Due to a court ruling the UK is more or less living with a SOPA style Internet filtering system. News today that it is, of course, blocking access to legitimate content:

Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.

Contrast this actual reality with the following statement made by Chris Dodd during the SOPA debate:

THR: How do you answer critics who say this legislation would be a threat to free speech online?

Dodd: That’s the most offensive line of all... Illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment. The Internet is not a law-free zone. It doesn’t create exceptions for illegal activity. Stealing is wrong. The First Amendment doesn’t protect stealing. There’s nothing in this bill in any manner, shape or form that would deprive people of their First Amendment rights.

You know the great H.L. Menken line: "When they tell you it's not about the money, it's about the money." So they bring up freedom of speech, break the Internet. But the fact of the matter is, it’s a huge revenue stream off of this.

He goes on to argue that the DMCA also has no consequences at all for freedom of speech!

That was the same argument made 14 years ago when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was adopted. And it’s the same argument — the sky is falling. You only need to go back and take a cursory look to see what happened in the last 14 years, the advances and innovations in technology despite the claims in 1998 [of what would happen] if [Congress] passed that act. It did not break the Internet. It did not deprive anyone of freedom of speech at all. And it certainly did not curtail or stymie creative innovation in new technology.

This is what SOPA looks like.

I'm recommending this article as an entry point into a very interesting rabbit hole regarding the NDAA. Rand Paul and Dianne Feinstein have proposed a simple amendment stating that an authorization for the use of military force by Congress does not authorize the indefinite detention of US citizens on US soil unless it is explicitly stated.

I can't say that I have a problem with such a clarification, but everybody else does.

The libertarian left doesn't like it because the Constitution prevents such detentions of both citizens and non-citizens alike. I agree with that in theory, but it clearly didn't help much in the case of Padilla and the matter was never really satisfactorily resolved, so I can't say I'm opposed to some clarification from Congress even if it is only part of what is needed.

The authoritarians don't like it because they don't like civil liberties at all. The Wall Street Journal editorial that the linked blog post skewers is a great example. Check out this zinger:

With its strict rules on surveillance, the U.S. is already something of a safe haven for people who wish to kill innocents.

Seriously?

Frankly, the time for Congress to make this clarification was in 2002, not in 2012. It means little now. Furthermore, the authoritarians have a funny way of referring to Supreme Court decisions that occurred over the past 10 years in which they got their asses handed to them as if they agreed with those positions all along. Here is the WSJ again:

This question last reached the Supreme Court in the 2004 case of Louisiana-born al Qaeda terrorist Yasser Hamdi. The Court said that Hamdi deserved a habeas corpus hearing to challenge his detention, but it reasonably declined to equate his predicament with that of a domestic criminal.

The authoritarians didn't want Hamdi to have a habeas hearing either!

In the end, although its nice to have Congress clarifying things like this, the Supreme Court is the only authority that the authoritarians respect. The message needs to come from there.

Or we need to amend the Constitution to clarify this rather than passing a bill in Congress.

WSJ editors come out swinging in defense of indefinite detention of US citizens | Privacy SOS

The issue is long-standing royalty rate discrimination against internet radio. As each new form of radio was invented (including cable and satellite radio), new legislation was passed but only addressed the new form. The result is dramatically different royalty rates: satellite pays about 7.5% of revenues and cable pays about 15%, while Pandora pays more than 50% of revenue in royalties. The inequity in how different digital radio formats are treated under the law when it comes to setting royalties is a clear case of legislation falling behind advances in technology. The current law penalizes new media and is astonishingly unfair to internet radio.

This has long been a problem. Lots of history here.

The royalty system for Internet Radio has always been broken. Internet Radio stations are required to pay several kinds of royalties that traditional FM broadcast stations and satellite based radio stations are not required to pay. The recording industry negotiated themselves a bigger pie slice on the Internet through a process that included shutting down a large number of stations in the summer of 2002 (including SOMA FM) because the industry didn't think those stations were big enough to bother allowing them to exist and its leadership has no concept of how things in technology grow over time.

Why doesn't the government have consistent policies for this?

The answer is Realpolitik - nascent Internet services don't have the negotiating position of the ClearChannels of the world, and the RIAA is too myopic to understand that they are strangling new revenue streams in the cradle.

Support The Internet Radio Fairness Act – Pandora Radio

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to require police to obtain a warrant before reading people's emails, Facebook messages and other forms of electronic communication.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the author of the bill and chairman of the committee, said he does not expect the full Senate to vote on the measure until next year.

I don't know what to think of Leahy anymore after the SOPA debacle. Its nice to see someone doing something positive for privacy rights in our government. Politics is weird. Your mortal enemy on one bill might be your best friend on another.

Senate panel votes to require warrant for police email searches - The Hill's Hillicon Valley

This post by Stewart Baker has apparently riled up the Internet for two reasons. One is because he is a supporter of the TSA, and lots of people have a problem with that, and are looking for an opportunity to attack him for it. The second reason is because he makes the mistake of framing his analysis in the context of sex, and for some reason everyone has taken that a bit too seriously.

In fact, there is a lot of pressure to be efficient when negotiating the TSA security line. That pressure isn't sexual. The people behind you will be annoyed with you if you move too slowly through the line. The agents will scream at you if you do something wrong. Although these pressures aren't about sex, they are real, and it makes sense to discuss their impact on people's perceptions of the TSA.

I totally agree with Barker's conclusions in this article, even though I disagree with him about a great many other things.

The agency should avoid any hint that it is judging our performance from on high. How about a sign on the way to the belt that says, “Forty of the forty-two TSA officers now on duty have forgotten their cell phones at least once while walking through the scanner. We’re hoping this sign will help you avoid our mistake”? Or one that says, “We change our protocols from time to time to make life harder for terrorists. We know it makes life harder for you too, and we’re sorry. If you’ve got questions about the new procedures, just ask”?

I have been yelled at by TSA agents before, for messing up the procedures of the security line. TSA agents should never assume that travelers understand the procedures of the security line. TSA agents should never yell at travelers. Whats worse is in this case my knowledge of the procedures was correct and the TSA agent was wrong.

I have an 11 inch Macbook Air. Although TSA regs require laptops to be taken out of your bag for screening, the 11 inch Macbook Air is so small that the TSA doesn't consider it a laptop - it is a personal electronics device, like a video game system or mp3 player, and it can stay in the bag.

However, the person operating the X-ray machine has the right to ask that any device be removed from the bag and rescreened. Unfortunately, in this case the x-ray screener didn't tell the agents to remove the electronics device from my bag - she said "Laptop in bag!" at which point I had a TSA agent confronting me about the fact that there was a laptop in my bag and explaining forcefully that all laptops must be removed from bags prior to screening.

While I removed the laptop from the bag I tried to explain that the device was not a laptop per the TSA's regs. This really pissed the agent off - "Does it have a keyboard on it!? Then it must come out! ALL LAPTOPS MUST BE REMOVED FROM BAGS PRIOR TO SCREENING!!"

Eventually several other TSA agents joined in the argument and in the end they explained to me that I had made an incorrect assumption about what the first agent had said. In my mind the meaning of "Does it have a keyboard on it?" is crystal clear.

Stewart Baker is absolutely right - the TSA could use an attitude adjustment. There is no reason to scream at people who are trying to comply with the policies. It is unfortunate that this point seems to have been lost among all the hand wringing over the fact that he framed the issue in sexual terms.

You can't talk to Americans about sex. We're too conservative. We can't take it.

The Volokh Conspiracy » Sex Secrets of the Security Line

Police used Moocherhunter to find other devices connected to the subscriber’s wireless router, which led them to Richard Stanley, who lived across the street from the subscriber. Police then used the Moocherhunter information to obtain a warrant to search Mr. Stanley’s home, and based on evidence they found, Mr. Stanley was indicted in November 2011 for possessing child pornography.

Mr. Stanley sought to suppress the evidence, arguing that police needed a warrant to use Moocherhunter to locate him. U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti found that Mr. Stanley “could have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the signal he was sending to or receiving” from the wireless router.

“An internet subscriber does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address or the information he provides to his Internet Service Provider, such as Comcast, in order to legally establish an internet connection, and likewise, a person connecting to another person’s wireless router does not have an expectation of privacy in that connection,” she wrote in a Nov. 14 order.

I'm not sure whether you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location from which you are making a wireless transmission (a reasonable expectation against triangulation). I'm also positive that if you did, the police would have successfully obtained a warrant in this case. However, I'm also pretty sure that the argument quoted above is incorrect in its reasoning, if not in its conclusions (again, I'm not sure what the right conclusion is, but this reasoning doesn't get me there.)

The reason you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding your IP address and subscriber information is the third party rule - things that you've told your ISP, you've told the government, more or less. You haven't told a wireless access point what your physical location is, so if you have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding that information, its for a totally different reason.

Update: OK, I think I figured out how this should work. The rule should be the same as for automobile searches - probable cause should be required but a warrant should not be required.

Wireless transmissions are fickle and transient. Police may need to act in the moment to triangulate them, and so the bureaucratic requirement for a warrant is too onerous and would not work in practice. However, people DO have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the physical source of their wireless transmissions, and the police should establish probable cause before triangulating them. Otherwise you have a situation where the police can monitor everyone's physical movements all the time by tracking their cellphones, and that ain't gonna work. There are several case precedents that could be used to buttress both positions.

In this case the police had probable cause. They didn't get a warrant, but they didn't need to. The triangulation of the defendant's wireless signal was proper and the evidence should not be suppressed.

Can Police Locate Wireless Internet Moochers Without a Warrant? - Law Blog - WSJ

The parties are dominated by radicals. Radicals care enough to get involved. But radicalism doesn't win you the Presidency. In a Presidential race, the radicals are a liability.

Although there are more conservatives than liberals in America, the Presidency is not won on an idealogical basis either - the American people are open to Presidents from either party. They do not share the closed mindedness that partisans have.

The American people want a vision for running the country that has a chance of actually working.

Kerry never asserted such a vision - a vote for him was really a vote against George Bush, for a variety of reasons. Obama, on the other hand, inspired a lot of people in his first campaign that he had a different way forward.

The reason Republicans couldn't sell it this time around was that the story was deregulation and low taxes. Its the same story that we'd gotten from the Bush administration, and people know that those policies created the economic mess that we've just lived through. Only partisans are unable to see that.

Romney played up the idea that these four years haven't been that great, so why not try something different, but people weren't buying it. They associate the pain they are currently feeling with the policies Romney is offering to switch to.

I'm not happy about all the talk about demographics that is factoring into the aftermath. Its overtly racist - its the view that America is a country of people of particular colors and sexes and your political views more or less boil down to what color your skin is and what kind of sex organs you have, so if a particular party can just appeal to certain colors and certain organs they can build a coalition that will put them into office.

The Presidency is not won on an idealogical basis, so building coalitions of identity groups is not sufficient. Furthermore, I want a candidate that appeals to what I think rather than who I am.

If Republicans want to be relevant again they either have to come up with a plan that actually makes sense right now, or they have to wait until the plan they have makes sense again.

A stuck clock, is, in fact, right twice a day.

There are times when lower taxes and deregulation are the things that you want. The 1980's were such a time. Every situation is not just like the 1980's. This situation is not anything like the 1980's. The solution that worked in the 1980's will not work now. The solutions that will work now would not have worked then.

If the Republicans could come to the table with a proposal that might actually work now, they would be more relevant, but they can't. They are signed up to rigid agreements not to raise taxes and they are prepared to drive the country off the cliff rather than raise the debt ceiling.

They are too beholden to their solutions to actually think about the problem, and they think the reason Romney lost was because he was too moderate, rather than because he wasn't proposing something that made sense, so they aren't going to start putting the problem before their ideology any time soon.

So the Republican party is our stuck clock, which we are going to put away for now because it isn't telling us the right time. I think it is going to be about another decade before we really need to get that clock out of the closet again. By then it is going to be covered by a lot of dust and it might be hard to get it running. That means the pendulum is probably going to swing too far to the left, because once it gets going in that direction it might be hard to slow it down.

There is a wildcard though. If the Dems make a major national security mistake, the Republicans will be back in again in a heartbeat.

I think this is a pretty accurate summation:

Heather Higgins, of Independent Women's Voice: "A majority of the American people believe that the one good point about Republicans is they won't raise taxes. However they also believe Republicans caused the economic mess in the first place and might do it again, cannot be trusted to care about cutting spending in a way that is remotely concerned about who it hurts, and are retrograde to the point of caricature on everything else."

Noonan: 'People Are Afraid of Change' - WSJ.com

Now Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, the co-CEOs at the $2 trillion Pimco money managers, are citing the same biblical warning to jar investors awake and prepare for the coming lean years of slow, low growth and austerity. Except in Pimco’s new warning, the future just got much, much darker for investors — no recovery until 2022.

The long blah.

Stocks dead, bonds deader till 2022: Pimco - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch

And what really takes place in the United States is that there's an almost unspoken assumption that this is the war that the United States can win on its own. And I just don't think that's true. So, what we see is the U.S. trying to do more, the U.S. trying to do more. The only people that can really decisively defeat al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula are Yemenis themselves. I think what's taking place right now is that by the U.S. acting so heavy-handedly that the U.S. is actually closing down the amount of space that local clerics, that tribesmen in Yemen have, to stand up and confront al-Qaida and say, look, what it is that you're doing, what it is that you're arguing has no place within Islam. And in fact, we have seen some clerics do this in Yemen. There was a case just a few months ago where an anti-al-Qaida cleric was standing up, was lecturing in the mosque that these suicide bombings were a travesty, that they were crimes. And this cleric, unfortunately, was an individual who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.

'The Last Refuge': Fighting Al-Qaida In Yemen | WBUR & NPR