Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.null

L. Gordon Crovitz: You Commit Three Felonies a Day - WSJ.com

The celebration in many Muslim countries that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has given way to broad disillusionment with mass killing and the ideology behind it, according to a number of polls.

Between 2002 and 2009, the view that suicide bombings are “often or sometimes justified” has declined, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, from 43 percent to 12 percent in Jordan; from 26 percent to 13 percent in Indonesia; and from 33 percent to 5 percent in Pakistan (excluding some sparsely populated, embattled areas). Positive ratings for Osama bin Laden have fallen by half or more in most of the countries Pew polled.

Rethinking Our Terrorist Fears - NYTimes.com

Munich police restricted car traffic at the Oktoberfest and detained two Islamic extremists after al-Qaeda threats against Germany suggested the world’s largest beer festival may be a terror target.

The detainees have links to Abu Talha, an al-Qaeda spokesman who urged Germans in a video before yesterday’s election to vote for pulling German troops out of Afghanistan, Munich police spokesman Peter Reichl said by phone today.

Al-Qaeda released videos threatening Germany before the election, prompting tighter security at airports and train stations and a flight ban over the Oktoberfest, which draws an average 375,000 people a day. The 16-day festival of beer, sausages and lederhosen ends Oct. 4.

“We’ve looked at the six videos,” Reichl said. “We took the measures after one of them showed an image of the Oktoberfest and Harrach talked about Muslims needing to stay home for two weeks after the election.”

Munich Cordons Off Oktoberfest, Two Islamic Extremists Held - Bloomberg.com

An all female tribe of martial artists who live deep in the forest. For real.

In the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging. Calling themselves the “Asgarda”, the women seek complete autonomy from men. Residing in the Carpathian Mountains, the tribe is comprised of 150 women of varying ages, primarily students, led by 30 year-old Katerina Tarnouska. Reviving the tribal traditions of the Scythian Amazons of ancient Greek mythology, the Asgarda train in martial arts, taught by former Soviet karate master, Volodymyr Stepanovytch, and learn life skills and sciences in order to become ideal women.

PLANET° » Asgarda

I think it is important to correct an error I made in my response to Texas Instruments' DMCA takedown order. I wrote:

I did not include specific information, such as the numeric keys, which might have facilitated [the violation of Texas Instruments' Intellectual Property.]

Then later:

I sympathize with your position Mr. Foster. In fact, the post you asked me to remove predicted that Texas Instruments might pursue legal action against the people who are attempting to violate their intellectual property. However, I am not one of those people and I ever expected to receive a legal threat from you.

Although I did not include the numeric keys in my post, I would not have been facilitating the violation of TI's IP even if I had done so. I think that Jennifer Granick has made a clear and correct case in her blog post about this controversy that Texas Instruments does not have a legitimate intellectual property interest in those keys.

The keys are not intended to protect TI's copyrights, they are intended to prevent interoperability with TI's hardware. The DMCA provides a exemption for reverse engineering to achieve interoperability. This exemption was specifically intended to prevent companies from making the sort of claims that TI has made in this instance.

In order to have a competitive and innovative technology marketplace its important that we protect the right of third parties to built unauthorized interoperable software. The alternative would see bogus claims of "copyright infringement" used to prevent third parties from building technology that supports even the most trivial protocols and interfaces. Myriad powerful peripherals, systems, and software would be eliminated from the marketplace.

The bottom line is that TI is using claims of copyright infringement in a context that has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, and they are wrong to do so.

RE: My Response to the DMCA notice I received from Texas Instruments

In a recent blog post, which you cannot read because it was censored by a DMCA takedown notice from Texas Instruments, I used the term "Angry Mob Cryptanalysis" to refer to a situation in which a distributed key cracking effort is targeted at a public key that is widely known and widely resented. This term has an origin in the annals of computer security research and my use of it might be misunderstood so I felt that I should elaborate.

Matt Blaze originally coined the term "Angry Mob Cryptanalysis" in a paper he wrote back in 1996 about government key escrow. The term and its origin are burned into my brain because I recall being excited at the prospect - a democratic check upon communications security!

In Blaze's paper a person would broadly distribute shards of his private key. If that person was later accused of a crime the police might issue a public call for shards. If a large number of people were sympathetic to the call they might reveal their shards, allowing the police to proceed with monitoring that person. Its sort of like replacing judicial warrants with a grand jury system, enforced with hard mathematical constraints that cannot be subverted. If the police want to intrude upon someone's privacy they'd have to convince a large enough group of people in the community in order to do so. A very interesting and brilliant idea with numerous variations.

But if you think about it, every key faces a threat to its security from the general public in a world where distributed key cracking efforts can be organized, regardless of whether the creator of that key intentionally escrowed it with the public in the first place. I think the term "Angry Mob Cryptanalysis" is fitting in any situation where there is a public effort to crack a key. Its a risk that designers of crypto systems need to consider - how widely distributed is your public key, what is the key strength, and how much public resentment might exist about it? If the key is weak enough and the resentment high enough, you might fall victim to a public cracking effort.

A perfect example of a place where this might be useful is the context of a computer worm like Conficker. Conficker.B currently controls about 5 million hosts on the Internet, and the security experts who monitor it are concerned that those infected nodes represent a collective threat to Internet security. For example, they could be used to launch denial of service attacks if the Conficker bot master was able to update them. Fortunately, the bot master is blocked through a daily effort by members of the Conficker Working Group to contro... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

TI’s response has been to target programmers and bloggers with cease and desist letters telling them that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act require them to take down the keys, remove links to forum discussions, and delete blog posts.

The law, however, is not on TI's side.

EFF on the DMCA takedown MemeStreams received.

Hey, TI, Leave Those Kids Alone | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Obama is defending executive power against his supporters by making shrewd moves that have the appearance of concession without the substance and leave the public believing that he has a "balanced" position on civil liberties when in fact little has changed.

Consider his initial act of closing GitMo. Highly visible and widely celebrated in liberal circles, but the courts had already put the substantive question of executive detention to rest 6 months before Obama became President. The move was entirely symbolic and frankly, a huge waste of money. In my view, leaving GitMo open would have sent a better message - that the physical location of the prison is totally irrelevant - its the policies under which it operates that matter.

Now we have the states secrets announcement. I was wrong about this to begin with - Obama is not going to reverse course on any position Bush took in pending cases unless he is forced to by some external circumstance. I think the linked observations are astute:

By voluntarily checking its own assertion of the privilege, the Administration may have slowed the momentum... to establish greater restrictions on executive use of the privilege... Ironically, then, the very policy shift that limits the privilege today may be the one that prevents courts and Congress from limiting abuse of the privilege in the future.

Also consider the recent announcement on border searches of laptops. The Bush era policy failed to specify any limit for the amount of time randomly selected laptops would be held for forensic analysis. The Obama era policy doesn't specify a limit either, but it does specify some administrative hurdles that have to be crossed if the analysis is going to take longer than 5 days. This creates the appearance of "limiting" without the substance, and some reporters fell for it - giving the administration headlines like "Homeland Security restricts laptop searches at border" and "Tighter oversight on border laptop searches".

Certainly some percentage of readers came away from the mix of headlines with the perception that Obama is taking a "balanced" position on civil liberties - which is precisely what his mainstream supporters want to hear.

These new border search policies continue to make a total mockery of the notion that we live in a free society, where law enforcement agents do not go on detailed fishing expeditions through the most private papers and correspondence of citizens without some prior suspicion. Nevertheless, in order to figure that out you'd have to pay attention to the details and actually understand whats going on. Most people don't, and the Obama administration has now clearly established a pattern of abusing that misunderstanding in order to mislead the public on these issues.

We continue to be governed by slick spinmasters who have little regard for the basic principals that underpin the great institutions they've managed to gain control of. Our downward spiral quickens.

Obama on Civil Liberties

A 24-year-old Afghan man at the center of an unfolding FBI investigation into a possible U.S. terrorism cell was ordered held without bond in Colorado Monday as authorities raced to learn more about an alleged plot using hydrogen peroxide explosives and who else might have been helping to carry it out.

Meanwhile, authorities in Washington and elsewhere were stepping up safety patrols on mass transit systems in response to an advisory issued in connection with the probe.

This sounds like one of the more serious domestic terrorism plots that has been uncovered.

Terror Probe Puts U.S. Mass Transit Systems on Alert - washingtonpost.com

Ira Winkler does not mince words in expressing his opposition to US border laptop search policies.

it is horrifying that a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil could be subject to illegal search and seizure on the basis of ... nothing -- no evidence, and not even a shred of suspicion.

Beyond that, though, there is the dubious opinion of the Department of Homeland Security's Privacy Office that searching electronic devices is no different than searching a briefcase or backpack. That is one of the most clueless statements to come out of the DHS.

I totally agree.

Opinion: Suspicionless laptop searches are wrong for many reasons