Obama is the first U.S. president to have assigned a United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. Victoria Espinel has lead the way for bills such as SOPA and PIPA and the subsequent controvercial siezing of Megaupload. I first became aware of the upcoming threat from a whitepaper issued by Victoria Espinel, in the spring of 2011 asking for increased penanaties for online streaming. The Obama Administration is responsible for asking for the cyber security legislation that has lead to CISPA and the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 that has been a threat to online civil liberties and privacy. We must stop these bills before they start, at their place of origin. The Obama Administration is the seed.
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
Obama in a signing statement for the NDAA said he was reluctant to sign it because of the controvercial section 1021 but went ahead anyway; don’t listen to what he says. On August 6th, The Obama Administration appealed Judge Forrest’s temporary injunction that invalidated Section 1021 as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments. This has been reported by Chris Hedges that filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran, and later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. Section 1021 of the NDAA granted the executive branch the power to hold indefinitely in military facilities U.S. citizens without due process and habeas corpus. It should be noted that, today is Bradley Manning’s 824th day of detention without trial, to which the legal maximum is 120 days.
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
Julian Assange in a public statement from the balcony of the Equador Embassy in London said, “On Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to observe, but I knew there would be witnesses, and that is because of you. If the UK did not throw away the Vienna Conventions the other night, it is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching. So the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the embassy of Ecuador.” The full transcript can be found at the telegraph.co.uk
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
Rob Bishop, one of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s developers, is going on a Hackerspace tour across the United States. There will be informal talks, Q&A session, demo and hands-on workshops. Our very own, a local hackerspace, Nullspace Labs, located in Downtown Los Angeles, will be included in the tour and will start at 7pm on October 2nd. And a bit further away in Fullerton at 7pm at the 23b Shop. The Raspberry Pi is tiny ( the size of a credit card ) and cheap ( around $40 dollars ) computer primarily for the purpose of education.
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
August 16th was the 19th Birthday for the Debian Community, “The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a ‘distribution’ of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.” Debian is the rock that Ubuntu is based on, to which which there are other variations such as gNewSense and Mint.
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
Sqrrl Data, Inc. has landed two million dollars in seed funding to develop NSA technology, the company provides products for Apache Accumulo. The software was initially developed for the needs of the NSA has fine-grained security controls to limit who has access to what data, without the need to seperate data into seperate databases. It is free software, source code available, and based on Google’s BigTable design, in similarity to HBase, Hypertable and Cassandra. Alex Williams on TechCrunch points that the problem Apache Accumulo solves is that, “Much of the data that people want to analyze is under such regulations as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley. You can’t put all the data together without running afoul of regulations.”
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 has been clarified to apply to online video, ruled by the District Court for the Northern District of California. Online viewing habits may be disclosed “to a law enforcement agency pursuant to a warrant issued under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, an equivalent State warrant, a grand jury subpoena, or a court order.” Or if users’s consent to their information being shared. For more information visit EFF.org on the Deeplinks blog.
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
Declan McCullagh of CNET quoted Pablo Chezez, Google’s public police director, “One thing that we are very seriously taking a look at is the question of software patents, and whether in fact the patent system as it currently exists is the right system to incent innovation and really promote consumer-friendly policies”. Meanwhile, in a new move for Google, they have gone on the offensive on the patent war: Motorola Mobility, now a part the company, has filed an injunction against Apple for the iPhone, iPad and others hardware.
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
Jay Stanley of the ACLU reported that The International Association of Chiefs of Police recently approved “Recommended Guidelines for the use of Unmanned Aircraft” a.k.a. drones. Establishing a broad concensus that:
1. warrents are necessary for the use of drones where subjects have a reasonable expectation of privacy
2. images should not be retained unless relevant to a crime
3. the public should be given meaningful notice of drone use
4. police drone use should be subject to tracking and audits, with accountability for misuse
5. weapons should not be placed on domestic drones
Code is law, if we can’t read the code, we don’t know the law. If we don’t know the law, than the system should be declared unjust and rejected at all costs.
On June 8th I reported that the California Location Privacy Act SB 1434 passed the California Senate with a vote 30 to 6, and on Wednesday, August 22nd it has passed the Assembly with a vote of 63-11. The bill will require law enforcement to get a search warrant to be able to obtain location information from any electronic device, unless in an emergency or requested by the owner of the device. I urge Governor Brown to sign SB 1434.
Tune in next week for an overview of free, as in freedom, software for music and audio communities. For Poobah.com this is Braydon Fuller logging offline.
Source
August 24th, 2012 / The Tom Coston Show / ©2012 Poobah Records, available under the terms of an Attribution license.