ARTS & FARCES internet

Imagine a scenario where the electronic media you watch—and more importantly, how you watch it—is closely monitored. If you own a ReplayTV 4000, that’s exactly the scenario you’re going to find yourself in. ReplayTV 4000 is a digital video recorder. It works similarly to a VCR except it records video and audio to a hard disk instead of tape.

In the ongoing battle between the technology and entertainment industries, the media companies struck a decisive blow late last week when they somehow managed to get Federal Magistrate Judge Charles Eick to order Sonicblue to monitor the television viewing habits of its customers.

Only in America—but probably not only in Orange County, California—can a judge under house arrest on six counts of possessing child pornography and facing additional charges of child molestation run for re-election to the bench. Virtually unopposed.

Oddsmakers put Judge Ronald C. Kline’s chances of re-election at 50-50, mostly because no other names will be on the ballot, and even though he faces up to 30 years in prison. After Kline was indicted, 11 other candidates entered, but they’ll be write-in candidates.

In a strange twist, pornography was found on Kline’s home and office computers after a hacker got into one of Kline’s computers and forwarded the incriminating information to an Internet pedophile watchdog.

Ain’t America great?

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a lawsuit that seeks to force the disclosure of records related to the sale of personal information to law enforcement agencies. EPIC believes that both the U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments are in violation of the law by failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by EPIC.

EPIC filed the FOIA requests in response to reports that ChoicePoint is selling personal information to federal law enforcement agencies. Documents obtained by EPIC indicate that ChoicePoint and other profiling companies, including Experian, have sold personal information to the IRS. ChoicePoint has gone so far as to create a federal government portal site to service its relationship with the IRS.

Scott Harris has written an excellent history and overview of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that was published in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.

Harris quotes Dave Farber summing up the division between the old and new Internet: “In the early days the Net was free. It was an information barter economy. You gave things to people, they gave things to you. It was that way for a long time, until relatively recently…. It was almost like the utopian socialism attitude of the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

The Harris piece also notes John Perry Barlow’s comparision of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center to the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to orchestrate the Nazi takeover of Germany. The comparison is somewhat inflamatory: the Reichstag fire was set by the Nazis themselves; there’s no evidence that any American government official had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

The best quote is saved for last, when John Gilmore is asked about the vitality of the EFF’ work: “What we’ve been doing has been needed all along. You always need the Constitution. Right?”

Best I can tell, MSNBC broke the Magic Lantern story in November 2001. Magic Lantern is the code-name for the FBI’s Internet spying software that is reportedly capable of entering an individual computer like a virus and recording all user activity. Keystrokes, passwords, encryption keys, mouse-clicks, menu selections, everything one does on his computer will be dutifully reported back to the FBI. For the most part, this story has gotten very little coverage in the mainstream media since MSNBC’s first report. Even after the FBI acknowledged the project in the month after the MSNBC story first appeared (prior to that, the FBI would neither confirm nor deny that it was working on Magic Lantern), the mainstream media mostly ignored the story.

While the technology employed by Magic Lantern is probably nothing new—readily available hacker tools like Back Orifice and SubSeven are both means to the same end—the FBI project would be a dramatic advance for law enforcement. Magic Lantern’s main use would likely be to obtain the private encryption keys of suspects. The software could be installed by something as innocuous as an email message apparently from a friend. Some sort of keystroke-detection device installed by an agent has already been used by the FBI in at least one case, but Magic Lantern would eliminate the risk associated with physically planting a monitoring device on a suspect’s computer.