Brin needs killing, XIIV
- Forwarded message from David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] - From: David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 04:02:03 -0500 To: Ip ip@v2.listbox.com Subject: [IP] more on No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.1.0.040913 Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Forwarded Message From: Josh Duberman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 19:19:51 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! Hi - I forwarded these messages to author David Brin. His reply is below, and he gave permission for you to post it IP if you wish. Thank you and best wishes - Josh Josh, thanks for sharing these remarks about privacy. Alas, these folks are falling for the usual trap that has snared so many well-meaning people for the last decade. They are right to worry about creeping Big Brotherism... and vigorously defending the wrong stretch of wall. What weird reflex is it, that makes bright people fall for the trap of seeing SECRECY as a friend of freedom? (Oh, when it's YOUR secrecy you call it privacy.) To rail against others seeing, without suggesting any conceivable way that (1) the technologies could be stopped or (2) how it would help matters to stop govt surveillance even if we could. As I've emphasized in The Transparent Society, the thing that has kept us free and safe has been to emphasize MORE information flows. To ENHANCE how much average people know. http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/04/mortal_gods/index_np.html And yes, this is the one way to protect genuine PRIVACY... though any sensible person knows that the word will be re-defined in a new century flooded with cheap cameras. (For a look at the near future, see: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1078288485.php) This inane reflex to try to blind others, instead of empowering citizens to look back, is like a drug, alas. But slowly people are awakening to the facts. The world will be a sea of cameras and vision. But that needn't be a nightmare, if we can hold the watchers accountable by looking BACK. With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com http://www.davidbrin.com David Farber wrote: Orwell was an amateur djf -- Forwarded Message From: Lauren Weinstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:38:28 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! Dave, It's time to blow the lid off this no expectation of privacy in public places argument that judges and law enforcement now spout out like demented parrots in so many situations. Technology has rendered that argument meaningless -- unless we intend to permit a pervasive surveillance slave society to become our future -- which apparently is the goal among some parties. It is incredibly disingenuous to claim that cameras (increasingly tied to face recognition software) and GPS tracking devices (which could end up being standard in new vehicles as part of their instrumentation black boxes), etc. are no different than cops following suspects. Technology will effectively allow everyone to be followed all of the time. Unless society agrees that everything you do outside the confines of your home and office should be available to authorities on demand -- even retrospectively via archived images and data -- we are going down an incredibly dangerous hole. I use the slimy guy in the raincoat analogy. Let's say the government arranged for everyone to be followed at all times in public by slimy guys in raincoats. Each has a camera and clipboard, and wherever you go in public, they are your shadow. They keep snapping photos of where you go and where you look. They're constantly jotting down the details of your movements. When you go into your home, they wait outside, ready to start shadowing you again as soon as you step off your property. Every day, they report everything they've learned about you to a government database. Needless to say, most people would presumably feel incredibly violated by such a scenario, even though it's all taking place in that public space where we're told that we have no expectation of privacy. Technology is creating the largely invisible equivalent of that guy in the raincoat, ready to tail us all in perpetuity. If we don't control him, he will most assuredly control us. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, Fact Squad - http://www.factsquad.org Co-Founder, URIICA - Union for Representative International Internet
Re: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
At 12:30 PM 1/12/2005, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: Just out of curiosity, if the man doesn't need a warrent to place a surveilance device, shouldn't it be within your rights to tamper with, disable or remove such a device if you discover one? Do you mean that if you discover an unsolicited gift of consumer electronics attached to your car, do you have the right to play with it just as you would if it came in the mail? I would certainly expect so... On the other hand, if it appears to be a lost item, you could be a good public citizen and take it to the police to see if anybody claims it... GPS tracker is an ambiguous description, though. GPS devices detect where they are, but what next? A device could record where it was, for later collection, or it could transmit its position to a listener. Tampering with existing recordings might have legal implications, but putting a transmitter-based system in your nearest garbage can or accidentally leaving it in a taxi or mailing it to Medellin all seem like reasonable activities. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Brin needs killing, XIIV
At 10:05 AM +0100 1/14/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: Brin needs killing, XIIV er, Eleventy Four? Fifteen the hard way? ;-) Cheers, RAH Who was backhanded once for calling Brin a statist in public... -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Searching with Images instead of Words
hi, They had been researching on this line in Indian Institue of Science, Bangalore. I think image searching has fundamental limits. For successfully matching two images, there should be a subset of information in both that totally match or match with a high probability. Expecting a front view of an image to match with a side view of the same image is impossible. They are both disjoint sets of information. If all the images are frontal images, we can match them with a hight probability, otherwise I doubt this technology has a future. Sarad. --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/184226 Posted by: CmdrTaco, on 2005-01-13 20:29:00 from the blessing-for-those-who-can't-spell dept. [1]johnsee writes A computer vision researcher by the name of Hartmut Neven is [2]developing ingenious new technology that allows the searching of a database by submitting an image, for example, off a mobile phone camera. Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are, or the photo of a city building to see its history IFRAME: [3]pos6 References 1. http://www.sandstorming.com/ 2. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101341ref=5147543 3. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=2936alloc_id=13732site_id=1request_id=9329739 - End forwarded message - -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature __ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com
Do You Own Yourself?
http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/ownyourself.shtml The Lawful Path Do You Own Yourself? by Butler Shaffer One of my favorite quotations comes from Thomas Pynchon: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don´t have to worry about answers. Our world is in the mess it is in today because most of us have internalized the fine art of asking the wrong questions. Contrary to the thinking that would have us believe that the conflict, violence, tyranny, and destructiveness that permeates modern society is the result of bad or hateful people, disparities in wealth, or lack of education, all of our social problems are the direct consequence of a general failure to respect the inviolability of one another´s property interests! I begin my Property classes with the question: do you own yourself? Most of my students eagerly nod their heads in the affirmative, until I warn them that, by the time we finish examining this question at the end of the year, they will find their answer most troubling, whatever it may be today. If you do own yourself, then why do you allow the state to control your life and other property interests? And if you answer that you do not own yourself, then what possible objection can you raise to anything that the state may do to you? We then proceed to an examination of the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The question of whether Dred Scott was a self-owning individual, or the property of another, is the same question at the core of the debate on abortion. Is the fetus a self-owning person, or an extension of the property boundaries of the mother? The same property analysis can be used to distinguish victimizing from victimless crimes: murder, rape, arson, burglary, battery, theft, and the like, are victimizing crimes because someone´s property boundaries were violated. In a victimless crime, by contrast, no trespass to a property interest occurs. If one pursues the substance of the issues that make up political and legal debates today, one always finds a property question at stake: is person x entitled to make decisions over what is his, or will the state restrain his decision-making in some way? Regulating what people can and cannot put into their bodies, or how they are to conduct their business or social activities, or how they are to educate their children, are all centered around property questions. Property is not simply some social invention, like Emily Post´s guide to etiquette, but a way of describing conditions that are essential to all living things. Every living thing must occupy space and consume energy from outside itself if it is to survive, and it must do so to the exclusion of all other living things on the planet. I didn´t dream this up. My thinking was not consulted before the life system developed. The world was operating on the property principle when I arrived and, like the rest of us, I had to work out my answers to that most fundamental, pragmatic of all social questions: who gets to make decisions about what? The essence of ownership is to be found in control: who gets to be the ultimate decision maker about people and things in the world? Observe the rest of nature: trees, birds, fish, plants, other mammals, bacteria, all stake out claims to space and sources of energy in the world, and will defend such claims against intruders, particularly members of their own species. This is not because they are mean-spirited or uncooperative: quite the contrary, many of us have discovered that cooperation is a great way of increasing the availability of the energy we need to live well. We have found out that, if we will respect the property claims of one another and work together, each of us can enjoy more property in our lives than if we try to function independently of one another. Such a discovery has permitted us to create economic systems. There is no way that I could have produced, by myself, the computer upon which I am writing this article. Had I devoted my entire life to the undertaking, I would have been unable even to have conceived of its technology. Many other men and women, equally unable to have undertaken the task by themselves, cooperated without even knowing one another in its creation. Lest you think that my writing would have to have been accomplished through the use of a pencil, think again: I would also have been unable to produce a pencil on my own, as Leonard Read once illustrated in a wonderful, brief essay. Such cooperative undertakings have been possible because of a truth acknowledged by students of marketplace economic systems, particularly the Austrians about human nature: each of us acts only in anticipation of being better off afterwards as a result of our actions. Toward whatever ends we choose to act, and such ends are constantly rearranging their priorities within us, their satisfaction is always expressed in terms inextricably tied to decision making over something one owns (or seeks to own). Whether I wish to
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RE: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
Bill Stewart wrote: At 12:30 PM 1/12/2005, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: Just out of curiosity, if the man doesn't need a warrent to place a surveilance device, shouldn't it be within your rights to tamper with, disable or remove such a device if you discover one? Do you mean that if you discover an unsolicited gift of consumer electronics attached to your car, do you have the right to play with it just as you would if it came in the mail? I would certainly expect so... Attaching it to another car would seem a suitable prank - someone who travels a lot, on an irregular path - a pizza delivery guy, or a real estate agent. Or perhaps a long distance truck. It would take some chutzpa, but tacking onto a cops car would send a message Peter Trei
US slaps on the wardriver-busting paint
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/13/wi_fi_paint/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Security » Network Security » Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/13/wi_fi_paint/ US slaps on the wardriver-busting paint By Lester Haines (lester.haines at theregister.co.uk) Published Thursday 13th January 2005 11:52 GMT Security-minded US decorators' supply outfit Force Field Wireless (http://forcefieldwireless.com) claims to have developed a DIY solution to the international menace of marauding geek wardrivers - DefendAir paint laced with copper and aluminum fibers that form an electromagnetic shield, blocking most radio waves and protecting wireless networks. According to a South Florida Sun Sentinel report (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/local/sfl-sbgizmos09jan09,0,2849380.story?coll=sfla-business-headlines), one coat of the water-based paint shields Wi-Fi, WiMax and Bluetooth networks operating at frequencies from 100 megahertz to 2.4 gigahertz, while two or three applications are good for networks operating at up to five gigahertz. Simple as that. Of course, there are a few downsides to this miracle product. First up, you must be careful how you slap it on. Force Field Wireless rep Harold Wray admits that radio waves find leaks, while the company asks users to be aware that the product must be applied selectively otherwise it might hinder the performance of radios, televisions and cell phones. Reg readers can make of this apparent contradiction what they will, and are asked to direct any technically-based sceptisicm to Force Field Wireless, and not to Vulture Central. Thankyou. Another snagette is that DefendAir is available only in grey - a fact sufficient to provoke what is known in the UK as interior designers' wobbly. Mercifully, it can be used as a primer, so those who require wireless peace of mind plus bold fashion statement can rest assured that coat of Wardriver Crimson will cover it up quite nicely. It only remains for us to say that DefendAir costs a cool $69 per gallon (US gallon, presumably). Still, that's a small price to pay for the absolute certainty that High School students are not right now sitting across the street recording your credit card details for later deployment in the online purchase of pornography, drugs and semi-automatic weapons. ® Related stories Business frets over wireless security (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/01/wifi_security_worries/) UK scientists roll out Wi-Fi proof wallpaper (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/12/wifi_wallpaper/) Michigan wardrivers await sentencing (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/06/michigan_wardrivers_guilty/) Wi-Fi 'sniper rifle' debuts at DEFCON (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/03/wi-fi_aerial_gun/) -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Isle of Man welcomes US online punters
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/13/isle_man_gambling/print.html The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register » Internet and Law » eCommerce » Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/13/isle_man_gambling/ Isle of Man welcomes US online punters By Lester Haines (lester.haines at theregister.co.uk) Published Thursday 13th January 2005 15:37 GMT The Isle of Man now allows US punters to gamble in online casinos based on the island, the NY Times reports. The announcement will rattle US authorities opposed to American citizens having a flutter beyond the reach of US legislation. Indeed, US prosecutors have launched a series of actions against operations doing business with foreign online casinos. Some credit cards, Amex (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/18/gambling_block/) included, do not allow customers to gamble on the web at all. In response, the WTO recently declared (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/us_gambling_wto_rumble/) that this prohibition of cross-border trade breaks breached the 1994 general agreement on trade and services, and ruled in favour of Caribbean nation Antigua and Barbuda in the matter. The Isle of Man has operated online casinos since 2001, initially attracting some big-bucks operators including MGM Mirage. However, after an initial boom, a flattened market provoked many, MGM among them, to shut down their Irish Sea operations. The island's new policy came into force on 1 January, and is clearly an attempt to revitalise the online gambling economy. Tim Craine, the head of electronic business for the Isle of Man, said: There's a lot of business looking to relocate to a reputable, regulated jurisdiction. We're hoping to capitalize on that business by changing our policy. Craine confirmed that the Isle of Man is particularly looking to attract representatives of the burgeoning online poker business (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/12/online_poker/), currently worth between $2m and $2.5m per day worldwide. ® Related stories Punters warm to online poker (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/12/online_poker/) Online roulette has Germans in a spin (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/15/spielbank_wiesbaden/) WTO rules against US gambling laws (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/11/us_gambling_wto_rumble/) UK Gov unwraps Gambling Bill (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/19/gambling_bill/) Amex prevents punters gambling online (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/18/gambling_block/) Online poker ace scores £4,500 - per week (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/15/online_poker_ace/) Irish punters enjoy online betting (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/05/irish_online_betting/) -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Brin needs killing, XIIV
To leave the attributions and headers, or not? --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Forwarded message from David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] - From: David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 04:02:03 -0500 To: Ip ip@v2.listbox.com Subject: [IP] more on No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! Thank you and best wishes - Josh Josh, thanks for sharing these remarks about privacy. Alas, these folks are falling for the usual trap that has snared so many well-meaning people for the last decade. They are right to worry about creeping Big Brotherism... and vigorously defending the wrong stretch of wall. I was naive once too. What weird reflex is it, that makes bright people fall for the trap of seeing SECRECY as a friend of freedom? As we all know, 'freedom' is a value-neutral term when used on it's own, without a suitable modifier, as in the above. (Oh, when it's YOUR secrecy you call it privacy.) To I imagine that most people, in the fuzzy space of colloquial conceptions, associate 'privacy' with the information security of their own lives, and associate `secrecy' with the concealment of corporate or government information, processes, and assets. But we may use the terms interchangeably if it makes you happy. To wit: I have secrets which I would like to keep from malicious criminals and other government workers. rail against others seeing, without suggesting any conceivable way that (1) the technologies could be stopped or (2) how it would help matters to stop govt surveillance even if we could. As I've emphasized in The Transparent Society, the thing that has kept us free and safe has been to emphasize MORE information flows. To ENHANCE how much average people know. Ok, that is a nice idea but... http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm [skimmed] Given the information-centric disparity that already exists between individuals of varying allegiance or association, how is it possible to assure that most everyone is brought up to speed on the current state- of-the-art in the numerous fields of study and technology that relate to intelligence and counter- intelligence in such a way as to make the playing field level for all? As it stands, with the mutability inherent in the acquisition and interpretation of signals and surveillance data, it is too easy for large masses of people to acquire widespread mis- conceptions about the veracity of the information at their disposal. Put another way: hypothetical well-organised dis-information sophisticates could in theory arrange to give the masses a false sense of security and inclusiveness within a subtly fraudulent framework of public-mediated surveillance and information sharing. Perhaps this could be arranged by building backdoors and covert access points in the public surveillance network which would allow the 'cabal' to diguise their activities while also permitting them to arbitrarily muck about with the publically availble data, subject only to constraints imposed by the actual state-of-the-art -- enhanced on a practical level by virtue of limiting in some ways the technology available to the masses. If that makes sense to you, then it should become obvious that certifying the `public surveillance network' free compromise by privilaged elites of any kind becomes a very difficult task. And as we all know, groups like the NSA and their foreign counterparts already enjoy an indeterminate lead on the public in areas of interest and relation to information technology and surveillance. So, how do we as average citizens mitigate the threat of being lulled into a false sense of security by the flashy newness of some kind of hypothetical BrinWorld public surveillance and sharing network? Clearly this is a large problem, and I certainly don't have the answer. But, I think the idea of BrinWorld is the correct approach, and obviously some very intelligent people think so too. I would refer to the paper entitiled The Weapon of Openness, by Arthur Kantrowitz, which approaches this issue from a more general perspective. Most likely, there is a solution that we all can live with. Avoiding the risks will, however, be rather difficult. Personally, I wouldn't mind too much living in a total surveillance world if I were assured that everyone else was subject to the same level of scrutiny. This is primarily because I don't engage in activities which are particularly shameful or which are dependent upon the immoral or wanton explotation and subversion of another person's right to pursue interests that do not harm others. I am fully aware that a great many people do engage in such activities, some of which are cultural rites or religious rituals that are validated by the tacit legitimacy given to them by a tyrranical majority. And then there are people who live off the avails of crime because they find that
Sun creates worlds smallest SSL Web server
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=38DE2210-C6D9-4A59-B84F-98588FA24962 - Computer Business Review Sun creates world's smallest SSL Web server Sun Microsystems Inc has created what can truly be called a microsystem. The tiny server, nicknamed Sizzle (from Slim SSL), is the size and shape of a quarter. It was created by Sun's engineers as a proof-of-concept machine for embedded applications and will be presented at the Pervasive Computing and Communications show in March. 14 Jan 2005, 10:47 GMT - Sizzle is a wireless Web server and is based on an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Crossbow Technology Inc. The server has 8Kb of main memory, which implements a stripped-down operating system plus a Web server and an SSL server. Crossbow has created its own operating system, called TinyOS, for these remote computers, often referred to as motes. The mote that Sun is using in Sizzle is called the MICA2DOT, and it is powered by a three-volt button battery, like the kind in your motherboard to keep your BIOS settings alive. It is unclear if Sun is using TinyOS or a stripped-down version of Solaris or Linux to create its micro Web server. Sun is adding 128Kb of flash memory to the mote, and it is implementing a version of SSL based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) that Sun says makes public key cryptography suitable on a very tiny machine with extremely limited capabilities. Sizzle can complete an SSL handshake in under four seconds, and can do it in under two seconds with sessions that are reused; the Web server can transfer about 450 bytes per second. While you may not be able to run Yahoo on it, you can build vast arrays of sensors with ad hoc networking, which is what motes are for. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Hanging the Pirates
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0131/096_print.html Forbes Security Hanging the Pirates 01.31.05 Paul Kocher has a way to save Hollywood from illegal copying. Over the past few months top brass from Hollywood and Japan's consumer electronics giants have been hashing out their futures in hotel meeting rooms in Tokyo and Los Angeles. Topic A is the politically charged debate over the standard for the new high-definition DVDs, which the film industry hopes will swell the current $24 billion DVD market, as hi-def becomes the norm. Most of the players want to get something decided on within a year. But, as big as the stakes are in those discussions, the movie studios are even more keen on the outcome of the talks on the 39th floor of Toshiba's Tokyo headquarters. By the Numbers Price of Piracy Illegal file-sharing hits music far harder than film--for now. $21 billion n DVD sales in U.S. in 2004, a 200% increase since 2000. $12 billion CD sales in U.S., a 17% decline since 2000. $3 billion Amount movie studios lose to piracy each year. $4 billion Amount music publishers lose to piracy each year. Sources: Adams Media Research; RIAA; MPAA. There, a select security committee representing both hardware and film makers has an extremely rare opportunity to stop digital piracy from doing to movies what it did to music. Napster and its ilk have helped knock 17% off of record label sales in the past three years. With DVD's basic encryption already cracked and one-quarter of American homes now capable of broadband-speed downloads, it's inevitable that one day the latest Harry Potter film will be swapped as easily as U2's new hit. This is the number one priority at the highest levels, says Thomas Lesinski, president of Paramount Home Entertainment. The studios want to have more control over protecting our content. One of the most important people involved in that discussion is Paul Kocher, the 31-year-old president of Cryptography Research, a tiny San Francisco consulting and licensing firm that brought in $6 million last year. Kocher is soft-spoken, young and obscure, but his credibility in the encryption business is sterling. Eight years ago, fresh out of Stanford, Kocher cowrote Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the protocol that secures the vast majority of commerce on the Internet. What Kocher is pushing is the concept of renewable security. Any attempt to erect a one-time, rigid barrier between thieves and content, he says, is useless, including the current method pushed through by the Japanese consumer electronics companies. With very few exceptions, all the major security systems being used by the studios today are either broken and can't be fixed, or they're not deployed widely enough to be worth hacking, says Kocher. Under the existing Content Scrambling System, electronics makers install the exact same encryption code into nearly every DVD player. But that was broken by European hackers in 1999 and the trick disseminated widely on the Internet. Even the least sophisticated user can now download a program that easily copies protected movies. Kocher's alternative is to allow for constant change. His system, called self-protecting digital content, places the security on the disc instead of in the player. A software recipe running into the millions of steps is burned onto every new movie disc. Each DVD player would contain a small chip costing only a few extra cents that would follow the recipe faithfully. If the DVD player decides the disc is secure, it will decode it and play the movie. But each film could have a different recipe. So if a pirate breaks the code on Spider-Man 2, he wouldn't necessarily be able to break the code on Elf. The studios would always be one step ahead of the thieves; at the very least it would take pirates more time to break each film. Not a big deal: Studios make most of their money from DVDs in the first three months, anyway. A lot of security systems are hard and brittle, says Robert Baldwin, head of the security firm Plus Five Consulting. Paul's is more like a willow tree. It bends and recovers. No studio executive contacted would comment on Kocher's scheme on the record, but it looks likely to be the backbone of any eventual security standard. A group including IBM, Toshiba, Time Warner and Microsoft is also angling to get a complementary encryption scheme called AACS into every future player. It will likely be written to work with Kocher's idea. Consumer electronics firms, which dictated the last encryption format, never had much to lose from security leaks. Film executives like the fact that Kocher's scheme gives them a stronger hand. Now they will be able to decide how much security they want on each disc and when it needs to be updated. Kocher, son of a physics professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says he learned about computing because he stayed home a lot, too lazy to bike the two miles into town. He initially wanted to be a
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Victor Davis Hanson: Triangulating the War
The best book I read this year was Hanson's Carnage and Culture. Recommend it highly. Cheers, RAH http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/hanson/hanson200501140730.asp Victor Davis Hanson The National Review January 14, 2005, 7:30 a.m. Triangulating the War Yesterday's genius, today's fool, tomorrow's what? Victor Davis Hanson Reading the pages of foreign-policy journals, between the long tracts on Bush's failures and neoconservative arrogance, one encounters mostly predictions of defeat and calls for phased withdrawal - always with resounding criticism of the American botched occupation. Platitudes follow: We can't just leave now, followed by no real advice on how a fascist society can be jumpstarted into a modern liberal republic. After all, there is no government handbook entitled, Operation 1A: How to remove a Middle East fascist regime in three weeks, reconstruct the countryside, and hold the first elections in the nation's history - all within two years. Almost all who supported the war now are bailing on the pretext that their version of the reconstruction was not followed: While a three-week war was their idea, a 20-month messy reconstruction was surely someone else's. Yesterday genius is today's fool - and who knows next month if the elections work? Witness Afghanistan where all those who recently said the victory was lost to warlords are now suddenly quiet. Heads You Lose, Tails We Win Indeed, from the oscillating analyses of Iraq, the following impossible picture often emerges from our intelligentsia. It was a fatal error to disband the Iraqi army. That led to lawlessness and a loss of confidence in the American ability to restore immediate order after Saddam's fall. Yet it was also a fatal error to keep some Baathists in the newly constituted army. They were corrupt and wished reform to fail - witness the Fallujah Brigade that either betrayed us or aided the enemy. So we turned off the Sunnis by disbanding the army - and yet somehow turned off the Shiites by keeping some parts of it. Massive construction projects were hogged by gargantuan American firms, ensconced in the Green Zone that did not engage either local Iraqi workers or small companies and thus squandered precious good will. Or, indigenous contractors proved irresponsible and unreliable, evidence for why Iraq was in such bad shape to begin with. And when we did put exclusive reliance on them, it ensured only lackadaisical and half-hearted reconstruction. We also lost hearts and minds by using GPS bombs to obliterate houses full of killers and take out blocks of insurgents. And yet we lost hearts and minds by failing to act decisively and de facto turning over large enclaves to terrorists and Saddamites whom we were afraid to root out. Elections should have been held earlier; no, they must be delayed since they come too soon when the country is still unsecured. Our helmeted soldiers with sunglasses are holed up in enclaves, don't mingle, and perpetuated the heavy-handed image of snooty occupiers. But leaving the Green Zone is an open invitation to kidnapping and worse. So we are both too well hidden and yet not hidden enough. Embedded media gave us a real-time picture of the fighting. But (if one is conservative) it left open the opportunity for sensationalism on the part of wannabe crusaders, and (if one is liberal) it created too close a psychological bond with the soldiers that impaired objectivity. It was a mistake to postpone Iraqi sovereignty for so long; but it is an equal mistake to rush into elections while the country is so insecure. The CIA is impotent, out-of-touch, and clownish; somehow it mind-controlled Allawi, Chalabi, and a host of other Iraqi puppets. The litany from the mercurial Beltway always goes on: There were enough troops to take out Saddam in three weeks, but not enough to restore order to the countryside - but still too many that resulted in too high an American profile on the streets of Baghdad. The transformations of Donald Rumsfeld (this week's genius, last week's fool) have left us stripped down and bereft of the muscle needed. Yet new, more mobile brigades in strikers and special forces with laptops are preferable to old armored divisions on the streets of Iraqi. We cannot flee, but must not stay. Iraqis publicly say we should leave, but privately beg us to remain. We were after cheap oil, but gas prices somehow climbed almost immediately after we went in. Democracy won't work with these people, but somehow we are seeing three elections in the wake of the Taliban, Arafat, and Saddam. There are many constants in all this pessimistic confusion - beside the fact that we are becoming a near hysterical society. First, our miraculous efforts in toppling the Taliban and Saddam have apparently made us forget war is always a litany of mistakes. No conflict is conducted according to either antebellum planning or can proceed with the benefit of hindsight. Iraq was not
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Re: Searching with Images instead of Words
Expecting a front view of an image to match with a side view of the same image is impossible. They are both disjoint sets of information. If all the images are frontal images, we can match them with a hight probability, otherwise I doubt this technology has a future. You are applying pure logic to a very complex subject. I'd bet this is already routinely done by TLAs and whatnot, at least as a pre-screen before human photograph inspectors. The most obvious hole in your statement is with respect to 2D Spatial FFTs of the image...you can probably greatly increase your match probability via certain masking criteria applied to the 2D FFT. And from there there's lots of stuff that can be done with colors and other indirect stuff such as (perhaps) camera signatures in the photo (eg, If there's text that says Hamamatsu Synchroscan Streak Camera then don't bother doing the FFT--it ain't a picture of your dog). Look...a human being can recognize the side image of a person a lot of the time. There should be no reason this intelligence can't be encoded somehow. -TD
Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html wnbc.com Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger. New Gun Frightens Police Scott Weinberger The most shocking fact may be that the gun -- known as the five-seven -- is being marketed to the public, and it's completely legal It was a very difficult decision for members of law enforcement to go public about the new weapon, but officers fear that once word of the weapon begins to circulate in the wrong circles, they will be in great danger. They agreed to speak to NewsChannel 4, hoping the public will understand what they call the most devastating weapon they face. The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading. This would be devastating, said Chief Robert Troy, of the Jersey City Police Department. Troy said he learned about the high-powered pistol from a bulletin issued by Florida Department of Law Enforcement to all of its agents. Troy believes faced with this new weapon, his officers would be at a total disadvantage. Dealing with a gun like this -- it's a whole new ballgame, Troy said. Troy is not the only member of law enforcement to voice concern. As NewsChannel 4 began to contact several more departments in the Tri-State Area, it turned out that officers in Trumball, Conn., had seized one of these handguns during a recent arrest. Certainly, handguns are a danger to any police officer on any day, but one that specifically advertised by the company to be capable of defeating a ballistic vest is certainly the utmost concern to us, said Glenn Byrnes, of the Trumball Police Department. However, the company said that bullet is not sold to the public. Instead, gun buyers can purchase what the company calls a training or civilian bullet -- the type loaded into the gun confiscated by Trumball police. At a distance of 21 feet, Trumball police Sgt. Lenny Scinto fired the five-seven with the ammo sold legally to the public into a standard police vest. All three penetrated the vest. The bullets even went through the back panel of the vest, penetrating both layers. In a similar test, an officer fired a .45-caliber round into the same vest. While the shot clearly knocked it down, it didn't penetrate the vest, and an officer would likely have survived the assault. The velocity of this round makes it a more penetrating round -- that's what had me concerned, Scinto said. FN Herstal told NewsChannel 4 that they dispute the test, stating, Most law enforcement agencies don't have the ability to properly test a ballistic vest. When NewsChannel 4 asked how this could have happened, the spokesperson said: We [the company] are not experts in ballistic armor. Back in Trumball, Scinto said his officers would have to rethink how to protect the public and protect themselves. This is going to add a whole new dimension to training and tactics. With the penetration of these rounds, you're going to have to find something considerably heavier than we normally use for cover and concealment to stop this round, Scinto said. In Jersey City, Troy said he will appeal to lawmakers, hoping they will step in before any of his officers are confronted with the five-seven. This does not belong in the civilian population. The only thing that comes out of this is profits for the company and dead police officers, Troy said. I would like the federal government to ban these rounds to the civilian public. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Terrorism as an Excuse
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/lott200501140924.asp The National Review January 14, 2005, 9:24 a.m. Terrorism as an Excuse Another CBS campaign. By John R. Lott Jr. Who could oppose laws preventing terrorists from getting guns? Obviously no one. But it would be nice if laws accomplished something more than simply making it more difficult for Americans to own guns. Ironically the day before CBS finally released its report on the 60 Minutes Memogate scandal, 60 Minutes was again stirring up fears about how terrorists would use 50-caliber rifles to attack Americans. Last year it was the semi-automatic assault-weapons ban before it expired. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) claimed the ban was the most effective measures against terrorism that we have. Of course, nothing happened when the law expired last year. There was nothing unique about the guns that are banned under the law. Though the phrase assault weapon conjures up images of the rapid-fire machine guns used by the military, in fact the weapons covered by the ban function the same as any semiautomatic hunting rifle; they fire the exact same bullets with the exact same rapidity and produce the exact same damage as hunting rifles. Back in the mid-1980s it was the hysteria over plastic guns when the Austrian company Glock began exporting pistols to the United States. Labeled as terrorist specials by the press, fear spread that their plastic frame and grip would make them invisible to metal detectors. Glocks are now common and there are good reasons they are one of the favorite pistols of American police officers. The plastic gun ban did not ban anything since it is not possible to actually build a working plastic gun. Now it is the 50-caliber rifles' turn, especially with California outlawing the sale of these guns since the beginning of the year. For years gun-control groups have tried to ban 50-caliber rifles because of fears that criminals could use them. Such bans have not been passed these guns were simply not suited for crime. Fifty-caliber rifles are big, heavy guns, weighing at least 30 pounds and using a 29-inch barrel. They are also relatively expensive. Models that hold one bullet at a time run nearly $3,000. Semi-automatic versions cost around $7,000. Wealthy target shooters and big-game hunters, not criminals, purchase them. The bottom line is that only one person in the U.S. has been killed with such a gun, and even that one alleged case is debated. The link to terrorism supposedly provides a new possible reason to ban 50-caliber rifles. But the decision to demonize these particular guns and not say .475-caliber hunting rifles is completely arbitrary. The difference in width of these bullets is a trivial .025 inches. What's next? Banning .45-caliber pistols? Indeed the whole strategy is to gradually reduce the type of guns that people can own. Sniper Central, a site for both military snipers and law-enforcement sharpshooters, claims that For military extreme long-range anti-personnel purposes, the .338 Lapua is king. Even the .50BMG falls short. (Do to accuracy problems with current ammo). The .338 Lapua round simply has what is called a better bullet coefficient, it produces less drag as it travels through the air. With a 50-caliber rifle it is possible for an extremely skilled and lucky marksman to hit a target at 1,800 meters (versus 1,500 meters plus for the .338 Lapua), though most marksmen say that the effective range for any of these guns is around 1,000 meters. The worst abuse that 60 Minutes focused on was the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993 having a 50-caliber gun. Yet, no one was harmed with the gun, and the Davidians surely had many other weapons. 60 Minutes also tried to scare people with incendiary and explosive ammunition, but the ammunition discussed is already illegal. Fighting terrorism is a noble cause, but the laws we pass must have some real link to solving the problem. Absent that, many will think that 60 Minutes and gun-control groups are simply using terrorism as an excuse to promote rules that he previously pushed. Making it difficult for law-abiding Americans to own guns should not be the only accomplishment of new laws. - John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The Bias Against Guns and More Guns, Less Crime. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
At 01:54 PM 1/14/2005, R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger. ... The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading. A couple of questions to the gunpunks out there... I've heard that rifles easily penetrate bullet-proof vests, and that vests are really only useful against average-to-small handguns and against shotguns. Is this accurate? Any idea how much you can saw off a rifle and still have it penetrate typical cop vests? (And I assume the 20 rounds in seconds is just a scary way to say it has a big magazine and you have to pull the trigger 20 times.) Also, the police expressed worry that criminals might hear about these guns and then the cops would be in big trouble. Sounds silly to me - while some criminals might buy a cop-killer handgun for bragging rights, random criminals presumably only buy weapons useful for the scenarios they imagine being in, which is Saturday Night Specials for most applications, or whatever currently fashionable Mac10/Uzi/etc. for druglord armies that expect to be shooting at each other, or rifles for distance work and dual-use pickup-truck decoration. Do many criminals expect to initiate shootouts with vest-wearing cops in scenarios where a rifle isn't practical? Do most cops wear bullet-proof vests regularly other than in holdup/hostage SWAT situations, where the criminal might have rifles anyway, and where a regular pistol is just fine for shooting hostages? Or is this mainly a problem for the cases when cops want to stage military-style pre-dawn assaults on people's houses, where they expect that the targets usually only have pistols handy near the bed and don't have time for rifles? Seems like scare-mongering to me, not a practical concern. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States (1997)
Click the link for the couple of tables referenced in the text. Cheers, RAH http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/1997/spring/art4sp97.htm Naval War College Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States Richard J. Norton and James F. Miskel In the past several years, images of American servicemembers hurriedly deploying to various parts of the developing world in response to collapses of state governments have become relatively common. For example, in 1995 U.S. troops kept uneasy watch on the borders of the disintegrating Former Republic of Yugoslavia, patrolled the streets of Haiti, dealt with streams of refugees pouring out of Rwanda, and withdrew from Somalia after four years of humanitarian operations. These operations have not been inexpensive; they have cost billions of dollars and dozens of American lives. U.S. military involvement with faltering and failing states takes many forms. 1 Actual combat may be involved, against opponents ranging from criminal gangs possessing little more than light infantry weapons to semiprofessional armies boasting artillery and armor. 2 In other circumstances, nation building activities, such as road building, water purification, and power restoration, make up the bulk of the efforts. Additional tasks have included advising on clearing land mines, providing security escorts to representatives of humanitarian organizations, serving as an interim police force, evacuating foreign nationals, or simply maintaining an offshore military presence. As 1995 demonstrated, states can fail in any portion of the populated globe. The preparation time given U.S. military planners to respond to these missions can range from months to only days; actual involvement may last from weeks to years, with a proportionate range of costs. Additionally, in an era of shrinking resources and limited force structure, it is all the more significant that units committed to these missions are likely to be unavailable for other operations. Therefore, military leaders are among the decision makers who have a vested interest in being able to predict more accurately which states are likely to fail. Others with this interest would include the president, senior diplomats in the State Department, and the directors of humanitarian nongovernmental organizations. Early identification of candidates for failure would allow time to list required assets and prepare detailed contingency plans. If, as we shall argue, traditional economic aid does not significantly help states that are at high risk of failure, early identification could also aid in forestalling the authorization of costly and unproductive civil affairs or nation-building missions. In fact, early warning can provide time to debate usefully whether the military should be involved at all, and if it should, what shape the participation should take. Despite the frequent and prominent involvement of the U.S. military, dealing with faltering and failed states is primarily a diplomatic issue. Traditionally, development aid has been viewed as an essential element in preventing states from failing. Development aid has included military nation building and civil affairs projects, not only as routine peacetime operations but also as part of disaster response packages and postconflict assistance. These projects are often funded solely by the regional commanders in chief or the military services. Attempts to apply this aid have frequently been lengthy and quite costly. 3 Yet notwithstanding the costs that were borne, these efforts have restored very few failing states to health. Debates regarding the efficient and effective application of current fiscally constrained military budgets have become commonplace, both within and outside the military services. A factor in this debate may be a dawning anxiety about the wisdom of high risk, low return investments in failing states, investments that may yield little or no positive return. For these reasons it seems to us that military planners and decision makers should be interested in considering new approaches toward aiding failing and faltering states. 4 One such approach would recognize that the economic, social, and political conditions in failing states are so adverse that they merit qualitatively different treatment by the United States. Too often, U.S. foreign aid and military assistance policies have dealt with failing states as if they were no different from other underdeveloped and poor nations. Traditional programs were designed for less dire situations and can, at best, only moderate the symptoms, not cure such diseases. Thus, continued spending on traditional forms of foreign aid for these states is not the most cost-effective strategy in an era of scarce resources. A better approach--akin to triage for battlefield wounds--would limit aid in these cases to short-term humanitarian assistance, like disaster relief. These states do not offer fertile soil for economic
Feral Cities
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/art6-a03.htm Norton FERAL CITIES Richard J. Norton Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.1 Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot's Rat's Alley.2 Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants would have access to the world's most modern communication and computing technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city. Admittedly, the very term feral city is both provocative and controversial. Yet this description has been chosen advisedly. The feral city may be a phenomenon that never takes place, yet its emergence should not be dismissed as impossible. The phrase also suggests, at least faintly, the nature of what may become one of the more difficult security challenges of the new century. Over the past decade or so a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to the phenomenon of failing states.3 Nor has this pursuit been undertaken solely by the academic community. Government leaders and military commanders as well as directors of nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental bodies have attempted to deal with faltering, failing, and failed states. Involvement by the United States in such matters has run the gamut from expressions of concern to cautious humanitarian assistance to full-fledged military intervention. In contrast, however, there has been a significant lack of concern for the potential emergence of failed cities. This is somewhat surprising, as the feral city may prove as common a feature of the global landscape of the first decade of the twenty-first century as the faltering, failing, or failed state was in the last decade of the twentieth. While it may be premature to suggest that a truly feral city-with the possible exception of Mogadishu-can be found anywhere on the globe today, indicators point to a day, not so distant, when such examples will be easily found. This article first seeks to define a feral city. It then describes such a city's attributes and suggests why the issue is worth international attention. A possible methodology to identify cities that have the potential to become feral will then be presented. Finally, the potential impact of feral cities on the U.S. military, and the U.S. Navy specifically, will be discussed. DEFINITION AND ATTRIBUTES The putative feral city is (or would be) a metropolis with a population of more than a million people in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city's boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.4 In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city's occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative. Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks. A feral city experiences massive levels of disease and creates enough pollution to qualify as an international environmental disaster zone. Most feral cities would suffer from massive urban hypertrophy, covering vast expanses of land. The city's structures range from once-great buildings symbolic of state power to the meanest shantytowns and slums. Yet even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.5 Feral cities would exert an almost magnetic influence on terrorist organizations. Such megalopolises will provide exceptionally safe havens for armed resistance groups, especially those having cultural affinity with at least one sizable segment of the city's population. The efficacy and portability of the most modern computing and communication systems allow the activities of a worldwide terrorist, criminal, or predatory and corrupt commercial network to be coordinated and directed with equipment easily obtained on the open market and packed into a minivan. The vast size of a feral city, with its buildings, other structures, and subterranean spaces, would offer nearly perfect protection
FBI Keeping Records on Pre-9/11 Travelers
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050115/D87K6FAG3.html My Way News FBI Keeping Records on Pre-9/11 Travelers Jan 14, 7:45 PM (ET) By LESLIE MILLER WASHINGTON (AP) - If you're among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it - and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal. The bureau is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001 in its permanent investigative database, according to information obtained by a privacy group and made available to The Associated Press. Privacy advocates say they're troubled by the possibility that the FBI could be analyzing personal information about people without their knowledge or permission. The FBI collected a vast amount of information about millions of people with no indication that they had done anything unlawful, said Marcia Hofmann, attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which learned about the data through a Freedom of Information Act request. The fact that they're hanging on to the information is inexcusable, Hofmann said on Friday. FBI spokesman Bill Carter said the bureau was required to retain its records. There are rules that have been set by the National Archives with regard to the retention of records by government agencies, Carter said. Hofmann, though, said the FBI still had a legal responsibility to tell people that it had obtained information about them and to let them have access to it. As part of its investigation into the terrorist attacks, the FBI asked for, and got, the records from a number of airlines shortly after Sept. 11. The FBI also got one set of data through a federal grand jury subpoena. The privacy center in May requested records of the FBI's acquisition of the data. The bureau last week turned over 12 pages of information, much of it blanked out for security reasons. The 12 pages do show that the bureau obtained 82.1 million passenger manifests, or lists of people who flew on planes, between January and September 2001, in addition to the 257.5 million passenger name records. Citing privacy concerns, the FBI didn't reveal which airlines turned over the information, which airline employees turned it over and which FBI special agents got it. The data are called passenger name records, or PNR, and can include a variety of information such as credit card numbers, travel itineraries, addresses, telephone numbers and meal requests. David Hardy, the FBI's chief of the record/information dissemination section of the records management division, said in a legal document dated Jan. 5 that the data were being stored and combined with other information from the Sept. 11 investigation, dubbed PENTTBOMB. I have been advised that the Airline Data Sets have been entered by the Cyber Division into a 'Data Warehouse' and have been intertwined for analytical purposes with the information from several other PENTTBOMB Data Sets, Hardy wrote in a statement to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where the privacy center filed its suit. Hofmann, the attorney for the privacy group, said the FBI had a legitimate reason for collecting information to get a better picture of the hijackers' travel patterns and possible associates. But, she said, it wouldn't seem that there's any reason to keep that information now. The FBI's Carter said he couldn't comment on what may be happening to the data because the bureau is involved in a lawsuit by the privacy center. Daniel Solove, a George Washington University Law School professor and author of a book on privacy, said not enough is known about what the FBI is doing with the data to determine if there is a problem. Data just sits around and who knows what people are doing with it? Solove said. The public is left completely out of the loop, not told what this data is for. The agency is basically saying 'Trust us.' Solove suggested there was irony in Congress last year ordering the FBI to more quickly purge information obtained in background checks of gun buyers. That, he said, can be useful in tracking down criminals. Congress wants to protect guns at great cost, but when it comes to privacy and civil liberties generally, it doesn't register on the same level, Solove said. --- On the Net: Electronic Privacy Information Center: http://www.epic.org FBI: http://www.doj.gov -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
On 2005-01-14T16:54:32-0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun I care? Well, perhaps I do... I should go pick one up before they're banned. The most shocking fact may be that the gun -- known as the five-seven -- is being marketed to the public, and it's completely legal The name is Five-seveN. It's made by Fabrique Nationale (FN). Allegedly the U.S. secret service likes the Five-seveN, along with the FN P90 (unavailable to civilians except title 2 firearms dealers because it's only made in a select-fire version). They both use the same 5.7mm rounds, which makes logistics easier. Of course, they also use MP5s and 9mm handguns... Other guns with civilian-legal armor-piercing ammo include the CZ-52, .223 pistols, and most all rifles. At a distance of 21 feet, Trumball police Sgt. Lenny Scinto fired the five-seven with the ammo sold legally to the public into a standard police vest. All three penetrated the vest. The real ammo penetrates CRISAT/PAGST armor at 100m and 300m respectively. Level 2 or 3a armor is really rather pathetic. Back in Trumball, Scinto said his officers would have to rethink how to protect the public and protect themselves. Police have no duty to protect the public. Anyway, most of the public doesn't walk around wearing vests, so protecting the public from these is no different than protecting them from other firearms. Protecting the police from these is no different than protecting them from rifles. Only trauma plates can stop pointy, high-velocity rounds. This is going to add a whole new dimension to training and tactics. With the penetration of these rounds, you're going to have to find something considerably heavier than we normally use for cover and concealment to stop this round, Scinto said. Cool, more LEOs instantly recognizable as beetles, having exoskeletons. I recommend Kafka's Metamorphoses to them as sociological grounding for what sort of reaction they can expect. -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. -Heraclitus 53
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Re: Ridge Wants Fingerprints in Passports
On 2005-01-13T17:46:39-0800, Bill Stewart wrote: He's smearing his sticky fingerprints all over everything else, and now he wants them in our passports? Oughtta learn to keep his hands to himself. Fine with me if the first person to get a new biometric passport gets Ridge's fingers as part of the deal -- to verify for the world that the prints are valid. -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. -Heraclitus 53
Re: Searching with Images instead of Words
hi, They had been researching on this line in Indian Institue of Science, Bangalore. I think image searching has fundamental limits. For successfully matching two images, there should be a subset of information in both that totally match or match with a high probability. Expecting a front view of an image to match with a side view of the same image is impossible. They are both disjoint sets of information. If all the images are frontal images, we can match them with a hight probability, otherwise I doubt this technology has a future. Sarad. --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/184226 Posted by: CmdrTaco, on 2005-01-13 20:29:00 from the blessing-for-those-who-can't-spell dept. [1]johnsee writes A computer vision researcher by the name of Hartmut Neven is [2]developing ingenious new technology that allows the searching of a database by submitting an image, for example, off a mobile phone camera. Imagine taking a photo of a street corner to find out where you are, or the photo of a city building to see its history IFRAME: [3]pos6 References 1. http://www.sandstorming.com/ 2. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101341ref=5147543 3. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=2936alloc_id=13732site_id=1request_id=9329739 - End forwarded message - -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature __ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! http://my.yahoo.com
Re: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
At 12:30 PM 1/12/2005, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: Just out of curiosity, if the man doesn't need a warrent to place a surveilance device, shouldn't it be within your rights to tamper with, disable or remove such a device if you discover one? Do you mean that if you discover an unsolicited gift of consumer electronics attached to your car, do you have the right to play with it just as you would if it came in the mail? I would certainly expect so... On the other hand, if it appears to be a lost item, you could be a good public citizen and take it to the police to see if anybody claims it... GPS tracker is an ambiguous description, though. GPS devices detect where they are, but what next? A device could record where it was, for later collection, or it could transmit its position to a listener. Tampering with existing recordings might have legal implications, but putting a transmitter-based system in your nearest garbage can or accidentally leaving it in a taxi or mailing it to Medellin all seem like reasonable activities. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Brin needs killing, XIIV
At 10:05 AM +0100 1/14/05, Eugen Leitl wrote: Brin needs killing, XIIV er, Eleventy Four? Fifteen the hard way? ;-) Cheers, RAH Who was backhanded once for calling Brin a statist in public... -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: [IP] No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! (fwd from dave@farber.net)
Bill Stewart wrote: At 12:30 PM 1/12/2005, Roy M. Silvernail wrote: Just out of curiosity, if the man doesn't need a warrent to place a surveilance device, shouldn't it be within your rights to tamper with, disable or remove such a device if you discover one? Do you mean that if you discover an unsolicited gift of consumer electronics attached to your car, do you have the right to play with it just as you would if it came in the mail? I would certainly expect so... Attaching it to another car would seem a suitable prank - someone who travels a lot, on an irregular path - a pizza delivery guy, or a real estate agent. Or perhaps a long distance truck. It would take some chutzpa, but tacking onto a cops car would send a message Peter Trei
Re: Florida man faces bioweapon charge
On 2005-01-13T17:48:13-0800, Eric Cordian wrote: RAH pastes: She said that on at least one occasion he showed her something he had purchased via the Internet and expressed concern that if their cat inadvertently ate enough of it, the cat would die, according to the affidavit. Obviously this news story is the grand prize winner in an innuendo contest. The article also neglects to mention FEDERAL AGENCIES' pet KILL ratio. I'm not sure about cats specifically, but dog killing is quite popular. The FBI is still investigating who sent two letters that contained ricin in 2003 through the U.S. postal system. Those letters contained threats and complaints about labor regulations in the trucking industry. Evidently the kid was in possession of Envelopes of Mass Destruction as well as castor beans, guns, and books. Envelopes! Everyone knows that civilized people communicate via instant/text message or email (insofar as they are distinct). We have no need for these ENVELOPES, which as well as being used to send toxins to KILL LAW-ABIDING TAXPAYERS also cause untold annual economic damage from paper-cut-caused hospital visits. In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and journalist in London, died after a man attacked him with an umbrella that had been rigged to inject a ricin pellet under his skin. And WTF does this have to do with the guy with the castor beans? I spot the beginnings of yet another war. Please excuse me while I go bury my umbrellas. PATRIOTS use hooded raincoats. We have no NEED for barbaric and dangerous implements like UMBRELLAS. Looks like Ricin Theatre has joined Anthrax Theatre in the armory of Weapons of Mass Deception. You forgot the guns! The GUNS! Those terrible and bloody implements of death ARE totally unnecessary! Never mind that they're PERFECTLY LEGAL and they don't make ricin (excuse me, castor beans) any more deadly. He still had guns! -- War is the father and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free. -Heraclitus 53
Re: Brin needs killing, XIIV
To leave the attributions and headers, or not? --- Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Forwarded message from David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] - From: David Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 04:02:03 -0500 To: Ip ip@v2.listbox.com Subject: [IP] more on No expectation of privacy in public? In a pig's eye! Thank you and best wishes - Josh Josh, thanks for sharing these remarks about privacy. Alas, these folks are falling for the usual trap that has snared so many well-meaning people for the last decade. They are right to worry about creeping Big Brotherism... and vigorously defending the wrong stretch of wall. I was naive once too. What weird reflex is it, that makes bright people fall for the trap of seeing SECRECY as a friend of freedom? As we all know, 'freedom' is a value-neutral term when used on it's own, without a suitable modifier, as in the above. (Oh, when it's YOUR secrecy you call it privacy.) To I imagine that most people, in the fuzzy space of colloquial conceptions, associate 'privacy' with the information security of their own lives, and associate `secrecy' with the concealment of corporate or government information, processes, and assets. But we may use the terms interchangeably if it makes you happy. To wit: I have secrets which I would like to keep from malicious criminals and other government workers. rail against others seeing, without suggesting any conceivable way that (1) the technologies could be stopped or (2) how it would help matters to stop govt surveillance even if we could. As I've emphasized in The Transparent Society, the thing that has kept us free and safe has been to emphasize MORE information flows. To ENHANCE how much average people know. Ok, that is a nice idea but... http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm [skimmed] Given the information-centric disparity that already exists between individuals of varying allegiance or association, how is it possible to assure that most everyone is brought up to speed on the current state- of-the-art in the numerous fields of study and technology that relate to intelligence and counter- intelligence in such a way as to make the playing field level for all? As it stands, with the mutability inherent in the acquisition and interpretation of signals and surveillance data, it is too easy for large masses of people to acquire widespread mis- conceptions about the veracity of the information at their disposal. Put another way: hypothetical well-organised dis-information sophisticates could in theory arrange to give the masses a false sense of security and inclusiveness within a subtly fraudulent framework of public-mediated surveillance and information sharing. Perhaps this could be arranged by building backdoors and covert access points in the public surveillance network which would allow the 'cabal' to diguise their activities while also permitting them to arbitrarily muck about with the publically availble data, subject only to constraints imposed by the actual state-of-the-art -- enhanced on a practical level by virtue of limiting in some ways the technology available to the masses. If that makes sense to you, then it should become obvious that certifying the `public surveillance network' free compromise by privilaged elites of any kind becomes a very difficult task. And as we all know, groups like the NSA and their foreign counterparts already enjoy an indeterminate lead on the public in areas of interest and relation to information technology and surveillance. So, how do we as average citizens mitigate the threat of being lulled into a false sense of security by the flashy newness of some kind of hypothetical BrinWorld public surveillance and sharing network? Clearly this is a large problem, and I certainly don't have the answer. But, I think the idea of BrinWorld is the correct approach, and obviously some very intelligent people think so too. I would refer to the paper entitiled The Weapon of Openness, by Arthur Kantrowitz, which approaches this issue from a more general perspective. Most likely, there is a solution that we all can live with. Avoiding the risks will, however, be rather difficult. Personally, I wouldn't mind too much living in a total surveillance world if I were assured that everyone else was subject to the same level of scrutiny. This is primarily because I don't engage in activities which are particularly shameful or which are dependent upon the immoral or wanton explotation and subversion of another person's right to pursue interests that do not harm others. I am fully aware that a great many people do engage in such activities, some of which are cultural rites or religious rituals that are validated by the tacit legitimacy given to them by a tyrranical majority. And then there are people who live off the avails of crime because they find that
Re: Searching with Images instead of Words
Expecting a front view of an image to match with a side view of the same image is impossible. They are both disjoint sets of information. If all the images are frontal images, we can match them with a hight probability, otherwise I doubt this technology has a future. You are applying pure logic to a very complex subject. I'd bet this is already routinely done by TLAs and whatnot, at least as a pre-screen before human photograph inspectors. The most obvious hole in your statement is with respect to 2D Spatial FFTs of the image...you can probably greatly increase your match probability via certain masking criteria applied to the 2D FFT. And from there there's lots of stuff that can be done with colors and other indirect stuff such as (perhaps) camera signatures in the photo (eg, If there's text that says Hamamatsu Synchroscan Streak Camera then don't bother doing the FFT--it ain't a picture of your dog). Look...a human being can recognize the side image of a person a lot of the time. There should be no reason this intelligence can't be encoded somehow. -TD
Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html wnbc.com Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger. New Gun Frightens Police Scott Weinberger The most shocking fact may be that the gun -- known as the five-seven -- is being marketed to the public, and it's completely legal It was a very difficult decision for members of law enforcement to go public about the new weapon, but officers fear that once word of the weapon begins to circulate in the wrong circles, they will be in great danger. They agreed to speak to NewsChannel 4, hoping the public will understand what they call the most devastating weapon they face. The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading. This would be devastating, said Chief Robert Troy, of the Jersey City Police Department. Troy said he learned about the high-powered pistol from a bulletin issued by Florida Department of Law Enforcement to all of its agents. Troy believes faced with this new weapon, his officers would be at a total disadvantage. Dealing with a gun like this -- it's a whole new ballgame, Troy said. Troy is not the only member of law enforcement to voice concern. As NewsChannel 4 began to contact several more departments in the Tri-State Area, it turned out that officers in Trumball, Conn., had seized one of these handguns during a recent arrest. Certainly, handguns are a danger to any police officer on any day, but one that specifically advertised by the company to be capable of defeating a ballistic vest is certainly the utmost concern to us, said Glenn Byrnes, of the Trumball Police Department. However, the company said that bullet is not sold to the public. Instead, gun buyers can purchase what the company calls a training or civilian bullet -- the type loaded into the gun confiscated by Trumball police. At a distance of 21 feet, Trumball police Sgt. Lenny Scinto fired the five-seven with the ammo sold legally to the public into a standard police vest. All three penetrated the vest. The bullets even went through the back panel of the vest, penetrating both layers. In a similar test, an officer fired a .45-caliber round into the same vest. While the shot clearly knocked it down, it didn't penetrate the vest, and an officer would likely have survived the assault. The velocity of this round makes it a more penetrating round -- that's what had me concerned, Scinto said. FN Herstal told NewsChannel 4 that they dispute the test, stating, Most law enforcement agencies don't have the ability to properly test a ballistic vest. When NewsChannel 4 asked how this could have happened, the spokesperson said: We [the company] are not experts in ballistic armor. Back in Trumball, Scinto said his officers would have to rethink how to protect the public and protect themselves. This is going to add a whole new dimension to training and tactics. With the penetration of these rounds, you're going to have to find something considerably heavier than we normally use for cover and concealment to stop this round, Scinto said. In Jersey City, Troy said he will appeal to lawmakers, hoping they will step in before any of his officers are confronted with the five-seven. This does not belong in the civilian population. The only thing that comes out of this is profits for the company and dead police officers, Troy said. I would like the federal government to ban these rounds to the civilian public. -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: Police Worried About New Vest-Penetrating Gun
At 01:54 PM 1/14/2005, R.A. Hettinga wrote: http://www.wnbc.com/print/4075959/detail.html NEW YORK -- There is a nationwide alert to members of law enforcement regarding a new kind of handgun which can render a bulletproof vest useless, as first reported by NewsChannel 4's Scott Weinberger. ... The weapon is light, easily concealable and can fire 20 rounds in seconds without reloading. A couple of questions to the gunpunks out there... I've heard that rifles easily penetrate bullet-proof vests, and that vests are really only useful against average-to-small handguns and against shotguns. Is this accurate? Any idea how much you can saw off a rifle and still have it penetrate typical cop vests? (And I assume the 20 rounds in seconds is just a scary way to say it has a big magazine and you have to pull the trigger 20 times.) Also, the police expressed worry that criminals might hear about these guns and then the cops would be in big trouble. Sounds silly to me - while some criminals might buy a cop-killer handgun for bragging rights, random criminals presumably only buy weapons useful for the scenarios they imagine being in, which is Saturday Night Specials for most applications, or whatever currently fashionable Mac10/Uzi/etc. for druglord armies that expect to be shooting at each other, or rifles for distance work and dual-use pickup-truck decoration. Do many criminals expect to initiate shootouts with vest-wearing cops in scenarios where a rifle isn't practical? Do most cops wear bullet-proof vests regularly other than in holdup/hostage SWAT situations, where the criminal might have rifles anyway, and where a regular pistol is just fine for shooting hostages? Or is this mainly a problem for the cases when cops want to stage military-style pre-dawn assaults on people's houses, where they expect that the targets usually only have pistols handy near the bed and don't have time for rifles? Seems like scare-mongering to me, not a practical concern. Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
