General John Ashcroft is busy addressing our most pressing legal needs: protecting Hollywood.

Ashcroft declares “most aggressive assault” on piracy in US history

At a press conference in Los Angeles today, Atttorney General John Ashcroft announced an expansion of Department of Justice powers to combat intellectual property theft. Some say the approach appears to be modeled after the war on drugs.
The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation’s intellectual property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a “widespread” problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.

In an extensive report released Tuesday, senior department officials endorsed a pair of controversial copyright bills strongly favored by the entertainment industry that would criminalize “passive sharing” on file-swapping networks and permit lawsuits against companies that sell products that “induce” copyright infringement.
Link to Declan’s News.com story, Link to DoJ press release, Link to the lengthy report issued today by the DoJ’s Task Force on Intellectual Property (PDF). More coverage at the LA Times: Link 1, Link 2

Via Boing Boing