Point and Click Surveillance

Wired has an excellent article on the FBI's surveillance system used to eavesdrop on anyone with a cellphone. Some of the pictures are particularly revealing; they show how simple it is to use this powerful system. Some commentary on the system from the article:

Columbia's Bellovin says the flaws are appalling and show that the FBI fails to appreciate the risk from insiders.

"The underlying problem isn't so much the weaknesses here, as the FBI attitude towards security," he says. The FBI assumes "the threat is from the outside, not the inside," he adds, and it believes that "to the extent that inside threats exist, they can be controlled by process rather than technology."

Bellovin says any wiretap system faces a slew of risks, such as surveillance targets discovering a tap, or an outsider or corrupt insider setting up unauthorized taps. Moreover, the architectural changes to accommodate easy surveillance on phone switches and the internet can introduce new security and privacy holes.

"Any time something is tappable there is a risk," Bellovin says. "I'm not saying, 'Don't do wiretaps,' but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?"

Well it's a good thing that we can completely trust the FBI to understand the scope of its responsibilities and the limits of its power because it has never abused the privileges entrusted to it in the past. Oh, wait.

Thoughtcrime, fine, but Windows? The horror!

Another day, another ridiculous copyright-related story that is a testament to how our government and its Big Media puppeteers are ruining peoples lives. This one comes courtesy of the lovely Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005. It makes the innocuous act of turning on anything capable of recording multimedia (your phone or camcorder today, perhaps your cuff links tomorrow at the rate technology is getting more portable and powerful) punishable by three to six years in prison. Nice.

Today's unlucky soul is an ex-administrator of a BitTorrent tracker who pled guilty to counts of ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ (Thoughtcrime, anyone?) and ‘criminal copyright infringement.’ This meant some jail time for him, followed by some ankle-bracelet accompaniment following. Now the government wants to monitor him even more, tracking his internet and computer usage. But, wait! It gets worse:

"'I had a meeting with my probation officer today, and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me, that is part of my sentence. However, their software doesnt (sic) support GNU/Linux (Which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.' ...
Sk0t is left with a tough choice. Give in to the evils of the monitoring software, format his hard drive and install Windows - or be barred from using a PC completely."

Bush legalizes NSA progam

The New York Times today reported that Bush has signed into law a new bill that "broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants." Basically, it puts the Attorney General (As Cory Doctorow would say, Chief Torturer and Selective Amnesiac Alberto Gonzales) the power to approve international surveillance. It turns out those secret courts that were set up to approve this kind of stuff just were getting in the way too much! Funny, even they felt some obligation to defend American liberties, something that this president clearly does not value.

How did he ever get away with this? What was that whole wiretapping scandal about? Wasn't there enough of an outcry that the President knew that he could never get away with something like this again? Well, apparently not because he just did.

This development is troubling, but another disturbing revelation comes towards the end of the article:

In January, the administration placed the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and subjected it for the first time to the scrutiny of the FISA court.

Democratic Congressional aides said Sunday that they believed that pressure from major telecommunications companies on the White House was a major factor in persuading the Bush administration to do that. Those companies were facing major lawsuits for having secretly cooperated with the warrantless wiretapping program, and now wanted greater legal protections before cooperating further.

But the change suddenly swamped the court with an enormous volume of search warrant applications, leading, in turn, to the administration’s decision to seek the new legislation.

So you're saying that 1) the only reason that the wiretapping thing ever became such an issue was because the telcos were playing a big game of lobbyist-CYA and 2) that following due process just became too troublesome to deal with? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THIS COUNTRY???

Malaysia: hopefully not the future U.S.A.

Malaysia will potentially use anti-terror laws to crack down on free speech, specifically that which insults those in power or the predominant religion of the country. Insults to those in power or the perceived national heritage have been used in other countries as well, such as Turkey, to stifle critics of the powers that be.

Unfortunately, the United States seems to be creeping towards this state of affairs itself. The president already gave himself dictatorial powers, we're detaining people indefinitely that are suspected "terrorists" and respected politicians have already claimed that we should re-examine our free speech beliefs to stay ahead of terror.

What's the next logical step? Something like what Malaysia is doing now?

"Piracy," not burglary should be law enforcement's priority, says Big Media

From Ars Technica:

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul Stweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

Just what we need... more bank robberies and burglaries, less sharing of online music. Give me a break. Exactly the kind of delusions, greed and illogical argumentation that I would expect from the industry that, as Ars Technica puts it, "defines solipsism."

Apple: turning into law enforcement, one step at a time

When Apple announced that it was going to sell DRM-free music, most people thought that that would be a good thing for the iPod-addicted masses. DRM restricts consumers options and freedoms, and is entirely unwanted on their end. Even though Apple was raising the cost 30 cents (for an increase in quality as well, not just for taking away a "feature" that customers didn't want in the first place), the announcement was greeted with general acclaim by those who hoped that Apple was moving away from the privacy-invasive techniques of Big Media.

The devil, of course, is in the details. Apple has traded in DRM on its EMI tracks for something even more insidious: a water mark that embeds the name and email address of the user that purchased it in the file, allowing Apple (or anyone else) to identify who the file was originally sold to. Of course, this can be easily circumvented by converting the file to mp3, overwritting the name and email (steve@mac.com, for a good laugh), etc. However, the fact remains that the vast majority of users either do not know, do not care, or do not care to figure out how to eliminate this data from their files. See for yourself:

dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$ strings 01\ Proper\ Education\ \(Radio\ Edit\).m4p | grep "name"
nameDaniel Colligan
name
dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$ strings 01\ Proper\ Education\ \(Radio\ Edit\).m4p | grep ".com"
dannycolligan@gmail.com
"com.
dannyc@sf:~/Desktop/Music From Laptop/DRM (iTunes)$

Apple's actions beg the question, why are they doing this? What possible benefit could Apple reap from putting identifying information in its files? Since they have the iTunes player on virtually every consumer desktop these days, is it so improbable that the next iTunes upgrade will include a spy that informs Apple whenever you have files that do not belong to you and/or deletes them and/or informs someone else (say, those labels that Mr. Jobs has been cozying up to lately)? Ars Technica points out that iTunes already feeds data back to Apple so that the iTunes client can recommend tracks that you might like. Put the dail-home feature with the identifying info feature, however, and you have a recipe for a copyright infringement detector. Just what we all need: now in addition to Big Media watching our every transmission over the network, Apple will be the overlord of our hard drive.

If it's not obvious to you already, avoid using iTunes for your own sake.

Setting up an epic lawyer-fest for the ages?

From slashdot today:

"First it was Napster; then it was Internet radio; then it was little girls, grandmothers, and dead people. But now our friends at the RIAA are going decidedly low-tech. The LA Times reports that the RIAA wants royalties from radio stations. 70 years ago Congress exempted radio stations from paying royalties to performers and labels because radio helps sell music. But since the labels that make up the RIAA are not getting the cash they desire through sales of CDs, and since Internet and satellite broadcasters are forced to cough up cash to their racket, now the RIAA wants terrestrial radio to pay up as well."

Finally, the RIAA is duking it out with another entity that can afford to pay lawyers: ClearChannel. No one is quite sure how this battle will turn out, but hopefully it will erode both entitys' power and credibility (after all, ClearChannel sucks, too). An odd coincidence is this onion article, just put out today.