Digital Citizen

Another Counterpuncher pointing out how distant some anti-war voices are from their words; Lance Selfa writes about the Progressive Democrats of America:

[T]he majority of liberal candidates the PDA backed in Democratic primaries lost to more conservative Democrats–many of them backed by the party establishment. Many of the winners–especially those, like Illinois candidate Tammy Duckworth, who were recruited and promoted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its pro-war leader Rep. Rahm Emanuel–are pro-war themselves.

This has put the PDA in the same position as previous formations like it: working for the election of Democrats who not only don’t share their views on the war or health care, but are actually opposed to them. Yet in the interests of party unity and a broader outlook, the PDA has urged its members to work for these candidates.

Selfa doesn’t mention Cindy Sheehan, but I’m reminded that Sheehan is a member of the PDA Board and widely known as an anti-war voice (probably the one person credited with keeping the anti-war movement going on a national stage). But I have to wonder what does she really stand for? In her essay “Supporting Hillary” she told us that she “will not make the mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As I won’t support a pro-war Republican.”.

PDA supports Democratic Party candidates. But the Democrats are the loudest voices against progressive candidates, telling voters how voters are wasting their vote on third-party or independent candidacies, excluding third-party and independent candidates from debates; in short, encouraging voters to forgo their values and adopt the values of the corporations that fund the Democratic Party.

If you give them the opportunity, the Democrats and their agents (MoveOn.org, PDA, etc.) will sell your interests down the river. Don’t buy into the two-party trap.

Boing Boing has the scoop:

The Nielsen Buzzmetrics conference on “Consumer Generated Media” (e.g., blogs, Flickr streams, youtubes, Wikipedia, etc) has a blanket prohibition on any reporting or blogging. Now, there’s nothing wrong with an off-the-record conference, I’ve attended and even helped run many of them. But the usual practice is to adopt the Chatham House Rule — no reporting on stuff that the speaker declares off-the-record, and no attributing any remarks without permission of the speaker. It’s pretty ironic for a “consumer generated media” conference to prohibit the creation of “consumer generated media.”

Although I do think there’s something wrong with an off-the-record conference particularly when people are invited who report things or simply enjoy their freedom of speech. The last sentence is telling (”But there’s an interesting parallel to the standards meetings and UN treaty bodies I’ve attended on Internet [governance] — the less Internet access those meetings had, the more likely it was that the meeting had been called to destroy the Internet.”); it’s not for the speaker to decide whether they’re to be a part of “consumer generated media”, it’s for the person reporting to decide. If you don’t want your comments to be repeated, don’t tell them to people you can’t trust to keep your secret. Certainly don’t hold a conference to air them.

Some issues are too important not to share; there are reasons why the high-ranking officials in government, for instance, have closed-door meetings to discuss the fate of democracy. I recall a similar problem writ small regarding secrecy at an ostensibly “community” radio station where I used to work. A number of important Board meetings were held in closed session (I was the only person to regularly attend these meetings as an audience member and I was regularly kicked out of the closed session discussion so often nobody else at the station heard the run-up to the closed session affair). Meeting minutes had insufficient detail to put together voting records even on open session votes. This Board defended Board-elected Board members (in other words, the Board was not fully accountable to the voting members) in the worst way by saying it helped keep control over the Board. Board meetings allotted far too little time to discuss matters of significance such as why ballots in one Board election were shipped out to an unnamed accountant, why the accountant’s unobserved vote tally was being taken seriously, and where those ballots ended up afterwards. I learned that not all paying members had received ballots in that election. Policies such as these are carefully constructed to maintain the appearance of fairness and democratic oversight while delivering neither.

So even though I disagree with the take Boing Boing presents here, I find the subsequent discussion of consumerism interesting and I wonder if they’re as sensitive to the self-contradiction they pose as I’m sure you will be if you read their post.

Following up on a previous post, Rep. Markey has admitted that he made a mistake in calling for Soghoian’s arrest:

On Friday I urged the Bush Administration to ‘apprehend’ and shut down whoever had created a new website that enabled persons without a plane ticket to easily fake a boarding pass and use it to clear security, gain access to the boarding area and potentially to the cabin of a passenger plane. Subsequently I learned that the person responsible was a student at Indiana University, Christopher Soghoian, who intended no harm but, rather, intended to provide a public service by warning that this long-standing loophole could be easily exploited. The website has now apparently been shut down.

Under the circumstances, any legal consequences for this student must take into account his intent to perform a public service, to publicize a problem as a way of getting it fixed. He picked a lousy way of doing it, but he should not go to jail for his bad judgment. Better yet, the Department of Homeland Security should put him to work showing public officials how easily our security can be compromised.

It remains a fact that fake boarding passes can be easily created and the integration of terrorist watch lists with boarding security is still woefully inadequate. The best outcome of Mr. Soghoian’s ill-considered demonstration would be for the Department of Homeland Security to close these loopholes immediately.

Boing Boing quotes Avi Rubin saying Soghoian’s approach was a bad way to go about alerting people to the fact of no real security in Continental’s boarding passes (perhaps all airline boarding passes); Rubin called it “a real lapse in judgement [sic]“.

But there’s a huge problem here which isn’t being addressed by the comments thus far.

Rep. Markey has sufficient power in the US government to create a real problem for anyone by linking them to terrorism in the way he did Soghoian when he called for Soghoian’s arrest. The US government isn’t above holding people indefinitely, without charges, without representation, and torturing them. If we’re going to start challenging people’s speech on the basis of what might happen afterwards, I think Markey’s words and demonstrated US government behavior to date ought to weigh more heavily than someone possibly using a fake boarding pass to upgrade their seating from coach to first class (as Soghoian’s website suggested one could try doing with the website-generated boarding pass).

Jeff Taylor writes in Counterpunch:

The Bush administration has overreached. Years of incompetence, deceit, and hypocrisy have caught up with it, and the President’s lackeys in Congress are going to pay a price on Election Day. If Democrats take over the House and/or Senate, it will be by default. It will be because Republicans deserve to lose, not because Democrats deserve to win. In fact, both parties deserve to lose, but at the moment Republicans more richly deserve to lose. Also, with a two-party system there is no easy way for Americans to register their displeasure with the tweedledee party in power other than voting for the tweedledum party out of power.

When you lose competition, you lose leverage. The Democrats and Republicans know how and when to collude to frame a debate and survive. Please investigate write-in candidates, so-called “third party” candidates, and independents in all races. Take their candidacies seriously and tell the Democrat/Republican alternatives why your vote shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Since the announcement of Christopher Soghoian’s fake Northwest Airlines boarding pass generator, someone talking with Soghoian via instant message says that Soghoian was visited by the FBI. Wired reports Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) has called for Soghoian’s arrest. ABC News quotes a statement from Markey:

The Bush administration must immediately act to investigate, apprehend those responsible, shut down the website, and warn airlines and aviation security officials to be on the look-out for fraudsters or terrorists trying to use fake boarding passes in an attempt to cheat their way through security and onto a plane.

According to Boing Boing:

Calls and emails I made to the 24-year-old computer science student after learning of the reported FBI visit were not returned. An iChat transcript provided to BoingBoing shows Soghoian claimed the FBI was at his door between 345 and 350pm PST. He stopped responding to incoming IM messages at that time, and has not responded to other incoming messages since.

FBI special agent Wendy Osborne declined to confirm whether Soghoian had been visited or if an investigation was taking place, citing FBI policy, but said “We will confirm that he has not been arrested.”

Soghoian’s fake boarding pass generator has been taken offline.

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Torrentfreak has the scoop:

23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for the work he put in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents.

I’m not in favor of this outcome, but now that a standard is set I hope we’ll keep this in mind the next time a corporation is convicted of copyright infringement because we’ll have to decide what international body should use unreasonable pressure to compel that country to adopt law which makes copyright a criminal offense (instead of a civil matter as it used to be in the US), determine how much of a fine should be paid (3 million francs is hardly a slap on the wrist for Microsoft, but $3,000 can be significant for an individual real person), and who should be chosen to go to prison and then suffer some kind of detention. Of course, we have to pick someone because corporations have no body to incarcerate and no soul to save, as the saying goes.

Somehow, I think it will be forgotten or ignored like the press conveniently did for that Microsoft copyright infringement story was in 2001.

Or perhaps we’ll institute a different copyright regime that respects what people apparently want to do and distinguishes between commercial infringement and non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution. Some countries actually let people copy and share; if I recall correctly, this one was one sore spot about Canadian copyright law American broadcasters didn’t like.

Make your own boarding passMake your own boarding pass and find out. That site

will produce a boarding pass good enough to get anyone past TSA, and thus, into the “secure” gate areas of the airport terminal.

Note that this will not be a valid pass, so it will not get you on the airplane. For that, you need to actually buy a ticket.

Why would you want one of these?

1. To meet your elderly grandparents at the gate
2. To ‘upgrade’ yourself once on the airplane - by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you’re already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.
3. Just to demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

And read on for recipes to skirt the no-fly list.

Spend your time on the plane contemplating who benefits from the so-called “war on terror” and why it, like the American “war on drugs”, will never end and has nothing to do with keeping you safe.

Help Defective by Design tag DRM-encumbered catalog items so others don’t buy them.

Boing Boing says “So far a few dozen Amazon users have tagged over 150 products containing DRM (Blu-ray, HD DVD, FairPlay, and more) as DefectiveByDesign using the e-retailer’s own ‘tagging’ system.”

See what’s been tagged so far.

hypebot’s got the scoop on the latest radio pay-for-play scam:

Just months after the major labels settled the NY payola probe, two Universal distributed labels (Blackground and the band Nickleback on Roadrunner) reportedly tried to influence chart positions by buying late night ads on NY radio that feature more than 60 seconds of the song. This practice which tricks computerized airplay reporting tools was specifically band[sic—banned] in the recent settlement.

Who were we, the ostensible owners of the public airwaves, to distrust that self-regulation works? Why charge the broadcasters rent when they’re doing us such favors?

One blogger has discovered a practical problem with not having the freedom to alter software (or have it altered):

The server contacted is for a company that no longer even services the product. The product activation people do not answer the phone, even after a 6 minute hold period that consists of really bad techno music and product pitches, probably for more things that do not work…

Anything you ever buy that has “product activation” may stop being something you can use at any time, for any reason. Consumers are being raped wholesale by these companies when they invade our privacy with this method of copy protection - and thats assuming it even works in the first place.

The software does install great on a microwave oven, however…

Some posters to that blog take the sycophantic view that it was unreasonable for the blogger to let the software go uninstalled for a couple of years:

the CD for a couple of years before Installing it?

I have no real love for Sony, but it sounds as if you’re at least partly to blame.

suggest workarounds of various kinds. These posters aren’t unusual; what the arguments against the blogger (or offering some half-baked form of “help”) all have in common is that people have been taught to accept the power of proprietors as immutable and even desirable.

The real problem here is the unexamined lack of freedom for computer users. Let’s take the time to debunk the arguments presented there more thoroughly, this time accounting for user’s freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify computer software.

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