It's not unusual for government officials -- the very people we disagree with regarding civil liberties issues -- to agree with us on consumer privacy issues.

But don't forget that this person advocated for full-body scanners at airports while on the payroll of a scanner company.

Imagine a world in which every major company in America flew hundreds of thousands of drones overhead, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, collecting data on what Americans were doing down below. It's a chilling thought that would engender howls of outrage.

Now imagine that millions of Americans walk around each day wearing the equivalent of a drone on their head: a device capable of capturing video and audio recordings of everything that happens around them. And imagine that these devices upload the data to large-scale commercial enterprises that are able to collect the recordings from each and every American and integrate them together to form a minute-by-minute tracking of the activities of millions.

So, who owns and what happens to the user's data? Can the entire database be mined and analyzed for commercial purposes? What rules will apply when law enforcement seeks access to the data for a criminal or national security investigation? For how long will the data be retained?

Ubiquitous street video streaming will capture images of many people who haven't volunteered to have their images collected, collated and analyzed. Even those who might be willing to forgo some degree of privacy to enhance national security should be concerned about a corporate America that will have an unrestricted continuous video record of millions.

We need to consider what rights consumers have, and what rights nonparticipant third parties should have.

Maybe the market can take care of this problem. But the likely pervasiveness of this type of technology convinces me that government must play a regulatory role.

The new data collection platforms right in front of us are much more likely to affect our lives than is the prospect of drones overhead surveilling American citizens.

According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the loss or improper disposal of paper records, portable devices like laptops or memory sticks, and desktop computers have accounted for more than 1,400 data-breach incidents since 2005 -- almost half of all the incidents reported. More than 180,000,000 individual records were compromised in these breaches...

It is the hacker -- a sort of modern folk devil who personifies our anxieties about technology -- who gets all the attention. The result is a set of increasingly paranoid and restrictive laws and regulations affecting our abilities to communicate freely and privately online, to use and control our own technology, and which puts users at risk for overzealous prosecutions and invasive electronic search and seizure practices. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the cornerstone of domestic computer-crime legislation, is overly broad and poorly defined. Since its passage in 1986, it has created a pile of confused caselaw and overzealous prosecutions.

Many members of the American public are already convinced something should be done about hackers. Many of our representatives feel the same way. A lack of knowledge of the underlying technology, much less the methods or culture, hasn't deterred legislators from crafting an overbroad response with the CISPA bill. Examining the issues more closely or reconsidering the legislation doesn't seem to be an option. After all, a "cyber Pearl Harbor" is all but inevitable, a conclusion confirmed by shouting "HACKER!" in the halls of Congress and hearing it echoed back by like-minded representatives, sympathetich government agencies, the media and a subset of the American public.

In the effort to protect society and the state from the ravages of this imagined hacker, the US government has adopted overbroad, vaguely worded laws and regulations which severely undermine internet freedom and threaten the Internet's role as a place of political and creative expression.

Ms. Napolitano said she cut the email cord while governor of Arizona “because I was just getting — you know, you get hundreds and hundreds of things all the time.”

In her current job, “which has a hundred thousand different things that happen on any given day, [not using email] allows me to focus on where I need to focus,” she added.

“I also don’t like the process where people could send you an email, then say, see, you were told, or you know this. And then it comes back two years later to say, hey, you got this email — among the thousands you get every day.

“I want to be a little more selective on how that goes,” she concluded.

Despite that manifest logic, transport companies have been slow to release that data in a form that developers can use. And even when they do, it often comes hedged around with conditions that make it useless. Here's an example from the UK, where Alex Hewson has been trying to get hold of live train data to create applications using it.

As his fascinating blog post explains, something called the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) collates the primary data:

Through its subsidiary TISL ("Train Information Services Limited", more commonly known as NRE / National Rail Enquiries) ATOC owns a datasource called Darwin. If you want an API for querying live train running information complete with all the delays and cancellations at any given moment they're the only shop in town.

As a series of blog posts by Hewson reveals, the relationship between ATOC and developers has not been of the best, especially once a formal license to use the data was required in 2009.

During a "Developer Engagement Day" in January this year, and responding, perhaps, to criticism over the way it makes this publicly-funded data available, NRE expressed a desire to work with the development community more constructively. Hewson was naturally keen to see the details of the license that was being offered in the wake of this new openness, and noted a couple of unusual elements:

There are clauses saying you'll lose access to the data if you bring TISL into "disrepute" and that the signatory may not publicly discuss the subject without written consent from TISL.

15.2. Either party shall be entitled to terminate the Agreement on notice without liability at any time if:

...

15.3.1. the Customer brings TISL, the TOCs or the passenger rail industry into disrepute

Disrepute is a fabulously broad word -- it covers anything that blackens their name even if what you said was true. In other words you aren't allowed to criticise them.

By a happy coincidence, the body that oversees the national railways in the UK, the "Office of Rail Regulation", has been conducting a review into "how NRE deals with applications for access to its RTTI database ('Darwin')." I'm sure many of the developers who have had dealings with ATOC's subsidiary over the last few years will have submitted their views on this topic. I can't wait to read them.

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When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things:

• We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.
• We evaluate the scope of the request. If it’s overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request. We do this frequently.
• We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.
• We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user’s search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.

68 percent of the requests Google received from government entities in the U.S. were through subpoenas. These are requests for user-identifying information, issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”), and are the easiest to get because they typically don't involve judges.

The 510 Bill gives new powers to an administrative branch of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry called the General Copyright Directorate (Dirección General de Derecho de Autor, henceforth DGDA). Unlike similar copyright administrative offices around the world, the DGDA will have the power to impose fines on infringers without prejudice of further criminal or civil actions.

[T]he DGDA has the power to unilaterally haul any alleged infringer, ask them to mount a defence within 15 days, impose fines of up to $100k USD ($200k for re-offenders), and on top of that this person may still have another civil case against them added to the administrative fine. Adding insult to injury, they also have to pay for the publication of the fine so that everyone knows what a nasty pirate they are.

The funds accrued by the General Copyright Directorate from the fees for the services it provides and the fines imposed in the exercise of its powers, will be aimed at improving its operational infrastructure and to boost the performance of its officers, complementary to the funds that the State Budget reserves for the operation of the entity[...]. The amounts corresponding to each official, shall not exceed fifty percent (50%) of the total basic salary monthly remuneration.

This is what I think will happen if the law passes as it stands. The DGDA will immediately try to monitor all torrent use in Panama, be it legitimate or not, and all people identified with IP addresses will be summoned and summarily fined. After all, the institution and its employees will have a direct financial incentive to assume guilt. Then those same people will be sent again and again, as there will be clear incentive to fine re-offenders.

“The problems are the same,” Schneier told Ars. “Once you build such a system, you have to build the security to ensure that only the good guys use it. And that's not an easy task. It is far more secure not to have the capabilities in the first place.”

The responses to that consultation have now been published -- all 471 of them. That's a surprisingly high number for what was once an arcane area of interest only to a few lawyers, and a measure of just how important the subject has become. On that Web page there's the following slightly unusual statement:

in the course of reviewing the responses received, it became clear that a small number of respondents had advanced criticisms or inappropriately criticised the activities of others in the sector. The Government has now carefully reviewed the submissions to establish any potentially defamatory material and has redacted any inappropriate or defamatory comments.

What makes this censorship of linked information even more striking is that alongside the main consultation document itself (pdf) the UK government also published guidance on providing "open and transparent evidence" (pdf), where we read:

When you draw on other work, a reference, and link to the original work should be included. References to other people’s work should have the relevant web link

This does not augur well for the results of the consultation. It suggests that the UK government is happy to gloss over one of the key failings of the present copyright system -- the UK collection societies -- and is seeking to present a very partial view of the real situation. It also undermines confidence in the whole consultation process: if the UK government has arbitrarily redacted true information that it finds inconvenient once, what's to say it hasn't done so multiple times elsewhere? If people aren't allowed to provide all the evidence what's the point of conducting a consultation in the first place?

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Top Three Reasons to Mandate Open Sourcing of Custom Federal Software:

Openness: Open Sourcing ensures basic fairness and transparency by making software and related artifacts available to the citizens who provided funding, consistent with the President’s 2009 declaration that “Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”

Economic Multiplier: Making Provides an economic stimulus by serving as the raw material that supports a competitive software development and services industry.

Supports the Federal “Shared First” Agenda: Maximizes value to the government by significantly increasing reuse and collaborative development between federal agencies and the private sector, consistent with the current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “Shared First” initiative.

We agree, and the first section of our source code policy is unequivocal: We use open-source software, and we do so because it helps us fulfill our mission.

Open-source software works because it enables people from around the world to share their contributions with each other. The CFPB has benefited tremendously from other people’s efforts, so it’s only right that we give back to the community by sharing our work with others.

This brings us to the second part of our policy: When we build our own software or contract with a third party to build it for us, we will share the code with the public at no charge. Exceptions will be made when source code exposes sensitive details that would put the Bureau at risk for security breaches; but we believe that, in general, hiding source code does not make the software safer.

We’re sharing our code for a few reasons:

• First, it is the right thing to do: the Bureau will use public dollars to create the source code, so the public should have access to that creation.
• Second, it gives the public a window into how a government agency conducts its business. Our job is to protect consumers and to regulate financial institutions, and every citizen deserves to know exactly how we perform those missions.
• Third, code sharing makes our products better. By letting the development community propose modifications , our software will become more stable, more secure, and more powerful with less time and expense from our team. Sharing our code positions us to maintain a technological pace that would otherwise be impossible for a government agency.

The CFPB is serious about building great technology. This policy will not necessarily make that an easy job, but it will make the goal achievable.

While governments around the world have been moving to embrace open source for a long time, adoption has been pretty slow in the U.S., though it is steadily growing as more federal agencies revise their guidelines and regulations, and some states pass laws requiring the consideration of open source options. But as a new agency that actively pursues the opportunities presented by technology, the CFPB is ahead of the curve. TechCrunch's Scott Merrill got additional details, like the fact that they are trying to lead by example:

I asked Willey what kind of advocacy — if any — the CFPB was doing (or planning to do) for open source software within the government. He shared that they’re using GitHub Enterprise internally, and have fielded a number of questions from other agencies about how they procured that and set it up. “It’s hard for us to have these conversations with other agencies without implicitly advocating an open source philosophy,” Willey told me. “So instead of trying to sell open source to other agencies on principle, we’re finding that it’s a lot easier to prove the value of open source software by showing our colleagues the great results it has gotten us.”

I was curious whether the CFPB’s policy is the natural result of more digital natives taking government jobs. According to Willey, it was “simply the byproduct of building a government organization from scratch in the information age: we are able to craft our technology philosophy with a modern perspective.”

It's good to see people in government placing an emphasis on staying at the forefront of technology, especially in terms of open source. The entire philosophy of open source is perfectly matched to the ideals of a transparent, accountable government that serves and belongs to its citizens, and hopefully the CFPB will lead more agencies in that direction.

Of course, that's an eminently sensible thing to do, not least because it wouldn't require a radical overhaul of European copyright, just some tinkering at the edges. Despite that, the idea is likely to meet stiff resistance -- and not just from the industry dinosaurs that reflexively resist any change that might reverse the copyright ratchet by even a few degrees.

At a time when the European Commission is hell-bent on getting ACTA ratified by the European Parliament, it won't take kindly to national governments going their own way on exceptions. That's particularly the case since the Commission is also drafting a new directive specifically designed to harmonize EU copyright law.

The Dutch government will be well aware of all those countervailing pressures, which makes this unexpected move all the more bold. Let's hope it inspires other EU countries to lend their weight to this much-needed initiative to make European copyright laws fit for the digital age.

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I think this "two computer problem" is a symptom of a much larger issue. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Moore's law, it's general principal is that technology gets twice as good every 18 months. So if it takes government about 18 months to do anything expensive (by expensive I mean: something that costs more than a few thousand dollars) with technology, we've built in that government must be at least one cycle behind the private sector when it comes to Moore's law. Compounding this is the sunk-cost fallacy: In order to stay just one cycle behind the rest of society, government would have to begin the purchasing process again as soon as new computers hit desks. But they won't do that, because "you just got a new computer!"

Thus, a great gap has built up, not just with the pace of work, but in the access to technology. But the thing that makes this frightening is that Moore's law isn't linear, it's exponential. With every cycle of Moore's law, the difference between two points on the curve doubles. Being one cycle behind the curve 18 months from now is twice as bad as it is today.

Bob Goodlatte spent 2011 CO-AUTHORING and INTRODUCING the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). SOPA makes the federal government EVEN BIGGER.

If passed, SOPA will dramatically increase the federal government’s role in our lives, online and offline. It authorizes the Attorney General to block websites accused of copyright infringement from search engines and ISPs. And it allows the Attorney General to “commence action” against them without a court order. SOPA will result in fewer independent websites, blogs, media sources, start-ups and tech industry jobs. And as a result, lower quality.

How will it do this, you ask? Simple. It increases the cost of doing business for U.S. tech firms, payment network providers and advertisers.

In addition to increasing legal and compliance costs for small businesses, it also increases the size and scope of the federal government.

SOPA expands the State Department, Attorney General's Office, Copyright Office and other agencies and creates a new set of bureaucrats. One we have never heard of before is the “intellectual property attache.” IP Attaches will be trained and appointed to regional bureaus, embassies and diplomatic missions throughout the world. And they work with copyright holders at the expense of taxpayers.

The logic is simple: When a citizen makes a request pursuant to the FOIA, either implicit or explicit in the request is that it seeks records that are subject to the FOIA; where the only records that exist are not subject to the FOIA, the statement that "there exist no records responsive to your FOIA request" is wholly accurate....

I write principally to convey to you my disagreement with the suggestion of David Uhlmann, former chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department, as reported in the New York Times on October 4, 2011, that "fortunately, this is an isolated situation." This probably is an unusual case; but not because it reflects an isolated problem. More probably, it is an unusual case because the Federal Tort Claims Act discourages lawyers from filing malicious prosecution cases.

When Mr. Vidrine came to me in September, 2005, I filed an administrative claim with the Department of Justice, as required by the Federal Tort Claim Act. By July, 2007, DOJ had failed (for nearly two years) to take any action on the claim, so I filed the civil suit in federal court in Lafayette, LA. I then fought with the government for over 3 ½ more years to get access to the EPA/FBI files documenting the perjury and other acts used by government agents to secure an indictment in December, 1999, and to get truthful deposition testimony uncovering how and why they had kept the prosecution going for nearly four more years (until September, 2003), when all charges were finally dismissed because there had never been a shred of evidence that any crime had been committed. I then tried the case in June, 2011.

Plainly, what happened in this case just should not happen in our country, and to minimize the number of times it happens again the FTCA should be strengthened to make it a more effective form of relief for those injured by government misconduct. Most victims of governmental abuse of power simply cannot afford to pay a lawyer to pursue malicious prosecution cases, because the standard of liability (which requires proof of the lack of “probable cause”) is high, and because malicious prosecution cases (like this one) are often complex and involve many witnesses and thousands of documents. (The government produced over 15,000 documents in this case and then argued that their extensive investigation proved that they did have probable cause and were not acting maliciously.)

Given those realities, the Federal Tort Claim Act would better serve our country’s historical interests in preserving our freedom by preventing abuses of power (1) if it allowed the Court to award punitive damages (as the Federal Court noted in its opinion in this case, stating on page 142 that “. . . given the egregious conduct displayed by an agent of the government and the devastation wrought on otherwise law-abiding citizens, had punitive damages been allowable, this Court would have awarded punitive damages in the hope of deterring such reckless and damaging conduct and abuse of power in the future;” (2) if it allowed the Court to compensate Plaintiffs for the attorneys fees they incur in prosecuting the action, (3) if it did not cap attorney fees at 25% of the Plaintiff’s recovery, and (4) if – at least in those cases which are brought solely against the United States (and not against any prosecutor personally) – it expressly allowed “malicious prosecution” claims to be based on the acts of “prosecutors.”

One of the more distressing allegations made at trial, involved allegations of Agent Phillips’ sexual, extra-marital affair (and its subsequent “cover up”) with Agent Barnhill. The evidence strongly indicated Agent Phillips deliberately used his investigation and prosecution of Hubert Vidrine to foster, further, facilitate and cloak his extra-marital affair with Agent Barnhill, and perhaps, to exert improper influence over the manner in which she investigated and reported upon this case. Agent Barnhill candidly testified that she and Agent Phillips began a physical, sexual relationship while assigned to this matter, which lasted from approximately 1996 until January or February 2001. Agent Barnhill testified she and Agent Phillips were only physically intimate when working together on the Vidrine case — in other words, they did not meet to pursue their sexual relations on occasions when they were not working the case together. Thus, the case granted the opportunity for those rendez-vous, as well as providing justification for Agent Phillips wife.

During the investigation and prosecution, Agent Barnhill, who was single, lived in South Louisiana; Agent Phillips, who was married, lived in Dallas, Texas with his wife. Prior to and at trial, plaintiffs’ counsel consistently argued Agent Phillips used the Vidrine investigation as a cover, excuse and opportunity to facilitate his illicit affair with Agent Barnhill and to hide the affair from his wife. Plaintiffs consistently argued Keith Phillips manufactured a case, both in law and fact, against Hubert Vidrine, and carefully fed the AUSA and his supervisors only the information which would further that end and perpetuate the case, all to promote access to Agent Barnhill and perpetuate and conceal their illicit affair. Regrettably, the Court agrees with plaintiffs: this inappropriate and unprofessional behavior likely was, at least in part (if not in whole) a motivation for Agent Phillips’ continued pursuit of Hubert Vidrine, without probable cause, and certainly with a complete and total reckless disregard of Hubert Vidrine’s rights.

“We diminish our legitimacy when we do things under a blanket of secrecy,” Judge Smith said in an interview. “The only way people can get confidence in what we’re doing is if they can get access to what we are doing and know why we are doing it.”

Judge Smith analyzed the 4,234 electronic surveillance orders issued in his Houston courthouse between 1995 and 2007 and found that 91.8% of them remain sealed today.

Judge Smith says he now sets time limits for the seals on orders that he signs. If prosecutors want to renew the seal, they must request an extension. “It’s more work,” Judge Smith says, “but I think it’s necessary work.”

He said he is worried that “people who aren’t indicted – regular law abiding citizens like you or me,” will never know if their records were obtained in an investigation, he says, “because these sealing orders live on indefinitely.”

This sweeping prohibition encompasses a substantial number of uses of the seal that would not suggest government endorsement, such as the display on a website of an exact copy of an official County news release that contains the image of the seal next to the text, or the publication in a newspaper of a photograph of a County official delivering a speech from a podium upon which the County seal is attached and visible.