Those who relish freedom need to defend it. Here are some warnings about mistakes we could make easily that would undermine any effort to prevent the worst of all fates

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Microsoft recently announced its Palladium initiative. The Palladium is a warmed-over Clipper chip. Microsoft is selling the idea as a hardware-enabled way to make your PC software secure, but all it really amounts to is a digital cop that arrests any software that tries to use copyrighted content in an unapproved manner. In plain language, your computer will only play songs or movies if you've paid for them. That's right. It's chip-enforced digital rights management.

It seems natural for Microsoft to be interested in digital rights management because Gates and company are perhaps the most paranoid creatures on earth when it comes to piracy. However, I believe there is an even more ulterior motive here. Microsoft has a patent on the concept of a digital rights management operating system. If Microsoft can make the Palladium successful, it can present the open source community with two choices. PCs running Linux or any other non-Microsoft OS may not use the chip, in which case these PCs will not be able to play any copyrighted DVDs or music CDs. If the open source OS uses the chip, someone has to pay Microsoft for the right to do so, since it owns the patent.

Some people are dismissing the Palladium chip because they equate it with Intel's plans for the CPU ID, plans that were thwarted by the massive public reaction against the ID. Nevertheless, Palladium is likely to get the backing of huge content providers. If these content providers have the power to sway Congress on issues as outrageous as cracking P2P networks, then they have the power to get Palladium installed on every motherboard by default. That's what makes Palladium scary.

New York Times - free registration required Bush Rolls Back Rules on Privacy of Medical Data.

The Bush administration on Friday formally rolled back some major protections for the privacy of medical records adopted by President Clinton.

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The issue of medical privacy now goes to the political arena. Some Democrats are already making an issue of the new rules.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the administration was "favoring the interests of powerful corporations over those of ordinary Americans."

In a recent speech, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the White House seemed to worry less about the privacy of medical records than about the secrecy of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force.

Under this administration, Mr. McAuliffe said, "it's O.K. to reveal personal medical information about the American people, but when the oil companies meet with policy makers to ask for special favors, that's guarded like a state secret."

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Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the Bush administration had made some improvement in the marketing rules, but left some loopholes.

"The final regulations appear to shut down some of the existing avenues of commercial exploitation of personal medical data by third parties without the knowledge or consent of the patient," said Mr. Markey, who is co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus. "But the regulations still allow a drug company to pay a pharmacy to act as its agent and allow the pharmacy to do the marketing without disclosing the financial arrangement."

Although a drugstore could not sell health information on a patient to a drug company, Mr. Markey said, the drug company could pay a pharmacist to recommend that patients switch from one drug to another. The definition of "marketing" in the new rules excludes communications to a patient by a health care provider who is promoting goods and services offered by the provider itself.

An administration official confirmed that reading of the rules.

Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, president of the American Psychiatric Association, criticized the decision to drop the consent requirement.

"This abolishes the traditional control that patients have had over access to their medical records," Dr. Appelbaum said. "It may discourage patients from revealing information to their physicians that's necessary for their treatment, and it may encourage doctors not to record important but embarrassing information in the patients' medical charts.