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Submission + - DOJ Seeks Mandatory Data Retention for ISP's 3

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Computerworld reports that in testimony before Congress the US Department of Justice renewed its call for legislation mandating Internet Service Providers (ISP) retain customer usage data for up to two years because law enforcement authorities are coming up empty-handed in their efforts to go after online predators and other criminals because of the unavailability of data relating to their online activities. "There is no doubt among public safety officials that the gaps between providers' retention policies and law enforcement agencies' needs, can be extremely harmful to the agencies' investigations" says Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department adding that data retention is crucial to fighting Internet crimes, especially online child pornography (PDF). Weinstein admits that a data retention policy raises valid privacy concerns however, such concerns need to be addressed and balanced against the need for law enforcement to have access to the data. "Denying law enforcement that evidence prevents law enforcement from identifying those who victimize others online," concludes Weinstein."
United States

Submission + - US Scraps Virtual Fence along Mexican Border

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "The Arizona Republic reports that the federal government has officially cancelled its multibillion-dollar plan to build a virtual fence along the border with Mexico as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disclosed in a congressional briefing that the program known as SBInet was costing too much and achieving too little. "SBInet cannot meet its original objective of providing a single, integrated border-security technology solution," says Napolitano. Boeing was hired in 2006 to develop the system under a three-year federal contract with cost projections for full build-out as high as $8 billion but efforts were plagued by delays, glitches, budget increases and congressional criticism. Napolitano has ordered Customs and Border Protection to launch a more modest and geographically tailored effort using SBInet funds and existing technology such as mobile-surveillance systems, unmanned aircraft, thermal-imaging devices and remote-video surveillance with proven elements of SBInet including stationary radar and infrared-sensor towers. SBInet cost nearly $1 billion for development along 53 miles of Arizona border. Homeland Security says its new plan can enhance security along the remaining 323 miles of Arizona border at a total cost of less than $750 million."
United States

Submission + - Patriot Act Up For Renewal, Nobody Notices

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "When the Patriot Act was first signed in 2001, it was billed as a temporary measure required because of the extreme circumstances created by the terrorist threat. The fear from its opponents was that executive power, once given, is seldom relinquished. Now the Examiner reports that on January 5th, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill to add yet another year to the soon to be expiring Patriot Act extending it until February, 2012 with passage likely to happen with little debate or contention. If passed, this would be the second time the Obama administration has punted on campaign promises to roll back excessive surveillance measures allowed under the act passed in the wake of 9/11. Last years extension passed under the heading of the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. "Given the very limited number of days Congress has in session before the current deadline, and the fact that the bill’s Republican sponsor is only seeking another year, I think it's safe to read this as signaling an agreement across the aisle to put the issue off yet again," writes Julian Sanchez."
United States

Submission + - Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans 1

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "CBS News reports that the Obama administration is currently drafting the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which will be released by the president in the next few months. "We are not talking about a national ID card," says Commerce Secretary Gary Locke whose department will be in charge of the program. "We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities." Although details have not been finalized, the "trusted identity" may take the form of a smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt says that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential if I don't want to," says Schmidt. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this.""
Power

Submission + - Labor Lockout Lingers at Honeywell Nuclear Plant

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Federal News Radio reports that in Metropolis, Illinois, the nation's only site for refining uranium for eventual use in nuclear power plants, some 230 union workers locked out by the company since last June, take turns picketing and warn of possible toxic releases into the community while they're not at their jobs. Even in better times, the plant has been a source of concern. In September 2003, toxic hydrogen fluoride was released in an accident. Three months later, seepage of mildly radioactive gas sent four people to the hospital and prompted the evacuation of nearby residents. Now a recent safety inspection by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that temporary workers brought in by Honeywell weren't properly trained and were cheating on tests and that Honeywell had neglected to report liquids that were released into the air. Metropolis' troubles began last spring when efforts to negotiate a new contract broke down at the Honeywell plant. Honeywell opted not to let the union employees work without a contract, citing the lack of bargaining progress and what it called the union's refusal to agree to provide 24 hours of notice before any strike. Jim Hambrick, proprietor of a downtown souvenir shop billed as "the Largest Superman Collection on the Planet," believes most of the town backs the locked-out workers. "If you look at it in terms of Superman, you've got good versus evil.""
Businesses

Submission + - America's Cubicles Are Shrinking (latimes.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "In the 1970s, American corporations typically thought they needed 500 to 700 square feet per employee to build an effective office, but the LA Times reports that today's average is a little more than 200 square feet per person, and the space allocation could hit a mere 50 square feet by 2015. "We're at a very interesting inflection point in real estate history," says Peter Miscovich who studies workplace trends. "The next 10 years will be very different than the last 30." Although cubicles have shrunk from an average of 64 feet to 49 feet in recent years, companies are looking for more ways to compress their real estate footprint with offices that squeeze together workstations while setting aside a few rooms where employees can conduct meetings or have private phone conversations. "Younger workers' lives are all integrated, not segregated," says Larry Rivard. "They have learned to work anywhere — at a kitchen table or wherever.""
Security

Submission + - NSA adds Kahn Collection to Cryptologic Museum

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Baltimore Sun reports that as recently as the late 1960s, the very existence of the National Security Agency was a closely held secret until a New York newspaper reporter named David Kahn published "The Codebreakers," a 1,200-page blockbuster that would establish Kahn as the world's leading expert on the history of cryptology, the art and science of making and breaking codes. "According to my editor, the NSA director flew up to New York to say it would be dangerous to national security, and unpatriotic, to publish it," says Kahn. Fast forward 43 years and now the NSA has announced it has added the David Kahn Collection to the library of its public anteroom, the National Cryptologic Museum — complete with more than 130,000 pages of original interview notes and 2,800 books. "For those who care about cryptology — what it is, how it works, where it fits into world history and culture — at some point, [they'd] want to look at the Kahn collection," says curator Patrick Weadon. "It's an eclectic cornucopia of all things cryptological." In the mid-1960s, when Kahn was reporting for "The Codebreakers," most of the history-altering cryptologists of World War II were still alive and possessed of their memories and many were being interviewed by Kahn for the first and, as it turned out, last time. Kahn kept copious, well-organized notes on every conversation. "No one else did research this comprehensive and thorough, and in many cases, it can never be done again," says Rene Stein, the museum librarian charged with cataloguing the Khan collection. Kahn was honored for his contribution during a private event at the National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) when General Alexander presented Kahn with a bronze medallion."
United States

Submission + - A Big Loss for Fair Use and the Tech Policy World

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Gigi Sohn writes in the Huffington Post that one of the results of the mid-term elections was the defeat of Representative Rick Boucher, the current Chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, widely recognized as one of the most tech-savvy and intelligent members of Congress, and long an advocate for consumers on a wide variety of communications and intellectual property issues. Boucher has been the best friend of fair use on Capitol Hill writes Sohn. In 2002, 2003 and 2007, Boucher introduced legislation to allow consumers to break digital locks for lawful purposes, a fair use exception to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and while the odds against that legislation passing were always great, Boucher understood the symbolic importance of standing up for consumers' rights to use technology lawfully. "As important, he served as a moderating force both on the House Energy & Commerce and Judiciary Committees against those many members of Congress willing to give large media companies virtually everything on their copyright wish lists.""
United States

Submission + - DMCA Used to Stifle Political Speech in Ohio Race

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "EFF reports that after Ohio Congressman John Kasich put out a commercial featuring a man dressed as a steelworker discussing Governor Ted Strickland’s record, Strickland's campaign folks apparently realized that the "steelworker" was really a paid actor, and put together their own video, mixing in clips of some of the actor's other work to make fun of Kasich. Now the DMCA has been used to send a take down demand to YouTube removing Strickland's video for at least 10 days because it uses short clips from the actor's movies. First, the political video's use is transformative because it provides evidence that the supposed steelworker was actually a paid actor and as the Supreme Court explains, transformative works "lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine’s guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright." Second, the political ad only uses a few seconds of the original film so a fair use is particularly justifiable when it uses the minimum necessary to make its point. "What's troubling, yet again, is that this form of political speech has been removed from YouTube in the heat of an election battle," writes Mike Masnick on Techdirt. "Even if the takedown was not political, it's clearly a case of copyright law being used to stifle political speech.""
United States

Submission + - Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Alexis Madrigal has an interesting essay in the Atlantic about the popular response of people in the 19th century to the development of the electric power industry in America. Before electricity, basically every factory had to run a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine, transmitting power from a water wheel or a steam engine to the machines of a manufactory but with the development of electric turbines and motors the public believed engineers were tapping mysterious, invisible forces with almost supernatural powers for mischief. "Think about it," writes Madrigal. "You've got a wire and you've got a magnet. Switch on the current — which you can't see and have no intuitive way to know exists — and suddenly the wire begins to rotate around the magnet. You can reverse the process, too. Rotate the magnet around the wire and it generates a current that can be turned into light, heat, or power." And that brings us back to Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist who was was shockingly popular in his heyday and whose popularity closely parallels the rise of electrification in America. "I think Goldberg's drawings reminded his contemporaries of a time when they could understand the world's industrial processes just by looking. No matter how absurd his work was, anyone could trace the reactions involved," writes Madrigal. "People like to complain that they can't understand modern cars because of all the fancy parts and electronic doo-dads in them now, but we lost that ability for most things long ago. ""
United States

Submission + - Public Clearinghouse Proposed for Evoting Failures (fcw.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Alice Lipowicz writes in Federal Computer Week that Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, has reviewed hundreds of reports of problems with electronic voting systems during the last eight years and is recommending a new regulatory system with a national database, accessible by election officials and others, that identifies voting system malfunctions reported by vendors or election officials and that new legislation require vendors report evoting failures to the clearinghouse. "We need a new and better regulatory structure to ensure that voting system defects are caught early, officials in affected jurisdictions are notified immediately, and action is taken to make certain that they will be corrected for all such systems, wherever they are used in the United States," writes Norden adding that election officials rely on vendors to keep them aware of potential problems with voting machines, which is often done voluntarily and that voting system failures in one jurisdiction tend to be repeated in other areas, resulting in reduced public confidence and lost votes."
United States

Submission + - Building Prisons Without Walls using GPS Devices (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. "By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace," writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. "The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers," adds Wood. "The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.""
United States

Submission + - Please Mr. Postman, a Plan for the Digital Age

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui write in the Washington Post that with projected deficits through 2020 of $238 billion the debate over potential changes at the US Postal Service is like a fight over the dessert bar on the Titanic: email has already supplanted letters, more people will send money via PayPal rather than mail checks, people will download their movies and books, check their bills online, and receive information about their investments electronically. Delivery volume for first-class mail fell 22 percent from 1998 through 2007, tumbled an additional 13 percent last year and was down 3 percent in the first half of this year despite heavy mailings from the Census Bureau. USPS's future lies in things that need to be delivered physically: shoes, computers and other objects and the USPS has assets that could let it take on UPS and FedEx. "USPS needs to start with the future and work backward to the present," write Carroll and Mui. "It needs to forecast volumes for all types of its business five, 10 and 15 years out and design a business model that will thrive under those scenarios. Only then can it figure out what radical changes need to be made now." In other words, USPS needs to first design the whole bridge, then build it. ""To avoid the fates of Kodak and General Motors, the Postal Service must learn from their failures. It must start by convincing Congress and other stakeholders that it is in the middle of a full-blown crisis. It can either lead change or be overrun by it. ""
United States

Submission + - Judicial Nominations in the Internet Age

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Chris Good writes in the Atlantic that nominees to the Supreme Court and other high profile positions are required to provide the Judiciary Committee with everything they've ever written or said publicly, to the best of their abilities within reason, and thanks to the Internet the last major judicial nominee reported out by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu, included links to YouTube videos of lectures and talks he gave, 573 pages of public writings, news articles about him, syllabi from courses he taught, and statements about legal issues. Even so Liu was admonished for failing to fully disclose his writings and public speeches to Senators including appearances at such occasions as brown bag lunches and alumni gatherings. "In preparing my original submission, I made a good faith effort to track down all of my publications and speeches over the years," wrote Liu. "I checked my personal calendar, I performed a variety of electronic searches, and I searched my memory to produce the original list. But I have since realized that those efforts were not sufficient." Not so long ago, entire news articles in local papers could go wholly unnoticed, by both the nominee and committee members and staff but not so in the era of the internet. "There are many, many opportunities for people to say things publicly, in a documented way, these days," writes Good. "Imagine what will happen when, decades from now, a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.""
United States

Submission + - Defense Chief Urges Big Cuts in Military Spending

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says the Pentagon is wasting money it will no longer get, and focused on targets as diverse as the large number of generals and admirals, the layers of bureaucracy in the Pentagon, and the cost of military health care. “The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, opened a gusher of defense spending that nearly doubled the base budget over the last decade,” Gates says. “Military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny. The gusher has been turned off, and will stay off for a good period of time.” Gates, a Republican who was carried-over as Defense Secretary from the Bush administration, has already canceled or trimmed thirty weapons programs with long-term savings predicted at $330 billion but is now seeking to convert as much as 2 percent or 3 percent of spending from “tail” to “tooth” — military slang for converting spending from support services to combat forces and while this may not seem like a significant savings in the Pentagon’s base budget, cuts of any size are certain to run hard against entrenched constituencies. Gates’s critique of top-heavy headquarters overseas was underscored by the location of the speech at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. President Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, warned the nation of the menacing influence of an emerging “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address as president in 1960. "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals," said Eisenhower, "so that security and liberty may prosper together.""

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