Feds can take your computer for no reason

In the name of "national security," the Department of Homeland Security has announced that customs officials can take people's computers without cause, keep them as long as they deem necessary to snoop through them, and share whatever they find with other governmental or private entities. DHS claims that this is necessary to "prevent terrorism." CNet has links to the policy text.

This isn't actually anything new; the government has been doing this without a publicly stated policy for some time, and it's made the news before. What's new is that the government is admitting that its policy is to rifle through travelers' private information without any justification.

If you must travel to other countries with a laptop computer, remove any information which might be remotely confidential before taking a foreign trip. It's best to clean out all music files; you might inadvertently have something in violation of copyright. Put everything you need on a server, in encrypted form or with restricted access, and retrieve it when you get to your destination. Then wipe it again before your trip home. With anything that's optional -- a music player, a PDA -- leave it behind if you can.

When dealing with tyrannical, power-mad governments, extra precautions are necessary.

Just for fun...

Liberty LOLcats.

China: Censorship as usual

It's hard to guess how IOC head Jacques Rogge thought he'd get away with his lie that China would not be censoring the Internet during the Olympics. Not only has censorship continued as usual, but the IOC was caught making a secret deal to agree to censorship. Yielding to censorship when there is no alternative is one thing; claiming "there will be no censorship on the Internet" while working behind the scenes on a censorship deal is despicable.

Kevan Gosper, whom the IOC backstabbed with the deal, suggested that "the internet crackdown may have been triggered by the series of disasters and mishaps that had 'traumatised' China." If so, that's a very frustrating result for all of us who gave money to help the earthquake victims, thinking that China might become a bit more open as a result. Now I have to wonder how much of the money I gave just went straight into the pockets of "traumatised" Chinese bureaucrats.

A news article which I found on the Financial Times website yesterday, but today was reduced to a very truncated form, contained the following:

However, the ruling Communist party has stressed the need to use the internet to “correctly guide” public opinion. The world wide web is “the battlefield forward position for the propagation of advanced socialist culture”, Hu Jintao, president, said last month.

For all of its supposed encouragement of private enterprise, China remains a fundamentally socialist state. "Private" property exists only in the sense of a trust granted by governmental authority, on which unlimited conditions can be set. Freedom of speech is implicit in real private property; if you own something, you can use it for any purpose which doesn't violate the rights of others. If you merely have it in "stewardship" for the "good of the people," then "the people" (who run the government) can place any requirements they want in order to "correctly guide" the other people. It wouldn't even be right to say that the private enterprise system in China is a sham; the government admits to being socialist, with all that entails.

For whatever it's worth, I'm giving my business to Pepsi as long as there are Olympic promotions on Coke cans.

Obama honors mass murderer

Barack Obama's "Joshua Generation" project ran into an embarrassing snag when it turned out that an existing group owns the name. This is an embarrassing mistake, but no more than that.

But his choosing the name in the first place, honoring the Biblical Joshua, is more troubling. Obama said:

As great as Moses was, despite all that he did, leading a people out of bondage, he didn't cross over the river to see the Promised Land. God told him your job is done. You'll see it. You'll be at the mountain top and you can see what I've promised. What I've promised to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. You will see that I've fulfilled that promise but you won't go there. We're going to leave it to the Joshua generation to make sure it happens. There are still battles that need to be fought; some rivers that need to be crossed.

The "battles" to which he alludes included the massacre of the entire population of Jericho and Ai by Joshua's army. His forces, allegedly operating on God's orders, killed all the men. All the women. All the children. Even all the livestock. (Chances are this never happened, but it's the Biblical story, not the historical fact, which is important for this purpose.)

Why did he name a campaign for a brutal killer?

Joshua said, you know, I'm scared. I'm not sure that I am up to the challenge, the Lord said to him, every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, I have given you. Be strong and have courage, for I am with you wherever you go. Be strong and have courage. It's a prayer for a journey. A prayer that kept a woman in her seat when the bus driver told her to get up, a prayer that led nine children through the doors of the little rock school, a prayer that carried our brothers and sisters over a bridge right here in Selma, Alabama. Be strong and have courage.

Obama compared Rosa Parks to a perpetrator of genocide. That is sickening.

Berkman fellows oppose censored "free" wireless

A group of fellows and faculty members with Harvard's Berkman Center have filed formal comments against the FCC's proposal for auctioning AWS-3 (Advanced Wireless Services) spectrum with the requirement that the winning bidder provide national free wireless Internet service with content filtering. The proposal provides for a single winner in the auction, which will have a nationwide monopoly on the 2155-2180 MHz band. The auction's winner is ultimately expected to be reachable by at least 95% of the United States' population.

The authors of the comment state that "to characterize the Internet as a system for controlled 'content' transmission is to undermine its salient characteristic as a participatory environment. The value of the Internet is created by the contributions of its participants." The comment notes a particularly nasty recommendation:

[Licensees must] use best efforts to employ filtering to protect children from exposure to inappropriate material as defined in paragraph (a)(1). Should any commercially-available network filters installed not be capable of reviewing certain types of communications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the licensee may use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications as part of the AWS-3 free broadband service, to ensure that inappropriate content as defined in paragraph (a)(1) not be accessible as part of the service.

That's the Andrew Cuomo approach: Block whole protocols to "protect children." It's a safe guess that the monopolist won't offer a newsgroup server.

The Berkman group's opposition to censorship is laudable, but it doesn't go far enough. The whole proposal is scary; it creates a legal monopoly over an important chunk of the EM spectrum, guaranteeing that the monopolist will have a cozy relationship with the FCC. It will get favors from the federal government, and in return will do the government's bidding. Focusing just on the filtering misses a major point. The FCC proposal is deadly to the Internet.