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Freedom of speech, if you don’t mind walking

/ Big Brother

Today’s WSJ has a story on how the FBI threatened to take away Moroccan immigrant Yassine Ouassif’s green card if he didn’t become an informant (behind a pay wall, sorry, a summary is here). Down at the bottom of the story is this bit:

Ms. Aklaghi [Ouassif’s lawyer] says she learned more at that point about why federal authorities were so interested in him. Mr. Ouassif had been secretly recorded by an FBI informant talking to friends in a San Francisco mosque. A Homeland Security lawyer, she says, did not specify what Mr. Ouassif had said, but told her that his statements did not indicate criminal intent and were fully protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, his statements had landed him on the no-fly list, Ms. Aklaghi says, and led to all his subsequent travails.

So, if her information is correct, what this says is that Homeland Security is taking the position that though the First Amendment stops the government from “abridging the freedom of speech,” it doesn’t say anything about taking away someone’s ability to board an airplane if he says something we don’t like.

Homeland Security, of course, is not commenting at all, which points to the other big problem with all this nonsense: the people currently running the show are so secretive (and our congress so complicit) that it’s almost impossible to find out what’s actually being done in our name. Where’s the transparency? Where’s the freedom to be left alone when you’re doing nothing wrong? This is not how the America I learned about in civics class works. We deserve better — a lot better.

Update 7/12/06: corrected spelling of Aklaghi’s name.

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Cornell cracks European GPS DRM

/ Intellectual Property

Galileo is the EU’s first global navigation system, and unlike the US GPS system is partially funded by private investors. Part of their business model is to sell their data, so they’ve added noise to the signal using a pseudo-random number sequence, with the intention of selling the “offsets” to licensed manufacturers of GPS receivers. Now researchers at Cornell have decoded that sequence, using statistical analysis of the signal. From the Cornell press release:

Afraid that cracking the code might have been copyright infringement, Psiaki’s group consulted with Cornell’s university counsel. “We were told that cracking the encryption of creative content, like music or a movie, is illegal, but the encryption used by a navigation signal is fair game,” said Psiaki. The upshot: The Europeans cannot copyright basic data about the physical world, even if the data are coming from a satellite that they built.

The moral of the story: just because people benefit from your work doesn’t mean they’ve agreed to pay you, and business plans don’t carry the force of law.

(Thanks to Lenny for the link!)

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LiveJournal-integrated Jabber

/ Media Technology

Interesting: Livejournal has just launched a Jabber server, and are developing integrated features like posting via Jabber and of course integrated Friends and Buddy lists. And they’ll be federating, so you’ll be able to talk to other Jabber-enabled systems (like GMail/GTalk) without the usual mucking about in monopoly-space (you know, like you do with AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and all the other dark-age services that still wish it was 1990).

(Thanks to Sunyata__ for the link!)

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Event: Christopher Allen and Michael Goldhaber at BayCHI

/ Events

Two talks that look interesting at BayCHI this Tuesday, July 11 at 7:30 at PARC in Palo Alto:

(Thanks to Perlick for the heads up.)

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How do you attribute someone who doesn’t give his name?

/ Intellectual Property

A few weeks ago a coworker came to me with a conundrum: he was writing an academic paper and needed a picture of a certain kind of cloud to illustrate a point he was making. He used the Creative Commons search engine and found an image on Flickr.com that both fit his needs and was released under a license that only required that he give attribution to the photographer. Only one problem: the photographer’s Flickr page didn’t list his real name or contact info anywhere. Just a handle… “Cyberdude,” or something like that.

If he was just using this photo to illustrate a blog entry, my coworker would probably have just said “Photo curtsey of Cyberdude” and with a link to this guy’s Flickr page, but there was no way he was going to say that in a professional academic paper. He could have created a Flickr account and left a comment asking for permission and the photographer’s real name, but that’s the kind of effort to gain permission that Creative Commons licenses were specifically designed to avoid. No doubt the photographer didn’t list any contact info to avoid spammers or stalkers, but that need conflicts with the needs specified by his license. A Catch-22.

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