Far more important, of course, is the question of law and civil liberties. Great democratic leaders have broken the rules in times of war: had Abraham Lincoln not suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1861, there would be no United States today. But the situation was extreme, and the lapse was temporary: victory in the Civil War brought a return to normal legal procedure. Can anyone think of an event that would persuade our current leaders that they no longer need extraordinary powers?

The point is that our new, threatened condition isn't temporary. We're in this for the long haul, so any measures we take to fight terrorism had better be measures that we are prepared to live with indefinitely.

The real challenge now is not to stamp out terrorism; that's an unattainable goal. The challenge is to find a way to cope with the threat of terrorism without losing the freedom and prosperity that make America the great nation it is.

New York Times - Editorial Op-Ed: free registration required The War on Civil Liberties.

It would be easy to dismiss the harm that has been done to our civil liberties in the past year. Most of us do not know anyone whose rights have been seriously curtailed. The 1,200 detainees rounded up after Sept. 11 and held in secret were mainly Muslim men with immigration problems. So were the people the government tried to deport in closed hearings. The two Americans who were labeled "enemy combatants," hustled off to military brigs and denied the right even to meet with a lawyer, are a Saudi-American man captured in Afghanistan and a onetime Chicago gang member.

There is also no denying that the need for effective law enforcement is greater than ever. The Constitution, Justice Arthur Goldberg once noted, is not a suicide pact.

And yet to curtail individual rights, as the Bush administration has done, is to draw exactly the wrong lessons from history. Every time the country has felt threatened and tightened the screws on civil liberties, it later wished it had not done so. In each case -- whether the barring of government criticism under the Sedition Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1918, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II or the McCarthyite witch hunts of the cold war -- profound regrets set in later.

When we are afraid, as we have all been this year, civil liberties can seem abstract. But they are at the core of what separates this country from nearly all others; they are what we are defending when we go to war. To slash away at liberty in order to defend it is not only illogical, it has proved to be a failure. Yet that is what has been happening.

New York Times - free registration required Intel Says New Processors Will Add SecurityFeatures.

Intel will also secure the pathways within the computer, including the electrical connections between the vault and the display or keyboard.

"It's a new level of safer computing," Mr. Otellini said.

Intel did not release many details about the system but said it would work in conjunction with other hardware- and software-based security efforts, like Microsoft's Palladium.

Such technologies should not only keep hackers and viruses from infiltrating data stored or being processed on a computer but could also lock music or video files onto a particular computer, preventing unauthorized sharing.

Economist.com | LAST WORD - Tinkerers' champion.

It is not just libertarians who are concerned about the restrictions caused by America's latest copyright law. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, argues that the "freedom to tinker"--the right to understand, repair and modify one's own equipment-- is crucial to innovation, and as valuable to society as the freedom of speech

When Edward Felten began a recent presentation in San Francisco on the weaknesses of copy-protection software, he did not get far. He had just put up his first slide when two FBI agents stormed the stage, handcuffed the stunned Princeton computer-science professor and arrested him--as Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer, had been at a Las Vegas hackers' conference in July 2001. The mock arrest was the opening act of a panel at the 2002 "Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy", a favourite get-together for tech-savvy civil libertarians, to illustrate the chilling effects of America's latest copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Yet Dr Felten could well have had himself arrested--if he were less cautious. In January 2001, the record industry threatened to sue him when he and several colleagues wanted to talk publicly about how they had broken a copy-protection system. Now, on sabbatical leave at Stanford University's Centre for Internet and Society, he is trying to develop the theoretical basis for what he calls the "freedom to tinker". As a result, Dr Felten embodies the growing tension between academic freedom and stricter copyright rules--a tension that could one day lead to scenes like the one in San Francisco being played out for real.

Slashdot | Ed Felten in the Economist.

shaikeiro writes "A fine article in the Economist about Ed Felten and what he is up to now. Also a good summary of what "freedom to tinker" means. From the article: "Thus, the freedom to tinker ends up being about the freedom of culture."" ---Are you a member of the EFF yet?