May 03, 2003
Why Gary Hart wants to blog
Wired News: Why Gary Hart wants to blog.
Meantime, I'm not exactly sure who's publishing this Howard Dean group weblog, but it appears to be some of his campaign staffers.
Feeling the boot heel of the Patriot Act
A uniformly depressing news day. Here's a commentary from the LA Times: Feeling the Boot Heel of the Patriot Act. You have to wonder why this didn't appear in the New York Times.
Several weeks ago, my roommate Asher and I went to an Indian restaurant just off Times Square in the heart of midtown Manhattan. We helped ourselves to the buffet and sat down to begin eating.Suddenly there was a terrible commotion and five police officers in bulletproof vests stormed down the stairs. They had their guns drawn and were pointing them indiscriminately at the restaurant staff and at us.
"Go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled. I hesitated, lost in my own panic. "Did you not hear me? Go to the back and sit down," they demanded. I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging from late teens to senior citizen. One of the officers pointed his gun in the waiter's face and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen.
The police placed their fingers on the triggers of their guns and kicked open the kitchen doors. Shouts emanated from the kitchen and a few seconds later five Latino men crawled out on their hands and knees, guns pointed at them.
After patting us all down, the five officers seated us at two tables. As they continued to kick open doors to closets and restrooms with their fingers glued to their triggers, officials in business suits emerged from the stairwell. Two walked over to our table and identified themselves as agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Homeland Security Department.
Having some limited knowledge of the rights afforded to U.S. citizens, I asked why we were being held. The INS agent said we would be released once they confirmed that there were no outstanding warrants against us and our immigration status was OK.
In pre-9/11 America, the legality of this would have been questionable. After all, the 4th Amendment states: "The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. "
"You have no right to hold us," said Asher. But they explained that they did: This was a homeland security investigation under the authority of the Patriot Act. ...
Shadowy gov. program snoops on immigrants
My friend Jane Black has a new story up at Business Week Online: At Justice, NSEERS Spells Data Chaos. This shadowy program has gathered extensive personal data on immigrants. But who has the info, and what's it being used for? Answers are hard to find. Excerpt:
I'm holding in my hands documents that don't exist, according to a Justice Dept. spokesman. The forms -- 21 pages worth -- are from 7 of the 76 regional bureaus of the Immigration & Naturalization Service, a bureaucracy formerly part of Justice that moved to the new Homeland Security Dept. on Mar. 1. These forms list anywhere from a dozen to three dozen questions presented to 130,000 males last winter, mostly Muslim immigrants required to "special register" with the INS so that the government could keep better tabs on foreign nationals.
Music labels may sabotage computers of infringers
NY Times: Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy. Record companies are financing the development of software that would sabotage the computers of people that download pirated music. Excerpt:
ome of the world's biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives.The record companies are exploring options on new countermeasures, which some experts say have varying degrees of legality, to deter online theft: from attacking personal Internet connections so as to slow or halt downloads of pirated music to overwhelming the distribution networks with potentially malicious programs that masquerade as music files.
The covert campaign, parts of which may never be carried out because they could be illegal under state and federal wiretap laws, is being developed and tested by a cadre of small technology companies, the executives said. ...
Among the more benign approaches being developed is one program, considered a Trojan horse rather than a virus, that simply redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the song they tried to download.
A more malicious program, dubbed "freeze," locks up a computer system for a certain duration ó minutes or possibly even hours ó risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called "silence," scans a computer's hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too.
Other approaches that are being tested include launching an attack on personal Internet connections, often called "interdiction," to prevent a person from using a network while attempting to download pirated music or offer it to others.
This is, frankly, pretty astonishing.
