Noah Shachtman:

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come.

CEO Christopher Ahlberg:

We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring

Julian Sanchez:

They're calling it a tweak.

Yet those four little words would make a huge difference.

I can see both sides of this dispute. It really boils down to what you think the scope of the term is. I tend to agree that the term ought to be clearly defined, and that is part of the problem. Congress will need to wade into this water and clearly regulate what kinds of electronic transactional records are available without court review.

A very good example is locational information from the cellular phone system. The FBI wants it without a warrant, some courts have argued that a warrant would be required. This change may push the argument in the FBI's favor.

The fact is that we're going to need to see some limit on warrantless collection of transactional information if we're going to maintain some semblance of a right against unreasonable privacy intrusions in a world where everything that we do is constantly being recorded by computers.

Obama's Power Grab

Howard Schmidt:

Today, I am pleased to announce the latest step in moving our Nation forward in securing our cyberspace with the release of the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). This first draft of NSTIC was developed in collaboration with key government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates. What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

No longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services.

We seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers -- both public and private -- to authenticate themselves online ...

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

To get the page backup, I have to swear under penalty of perjury that I think the takedown was a mistake (yet the sender of a takedown does not have to swear that they think the takedown is valid!), consent to a lawsuit if the sender disagrees, and wait two weeks. Two weeks!

In short, the DMCA lets you get any page taken off the Internet for two weeks. This isn’t just a law itching for abuse; it’s a law being abused.

The problem, which isn't limited to the DMCA, is that our justice system is not blind to wealth. If you are wealthy, its not expensive to send out C&D notices such as DMCA "takedowns." In fact, you can make legal threats of every sort and variety, no matter how unreasonable, essentially without consequence, as long as the people you are threatening are not wealthy. Most people who live in our society do not have the means to defend themselves against legal claims in our justice system, no matter how unreasonable or illogical or downright fraudulent those claims might be. The consequence is that wealth makes right - always - unless you're lucky enough that some public interest law firm takes an intellectual interest in the case.

There ought to be financial consequences associated with fraudulent legal threats. Its the only thing that I can see that would balance the scales. Its not about recovering the money wasted complying with a fraudulent claim - its about ensuring that people don't file fraudulent claims in the first place.

Is the DMCA a scam?

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

Blindness, and Seeing

Hadley Leggett:

Starting this fall, you'll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called "WikiTrust" will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

Called WikiTrust, the program assigns a color code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates author reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It's based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it's likely to be.

"They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the project.

Noteworthy writes: It's pretty egregious that neither Wired nor the WikiTrust folks bothered to mention the Puppy Smoothies paper, which was published in 2006, a year before the earliest citations on the WikiTrust site. (Why didn't Virgil mention this?)

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

Decius: Noteworthy later points out that the Wikitrust people did reference my paper in their first paper. I'm really happy to see these ideas making it into practice regardless of how much credit I'm getting. I pushed the ball a little bit forward but these guys have taken it all the way and thats awesome. Congrats Wikitrust!

Wikipedia adopts Text Coloring for Trust Idea that I helped develop

Thanks to two other MemeStreams users I learned that the new Obama flavor DHS laptop search policies are out and that the ACLU is suing DHS for more specific information.

I read through all of this stuff.

The most important take away is that Obama is continuing the civil liberties excesses of the Bush years. That impression is no longer theoretical. This isn't some lawsuit that they were already up to their ears in when he took office. This is administration policy that was radically expanded during the Bush years which Obama's team took the time to review, reconsider, and rewrite. This is Obama on civil liberties. Its not pretty.

While I'm glad that DHS took the step of publishing this information it will not resolve the substantive policy debate in any way.

Janet Napolitano seems to disagree:

“The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”

In fact, with one minor exception that I'll discuss, there is no "civil liberty" acknowledged here, so this policy cannot be said to strike any sort of balance.

These documents explain that DHS randomly seizes laptops, cellphones, and cameras and "detains" them for indepth forensic analysis in search of evidence of any crime. They will usually keep these items for less than 5 days but they can keep them for extended periods of time. By randomly I mean without any suspicion at all. They literally pick you out of the line at random.

We're told that DHS will store the electronics in a secure location and destroy any copies when they are done with them, but anything else would be totally irresponsible. The mere fact that they aren't leaving your laptop in an insecure location doesn't balance your civil liberties interests!

The privacy impact study does take the time in its introduction to acknowledge that "the... central privacy concern is the sheer volume and range of types of information available on electronic devices as opposed to a more traditional briefcase or backpack." It almost sounds like they are off to a good start, but the document never directly addresses the privacy implications of having Customs officers forensically examine that information, which includes detailed records of personal correspondence, work product, web surfing history, photographs and music collections, etc. That is the central concern here and the document steps around it with a creepy degree of bureaucratic blindness:

CBP and ICE have identified six privacy risks associated with the examination, detention, retention, and/or seizure of a traveler’s electronic device or information during a border search: (1) t... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

DHS Secretary Napolitano Announces New Directives on Border Searches of Electronic Media

Brian Ulrich:

Not if, but when.

Over the past 7 years I have been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.

Thom Andersen:

Perhaps "Blade Runner" expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation, because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter and blander. Buffalo will become Miami, and Los Angeles will become Death Valley at least until the rising ocean tides wipe it away. Computers will get faster, and we will get slower. There will be plenty of progress, but few of us will be any better off or happier for it. Robots won't be sexy or dangerous, they'll be dull and efficient and they'll take our jobs.

Gregory Clark:

The economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.

Niall Ferguson:

Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.

Even Felix the Cat's luck ran out during the Depression.

Jared Diamond:

When you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.

David Piling, at lunch with Jared Diamond:

I am famished, and opt for a bit of everything.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Dark Stores

Recently, Comcast has added a "Domain Helper" to its DNS servers. Now, instead of implementing the DNS protocol as specified in the RFC, Comcast will redirect your query to a Comcast-branded Yahoo! search page, using the text of your DNS query as search input to Yahoo. Never mind that this breaks the Internet ... there are ads to be served!

This service is reminiscent of Verisign's SiteFinder service from ~2003, about which much hubbub is preserved in the MemeStreams archive. (See below.)

Comcast customers can opt out of Domain Helper:

When a non-existent web address is typed into a browser, a built-in error message is displayed. The Comcast's Domain Helper service is designed to help guide you to a useful search page that has a list of recommended sites that come close to matching the original web address that did not exist.

If you are a residential or commercial cable modem subscriber, and you wish to opt-out of the Comcast Domain Helper service, please complete the form below.

At the end of this process they inform you that it may take two days for the opt-out procedure to be completed. Meanwhile, enjoy the broken DNS!

From the archive, a small selection on SiteFinder:

VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organization ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012.

The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.

The dispute over who controls key portions of the Internet's address system erupted into open conflict today when VeriSign Inc., the world's largest addressing company, sued the Internet's most visible regulatory body, charging that it has been unfairly prevented from developing new services for Internet users.

We all rely on them [DNS servers], and their management should be done in a way appropriate for their status.

Omniture is now tracking hits to every nonexistent .com/.net domain thanks to Verisign.

Comcast Domain Helper Opt-Out

Martin Wolf:

The UK's fiscal position, with a deficit of 14 per cent of gross domestic product forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for 2010, is radically unsustainable. Big spending cuts and tax increases, relative to GDP, are inevitable.

Paul Krugman:

Lost decade, anyone?

Mike Shedlock:

Today, Riksbank, Sweden's central bank cut the deposit rate to -0.25%, effectively charging savers interest on deposited money.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age:

Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital maniupulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years and then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.

The abandoned or stalled developments -- and Martins's photos of them -- can be seen as signs of the hubris (and occasional criminality) that typified the boom and the economic and human damage that remained in its wake.

Tom Vanderbilt:

Sure, people were gullible, living beyond their means as Edmund Andrews admits to doing. But as Alyssa Katz reminds us, the real estate bubble was also a crime scene. The only trouble is delineating where crime ended and social policy began.

Richard Florida:

One thing we know about crises is they frequently bring about significant changes in the system of housing tenure. The Great Depression and New Deal innovations in housing finance and housing policy, plus the post-war boom and infrastructure building, brought a massive shift toward single family homeownership. My hunch is it's time for new hybrid forms of housing tenure which mix the benefits of ownership with the flexibility of renting.

Michael Spence:

What can we expect as the world’s economy emerges from its most serious downturn in almost a century?

Lower growth is the best guess for the medium term. It seems most likely, but no one really knows.

It is not inconceivable that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water.

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

A Dish Best Left Uneaten