flynn23 wrote:
Actually you don't have a right to privacy. There's nothing in the constitution or the bill or rights that grants anything in the way of privacy. So privacy is not a good reason to rub this out.

With respect to the matter of government surveillance there absolutely is a specifically enumerated Constitutional "right to privacy." Its the 4th amendment. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has ruled that an intent to protect a general "right to privacy" is obvious in a reading of the Constitution and the 9th Amendment gives it teeth. I'm quoting here from Griswold vs. Connecticut:

Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were described in Boyd v. United States, as protection against all governmental invasions "of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life." We recently referred in Mapp v. Ohio, to the Fourth Amendment as creating a "right to privacy, no less important than any other right carefully and particularly reserved to the people."

We have had many controversies over these penumbral rights of "privacy and repose." These cases bear witness that the right of privacy which presses for recognition here is a legitimate one.

RE: Pentagon Expands Domestic Surveillance

The term ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It's not necessarily a goal, and we'll never achieve perfect findability, but we're surely headed in the right direction.

This is a brilliant article from a technological vision standpoint and an absolutely stupid one from a political perspective. Its worth reading for both reasons.

On the later point this is a reality which is coming and an attitude that will need to be stared down. A grand tyranny of the majority is called for here, in which one lives in an intolerant social sphere filled with busy bodies who shun and judge eachother using the latest high tech gadgets. Those who whine about personal privacy are called luddites and compared to irrational fundamentalists!

This is nuts. I'd much rather have the FBI breathing down my neck. They have limits, checks, and balances. My neighbors do not. Putting every private life under the microscope usually reserved for Presidential Candidates and Supreme Court nominees will result in a society that is far too conformist to be innovative or free.

You can accomplish most ubicomp applications while protecting privacy.

O'Reilly Network: UFOs (Ubiquitous Findable Objects)

In a research paper appearing in the November/December 2005 issue of IEEE Security and Privacy, we analyzed publicly available information and materials to evaluate the reliability of the telephone wiretapping technologies used by US law enforcement agencies. The analysis found vulnerabilities in widely fielded interception technologies that are used for both "pen register" and "full audio" (Title III / FISA) taps. The vulnerabilities allow a party to a wiretapped call to disable content recording and call monitoring and to manipulate the logs of dialed digits and call activity.

In the most serious countermeasures we discovered, a wiretap subject superimposes a continuous low-amplitude "C-tone" audio signal over normal call audio on the monitored line. The tone is misinterpreted by the wiretap system as an "on-hook" signal, which mutes monitored call audio and suspends audio recording. Most loop extender systems, as well as at least some CALEA systems, appear to be vulnerable to this countermeasure.

John Markoff has a story on this today.

Ha... They were using old school dtmf techniques to detect call status! Thats a bizarre approach. You'd think they'd have some device that spoke SS7 and the network would simply send the digital call traffic to them. U: I just read the paper. Apparently there IS no good reason they are using inband signals. Its a good paper. Read it.

Of course, this kind of vulnerability isn't what I'm really interested in with respect to CALEA equipment. The big question is how does Law Enforcement get access to the CALEA system and is the security/authentication of that access method sufficient to prevent other parties from using the system. I've heard unsubstantiated whisperings that it isn't... U: The paper seems to allude to this suspicion as well...

Blue Boxing Wiretapping Systems

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats. "This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It's letting the terrorists know we are out there," Fernandez said.

Random ID checks... Odd that they have the ACLU guy giving that a positive quote.

BREITBART.COM - Miami Police Take New Tack Against Terror

Transport Canada is road-testing cutting-edge devices that use global positioning satellite technology and a digital speed-limit map to know when a driver is speeding, and to try to make them stop.

When a driver hits a certain percentage above the posted speed limit, the device kicks in and makes it difficult to press the accelerator.

Why write tickets when you can just have your computer take over their car?!

The Globe and Mail: New spyware gives drivers a brake

The Convention on Cybercrime will endanger Americans' privacy and civil liberties--and place the FBI's massive surveillance apparatus at the disposal of nations with much less respect for individual liberties.

For instance, if the U.S. and Russia ratify it, President Vladimir Putin would be able to invoke the treaty's powers to unmask anonymous critics on U.S.-based Web sites and perhaps even snoop on their e-mail correspondence.

There's an easy fix. The U.S. Senate could attach an amendment to the treaty saying the FBI may aid other nations only if the alleged "crime" in their country also is a crime here. The concept is called dual criminality, and the treaty lets nations choose that option.

Unfortunately, neither the Bush administration nor the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been willing to make that change, calling it too "rigid."

Fuzzy logic behind Bush's cybercrime treaty | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Pentagon expands domestic surveillance.

And Bruce Schneier weighs in as well...

Not only does involving the military in domestic surveillance mean bluring the line between citizens and enemies, it also means applying the 4th amendmend to military operations. What is the FBI not doing that you need them to be doing?

Pentagon Expands Domestic Surveillance

Mike the Usurper wrote:

On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.

And if I were a university, I wouldn't count a course that said Thomas Jefferson was the anti-christ as something worthwhile either.

The Jefferson quote is over the top, but I don't see this quoted content as being grounds to refuse credit. You may be required to understand Thomas Jefferson in order to get into college, but you should not be required to like him. In order to refuse these students the State must establish that they do not gain the basic knowledge needed in order to comprehend college level material from these classes. If that is the case it will take a lot more then a few quotes to demonstrate it.

U: I did some more digging. This quotation sounds like the UC system might have some reasonable objections:

For example, a course titled "Christianity and Morality in American Literature" was rejected because it used an anthology as its only textbook — whereas UC requires that students read assigned works in their entirety; anthologies may not be the only required texts in literature courses.

On the other hand, the complaint includes some troubling statements which seem to indicate that UC has a problem with the perspective of the content rather then the content itself:

As a result of the orientation/approach of the texts in question, which expressly prioritize religion over science, a course relying on these texts as core instructional materials does not meet the faculty’s criteria for the UC subject “d” laboratory science requirement.

IMHO, denying a student entrance into public colleges soley because you don't agree with the religious point of view of the content they learned in private high school classes is precisely equivelent to requiring public high school classes to be taught from a religious point of view. It attempts to use the power of the state to force other people to accept a perspective on religion. That is an affront to the First Amendment.

RE: Here's the Problem With Emily Dickinson - New York Times

Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to "gain a partisan political advantage."

Sympathetic Vibrations

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