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Christopher Soghoian, the Indiana University graduate student who in late October created a fake boarding pass generator to bring attention to airport security holes, is officially under investigation by the Transportation Security Administration, as first reported here last week.

The FBI, which raided Soghoian’s house and confiscated his computers and passports, dropped its investigation and returned his belongings in mid-November. Now the TSA has sent Soghoian a letter confirming its investigation of civil charges that he violated air safety laws. The fines can be up to $11,000 per violation.

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Soghoian has until the day after Christmas to respond in writing to the charges against him. For him, worse than the specter of fines is the notion that he may one day find his own name on the TSA’s no-fly list.

“If they decide that the only safe way for me to leave the country is by boat, then that’s pretty much the end of my career here in the States,” Soghoian said. “It’s one thing to harass researchers, but if they can chase them out of the country, then that’s a real chilling effect.”

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A newly revealed system that has been assigning terrorism scores to Americans traveling into or out of the country for the past five years is not merely invasive, privacy advocates charge, it’s an illegal violation of limits Congress has placed on the Department of Homeland Security for the last three years.

The Identity Project, founded by online rights pioneer John Gilmore, filed official objections to the Automated Targeting System, or ATS, on Monday, calling the program clearly illegal.

The comment cited a little-known provision in the 2007 Homeland Security funding bill prohibiting government agencies from developing algorithms that assign risk scores to travelers not on government watchlists.

“By cloaking this prohibited action in a border issue … the Department of Homeland Security directly and openly contravenes Congress’ clear intent,” wrote project members Edward Hasbrouck and James Harrison.

A DHS spokesman said the language in the appropriations bill doesn’t cover the ATS, and insisted the program is legal.

At the National Targeting Center, the ATS program harvests up to 50 fields of passenger data from international flights, including names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and uses watchlists, criminal databases and other government systems to assign risk scores to every passenger.

Though the government has provided few details, such a system could look at travel history, who the ticket was purchased from or what kind of car someone drives to attempt to figure out who is a likely terrorist threat.

When passengers deplane, Customs and Border Protection personnel then target the high scorers for extra screening. The notice says the data and the scores can be kept for 40 years, shared widely, and be used in hiring decisions. Travelers may neither see nor contest their scores.

Paul Rosenzweig, a high-level Homeland Security official, told Congress in September that the system had “encountered 4801 positive matches for known or suspected terrorists.” However, it is unclear how many of those were correct matches.

No, it’s very clear. Zero. If there were any, they’d name specifics and defend the program that way.

(I’ve had some reports that this post crashed a browser after asking if an MPEG4 codec could be installed, so I’ve moved the movie itself after a “more inside” link. If you’re sure your browser can handle it, click the link)

Read the rest of this entry »

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Kids across America are warned to stay away from “nose candy�? in anti-drug campaigns. But a Kanawha County student is fighting his suspension for pretending to put actual candy up his nose.

According to a lawsuit filed in Kanawha Circuit Court Monday, a student-athlete at Sissonville High School was given Smarties candy as a reward for good academic performance. In front of his teacher and fellow classmates, the student pretended to put one of the small candy discs up his nose. Another student used his cell phone to record video of the incident.

Principal Calvin McKinney, who is named as a defendant along with the Kanawha County school board, allegedly called the plaintiff into his office and confronted him about the incident.

“The plaintiff informed … McKinney … that at no time did he possess any drug or did he claim to possess any drug,�? according to the suit.

Still, McKinney then threatened to suspend the student — identified in the lawsuit only by his initials — unless he joined McKinney’s “Narc Program�? and went undercover to find real drug users at the school, according to the suit.

“The [student] was told that he was to ‘hang around the bathroom’ and the school parking lot,�? the suit states.

McKinney’s investigation into the incident confirmed that the student was telling the truth about the Smarties candy, according to the suit.

“The plaintiff was informed that even though it was, in fact, just candy … McKinney needed another ‘Narc’ for his program and that if the student would not agree to enter said Narc Program that he would be suspended,�? the suit reads.

After the student and his parents met with school officials and the student refused to cooperate with McKinney’s proposal, he received a 10-day suspension, according to the suit.

I guess that War on Drugs thingy is going spiffy.

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A woman whose parents are charged with kidnapping her to stop her wedding testified tearfully Wednesday that they grabbed her by the hair and told her she was breaking the commandment to honor them.

Lemuel Redd, 59, and his wife, Julia, 57, of Monticello, pleaded not guilty and were ordered to stand trial after the testimony from their daughter, Julianna Redd Myers, 21.

Defense attorneys Dean and Rhome Zabriskie said they were talking to prosecutors about a plea bargain.

“Naturally, they’re under a lot of stress, and they want there to be healing in the family,” Rhome Zabriskie said.

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FAST food could now be taken literally after a Crawley mum was fined £125 by a McDonald’s restaurant because her family took too long finishing their meal.

Mum-of-two Maria Peters, 30, from Felbridge Avenue, in Pound Hill, is the latest to get fined after her visit to the McDonald’s Drive Thru at Gatwick’s South Terminal was timed on camera.

The multi-national food giant has set a 45-minute maximum stay for customers parking next to the Gatwick restaurant.

Unaware of this rule, when Mrs Peters visited the chain on October 29 at 4pm with 31-year-old husband Scott, 15-month-old daughter Connie and seven-yearold son Ryan, who goes to Meath Green Junior School, in Horley, she stayed for 53 minutes – eight minutes longer.

And on Wednesday last week Mrs Peters got a shock when the £125 fine sent by Civil Enforcement Ltd (CEL) arrived in the post.

God is real. And he’s unbelievable.

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File sharing is considered by many to be an ethical grey area. It clearly isn’t theft, as theft involves depriving someone of property (although the record companies are doing their best to redefine the word it would seem). The only argument against file sharing that needs to really be taken seriously (in regards to its ethical, not legal, status) is whether causing the record companies to lose sales, hence reducing their profits, is ethically wrong.

In other places I have argued that how an action impacts society should guide our ethical judgments about it. Thus we regard theft as wrong because if we as a society condoned theft then ownership would be meaningless. And without ownership people aren’t motivated to create the infrastructure and developments that give us the high quality of life we enjoy now. File sharing too can be analyzed in this fashion, we simply have to ask whether a society in which file sharing was allowed would be better or worse than one without it.

It should be obvious that, by these standards, protecting someone’s sales is, in general, not an ethical obligation. In fact allowing someone’s actions to reduce the profits of another is the foundation of capitalism. If you own the only source of diamonds then you can like a monopoly, selling a small amount of your product at high prices. You will make a lot of money, but your business won’t operate at the level that is optimal for society. But if I open a diamond mine then we will be in competition. Your sales will be reduced as a result, and your profits even more so (since you can no longer price your product as if you were a monopoly), but in the end there is a net benefit to society (this is a well established fact).

So what we really need to consider is if file sharing, as an individual case, is good or bad for society, since we have seen that in at least some cases causing a company to lose sales, and reduce its profits, is good for society. It is not clear to me that if file sharing was accepted that the record companies would go under, after all some people would still want to buy CDs and other band merchandise. Someone might even set up a CD rental business like Netflix, which would give people the convenience of having the physical CD, but at a fraction of the cost*. But let us consider the “worst�? case, in which the record companies do go under. Is this a bad or a good thing?

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Acht grote gemeenten trekken gezamenlijk op tegen de dominantie van Microsoft-software op de computers van hun werknemers. Ze hopen de bedrijven waarmee zij zaken doen op it-gebied, automatiseringsbedrijven als Centric en Getronics PinkRoccade, ertoe te bewegen om ondersteuning te bieden voor alternatieven die vaak veel goedkoper zijn.

De acht gemeenten, waaronder Groningen, Eindhoven, Almere en Enschede, willen graag overstappen op zogenoemde open-sourcesoftware, maar stuiten daarbij op onwil bij hun leveranciers van it-infrastructuur.

Tja. Volg het geld. Waar verdienen ze het meeste mee?

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Hundreds of thousands of people will refuse to sign up to the UK Government’s planned identity register, according to just-published research. Around eight per cent of those surveyed said they would refuse to sign up to the database even if they are fined.

The survey was carried out by polling firm YouGov on behalf of the Daily Telegraph newspaper and in a sample of 1,979 people found that a significant proportion were prepared to defy the government over the database.

Of the 39 per cent of people who opposed the identity register, 21 per cent said they would resist signing up, even if it meant paying a small fine. That figure is eight per cent of the total.

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Copyright criminals must face far tougher regulation to protect the entertainment industry, a report says.

The Gowers Report was commissioned by the government to look at modernising UK copyright laws for the digital age.

While it proposes new powers against copyright infringement, it also says private users should be allowed to copy music from a CD to their MP3 player.

It also recommends the 50-year copyright protection for recorded music should not be extended.

[..]

The Association of Independent Music (AIM) said it was particularly unhappy over the issue of allowing more private copying.

A spokesman said: “This is taking pragmatism to the point of capitulation, and falls drastically short of creating the progressive copyright framework needed in the digital age.

“By tidying up a small part of the copyright law, we believe Gowers may well be opening the floodgates to uncontrolled and unstoppable private copying and sharing from person to person, as well as format to format.”

Dear Spokesman. I’ve got some bad news for you…

Oh, and the sidebar has a link to an article that shows how well the industry takes care of artists…

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If you have not read or seen the recent hilarious posting by Kotaku about Nintendo’s Safety Manual from Japan, go take a look. Once you do, this entire post will make much more sense.

Thanks to one of our clients in Japan, who just happens to work for one of the printing companies Nintendo regularly uses, we are pleased to be able to bring you scans of some of the missing diagrams from the Wii Safety Manual. These helpful instructions somehow got cut from the final, shipping version but are no less important when it comes to proper handling of the Wii.

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You the taxpayer paid for Donald Brittain’s The Champions, his National Film Board of Canada trilogy exploring the careers of Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque. But you can’t see it — because rights to much of the footage used in this production have expired. “And it won’t become available until the NFB decides that it is worth its money to renew the cost of image clearances,” says Samantha Hodder, executive director of the Documentary Organization of Canada.

Thanks to spiralling copyright licensing costs, payable to whoever holds the copyright (unions, archives, creators, corporations) — and thanks, too, to the rising cost of insurance to protect against copyright claims — more and more public film footage is no longer available to the Canadian public, nor for use by Canadian creators. That’s the message of the DOC’s new white paper, released yesterday by the 700-member organization.

The Copyright Clearance Culture and Canadian Documentaries, written by Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, cites many eyebrow-raising cases. An example: Quebec filmmaker Sylvie Van Brabant’s film Remous/Earthwalk has been withdrawn from public circulation because its main character sings 30 seconds of a recognizable tune whose rights the National Film Board has deemed too expensive to renew.

And to think that originally Copyright law was created to promote the arts. It is now doing the reverse, and should mostly be abolished.

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Has liquid water flowed on Mars in this decade?

In June 2000, we reported the discovery, using the Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera, of very youthful-looking gullies found on slopes at middle and high latitudes on Mars. Since that time, tens of thousands of gullies have been imaged by all of the Mars orbiting spacecraft: Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

During the years since the original June 2000 report, the Mars Global Surveyor’s camera was used to test the hypothesis that the gullies may be so young that some of them could still be active today. The test was very simple: re-image gullies previously seen by the camera and see if anything has changed.

In two cases, something changed. One of those cases is presented here. A gully on the wall of an unnamed crater in Terra Sirenum, at 36.6 degrees south, 161.8 degrees west, was initially imaged by the camera on Dec. 22, 2001 (left). It showed nothing noteworthy at the location where a change would later be observed, but a group of nearby gullies exhibited an unusual patch of light-toned material. As part of our routine campaign to re-image gully sites using the camera, another image of this location was acquired on April 24, 2005. A new light-toned deposit had appeared in what was otherwise a nondescript gully (right). This deposit was imaged again by the camera on Aug. 26, 2005, at a time when the sun angle and season were the same as in the original December 2001 image, to confirm that indeed the light-toned feature was something new, not just a trick of differing lighting conditions. In August 2005, the feature was still present.