A Vermont federal judge has ruled that a person cannot be compelled by police to divulge his PGP key. This is by no means the end of the legal debate (Orin Kerr comments), but it’s certainly good news.
Clusty search on the 5th Amendment.
Category: Electronic Rights
A Bit of Wisconsin Open Records History
Walter H. Besley may well have been Wisconsin’s first open-government crusader.
Back in 1853, five years after Wisconsin became a state, Besley, the clerk of circuit court in Jefferson County, billed the County Board of Supervisors $22 for two expenses: wood to furnish his office and a large box of candles to light and warm it.
The board rejected the expenditure. Besley sued and won. The board was ordered to pay these expenses, plus interest and “the costs of suit.”
In 1856, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard the case on appeal. It affirmed the circuit court’s ruling, citing a state law mandating that the clerk and other county officials “keep his office open during business hours, Sundays excepted, and all books and papers required to be kept in this office shall be open for the examination of any person.”
The court said the Legislature’s intent was clear: “to accommodate the wants of the citizens” who had business to transact. “To require these officers to keep their offices open during business hours,” it wrote, “and yet provide no means of warming or lighting them would be simply absurd.”
While the law did not require the clerk “to keep a tavern” — which presumably would also accommodate the wants of some citizens — “it is clearly the object and intention of the statute that these county offices shall be kept open, and in a suitable condition.” Thus the expenses presented by Besley were “a proper and legal county charge” that the board was wrong to reject.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Act I: The act of buying
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
Former Technician ‘Turning In’ AT&T Over NSA Program
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
“What the heck is the NSA doing here?” Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.
Perhaps our elected officials might consider this matter vis a vis AT&T’s flawed video “competition” bill. unlikely
Internet Freedom? Comcast Blocks the Bible
To test claims by users that Comcast Corp. was blocking some forms of file-sharing traffic, The Associated Press went to the Bible.
An AP reporter attempted to download, using file-sharing program BitTorrent, a copy of the King James Bible from two computers in the Philadelphia and San Francisco areas, both of which were connected to the Internet through Comcast cable modems.
We picked the Bible for the test because it’s not protected by copyright and the file is a convenient size.
In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When we tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.
Not all Comcast-connected computers appear to be affected, however. In a test with a third Comcast-connected computer in the Boston area, we were unable to test with the Bible, apparently due to an unrelated error. When we attempted to upload a more widely disseminated file, there was no evidence of blocking.
Much more at the EFF.
Ballmer: “Google Reads Your Email and We Don’t”
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a knock at one of his chief rivals during a speech to an audience in the U.K., saying Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue.
The software giant’s chief made the remarks during a discussion about consumer software revenue models, and Ballmer used the dialogue as an entry point to take his shot at Google. The video is available to watch via the web site Mydeo.com. Ballmer made his remarks after an audience member asked him if an advertising model could support software business in the future. The CEO said a combination of models – – commercial and ad-paid – – would go forward.
“What’s a good example? Will online publications be largely ad-funded as things move from the physical world to the online world?” Ballmer said. “I think the answer is yes.
“Have we seen the migration of things even like email? . . . Our Windows Live Hotmail, in and of itself, doesn’t generate much ad revenue. So we’ve had to put, essentially, a whole portal around it because the traffic around it is very valuable but it’s not very easily monetized in the context of mail.
“Google’s had the same experience, even though they read your mail and we don’t,” Ballmer said, to chuckles and and a couple of gasps in the audience. “That’s just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It’s not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out.”
“NBC is an AT&T Sock Puppet”
How do I say it more clearly? Honestly, folks, we need better leadership than this in the seats of media power, and until that happens, we’ll just continue to miss the point, over and over and over again.
At an anti-piracy summit in Washington Wednesday, NBC’s Jeff Zucker actually called for AT&T and other Internet-service providers to install filtering software to, and get this, “weed out pirated content and unclog networks.” This is one of the most dangerous and desperate things I’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of someone who, among other things, is charged with certain responsibilities vis-a-vis the First Amendment. And the REAL PROBLEM is that this line was likely penned by the Telcos, not Zucker or his writers. I mean, come on! “Unclog networks?” Where have we heard that before?
AT&T would LOVE to filter the Web.
Google & Privacy
It’s been fun and edifying watching Google’s PR engine at work. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has been evangelizing the need for “international privacy standards.”
Google’s most powerful PR tool to-date is the comforting and accessible video series featuring Maile Ohye, a personable young woman who is a senior support engineer, giving a chalk talk about what information Google captures when you search, how it uses that information and how you can control it. The two videos in the series to-date are designed to be very comforting.
The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free
The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.
Scroogled
Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches… What if it controlled your life?