Privacy

DRJ at Patterico's points to a "peeping tom" case that was dismissed by the court because it took place in public, ruling that the law under which the person was charged did not allow for an expectation of privacy when in public.  Patterico notes that this would mean that no one, even in public, has an expectation of privacy beneath their clothes (the offense here was someone sneaking a picture up a girl's skirt), and suggests that the legislature will rapidly correct the oversight by allowing for an expectation of privacy, in public, for people wearing clothes.

Unintended Consequence: security scanning equipment, which uses sonar to create a detailed body image through a person's clothes, will violate the expectation of privacy and become subject to the 4th Amendment's warrant-or-consent requirements.  Simultaneously, all of Hollywood's paparrazi will declare bankruptcy.

... so that they can evesdrop easier.  Ye gods.  There is absolutely no reason for anyone to be forced to design their network, their software, or anything else to make it easier for the police to violate the Fourth Amendment.  That onus falls upon the police.  Some networks are even deliberately designed to be difficult or impossible to intercept, and their users generally consider this a feature.  Is all public speech on the topic of cryptography now verboten unless it includes an FBI backdoor?

Unlike tags now used to enforce curfews for general criminal offenders, which communicate on localised radio frequencies, the new device uses global satellite positioning technology. This will allow probation services and police to pinpoint the wearer anywhere in the UK to within three metres.

The device is capable of providing a detailed diary at the end of every day of where the user has been.

The electronic diary can be studied remotely by experts to build up a profile of the offender which will help them predict whether the person will offend again.

So, in short, we have a device that records its own position on a continuing basis and reports that to police, who then try to analyze the individuals behavior patterns to predict recidivism rates. We have an initial application to sex offenders, always an easy group to target ("SAVE THE CHILDREN!"), but applied post-release when they have served their sentence and, in theory, have their rights restored. And we have a prior program of similar nature applied, it seems, to offenses as minor as a curfew violation.

Britain has truly become a living hell. And it's only getting worse.

From Declan's Politech list:

The government has published a Privacy Act notice about its CAPPS-2 program, which would require all airlines to provide JetBlue-style information (full PNRs) to the government -- all the time, before every flight. It's like another JetBlue database dump that happens again and again, day after day, month after month, airline after airline. Affecting everyone who ever flies.

CAPPS-2 is the real thing, for which the Torch Concepts/JetBlue contract was one of the test runs. The government is taking public comments on the CAPPS-2 proposal, by email or postal mail, between now and September 30th. After that, if you send them your opinion, they'll ignore it (even more than usual).

As a brief overview, CAPPS-2 would require airlines to collect peoples' full legal name, residence address, home phone number, and date of birth (none of which is currently used by airlines today) before they can even make a flight reservation. They would be required to hand this information, and everything else in the PNR (flight reservation), to the government, LONG BEFORE the flight takes off. Then the government (or its "contractors") would do the same kind of data matching that Torch Concepts did, hooking up your flight reservations to credit databases and many other government and private databases. The difference is that if YOUR data was one of those "anomalous records" (that didn't fit one of the standard patterns of your airline's customers), you would be singled out to be specially searched, and/or kept off the airplane.

The preposterous invasion of privacy proposed by our government under the label "CAPPS-2" is in its public comment period until September 30th. You have until that date to submit your comments, by email, to privacy@dhs.gov with the subject DHS/TSA-2003-1. The headline link is to the proposal itself (PDF format). The report from Torch Concepts on the JetBlue test run is also available. If you would prefer to go through the EFF for your comments, they have an alert with a pre-written comment letter.

Thanks to Declan's Politech list for information on the public comment period.

Officials plan to put information about the state´s 1,200 registered sex offenders on the Internet to allow residents to easily determine if a convicted offender lives in their neighborhood.

The Department of Public Safety plans to launch the online sex offender registry on Monday.

The Legislature instructed the department to have a site up and running by the end of the year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such Internet registries do not infringe on sex offenders´ constitutional rights.

This one comes back to the basic issue of what happens to a criminal once they have "served their time". There are basically three options:

1. Allow full restoration of rights, including privacy, upon release.
2. Use registries like this one to "keep an eye on them" (in a manner similar to a criminal on probation).
3. Do not release those deemed liked to commit additional crimes if released.

   The problems with each proposal should be obvious. If you allow full rights, some will likely commit new crimes (and the rate for sex offenses is supposedly very high). If you use "sex offender registries" then you are taking an active measure that will likely prevent the criminal from ever having a normal, successful life; in other words, while you are making sure that potential victims are aware of the criminal's history (if they bother to check), you are also increasing the rate of recidivism by denying non-criminal activities. And if you simply keep them locked up once their sentence has been served, you've suddenly moved into the realm of locking people up for what they might do; thoughtcrime.

   I don't know what the answer is, but I'm not sure I like any of them.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the government's attempt to bar the press and the public from a trial where plaintiff John Gilmore is challenging the constitutionality of requiring airline passengers to show ID.

Last week, the government tried to sidetrack Gilmore's appeal to the Ninth Circuit by asking to have the case heard in secret and with motions filed "under seal," arguing that disclosing the security directive could be "detrimental to the security of transportation."

"This case is about the unconstitutionality of secret law as well as about forcing people to show ID," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "We're glad the court didn't buy into this administration's obsession with secrecy."

When Gilmore's case was dismissed by US District Judge Susan Illston in 2002, the government refused to show the challenged regulations to the district court -- or admit that the regulations even existed.

Although this is a victory, it needs to be taken in context. No one is even remotely able to become familiar with all the aspect of the law that they deal with in their daily life, much less the law covering rare situations. It has been estimated that there are over 20,000 gun laws on the books already. Who could possibly expect to remember all of those laws? And yet, we are told that ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The fact is, humans operate on a set of very basic assumptions about what society considers acceptable. Simple rules like "Don't hurt other people" and "Don't take other people's property". Even those rules require lawyers to analyze the details of a case when the stakes become high enough. The more complex you make the legal code, the less likely people are to follow it successfully, simply because they do not know and can not know what the law is -- only the simple rules they have managed to internalize.

Insofar as the law agrees with those rules, it will be generally obeyed. Not because of the law -- because of the social rules. Thus, we have the illusion of being "law-abiding" citizens when in fact we are merely following our existing social mores.

That's why victimless crimes, like the drug laws, get no traction among the people. They conflict with the social rules that say "It's OK if you aren't hurting anyone or stealing their property". There are broad efforts to create a new social rule ("Don't do drugs") but those efforts have, so far, failed miserably. Pushing rules from the top down doesn't work. They have to start with the people.

US law-makers have taken steps towards imposing controls on hidden software that can secretly spy on online habits. A key congressional panel endorsed a bill that would force the makers of spyware to notify users before installing any software on their PCs. Spyware is a broad term for software that hides on a PC, collecting data about you and what you do on the net. The proposed measures could become law later this year, according to one of the panel members.

This is a mixed bag. It will presumably help legitimate software companies understand the need to notify users before installing anything like this, but legitimate software companies are not really the problem. The problem is the illegitimate software companies that distribute spyware using security holes in the Windows operating system. This law won't stop them, although it might allow for punishment once caught.

The real solution would be for either Microsoft to fix their broken piece-of-excrement operating system, or for people to stop using it. But neither one is likely.

In the absense of a proper fix, passing laws to protect buggy software from the consequences of its poor design choices will only encourage similarly poor software design.

The ACLU has a really good animation up about privacy and pizza delivery. (No, really). It's not directed at anything specific, just privacy in general. It's both hilarious and terrifying -- watch it yourself and send it to your friends. They'll get the point, and they'll be more willing to listen the next time.