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August 1, 2007
Borat vs. the Internet: Privacy and Security Links for 1 August, 2007
» Wired's "Threat Level" has a savage takedown of Associated Press coverage of proposed Internet surveillance legislation:
"The Administration now claims it needs a massive rewriting of the nation's spying laws because some foreigner to foreigner communications pass through switches in the United States.
"Did they just discover this? No.
"Has the Administration known about this hole in the numerous times it has pushed Congress to increase the government's spying powers in the last 6 years? Certainly.
"Why is it an emergency now? Could it be because the Administration has never moved to have a rational debate about how to grab these communications without sweeping in the Constitiutionally-protected communications of Americans, BECAUSE the administration has been secretly sitting on those switches, monitoring Americans and foreigners alike?"
It's a deserved shellacking, and it raises an old but important issue: If national media can't be bothered to get these stories right, our politicians lose an important feedback loop, because we don't know enough to complain.
» Prediction: The "Pervs are infiltrating MySpace" story is not going to go away until November of next year. New Jersey's Attorney General is going back to that well for the third time, for instance. For local politicians, it's golden stuff because "the Internet" is a giant, abstract externality they can "take action" over without risking any local constituencies' anger. For national politicians, it's not The War.
With this particular story, since it seems likely MySpace will be finding and booting registered sex offenders regularly, every new subpoena offers an opportunity to put the story back in the limelight.
What that all means is that we'll be dealing with over a year of half-baked, awful proposals for fixing the problem that will mainly serve to strip everyone of any anonymity or privacy.
» This happened late last week, but it bears repeating because, well, it's sort of funny, as long as you think "former Soviet-bloc countries devolving back into Stalinism" is funny:
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued a report entitled "Governing the Internet," in which it asserted that even as the Web grows, so do censorship and restriction of free expression.
Held up as a poster child for the pro-censorship lobby was Kazakhstan's information minister, Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, who said he's going to purge the Internet of "dirt" and "lies:"
"'Those who think it is impossible to control the Internet can continue living in a world of illusions,' Yertysbayev told the Vremya newspaper in a recent interview."
With that kind of can-do attitude, he's wasted on Kazakhstan. Surely some American security company will snap him up. Or maybe an attorney general's office.
Posted by mhall at 5:43 PM | Add Comment
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