Just ask the Stars and Stripes.

The White House is using the Secret Service and local police to sequester dissenting voices in “free speech areas” far from motorcades, media, and the public at large at Presidential appearances. Just dissenters, not supporters, mind you.

There is no reasonable justification for this behavior. It’s certainly not safety; do we think a militant anti-Bush nut bent on violence can’t pretend to be a supporter long enough to get closer? I think not. This is about control, about scripting appearances, and about hiding and marginalizing dissent. This is not American. We’re said to be fighting those who “hate freedom,” but what do actions like this suggest about those leading that fight?

Lots, I’ll tell you. Actually, instead of telling you, I’ll point you at Slacktivist again, who provides an excellent discussion of the idea of NMPW. It is pretty much without exception a bone thrown to the hard right, for whom protecting marriage means making sure gay people don’t get married. That we could have such an “official” week without discussing issues like domestic violence should make clear what the actual agenda is.

Homeland Security sent a Homeland Security employee’s fiancee back to Germany for no good reason last week. Read this. There have been dozens of stories like this, and some turn out to be fabrications or misrepresentations. I’ll be very interested to discover that rationale, if any, DOHS is able claim for holding her for 20 hours and shipping her home despite her valid documents.

Well, Mr. Bush, among other things it prohibits collective punishments, like bulldozing orchards because their owners won’t tell you anything about the resistance attacks.

That the owners may not know anything is, of course, immaterial.

The embattled White House — in the midst of an avoidable quagmire in Iraq, an utter lack of WMD, no real connection between Saddam and Al Queda, and a complete failure in locating either boogeyman we’ve been chasing for 2+ years (not to mention the Plame affair) — has gone on the offensive. Powell, Rice, and Cheney have all given aggressive speeches in the last week (Cheney’s was apparently the standout) wherein they insist again how justified the action in Iraq was, how bad Saddam was, how useless the UN was, and how (PNAC-style) we can and should do anything we want. (They leave out the whole lies-about-yellowcake bit, not to mention the complete-lack-of-postwar-planning bit, and don’t even ask about the how-can-we-afford-to-do-this-alone problem.)

Also included in this PR offensive may be a campaign of identical letters from different soldiers published in newspapers across the country this week. Gee, I wonder who wrote them?

Did David Kay find evidence of Iraqi WMD or not? It’s hard to tell from the media, which can’t be trusted to actually, you know, ask questions, but fortunately there’s handy examination of the findings disclosed so far. Hint: the White House isn’t happy.j

Yeah, you read that right. A Fresno, California liberal group (Peace Fresno) discovered that the quiet guy taking notes in their meetings who claimed to be “independently wealthy” was in fact an undercover sheriff’s detective (who died in a motorcycle accident on August 30; coverage of his death in the paper included a photo that members noticed).

Local law enforcement insists there was no investigation of the group (described in the article as “a bunch of Unitarian schoolteachers”), and that there are no documents or notes resulting from his surveillance. The officer’s family insist he was unlikely to be a member of the group on his own time, however, and he was using an assumed name for his role there.

In July, state attorney general Bill Lockyer told California law enforcement to not collect intelligence on religious or political groups without evidence of criminal activity. But under the federal Homeland Security Act of 2002, intelligence agents can look at acts of civil disobedience and minor law-breaking.

Shit like this gives me The Fear.

This Administrations’ Drug Czar (John Walters) wants to institute random drug tests of schoolkids. I have a notion that treating kids like criminals isn’t the best way to teach them to be citizens, but maybe there are folks who think it’s best if they’re just brought up to do what they’re told. (via TalkLeft)

Does anyone else think it’s curious that the “War on (Some) Drugs” is being ramped up when we’re in a quagmire in Iraq, we can’t find Saddam or Osama, and the economy is languishing?

With all the attention focussed on the White House and the DOJ’s investigation thereof vis a vis the Plame affair, one basic avenue appears essentially unexplored: why not go to Bob Novak himself and insist that he disclose his source? Journalists are subpoenaed every day to participate in trials and investigations, with varying degrees of success. There’s certainly a stance that suggests that pursuing Novak would be inappropriate and contrary to our free press, but, as Mark Dowie points out in Salon, there is little doubt what Ashcroft’s DOJ might have done had Novak been a partisan columnist for that other party.

Remember before, when I noted how the grad student at Princeton may well have violated the law by pointing out the using the shift key will bypass SunnComm’s new “copy protection” on CDs? Go on back and read the other entries, if you want: one and two.

SunnComm is suing him. Excellent response, boys: rather than, you know, selling a product that doesn’t suck, or (failing that) abandoning the snake oil business altogether, you sue the guy who points out that your emperor is as naked as a jaybird. It’s worth noting, I’m sure, that SunnComm’s stock is down 20% — to something like twelve cents a share — since the introduction of this “technology” (which they tauted as serious best-of-breed stuff, shockingly enough; I’m not sure if it’s fair to blame the guy that says your boat’s full of holes if it turns out not to float).

N.B. that the complaint utterly ignores the whole idea of Fair Use:

SunnComm is taking a stand here because we believe that those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used. Owning copying technology is not an unconditional ‘free pass’ to replicate or distribute protected work.

I guess that only applies to them owning the copyright, and not to me owning the CD, huh?

The Vatican is insisting now that condoms do not in fact stop the AIDS virus, so there’s no reason for people in AIDS-ravaged countries to use them.

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass – potentially exposing thousands of people to risk. The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to the HIV virus. A senior Vatican spokesman backs the claims about permeable condoms, despite assurances by the World Health Organisation that they are untrue.

Do we really need further proof how absurdly out of touch this Church is? It’s a political organization with a right-wing agenda. Given the AIDS rate and horrifying life-expectancy statistics in many African countries, it’s hard to see claims like this as anything but pure, unadulterated evil.

The White House’s response to the Plame affair has been pretty absurd so far, but now they’re into theater. By insisting on disclosure from 2,000 people, they’ve cast the net so wide they’re almost certain to allow the real culprit to escape. Novak’s “Senior Officials” must have come from a group much smaller than 2,000 Executive employees, and smart money is on folks very close to the Oval Office.

Not that they care, of course. They have aggressively tried to shape this as an issue of an innocuous leak, not one that put real people in real danger and that really, honest-to-God violated Federal law. Now Bush is saying he has “no idea” whether Justice will find the person responsible. I’m sure Ashcroft’s DOJ is working overtime on this one, too, aren’t you?

(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.