Report Downplays Echelon Effect
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
5/24/2001; 11:37:37 PM 'A global surveillance system known as Echelon does exist and has the ability to eavesdrop on telephone calls, faxes and e-mail messages, a European Parliament committee has concluded.

'In a 250KB draft report, the committee said that Echelon -- operated by English-speaking countries including the United States, Canada and Great Britain -- is designed for intelligence purposes but that no "substantiated" evidence exists that it has been used to spy on European firms on behalf of American competitors.'

Rethinking Music Security
Music & MP3
5/23/2001; 10:15:07 PM 'Last Friday, a consortium of more than 100 content and technology companies called the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) failed to reach a consensus on a screening application that would enable media players to distinguish between secure and unsecure files.

'The lack of agreement means that for yet another year, portable and PC media players will continue to play both secure and unsecure music files and MP3 files.'

Net TV firm set to guard Canadian border
Misc.
5/23/2001; 10:12:14 PM 'JumpTV, which has yet to turn on the most controversial part of its service, says it will avoid the lawsuits by limiting its viewership to Canadians, with technology that purports to pinpoint Web surfers by country, region and even ZIP code.

'If implemented, it would be the first time a high-profile Web entertainment service has set up a technological walled garden attempting to eliminate the international reach of the Web.'

High Court to Hear Net Porn Case
Free Speech
5/21/2001; 2:13:31 PM 'The Supreme Court said Monday it will revisit the free-speech debate over congressional efforts to limit children's access to online pornography.

'The court agreed to review lower court decisions blocking enforcement of a 1998 law making it a crime to knowingly place objectionable material where a child could find it on the World Wide Web.'

First Anniversary
Personal Notes
5/20/2001; 11:48:53 AM No [more] posts today... it's my first wedding anniversary! Party time!

Eurocops want seven-year retention of all phone, Net traffic Misc.5/18/2001; 3:20:13 PM 'The official EU body that represents the member governments will recommend the long-term retention of personal data at a meeting with the European Commission later this month, according to documents leaked to London-based civil liberties journal Statewatch. 'The Council of the European Union, which represents the 15 member governments, will discuss implementing a policy originally designed with the FBI six years ago. It calls for the retention of "every phone call, every mobile phone call, every fax, every e-mail, every website's contents, all internet usage, from anywhere, by everyone, to be recorded, archived and be accessible for at least seven years," notes the journal.'I'm not certain this is even technologically feasible. Oh sure, the data can be collected, but I'm not convinced we could store it for seven years and have it usable and relatively easily retrievable. I would not be surprised that that would be the most complicated database undertaking in the world. Probably only scientists could match that amount of data (astronomers in particular), and they tend to have obvious ways of organizing the data (such as by position in the sky and time). Even trying to identify the point of origin of all these phone calls, faxes, e-mails and whatnot as quickly as they occur will be difficult, let alone getting them to a storage facility.Even though our storage technology is improving, data use on the internet is also increasing rapidly. I don't think this is going to work half as well as the lawmakers think it will. Clearly the lawmakers (yet again!) have failed to consult anybody who actually knows about technology. Even storing the contents of "every site on the Internet" at any given point in time is beyond the capabilities of anybody I know, such as Google, let alone for seven years (as I presume that means some sort of snapshot system). Idiots.

Proposed international law treaty puts rights at risk Misc.5/18/2001; 2:58:20 PM 'But the treaty's drafters began their work before cyberspace took its present form. Back then, business in other nations included a physical presence. You went there, set up shop and agreed to abide by that place's rules.... Cyberspace has blurred all borders....'Some nations' laws deny rights we take for granted in the United States and some other democracies. If critics are correct, the Hague Convention would turn local laws into international fiats, making the most restrictive laws anywhere the effective law of the Internet.'I don't have the faintest idea what the solution is to the problem of international legal conflicts is. However, I do know that the most obvious solution, which is this, will not work. This will only please the most restrictive regimes imaginable... and actually not even them.

MS incites UCITA breach UCITA5/12/2001; 7:11:27 PM 'Whereas Maryland's version of UCITA gives jurisdiction to Maryland, Microsoft insists that jurisdiction for the use of Passport resides in the law and courts of Washington state. As a result of this conflict, it appears that Maryland residents are not allowed to use the Microsoft service.''Although this conflict did seem to be an amusing instance of both Microsoft and the legislative sponsors of UCITA in Maryland getting hoisted on their own petards, I at first didn't see any significant consequences to all this legal snafu. Passport is a free service, and Maryland's version of UCITA includes an escape hatch for free products, designed in part at the behest of open-source software advocates. But then I remembered that the Passport license is subsidiary to the license for MSN; so I checked the license terms of MSN....'My intuition says we're missing some critical part of this story, but I'm not really certain what it is. What were Microsoft's lawyers thinking?

They Know If You've Been Bad or Good Surveillance and Privacy from Government5/12/2001; 11:34:03 AM 'Independence Hall will forever be depicted in history books as the birthplace of the United States. Along with the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, it is among the most recognizable symbols of freedom in the world. Ironically, this building where the Declaration of Independence was signed, emancipating Americans from an intrusive government, is now the site of a high-powered video surveillance camera.'From the no unenforcable law series on iRights. (I need to re-factor this site's catagories, "No Unenforcable Law" would become a new catagory, headed up by the Human Justice story.)

Transaction Costs and the Social Costs of Online Privacy
Privacy from Companies
5/11/2001; 10:46:06 PM 'Economically, privacy can be understood as a problem of social cost, where the actions of one agent (e.g., a mailing list broker) impart a negative externality on another agent (e.g., an end consumer). Problems in social cost can be understood by modeling the liabilities, transaction costs and property rights assigned to various economic agents within the system, and can be resolved by reallocating property rights and liability to different agents as needed to achieve economic equilibrium. This article examines how advances in high speed networking and data storage have radically reduced the costs to businesses of collecting, storing, manipulating and exchanging large amounts of personally identifying information on consumers, and the policy implications that these cost reductions have on property rights over personal information. A complementary economic and legal system that recognizes individual property rights over personal information is suggested as a way in which to greatly accelerate the adoption of electronic commerce and to extract inefficiencies from the already existing marketplace for personal information.'

More interesting and accessible then that abstract may indicate. I found this by following a link in the three criticisms article earlier. I'm still chewing on it, but I was starting to develop an argument much like the thesis of this piece.