Category Archives: politics

Send in the drones

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Unman...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Unmanned aerial vehicle of the CBP Air and Marine Unmanned Aircraft System. (Predator unarmed) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In response to a FOIA request submitted by the EFF, the FAA has released a two lists of its authorizations to fly drones in the United States. One list (called COA) covers governmental entities and a second list covers drone manufacturers who are flight-testing their products.

The EFF has a full summary of what it found and a map showing where the listed entities are located here.

Some of the entities on the COA list are unsurprising. For example, journalists have reported that Customs and Border Protection uses Predator drones to patrol the borders. It is also well known that DARPA and other branches of the military are authorized to fly drones in the US. However, this is the first time we have seen the broad and varied list of other authorized organizations, including universities, police departments, and small towns and counties across the United States. The COA list includes universities and colleges like Cornell, the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, and Eastern Gateway Community College, as well as police departments in North Little Rock, Arkansas; Arlington, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Gadsden, Alabama; and Ogden, Utah, to name just a few. The COA list also includes small cities and counties like Otter Tail, Minnesota and Herington, Kansas. The Google map linked above plots out the locations we were able to determine from the lists, and is color coded by whether the authorizations are active, expired or disapproved.

The second list we received includes all the manufacturers that have applied for authorizations to test-fly their drones. This list is less surprising and includes manufacturers like Honeywell, the maker of Miami-Dade’s T-Hawk drone; the huge defense contractor Raytheon; and General Atomics, the manufacturer of the Predator drone. This list also includes registration or “N” numbers,” serial numbers and model names, so it could be useful for determining when and where these drones are flying.

Keep in mind that drones will almost certainly reduce the privacy of citizen activities, and their are questions about whether and to what extent they can be used to watch citizens acting on their own property without a warrant. And they can operate undetected.

Now drones are also being used domestically for non-military purposes, raising significant privacy concerns. For example, this past December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased its ninth drone. It uses these drones inside the United States to patrol the U.S. borders—which most would argue is within its agency mandate—but it also uses them to aid state and local police for routine law enforcement purposes. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported in December that CBP used one of its Predators to roust out cattle rustlers in North Dakota. The Times quoted local police as saying they “have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June.” State and local police are also using their own drones for routine law enforcement activities from catching drug dealers to finding missing persons. Some within law enforcement have even proposed using drones to record traffic violations.

Drones are capable of highly advanced and almost constant surveillance, and they can amass large amounts of data. They carry various types of equipment including live-feed video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. Some newer drones carry super high resolution “gigapixel” cameras that can “track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet[,] . . . [can] monitor up to 65 enemies of the State simultaneously[, and] . . . can see targets from almost 25 miles down range.” Predator drones can eavesdrop on electronic transmissions, and one drone unveiled at DEFCON last year can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations—without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer. Drones are also designed to carry weapons, and some have suggested that drones carrying weapons such as tasers and bean bag guns could be used domestically.

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Internet freedom

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Sergey Brin, speaking to the Guardian today, sends up a warning flare regarding Internet freedoms.

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google’s partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks.

He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.

Regardless of your feelings about Google as a company, he is certainly correct in voicing these concerns.

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Political quote of the day

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It’s a ridiculous argument. Ridiculous. It’s been largely debunked this week by the people who have looked at it. It’s a ridiculous way to look at the problem. And this is a political moment and you’re going to be seeing — just to borrow a line from Mario Cuomo — “you’re going to see a lot of politicians choose to campaign in fiction, but we have to govern in fact.”

–Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, criticizing the claims made by Mitt Romney last week that women have been disproportionately hurt by the recession.

It takes one to know one

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Kip Hawley, head of the TSA from July, 2005, to January, 2009, has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that is worth a full read. He admits that the current airport security operation is broken and he offers his suggestions for reform, including allowing knives, liquids and lighters onto aircraft. A breath of fresh air from a (former) regulator.

Excerpt:

More than a decade after 9/11, it is a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to protect. Preventing terrorist attacks on air travel demands flexibility and the constant reassessment of threats. It also demands strong public support, which the current system has plainly failed to achieve.

The crux of the problem, as I learned in my years at the helm, is our wrongheaded approach to risk. In attempting to eliminate all risk from flying, we have made air travel an unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas, while at the same time creating a security system that is brittle where it needs to be supple.

Any effort to rebuild TSA and get airport security right in the U.S. has to start with two basic principles:

First, the TSA’s mission is to prevent a catastrophic attack on the transportation system, not to ensure that every single passenger can avoid harm while traveling. Much of the friction in the system today results from rules that are direct responses to how we were attacked on 9/11. But it’s simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.

Second, the TSA’s job is to manage risk, not to enforce regulations. Terrorists are adaptive, and we need to be adaptive, too. Regulations are always playing catch-up, because terrorists design their plots around the loopholes.

True online privacy?

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Nicholas Merrill at the 27th Chaos Communicati...

Nicholas Merrill at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One can hope. Check out this article by Declan McCullagh at Wired:

Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.

Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he’s raising funds to launch a national “non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption” that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.

The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also — and in practice this is likely more important — challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

I would pay much more for this kind of online security. I hope Merrill makes it come true.

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Anti-trust quote of the day

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Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open… Two years after the agency model came to bookselling, Amazon is losing its chokehold on the e-book market: its share has fallen from about 90 percent to roughly 60 percent… Brick-and-mortar bookstores are starting to compete through their partnership with Google, so loyal customers can buy e-books from them at the same price as they would from Amazon. Direct-selling authors have also benefited, as Amazon more than doubled its royalty rates in the face of competition… The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.

– Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

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Several US Courts of Appeal have broadly applied the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (enacted in the 1980s) in a way that criminalizes activities such as using a computer for purposes violating an employer’s Internet use policy or violating the terms of a service of a website. No reasonable person would view such “violations” as a crime and these courts have exposed people to needless prosecution.

But now, the Ninth Circuit has brought some sanity. From The Register:

In a highly anticipated test of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit construed the law narrowly Tuesday, saying prosecutors can’t use it to go after someone who checks sports scores from a work computer or fibs on Facebook. The 1984 law is an anti-hacking statute, not a tool to make federal criminals of anyone who violates employer computer policies or a website’s terms of service, the en banc panel said in a 9-2 opinion in U.S. v. Nosal, 10-10038.

“The government’s construction of the statute would expand its scope far beyond computer hacking to criminalize any unauthorized use of information obtained from a computer,” Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for the majority. “This would make criminals of large groups of people who would have little reason to suspect they are committing a federal crime.”

You can read the decision here.

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Bizarre

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George Zimmerman, accused of murdering an unarmed teenager, has apparently lost his attorneys, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The lawyers for George Zimmerman, the member of a neighborhood watch group who killed an unarmed teenager, said they were withdrawing as his legal counsel, a surprise twist in a case that has riveted the nation.

“We’ve lost contact with him,” attorney Craig Sonner said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “He’s gone on his own.” Mr. Sonner said the last time he had communicated with his client was on Sunday. Since then, Mr. Zimmerman hadn’t returned phone calls, text messages or emails, he said.

What the hell? This comes on the same day that Zimmerman launched his own website, seeking donations for his legal defense.

Competing on worker protections

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How are Apple’s competitors doing in terms of disclosing or reducing worker abuse at their plants in China?

None too well, according Nick Bilton in the New York Times.

Over the past week I have asked Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Lenovo about their reports on labor conditions. Many, if not all, of these electronics makers also use Foxconn.

Most responded with a boilerplate public relations message. Some didn’t even respond. The answer from Barnes & Noble, the maker of the Nook e-reader, was typical. Mary Ellen Keating, a senior vice president, said only, “We don’t comment on our supply chain vendors.” Ms. Keating wouldn’t say why Barnes & Noble does not discuss its manufacturing.

Lenovo e-mailed an off-topic report on sustainability.

Samsung, which sells far more cellphones than Apples does, gave no response.

Although some technology companies share some information about their audits, none go into detail about the violations they find or what they are doing to fix problems.

“When violations exist, they don’t follow up nearly as well as Apple does,” said Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, which monitors and investigates labor conditions in China.

Disclosure: I am long AAPL.

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