No. Your analogy is part of the problem. The DOJ and Feds have subverted the concept of innocent until proven guilty into If you're not doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have anything to hide.

By setting up your analogy with the statement that there is a dead body in the trunk, you've already presumed guilt, nothing any civilized society should be doing.

What kind of a crime can be committed where the only access to incriminating evidence lies in the mind of the accused? We're entering a dangerous era of thought-crime. Why doesn't the DOJ just apply some random permutation on the data so that it generates some unrelated and arbitrary but incriminating documents?


TL;DR - Law enforcement should either do better detective work to find evidence without relying on the accused to provide it, or save taxpayer money, cut the whole "democracy" shenanigans, and just use false or forced confessions.

You mean the FCC actually protected public interest at one point? With the likes of Meredith Baker it's hard to believe they ever did anything other than line their own pockets by selling democracy, one dollar at a time.

In that case, software should be (and is) copyrightable, not patentable. The issue is that the US patent system is granting a legal monopoly (aka, a patent) on a vague conceptual description with no physical embodiment. Innovation dies when the simple act of improving upon ideas (aka, algorithms) is illegal.

The system is terribly broken, and the influence of $$$ in the political/legal system prevents it from being fixed.

But unlike Android, consoles aren't sold on a platform of openness. If non-rooted Andoid gains adoption because of this, then Google will have done more to neuter Linux than Microsoft ever could.

btw, Trusted Computing is almost as much of an oxymoron as Digital Rights Management.

This Orwellian doublespeak makes my brain hurt. They only sound like features because marketing won't call it "Limited Application Execution" and "Digital Restrictions Management". Has anyone seen my tinfoil hat?

And so the era of mandatory "trusted computing" begins, kicked off, ironically, by Google.

If you wish to consume licensed IP content on a device in your possession, then the content owners will determine what computing functions are allowed on such device. And the device remote kill-switch will make you think-twice about content misuse.

As I've watched Android dominate the tablet market, I'm bothered by the fact that these devices do not give root access without "jailbreaking". Isn't Android a major step toward the very scary world of "Trusted Computing"? That is, the hardware manufacturer, government, or whoever else has power can deny the ability for a user to run a program (or all programs!) at whim. Right out of the box, the user is denied permission to use their hardware in the way that they see fit.

I feel much more comfortable with a full Linux distro that empowers its users, rather than makes them comfortable with someone else holding the keys to their machine. Besided, android hardly seems compatible with the "open" goals of OLPC. A full distro would take advantage of a real JVM and a much richer software eco-structure instead.

We assume that banks transact their client's funds with an implicit neutrality, or else anyone in possession of a check couldn't trust that it was a valid monetary substitute. BoA isn't indicating "illegal" behavior, only that the recipient is acting in a manner inconsistent with BoA policies.

Between the Government stampede to eliminate the 1st amendment, and the use of corporations to act where the rule-of-law isn't convenient, the US Government and Corporate overlords are playing with fire.

All democracy-loving non-US entities should be watching carefully as this plays out.

Thomas Jefferson said, "Information is the currency of democracy". The WikiLeaks drama is showing us how readily our own politicians will abandon core values of democracy in order to avoid embarrassment. It also clearly demonstrates that we live in a world where our personal communications can readily be disrupted at the whim of private corporations under pressure from these same politicians. The entertainment industry has tried to criminalize peer-to-peer technologies for years, but what is happening with WikiLeaks makes it more essential *now*, than ever before, that we adopt open source peer-to-peer technologies on a large scale. Perhaps the most important of these is The tor project which permits private and anonymous communications. Democracy cannot exist if people cannot speak freely without fear of reprisal. The more TOR relays that exist around the globe, the more immune we all are to the government/corporate censorship we are witnessing. Do your part in ensuring your digital rights by running a relay and becoming part of the network.

If you value democracy then you should understand that the backlash from the WL episode will be a push for laws and technology to control communications at the direct expense of democratic ideals which require free speech. Anonymity and secure peer-to-peer communications, already at risk, will be further threatened under the premise of terrorism. If you want to help ensure that democracy prevails in the face of reactionary politics, then run a TOR server ( http://www.torproject.org/ ) now, and consider any of these alternatives.