(All via Prof. Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog)

SunnComm’s president asserts in today’s Boston Globe that nothing in Alex Halderman’s report (noted yesterday) is surprising to them. BMG spokesperson Nathaniel Brown insists even they were completely aware of how trivial the new “protection” is to circumvent (to recap: press “shift” when you put in the CD). The Globe continued:

”There’s nothing in his report that’s surprising,” said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ”There’s nothing in the report that I’m concerned about.” Whitmore said his company’s system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a legal way to make copies for personal use, not to stop large-scale piracy.

I suppose pointing out that we already have a legal way to make copies for personal use with perfectly normal CDs would be rude, huh? I’ll go ahead and say it anyway: making copies for personal use — say, to put on your iPod, or to use in your car — is perfectly legal. It’s called Fair Use, but the RIAA would like very much to make that go away.

Whitmore goes on to note that future versions of this protection will be harder to circumvent, since they will interact directly with the computer’s operating system, and that “the deployment of this mechanism will be throughout all operating systems.” Really, Bill? Even Linux and FreeBSD and Mac OS X? I doubt it.

A few things are worth noting here. First, I wonder if they’re deploying something so trivial to bypass simply because of the anti-circumvention clauses in the DMCA — i.e., as sort of an additional gotcha on top of the RIAA’s sue-kids-and-grandmothers strategy.

Second, you gotta wonder how much BMG paid for this absurdly trivial “copy protection” mechanism. I mean, c’mon, people; this is a bad joke. As Halderman points out, this isn’t some “dark secret of computer science.” Anyone with a brain can figure out how to bypass this “security.”

Finally, I want to point out that what he means when he says this tool will be integrated into your operating system, he means that future computers from Microsoft (and maybe others, but probably not) will include code specifically designed to STOP YOU from doing things that those computers can do now. Music files aren’t distinct from other files, nor are video files. Music files you make with a kazoo and a $5 microphone aren’t distinct from copies of the new OutKast CD. The flexibility of computing is that you an do anything you want to any of these files. DRM means, basically, removing that flexibility. This is why it’s unlikely that the programmers behind Linux and FreeBSD will support such schemes: removing flexibility is anathema to these people, and for good reason.

Food for thought.

Professor Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker weblog is an excellent resource for those of us concerned about copyright, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and the survival of Fair Use. As I noted before, rightsholders were pretty successful in getting the DMCA passed 5 years ago; this law tilts the playing field drastically in favor of folks like the RIAA. Here’s a real-world example.

Big Music hates the idea that you can copy your CDs to your computer and share those files. Actually, they hate the idea that you can even copy the files to anything, since every copy you make, to them, represents a lost sale (a wholly false assertion, but never mind that for now). Consequently, they’ve been working for years to figure out a way to copy-protect their CDs so that digital reproduction is, if not impossible, then very restricted. These efforts have not met with much success; quite famously, one copy-protection method tauted as “the best ever” a year or so ago turned out to be circumventable with a green sharpie.

Well, they’re not giving up (notwithstanding the “success” the software industry has had with copy protection; many of you may remember what a PITA that was with the likes of Lotus and dBase 15 years ago). SunComm has released what they insist is the most secure anti-copying technology yet.

As it happens, Prof. Felton cites a paper today pointing out that you can probably circumvent it by holding down the shift key in Windows when you load the CD. (He’s citing this, which is an interesting read.)

The not-so-interesting part? Publishing this paper may well be a criminal violation of the DMCA, since it contains information on how to circumvent a copy protection scheme. Does this sound right to you? No? Well, that’s the DMCA for you. It doesn’t matter what you plan to DO with the copy — e.g., putting tracks from a CD you own on your iPod is just as bad as uploading them to a thousand college kids via Kazaa. All they’d care about is that you circumvented their copy protection, and that’s illegal — and criminal, not civil.

The Agonist — an interesting read most days, by the way — is running a summary of the Diebold voting machine saga, including a rather exhaustive list of their attempts to silence critics through legal skullduggery (instead of, say, actual responses and rebuttals). Read this. No, really.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (a fine group you should join) has released a report on the unintended consequences of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), a far-reaching revision of American copyright law that essentially erases the concept of Fair Use. Please read this, and then contact your congresspeople. Job One: Axe PATRIOT. Job Two: Axe the DMCA.

NPR may have edited a transcript to remove commentary about Justice giving the White House a day’s reprieve on the “preserve all evidence” order in re: the Plame affair. This is tantamount to a license to destroy evidence, and (if granted) came directly from Ashcroft.

The questions, then, are “Why did NPR do this, if they did?” and “When will we here more of this story, if ever?”

Sen. Arlen Spector (R-Penn) has joined the voices calling for John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the CIA leak investigation. Ashcroft employed possible suspect and White House aide Karl Rove during a number of campaigns prior to his appointment as A.G.

The Guardian is reporting that the White House censored and edited an EPA report on global warming so much as to completely undermine the scientists’ findings, apparently because “global warming” isn’t part of the GOP platform.

It’s a shame how things like science can get in the way of politics, isn’t it?

In the days and weeks ahead, I suspect we’ll hear calls for an independent counsel to investigate the Wilson/Plame affair. I’m just as certain that the GOP will insist that such a thing is not needed, that we can trust Ashcroft and his existing criminal investigation, and that there’s no reason to worry.

When they say that — and they will — consider these quotes from GOP legislators concerning possible campaign fundraising law violations and the conflicts of interest involved in the Justice Department investigating a sitting president. Then consider which is the greater sin: campaign finance violations, or outing a covert operative of the CIA?

Slacktivist — a fine site worth visiting frequently — has a nice rundown of the Administration’s efforts since the weekend. His post title says it all: “Smear, smear again.” Smearing Wilson is just a bit difficult, though, since he has served Democratic and Republican administrations with distinction, and was singled out for praise by the other President Bush.

The Feds are invoking PATRIOT in letters to journalists insisting that they retain all their materials related to the Adrian Lamo hacking case (Lamo gained notoriety for breaking into companies’ systems, and then offering to help fix the holes he exploited; Lamo turned himself in on September 9). An FBI spokesman stated that “all reporters who spoke with Lamo” should expect such letters.

This flies in the face of traditional subpoena power, and in fact may well be in violation of the DOJ’s own guidelines, not to mention New York law. Of course, that those so notified aren’t allowed to tell disclose that they’ve been contacted, so these actions by the Feds are only now coming to light. The best part may well be that they’re using clauses of the Act designed to apply to ISPs and the like, not journalists (the specific language is apparently “providers of electronic communication”). More coverage here.

This time, it’s Federal judges from both parties, including Rhenquist.

After a long conversation at dinner when I suggested there was little to be optimistic about in the current political landscape, I came home to discover that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate the White House in the “let’s-blow-the-CIA-agent’s-cover” scandal I noted here months ago, and which the mainstream media essentially ignored. The CIA has no enforcment powers of its own, but it surely has done its own investigation or it wouldn’t be hassling Herr Ashcroft. Of course, emnity between the CIA and 1600 Pennsylvania is no secret; the spooks from Langley have been somewhat marginalized by the neocon “don’t bother us with the facts” worldview pervasive in the West Wing, and have resisted providing intelligence to support assumed conclusions (instead of, say, gathering intelligence and acting on what one discovers).

In case you’re confused, the precis is this: columnist Robert Novak named Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative in his column, apparently tipped off by (unnamed) senior officials in the White House. This woman was the wife of Joseph Wilson, who was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium — and who discovered that, well, there was no real evidence that they had. Never mind that; of course; the administration used the Niger story as part of its smoke-and-mirrors cassus belli for invading Iraq. Wilson publically criticized the administration for using this dubious and ultimately unsupportable claim, and smart money says they outed Plame in retaliation, and the Post (see link below) even has a source saying so:

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson’s account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush’s use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

In any case, Novak did indeed name her, and was apparently correct — the CIA has been doing damage control. Wilson himself said in an August 21 forum in Seattle that he believes White House adviser Karl Rove is the culprit, and that he’d like “to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.”

The Talking Points Memo interview with Wilson is here (PDF link). TPM’s post on this is here, and is worth reading as well. More coverage:

• CBS News
• New York Times (nogators/nogators, as always)
• Washington Post
• Time

Now: what happens next?

There’s another site up at BlackBoxVoting.com (as opposed to .org) that covers much of the same stuff, and appears to also be a promotional effort for Harris’ book. Check it out.

In other news, Maryland is planning to approve a contract (NYT link; nogators/nogators) for the Diebold machines despite a STATE OF MARYLAND report detailing a host of security flaws. Good God.

Remember that story I noted yesterday, about the Diebold election machine problem? And how Bev Harris had unearthed company memos more or less admitting how wholly fscked the system is, and that they didn’t care? If not, go read it again; I’ll wait.

Bev Harris’ site is shut down today, courtesy of Diebold. This ought to tell you something, and it’s not something good.