"What we're trying to do is . . . improve public confidence that this privilege is invoked very rarely and only when it's well supported," said a senior department official involved in the review, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy had not yet been unveiled. "By holding ourselves to this higher standard, we're in some way sending a message to the courts. We're not following a 'just trust us' approach."

You mean these assertions weren't subject to internal review before?!

Obama to Set Higher Bar for Keeping State Secrets - washingtonpost.com

Data-Mining - not just for counterterrorism.

“The IDW objective was to create a data warehouse that uses certain data elements to provide a single-access repository for information related to issues beyond counterterrorism to include counterintelligence, criminal and cyber investigations,” stated a formerly secret fiscal year 2008 budget request document. “These missions will be refined and expanded as these capabilities are folded into the NSAC.”

They're going to collect everything they can and use it to investigate everything they can.

FBI’s Data-Mining System Sifts Airline, Hotel, Car-Rental Records | Threat Level | Wired.com

lonew0lf wrote:
Congress is going to give health care entities an exception to notify people if they get broken in to as long as they use cryptography.

A large percentage of compelled data breach notifications involve accidental data loss - an employee looses their laptop or some backup tapes get misplaced and no one can account for them. If in such cases the data was properly encrypted, it hasn't necessarily been exposed. I think its reasonable for the state to allow entities to forgo notifications in these cases. These kinds of exceptions give these entities a reason to invest in encrypting data at rest and they have motivated large scale adoption of encryption in corporate environments in recent years.

The question is - exactly what kinds of encryption are considered adequate. The Federal Register notification linked through this article says "The guidance specified encryption and destruction as the technologies and methodologies for rendering protected health information, as well as PHR identifiable health
information under section 13407 of the Act and the FTC’s implementing regulation, unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized
individuals such that breach notification is not required. The RFI asked for general comment on this guidance as well as for specific comment on the technologies and methodologies to render protected health information unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals."

If this is something that concerns you'd I'd suggest digging up that guidance and checking to see if you think the requirements are adequate.

RE: Congress needs to get punched in the face!

Since there's apparently been a problem with EVs not making enough noise to scare pedestrians back into the crosswalk, Nissan has now decided to add sound effects to their vehicles for conspicuity (and probably to open another revenue stream for the RIAA). Imagine sitting next to the overpass thirty years from now and hearing something that sounds like an Eno soundtrack as cars whizz by.

Nissan makes EV's sound-themable

“It will be a long slog -- a matter of years -- with the risk of some relapses along the way."

Wired's Long Boom cover story was one of the most insipid things that they ever printed. It was clear the minute you saw it that the exact opposite was going to happen.

I think "The Long Slog" would be a more apt name for the present era.

In 1997 I was a student. By the time this slog is over, I will be an old man.

Volcker Sees ‘Long Slog’ for U.S. Economy, Seeks Bank Limits - Bloomberg.com

The ad questions why Ross has fought against a government-run health care plan when a poll shows that 55% of people in his state support it. Ross, the ad notes, has taken $921,670 in campaign contributions from health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry since arriving in Congress.

Its important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change - it is us. I don't really believe in campaign finance reform - if you pass federal laws removing the money from one location it is just going to pop up somewhere else. People are under tremendous pressure from pundits, churches, activists, and true believers to tout a party line and wealthy people will always be able to get their messages out. It is easy to mislead the public when you have millions with which to do it.

I've always been a believer that the answer to bad speech is better speech. We need good, publicly funded, refereed voter guides that provide balanced information about the issues, and we need to promote a culture that advocates that people evaluate the information in these guides objectively and without regard to partisan bias.

I've written about this subject here.

What Lessig is up to.

... well, almost.

Tom Cruise makes up for all that scientology crap...

The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination.

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession | Mail Online

o/~ i can see clearly now
    the rain has gone... o/~

--timball

The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful

Bob Barr wrote a nice essay on border searches of laptops that does a good job picking at the argument that nothing has changed:

In earlier times, the government also relied much more heavily than nowadays on customs duties for its revenues, and the number of offenses for which federal agents were responsible was far fewer. As such, it was difficult to fault customs agents for conducting brief physical inspections of travelers’ luggage.

Unlike customs agents in the post-Revolutionary War era, however, the jurisdiction today of federal law enforcement agents encompasses literally thousands of criminal and civil offenses...

The huge expansion of the universe of possible offenses for which an individual can be charged, coupled with the massive increase in the amount of information that can be stored on even the cheapest of modern electronic devices, has caused many privacy advocates and civil libertarians to question the propriety if not the constitutionality of this vast expansion of the government’s “border search” power. In the absence of legislation placing reasonable limits on this power, the 1,000 such searches just of laptops the government said it has conducted in the last year, will expand exponentially.

Their policy allows them to search every single laptop.

Going abroad? Leave the laptop | The Barr Code