http://www.privacyfoundation.org/ OR http://www.law.du.edu/privacyfoundation/
NSA Litigation:
The Privacy-First Amendment-Press- National Security Interface
Morning/Lunch Seminar
FRIDAY, October 27, 2006
Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver, Room 180
2255 E. Evans Ave., Denver, Colorado 80208
Schedule of Events:
10:00 – 10:05 Welcome: Dean Beto Juárez, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
10:05 – 10:15 Introduction: John Soma, Executive Director, Privacy Foundation
Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
10:15 – 10:40 Panel I: Current Status of NSA-Privacy Litigation
▪ Erica Craven, Esq., Levy, Ram & Olson LLP, San Francisco, CA
▪ Taylor Pendergrass, Esq., ACLU, Colorado
10:40 – 10:45 Break
10:45 – 11:45 Panel II: Privacy-First Amendment-Freedom of the Press
▪ John Ferrugia, Investigative Reporter, Channel 7, Denver CO
▪ Steven D. Zansberg, Esq., Faegre & Benson, Denver CO
11:45 – 11:50 Break
11:50 – 12:50 Round Table Discussion: Future Ethical & Privacy Issues in the Patriot Act
Co-Moderators: John Soma and Warren Smith
Panelists: Erica Craven, Taylor Pendergast, John Ferrugia, and Steven Zansberg
12:50 Lunch/Heavy Hors D’Oeuvres
Sony may cut earnings outlook
Sony earnings hit by massive battery recall and price pressure on consumer electronics
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service October 17, 2006
Sony is considering cutting its earnings outlook for the year as it copes with a massive recall of laptop computer batteries and price pressure on a number of products.
Sony to recall Vaio laptop batteries
Sony to offer replacements for around 90,000 battery packs
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service October 17, 2006
Sony has added its name to a growing list of computer makers recalling laptop PC batteries made by one of its own subsidiaries.
The Tokyo-based company said it will offer replacements for around 90,000 battery packs sold with models of its Vaio PCs in Japan and China.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/53687.html
PC Makers May Seek More Than Battery-Recall Costs From Sony
By Keith Regan www.EcommerceTimes.com Part of the ECT News Network 10/16/06 1:40 PM PT
Toshiba, Fujitsu and Hitachi are considering whether to try to recoup damages from Sony as compensation for lost business in the wake of Sony's massive laptop battery recall. It's unlikely Sony would be willing to compensate its PC-making customers for any costs beyond those directly associated with implementing the recalls themselves.
Already facing tens of millions of dollars in costs associated with replacing recalled laptop batteries for several major PC makers, Sony now faces the prospect that some of these companies will try to recoup additional damages, such as compensation for lost business.
It might be fun to write an article “responding” to these proposals...
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MICROSOFT_PRIVACY?SITE=VALYD&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Microsoft to Release Privacy Guidelines
By ALLISON LINN AP Business Writer Oct 16, 5:33 PM EDT
REDMOND, Wash. (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. is preparing to release privacy guidelines based on its own internal practices in hopes of getting companies to adopt more cohesive standards for safeguarding people's personal information.
Microsoft will issue the hefty document Thursday, urging commonsense practices such as clearly telling customers why a company collects personally identifiable information like e-mail addresses or phone numbers.
Among other things, the document also calls for companies to make a business case for why the information is needed and recommends they delete data no longer needed for that purpose. Microsoft also recommends internal practices that can help keep personal information such as credit card numbers from accidentally getting into the wrong hands.
The company wants to work with other companies to eventually establish some more generally agreed-upon guidelines, although it's unclear how long that will take.
... Analysts credit Microsoft with having a major change of heart about privacy about five years ago, following backlash over Hailstorm, a product that sought to store all sorts of personal information under one logon, so people could more easily access accounts and products online. The product, now called Passport, was scaled back considerably after people balked at leaving all their information in the hands of just one company.
... Wilcox said Microsoft may be able to gain an even greater competitive advantage if, through these guidelines and other measures, it can establish itself as the industry leader and the force behind any industry standards on privacy.
Gee, Microsoft spent $7 million on this? It must be amazingly difficult to find predators, right?
.techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=19520
Italy adopts Microsoft anti-child-porn technology
Posted by Reverend on 16 Oct 2006 - 19:25 GMT
Techzonez Italy became the first European country to adopt a Microsoft system for combating child pornography on the Internet, something the government and the computer firm believe the whole continent is set to take up. [Hack one, hack all! Bob]
At a news conference on Monday, the Italian police's special communications unit said the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), which is already in use in Canada and Indonesia, will speed up its investigations into Web pornography by 80 percent.
"In substance, we want to oppose pedophile rings with an international network of cyber-police," said the head of the police postal and communications squad, Domenico Vulpiani.
Microsoft developed the system after a Canadian police officer working in the field wrote to the company for help in what investigators say is a constantly increasing field of crime which preys on young users of the Internet.
A spokesman for the software giant said Britain and Spain were likely to adopt the system -- a database to help investigators sift through suspect Web site and electronic communications -- in the coming months and that five other European countries were not far behind.
Microsoft has spent $7 million developing the system and is giving it free-of-charge to governments.
...well, maybe not.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71948-0.html
MySpace Predator Caught by Code
By Kevin Poulsen 02:00 AM Oct, 16, 2006
Yaphank, NY -- The computer crimes unit of New York's Suffolk County Police Department sits in a gloomy government office canopied by water-stained ceiling tiles and stuffed with battered Dell desktops. A mix of file folders, notes, mug shots and printouts form a loose topsoil on the desks, which jostle shoulder-to-shoulder for space on the scuffed and dented floor.
I've been invited here to witness the end-game of a police investigation that grew from 1,000 lines of computer code I wrote and executed some five months earlier. The automated script searched MySpace's 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders -- and soon found one that was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys.
... In May, I began an automated search of MySpace's membership rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, mined from the Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry website -- a gateway to the state-run Megan's Law websites around the country. I searched on first and last names, limiting results to a five mile radius of the offender's registered ZIP code.
Wired News will publish the code under an open-source license later this week.
The code swept in a vast number of false or unverifiable matches. Working part time for several months, I sifted the data and manually compared photographs, ages and other data, until enhanced privacy features MySpace launched in June began frustrating the analysis.
Excluding a handful of obvious fakes, I confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data. Of those, 497 are registered for sex crimes against children. In this group, six of them are listed as repeat offenders, though Lubrano's previous convictions were not in the registry, so this number may be low. At least 243 of the 497 have convictions in 2000 or later.
... Last week, I told MySpace about my search, and Lubrano. The company's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, responded that MySpace would like to ban sex offenders from the site, but is waiting for new laws that would make it easier to do so. He said the company is lobbying Congress for legislation that would require sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses with a central database. "By having such a database, MySpace and other sites would be able to access it in order to block these individuals from ever registering on the site," Nigam said, in a written statement.
This is interesting. I'm teaching Business Continuity again in January, and packages like this make identifying options easier. (No doubt someone will scale it down to “small office” size and sell subscriptions...)
Sun thinks inside the box for datacenter system
Sun claims its Project Blackbox offers a mobile datacenter at a fraction of the cost and 20 percent more power efficiency
By Robert Mullins, IDG News Service October 17, 2006
To help enterprises with expanding datacenter needs, Sun Microsystems decided to think inside the box.
Sun's Project Blackbox crams multiple servers and storage hardware into a box the size of a semi-trailer truck that can be literally driven up to a company, plugged in, and turned on.
The Blackbox, available in either a 20-foot or 40-foot long shipping container, can be configured to hold up to 250 Sun Fire servers or up to 2 petabytes worth of storage devices or 7 terabytes worth of memory. The equipment runs on Sun's Solaris 10 operating system and uses water cooling to dissipate heat from the processors. This kind of rapid deployment of extra computing power will address many of the needs of the modern enterprise data center concerned with performance but also energy and space efficiency, said Anil Gadre, chief marketing officer for Sun.
"Basically, it rolls up to you, you hook up the power, you hook up your network and you hook up the chiller water lines and you’re ready to go," Gadre said. "It's like prefab housing."
... It sees its target markets as rapidly-growing Web 2.0 companies that need to quickly add servers to keep their sites up, as well as high-performance computing centers, military deployments or other instances in which an enterprise needs to quickly ramp up computing capacity, Gadre said.
“We gotta do something!” Expect whatever they do to impact all users of the Internet.
(England is changing. Years ago, this reporter would have been forced to report only on vegetable gardens...)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/16/eu_terror_web_plans/
EU plans to block terror sites, but doesn't know how
By John Lettice Published Monday 16th October 2006 15:41 GMT
A meeting of EU interior ministers held in August in the wake of the 'liquid bomb plot' arrests called for the acceleration of European plans to tackle terrorism, and as part of these, for measures to "tackle the use of the Internet by terrorists to radicalise young people, spread messages of hate and plan mass murder" (see Home Office announcement (http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/press-releases/eu-ministers-discuss-threat)). Ah yes, but how?
Speaking after the meeting Franco Frattini, Justice & Home Affairs Commissioner, said that the Internet should be made a "hostile environment" for terrorists. "I think it's very important to explore further possibilities of blocking websites that incite to commit terrorist actions," The Times reported (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2316668,00.html). Yes Franco, but how do you propose to do that, exactly? Or even approximately?
After the August meeting Spy Blog (http://spyblog.org.uk/) wrote to Frattini asking for details of what he was proposing, and putting forward a detailed list of 17 questions (http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2006/10/response_from_the_european_commission_regarding_the_policy_of_censoring_terroris.html) covering consultation, mechanisms, definitions, distinctions and safeguards. Spy Blog now has a response from Jonathan Faull, EU Commission Director General for Justice, Freedom and Security, but although lengthy, the document sheds little or no light on the matter.
Essentially, the Commission seems to know approximately what it wants to do, to have barely the vaguest of notions how to go about doing it, but to be exceedingly keen to assure people that it won't do anything that is in conflict with the principles of the European Union. Take question one, for example, "Are you proposing a European Union version of the national level firewall content filtering and censorware software such as is used in the 'Great firewall of China' or in Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes?"
Faull responds with a refrain that will become tedious well before question 17. "At such an early stage of our consultations it would be premature to speak about a specific solution... [so ominously, perhaps we're not altogether ruling that one out]... the European Union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law. In consequence, policy options undermining such principles will be necessarily ruled out."
Relieved? We know we were. So even if Europe does build a Great Firewall it won't be one that undermines our basic principles, right...
Question two then, "Are you proposing to ban websites in the United States of America, such as Yahoo Groups of the Google search engine cache? This is where the vast majority of home made bomb making instructions are written and published on the Internet?" A good question, says Faull, confirming that much of the material in question is hosted outside of European jurisdiction, and adding that "a particular web site may contain both legitimate content and content aiding or abetting terrorism. Such factors will be considered as part of our consultation process."
So we can put that one down as a 'don't know', then. How will they differentiate between research for scientific and terrorist purposes? What will they do to stop blocked sites immediately popping up elsewhere, how will they make sure they get the right sites, and only the right sites, who will pay for mistakes, and how much will it all cost?
Faull, ever so politely, has coherent answers to none of these questions, and more, but then "we are still at the early stage of a the beginning of consultations and it would be premature to speak about a specific solution," and of course as "we are still considering legislative and non legislative options, we cannot speak about a specific option." Much more, or should we say less, at Spy Blog (http://spyblog.org.uk/). We particularly commend the answer covering the precise definition of terrorism, set down confusingly here (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32002F0475:EN:HTML) (some might suggest certain Governments could fall victim to (d)-(i) of Article 1), but subject to the "current reflection and consultation exercise [which] will consider whether a modification of such articles is actually required". So it's precise and set down, but fluid. Perhaps.
Note however that the decidedly vague nature of the Commission's planning does not necessarily mean it is not starting to happen anyway. The Internet has figured increasingly prominently in recent UK anti-terror legislation and investigations, and the Justice & Home Affairs Ministers are likely to continue to move the agenda on, with or without the Commission's consultations.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003563.shtml
“You can VIEW the entire letter …”
TechWorld (a UK publication) has an article about a “leaked” letter from the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) (apparently MSFT funded) about, as the article puts it, the “potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given to open source software development.”
Nothing weird there. What is weird is, first, that such a letter has to be “leaked” (aren’t submissions to the EC a matter of public record?), and, second, the way in which the letter is made available on the TechWorld website. TechWorld gives you a link to the letter. The link states: “You can view the entire letter here.” And indeed, the link means what it says. You can ONLY view the letter. The PDF is locked so that it can’t be printed.
Is it really the case that copyright law would forbid a letter written to a government agency from being printed on a users computer?
Note, this is a simple restriction to get around (but is that legal?): If you’ve got access to Acrobat Professional, you can save a version and turn off the password security (apparently without the password, as I did).
posted by [ Lessig ] on [ Oct 16 06 at 11:27 PM ]
Attention Virtual Lawyers!
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2031501,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
Virtual Economies Attract Real-World Tax Attention
By Adam Pasick, Reuters October 16, 2006
LONDON (Reuters)—Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of real-world authorities.
"Right now we're at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise—taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth," said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
"You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there's no mechanism by which you're taxed on this stuff," [and if something ain't taxed, we gotta tax it! Bob] he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012774.html
October 16, 2006
DHS OIG Evaluation of Information Security Program for FY 2006
Evaluation of DHS' Information Security Program for Fiscal Year 2006 (PDF, 42 pages), released October 16, 2006.
[Unusually, that is a bad link. Here's the report: http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtrpts/OIG_06-62_Sep06.pdf Note the September date! Bob]
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012777.html
October 16, 2006
Article Examines Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure
Levine, David S., "Secrecy and Unaccountability: Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure". Florida Law Review, Forthcoming. [via SSRN]
"Trade secrecy - the intellectual property doctrine that allows businesses to keep commercially valuable information secret for a potentially unlimited amount of time - is increasingly intruding in the operation of our public infrastructure, like voting machines, the Internet and telecommunications. A growing amount of public infrastructure is being provided by private entities that are holding critical information about their goods and services secret from the public. This Article examines this phenomenon, which is largely unexplored in legal scholarship, and identifies a significant conflict between the values and policies of trade secrecy doctrine and the democratic values of accountability and transparency that have traditionally been present in public infrastructure projects."
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/012779.html
October 16, 2006
New on LLRX.com
New on LLRX.com for October 15, 2006
Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide, Updated, by Sabrina I. Pacifici and Donna Cavallini
Deal or No Deal – Licensing & Acquiring Digital Resources, by Kara Phillips
The Tao of Law Librarianship: Flickr is the Web Photo Tool Preferred by Superheroes and Librarians, by Connie Crosby
CongressLine: Congressional Leadership, by Paul Jenks
E-Discovery Update - by Fios Inc.: Developing a Case-Specific E-Discovery Plan, by Conrad J. Jacoby
Reference from Coast to Coast: The Test Results are In!, by Jan Bissett and Margi Heinen
Commentary: Biodefense and the Freedom of Information Act, by Beth Wellington
FOIA Facts: FOIA Legislation Update, by Scott A. Hodes
After Hours 2006 Holiday Gift Guide, Kathy Biehl
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/LAW/10/16/sticker.suit.ap/
Nurse sues over ticket for anti-Bush bumper sticker
ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- A woman who was ticketed for having an obscene anti-Bush bumper sticker filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday against a county in the state of Georgia and its officials.
Denise Grier, 47, of Athens, Georgia, got a $100 ticket in March after a DeKalb County police officer spotted the bumper sticker, which read "I'm Tired Of All The BUSH**." [I don't get it. Clearly the missing letters are “IT” -- why is she angry with computers? Bob]
A DeKalb judge threw out the ticket in April because the state's lewd decal law that formed the basis for the ticket was ruled unconstitutional in 1990. (Watch to see what else Grier glued to her car -- 1:36)
