Reporters Warned By TSA Not To Report On Scanner Failures

Police Statism, Technology
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The agency that is “tasked” with keeping flights “safe” is warning reporters not to report on scanner failures. You see, if terrorists were to find out these weaknesses it could jeopardize the security of passengers and indeed national security.

Via Slashdot:

“When anti-TSA activist Jonathan Corbett exposed a severe weakness in TSA’s body scanners, one would expect the story to attract a lot of media attention. Apparently TSA is attempting to stop reporters from covering the story. According to Corbett, at least one reporter has been ‘strongly cautioned’ by TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz not to cover the story. If TSA is worried that this is new information they need to suppress to keep it away from terrorists, that horse may have left the barn years ago. Corbett’s demonstration may just be confirmation of a 2010 paper in the Journal of Transportation Security that concluded that ‘an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible’ to X-ray scanners.”

One of the first things that the state eliminates under the guise of national security are freedom of the press and of speech. Good thing that the Internet still manages to remain decentralized and largely uncontrolled (though this is sadly changing as well). Here’s the YouTube video that apparently kicked off recent TSA frenzy.

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Bastiat Weeps For The Billionth Time

Business, IP Law, Protectionism, Technology
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@pablodPablo Defendini
LOL self-pub is the new piracy! “@DigiBookWorld: Heard at #dbw12: Self publishing costs publishers $100 million in opportunity”

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SOPA is the Symptom, Copyright is the Disease: The SOPA wakeup call to ABOLISH COPYRIGHT

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Technology
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[Update: See also EU’s controversial copyright law rejected by parliament, July 5, 2018]

Over at C4SIF, I’ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA). As Jeff Tucker noted recently,1 the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even “libertarians,” but with civil libertarians of the “left,” as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning–the more radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians (such as some of the people associated with C4SS2 ).

Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important, and piracy is bad–but then they bemoan that SOPA “goes too far.” For example, as I noted in Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PCMag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy “is of course a real problem”. …

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  1. See Tucker: Protesting Government Digitally. ↩

  2. See, e.g., Kevin Carson: So What if SOPA Passes? ↩

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Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA: Translating the Candidates’ Answers

IP Law, Technology
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Mike Masnick has this interesting post up today at Techdirt:

Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA

from the national-issue dept

It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren’t interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week’s protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it’s not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills… and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they’re the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith…). Mediaite has the video:

Read more>>

Masnick quotes each of the four candidates’ responses to the question. I provide them below, with “translations” provided by my friend Daniel Coleman for the three statist candidates:

Gingrich: “You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations’ economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Translation: I joke about using power to hurt people who disagree with me on policy. But seriously, folks, this bill got way too unpopular for me to be able to support it. I think you need the powers of this bill vested differently so that it won’t cause as much of an outrage. …

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Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA: Translating the Candidates’ Answers Read Post »

Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Mercantilism, Protectionism, Technology
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Cory Doctorow has a great speech up, The coming war on general computation, delivered at the the 28C3, the recent Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin. (He’s also written an article based on the transcript.) Doctorow explains that how the copyright interests want general purpose computers to be regulated, or hobbled, so that people cannot evade copyright restrictions and copyright circumvention prohibitions. (Why Doctorow is not yet a complete copyright abolitionists is a mystery to me.) He has an interesting point at around 45:00 about how the Internet and technology only provides an incremental benefit to the state, since they are already organized enough to be in charge, but can provide a more qualitative change–a “phase shift”–for the subjects of the state, in helping them to better organize and fight the state.

His summary of the talk:

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

[C4SIF]

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