The Goldfish-Bowl Era: Privacy and the Net Dr. Postol and the "Classification" of Public Documents Dolby and the Right to Link The Broken Patent System Copyright Craziness Carnivore Brought to You by the Letter "$" Justice is Blind... except to Email More to Come

 

The Goldfish-Bowl Era : Privacy and the Net:

Do companies that own a piece of computer equipment automatically own all data stored on or produced with it? Do employees surrender all rights to privacy merely by working at a company? Alas, currently, legal opinion seems to say, Yes. Orwelll was wrong: the future belongs to Big Brother, Inc.

• The New York Times has an article on an opposing view, though.(Reconsidering the Privacy of Office Computers, 2001 Jul 27)
• You can also read the original paper outright: "In Defense of the Hard Drive", by Judge James Rosenbaum in The Green Bag.
• EPIC reports that a federal judge has demaned details from the FBI about a keyboard sniffer used to steal a defendant's PGP passwords. (PDF: 2001 Aug 8)
  • The Washington Post has also run a story on Scarfo's case. (2001 Aug 14).
• At last, someone in the mainstream media has noticed: The New York Times reports on the growing prevalance of covertly-placed "Web bugs" on the so-called "free" personal pages offered by AOL, Yahoo, etc. (2001 Aug 14).
• According to Yahoo! News, a judge has ruled that Yahoo! can preserve the anonymity of people who had posted critical comments to a message board anonymously. (2001 Aug 14)
• A column in the Washington Post examines gator.com's policy of surreptitiously slipping ads into a Web browser's wiindow. (2001 Aug 30).
• Is a citizen allowed to record police actions as proof of police misdeeds? Not in Massachusetts, apparently, according to this Boston Globe article (2001 Sep 27). It seems the state can tape you but you don't have the same right.

   

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Dr. Postol and the "Classification" of Public Documents:

Dr. Theodore Postol, a professor at MIT, has been a long-time opponent of the Pentagon's ballistic missile defense program. He claims that the Pentagon has falsified results to make BMD more attractive. In support he offered tables and charts drawn from a non-classified document. After he published -- and after the report from which he drew his arguments was widely published, even on the Net -- the Pentagon decided that the document was, actually, a "secret" and classified it. Now they are pressing MIT to investigate Postol's violation of classification regulations; and they are threatening MIT's contracts if the institution doesn't comply. Apparently the Pentagon is rusty on its Latin and doesn't understand what the Constitution means by "no ex post facto law".

• A New York Times article on the situation (2001 July 27).
• Geoffrey Forden, in a Washington Post op-ed, summarizes the affair and raises some good questions about the government's motivation. (2001 Aug 29)

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Dolby and the Right to Link

Say a page contains software that violates a patent. Can one reasonably construe that a hyperlink to that page also violates the patent? Dolby International apparently believes so. One wonders how long it will take until a corporation asserts that talking about software that violates a patent also violates the patent... The free speech issues are staggering, and -- one would think -- obvious.

• Dolby's letter to NetBSD regarding the alleged infraction. (2001 Aug 3)

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The Broken Patent System

It's pretty clear that the US patent system has gotten wildly out of hand. USPTO examiners are tremendously overworked, notably understaffed, and woefully undertrained, unable to rationally evaluate the literally hundreds of thousands of patents filed each year. (In 2000, the USPTO received 293,244 applications and granted 165,504 of them.)

• The New York Times reports that, due to an extremely broad patent granted to the University of Wisconsin, all stem cell research might have to pass through a single biotechnology company -- a staggering mutli-billion dollar windfall that could delay crucial medical innovations. (2001 Aug 17)
• Howard Markel, in the New York Times, has an op-ed about the effect of patents on medicine. (2001 Aug 24)

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Copyright Craziness

At long last, major media is beginng to sense the ills fermenting under the current "intellectual property" regime. Here are some generic issues; also see a whole host of abuses due to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (the worst law of the past decade).

• The Washington Post weighs in with an editorial. (2001 Aug 17)

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All the Facts, M'am: FBI, Carnivore, and Blanket Surveilliance

The FBI has deployed a system called Carnivore that allegedly scans all email passing through a given ISP. There are obvious privacy considerations, which of course the FBI fails to recognize.

• The Washington Post has an article on the FBI's move to expand Carnivore coverage to include wireless emails. (2001 Aug 24)

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Brought to You by the Letter "$"

Who owns the alphabet? It sounds like a silly question but courts are busy carving up portions of it and assigning them to corporations. It's more evidence of the amok nature of the patent, trademark, and copyright (PTC) system -- the so-called "intellectual property" regime that is running wild.

• The New York Times reviews some recent developments in this ludicrous progression. (2001 Sep 2)

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Justice is Blind... Except to Emails

This topic is attracting so much attention in the media that I've spun it off from The Goldfish Bowl Era.

One might think that, since judges and their staffs hold the power of innocence or guilt, of life and death, that they might be trusted with policing their own use of the Internet. Some disagree... and if you don't trust your judges not to surf during office hours, you must have a terrifying view of the American judiciary.

• The New York Times has an article, describing federal judges who -- believing that software that monitors their downloads is an invasion of privacy -- disabled it. Yay for the good guys in the black robes. (2001 Aug 8).
• Unfortunately, not all judges are so enlightened: The New York Times reports that a "special commmitee" has suggested that the Judicial Conference order the reactiviation of the monitoring software. (2001 Aug 14)
• Justic Alex Kozkinski has an excellent op-ed in WSJ.com lambasting those who are behind this move. (2001 Sep 4)
• Jeffery Rosen,, in the New Republic, has another excellent op-ed. (2001 Sep 4)
• Somtimes, the good guys win, or at least, don't lose. The Administrative Office dropped its noxious demands prior to a meeting of the Judicial Conference, as reported at censorware.org (2001 Sep 7) and in the New York Times (2001 Sep 9). Unfortunately, this was more of a strategic withdrawal rather than a satisfyingly decisive -- and public -- rout.

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Signs of Hope: The Mainstream Media are Beginning to "Get It"

• A really good overview of the history of Content Cartel technophobia appeared in Business 2.0 (2002 April 20).
• That same issue had an article on the brewing dust-up between Hollywood and Silicon Valley (2002 April 20).