cananian

One of the architects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act acknowledged that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright control have not been successful" in a conference in Montreal. Michael Geist attended the conference and reported the news. The conference's topic was on music and copyright reform in Canada; the US is pressuring our northern neighbors to enforce draconian restrictions on fair use similar to our DMCA. Hopefully the Canadians will heed the message and resist the pressure.

In other news, Slashdot brings some stories of ignored referendums. It's easy to claim that voters "don't know what they're voting for" when the politicans don't like what the voters have asked for, apparently... read the high-moderated comments on the article for more examples. Sigh.

But at least you can use genetic engineering to add additional color receptors to expand the number of "colors" we can see. I'd love to know what the world looks like with 4 color receptors, instead of my plebian 3.

Last Friday Congress passed an expansion of the FBI's ability to spy on ordinary Americans via secretive "National Security Letters", details of the use of which the FBI has refused to reveal. EPIC is leading the public investigation of these "NSLs", but the FBI has been thumbing its nose at FOIA requests: they recently released a completely-blacked-out six page list to EPIC to "explain" their use of NSLs since 10/26/2001.

And today's death penalty update: the FBI allowed known innocents to be put to death to protect secret informants in Boston. [In an update to an earlier entry in this blog, the FBI has said that it's the "training camps" for anti-war protestors that worry it to the point of infiltrating constitutionally-protected demonstrations. Next up: investigating those suspicious "spring training camps" of baseball players. After all --- some of them are from Cuba!] [More FBI misdeeds: the Judi Bari case.]

Back to Diebold: Dennis Kucinich has requested that the House Judiciary Committee investigate Diebold's abuse of the DMCA to suppress its memos. And, in the historical-offenses drawer: security problems with Diebold ATMs.

Avi Rubin testified before Maryland's House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, saying, the report on Diebold's software flaws should be released, if those flaws have been fixed as Diebold claims. In response, he was called an enemy of democracy: "They're telling the public: Don't trust them, don't trust the voting equipment." That's ridiculous. Thankfully at least one Maryland state delegate agrees: "I was disappointed the [election] administration didn't come forward with stronger and more focused responses to what his complaints had been since day one."

The RISKS forum has a collection of articles on voting machines in digest 23.01, 23.02, and 23.03: Grant Parish, Louisiana has an absentee ballot mixup in a close race, WinVote machines not counting one in a hundred votes (exactly what you'd expect from sophisticated ballot fraud; WinVote is run by former Diebold principals), also replaced machines in that election (earlier article) (Fairfax County, VA); the Boone County, IN overvote (MicroVote machines); a surprising risk even of voter-verified machines (Vote-Trakker machines, Southington, CT); two articles on the uncertified Diebold machines in Alameda County CA (earlier); risks of lever machines; incorrect instructions given on touchscreen machines in Pleasanton, CA; Irish Labour Party demands e-voting be suspended; and the Electronic Privacy Information Center's alert on the Congressional Research Service's report on Electronic Voting.

EPIC is also one of the sponsors of the conference, titled "Claim Democracy: Securing, Enhancing and Exercising the Power of the Right to Vote". It's in Washington, D.C. on the weekend of November 22-23.

In university round-up, we've got articles on the Diebold files from MIT (this article was on the front page of the student paper and brought me quite a bit of notoriety), Duke, UC Berkeley, and Harvard.

Gore Vidal weighs in on voting machines (scroll down).

I was also mentioned in the Washington Post on Thursday.

The EFF has archives of the Online Policy Group v. Diebold case; you should read especially their application for an injunction against Diebold.

Finally, my cease-and-desist letter from Diebold is now up on chillingeffects.org.

Updates on the Patriot Act and Echelon courtesy of Slashdot. If you've ever wondered why random keywords appear at the end of my emails, this posting from the ACLU may demystify you.

The RIAA filed 80 more lawsuits yesterday. And the SCO group has begun to infringe my copyrights on portions of the Linux kernel. In other news, I recently granted copyright for my original PPTP-linux client to the FSF, so they can prosecute other copyright infringement of my code. I also signed over my contributions to GNU Classpath and GNU libc. [The FSF's copyright assignment legalese is actually incredibly safe and friendly: they even allow you to reclaim your copyright if you eventually decide you'd rather resell the code or somesuch. Of course, the rights you've provided under the GPL persist, but it does allow you to go back and resell non-GPL'ed versions of the code if you like.]

I drafted a DMCA counternotice to MIT's Copyright Agent in response to Diebold's cease-and-desist letter. I'm getting it looked over by smart people right now =) and will post it when it is finalized. In the meantime, you may be interested in my advice on filing a DMCA counter-notice.

The EFF's Wendy Seltzer wrote a very good reply to Diebold on behalf of the San Francisco Indymedia C&D recipients.

Elsewhere, Wired News has another article about the "E-Vote Protest".

It has been brought to my attention that there is excellent precedent to refuse Diebold's claims in the "Tobacco papers" case, as described in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle and in more depth in a profile of defendant Stanton Glantz.

I'm still looking for more definitive legal reference, but here is the "layman's" version of the relevant argument. Glantz received an anonymous package of internal tobacco company documents and published them. Then, as described in the profile above:

When Brown & Williamson filed suit to force the return of the documents in February 1995, the stage was set for a First Amendment fight. Suddenly, the very freedom of a researcher and a university to disseminate information was on the line. "Basically, they were trying to keep books out of the library, and universities are here to spread information, not suppress it," Glantz says. He was summoned to a meeting at the university counsel's office, across Parnassus Avenue, which runs through the UCSF campus. "I was riding the elevator down and I was thinking, 'Time to walk the plank. They're going to toss me overboard.'"

[...]

But saying they'd rather fight than quit, the UC administrators backed Glantz. The university lawyers argued that the documents were a legitimate subject of study and that they were already public records because they had been written about so extensively in the New York Times and elsewhere. In June 1995, the California Supreme Court ruled in the university's favor. To spare strain on the library, the university published them on the Internet and sold copies on CD-ROM.

In the case of the Diebold memos, these documents have been extensively published on the web (see citations at http://www.why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html) and elsewhere, including a book and at least one widely-syndicated AP article. More coverage will surely follow. I think the precedent holds.

Boston.com now has an Associated Press article on Diebold's take-down actions.

Today MIT got a cease-and-desist letter from Diebold about the documents I've mirrored here. It seems they really don't want people to learn how untrustworthy their election equipment is.

As a temporary measure, I've taken down direct links to the lists.tgz archive. The BitTorrent tracker is still up, at http://cscott.net/Activism/lists.tgz.torrent --- this is not a hyperlink because of some braindead legal precedent in the 2600 DeCSS case. The torrent file will still work, although no actual content is hosted at cscott.net. Magic! [BitTorrent peers are still very welcome, though: everyone who downloads the file and leaves bittorrent running can contribute to ensuring this content remains available at this link. Let me know if you decide to help out this way.]

My pgp/gpg key is available at pgp.mit.edu; email me if you're interested in helping maintain this mirror.

There's an excellent article in the Baltimore Sun from Monday, talking about the Sklyarov and Felten cases, but also about the DMCA and fair use more generally. It's very readable and worth a look.