Freed from a bogus judgement

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The Thomas v. Captiol case was something we all watched with horror as some poor woman was slapped with a fine of $220,000 simply for having downloaded some music. However, that case has recently been overturned due to the fact that the RIAA's argument that merely having copyrighted music available for download is a crime.

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When this guy tried to sign up for Comcast cable without providing his Social Security Number, they harassed him saying that they were required to ask for it under the Patriot Act.

Deal with this by first finding out what they're going to do with it and how they're going to protect it. I would most likely use the '0' trick or just make sure your credit reports are frozen and they wouldn't be able to run credit on you even if they tried.

Want to be battle? Because this is how you become cattle.

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The optional license will include a picture and radio frequency identification tag that can be scanned to verify a person's identity. The tag will not contain any personal information - only an assigned number, authorities said.

How reassuring. So they won't be able to take my data from it, but they'll be able to clone it and frame me or just use the unique ID to track me remotely. But they're going to be passing out sleeves that prevent it from being read remotely without your authorization. So if you don't find it bulky and actually use it, you'll be partially protected until it's time to pull it out to be read or if someone gets a few seconds alone with your wallet to pull it out and clone it.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

DNA might not be as strong evidence as you've been led to believe.

Y.R. Tap - The reject Cryptokid

The NSA has been working on their public image and trying to market itself as a cool place to work partially with their "Cryptokids" campaign. Their goal is to teach kids about what the NSA does in a fun, kid-friendly way.

But that's not what I'm posting about.

I ran across this interesting comic about the unpopular little-know cryptokid, Y.R. Tap, the NSA domestic spying fly. The fly shows the Cryptokids what can happen when civil liberties are violated.

Sarah Palin

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Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, who supported Bush in 2004 has recently changed his tune. Now that he's supporting Obama, people want to know why. "The designation of Palin to be vice president," he said. "She's scary."

He also said this of Obama:

I have concluded that the country is safer in the hands of Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic Party and protector of the philosophy of that party. Protecting and defending the U.S. means more than defending us from foreign attacks. It includes defending the public with respect to their civil rights, civil liberties and other needs, e.g., national health insurance, the right of abortion, the continuation of Social Security, gay rights, other rights of privacy, fair progressive taxation and a host of other needs and rights.

Oink!

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Today I found an article about how several of McCain's "objectionable" earmarks over the last few years belonged to a town in Alaska who's mayor was none other than Palin herself. Ouch.

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I really hate the kinds of things companies pull in their contracts and terms of service. Even more I hate when people say, "you signed it so quit complaining!" What they don't seem to understand is that even if the information is there, that doesn't mean that people can understand it or its implications. Thus was the case in a Washington supreme court ruling that mightily smacked and slapped around the one-sided AT&T service agreement.

The court had the option of determining that some portions of the contract were legally valid and could be enforced. Instead, the ruling determined that unconscionable conditions pervaded the agreement, rendering it invalid in its entirety

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Bruce Schneier explains how easy it is to get past security and fly on a plane even if you're on the supposed "no fly list"

Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

His article on why the no-fly-list and photo ID checks are useless against terrorists here.

What should we do about privacy problems? Attack the person who found the problem!

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When Betty Ostergren, otherwise known as the "Virginia Watchdog" and on of my personal heroes, started posting social security numbers and other private data about state senators, she turned a few heads.

She got the information from the state's own public records websites where the senators were quick to pull some strings to get their information off the sites, but Betty refused to pull it off hers until they fixed the system that left all the other less-connected people vulnerable.

Their response was to draft a law for her specifically (what an honor!) that would make it illegal to disseminate any public records that contained Social Security numbers. Facing tens of thousands of dollars in fines, she was fortunately rescued by the Virginia ACLU who filed a lawsuit on her behalf.

And the good news is that the right decision was reached and the state of Virginia was told to eat crow. The saddest and sickest part of the whole situation is that they violently attacked the person who publicized what they were doing wrong while they made no effort to fix the wrong she exposed.