LA Times on brinworld, complete with nothing to hide quote

[Major Variola (ret)]

   Article Published: Sunday, February 06, 2005
- 7:14:24 PM PST

   Who's got an
   eye on you?

   Secret
   cameras are
   everywhere

   By Andrea
   Cavanaugh,
   Staff Writer

   Smile!

   If you're
   making your
   way around
   Los Angeles
   -- or any
   metropolitan
   area in
   America these
   days -- there's
   a good
   chance your
   movements
   are being
   recorded by a
   surveillance
   camera.

   Once limited
   mostly to
   banks and
   convenience
   stores, the
   beady eye of
   the surveillance camera has appeared nearly
everywhere over the past
   decade. Cheaper surveillance systems and
heightened fears of terrorist
   attacks have created a world that is
increasingly captured on camera.

   "If you're outside doing anything, you're
being recorded 50 percent of the
   time," said Paul Ramos, vice president of
sales and marketing for Fairfax
   Electronics, a Los Angeles company that sells
security systems.

   "If you're shopping or attending an event, it
goes up to 90 percent. Yes,
   Big Brother is there, and Big Brother is
strong."

   Perched on rooftops and under eaves, cameras
discreetly rake shopping
   centers, stadiums, office buildings and
parking lots.

   Police say surveillance cameras, whether
installed by businesses,
   homeowners or local governments, act as a
powerful law-enforcement tool
   and crime deterrent. Law-abiding people have
nothing to worry about, said
   Lt. Paul Vernon of the Los Angeles Police
Department.

   "When people start talking about Big Brother,
I say, 'I've got nothing to
   hide.' Those cameras aren't looking into my
home, and if they were, it
   would be pretty boring."

   Although law-enforcement agencies hail the
technology as a labor-saving
   device that allows them to patrol much larger
areas with fewer sets of eyes,
   many civil libertarians view surveillance
cameras as a creeping erosion of
   privacy rights.

   "How would you like to be followed around by
a slimy guy in a raincoat
   who records everything you do? It's a
technological version of a slimy guy
   in a raincoat," said privacy expert Lauren
Weinstein, who is producing a
   radio series about technology's impact on
society.

   "The difference is, you can't see it, you
don't know what it's pointed at, or
   how long the images are going to be stored."

   The mostly unregulated recording takes place
with a tacit nod from the U.S.
   Supreme Court, which has indicated again and
again that people have no
   reasonable expectation of privacy in public
places.

   Government agencies across the United States
are installing cameras in as
   many public areas as possible, but they are
still behind the curve compared
   with European cities, Ramos said.

   In Los Angeles, surveillance devices
increasingly are used by government
   to patrol public places. Several recently
installed cameras along Hollywood
   Boulevard scan stretches popular with
tourists and criminals alike.

   And, buoyed by the success of a surveillance
program at crime-plagued
   MacArthur Park west of downtown, the LAPD
recently unveiled a camera
   system capable of scanning thousands of
license plates per hour and
   employing controversial facial-recognition
software to pinpoint known
   

The Legacy of Judicial Activism

[Jeff . Hodges]

eat feces hettinga.

The Legacy of Judicial Activism
By Stephen Pomper, Washington Monthly
Posted on December 16, 2004, Printed on February 8, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20768/

Now, with the ailing William Rehnquist entering his 18th year as chief justice 
of the U.S. Supreme Court, liberals find themselves facing an unexpected truth 
about his legacy: It hasn't been that bad.

To the surprise of the legal left, the Rehnquist Court has refused to overturn 
Roe v. Wade and has broken new ground in protecting the civil rights of 
homosexuals. It has endorsed some forms of affirmative action. In last 
Spring's highly charged enemy detainee cases, it refused to write the 
executive branch a blank check for wartime detention powers. And even in its 
hypertechnical (and therefore less controversial) federalism cases, which 
concern the powers of Congress over the states, the Court has feasted less 
aggressively on Congress' legislative authority than might have been 
anticipated, contenting itself to snack on bits and pieces. In retrospect, 
liberal anxieties about how far this Court would go in implementing the Reagan 
revolution are looking somewhat misplaced if not, on occasion, hysterical.

So how did the Court arrive at such a sane and centrist position? In The Most 
Activist Supreme Court in History (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 
political scientist Thomas Keck gives credit to a practice that has long been 
the rhetorical whipping boy of the legal right: judicial activism. And, in 
particular, he credits the bipartisan activism practiced by the Court's 
powerful swing justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. To find Keck's analysis useful, 
you don't have to accept his conclusion that the Rehnquist Court is in fact 
the most activist Court in history. You do, however, have to accept some of 
his premises about what makes for an "activist" Court. Keck sees Supreme Court 
activism as having three separate prongs, linked by a fundamental disdain for 
Congress. The first is a tendency to invalidate statutes in impressive 
numbers, disregarding Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's admonition that 
nonelected judges should give great deference to democratically elected 
legislatures. The second is the extent to which the Court asserts its 
supremacy by declaring that it alone may interpret the Constitution . even 
where the Constitution appears to give other branches of government the right 
to share this authority. And the third indicator, argues Keck, is the 
willingness to wander into so-called "political thickets" . messy cases with 
no clear right answer and big-time political implications.

Does Keck fully make the case that the Rehnquist Court (which invalidated a 
record 33 federal statutes on constitutional grounds in eight years, made 
soaring pronouncements about the supremacy of its constitutional views over 
Congress,' and wandered into the mother of all political thickets in Bush v. 
Gore) is more activist than the Warren Court (which invalidated far more state 
and local laws, handed down the catalytic Brown v. Board of Education 
decision, and steered somewhat irresponsibly toward a constitutional guarantee 
of economic equality)? Not really, but it doesn't matter. Even if you think 
the Warren Court should win top activist billing for the breadth and impact of 
its decisions, the Rehnquist Court's voluminous, if tempered, record gives 
Keck more than enough material to chew on.

It also raises the question: How can conservatives possibly square the 
Rehnquist Court's activist legacy with their own anti-activist rhetoric? Well, 
it turns out there's a trick: There are actually two different kinds of 
activism . conservative and liberal . and conservatives don't count decisions 
within their own tradition as, well, activism. In teasing this out, Keck 
explains that the two activist traditions have very different objectives. 
Conservative activists want to achieve limited government . particularly at 
the federal level . and tend to get there by arguing that Congress is 
interfering with economic or states' rights. By contrast, liberal activists 
want to protect the core freedoms that allow vulnerable minorities to 
participate in the political process. They give extra scrutiny to laws that 
affect those minorities, and invalidate those that they judge to put 
politically tinged freedoms at risk. The heyday of conservative activism was 
the early New Deal era, when the Court struck down one after another of FDR's 
legislative initiatives; Roosevelt put an end to that by threatening to pack 
the Court. The heyday of liberal activism was the Warren Court era of the '50s 
and '60s and the early Burger Court period of the '70s, which has left a 
legacy (including Roe v. Wade) that rankles conservatives to this day.

As to how conservatives have developed a guilt-free approach to their own 
brand of activism, the key to understanding this is the doctrine of 
originalism. The idea behind originalism is t

[i2p] weekly status notes [feb 8] (fwd from jrandom@i2p.net)

[Eugen Leitl]

- Forwarded message from jrandom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

From: jrandom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 12:57:44 -0800
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [i2p] weekly status notes [feb 8]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Hi y'all, update time again

* Index
1) 0.4.2.6-*
2) 0.5
3) i2p-bt 0.1.6
4) fortuna
5) ???

* 1) 0.4.2.6-*

It doesn't seem like it, but its been over a month since the 0.4.2.6
release came out and things are still in pretty good shape.  There
have been a series of pretty useful updates [1] since then, but no
real show stopper calling for a new release to get pushed.  However,
in the last day or two we've had some really good bugfixes sent in
(thanks anon and Sugadude!), and if we weren't on the verge of the
0.5 release, I'd probably package 'er up and push 'er out.  anon's
update fixes a border condition in the streaming lib which has been
causing many of the timeouts seen in BT and other large transfers,
so if you're feeling adventurous, grab CVS HEAD and try 'er out.  Or
wait around for the next release, of course.

[1] http://dev.i2p.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/i2p/history.txt?rev=HEAD

* 2) 0.5

Lots and lots of progress on the 0.5 front (as anyone on the i2p-cvs
list [2] can attest to).  All of the tunnel updates and various
performance tweaks have been tested out, and while it doesn't
include much in the way of the various [3] enforced ordering
algorithms, it does get the basics covered.  We've also integrated
a set of (BSD licensed) Bloom filters [4] from XLattice [5],
allowing us to detect replay attacks without requiring any
per-message memory usage and nearly 0ms overhead.  To accomodate our
needs, the filters have been trivially extended to decay so that
after a tunnel expires, the filter doesn't have the IVs we saw in
that tunnel anymore.

While I'm trying to slip in as much as I can into the 0.5 release, I
also realize that we need to expect the unexpected - meaning the
best way to improve it is to get it into your hands and learn from
how it works (and doesn't work) for you.  To help with this, as I've
mentioned before, we're going to have a 0.5 release (hopefully out in
the next week), breaking backwards compatability, then work on
improving it from there, building a 0.5.1 release when its ready.

Looking back at the roadmap [6], the only thing being deferred to
0.5.1 is the strict ordering.  There'll also be improvements to the
throttling and load balancing over time, I'm sure, but I expect
we'll be tweaking that pretty much forever.  There have been some
other things discussed that I've hoped to include in 0.5 though,
like the download tool and the one-click update code, but it looks
like those will be deferred as well.

[2] http://dev.i2p.net/pipermail/i2p-cvs/2005-February/thread.html
[3] http://dev.i2p.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/i2p/router/doc/
tunnel-alt.html?rev=HEAD#tunnel.selection.client
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter
[5] http://xlattice.sourceforge.net/index.html
[6] http://www.i2p.net/roadmap

* 3) i2p-bt 0.1.6

duck has patched up a new i2p-bt release (yay!), available at the
usual locations, so get yours while its hot [7].  Between this
update and anon's streaming lib patch, I pretty much saturated my
uplink while seeding some files, so give it a shot.

[7] http://forum.i2p.net/viewtopic.php?t=300

* 4) fortuna

As mentioned in last week's meeting, smeghead has been churning away
at a whole slew of different updates lately, and while battling to
get I2P working with gcj, some really horrendous PRNG issues have
cropped up in some JVMs, pretty much forcing the issue of having a
PRNG we can count on.  Having heard back from the GNU-Crypto folks,
while their fortuna implementation hasn't really been deployed yet,
it looks to be the best fit for our needs.  We might be able to get
it into the 0.5 release, but chances are it'll get deferred to 0.5.1
though, as we'll want to tweak it so that it can provide us with the
necessary quantity of random data.

* 5) ???

Lots of things going on, and there has been a burst of activity on
the forum [8] lately as well, so I'm sure I've missed some things.
In any case, swing on by the meeting in a few minutes and say whats
on your mind (or just lurk and throw in the random snark)

=jr
[8] http://forum.i2p.net/
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i2p mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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- End forwarded message -
-- 
Eugen* Leitl http://leitl.org";>leitl
__
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net


pgpDEOilLsLDW.pgp
Description: PGP signatu

Re: Identity thieves can lurk at Wi-Fi spots

[Ian G]

R.A. Hettinga wrote:

The facility uses software and sensors to monitor 480 wireless devices used
by medical personnel at 110 access points. Last month, it stopped about 120
attempts to steal financial information from medical personnel and patients
- double the number of incidents from a few months earlier.
The recent surge in evil-twin attacks parallels phishing scams ...
Has anyone seen any case details on any of these
attacks?  The few articles I read all seemed to start
out saying it was happening, and then ended with
limp descriptions of how it *could* happen.  That is,
more FUD.
The above though seems to be a claim that it has
happened.  Now, what exactly did happen?  Was it
a hack attack?  An eavesdropping attack?  An MITM?
Was there indeed even an attack, or was it just the
software indicating a couple of funny connects?
Last year, those 2 kids were caught doing the wireless
thing in front of the hardware store - but again, what
they did was to hack (well, walk) into the systems and
install a program.
iang, still on the trail of the elusive MITM...
--
News and views on what matters in finance+crypto:
   http://financialcryptography.com/

Identity thieves can lurk at Wi-Fi spots

[R.A. Hettinga]

USA Today



Identity thieves can lurk at Wi-Fi spots
 By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO - Coffee shop Web surfers beware: An evil twin may be lurking
near your favorite wireless hotspot.

Thieves are using wireless devices to impersonate legitimate Internet
access points to steal credit card numbers and other personal information,
security experts warn.

So-called evil-twin attacks don't require technical expertise. Anyone armed
with a wireless laptop and software widely available on the Internet can
broadcast a radio signal that overpowers the hot spot.
  How to avoid an 'evil twin'?? Install personal firewall and security
patches. Use hot spots for Web surfing only. Enter passwords only into Web
sites that include an SSL key at bottom right. Turn off or remove wireless
card if you are not using a hot spot. Avoid hot spots where it's difficult
to tell who's connected, such as at hotels and airport clubs. If hot spot
is not working properly, assume password is compromised. Change password
and report incident to hot spot provider. Do not use insecure applications
such as e-mail instant messaging while at hot spots.

 Source: AirDefense Then, masquerading as the real thing, they view the
activities of wireless users within several hundred feet of the hot spot.

"It could be someone sitting next to you on a plane or in a parking lot
across the street from a coffee shop," says Jon Green, director of
technical marketing at Aruba Wireless Networks, which makes
radio-wave-scanning equipment that detects and shuts down bogus hot spots.

"Wireless networks are wide open," says Steve Lewack, director of
technology services for Columbus Regional Medical Center in Columbus, Ga.

The facility uses software and sensors to monitor 480 wireless devices used
by medical personnel at 110 access points. Last month, it stopped about 120
attempts to steal financial information from medical personnel and patients
- double the number of incidents from a few months earlier.

The recent surge in evil-twin attacks parallels phishing scams - fraudulent
e-mail messages designed to trick consumers into divulging personal
information. Though the problem is in its infancy, it has caught the
attention of some businesses heavily dependent on wireless communications.

But most consumers aren't aware of the threat, security expert Green says.

Wi-Fi, or wireless Internet, sends Web pages via radio waves. Hot spots are
an area within range of a Wi-Fi antenna.

As the technology has grown - there are now about 20,000 hot spots in the
USA, up from 12,000 a year ago - so too have security concerns. Anil
Khatod, CEO of AirDefense, a maker of software and sensors, estimates
break-ins number in the hundreds each month in the USA.

Companies employing hundreds of people with wireless laptops are especially
vulnerable to evil-twin scams. When a worker's information is filched, it
can expose a corporate network.

"It presents a serious, hidden danger to Web users," says Phil Nobles, a
wireless-security expert at Cranfield University in England who has
researched the threat. "It's hard to nab the perpetrator, and the victim
has no idea what happened."

-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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'

Undeliverable mail: Re: Mail Authentification

[MAILER-DAEMON]

Failed to deliver to '<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>'

Foi encontrado um problema na mensagem.

O ficheiro data.zip está infectado com W32/[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Filtrado pelo Cluster de Email, 
www.webmail.pt


Reporting-MTA: dns; zipnet.pt

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From: cypherpunks@minder.net
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How Privacy Went Public

[R.A. Hettinga]

OpinionJournal

WSJ Online

 Wall Street Journal

AT LAW

How Privacy Went Public
Penumbras and emanations make strange bedfellows.

BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, February 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Last week a state judge held that New York City's refusal to issue marriage
licenses to same-sex couples violates the constitutional right to privacy.
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court mandated the recognition of
same-sex marriage in 2003, it too cited the right to privacy. Whatever the
merits of gay marriage, this is a case of judicial activism run amok, for
the contemporary right to privacy has its roots precisely in the
traditional definition of marriage.

 "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital
bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?" Justice William
O. Douglas asked rhetorically in the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case of
Griswold v. Connecticut. Then he answered: "The very idea is repulsive to
the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."

 But the court did not long confine those "notions of privacy" to "the
marriage relationship." In less than a decade it expanded the right of
marital privacy into a right of reproductive privacy. In Eisenstadt v.
Baird (1972) the court held that unmarried couples have the same right as
married ones to obtain and use contraceptives, and the following year, in
Roe v. Wade, the justices declared that the right to privacy includes
abortion.

 In 1986 the justices refused to take the next step of recognizing a right
to sexual privacy. In Bowers v. Hardwick, they upheld a state law
prohibiting homosexual sodomy between consenting adults. But in 1992 the
Supreme Court set the stage for overturning Bowers. In Planned Parenthood
v. Casey--a decision for which Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony
Kennedy and David Souter claimed joint authorship--the court essentially
upheld Roe, while asserting a new, breathtakingly expansive formulation of
the right to privacy.

 "Intimate and personal choices," the justices wrote, are "central to the
liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is
the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life." Justice Kennedy cited this
language in his majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that
found sodomy laws were unconstitutional after all.

 The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet taken up the question of same-sex
marriage. But as Justice Antonin Scalia argued in his Lawrence dissent,
it's hard to see how one could square a ban on same-sex marriage with what
he mockingly called "the famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage." If the
Constitution guarantees no less than the right to "define one's own concept
of . . . the universe," how can government limit the definition of marriage
to a man and a woman, or for that matter limit it at all? (Justice O'Connor
argued in Lawrence that "preserving the traditional institution of
marriage" is in fact a "legitimate state interest," but it's telling that
none of the other five justices in the majority joined her concurrence.)

 None of these cases rest on solid legal ground. As Justice Douglas
acknowledged in Griswold, the right to privacy is to be found not in the
Constitution but in its "penumbras" and "emanations." At the same time,
there is a strong political consensus against the government intruding into
people's bedrooms. If Griswold and Lawrence disappeared from the books
tomorrow, it's unlikely any state would rush to re-enact laws against
contraceptives or consensual sodomy.

 Abortion and same-sex marriage, by contrast, do spark strong opposition,
but not on privacy grounds. Abortion opponents argue that life before birth
is worthy of legal protection, while the case against same-sex marriage is
that it confers public approval on gay relationships--approval the New York
and Massachusetts courts have given without public consent.

 When judges find rights in hidden constitutional meanings, they run a
twofold risk. If they limit those rights, striking balances and compromises
between such competing values as privacy vs. life or privacy vs. morality,
they act as politicians, only without democratic accountability. The
alternative, to let those rights expand without limit, seems more
principled and thus is more appealing. But it ignores democracy's most
important principle of all: the right of the people to govern themselves.

 Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com.


-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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'