Copyright Laws Threaten Our Online Freedom

By Christian Engström

July 7, 2009

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.

The world is at a crossroads. The internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.

The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.

The internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to anybody with an internet connection. But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright.

The public increasingly recognises the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European parliament for the first time.

Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform.

We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.

Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?

The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us to decide what future we want.

The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament.

Engström, Christian. “Copyright Laws Threaten Our Online Freedom.” The Financial Times. 7 Jul. 2009. <http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87c523a4-6b18-11de-861d-00144feabdc0.html>

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code
Unlocking This Cipher Wasn’t Self-Evident; Algorithms and Educated Guesses

By Rachel Emma Silverman

July 2, 2009

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society — a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities — and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. “The art of secret writing,” or writing in cipher, has “engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages,” Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall “far short of perfection.”

To Mr. Patterson’s view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, “it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering.”

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would “defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race,” he wrote.

There is no evidence that Jefferson, or anyone else for that matter, ever solved the code. But Jefferson did believe the cipher was so inscrutable that he considered having the State Department use it, and passed it on to the ambassador to France, Robert Livingston.

The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Smithline’s neighbor, who was working on a Jefferson project at Princeton University, told Dr. Smithline of Mr. Patterson’s mysterious cipher.

Dr. Smithline, intrigued, decided to take a look. “A problem like this cipher can keep me up at night,” he says. After unlocking its hidden message in 2007, Dr. Smithline articulated his puzzle-solving techniques in a recent paper in the magazine American Scientist and also in a profile in Harvard Magazine, his alma mater’s alumni journal.

The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That’s when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what’s termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter “e” is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for “e.”

Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter. Mr. Jefferson’s correspondence shows that he used several code books of nomenclators. An issue with these tools, according to Mr. Patterson’s criteria, is that a nomenclator is too tough to memorize.

Jefferson even wrote about his own ingenious code, a model of which is at his home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. Called the wheel cipher, the device consisted of cylindrical pieces, threaded onto an iron spindle, with letters inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Users could scramble and unscramble words simply by turning the wheels.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was “upwards of ninety millions of millions.”

After explaining this in his letter, Mr. Patterson wrote, “I presume the utter impossibility of decyphering will be readily acknowledged.”

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as “dx,” don’t exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as “u” after “q”.

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson’s State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of “aa,” “ab,” “ac,” through “zz.”

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what’s called “dynamic programming,” which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be “tedious in the 19th century, but doable.”

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson’s cipher emerged — 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher’s text:

“In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events…”

That, of course, is the beginning — with a few liberties taken — to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. “Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson,” says Dr. Smithline. “And nobody knew until now.”

Silverman, Rachel Emma. “Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code.” The Wall Street Journal. 2 July 2009. <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html> (This article appeared on page A1 of the printed edition.)

Top 5 Facts for this Name:

1. How well envoweled is Charles Coker? 33% of the letters are vowels. Of one million first and last names we looked at, 60.6% have a higher vowel make-up. This means you are averagely envoweled.
2. In ASCII binary it is… 01000011 01101000 01100001 01110010 01101100 01100101 01110011 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101011 01100101 01110010
3. Backwards, it is Selrahc Rekoc… nice ring to it, huh?
4. In Pig Latin, it is Arleschay Okercay.
5. People with this first name are probably: Male. So, there’s a 98% likelihood you sweat just thinking of the price of shaver blades.

Name Origin and Meaning:

Forename:
Origin: Teutonic; French; Latin
Meaning: Manly, Full Grown

Surname:
Origin: (English) 1. Belonging to Coker (Soms). 2. = Cocker.

3 Things You Didn’t Know:

1. Charles Coker, what is your power animal? Your personal power animal is the Field Mouse
2. Your ‘Numerology’ number is 1. If it wasn’t bulls**t, it would mean that you are ambitious, independent, and self-sufficient. Although you are generally happy, loving, dynamic and charismatic, you can sometimes be egotistical, selfish and melodramatic.
3. According to the US Census Bureau°, 1.529% of US residents have the first name ‘Charles’ and 0.0093% have the surname ‘Coker’. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there are 427 Americans who go by the name ‘Charles Coker’.

Source: IsThisYourName <http://www.isthisyour.name/charles_coker.htm>

It seemed that absolutely no one was home at the Morongo Reservation on that hot day 54 years ago. But a reporter wrote that as she coaxed her car along a winding road into Portero Canyon, “the noise of bawling cattle gradually drowned out the sound of its toiling motor.”

“Then,” Ruth Little reported in the May 30, 1955, Daily Enterprise, “as we reached the small grass-carpeted forest of black walnut and cottonwood trees surrounding the corral, the din crescendoed into bedlam.” It seemed everyone was there, from grandparent to infant. And so were hundreds of bellowing cattle and a blazing fire with about 40 branding irons in its coals. It was time for the spring Morongo Roundup.

Robert Martin, Morongo Tribal Chairman, will round up Morongo Roundup memories in the next Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Dragonfly Lecture starting at 6 p.m. on Monday, July 6, at 17 West Hays, Banning.

Each year, from generation to generation, the Morongo Indian cowboys drove hundreds of cattle from the foothills, valleys, and deserts, branded and vaccinated the calves and got them ready for market. The roundup was a major Southern California event. Reporters flocked each year to cover what they saw as a colorful story, but for the Indian cowboys meant endless hours of sweaty and difficult work.

Although the big roundup is no longer held and the Upper Corral stands silent, Morongo tribal members still run cattle. They also are still passing Indian cowboy traditions to newer generations. Tribal chairman Martin’s grandfather, for example, ran cattle and worked in the annual roundups, and Martin, himself now a grandfather, worked in the roundups as a teen-ager. His family’s next generations of Indian cowboys also have cattle and are riding, roping, and rodeoing.

Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, a nonprofit that saves and shares Southern California’s American Indian cultures, languages, traditional arts and history, this year is exploring the Indian cowboys’ often-unrecognized place in history. The Learning Center is featuring lectures such as this one, in which participants are encouraged to share their own memories. Donations at the door will benefit the nonprofit, organizers said.

The annual Dragonfly Gala, scheduled for Aug. 8 at Morongo Community Center, also will feature an Indian cowboy theme.

Information: info@dorothyramon.org or 951.849.4676.

It appears that some cops need a little extra income from time to time. You might even say that he had a yen for crime.

School Boys Catch Purse-Snatching Cop

Agence France-Presse

Friday, June 5, 2009

A Japanese police officer has been arrested for snatching the purse of a 75-year-old woman after he was chased and caught by two high school students, police officials said Friday.

Police sergeant Naofumi Nomura, 29, allegedly stole the woman’s purse with about 10,000 yen ($130) in cash inside on Thursday night (local time) and ran off through the streets of the western city of Okayama.

Two high school students who heard the elderly woman’s screams chased Nomura on bicycle for 250 metres before overpowering him.

“I heard a woman screaming ‘thief!’ and turned around to see a man coming our way,” one of the boys, Ryutaro Hourai,15, said.

“We chased him as hard as we could. I can’t believe that a police officer who is supposed to catch criminals was caught by high school students.”

Kimiaki Hiraoka, chief inspector with Okayama’s prefectural police, said, “It was extremely deplorable. We’d like to offer our profound apologies to the victim and other people concerned.”

Agence France-Presse. “School Boys Catch Purse-Snatching Cop.” ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). 5 Jun. 2009 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/05/2591145.htm>

City Suspends Controversial Facebook Policy

By Chronicle Staff

The city of Bozeman held a press conference at 3 p.m., Friday to announce that it was suspending a controversial policy of requiring social-networking passwords as part of job applications.

City Manager Chris Kukulski read the press release reprinted below and then took questions.

A full story on the latest developments will be posted later this evening.

The press release is reprinted here in its entirety:

June 19, 2009

For Immediate Release:

The City of Bozeman believes we have a responsibility to ensure candidates hired for positions of public trust are subject to a thorough background check. The extent of our request for a candidate’s password, user name, or other internet information appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community. We appreciate the concern many citizens have expressed regarding this practice and apologize for the negative impact this issue is having on the City of Bozeman.

Effective at 12:00 p.m. today, Friday June 19, 2009, the City of Bozeman permanently ceased the practice of requesting candidates selected for City positions under a provisional job offer to provide user names and passwords for the candidate’s internet sites.

In addition, until further notice, the City will suspend its practice of reviewing candidate’s password protected internet information until the City conducts a more comprehensive evaluation of the practice.

Since the initial media inquiries, the City of Bozeman has been reviewing the practice of requesting user names and passwords to access a candidate’s internet sites. Today’s decision to terminate the use of passwords and usernames in this process reflects the City’s commitment to reconsider this practice. In addition, today’s decision to suspend the practice of inquiring into a candidate’s password protected internet sites demonstrates a continued commitment to ensure the City’s hiring practices comply with state and federal law and protect the safety of Bozeman residents.

Chris A. Kukulski
City Manager

“City Suspends Controversial Facebook Policy.” Bozeman Daily Chronicle. 19 Jun. 2009. <http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2009/06/19/breaking_news/70cityletter.txt>

McMenacing? Cop Accused Of Pulling Gun At McD’s

By Brian Maass

June 17, 2009

DENVER (CBS4) — A Denver police officer has been suspended after allegedly brandishing his gun at a McDonald’s restaurant in Aurora after his order took too long to fill.

Aurora police confirmed the CBS4 investigation saying the incident occurred May 21 at the McDonald’s at 18181 East Hampden Avenue.

A spokesperson for the Aurora Police Department said they plan to present the case — now classified as a felony menacing incident — to the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office Thursday for possible filing of criminal charges.

Sources familiar with the case, and the fast food worker’s account of what happened, say two off-duty Denver police officers placed an order from their car in the early morning hours of May 21. But once at the drive through window, the employee said the men became agitated and angry at how long their food was taking. The men thought they were being ignored, according to contacts familiar with the worker’s account. The male clerk then said one of the officer’s flashed his police badge and pointed a pistol through the drive through window in a threatening manner, before driving off without paying.

Both officers are assigned to Denver International Airport although only one has been placed on administrative leave with pay, pending the outcome of the case.

Maass, Brian. “McMenacing? Cop Accused Of Pulling Gun At McD’s.” CBS 4 (Denver, Colorado). 17 Jun. 2009. <http://cbs4denver.com/investigates/denver.police.suspension.2.1049330.html>

Bozeman City Job Requirement Raises Privacy Concerns

June 17, 2009

Applying for a job with the City of Bozeman? You may be asked to provide more personal information than you expected.

That was the case for one person who applied for employment with the City. The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city’s background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.

The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person’s “background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records.”

“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,” the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.

The requirement raises questions concerning applicants’ privacy rights.

Article 2, Section 10 of the Montana Constitution reads “the right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.”

The City takes privacy rights very seriously, but this request balances those rights with the City’s need to ensure employees will protect the public trust, according to city attorney Greg Sullivan.

“So, we have positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City,” Sullivan said.

Another concern the applicant raised was that by providing the City with a Facebook user name and password the City not only has access to the applicant’s page but also to the pages belonging to all of the applicant’s Facebook “friends.”

“You know, I can understand that concern. One thing that’s important for folks to understand about what we look for is none of the things that the federal constitution lists as protected things, we don’t use those. We’re not putting out this broad brush stroke of trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we’re not able to use or shouldn’t use in the hiring process,” Sullivan said.

When asked about creating a separate Bozeman Facebook page, then asking applicants to add the City as “friend,” thus allowing the City to view the applicant’s profile, Sullivan said officials could explore the option. This would limit the city to only view the page of the applicant.

No one has ever removed his or her name from consideration for a job due to the request, Sullivan added.

“Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns.” Montana’s News Station (CBS). 17 Jun. 2009. <http://montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=10551414&nav=menu227_3>

Attorney Defends Trooper in Oklahoma Ambulance Stop

By Sean Murphy, Associated Press Writer

June 15, 2009

Oklahoma City — Bothered that an ambulance driver failed to yield to him as he raced to provide backup on a call — and angered further when he thought the driver flipped him an obscene gesture — state Trooper Daniel Martin decided to stop the ambulance and give the driver a piece of his mind.

What Martin didn’t know then, his lawyer said Monday, was that there was a patient in the back of the ambulance.

“He’s not this ogre, this depriver of people’s rights,” the trooper’s attorney, Gary James, said. “He’s a good man.”

Since a cell phone video of the dispute taken by the patient’s son was released last month, Martin has faced criticism and has been placed on paid leave pending an investigation. The patient, Stella Davis of Boley, was eventually treated and released from the hospital, but relatives and others have questioned why the ambulance was stopped and pushed for answers.

In this image taken from video provided by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Trooper Daniel Martin gets in an altercation with paramedics after the ambulance failed to get out of his way quickly enough as he approached with his sirens on, in Oklahoma City on May 24, 2009.

After the trooper stopped the vehicle, a paramedic jumped from the back and demanded that Martin talk to him instead of the driver, according to a longer video, taken by the dashboard camera in Martin’s cruiser, that authorities released over the weekend.

“You get back in the ambulance, I’m talking to the driver,” Martin said.

“I’m in charge of this unit, sir,” the paramedic tells Martin, an Iraq war veteran who returned from the Middle East about a month before the May 24 incident in Paden, 40 miles east of Oklahoma City.

Martin tells the driver he’s going to give him a ticket for failure to yield.

“I ain’t going to be putting up with that (expletive),” Martin said. “You understand me?”

Then the paramedic, Maurice White Jr., said: “And I won’t put up with you talking to my driver like that.”

In this image taken from video provided by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Trooper Daniel Martin gets in an altercation with paramedics after the ambulance failed to get out of his way quickly enough as he approached with his sirens on, in Oklahoma City on May 24, 2009.

The situation escalates, with White repeatedly telling Martin he has a patient that he wants to take to the hospital, and Martin telling him to get back in the ambulance. They soon begin scuffling on the side of the road as Martin attempts to arrest White, at one point grabbing him by the throat, video shows.

Martin’s attorney said the trooper — whom he described as a decorated sailor and a 15-year law enforcement veteran — didn’t realize there was a patient in the ambulance until well after the situation had intensified. He either didn’t hear it or it didn’t register, he said.

In this image taken from video provided by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Trooper Daniel Martin gets in an altercation with paramedics after the ambulance failed to get out of his way quickly enough as he approached with his sirens on, in Oklahoma City on May 24, 2009.

Martin was trying to make a legitimate traffic stop, James said, when White became hostile, refused to comply with the patrolman’s orders and caused the situation to spiral out of control.

James said the law allows an officer to pull over an ambulance if its emergency lights and sirens aren’t running, as was the case in this incident.

Thompson Gouge, spokesman for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, which employs White as a paramedic, said the use of lights and sirens depends on the patient’s medical situation. Sometimes the lights and sirens often won’t be used when patients are transported to the hospital in order to keep them calm.

White’s attorney, Richard O’Carroll, said the veteran paramedic was trying to protect his patient and that the trooper had no reason to stop the ambulance, let alone try and arrest White. The trooper’s arms were bruised when White resisted arrest, James said.

“If the guy was bruised, it didn’t make any difference,” O’Carroll said. “He ought not to stop ambulance drivers for hurting his feelings.”

Murphy, Sean. “Attorney Defends Trooper in Oklahoma Ambulance Stop.” The Denver Post. 16 Jun. 2009. <http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12600551>

“[Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper] Martin’s attorney says the trooper either didn’t hear that there was a patient in the ambulance or it didn’t register.”

Hmmm… I wonder if that excuse would have worked for Paramedic White.

Oklahoma Paramedic Wants Trooper’s Gun and Badge

By The Associated Press

June 16, 2009

Oklahoma City — The paramedic who scuffled with an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper while a patient waited inside the ambulance says the trooper should lose his badge.

Maurice White Jr. said today on the CBS “Early Show” that trooper Daniel Martin was in a state of rage when he stopped his ambulance and totally disregarded the patient’s safety.

Martin stopped the ambulance May 24 for failing to yield.

White says he got out of the ambulance to tell the trooper they were taking a patient to the hospital. The argument quickly escalated into a scuffle and Martin put White in a choke hold.

Martin’s attorney says the trooper either didn’t hear that there was a patient in the ambulance or it didn’t register. He says White failed to comply with the trooper’s orders.

Associated Press. “Oklahoma Paramedic Wants Trooper’s Gun and Badge.” The Denver Post. 16 Jun. 2009. <http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12600551>