The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on. The Information Awareness Office's official seal features an occult pyramid topped with mystic all-seeing eye, like the one on the dollar bill. Its official motto is "Scientia Est Potentia," which doesn't mean "science has a lot of potential." It means "knowledge is power." And its official mission is to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness."

The phrase Total Information Awareness is creepy enough to merit a place alongside USA Patriot Act and "Department of Homeland Security," but it is not the Information Awareness Office's only gift to the language. The "example technologies" which the Office intends to develop include "entity extraction from natural language text," "biologically inspired algorithms for agent control," and "truth maintenance." One of the Office's thirteen subdivisions, the Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) program, is letting contracts not only for "Face Recognition" and "Iris Recognition" but also for "Gait Recognition." (Tony Blair has pledged the full coöperation of the Ministry of Silly Walks.) Another of the thirteen, FutureMap, "will concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events"--a sounder approach, ideologically, than regulation-based liberal soothsaying.

The Information Awareness Office is working on some really cool stuff that will eventually turn up at Brookstone and the Sharper Image, like a Palm Pilot-size PDA that does instantaneous English-Arabic and English-Chinese translations. But the Office's main assignment is, basically, to turn everything in cyberspace about everybody--tax records, driver's-license applications, travel records, bank records, raw F.B.I. files, telephone records, credit-card records, shopping-mall security-camera videotapes, medical records, every e-mail anybody ever sent--into a single, humongous, multi-googolplexibyte database that electronic robots will mine for patterns of information suggestive of terrorist activity. Dr. Strangelove's vision--"a chikentic gomplex of gumbyuders"--is at last coming into its own.

It's easy to ridicule this--fun, too, and fun is something the war on terrorism doesn't offer a lot of--but it's not so easy to dismiss the possibility that the project, nutty as it sounds, might actually be of significant help in uncovering terrorist networks. The problem is that it would also be of significant help in uncovering just about everything, including the last vestiges of individual and family privacy. This is why William Safire wrote the other day that the program should simply be shut down, as was Attorney General Ashcroft's Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), which was going to enlist postal workers and the like as amateur spies.

Political News from Wired News - Judge to Hear Air ID Challenge.

A federal court agrees to decide a case that could determine whether airline passengers should be forced to show an ID before boarding a flight.

[ ... ]

A U.S. District Court judge agreed to hear a challenge to an airline requirement that forces passengers to show identification before boarding a plane, despite a motion by the government and two airlines to dismiss it.

John Gilmore, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has sued United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging that the ID requirement stems from a "secret law" that violates his right to anonymous travel within the United States.

[ ... ]

"If there's a law that requires the public to show an ID, we ought to know about it," he said after the hearing. He maintains that the mere demand for an ID is an unreasonable requirement that violates the Fourth Amendment.

His attorney, William Simpich, argued before Judge Susan Illston that the requirement that Americans show their ID for domestic travel was the equivalent of creating an internal passport that allows authorities to monitor people's movements and activities in the United States. Additionally, he argued that United Airlines' requirement that Gilmore either show his ID or be frisked violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Justice Department Attorney Joseph Lobue argued that the ID rule was necessary to ensure aviation safety.

"The only way airlines can compare passenger lists with terrorists is by asking for an ID," said Lobue, adding that searches to prevent passengers from boarding with weapons were not unreasonable, and therefore did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

[ ... ]

"Gilmore might have a stronger argument about the alleged secret regulation," Kalt said. "There are statutory requirements about publicizing rules that affect people's rights, and assuming hypothetically that his claims are true, these requirements might have been violated. But the remedy is not to overturn the rules, it is just to publicize them."

CNET NEWS.COM - Court: Network Associates can't gag users.

In a victory for free-speech advocates and product reviewers, a New York state judge has ruled that Network Associates can't prevent people from talking about its products.

New York state Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Shafer issued a ruling, made public this week, prohibiting the security software specialist from trying to use its end-user license agreements to ban product reviews or benchmark tests.

The judge called the company's attempted ban "deceptive" because it implied consumers who conducted the reviews would be violating the law, when they would not. Shafer has not ruled on damages.

The New York attorney general's office began investigating the case after Network World Fusion magazine published an unfavorable review of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's "Gauntlet" firewall software in 1999. According to the ruling, Network Associates demanded a retraction and accused the magazine of violating its licensing agreement. At the time, the agreement stated that people could not review or test Network Associates products without prior approval from the company.

The attorney general's office filed suit last year, claiming the licensing agreement's language may cause people to believe that they're breaking the law by reviewing the product without consent.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - ACLU Weighs In On Surveillance Society.

DeAshcroft writes "In the wake of the TIA (and logo-morphing attempts to be less scary), the ACLU has issued a report discussing the increased use of technology to erode privacy and the decreased use of law to defend it. Take your own spin. Not a light read (24 pages), but it includes some points to ponder. I haven't seen a response from Poindexter on the John Poindexter Awareness Office, but maybe the ACLU will come to his aid when he's had enough. Then again, they don't seem to be collecting much information."

CNN.com - Drivers license spam scam busted.

Several unscrupulous "spammers" have been shut down after bombarding Internet users with e-mail offers for allegedly bogus international drivers' licenses, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

[ ... ]

Although spam is widely regarded as one of the top nuisances on the Internet, it is not illegal under U.S. law.

The FTC pursues spammers who violate existing laws against deceptive and unfair trade practices, and has announced roughly 150 settlements over the past year.

Consumers are encouraged to forward spam to the FTC for analysis and possible prosecution. The agency currently collects roughly 75,000 spam messages a day, an aide said.

Slashdot | Spammers Busted.

Scud_the_disposable_ writes "CNN has posted an article about the "shutting down" of several spammers who sell fake international driver's licenses. These licenses are supposed to win back suspended driving priviledges, and make holders immune to speeding tickets and other traffic violations." --- What makes me even more sad is that people fell for it. So far today is a slow spam day for me. Only 81 spam, but its only 9:30.

New York Times - free registration required Court Rules Against Network Associates' Software Review Policy.

A New York court has ruled that Network Associates, a maker of popular antivirus and computer security software, may not require people who buy the software to get permission from the company before publishing reviews of its products.

The decision, which the company has vowed to appeal, could carry a penalty in the millions of dollars, according to Ken Dreifach, chief of the Internet bureau of the office of the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer.

Last spring, Mr. Spitzer sued Network Associates, which has its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., asserting that the company's software included an unenforceable clause that effectively violated consumers' free speech. The clause, which appeared on software products and the company's Web site, read: "The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc."

In a decision the parties received late Thursday, Justice Marilyn Shafer of State Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled that the clause was deceptive and that it warranted a fine, which she wrote that she would determine in the future.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Network Associates Loses Battle to Silence Reviewers.

ajkessel writes "This article from today's New York Times covers a court ruling against Network Associates in a suit brought by the New York State Attorney General to invalidate Network Associate's shrink-wrap clause which states: 'The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc.' Network Associates has vowed to appeal." --- Reader SlashDotIDOne points to a CNET story which says "Network Associates could be forced to pay $0.50 for every license which included this draconian requirement: 'The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc.'"

Balkinization (balkin.blogspot) - Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Unconstitutional under Eldred v. Ashcroft?

In an earlier post, I strongly criticized the Supreme Court's First Amendment analysis in Eldred, arguing that the first amendment issues were not well thought out and that the Court seemed so preoccupied with the Copyright Clause that it dismissed the First Amendment issues as an afterthought. But anyone who understands the important connections between the free speech principle and the public domain should also understand that there is no way you can resolve the First Amendment issues in the case simply, or without making new law, and if you don't pay careful attention to the larger picture, even what appear to be the simplest and most uncomplicated statements of law will have all sorts of unintended side effects.

As a lawyer and legal scholar, it's my job, when confronted with decisions I don't particularly agree with, to make lemonade out of lemons-- to see how the court's reasoning might apply to future cases in ways I do approve of. And after thinking about Eldred's First Amendment analysis, it seems to me that the Supremes have made new law that puts the DMCA into question.