Tiburon Approves Recording Every Car That Enters/Leaves... Despite More Evidence Of Traffic Camera Abuse In UK

from the feeling-safer-yet? dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about plans in the wealthy coastal town of Tiburon here in northern California to photograph and record the license plate info of every car entering or leaving the town. It kicked off quite a debate in the comments, and now comes the news that the town is moving forward with the plan, despite complaints about civil liberties and privacy violations. Of course, it's worth noting that just as this plan is moving forward, reports out of the UK are indicating that law enforcement there has been abusing traffic cameras for purposes well beyond traffic monitoring. They're using traffic camera images of traffic around political protests to note cars that appear at multiple such events, and placing them on some sort of terrorist "watch lists." Police are apparently going through the database of images and "marking" certain cars, which then allow them to be searched in the fight against terrorism. Not that there's a big protest culture in Tiburon, but this certainly shows how a simple traffic camera effort can escalate into something that is much more questionable from a civil rights standpoint.

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Christian Engstrom Explains The Pirate Party's Position: Freedom To Communicate; Freedom From Privacy Invasion

from the sounds-reasonable-enough dept

Christian Engstrom, the representative from the Swedish Pirate Party who is now a member of the European Parliament has written an opinion piece in the Financial Times where he explains the basic rights he is fighting for and the worries about where society and culture go if we continue to allow a few small industries to overpower everyone else's rights:

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not "ours" at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

He details the inevitable push by copyright holders to simply block what the internet enables because their old business models can't keep up and they're unwilling to change:

The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.

While certainly copyright system defenders love to mock the Pirate Party based on its name alone, the basic tenets of what Engstrom speaks about are quite important and reasonable: encouraging creativity by enabling technologies is much more important than protecting an obsolete business model -- and stomping out individual privacy rights or technologies just because a few old businesses can't compete any more just doesn't make any rational sense.

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Understanding The Pirate Party

from the good-or-bad? dept

In writing about The Pirate Party's success in winning a seat in the EU Parliament, I noted that I wasn't necessarily a fan of The Pirate Party's name or some of its positions, but I do think the Party is bringing some attention to important issues. Ivor Tossell, at The Globe and Mail, has an interview with Christian Engstrom from The Pirate Party, who will be taking the seat, where they discuss a variety of issues -- including the name. When Tossell questions why it wasn't called something like the Copyright Reform Party, Engstrom pointed out (most likely correctly): "Because if that had been the name, you wouldn't be talking to me."

The other issue, that was raised in the comments to that post, was the assertion that members of The Pirate Party aren't actually interested in the civil rights and freedom issues the party stands for, but that they just want "free stuff." However, in the audio interview, Engstrom does a good job highlighting why the issues they fight for are very much civil rights issues. He talks about the value of privacy and human rights -- as well as access to information.

Much of the discussion does focus on the name. Engstrom insists that the name is essential -- and notes that he joined the party because the word "pirate" acts as an effective shorthand for everything that the party stands for. Tossell, though, does raise some important questions about how far the Party can go with the name, however. I tend to agree. While I agree that calling it The Pirate Party helps in getting initial attention (and press attention), it also brings out those sorts of false accusations that it's just about "getting free stuff" rather than serious issues that impact civil rights and innovation.

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EU Court Says Simply Taking Someone's Photo Can Violate Their Civil Rights

from the who-did-what-now? dept

I'm definitely a big supporter of privacy rights, but sometimes it seems that big time privacy rights supporters go too far. The latest is that an EU court on human rights has declared that simply taking someone's photograph can be a violation of their privacy. In the past, laws in Europe have said that you can't necessarily publish a photo of someone without their permission, but merely taking the photo was allowed. No longer. In the press release about the decision, the court explained its reasoning:

"The Court reiterated that the concept of private life was a broad one which encompassed the right to identity. It stressed that a person's image revealed his or her unique characteristics and constituted one of the chief attributes of his or her personality. The Court added that effective protection of the right to control one's image presupposed, in the present circumstances, obtaining the consent of the person concerned when the picture was being taken and not just when it came to possible publication."

Now, I could potentially understand such reasoning in private settings, but the statements above don't seem to limit the issue to private settings. The situation in the case itself also highlights what's a gray area between public and private. It involved a hospital that photographed a newborn baby -- as it does with all newborn babies. The parents protested and demanded the negatives, claiming that the photograph violated their baby's privacy rights -- and the court agreed. What's troubling is the implications of such a ruling, that you simply cannot photograph anyone without their official approval. This will almost certainly lead to new lawsuits, and even begins to raise some other questions. If it's a violation of someone's privacy rights to photograph them, at what point is it a violation of their rights just to see them?

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Up Is Down, Black Is White, Not Discriminating Against Internet Traffic Is Discriminating

from the explain-please? dept

While a bunch of consumer groups have come out in favor of keeping the internet neutral, a bunch of civil rights groups are taking the opposing view. However, the reasoning is hard to follow, as it doesn't make very much sense: "The effective prioritization of P2P traffic would represent an altogether new type of 'back of the bus' second-class status for our speech on broadband networks -- and ought to be resoundingly rejected." Actually, it's the use of traffic management that would create a second-class status for some traffic. Preserving network neutrality does exactly the opposite -- making sure all packets are treated equally. What the groups seem to be saying -- incorrectly -- is that by not using traffic management, P2P traffic is prioritized. That's not true. It's treated equally with any other traffic.

It's completely fair to argue that treating all packets equally doesn't make sense -- as many have. However, to claim that treating all packets equally somehow makes some traffic "second-class" is an outright misrepresentation. No one denies (perhaps other than these civil rights groups) that traffic management is all about officially making certain kinds of traffic second-class. They just argue that this is necessary and reasonable. The filing by these civil rights groups is simply backwards.

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China Can Access Mobile Phone Data To Spy On People

from the but,-you-know,-only-for-good-reasons dept

Given China's mentality towards its citizens, it probably won't surprise many people to find out that the head of the country's biggest mobile phone operator gleefully acknowledges that it can spy on anyone's location and has no qualms about handing that info over to authorities. He also talks about how the company is considering using this data to better target advertisements. While the article paints this as somehow shocking, it's been widely assumed that this was true already. And, the idea, as expressed in the article, that it wouldn't or couldn't happen in the United States seems a bit naive as well. Given how telcos helped the US government spy on phone calls without warrants, it seems like it may already be happening here as well.

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Surveillance Society: How Different Is The US From China?

from the some-similarities-here... dept

Over the weekend, the NY Times had an article that's stirring some discussion online, about China's new high-tech surveillance campaign, involving a ton of surveillance cameras combined with ID cards that include a ton of personal data about each individual. Much of the discussion is focused on the fact that US companies are often the suppliers providing the technology to make this possible -- the type of thing that gets Congress all riled up to start grandstanding. However, as you read through the details, you have to wonder how different things really are in the US. Admittedly, the Chinese plan goes further than what's being done elsewhere, but the Boston Globe (owned by the NY Times, incidentally) has a totally different article on how much money the Department of Homeland Security is spending on surveillance cameras for state and local governments around the US -- as well as an article on the push for the Real ID Act that would require a national ID card. Now, the easy defense for that is that it's to help defend against crime and terrorism -- but that's almost exactly the same claim the Chinese government is making. So unless we're willing to look at the same issues in the US, it seems rather hypocritical to complain about US firms supplying the technology for China to do something quite similar to what we're doing at home.

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