possibly noteworthy wrote:
Bellovin on Decius's HOPE topic

He seems to be searching for reason and order in an area that is patently unreasonable and hypocritical. In the case of U.S. citizens, the information customs agents are digging through their laptops for would be protected by a warrant requirement if it was transmitted Internationally over the Internet instead. The FISA update signed yesterday by George Bush makes this even more the case than it was before, as now warrants are required to monitor the communications of U.S. persons even if they are overseas. These searches are not part of a comprehensive approach to preventing the smuggling of information. No comprehensive approach is possible because warrant requirements and encryption stand in the way. The fact that neither of these things stand in the way of customs officials at the border is an accident of time, space, and technology, and not a willful result of policy.

These facts completely undermine the arguments made in the senate hearing, particularly by the Heritage Foundation's representative, that these searches are necessary for some sort of policy reason and legalistic objections to them miss the point. There is no policy reason. If there were, then you'd have to allow warrantless law enforcement monitoring of all international communications and you'd have to require cryptographic key escrow. We don't. We're not going to. We don't need to. And so we don't need to do these searches either.

RE: FISA and Border Searches of Laptops

The Department of Homeland Security is routinely searching laptops at airports when Americans re-enter the United States from abroad. The government then pores over or copies the laptop’s contents — including financial records, medical data and e-mail messages. These out-of-control searches trample the privacy rights of Americans, and Congress should rein them in.

I'm speaking on this subject at Hope in NYC next Sunday. If you are planning to be at Hope, drop by!

Editorial - The Government and Your Laptop - Editorial - NYTimes.com

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush's five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government's authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.

The Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill... New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.

Dosedo? Now that he is the nominee he needs to play to the right, whereas her actions have little long term consequence. Clearly this is a signal that mainstream Americans don't care if anti-terror forces obey the law, but I could have told you that.

Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) stressed that Congress was violating the separation of powers by interfering with the courts.

"This may be a historical embarrassment," Specter said Wednesday morning on the Senate floor. "Everyone knows we don't know what the program did, but here we are giving immunity to the telephone companies."

The Padilla case, and Gitmo, are the historical embarrassments. This telco stuff is but a footnote... perhaps an example that demonstrates Congress was unwilling to act. I'm not sure I completely understand the constitutional issues here but I'll bet the EFF/ACLU have a filing in order that should enlighten us, and I doubt the court system is going to pass on it if its credible. The EFF may have their day in court yet, but I suspect little will come of that anyway.

In general, accountability for the excesses of the GWOT can only be political. Bush has clearly demonstrated that the legal system does not literally constrain his actions. Surveillance laws can be ignored, American citizens can be seized on U.S. soil and held for many years without trial, tortured to the point where they don't really know who they are any more, and there is no accountability whatsoever.

The court system is an effective check upon the legislature, but only Congress can check the executive, and they'll only do it if large numbers of people demand it... A gapping loophole in the protections afforded by our social order. There is, ultimately, no escape from the tyranny of the majority.

For the record, I'm not terribly concerned about the rest of the compromise absent immunity. As previously noted here its cleaner than previous versions. Thats really what the EFF won at trail... a means to keep dishonest men from rewriting FISA.

Senate Approves Telecom Amnesty, Expands Domestic Spying Powers | Threat Level from Wired.com

I've had a report from someone with clue (and tcpdump) that a properly functioning DNS resolver that correctly uses randomised source ports
magically becomes vulnerable once the traffic's passed through a
Checkpoint firewall.

This is a very interesting observation that isn't constrained to Checkpoint... any NAT device that your DNS requests go through might steal any entropy your machine employed in selecting your source UDP port. There is no simple solution. The hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks here might just be near the collapsing point.

Full Disclosure: DNS and Checkpoint

New Texas Law Limits Computer Repair To Licensed Private Investigators

IJ client Mike Rife cannot compete with a government-created cartel that demands he close his businesses and complete a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator to get a state-required license to fix computers.

Texas now demands that every computer repair technician in the entire state acquire a private investigator’s license to repair a computer. To get that license, you are required to have a degree in criminal justice or perform a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator. If you perform certain repairs without a private investigator’s license, or if you have your computer repaired by someone without a license, you can be punished by a $4,000 fine and one year in jail as well as a $10,000 civil penalty.

I support the IfJ in this effort!

Institute for Justice: First Amendment Cases: Texas Computer Repair

This is a particularly good story on private "speech codes" maintained by Internet companies and the impact they have on people's discourse.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal.

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that — far from promoting smoking — the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.

The Associated Press: `Public' online spaces don't carry speech, rights

There is a causal relationship between Barbeque, Sweet Tea, and Death.

The South Shall Snack Again

ubernoir wrote:
You have a higher per capita murder rate which arguably could be connected to gun ownership and we have a government which sometimes treats its citizens like children.

Let me say this. There is a connection, but I'm not sure its direct.

We have a high murder rate and a high rate of gun ownership because we are a more violent society. Banning guns, or allowing them, may, or may not, actually relate to our murder rate. The same might be offered about banning violent movies. I've offered that we shouldn't execute people, because we communicate a message through doing so that killing people is a reasonable way to solve problems in peacetime. But regulations of individuals... well, you can't force people to be something they're not.

Our violence is related to our independence but not directly. We're more violent because of our history. The UK has quite a fine history of violence but most of it was committed overseas. In the US, it happened here. The French-Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Spanish American War, and the Civil War.... We had a period of about 100 years in which each generation fought on U.S. soil.

After, our western frontier experience was distinct from Canada's in that they deployed a strong federal police force to secure the frontier, whereas the US left security up to local governments, who were often too poor to keep order... Ultimately, Civil War vets took their guns west after the war and fended for themselves. And particularly in the south, the mutual distrust during a subsequent 100 year apartheid society that followed the 100 years of war provided a culture that was by then used to needing guns for war with a reason to keep them at peace.

I don't think Europe's most recent century of war (from the Franco-Prussian war to WWII) had the same impact because people didn't take the guns home after the battles were over.

Clearly, by the 1970's, these rationales for keeping firearms were gone, and at the same time you saw a rising tide of inner city violence caused by the peak of the suburban abandonment of the city, and thus you saw the sort of gun control laws beginning in the 1980's that this whole debate refers to. The pendellum is, today, swinging the other direction in many respects. Our cities are becoming safer, and the rates of violence are going down, but, like racism, it will take several generations to work some of this history out.

RE: Guns for Safety? Dream On, Scalia. - washingtonpost.com

If you live in or around Atlanta and you don't see this photo exhibit while its open (till October) you have made poor use of your time, as I can think of few things you could do with a Saturday afternoon here that are more important. The American Civil Rights movement is, I think, the last time people gave their lives for political establishment in this country. When I was young I used to think that these things had happened a long time ago... that this was ancient history and that ancient people did abhorrent things. Age changes your perception of time. The sixties weren't very long ago. These people... who were murdered by klansmen in the woods, who were shot at by snipers while marching in the streets, whose churches were bombed, who were infiltrated and spied upon by the government, federal, state, and local, who were brutally attacked, harassed, and arrested primarily because they demanded the right of poor people to register to vote... they were hardly older than my parents.

The threats that exist today to our civil liberties absolutely pale in comparison to what was going on here, in our hometown, just a few short years ago. If you want to know what a real fight looks like, and what real sacrifices are, you need look no further.

The exhibition features work by more than twenty... press photographers and amateurs who made stirring visual documents of marches, demonstrations and public gatherings out of a conviction for the social changes that the movement represented. Key photographs include Bob Adelman's Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, 1963; Morton Broffman's Dr. King and Coretta Scott King Leading Marchers, Montgomery, Alabama, 1965; Bill Eppridge's Chaney Family as they depart for the Funeral of James Chaney, Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1964; and Builder Levy's I Am a Man/Union Justice Now, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968.

Supplementing the photographs are archival documents, newspapers, magazines and posters from the period. These complementary materials demonstrate how, in the hands of community organizers and newspaper and magazine editors, photographs played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion. Documents such as Rosa Parks' fingerprint paperwork and the blueprint of the bus on which she protested are shown alongside related photographs for the very first time. Also included will be several contemporary portraits, by photographer Eric Etheridge, of the young men and women who challenged segregation as Freedom Riders in 1961 and who are now senior citizens. All the photographs and documents in this exhibition will be accompanied by descriptive captions and an audio-visual component to provide deeper historical context.

Don't miss the worksheet near the end of the exhibit listing security procedures for civil rights workers operating in the rural south.

Road to Freedom | High Museum of Art Atlanta

ubernoir wrote:
I am so shocked by this discussion. It is so unbelievably alien to anything, to any mind set or experience I have ever had as a European....

It seems a very strange idea of freedom. Like living in a bunker, "no one can get me now!", I'd rather walk in the fresh air, walk by the river, have a little faith, enjoy life rather than live in fear, not seeing enemies in every shadow, where every stranger might be a killer or a rapist, but seeing ordinary people with lives and hopes not threats. Where is the peace of mind when you need an AK47 as a comfort blanket?

If its any consolation I don't think the views on this thread accurately represent a cross section of Americans. Barely 20 percent of us own handguns. A lot of the people on MemeStreams are southerners, and southerners are more likely than people who live in other regions to own a gun, but gun owners are not in the majority even here. Certainly only a very small percentage keep their guns as close at hand as many on this thread seem to.

Crime, in some American cities, is oppressive. I certainly think its oppressive in Atlanta. Its a sad think that I feel less safe in my adopted home town that I do in almost any other city that I travel to, but that is the case. I'm always looking over my shoulder when I ride Marta, while I've recently ridden subways in Barcelona, Munich, New York, and Paris and not been the least bit concerned.

However, I don't own a firearm. I don't think carrying a handgun would make me feel safer. I generally prefer to be aware of by surroundings and avoid situations where one is likely to become a statistic. On the other hand, to the degree that ownership of handguns is a deterrent, the fact that other people carry enables me to benefit from their presence.

I don't think banning or allowing handguns is the solution to the problem. I think its one of those political footballs that gets passed around, like life prison sentences for failure to register as a convicted statutory rapist, that plays off of media sensationalism and makes people think that something is being done when nothing is being done. The problem is more complicated than that. Its a product of official corruption (which these political debates are a part, as are those thin blue line stickers on people's cars), a history of segregation, racism, and slavery that created a caste system which still persists, and suburbia's desertion of urban cores (which is fortunately a dying trend but more slowly here than elsewhere). These problems cannot be repaired with quicky legislation, and few of our leaders have the strength to form a long term vision to change the state of our communities. Most effective solutions are expensive. More police on the street (assuming they aren't corrupt) would have a greater deterrent effect than handgun ownership or any change in sentencing policy, but it costs real money, so it is almost never discussed.

RE: Guns for Safety? Dream On, Scalia. - washingtonpost.com