Have you heard about REAL ID?

This is basically the US government’s way to turn state drivers licenses into national ID card and link them through one huge national database. And how will these IDs be used?

Once the IDs and database are in place, their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocuously enough, but it has become a prerequisite for a host of government services and been coopted by private companies to create massive databases of personal information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because “common machine-readable technology” will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to easily read your private information off the cards in myriad contexts.

Social Security numbers are one of the worst privacy and security threats out there. Way too many businesses use them as IDs and as a means of authentication even though they are nothing of the sort. You might be saying, “Ok, Mike, yeah that sucks, but at least we’ll be more secure with REAL ID cards, right?”

And what will you get in return? Not improved national security, because IDs do nothing to stop those who haven’t already been identified as threats, and wrongdoers will still be able to create fake documents. In fact, the IDs and database will simply create an irresistible target for identity thieves.

So basically they’ll just become another way for you to lose your identity… and cost you money… and lose your privacy. As RealNightmare.org puts it, REAL ID is:

• REAL INVASIVE - Will create America’s first national identity card, increase the thread of identity theft, enable the routine tracking of individuals, and propel us toward a surveillance society
• REAL RED TAPE - Will mean bureaucratic nightmares, long lines, repeat trips, and higher fees for individuals trying to get licenses and IDs
• REAL EXPENSIVE - With a cost in the billions, REAL ID is a hidden tax increase that will force Americans to either pay higher fees to get their IDs, or pay more in state taxes.
• REAL POINTLESS - Will do little if anything to protect against terrorism

Sounds pretty hopeless, eh? At least, the second version of REAL ID isn’t as bad as the first version:

Original legislation contained one of the most controversial elements which did not make it into the final legislation that was signed into law. It would have required states to sign a new compact known as the Driver License Agreement (DLA) as written by the Joint Driver’s License Compact/ Non-Resident Violators Compact Executive Board with the support of AAMVA which would have required states to give reciprocity to those provinces and territories in Canada and those states in Mexico that joined the DLA and complied with its provisions. As a part of the DLA, states would be required to network their databases with these provinces, territories and Mexican states. The databases that are accessible would include sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, home addresses and other information. The foreign states and provinces are not required to abide with the Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) and are free to access and use the sensitive information as they see fit.

As they see fit? Mexico can do with my social security number as they see fit? Ugh…

If you’re sick and tired of all the identity problems and privacy invasions that already exist and don’t want to see the US become any more Orwellian, help repeal the REAL ID Act. There are states and congressmen that recognize this as a flawed system, but the gov’t isn’t backing down yet. There are several other resources like UnRealID.com, RealNightmare.org, and NO2RealID.org. Do yourself a favor and find out the truth about REAL ID before it’s too late.

I don’t like buying music online. There. I’ve said it. I don’t know if that makes me an old fart or what. I just don’t like doing it. When you buy the CD, you are actually buying something concrete… something substantial. When you buy music online, you’re buying bits.

I think my biggest problem with buying online though is that you get the music files in only one format and in only one bit rate (which you typically can’t control) and slathered chalk full of DRM. If I buy tens or hundreds of albums on iTunes, I am thereby chained to using iTunes and iTunes forever else I’ll have to rebuy all that music again. And that’s assuming that iTunes and Apple will still be around 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Those facts almost make me consider renting music. You pay a relatively small fee and can download all the music you want. But then again, if you ever stop your subscription or want to transfer your music elsewhere, you’re SOL. You never really owned anything.

However, if I own the CD, I can always rip, rip and rerip the music into any format I want. MP3 is still the dominant format nowadays, but I may want all Ogg Vorbis in a few years. No problem. I have the CD, so I can rerip it. And not just that, but CDs are already a pre-existing backup to their digital counterparts. After you rip it, the CD sits on a shelf or in a case. If your iPod or Zen or NAS dies on you, you can always just pop the CD back in and rip the songs again.

All that being said, there is one online music service that I’ve tried and may continue to use. It addresses most of my problems and I don’t feel too dirty using it:

Amazon’s music downloading service is almost everything that I’ve wanted. Look at this from their help page:

Where possible, we encode our MP3 files using variable bit rates for maximum audio quality and smaller file sizes, aiming at an average of 256 kilobits per second (kbps).

DRM-free means that the MP3 files you purchase from Amazon.com do not contain any software that will restrict your use of the file.

The albums and songs you purchase from AmazonMP3 Music Downloads are free of Digital Rights Management software so that you have the flexibility to play them on any of your media players, PC or burn them to CD.

They have high bit rate files and no DRM. NO FREAKIN DRM! No matter where I put this, it will work. It’s up to me to keep my actions legal. And I’m not a 15 year old kid that is going to share all this stuff. I actually believe in buying music and supporting the artists. If I like the stuff that the artist puts out, I have no problem giving them money so that they can continue to produce more. If my collection consists of a hundred one hit wonders, maybe I need to reevaluate my musical tastes, but that’s another blog entry…

So let’s take a look at how all this works. Let’s say you want to buy an album from Amazon. You go to the album page on Amazon as normal. Look for the amazon mp3 panel in the lower right hand side and click it if it’s available. Not all albums are available, of course, but I’ve found most of the things I’ve looked for (and my tastes aren’t too terribly mainstream):

That will bring you to the album’s purchase page in the MP3 Downloads section of Amazon. From here, you can either buy your music song by song or just buy the whole album. And a lot of songs and albums are even cheaper than iTunes:

So after purchasing the music, you than need to download Amazon’s Downloader application if you haven’t already and then the .amz token file which tells the Downloader app what to do:

 

The Downloader then just goes on automatically downloading your files whether in the foreground or in the background:

And when it’s done, you’re politely informed of that too:

You can then spawn off your default music player to start listening to your new purchase or you can click on “Show Downloads” to open Explorer in the folder where all your purchases are. For me, that is C:\Users\mike\Music\Amazon MP3\. They are arranged by artist then album. Pretty typical stuff. There you have all your free and clear mp3’s to do with what you want. How beautiful…

The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a pretty bare bones app. It’s not this bloated thing sitting there in your system tray taking up CPU cycles. Consequently, it doesn’t save any state. After you close it or even if you buy and download additional songs, it will have totally forgotten everything you bought beforehand. You can only access them through the file system. But that isn’t a big deal. I don’t really like it when applications try to manage that stuff for you… like iTunes. Yes, it’s yet another thing I don’t like about iTunes.

Anyway, I’ve bought three albums in researching Amazon’s MP3 service and I think I like it. I’m still a little uncomfortable that I don’t have anything concrete to show now that ten more of my hard earned dollars are gone, but I guess I need to get my head out of 1995 and embrace this new age of digital music, social networking and cloud computing.

Here’s an article by Cory Doctorow on the current state of copyright, how copyright got to the sorry state it’s in now, and how Creative Commons fits in the picture.

All this is taking the lawyers out of the law, letting us engage in the Internet’s natural, social, conversational modes without turning ourselves into accidental felons, and without hiring $400/hour white-shoe copyright attorneys to sit at our elbows and make sure our copying and pasting is within the bounds of the law.

So if you want your blog or web page licensed, just go to the Creative Commons licensing page, answer the questions and you’ll be told which CC license fits your needs. Choosing different options and seeing which license was selected for me allowed me to better understand the license I had previously selected for my blog. So go take a look and play around. See which license you need and apply it to your work. Search engines will even honor your license when performing searches. What more could you ask for?

Lawrence Lessig, known for his work on copyrights, recently posted on following the rules where he discusses when it’s done, why it’s done and why it’s not done. To help illustrate his point, he posted a video of a news segment (which I’ll also include here) on the Texas legislature and their blatent disregard for the rules (rules that they themselves voted on).

It’s pretty disgusting how the laws are getting increasingly strict for regular citizens to vote and increasingly harsh when regular citizens bend the rules when voting and then having our lawmakers act like this. Then to top it off, state representative Riddle tries to justify it all by saying how grueling their schedule is. It’s pretty incredible.What I would like answered is how are we to ask our senators and representatives to make a difference when they may not even be the one casting their own vote? Admittedly I don’t know how widespread this problem is, but it seems that we need our own lawmakers to start following the rules before we can ask them to help pass and enforce laws on our behalf.

We know how the telecoms were involved with the surveillance by the government. Well, last Thursday the Senate advanced legislation to give telecoms immunity for helping the government in these illegal activities… immunity not just for future involvement, but for their past involvement as well. This is nothing but bad. Thankfully, the mainstream media is giving their two cents worth. Here’s some excerpts of the excerpts:

[Telecom immunity] is not primarily about protecting patriotic businessmen, as Mr. Bush claims. It’s about ensuring that Mr. Bush and his aides never have to go to court to explain how many laws they’ve broken. It is a collusion between lawmakers and the White House that means that no one is ever held accountable.

All those who deliberately broke the surveillance laws should be held to account. If not, we are simply inviting more privacy abuses in the future.

Just because he’s the president doesn’t mean he can do an end run on the Constitution, and ignorance and fear of political retribution isn’t an excuse for violating our rights.

And to make a bad situation worse, it was recently uncovered that these privacy invasions had begun well before Sept 11th, which was the commonly held impetus for all of this:

Until a few days ago, it had been widely assumed that the Bush administration began its secret surveillance of citizens’ telephone calls and e-mails in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That was bad enough, given that the law requires government agents to first obtain a court warrant before spying on communications. But new court papers indicate that the illegal spying might have been going on for months before 9/11.

Now it appears that 9/11 may well have been used to cover a program that was in place months in advance, when there was no good argument for warrantless surveillance.

It’s amazing that AT&T would only fix their TOS after feeling tremendous pressure and criticism worldwide for their recent update to their TOS. Now, apparently, they agree with the rest of the world that freedom of expression is a good thing:

AT&T respects freedom of expression and believes it is a foundation of our free society to express differing points of view. AT&T will not terminate, disconnect or suspend service because of the views you or we express on public policy matters, political issues or political campaigns.

Aw, that just gives me a nice warm and fuzzy. How about you? I wish that AT&T would have added this statement for the right reasons and done this from the start, instead of adding this as damage control. And how can they even try to claim this at all? As Cory Doctorow said:

I wish they’d kept this in mind when they were illegally wiretapping the entire Internet for the NSA

Today the EFF confronted congress on the government’s surveillance of Americans and on the repercussions to those Americans’ privacy that could result. The government is collecting vast amounts of personal data and storing them in those oh so secure government databases:

We have all heard about security problems with government databases. A report from the Department of Homeland Security found 477 breaches in 2006 alone.

These databases are a black hat hacker’s dream come true. This is, of course, why OpenID is such a great idea. Sure it has its problems, but using OpenID means that login data doesn’t need to be distributed across the Internet at every website you visit. This decreases the black hats’ vector of attack tremendously. If I could have all of my login data being held at VeriSign, instead of having some of it at Yahoo, some at Tumblr, and some at Facebook… I’d be fine with that.

Anyway, while the distributed login data issue has a solution in sight, the government surveillance issue does not. The RESTORE Act will hopefully reinstate those checks and balances that were lost when the Protect America Act granted the telecoms immunity when helping the NSA spy on Americans. So I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Support the EFF!

So AT&T is in court over their alleged wire-tapping with the NSA. And apparently since AT&T didn’t feel like they had trampled over your rights enough, they’re now saying you can’t criticize them. In their new Terms of Service, they can immediately terminate or suspend your service for

conduct that AT&T believes… (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries

So if you post something on your blog that may damage their name (like I probably did recently) then your Internet connection can be cut off. Or if you do a podcast on them and say some unflattering things, no more iPhone service for you.

Oh AT&T, why can’t we be like we used to be? Best of friends… Running through the meadow? I wish things were how they used to be between us…

Yesterday I talked about Microsoft’s stealthy updating and what that means to Windows user. This post in the same vein. This is about AT&T and the US government illegally wiretapping Americans. In 2005, it was reported that the NSA has been illegally intercepting communications since about 2001. Shortly after this story broke, the EFF filed a lawsuit against AT&T for these actions. AT&T claimed it was only doing what the gov’t told them to do, but the judge rejected it.

Here is an email I received from the EFF on the case:

At a packed San Francisco hearing today [August 15th], the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended your Fourth Amendment rights and urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let our class-action lawsuit against AT&T go forward. The case demands that AT&T stop illegally assisting the National Security Agency to snoop on its customers’ telephone and Internet communications.

There’s much more at stake here than stopping the Bush Administration’s illegal spying and holding the telco giant accountable, though. The President is arguing that thin claims of “state secrets” can trump the courts’ constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.

Without judicial review, there’s no way to protect ordinary citizens against government abuses of power. No president, now or in the future, should be allowed unfettered authority to evade the courts and trample on your freedom. As Judge Vaughn Walker wrote in rejecting the government’s claims at the lower court, “The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”

Privacy and freedom is definitely something we as Americans take for granted and think we’re entitled too. But if we sit idle too long, they might just disappear faster than we think. We need to fight for our freedoms. Call your senator or representative to stop the spying. Or at the very least, donate to EFF so they can fight for us.

Sure it might be cliché to mention it, but think 1984. A world where Big Brother is everywhere. How far are we really from that now?