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FC: Senate should ask FBI nominee Mueller about privacy, EPIC says
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Robert Mueller, FBI director-designate, will be before the Senate Judiciary committee on Monday. EPIC's letter is a worthy effort to raise the topic of privacy, and will (I hope) get Mueller's views in the public record. EPIC's Marc Rotenberg correctly says that as the first FBI director of the 21st century, Mueller will have access to more sophisticated surveillance technologies than his predecessors. (Carnivore may get the most attention, but I'm more concerned about automated face recognition systems, and I hope that comes up on Monday.) Background on Robert Mueller, FBI director-designate: http://www.politechbot.com/p-02233.html Senate hearing notice: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hr073001f.htm Politech archive on Carnivore: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=carnivore Politech archive on Kyllo decision: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=kyllo -Declan *********

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the physics arXiv blog
by Technology Review Feed - arXiv blog 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[1]the physics arXiv blog _________________________________________________________________ [2]How terrorists groups resemble manufacturing firms Posted: 21 Jun 2009 09:10 PM PDT Terrorist organisations may be best understood as companies whose principle product is violence, suggests a new study of terror attacks Understanding how terrorist groups operate is hard, not least because of a severe lack of information about how they recruit, organise and plan their activities. So it's no surprise then that working out how best to stop these organisations is tricky. Now Aaron Clauset from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and his pal, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, say they've found an important new insight into terrorist activity that could help to solve this problem. The analysis is based on the one set of reliable data that we do have: the number and severity of terrorist attacks and rough idea of the size and age of the groups that carried them out (they've looked at the data from 1998 to 2005). Clauset and Gledistch say that a simple analysis of this data shows that the frequency of attacks increases over time in a pattern that is common to all groups: the time between attacks plotted against the group's experience decreases according to a power law. That can be explained in two ways. First, terrorist groups are born clumsy and increase their attack rate primarily because their members learn to be more efficient. In manufacturing industry, this kind of organisational learning is called learning by doing and is widely studied. Second, the terrorist groups are born small and increase their attack rate by recruiting new, replaceable, members, a process called organisation growth and is again well studied by economists. Perhaps economics can help. "In this light, terrorist groups may best be understood as firms whose principal product is political violence, and whose production rates depend largely on organizational growth and the availability of low-skill labor," say Clauset and Gledistch. That may well be an important insight because it implies that certain kinds of easily accessible organisations such as non-profit companies and groups of political activists, might be good models of terrorist groups from which additional insights can be gained. For example, it may be possible to determine whether the activity a group is best reduced by limiting its growth or by disrupting its organisation. But there is a puzzle in this data, say Clauset and Gledistch. The severity of terrorist attacks is independent of the size and experience of the organisation. So contrary to what you might expect, young and old terrorist groups are equally likely to carry out extremely severe attacks. "Internal factors seem to play a marginal role in the severity of any particular attack," say Clauset and Gledistch. Here's one explanation. Similar kinds of power laws are common in the real world: in the size of stock market crashes, the number of deaths in wars and the severity of forest fires. In these cases, the size of the conflagration has nothing to do with the size event that triggered it but everything to do with the network in which the event took place. Perhaps the same is true with terrorist attacks: the severity of the attack has more to do with the properties of the system being attacked than the organisation doing the attacking. Ref: [3]arxiv.org/abs/0906.3287: The Developmental Dynamics of Terrorist Organizations [4][ISMAP:di] [5][ISMAP:di] [6][arXivblog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA] [7][arXivblog?d=dnMXMwOfBR0] [8][arXivblog?i=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:gIN9vFwOqvQ] [9][arXivblog?d=7Q72WNTAKBA] [10][arXivblog?i=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:V_sGLiPBpWU] [11][arXivblog?d=l6gmwiTKsz0] [12][arXivblog?d=qj6IDK7rITs] You are subscribed to email updates from [13]Technology Review Feed - arXiv blog To stop receiving these emails, you may [14]unsubscribe now. Email delivery powered by Google Inbox too full? [15]Add to Google Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 References Visible links 1. http://www.technologyreview.com/ 2. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arXivblog/~3/7MnzJ1YcE9k/click.phdo 3. http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3287 4. https://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/IF-y765bnEMq_VKGmS85N7v3Llk/0/da 5. https://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/IF-y765bnEMq_VKGmS85N7v3Llk/1/da 6. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:yIl2AU… 7. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:dnMXMw… 8. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:gIN9vF… 9. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:7Q72WN… 10. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:V_sGLi… 11. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:l6gmwi… 12. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:qj6IDK… 13. http://www.technologyreview.com/ 14. http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailunsubscribe?k=118r9-S4Z0vJg-AkQPASPmD… 15. http://fusion.google.com/add?source=atgs&feedurl=http://feeds2.feedburner.c… Hidden links: 16. http://fusion.google.com/add?source=atgs&feedurl=http://feeds2.feedburner.c… 17. http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=cd8a8d490e4f3c4a37c539869bca4129&p=1 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: brute force physics Was: cleversafe...
by David Wagner 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Alexander Klimov wrote: > A problem with this reasoning is that the physical world and the usual > digital computers have exponential simulation gap (it is known at > least in one direction: to simulate N entangled particles on a digital > computer one needs computations exponential in N). This can be > considered as a reason to suspect that physical world is > non-polynomially faster than the usual computers (probably even to an ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > extent that all NP computations can be simulated). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ It is a commonly-held myth that quantum computers could solve NP-complete problems, but most experts who have studied the issue believe this is probably not the case. There is no reason to think that quantum computation could solve all NP problems in polynomial time, and in fact, there are good reasons to believe this is likely not the case. (Do note that factoring is not NP-complete.) See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#Relation_to_computational_co… or for a more nuanced and deep treatment of these issues, http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[IP] Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say
by Dave Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Going going -- //// -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:09:19 -0800 From: Steven Hertzberg <stevenstevensteven(a)gmail.com> To: dave(a)farber.net "Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism." [snip] "it seems" Congress did intend to authorize nationwide search warrants in all cases, not just ones pertaining to terrorism. [snip] "The only person in a position to assert your rights is the ISP and if it's in their local court, they are more likely to challenge it if it is bad or somehow deficient," Mr. Bankston said. ----Article---- BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun February 28, 2006 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/28232 Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism. The disagreement among the jurists about the scope of their powers simmered for more than two years before coming to light in an opinion unsealed earlier this month. The resolution, which underscored the government's broad legal authority to intercept electronic communications, comes as debate is raging over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and the duties of Internet providers to protect personal data. A magistrate judge in Orlando, James Glazebrook, first questioned the so-called nationwide-search provision in 2003, after investigators in a child pornography probe asked him to issue a search warrant requiring a "legitimate" California-based Web site to identify all users who accessed certain "password-protected" photos posted on the site. The Web provider was not named in public court records. Magistrate Glazebrook said that in passing the Patriot Act, formally known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, Congress made clear its focus was on terrorism. He said there was nothing in the language Congress adopted in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that suggested the nationwide-search provision should apply to garden variety federal cases. "The statutory language is clear and unambiguous in limiting district court authority to issue out-of-district warrants to investigations of terrorism, and that language controls this court's interpretation. The government has shown no legislative intent to the contrary," the magistrate wrote. He also noted that many of the examples given during legislative debate involved terrorism. The then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, described the nationwide-search language as applying in terrorism cases, the court noted. Magistrate Glazebrook denied the search warrant, but it was recently disclosed that the government appealed to a federal judge, G. Kendall Sharp, who granted it without explanation. The scenario played out again late last year, after prosecutors presented Magistrate Glazebrook with an application for a search warrant directed to a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal, Yahoo. The government asked that Yahoo produce web pages, documents, and usage logs pertaining to two e-mail addresses and a Web site allegedly linked to an Orlando man, Earl Beach, under investigation for involvement in child pornography. Magistrate Glazebrook allowed searches of Mr. Beach's home and computers, but again rejected prosecutors' request to acquire data located across the country. "Congress has not authorized this court to seize out-of-district property except in cases of domestic or international terrorism," the magistrate handwrote on the application. Again, prosecutors appealed. Judge Gregory Presnell took up the question and concluded that "it seems" Congress did intend to authorize nationwide search warrants in all cases, not just ones pertaining to terrorism. However, the judge acknowledged that the language Congress used was far from clear. "The court rejects the assertions made by both the United States here and the magistrate judge... that the statutory language is unambiguous. Although the court ultimately comes to a determination regarding the meaning of this language, by no means is it clearly, unambiguously or precisely written," Judge Presnell wrote. The chief federal defender in Orlando, R. Fletcher Peacock, said the dispute was a straightforward one pitting literal interpretation against legislative intent. "Judge Presnell was more willing to go behind the language of the statute and look at the statutory intent, and clearly Judge Glazebrook was not," the attorney said. One of the most striking aspects of the dispute is that there appears to be no other published court ruling addressing the nationwide-search provision, known as Section 220. The magistrate involved cited no cases directly on the point and neither did the government. An attorney with a group that pushes for online privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said yesterday that the lack of published cases on the subject reflects the fact that search warrant applications are presented outside the presence of defense lawyers, often before a defendant even knows he is under investigation. "It's fairly typical that search warrants for electronic evidence would be kept under seal," the privacy advocate, Kevin Bankston, said. "In most cases, they wouldn't be reported." Mr. Bankston said there is no question that the Justice Department wanted the Patriot Act to include nationwide-search authority for all crimes, but whether lawmakers accomplished that task is another question. "I don't know that Congress knew what it was voting on," he said. Civil libertarians have objected to the nationwide-search provision on the grounds that it allows prosecutors the discretion to pick judicial districts where judges are seen as more friendly to the government. Critics of the Patriot Act have also warned that allowing search warrants to be filed from across the country will discourage Internet service providers from fighting such requests even when they may be unwarranted. "The only person in a position to assert your rights is the ISP and if it's in their local court, they are more likely to challenge it if it is bad or somehow deficient," Mr. Bankston said. A spokesman for the prosecutors did not return a call seeking comment for this story. However, the Justice Department has said the nationwide-search provision was "vital" to its investigation of the gruesome murder in 2004 of a pregnant Missouri woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, whose unborn child was cut from her womb with a kitchen knife. Investigators claim that they used the Patriot Act authority to quickly obtain email evidence from an Internet provider across state lines in Kansas. That data led them to a woman who later confessed to the attack, Lisa Montgomery. In his ruling, Judge Presnell did not mention that episode, but suggested it was simpler for the courts and prosecutors to issue all warrants in a case from one place. "As a matter of judicial and prosecutorial efficiency, it is practical to permit the federal district court for the district where the federal crime allegedly occurred to oversee both the prosecution and the investigation (including the issuance of warrants) thereof," he wrote. The government has also complained that the former procedure caused court backlogs and delays in jurisdictions, like northern California, that are home to many Internet companies. It is unclear whether any charges resulted from the 2003 investigation, but the suspect involved in the disputed 2005 search, Mr. Beach, was indicted earlier this month on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. He has pleaded not guilty. A trial is set for April. Magistrate Glazebrook said in a brief interview yesterday that he could not discuss the specific cases that prompted the legal disagreement over the Patriot Act, but that he expects the question to arise again. "It is certainly something that will come up," he said. "There are a lot of interesting issues surrounding that." ________________________________ Steven Hertzberg http://www.hertzberg.org ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[Politech] Bush administration appeals loss in NSA/ATT case to 9th Circuit [priv]
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On Monday the Bush administration appealed its loss in the AT&T/NSA wiretapping case to the 9th Circuit. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker had ruled on July 20 that EFF's case alleging illegal cooperation with the NSA could proceed. I've placed some of the briefs filed today online here: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/doj.motion.073106.pdf http://www.politechbot.com/docs/eff.nsa.073106.pdf http://www.politechbot.com/docs/att.brief.073106.pdf And a writeup: http://news.com.com/2100-1036_3-6100612.html Also on a personal note, CNET News.com and the California First Amendment Coalition won permission from Walker today to file an amicus brief. For background on that point: http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6073213.html http://news.com.com/2100-7348_3-6073480.html -Declan _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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the physics arXiv blog
by Technology Review Feed - arXiv blog 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[1]the physics arXiv blog _________________________________________________________________ [2]How terrorists groups resemble manufacturing firms Posted: 21 Jun 2009 09:10 PM PDT Terrorist organisations may be best understood as companies whose principle product is violence, suggests a new study of terror attacks Understanding how terrorist groups operate is hard, not least because of a severe lack of information about how they recruit, organise and plan their activities. So it's no surprise then that working out how best to stop these organisations is tricky. Now Aaron Clauset from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and his pal, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, say they've found an important new insight into terrorist activity that could help to solve this problem. The analysis is based on the one set of reliable data that we do have: the number and severity of terrorist attacks and rough idea of the size and age of the groups that carried them out (they've looked at the data from 1998 to 2005). Clauset and Gledistch say that a simple analysis of this data shows that the frequency of attacks increases over time in a pattern that is common to all groups: the time between attacks plotted against the group's experience decreases according to a power law. That can be explained in two ways. First, terrorist groups are born clumsy and increase their attack rate primarily because their members learn to be more efficient. In manufacturing industry, this kind of organisational learning is called learning by doing and is widely studied. Second, the terrorist groups are born small and increase their attack rate by recruiting new, replaceable, members, a process called organisation growth and is again well studied by economists. Perhaps economics can help. "In this light, terrorist groups may best be understood as firms whose principal product is political violence, and whose production rates depend largely on organizational growth and the availability of low-skill labor," say Clauset and Gledistch. That may well be an important insight because it implies that certain kinds of easily accessible organisations such as non-profit companies and groups of political activists, might be good models of terrorist groups from which additional insights can be gained. For example, it may be possible to determine whether the activity a group is best reduced by limiting its growth or by disrupting its organisation. But there is a puzzle in this data, say Clauset and Gledistch. The severity of terrorist attacks is independent of the size and experience of the organisation. So contrary to what you might expect, young and old terrorist groups are equally likely to carry out extremely severe attacks. "Internal factors seem to play a marginal role in the severity of any particular attack," say Clauset and Gledistch. Here's one explanation. Similar kinds of power laws are common in the real world: in the size of stock market crashes, the number of deaths in wars and the severity of forest fires. In these cases, the size of the conflagration has nothing to do with the size event that triggered it but everything to do with the network in which the event took place. Perhaps the same is true with terrorist attacks: the severity of the attack has more to do with the properties of the system being attacked than the organisation doing the attacking. Ref: [3]arxiv.org/abs/0906.3287: The Developmental Dynamics of Terrorist Organizations [4][ISMAP:di] [5][ISMAP:di] [6][arXivblog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA] [7][arXivblog?d=dnMXMwOfBR0] [8][arXivblog?i=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:gIN9vFwOqvQ] [9][arXivblog?d=7Q72WNTAKBA] [10][arXivblog?i=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:V_sGLiPBpWU] [11][arXivblog?d=l6gmwiTKsz0] [12][arXivblog?d=qj6IDK7rITs] You are subscribed to email updates from [13]Technology Review Feed - arXiv blog To stop receiving these emails, you may [14]unsubscribe now. Email delivery powered by Google Inbox too full? [15]Add to Google Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 References Visible links 1. http://www.technologyreview.com/ 2. http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arXivblog/~3/7MnzJ1YcE9k/click.phdo 3. http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3287 4. https://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/IF-y765bnEMq_VKGmS85N7v3Llk/0/da 5. https://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/IF-y765bnEMq_VKGmS85N7v3Llk/1/da 6. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:yIl2AU… 7. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:dnMXMw… 8. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:gIN9vF… 9. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:7Q72WN… 10. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:V_sGLi… 11. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:l6gmwi… 12. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/arXivblog?a=7MnzJ1YcE9k:CCprs3blmIE:qj6IDK… 13. http://www.technologyreview.com/ 14. http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailunsubscribe?k=118r9-S4Z0vJg-AkQPASPmD… 15. http://fusion.google.com/add?source=atgs&feedurl=http://feeds2.feedburner.c… Hidden links: 16. http://fusion.google.com/add?source=atgs&feedurl=http://feeds2.feedburner.c… 17. http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=cd8a8d490e4f3c4a37c539869bca4129&p=1 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: brute force physics Was: cleversafe...
by David Wagner 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Alexander Klimov wrote: > A problem with this reasoning is that the physical world and the usual > digital computers have exponential simulation gap (it is known at > least in one direction: to simulate N entangled particles on a digital > computer one needs computations exponential in N). This can be > considered as a reason to suspect that physical world is > non-polynomially faster than the usual computers (probably even to an ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > extent that all NP computations can be simulated). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ It is a commonly-held myth that quantum computers could solve NP-complete problems, but most experts who have studied the issue believe this is probably not the case. There is no reason to think that quantum computation could solve all NP problems in polynomial time, and in fact, there are good reasons to believe this is likely not the case. (Do note that factoring is not NP-complete.) See, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#Relation_to_computational_co… or for a more nuanced and deep treatment of these issues, http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [silk] The Coming War on General Purpose Computing
by Udhay Shankar N 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

On 02-Jan-12 10:14 AM, Biju Chacko wrote: > Silklister Cory Doctorow gave an interesting [1] talk at the Chaos > Computer Congress in Berlin recently. A more polished version of this: http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html Lockdown The coming war on general-purpose computing By Cory Doctorow This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright. But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself. In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software. Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked forbdeliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectorsband challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy. These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched. Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own. This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with informationband what might be charged for each. Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances. But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems. You must now also stop the user from saving the file while it's unencryptedbwhich must happen eventuallyb and you must stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, enabling them to permanently decrypt the media and ditch the stupid player app entirely. Now you have three problems: you must stop the users who figure out how to decrypt from sharing it with other users. Now you've got four problems, because you must stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too. And now you've got five problems, because you must stop users who figure out how to extract these secrets from telling other users what the secrets were! That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. This created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media (such as songs and movies) from the unlocking programs while they were running. It created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works or the secrets. It also established a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And with that, illegal copying ended forever, the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, "Mission Accomplished". That's not how the story ends, of course, because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve. After all, these laws made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs. They made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside your computer, and they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened. In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. Copying only got easier following the passage of these lawsbcopying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say "Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it." Reality asserts itself. Like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, so must these regulations, which have broad general appeal but are disastrous in their implementation. Each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures. It's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened. It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law. MPs and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning. And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, still manage to pass good rules that make sense. That's because government relies on heuristics: rules of thumb about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue. Unfortunately, information technology confounds these heuristicsbit kicks the crap out of thembin one important way. The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, "Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be "No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberiesbeven if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberiesbno-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems. However, if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I requested a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars, the regulator might say "Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that." We might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say that once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars. We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special-purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. There's a heuristic for this: special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility. This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose networkbthe PC and the Internet. If you think of computer software as a feature, a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature. The heuristic would lead you to think that a computer unable to run spreadsheets or games would be no more of an attack on computing than a ban on car-phones would be an attack on cars. And, if you think of protocols and websites as features of the network, then saying "fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent", or "fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves," sounds a lot like "change the sound of busy signals," or "take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network," and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking. The rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless. So, our regulators go off, they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are, suddenly, numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is there mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcementbit satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset. This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I've a friend, who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company, who told me what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! After the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of entropy to the marketing department, they arrived at another solution: they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. Unfortunately, that was because the detergent was digesting your clothes. Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine. This was, needless to say, the opposite of making clothes newer. Instead, you were artificially aging them every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the "solution", the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date. Eventually, you would have to buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart. Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits." On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computerbit is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box. We don't know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don't like, are prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, or over the objection of the computer's owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware. In one famous incidentba gift to people who share this hypothesisbSony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the computer operating system's kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But that's not the only example. Nintendo's 3DS opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way. If it detects signs of tampering, it turns itself into a brick. Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it only runs "signed" operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from operating systems unless they allow for covert surveillance operations. On the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. Consider SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, which bans innocuous tools such as DNSSecba security suite that authenticates domain name informationb because they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too! It may seem like SOPA is the endgame in a long fight over copyright and the Internet, and it may seem that if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright. The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental levelb all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies. But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians. This is why, on one hand, Canada has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one awful copyright bill after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed to actually vote on each bill. It's why SOPA, a bill composed of pure stupid and pieced together molecule-by-molecule into a kind of "Stupidite 250" normally only found in the heart of newborn star, had its rushed-through SOPA hearings adjourned midway through the Christmas break: so that lawmakers could get into a vicious national debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance. It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals: because when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important. Canada's Parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation's fisheries, and a thousand other issues. The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmishbnot a war. Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don't have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it's a general-purpose computer, running software. The grievances that arise from unauthorized copies of Snooki's Confessions of a Guidette are trivial when compared to the calls-to-action that our computer-embroidered reality will soon create. Consider radio. Radio regulation until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor and interfere with other signals. But powerful software-defined radios (SDRs) can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher or air traffic controller, just by loading and executing different software. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, and asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in "trusted computing" machines. Ultimately, the question is whether every PC should be locked, so that their programs could be strictly regulated by central authorities. Even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to full-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdictions printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives. It doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs which cause specialized peripherals to output custom organisms which literally eat their lunch. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?" There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we've spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher. As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die. It won't be a hearing aid, though; it will really be a computer. So when I get into a carba computer that I put my body intobwith my hearing aidba computer I put inside my bodybI want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, or to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. Last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia, found itself in a great deal of trouble. It was caught distributing, to its students, rootkitted laptops that allowed remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. They photographed students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, microphones, and GPS tranceivers on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. We haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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FC: Senate should ask FBI nominee Mueller about privacy, EPIC says
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Robert Mueller, FBI director-designate, will be before the Senate Judiciary committee on Monday. EPIC's letter is a worthy effort to raise the topic of privacy, and will (I hope) get Mueller's views in the public record. EPIC's Marc Rotenberg correctly says that as the first FBI director of the 21st century, Mueller will have access to more sophisticated surveillance technologies than his predecessors. (Carnivore may get the most attention, but I'm more concerned about automated face recognition systems, and I hope that comes up on Monday.) Background on Robert Mueller, FBI director-designate: http://www.politechbot.com/p-02233.html Senate hearing notice: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hr073001f.htm Politech archive on Carnivore: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=carnivore Politech archive on Kyllo decision: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=kyllo -Declan *********

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[IP] Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say
by Dave Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Going going -- //// -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:09:19 -0800 From: Steven Hertzberg <stevenstevensteven(a)gmail.com> To: dave(a)farber.net "Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism." [snip] "it seems" Congress did intend to authorize nationwide search warrants in all cases, not just ones pertaining to terrorism. [snip] "The only person in a position to assert your rights is the ISP and if it's in their local court, they are more likely to challenge it if it is bad or somehow deficient," Mr. Bankston said. ----Article---- BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun February 28, 2006 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/28232 Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism. The disagreement among the jurists about the scope of their powers simmered for more than two years before coming to light in an opinion unsealed earlier this month. The resolution, which underscored the government's broad legal authority to intercept electronic communications, comes as debate is raging over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and the duties of Internet providers to protect personal data. A magistrate judge in Orlando, James Glazebrook, first questioned the so-called nationwide-search provision in 2003, after investigators in a child pornography probe asked him to issue a search warrant requiring a "legitimate" California-based Web site to identify all users who accessed certain "password-protected" photos posted on the site. The Web provider was not named in public court records. Magistrate Glazebrook said that in passing the Patriot Act, formally known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, Congress made clear its focus was on terrorism. He said there was nothing in the language Congress adopted in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that suggested the nationwide-search provision should apply to garden variety federal cases. "The statutory language is clear and unambiguous in limiting district court authority to issue out-of-district warrants to investigations of terrorism, and that language controls this court's interpretation. The government has shown no legislative intent to the contrary," the magistrate wrote. He also noted that many of the examples given during legislative debate involved terrorism. The then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, described the nationwide-search language as applying in terrorism cases, the court noted. Magistrate Glazebrook denied the search warrant, but it was recently disclosed that the government appealed to a federal judge, G. Kendall Sharp, who granted it without explanation. The scenario played out again late last year, after prosecutors presented Magistrate Glazebrook with an application for a search warrant directed to a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal, Yahoo. The government asked that Yahoo produce web pages, documents, and usage logs pertaining to two e-mail addresses and a Web site allegedly linked to an Orlando man, Earl Beach, under investigation for involvement in child pornography. Magistrate Glazebrook allowed searches of Mr. Beach's home and computers, but again rejected prosecutors' request to acquire data located across the country. "Congress has not authorized this court to seize out-of-district property except in cases of domestic or international terrorism," the magistrate handwrote on the application. Again, prosecutors appealed. Judge Gregory Presnell took up the question and concluded that "it seems" Congress did intend to authorize nationwide search warrants in all cases, not just ones pertaining to terrorism. However, the judge acknowledged that the language Congress used was far from clear. "The court rejects the assertions made by both the United States here and the magistrate judge... that the statutory language is unambiguous. Although the court ultimately comes to a determination regarding the meaning of this language, by no means is it clearly, unambiguously or precisely written," Judge Presnell wrote. The chief federal defender in Orlando, R. Fletcher Peacock, said the dispute was a straightforward one pitting literal interpretation against legislative intent. "Judge Presnell was more willing to go behind the language of the statute and look at the statutory intent, and clearly Judge Glazebrook was not," the attorney said. One of the most striking aspects of the dispute is that there appears to be no other published court ruling addressing the nationwide-search provision, known as Section 220. The magistrate involved cited no cases directly on the point and neither did the government. An attorney with a group that pushes for online privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said yesterday that the lack of published cases on the subject reflects the fact that search warrant applications are presented outside the presence of defense lawyers, often before a defendant even knows he is under investigation. "It's fairly typical that search warrants for electronic evidence would be kept under seal," the privacy advocate, Kevin Bankston, said. "In most cases, they wouldn't be reported." Mr. Bankston said there is no question that the Justice Department wanted the Patriot Act to include nationwide-search authority for all crimes, but whether lawmakers accomplished that task is another question. "I don't know that Congress knew what it was voting on," he said. Civil libertarians have objected to the nationwide-search provision on the grounds that it allows prosecutors the discretion to pick judicial districts where judges are seen as more friendly to the government. Critics of the Patriot Act have also warned that allowing search warrants to be filed from across the country will discourage Internet service providers from fighting such requests even when they may be unwarranted. "The only person in a position to assert your rights is the ISP and if it's in their local court, they are more likely to challenge it if it is bad or somehow deficient," Mr. Bankston said. A spokesman for the prosecutors did not return a call seeking comment for this story. However, the Justice Department has said the nationwide-search provision was "vital" to its investigation of the gruesome murder in 2004 of a pregnant Missouri woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, whose unborn child was cut from her womb with a kitchen knife. Investigators claim that they used the Patriot Act authority to quickly obtain email evidence from an Internet provider across state lines in Kansas. That data led them to a woman who later confessed to the attack, Lisa Montgomery. In his ruling, Judge Presnell did not mention that episode, but suggested it was simpler for the courts and prosecutors to issue all warrants in a case from one place. "As a matter of judicial and prosecutorial efficiency, it is practical to permit the federal district court for the district where the federal crime allegedly occurred to oversee both the prosecution and the investigation (including the issuance of warrants) thereof," he wrote. The government has also complained that the former procedure caused court backlogs and delays in jurisdictions, like northern California, that are home to many Internet companies. It is unclear whether any charges resulted from the 2003 investigation, but the suspect involved in the disputed 2005 search, Mr. Beach, was indicted earlier this month on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography. He has pleaded not guilty. A trial is set for April. Magistrate Glazebrook said in a brief interview yesterday that he could not discuss the specific cases that prompted the legal disagreement over the Patriot Act, but that he expects the question to arise again. "It is certainly something that will come up," he said. "There are a lot of interesting issues surrounding that." ________________________________ Steven Hertzberg http://www.hertzberg.org ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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