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One of my heroes is Paul Levy who spoke at the 2006 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in DC. He works at public citizen and is one of their main guns when it comes to protecting people online. You see, companies have this bad habit of bullying people out of their domain names or first amendment rights. Public Citizen offers free legal services in defense of innocent people in the face of bad corporations everywhere.

Their latest: a situation where a company sent a cease and desist letter with an interesting twist. They claimed that the cease and desist letter was copyrighted and that posting it online would result in a lawsuit. This, of course, was to try and prevent someone from making the letter public in an effort to get public opinion on their side.

Well, Public Citizen has a copy of the letter and has posted it on their site along with their excellent response explaining why sending a letter like that is a waste of time.

Update 2007.10.12

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If you've been following the case of Micheal Righi, a man who refused to show his receipt at Circuit City and was soon arrested (because he wouldn't show a police officer his ID), you know that our "security society" is pushing people to take away our rights and pushing others to accept it.

Fortunately, Micheal didn't back down, even when presented with a deal where they would drop all charges in exchange for giving up more of his rights.

I was presented with an offer to have my charges dropped in exchange for signing a document which asked the following of me:

I would not file a Section 1983 civil suit against the Brooklyn police department for infringing on my civil rights.

I would not make any disparaging remarks about the police department, with financial repercussions for doing so.

I would not discuss the details of this agreement.

These conditions were completely unacceptable to me.

Unfortunately, Michael and his family could not afford the time, effort, and money involved with a legal battle with the state. He accepted a deal where he gave up his right to sue them in exchange for immediate dismissal of the charges.

Thankfully, he is not under a gag order and can tell us how this turned out, but it's a shame and a crime that the court system is such that only those with enough money get justice.

Speaking of, people have been complaining to Michael about asking for donations such that he's decided to give away all the money donated even though it's $2000 short of what he's paid in legal fees so far. He says he can afford up to $10,000 to protect his rights and wants to remove all doubts about his intentions.

Let me say it again: it's a shame and a crime that the court system is such that only those with enough money get justice.

Keeping media open when it needs to be

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A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to and groups that I follow are making more noise about this. The main point, from Defective by Design's e-newsletter:

The Department of Justice has drafted this outrageous legislative proposal that threatens ordinary Americans with jail time and the sort of property forfeiture penalties applied in drug busts for P2P users, mixtape makers, and mash-up artists. The law would stiffen penalties for "attempted infringement", basically removing the requirement that the government or Big Media companies actually prove that infringement occurred. The IPPA would also authorize massive wiretapping to investigate copyright infringement by individuals. The government has plenty of tools to investigate and prosecute large scale criminal enterprises engaging in bootlegging, the IPPA will target every citizen.

The main point here is that it makes copyright infringement a criminal offense and that it only has to be attempted! Think of all the people who've already been served with lawsuits (many who were clearly innocent). Now imagine that they no longer have to prove infringement, only attempted infringement. This makes their case far easier to fight. But now it's a crime so the punishment would be stiffer as well.

RFID

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The people over at CASPIAN have warned about how companies are trying hard to get RFID tags into all their products without people knowing. Well, now they will. The anti-theft tags that nearly every product currently has will be combined with RFID technology so that nearly every item you walk out of the store with will also transmit a unique identifying number to any reader nearby. Theives, marketers and big brother are salivating.

You don't believe that companies are desperately interested in what you do every waking moment? Then you haven't been paying attention.

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How very interesting. This project was designed to strip the DRM from iTunes music so you can play them on any player or in any program you wish (as you are entitled to under fair use laws).

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Public Citizen reports:

A new law enacted last fall denies a fair hearing or hardly any hope of release to those confined at Guantanamo naval base, and to other non-citizens labeled "enemy

Public Citizen has a web petition going here.

Privacy.org points to an article explaining that the backscatter x-ray will be fielded in Phoenix. This X-ray device can penetrate clothes, but not skin making a pornographic video of them. Yes this allows the TSA to see if you're carrying bombs or guns, but it also removes your clothing.

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Today on Schneier's blog, he describes in farily decent detail why the DRM in Windows Vista is bad. Some choice bits:

And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn't look good.

What the entertainment companies are finally realizing is that DRM doesn't work, and just annoys their customers. Like every other DRM system ever invented, Microsoft's won't keep the professional pirates from making copies of whatever they want. The DRM security in Vista was broken the day it was released.

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade to Vista. It will be hard. Microsoft's bundling deals with computer manufacturers mean that it will be increasingly hard not to get the new operating system with new computers. And Microsoft has some pretty deep pockets and can wait us all out if it wants to.