During a hearing to review the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, Congress was told by intelligence official Donald Kerr that, “…it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.” Right, because we all know what a great job businesses are doing keeping our data safe! It is unacceptable for an official to declare that our rights need to be usurped and then have us rely on businesses to keep our records safe; they’ve been failing to do that for years, why would there be any difference now? In fact, if Mr. Kerr’s plan went through, these companies would be bigger targets for exploitation as they’d hold a bigger payout for would be attackers. Come on, no more ‘give up your rights to survive’ rhetoric, we’ve had enough.  There’s more good coverage on this at Wired.

Update: so someone started a petition on the Apple forums proposing that Apple either build iTunes for Linux, or they ‘unlock’ the locked database they introduced. Want to see the thread? Well it was here, but apparently Apple saw fit to remove it. That, along with their firmware upgrades to the iPhone that would undo (or even brick) previously modified phones, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want to have ‘open’ products. Check Digg for more coverage/commentary.

After being excited about the new iPod’s released by Apple just weeks ago, now we’re hearing that they may contain code to lock people out of their own devices. BoingBoing picks up the story, “The latest iPods have a cryptographic “checksum” in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn’t exist — like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players. Notice that this has nothing to do with piracy – this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware.” I know that as a Linux user I’m certainly in the minority of computer users, however Linux has been seen as a true alternative to Windows by some of Apple’s biggest competitors, Dell and HP. Additionally, it’s amazing that with the recent momentum towards opening up digital rights in their distribution of (some) DRM free songs from the iTunes store that Apple would choose to limit their customer’s choice by limiting how they can use your device. This is exactly what we’re concerned about when we say Digital Rights. How do you have rights if something you buy has limits on how you can use it? Now some are speculating that the lack of DRM is the reason Apple wants to lock their iPods down, “It’s hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can’t build their own players to load up iPods — now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it’s conceivable that we’d get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy — this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).”

There are reports of what is going on, as far as a technical level, “At the very start of the database, a couple of what appear to be SHA1 hashes have been inserted which appear to lock the iTunes database to one particular iPod and prevent any modification of the database file. If you try to do either of these, the hashes will not match and the iPod will report that it contains “0 songs” when the iTunesDB would otherwise be perfectly adequate.” Of course it’s pretty much assumed that some hackers will be able to get around this, but then any ‘updates’ released by Apple will fill these holes as they appear. So while this is hardly the first time a big company has tried to lock in customers, it comes somewhat unexpected from a company like Apple. I saw a sticker at Defcon that summed up all of the digital rights concern with the simple phrase, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” and that’s true on many levels. Here’s hoping that Apple will think about how their new scheme limit’s their users’ digital rights, and has an ‘update’ that returns them to the freedom they deserve. Otherwise I, and I’m sure many more, users will migrate to another audio player.

Two years ago, when a wiretapping proposal similar to the FISA expansion, California Senator Dianne Feinstein said that the proposal, “calls into question the integrity and credibility of our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.” Then last week, just days after stating, “There is a suspicion that the administration wants to move too boldly. And once you sacrifice rights, it’s hard to get those rights protected again“, she went and voted for the FISA expansion (S. 1927)! She’s not alone, 15 other Senate Democrats also voted to give the government even more power to wiretap. What am I missing here Dianne?

After the Democrats voted to expand the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) authority to spy on Americans without warrants, EFF has stepped up to show how to fight it. “Congress Caves on Warrantless Snooping — What Happened, and How To Fix It”

We also have to take the fight back to Congress, and for that we need your help. The most important check on the abuse of power ultimately isn’t Congress — it’s you. It’s up to you to hold your representatives accountable for allowing this egregious change or supporting it outright. Don’t let them think for a second that this went unnoticed: send them a letter here, call them to voice your opposition, and visit their home offices in your district during the August recess. Spread the word to your friends and family about what Congress has done and urge them to take action, too.

Fortunately, the law has a sunset date, and, more importantly, congressional leaders are already signaling that they want to revise the law before then. Restoring protections for your fundamental rights shouldn’t wait even a day. Neither should our efforts to make sure that happens — take action now.

It’s time to contact your representative and express your outrage, this must be rolled back.

Left to chance came online as my personal blog in the Fall of 2001. As events that year dictated, it quickly turned political as I found my voice and opted to raise awareness and spark conversation about the many evolving issues of the day.  In 2007 LTC had become neglected for two reasons; the news highlighting my discontent was being covered by popular media outlets better than in the past, and two, the site has been ‘banned’ at my place of employment, so that I could not update it during the day.  I’m actually kind of proud of that last fact, but I have since left that job and now have the freedom to do as I please once again.

Then, after attending an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Q&A session and speaking with their lawyers and staff at Defcon 15 (August, 2007), I donated to EFF and became a member. I left the conference with a feeling of wanting to do something to compliment their work in not only promoting awareness of digital rights and online privacy, but in trying to effect change by organizing my thoughts and sparking conversation on the topics. Once this occurs it is my hope that Left to chance will serve as some sort of sentinel that helps direct people to protest current and proposed laws so they can fight for their digital rights and online privacy.

I hope you find the site useful as well as educational.  Thanks.

Phil

After seeing an Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF.org Q&A session, and speaking with their staff lawyers last weekend at Defcon15, I become a member. Because of this I’m refocusing ltc to focus on digital privacy, rights and the law. Stand by for new articles later this week.