Interesting Stuff

For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a small group of lawyers and techies who are sort of like the ACLU, but only for technology-type stuff. Because the EFF is so small, they don’t have the resources to take on every case that comes along the way the ACLU does. Consquently, they wait for the perfect case, and then kick ass. The EFF was behind the class action lawsuit over Sony BMG’s rootkits (I don’t think I ever posted the resolution of that, but the EFF won and if you bought one of these CDs, you can get some money and a way to remove them from your machine and stuff). The EFF was behind the landmark case about the broadcast flag that finally gave you the right to record what you want on your TiVo or VCR (again). They were the ones who got the electronic voting company Diebold kicked out of North Carolina for their unethical business practices and intentional security problems. The EFF are all-around awesome people!

Anyways, they’re now battling AT&T over the warrantless wiretapping thing (the ACLU is also suing AT&T, but the two cases are, at least for now, separate). At DEFCON, I got to see a panel of 5 EFF people discuss this case with the audience. AT&T has been completely assy about every point, arguing ludicrous things, such as the claim that the address of their main datacenter is a trade secret (despite the fact that it’s registered with the city of San Francisco and is in the phone book). Time after time, the judge has come down on the EFF’s side. The EFF has even managed to work around the State Secrets issues that right-wing pundits expected would bring the entire trial to a standstill (the EFF’s arguments here were amazingly clever. Post a comment if you’re interested in hearing more). Earlier this week, the judge in the ACLU’s suit ruled that AT&T must stop their practices, though they plan to appeal this to the 9th circuit court of appeals (though knowing the 9th circuit, the decision should stand). The EFF’s judge has already made a similar ruling, and by now should have decided whether AT&T can continue the wiretapping while they appeal (though I don’t know the outcome of that edit: they can continue re-edit: that was for the ACLU case. I still don’t know what happened to the motion to stay in the EFF case). As usual, Fox “News” is using intimidation and straw-man arguments to say that the ruling is the work of a foolish, activist, outsider judge. The Washington Post is taking a more reasonable, moderate stance.

In the meantime, there’s a scary bill looming on the horizon. This bill, if passed into law, would specifically legalize warrantless wiretapping, thereby stripping away all congressional oversight. Personally, I feel this is ridiculous, because FISA (the secret court that is supposed to oversee wiretaps) has never once in its entire 30-year history turned down a wiretap application. Moreover, the Arlen-Cheney bill would move the ACLU’s and EFF’s legal battles from the normal courts over to FISA, where no one would ever be able to find out what occurred or why. If you want to keep your Fourth Amendment rights and not have a chilling effect set over all of America, please, please call or write to your Congresspeople (note that that link is secure and any data you put in that form will be encrypted; yet another good thing the EFF does).

A couple minor points about the EFF: they made a very compelling argument at DEFCON against both the pro- and anti-internet neutrality proponents, similar to inferno0069‘s viewpoint. They used the obvious arguments for why net neutrality is important and must be maintained. However, they also made the point that governmental oversight of the internet can be just as problematic, since it implies that the government will be forced to read your internet traffic (and since the majority of the world’s internet traffic gets routed through the US, they would be reading other countries’ traffic as well. Ideally, we can have internet neutrality without needing to regulate or legislate that.

I’ve also started looking into Freenet, which is a way of distributing files and viewing websites with security, anonymity, and plausible deniability (and which the EFF strongly supports). If nothing else, using it will help support the people in China attempting to speak out against their government and leaking the evidence about the Chinese death camps and other persecution of the Falun Gong. Some of you might remember a CS colloquium talk on Freenet several years ago. At the time, the audience (particularly Prof. O’Neill) argued with the speaker that Freenet makes copyright abuse trivial. However, their website makes the interesting observation that to enforce a copyright, you need to monitor and censor what people say/do/show, and that it is impossible to allow truly free speech and enforce the current incarnation of copyright law at the same time. If I had to pick one, I’d go with free speech, though.

Wow. That was a lot of links.