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.

Michael Chertoff wants your fingerprints

Michael Chertoff, head of DHS, wants to build a "server in the sky" of all fingerprints from all citizens of a variety of countries. When questioned about the potential for privacy invasions, he answered, "A fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private." Nevermind that fingerprints can be used as unique identifiers for a person, nor that government-managed databases have huge potential for misuse, theft, misidentification, leaks, etc. Great, this idiot is in charge of keeping us "safe?"

Via thinkprogress, Schneier

Military news correspondants far from impartial

The New York Times reports that many former military officers that appear as commentators on news networks are not held to the same impartiality standards as other pundits. These analysts regularly had conflicts of interest, including lucrative government contracts for businesses that they were involved in. Furthermore, not towing the Pentagon's line would result in that commentator getting cut off from insider information in the future. As a result, these analysts opinions were almost always in line with the Pentagon's story, misleading the American people about the true nature of the news.

Government to collect DNA samples from arrested persons

More great news! It now seems that the DHS wants to to build a gigantic DNA database of everyone even arrested (not CONVICTED) relating to a crime, regardless of the person's innocence.

This has huge implications for privacy and presumption of guilt. As the Council for Responsible Genetics puts it:

DNA databanks are not required in order to use DNA testing to establish evidence of guilt or innocence when there is a known group of suspects for a crime: a DNA sample can be taken from each individual and compared directly with a crime scene profile. Few people have problems with this use of DNA.

The permanent retention of DNA in a database for use in future investigations, however, is another matter. An individual captured in a police database becomes an automatic suspect for all future criminal investigations where database searches are performed. This undermines the presumption of innocence that is central to criminal justice systems in the US, UK and most democracies around the world.

Setting aside this fundamental problem, benefits of the use and expansion of these databases must be weighed against their societal costs. While the temptation on the part of law enforcement to put more and more people into the database seems logical (i.e. one would assume the more inclusive the database, the more likely a positive identification can be made), in practice, the benefits of expansion may be limited. In the UK, despite the large number of people in the database, DNA profiles are obtained from the examination of less than 1% of crime scenes, so that in 2002/3 only 1.6% of all crime detections were attributed to DNA database matches (including only 0.3% of all detections for violent and sexual offenses). Such a small contribution to crime detection may not warrant the onerous financial costs of large DNA databases, not to mention the dilatory effect backlogs have on crime solving.

At the same time, there are many reasons to be concerned about the use and expansion of police databases.[11] These include: impacts on people's privacy, potential for misuse by governments, discrimination, and the possibility of error and wrongful conviction.