Westboro Baptist Church
In a strange turn of events, news outlets are reporting Anonymous, the same ‘group’ (or loose association depending on who you listen to) responsible for the HB Gary fiasco is now threatening the Westboro Baptist Church. Or is it? Suspicions are surfacing the threat was posted by Westboro Baptist Church itself. I have an interesting observation regarding the & symbol.
First, this is the press release by ‘anonymous’ which contains some peculiar uses of the & as illustrated below.
- Free Speech & the Advocate of the People
- chauvinists & religious zealots
- attention & in the name of religion
- Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information
- intimidation and mental & emotional abuse
- Cease & desist your protest campaign
- Kansas, & close your public Web sites.
- propaganda & detestable doctrine
- conduction & promotion
- bigoted operations & doctrines
Note the significant use of & – Westboro Baptist Church is a fascinating group to me. I feel they represent a test of our dedication to free speech, the first amendment’s Gethsemane so to speak. Something about the post sounds like the WBC. For as long as it remains up, look at WBC’s reply. Very curious. Anonymous posted a reply to the WBC reply, note the difference in word usage.
Now look at this sentence:
You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance.
Note the super-run-on-super-comma sentence structure with two semi-colons. This is the same type of sentence structure used by WBC. There has been some research in the past to identify unique aspects of an individual’s writing style for author identification. I’m not overly impressed by its application in general because anyone who is aware of it can alter their writing style to suit. However, if you are not aware of it you can be betrayed by your own writing style. It is contended in the anonymous second reply that WBC has left their ports open to collect IPs for legal action. That would be an interesting outcome.
Personally, I think the “Operation Westboro” call to arms sounds remarkably like Westboro Baptist Church themselves, and any evidence of a WBC honey pot only strengthens that view.
P2P lawsuits examined with graph theory
P2P infringement cases are fascinating for several reasons. They are the essence of my argument the intersection of law and technology is going to be a significant one in the future once courts become more widely cognizant of the difference between abstraction and implementation. A case I am keeping tabs on now ACHTE/NEUNTE v DOES 1-2,094 is interesting because of the argument advanced regarding the BitTorrent protocol.
To review, with BitTorrent and most modern P2P protocols an individual offers to share a file. Various users locate files of interest to them. Traditionally, in the BitTorrent model the users locate a torrent file from a search engine or some other source, the torrent file points to a tracker which delivers a list of contacts to the program who have portions of the desired file. The program requests parts of the file from a variety of sources and reassembles the file once all the parts are downloaded.
ACTA Treaty
If pressed, I would name the ACTA treaty and Network Neutrality as the two most threatening issues of the day with regard to the Internet. The ACTA treaty has, until recently, been under super secret negotiations hidden from public scrutiny. There have been a number of leaks, and finally an official release of a treaty draft a few days ago. The treaty is titled as an “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” , but it, at minimum, shares equal space with combating so-called Internet ‘piracy’. Section 2.18(3) is particularly interesting and pertinent in the same context as DMCA and Network Neutrality issues.
Section 4: [Special Measures Related to Technological Enforcement of Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment]
ARTICLE 2.18 [ENFORCEMENT PROCEDURES IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT] 45
[...]
-
Without prejudice to the rights, limitations, exceptions, or defenses to [[ patent, industrial design, trademark and][copyright or related rights]][intellectual property rights] infringement available under its law, including with respect to the issue of exhaustion of rights, each Party [confirms that] [shall provide for] [civil remedies as well as limitations, exceptions, or defenses with respect to the application of such remedies, are available in its legal system in cases of third party liability[ 47 ][or liability for those who authorize infringement, or both] for [[patent, industrial design, trademark and][copyright or related rights]][intellectual property rights] infringement. 48
[...]
Each Party recognizes that some persons 49 use the services of third parties, including online service providers,[ 50 ] for engaging in [ patent, industrial design and trademark,] copyright or related rights infringement.
[...]
50
[For purposes of this Article, online service provider and provider mean a provider of online services or network access, or the operators of facilities therefore, and includes an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user’s choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a preliminary legal analysis of the treaty draft, noting:
“ACTA contains various provisions requiring countries to impose liability on intermediaries for their users’ behavior (Article 2.18(3)). This would apply to Internet intermediaries, but also to intermediaries such as libraries and educational institutions, which frequently provide Internet access to their customers and users.” – eff.org
Disturbing Trends Across the Pond
Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data
Since October 2007 when the refusal to disclose decryption keys was made criminal in the UK, the buzz around the smallish digital forensics research community has been alarm. Security researcher, by definition always on the lookout for failings in a system, immediately proposed a situation in which encrypted data is present on a system for which the user did not have the decryption key thus creating a crime through ignorance, not of the law but of the key. As reported by the Register in the above link, two individuals have been convicted under this ridiculous law.
Social media, 3rd party data storage, and warrants
Just a quick post about this article which I came across this morning regarding warrants going after facebook data. This is a very interesting trend with both privacy as well as public policy implications for the continued advancement of technology. One of my colleagues, who I did some privacy and ethics writing with earlier this year, and I have been preparing a paper on the problems the border searches of laptops cause from a technology adoption perspective – essentially our argument in brief involves technology becoming more and more a form of external cognition, and such searches discourage the continued progress for fear of privacy violations.
The flip side of this argument, is technology is adaptive and the past has demonstrated a continued evolution of technical solutions to circumvent legal interference. The evolution of peer2peer networks from Napster to the Pirate Bay and beyond is particularly illustrative. Attempts by US corporations and ICE to shut down these systems have met with increasingly sophisticated adaptations – decentralization, distributed trackers, moves to DNS registrars and TLDs outside of US jurisdiction, encryption, private tracking and so forth.
The former, chilling effect on technology adoption, is more applicable to low technology users who are not competent to judge the measure of their privacy in an online ecosystem. The latter is more applicable to high technology users – early adopters with significant technical savvy and understanding of the implementation details these systems use. Low technology users are more apt to unwittingly void their privacy even if their expectations of it are objectively unreasonable or to not adopt the technology out of fear. High technology users are more likely to meet the legal challenges with technical solutions – like an immune system – to move the technical state of the art continuously ahead of the legal competence.
There is a paper in here somewhere, but that will have to wait until I return from my study abroad session and get back into work mode.