WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Winding Down has a legal flavour this week. We cover the 4th Amendment and the border agencies, National Security Letters, First Sale Doctrine, the Google WiFi slurp, Hacker Andrew Auernheimer jailed over the AT&T slurp, and Microsoft, some photographs of Greenwich village, and a Samsung advert. URLs include interstellar ice grains, Boeing’s 787 battery fix, ‘Cyber Security’, EA’s Origin games service vulnerability, and the slump in PC sales.
I wish we had a constitution like that of the United States here in the UK. Some of the news in this issue makes it very clear just how clear sighted the founding fathers were. Maybe one day...
Shorts:
The lawyers in the US have been making a mint out of the tech community, but I’m happy to report that the results seem to have been pretty positive! Now where to start...
Well let’s start at the borders, and the start of the month. For some time now the border agencies have claimed the right to confiscate and search computers at the border, and that the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution doesn’t apply. (For my non-US readers, this amendment only allows reasonable searches, usually with a warrant.) The argument ran that when you are at the border you haven’t yet entered the US and so the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply.
I always felt that this was a rather specious argument, since it implied that US border posts were not on US territory. In fact, thinking about it, it implies that border posts on, say, the US/Canadian border, are actually on Canadian territory! Indeed the judges in the 9th Circuit Appeals Court (note the plural, the case was heard ‘en banc’, which means it was important enough to be heard in front of an entire set of judges) obviously felt something similar, because they firmly disagreed with the government on this and made it clear that the 4th Amendment does apply at the borders.
In addition, some bright spark on the government side came up with the bright idea of adding, as justification for the search, the fact that there were password protected files on the appellant’s laptop. The court recognized that the password protection of files is ubiquitous, and necessary given the personal and business information stored on computers. Therefore, it ruled, the presence of password protected files is not grounds for the reasonableness of a search under the 4th Amendment. I bet the government were kicking themselves for including that as a reason for the search!
And all this judgment on a case in which the judges found that the requirements of the 4th Amendment had in fact been met... Sadly there is nothing like this in the UK - and we desperately need something similar to the US Constitution, to provide us with protection against the ever-encroaching state.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-circuit-appeals-court-4th-amendment-applies-border-also-password-protected-files-shouldnt-arouse-suspicion.shtml
About a week later the US government suffered another setback at the hands of the judiciary. This time a federal court judge ruled that National Security Letters (NSLs), the controversial and clandestine surveillance tools used by the FBI to gather information on individuals, breach the Constitution and must be halted. Judge Susan Illston of the US District Court in San Francisco, ruled that they breach the First Amendment protections on freedom of speech.
Under this pernicious law, recipients are not allowed to disclose their content, or even discuss the fact that the letters exist! The judge went even further in her ruling on the law that created the NSLs. She said that the clauses in the law that limit court oversight of NSLs violate the principle of separation of powers, and since there was no way to rewrite the either of the clauses, she declared the whole law unconstitutional. Wow!
Of course this case is going to go all the way up the chain to the Supreme Court, given that it involves ‘national security’, and indeed, the judge has in effect given the government 90 days to appeal ruling before it comes into force.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/16/national_security_letters_banned/
The third, as important, case this month was heard in the Supreme Court itself, and was brought to the court not by the government, but by book publishers John Wiley & Sons. They objected to the fact that Thai student Supap Kirtsaeng was buying student text books in Thailand, where they are much cheaper than in the USA, and reselling the books on e-Bay, inside the US. Wiley wanted a ruling that this was illegal. In the event the court came down on the side of the student and what is a very important legal principle, ‘First Sale Doctrine’.
First sale doctrine is a very simple concept. It states that a manufacturer’s rights over an object (in this case a publisher’s rights over a book) end with its purchase. This is the fundamental reason why you can sell second hand goods, or lend things out to your friends! This is the reason why the publishers will only -license- you e-books or digital music: if it’s licensed, not sold, they retain the rights to control the stories and music. It’s also the reason why software is licensed, and not sold, whatever you may think when you purchase a program.
So, let the garage sales commence! (Car boot sales to my English readers...)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/19/supreme_court_protects_first_sale_doctrine/
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/supreme-court-rules-entertainment-industry-429695
In other legal news, Google is slated to cough up something in the region of US$7 million for its dubious slurping up of people’s WiFi data via Street View. If it had been an individual who had done this, they would be serving time in a jail. Hacker Andrew Auernheimer has received a 41 month prison sentence for using an automated Get program to collect 114,000 iPad users email addresses from a public facing AT&T server, and sharing the exploit on Gawker. The only thing wrong here is that the person at AT&T responsible for allowing the breach is not also serving the same sentence.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/10/google_to_settle_with_us_states_over_wi_spy/
http://www.infoworld.com/t/hacking/andrew-auernheimer-joins-growing-list-of-so-called-hackers-facing-harsh-justice-214742
And, as a coda to all these legal rulings and the like, I note that Microsoft has started to follow the route pioneered by Google, and is publishing figures on how many law enforcement requests for information on its customers it has received. To be precise, 75,378 last year, although it disclosed ‘content’ (whatever that means), in only two per cent of the cases. The breakdown of the figures is given in the article, and I’m not going to repeat them here, except to note that the UK figured in the top five for both Skype and other information requests. Why am I not surprised...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57575541-75/microsoft-opens-up-on-law-enforcement-requests/
Homework:
Nothing hi-tech, but the history buffs and photo enthusiasts among you might like to take a look at some pictures of New York’s Greenwich Village during the 1950s. There’s a video too, for those of you who like their pictures moving!
http://gothamist.com/2013/03/22/photos_of_greenwich_village_in_the.php#photo-1
For Geeks:
I don’t very often feature adverts on Winding Down, but you have to see this Samsung washing machine ad. It’s brilliant, make sure you watch it right through to the end!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xoe5Vjl90-o
Scanner: Other stories
Interstellar ice grains and life’s precursors
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=26714
Boeing outlines fix for 787 batteries
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/15/boeing_787_fix/
Defense companies cash in on government hyped ‘Cyber Security’ threat
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/03/13-9
EA Origin vulnerability puts players at risk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/19/ea_origin_bug_allows_remote_exploits/
Predicted nosedive in PC shipments spells trouble for Windows 8
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/predicted-nosedive-in-pc-shipments-spells-trouble-windows-8-214789
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
24 March 2013
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
