Your laptop will be detained at the border, without reason, forever

The Washington Post does a nice job of translating DHS policy

The policies state that officers may "detain" laptops "for a reasonable period
of time" to "review and analyze information." This may take place "absent
individualized suspicion."

into plain English:

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an
off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of
wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland
Security recently disclosed.
Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's
contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data
decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued
by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

Nevermind that any of this data can be transferred just as easily over the internet (which I highly advise for all travellers, btw), this is a scary and stupid policy. DHS is one-upping other sectors of government in the 'arbitrary and indefinite detention' genre by not even requiring suspicion to detain items. Michael Chertoff is the most dangerous man in America and needs to be stopped. Thank goodness there are a select few people in government (Sen. Russell Feingold, mentioned in the article) that still care about the Bill of Rights. See also Schneier's post.

Next battleground in the copyfight: textbooks

Great site: textbooktorrents.com

How long until publishing houses come along and engage in that time-honored tradition of copyright holding organizations: suing already penniless students?

Found via this ars technica article

FBI amassing eye scan database

And the new personal information that the government is vacuuming up this week is... eye scans! It appears that the FBI is adding information about people's eyes to the already existing biometric databases of the populace. Great.

NY Attorney General Pressures US ISPs to filter content

And this is how it all begins... under the guise of "protecting the children" and other such claims, the New York Attorney General has pressured several major US ISPs into filtering traffic. At least one ISP, Time Warner, has blacklisted all of USENET.

There can be no justification for this kind of behavior. What will happen we have seen a million times when a clueless administrator tries to close down an open network:

1) The people that this law is supposed to stop will use other channels (proxies, other USENET servers, encryption, etc.)
2) Everyone else will suffer the brunt of censorship and surveillance, until they decide to make like a child pornographer and circumvent the restrictions themselves.
3) The ad-hoc, secretive blacklist expands without notice or warning or opportunity for review by anyone, an increasing number of non-kiddie-porn sites get caught up in the filter, including sites that may be politically inconvenient for the Government (Wikileaks, Pirate Bay, etc.).
4) Government realizes it can get away with this kind of behavior, starts pressing for more elimination of "bad" things from the Internet.
5) Free speech plummets.

News coverage:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9964895-38.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/nyregion/10internet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/1819200&from=rss

There was an interesting comment on Slashdot, revealing that one can tell when Google has received a takedown notice for child porn relating to a search. Check out this search for an example (look at the bottom of the page): http://www.google.com/search?q=4chan

More airport madness

It appears now that you can be prevented from boarding an aircraft simply for wearing a designer T-Shirt -- this shirt (hilarious comments in the Boing Boing thread, btw) got someone banned from a flight because it depicts a transformer brandishing what looks like a cartoonish gun.

In other news, the EU is testing a flight system installed in every passenger seat that monitors your facial expressions for hints of terrorist inclinations. False positives, anyone?

Genetic Nondiscrimination

Don't let anyone tell you that the Bush administration was all bad. It actually did do something incredibly far-sighted and significant recently: the President signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) into law. This means that when everyone has their genes sequenced, the insurance companies don't own your soul.

Government has plans for martial law

Radar is reporting that the government has (not so?) contingency plans to round up suspicious individuals in the event of declared martial law... 8 million suspicious individuals, that is.

The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.