Radar Waves

Happy Wiretap Day

According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), today is the deadline by which network operators -- everyone who provides Internet service to businesses and consumers -- have to install "back doors" making it easier for the FBI to spy on American citizens. This is yet another nail in the coffin of American civil liberties, and a very dangerous check on free expression, not to mention the security and commercial viability of the Internet. As Wired succinctly explains:

Making surveillance easier and faster gives law enforcement agencies of all stripes more reason to eschew old-fashioned police work in favor of spying. The telephone CALEA compliance deadline was in 2002, and since then the amount of court-ordered surveillance has nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted that year, to 4,015 orders in 2006.

Of course, we still have the right to encrypt our communications. We suggest using tools such as the TorPark browsing anonymizer (a small but effective add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser), and GnuPG, a free and easy-to-use encryption tool that works on documents, emails, IMs, or just about anything.

Monday media: free IPTV, the adventures of Orkut in Brazil, and Google's ostensible metamorphosis into Big Brother

Busy day -- Marissa and I are both in the middle of a bunch of consulting projects. But there are a couple news blips worth pointing out:

1)    ABC announces it's gonna make some of its most popular shows (e.g. Lost Housewives, Desperado in Chief) available for free viewing on the Web. It's an ad-supported model -- the shows will be broadcast-only, embedded in a proprietary viewer and punctuated by interstitial video ads (let's just call them commercials, shall we?) by advertisers including AT&T, Ford and P&G. Inevitable hacks aside, the streams can't be downloaded, so it won't bite too hard into the small but hype-heavy iTunes TV download market. I'm all for it -- Disney owns much of the content as well as distribution, so there aren't a lot of palms to grease or hurdles to jump (local broadcasters are going to be pretty pissed, though -- but that's a much bigger story). It gives them an opportunity to do a little revenue-bearing market research, and to develop alternative marketing models for the TiVo age. Thumbs up.

2)    The NY Times discovers Orkut, alive and kicking in Brazil. While they do play up the kiddie porn angle, they fail to mention the venue's apparent popularity among drug dealers. So many threats to our security, so little time. Of course, it's a truism that as soon as the NYT discovers something, it's by definition on the way out (even my own NYT article about Smalls jazz bar in NY foreshadowed its imminent demise).

3)    Big concerns among net libertarians that the Google/Earthlink WiFi plan in San Francisco doesn't sufficiently address privacy concerns. This concern is somewhat legit -- according to someone we know on the inside, the G/E plan was the least privacy-friendly of any that the city reviewed. On the other hand, I just don't get it -- everyone in the universe is now toting around a mobile phone, taking and sending pics, downloading ringtones, texting and being texted. How does adding a mobile laptop to the mix really expose us to further scrutiny by either commercial or governmental forces? We're already about as transparent as possible. Truth be told, I'd rather have Google mining my GeoWeb metadata than SprintPCSNextel -- at least they know what to do with it, for crying out loud.