Student expelled for tweeting F-Word

A Senior at Garrett High School has been expelled after tweeting the F-word to his personal Twitter account via a school computer.

Austin Carroll, a final year student at Garrett High School said that he felt the school violated his rights, because whatever was posted on his personal Twitter account is his “personal business” and that nobody should be snooping around his content.

He tweeted the following: “Fuck is one of the fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and still fucking makes sense.”

While the school says the tweet was posted via a school computer, Austin insisted that it was actually done at home. It turns out that the school has tracking software installed to monitor all social networks used by students. If for instance a student posted content while at home and then later logged in again via a school computer, the software would crawl their accounts for blacklisted keywords and report it.

While the school does accuse him of using a school computer to send the tweet, a back trace shows that it was sent around 2:30am, which definitely confirmed it was done at his home. It seems that because he used a school laptop, it would have appeared to pass through the school network because the system used the school’s network IP address to connect to the Internet.

Austin’s mother and his entire senior class were in uproar about the situation saying that an outright expulsion was too strict a sentence for such a minor offense. Let’s face it, many kids curse all the time in real life conversations, so why throw this guy out of school just because he’s going all out on Twitter?

Austin has been transferred to another school in the area so he could graduate, but he is disappointed that he had to leave Garrett because of the number of things he wanted to do with his friends before leaving.

So is it really fair to allow schools to actively monitor all content posted on social networks? While Austin’s message may not have been the most mature way to express a feeling about something, he definitely didn’t seem to be planning to endanger anybody or anything. The one time I got in trouble for cursing in school, my parents got called in and we had a talk, and things were normal again the day after.

50 words banned from NYC school tests

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- You've heard of banned books? Get ready for banned words.

The city Department of Education is aiming to get 50 words removed from some city-issued standardized tests, and some of them are real head-scratchers.

Among the off-limits terms: "politics," "poverty," and "religion."

The reasoning: The words might be distracting to segments of the city's diverse student population.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott described the ban as guidance issued to the developers of standardized tests.

In a request for proposals for standardized tests the Department of Education said the words are not appropriate for use in statewide tests.

The city is not trying to get the words banned from classroom use.

"This is just making sure the test makers are very sensitive in the development of their tests," Walcott told WCBS 880 in an interview.

The station reports that certain words can elicit unpleasant feelings on the part of students. "Dinosaur," for example, would suggest evolution -- offensive to creationists. even "birthday" doesn't make the cut because Jehovah's Witnesses don't celebrate them.

Here is the complete list of words:

• Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
• Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
• Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
• Bodily functions
• Cancer (and other diseases)
• Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
• Celebrities
• Children dealing with serious issues
• Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
• Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
• Crime
• Death and disease
• Divorce
• Evolution
• Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
• Gambling involving money
• Halloween
• Homelessness
• Homes with swimming pools
• Hunting
• Junk food
• In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
• Loss of employment
• Nuclear weapons
• Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
• Parapsychology
• Politics
• Pornography
• Poverty
• Rap Music
• Religion
• Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
• Rock-and-Roll music
• Running away
• Sex
• Slavery
• Terrorism
• Television and video games (excessive use)
• Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
• Vermin (rats and roaches)
• Violence
• War and bloodshed
• Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
• Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

French Constitutional Court Bans Law Enforcement Use of National Biometric ID Database

Last week, the Conseil Constitutionnel, the highest authority on the French Constitution, declared the provisions of a law permitting judicial and police use of a centralized national ID database to be unconstitutional. 200 members of the French Parliament referred the law to the Conseil following the law's adoption on March 6th. The Conseil determined that the use of the centralized database was incompatible with France's fundamental rights, including the right to privacy and the presumption of innocence.

The proposed legislation mandated compulsory civilian ID cards containing a chip designed to store personal and biometric information, including home address, marital status, eye colour, and fingerprints. Proponents argued that the biometric ID card would be used to stop “honest folk” from becoming the victims of identity fraud. In fact, the law would have enabled the "honest folk" database to be used for criminal and judicial purposes. The Conseil correctly determined that such uses constituted a serious incursion into the right to private life, disproportionate to the law’s stated objective.

Another provision in the law would have allowed for a second, optional chip to be used for online authentication in e-commerce transactions. The Conseil determined that such use would require too broad a range of personal data to be collected without any guarantees of security and confidentiality. Furthermore, it condemned the law’s vague conditions for authenticating individuals, especially minors. EFF welcomes the Conseil's decision to strike out substantial parts of the legislation to protect privacy. Nevertheless, the Conseil should explain their unmotivated reasoning behind leaving significant anti-privacy portions of the law intact, namely biometric data collection for the purpose of preventing ID fraud.

The argument for biometrics is predicated on the flawed assumption that a national biometric ID scheme will prevent identity fraud. Massive databases already invite security breaches and a biometrics database of this scale is a honeypot of sensitive data vulnerable to exploitation. In Israel for example, the security protecting the database holding more than 9 million IDs was cracked and everyone’s biometrics were made available on the Internet. Such a data breach is not just costly—it is irreversible, you cannot change your fingerprints or your irises. Recently the UC Berkeley School of Law conducted an in-depth analysis of the costs of establishing a biometric employment identity card in the United States. They found that such a program would cost an upwards of "$40 billion in initial costs, but also $3 billion in ongoing annual expenditures." They also concluded that such a program's lack of proven effectiveness and its high risk of error would lead to "a Pandora’s box of civil liberty violations."

In its decision, the Conseil emphasized that they are not ruling either for or against biometrics [PDF, in French] (p.21):

This decision of the Council's should not be interpreted as being either in favour of biometrics or against it. Nor is the Council expressing any opinion either in favour of a register of biometric data or against it. What the Council is saying is that the safeguards involved in the creation and deployment of this register are inadequate. In the circumstances, the Council is not in a position to over-ride the wishes of the legislature.

The Conseil’s ambivalent statement is politically understandable. Regulators tend to romanticize the security and accuracy of biometric systems. In fact, there is a lack of evidence to demonstrate the reliability and proportionality of this new technology. Jean Marc Manach, a blogger and journalist from Owni.fr, argues that biometrics has proven inaccurate and therefore ineffective in fighting identity fraud or anything else. As long ago as August 2009, The Register magazine suggested that our trust in biometric technology is a delusion.

Last year, a French report revealed that 10% of biometric passports were fraudulently obtained [French]. The introduction of biometrics is exacerbating the problem of identity fraud instead of solving it. The French government already has several powerful surveillance technologies available to track people's movements, including mobile phone logs, web usage logs and credit card usage logs. They must provide evidence first that they can use this technology to enhance security before spending taxpayer money on another National ID biometric scheme.

French smart card and biometrics companies have lobbied heavily for the “honest folks” law. Their trade association, GIXEL (Professional Association of Industry and Electronic Components) gained notoriety in 2004 when they won the infamous French “Big Brother” award, for their systematic attacks on the right to privacy. Ironically, GIXEL got the award for their proposal to "educate" children under 6 years old and their parents about the need for biometric “security.”


The proposed collection of this vast amount of biometric information gives governments too much unchecked power and opens the door for government abuse. In their referral to the Conseil, French parliamentarians quoted Martin Niemöller's chilling poem "First they came." They argued that had this kind of database existed during WWII, the Nazis and collaborators in Vichy France could have more easily arrested French Résistance fighters based on their fingerprints or facial scans.

EFF, as one of 80 civil liberties organizations, has requested the Council of Europe in 2011 to investigate if National ID biometrics laws in Europe comply with the Council of Europe Privacy Treaty and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In light of the long list of privacy concerns surrounding biometrics, and the guarantee of future security breaches, biometric national ID laws cannot be justified. As more nations continue to adopt and implement biometric ID laws, now is the time for the Council of Europe to comply with its duty to seriously confront all of these issues. Under our watch, we refuse to let states collect massive amounts of biometric data without regard to our privacy rights.

New Counterorrism Guidelines Gives Authorities Vast Access to Private Info of Innocent Americans

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed expansive new guidelines for terrorism analysts, allowing the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) to mirror entire federal databases containing personal information and hold onto the information for an extended period of time—even if the person is not suspected of any involvement in terrorism. (Read the guidelines here).

Despite the “terrorism” justification, the new rules affect every single American. The agency now has free rein to, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage put it, “retrieve, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats ” and expands the amount of time the government can keep private information on innocent individuals by a factor of ten.

From the New York Times:

The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data mining them” using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat. (emphasis ours)

Journalist Marcy Wheeler summed the new guidelines up nicely saying, “So…the data the government keeps to track our travel, our taxes, our benefits, our identity? It just got transformed from bureaucratic data into national security intelligence.”

The administration claims that the changes in the rules for the NCTC—as well as for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies—are in response to the government’s failure to connect the dots in the so-called “underwear bomber” case at the end of 2009, yet there was no explanation of how holding onto innocent Americans’ private data for five years would have stopped the bombing attempt.

Disturbingly, “oversight” for these expansive new guidelines is being directed by the DNI’s "Civil Liberties Protection Officer" Joel Alexander, who is so concerned about Americans’ privacy and civil liberties that he, as Marcy Wheeler notes, found no civil liberties concerns with the National Security Agency’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program when he reviewed it during President George W. Bush’s administration.

As other civil liberties organizations have noted, the new guidelines are reminiscent of the Orwellian-sounding “Total Information Awareness” program George Bush tried but failed to get through Congress in 2003—again in the name of defending the nation from terrorists. The program, as the New York Times explained, sparked an “outcry” and partially shut down Congress because it “proposed fusing vast archives of electronic records — like travel records, credit card transactions, phone calls and more — and searching for patterns of a hidden terrorist cell.”

The New York Times reported, the new NCTC guidelines “are silent about the use of commercial data — like credit card and travel records — that may have been acquired by other agencies,” but information first obtained by private corporations has ended up in federal databases before. In one example, Wired Magazine found FBI databases contained “200 million records transferred from private data brokers like ChoicePoint, 55,000 entries on customers of Wyndham hotels, and numerous other travel and commercial records.” The FBI would be one of the agencies sharing intelligence with the NCTC.

Despite Congress’ utter rejection of the “Total Information Awareness” program (TIA) in 2003, this is the second time this month the administration has been accused of instituting the program piecemeal. In his detailed report on the NSA’s new “data center” in Utah, Wired Magazine’s James Bamford remarked that the new data storage complex is “the realization” of the TIA program, as it’s expected to store and catalog “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches.”

Unfortunately, the new NCTC guidelines are yet another example of the government using the word “terrorism” to infringe on the rights of innocent Americans. Aside from the NSA’s aforementioned warrantless wiretapping program, we have seen the Patriot Act overwhelmingly used in criminal investigations not involving terrorism, despite its original stated purpose. As PBS Frontline’s Azmat Khan noted in response to the new guidelines, investigative journalist Dana Priest has previously reported how “many states have yet to use their vast and growing anti-terror apparatus to capture any terrorists; instead the government has built a massive database that collects, stores and analyzes information on thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.”

This problem has been well documented for years, yet Congress and both the Bush and Obama administrations have continued to use terrorism as a justification for expansive laws, and Americans’ constitutional rights have become collateral damage.

Copyright isn't dead just because we're not willing to let it regulate us

Anything you've ever heard of is in copyright and requires a licence – it's inherently unjust

Cory Doctorow

The first time I ever heard someone declare the death of copyright, it wasn't a dreadlocked GNU/Linux hacker or a cyberpunk in mirror shades: it was a music executive, circa 1999, responding to the launch of Napster.

I thought he was wrong then and I think he's wrong now — as is everyone else who's declared copyright to be dead.

The problem is in the name: copyright. The Statute of Anne and other early copyright rules concerned themselves with verbatim copying because copying was the only industrial activity associated with creative expression at the time. There were lots of crafts associated with culture, of course, – performing music, plays and dance, painting pictures, and so on – but these weren't industrial activities.

There was no apparatus associated with them that allowed them to take place at vast scale and speed. And though there were some cultural gatekeepers – gallery owners, performance venue bookers, guilds – they had a much more tenuous role. Unlike printers (the industry), they were neither in the position to make a lot of money from a single creative act, nor in the position to alienate all that money from a creator, nor in the position to raise investor capital with the expectation of such money, nor in the position of having to fend off competitors who cut into their markets with duplicates.

When performance, visual media, and three-dimensional works became susceptible to industrial-scale distribution, we extended "copy"right to them, even though there weren't necessarily "copies" taking place.

Copyright was, is and always will be properly viewed as "rules governing the supply chain of the entertainment industry", and as the entertainment industry expanded, we expanded the rules to cover its new activities. Rules for industry can be a good idea, after all. At their best, they rebalance negotiating positions among different players in the industry (for example, the lack of negotiating leverage that artists have at the beginning of their careers), ban unscrupulous sales tactics, and defend competition from the monopolistic instincts of industrialists.

The "copy" in copyright is there because of an accident of history: once upon a time, to "copy" was to do something industrial. Copying required physical plant, employees, premises, trading. While not everything industrial could be reduced to "copying," all copying was presumptively industrial. There were ways of non-industrially copying things – a sculptor could copy another sculptor's work by application of her eye and hand and chisel, a writer could dip his quill and set out the lines of another writer – but it wasn't really necessary to explicitly declare that this wasn't the kind of thing regulated by copyright. Such activity was almost always invisible to rights-holders, and even if an individual work happened to rise to the attention of a rights-holder, he would seem like a bit of a fool trying to apply industrial rules to individual actors. It's like asking your neighbours to register as a bed and breakfast because they've got guests in for the weekend who've chipped in for groceries.

Industrial rule-making processes tend to be dominated by the powerful, the incumbent, and the wealthy. They're better-set to organise themselves, they're already familiar with the ins and outs of government, and they have the tautological legitimacy of success: "You are an upstanding firm because you got rich, therefore the way you got rich must be upstanding." As a result, copyright tended (and tends) to favour the interests of investors in creative works – labels, studios, publishers – at the expense of creators, who are more diffuse, and who are undermined by the "irrational" nature of creative work.

People raise capital for business – publishers, labels, studios – on the basis of an informed confidence that a market opportunity exists to recoup the investment. In the absence of any anti-competitive moves, you'd expect there to be about as many "investor" businesses in the creative sector as best evidence suggests can be supported, plus a little more representing an optimistic view of how to grow the sector.

On the other hand, creators create because they can't help themselves.

Even though I earn a living from my copyrights today, I always knew that I would be insane to count on this, and today I know that I am as lucky as a lotto winner. I have met so many talented writers who haven't gotten any breaks, and some of them have given up, but many of them continue to produce. They're not writing because they rationally believe that they will someday replace their day-jobs' salaries with royalties, advances and commissions – they write because they must.

As a result, the supply-side of the copyright industries always has a glut in excess of demand. There has never been, and will never be, an industrial regulation that will supply a living wage to a sizable fraction of those who dream of quitting their day jobs and pursuing the arts. We might attain this through a system of grants, or through the technological attainment of some kind of post-scarcity society, but there just aren't enough people who want to pay money for enough industrial entertainment product to pay the way of everyone who nurses the dream.

So on the one hand, you have a relatively stable and organised investor/distributor group in the copyright industries, and on the other hand, you've got this diffuse horde of creators and would-be creators.

Each is lobbying for copyright rules that favour their interests, and by and large, the creators lose. This leads to the doubly tragic life of the creator: even for the tiny minority who "make it" into the system, the result is often an abusive work-for-hire relationship with dodgy accounting, rotten contracts, and no shortage of out-and-out ripoffs that leave "famous, well-off" artists in penury at the end of their careers.

At various times in the history of industrialised entertainment, new technologies have engendered new copyright rules. Radio gave rise to blanket licenses; phonograms (initially in the form of player pianos) engendered compulsory mechanical licenses on compositions. Some of these were "good" rules and some were "bad" rules – where "good" can mean "pro-competition" and "fair to creators"; and "bad" can mean "anti-competitive" and "unfair to creators." Creators and the investor/distributor sector spend a lot of time arguing about the best way to manage these regulations and how they should be reformed.

But they also spend a lot of time arguing and lobbying about personal activities – from kids who share music over MegaUpload to amateur film-makers who upload their own mashups to YouTube. Most of this activity involves some commercial entity somewhere along the way, just as a writer who copied out an inspiring passage from Milton would have to buy her quills and paper and ink somewhere. But YouTube isn't part of the entertainment industry. It's a platform for sharing every kind of video there is, from momentous footage of a wartime atrocity to personally important footage of a wedding reception to trivial and unobjectionable footage of cute things being cute. It is more like paper than a publisher; more like film than a film studio; more like a microphone than a recording studio.

Anyone who is paying attention – including a sizable slice of entertainment executives – understands that limiting copying on the internet is a doomed exercise, and that the attempt necessitates the mass surveillance of every activity on the internet, widescale censorship, and the extension of complex, difficult-to-understand regulations to populations who have no hope of understanding them and who shouldn't be expected to. It's as though the industry has suddenly decided that singing in the shower counts as a regulated "performance" and now it wants to ask plumbers, shower-fixture makers and soap manufacturers to help it stamp out piracy, and wants cameras in our bathrooms and long legal agreements for anyone who desires to legitimately sing while he scrubs.

Even if shower-singing started to significantly displace a revenue stream for the entertainment industry, the idea of expanding an industrial regulation into a private domain is not only unworkable, it's inherently unjust.

There's still plenty of things for which we can use "copyright". For example, there's some evidence that requiring licenses for digital sampling provides a small but important income stream to an earlier generation of artists who got done over three ways – first, because the rules were written with corporations' advantage in mind; second, because the corporations cheated; and third, because they were largely from ethnic minorities who got a bad deal from the justice system in general.

If licensing sampling turns out to be the best (or least worst) way to redress these old wrongs, then copyright can create a streamlined system of licenses that makes it easy to license, and stages the compensation in proportion to the follow-on artists' earnings.

Instead, copyright has done just the opposite. By reifying copying (instead of competition or a fair deal for creators), a series of copyright rulings and laws have created a system where any traceable, widely distributed song that samples ends up taking a license; where the licenses are so expensive that only a few may be economically included in each song; and where the only reliable access to sample-licenses is through the big four labels, who are accustomed to dealing with one another and are hostile or indifferent to independent parties.

This has produced the worst possible copyright outcome. Instead of an industry regulation that promotes competition and rebalances the diffused and ineffective bargaining power of creators, the sampling regime we have today does the opposite. It dictates that the critically and financially successful sample-based music that predates the sample-for-licenses world can't be made at all today – the two most successful sampling albums of all time are Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy; both would lose millions if produced and cleared today. It also dictates that nearly every artist who wants to make the "sampling-lite" music that modern practice demands ends up with a major record label, even if the artist believes she can do better on her own or with a small independent.

Add to that the 45-year retrospective extension of copyright on sound recordings and now you have a world where pretty much anything you've ever heard of is in copyright and requires a licence, which requires signing your life away to the big four. Imagine instead that we created a sampling regulation similar to the mechanical royalty for cover songs. Add up all the samples in each song and then require a proportional royalty from revenues earned by the song. There are details to be sorted – dealing with overlapping samples, and establishing use thresholds for the minimum sample length covered by the rule and the maximum sample length it countenances before we just say, "You're not sampling, this is just a reissue, pay the mechanical royalty." There's the accounting, auditing, collection and payment.

The system would be ungainly compared to the one that gave us It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, but not so ungainly as to prevent the creation of such a record outright. And it sidesteps the major competitive and negotiation issues for labels and artists. So long as it only sought to regulate commercial recordings – industrial activity – it would have no impact on amateurs who upload to YouTube, and it would make it easy for a successful amateur to make the leap to pro, by filing the necessary paperwork about her sampling and then paying a portion of her income to the appropriate parties.

This is just one example of how we can craft regulations for the entertainment industry that value creation, investment and innovation, without criminalising fans or attacking the internet. The internet era is not – and should not be – silent on the question: "How do we ensure that creators and investors get a chance at money?" That's all copyright ever really wanted an answer to.

The inability of copyright to regulate cultural activity isn't anything new. It's probably true that this inability reduces the profitability of some entities in the entertainment industry's supply chain, just as it increases others'. But that's just a question of profit maximisation, not survival.

The problem is that the entertainment companies treated the increased ease of copying in the age of the internet as a signal that copyright should be expanded to cover more people and more activities, far outside of the entertainment industry. What they should have done is picked a new proxy for "this is an industrial activity within copyright's scope" and soldiered on regulating themselves, without trying to regulate the whole world at the same time.

It's time to stop declaring copyright dead because we aren't willing to let it be the ultimate regulator of everything we do with a computer.

GPS ruling is "hard" on the FBI—and that's a feature, not a bug

By Timothy B. Lee

National Public Radio reports that the FBI is still complaining about January's Supreme Court ruling that installing a GPS tracking device on a suspect's car without the owner's knowledge requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. The FBI said last month that it was forced to turn 3000 GPS devices off when the Suprme Court handed down its decision.

Yet NPR's reporting suggests the situation wasn't actually as dire as earlier reporting had suggested. NPR reports that the FBI "scrambled to get search warrants for weeks before the decision, working to convince judges they had probable cause to believe crimes were taking place." NPR says the government "still had to turn off 250 devices that they couldn't turn back on." In other words, they may have turned off 3,000 devices the day the Supreme Court issued its ruling, but they turned about 2,750 of them back on soon afterwards.

In Congressional testimony last month, FBI Director Robert Meuller said the ruling "will inhibit our ability" to do GPS tracking "in a number of surveillances where it has been tremendously beneficial." Mueller said that in cases where they didn't have probable cause, the FBI is forced to deploy teams of six to eight people to track suspects the old-fashioned way.

"If you require probable cause for every technique, then you are making it very, very hard for law enforcement," an FBI lawyer told NPR.

Of course, that's kind of the point. Law enforcement's job would be a lot easier if we just did away with the Fourth Amendment and gave the police unfettered spying powers. But that would open the door to abuses of power, so the founders wisely limited government searches to cases where the government could demonstrate it had probable cause to believe that a crime had been committed.

The fact that the FBI was able to get a warrant for more than 90 percent of the GPS devices it had in the field suggests the warrant requirement isn't too onerous. And in rare cases where a judge refuses to issue a warrant for tracking that's essential to an investigation, the FBI has the option to deploy its own resources to track suspects with human agents. The high costs of this option ensures that the FBI will use it sparingly. But that's a feature, not a bug.

Guest Post: A Doctor on Transvaginal Ultrasounds

By John Scalzi

A friend of mine is a physician who wants to speak about transvaginal ultrasounds but whose position makes it precarious to speak publicly about it. So I’m letting this doctor borrow my site for an entry to speak anonymously on the matter. Obviously, I will vouch for the doctor being a doctor and being qualified to speak on the subject.

Where Is The Physician Outrage?

Right. Here.

I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.

I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.

I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.

In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.

After all, it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation. They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.

It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.

Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.

1) Just don’t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.

2) Reinforce patient autonomy. It does not matter what a politician says. A woman is in charge of determining what does and what does not go into her body. If she WANTS a transvaginal ultrasound, fine. If it’s medically indicated, fine… have that discussion with her. We have informed consent for a reason. If she has to be forced to get a transvaginal ultrasound through coercion or overly impassioned argument or implied threats of withdrawal of care, that is NOT FINE.

Our position is to recommend medically-indicated tests and treatments that have a favorable benefit-to-harm ratio… and it is up to the patient to decide what she will and will not allow. Period. Politicians do not have any role in this process. NO ONE has a role in this process but the patient and her physician. If anyone tries to get in the way of that, it is our duty to run interference.

3) If you are forced to document a non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound because of this legislation, document that the patient refused the procedure or that it was not medically indicated. (Because both of those are true.) Hell, document that you attempted but the patient kicked you in the nose, if you have to.

4) If you are forced to enter an image of the ultrasound itself into the patient chart, ultrasound the bedsheets and enter that picture with a comment of “poor acoustic window”. If you’re really gutsy, enter a comment of “poor acoustic window…plus, I’m not a rapist.” (I was going to propose repeatedly entering a single identical image in affected patient’s charts nationwide, as a recognizable visual protest…but I don’t have an ultrasound image that I own to the point that I could offer it for that purpose.)

5) Do anything else you can think of to protect your patients and the integrity of the medical profession. IN THAT ORDER. We already know how vulnerable patients can be; we invisibly protect them on a daily basis from all kinds of dangers inside and outside of the hospital. Their safety is our responsibility, and we practically kill ourselves to ensure it at all costs. But it’s also our responsibility to guard the practice of medicine from people who would hijack our tools of healing for their own political or monetary gain.

In recent years, we have been abject failures in this responsibility, and untold numbers of people have gleefully taken advantage of that. Silently allowing a politician to manipulate our medical decision-making for the purposes of an ideological goal erodes any tiny scrap of trust we might have left.

It comes down to this: When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Because we are their last line of defense.

Job seekers getting asked for Facebook passwords

Resume, references, password: Job seekers get asked in interviews to provide Facebook login

By Manuel Valdes

SEATTLE (AP) -- When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password.

Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn't see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn't want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from prospective employers, and some of them cannot afford to say no.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person's social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

"It's akin to requiring someone's house keys," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it "an egregious privacy violation."

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks.

Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publically available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.

Companies that don't ask for passwords have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview. Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.

Asking for a candidate's password is more prevalent among public agencies, especially those seeking to fill law enforcement positions such as police officers or 911 dispatchers.

Back in 2010, Robert Collins was returning to his job as a security guard at the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services after taking a leave following his mother's death. During a reinstatement interview, he was asked for his login and password, purportedly so the agency could check for any gang affiliations. He was stunned by the request but complied.

"I needed my job to feed my family. I had to," he recalled,

After the ACLU complained about the practice, the agency amended its policy, asking instead for job applicants to log in during interviews.

"To me, that's still invasive. I can appreciate the desire to learn more about the applicant, but it's still a violation of people's personal privacy," said Collins, whose case inspired Maryland's legislation.

Until last year, the city of Bozeman, Mont., had a long-standing policy of asking job applicants for passwords to their email addresses, social-networking websites and other online accounts.

And since 2006, the McLean County, Ill., sheriff's office has been one of several Illinois sheriff's departments that ask applicants to sign into social media sites to be screened.

Chief Deputy Rusty Thomas defended the practice, saying applicants have a right to refuse. But no one has ever done so. Thomas said that "speaks well of the people we have apply."

When asked what sort of material would jeopardize job prospects, Thomas said "it depends on the situation" but could include "inappropriate pictures or relationships with people who are underage, illegal behavior."

In Spotsylvania County, Va., the sheriff's department asks applicants to friend background investigators for jobs at the 911 dispatch center and for law enforcement positions.

"In the past, we've talked to friends and neighbors, but a lot of times we found that applicants interact more through social media sites than they do with real friends," said Capt. Mike Harvey. "Their virtual friends will know more about them than a person living 30 yards away from them."

Harvey said investigators look for any "derogatory" behavior that could damage the agency's reputation.

E. Chandlee Bryan, a career coach and co-author of the book "The Twitter Job Search Guide," said job seekers should always be aware of what's on their social media sites and assume someone is going to look at it.

Bryan said she is troubled by companies asking for logins, but she feels it's not a violation if an employer asks to see a Facebook profile through a friend request. And she's not troubled by non-disparagement agreements.

"I think that when you work for a company, they are essentially supporting you in exchange for your work. I think if you're dissatisfied, you should go to them and not on a social media site," she said.

More companies are also using third-party applications to scour Facebook profiles, Bryan said. One app called BeKnown can sometimes access personal profiles, short of wall messages, if a job seeker allows it.

Sears is one of the companies using apps. An applicant has the option of logging into the Sears job site through Facebook by allowing a third-party application to draw information from the profile, such as friend lists.

Sears Holdings Inc. spokeswoman Kim Freely said using a Facebook profile to apply allows Sears to be updated on the applicant's work history.

The company assumes "that people keep their social profiles updated to the minute, which allows us to consider them for other jobs in the future or for ones that they may not realize are available currently," she said.

Giving out Facebook login information violates the social network's terms of service. But those terms have no real legal weight, and experts say the legality of asking for such information remains murky.

The Department of Justice regards it as a federal crime to enter a social networking site in violation of the terms of service, but during recent congressional testimony, the agency said such violations would not be prosecuted.

But Lori Andrews, law professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law specializing in Internet privacy, is concerned about the pressure placed on applicants, even if they voluntarily provide access to social sites.

"Volunteering is coercion if you need a job," Andrews said.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter responded to repeated requests for comment.

In New York, Bassett considered himself lucky that he was able to turn down the consulting gig at a lobbying firm.

"I think asking for account login credentials is regressive," he said. "If you need to put food on the table for your three kids, you can't afford to stand up for your belief."

The rights of dolphins, chimps, and other nonhuman persons

By John Rennie

Over the weekend, I borrowed a friend’s time machine and cold-bloodedly killed a Neandertal, a Homo erectus, an Australopithecus, a dolphin, a chimp, eight sentient robots, the first extraterrestrial visitor to Earth, and my neighbor with the unreasonably loud sound system. Question: in the eyes of the law, how many murders did I just commit?

Probably two is my guess, with an outside possibility of three. I might be able to spin a justifiable homicide defense around “too much Ke$ha” with respect to my noisy neighbor, but the charge would still be murder. Just 10 years ago I might have been able to argue that Homo neanderthalensis was a different species and that killing one was therefore not the same as killing a person. Recent genomic studies, though, have shown that modern humans and Neandertals interbred so heavily that it’s now doubtful whether they were separate species, which isn’t good for my case. That hairy little Homo erectus was clearly not one of our species, but his kind still looked and acted human enough that I wouldn’t want to take my chances with a sentimental jury. So I might hang for those three killings.

On all the others, though — the dolphin, the chimp, the australopithecine, the alien, and the robots — I ought to be able to walk away from everything except some charges on cruelty to animals and vandalism. No matter how smart, self-aware, empathetic, or ethical they might be, those creatures and things don’t qualify as persons under the law because they are not human beings. Doing awful things to them might make me a monster, but it doesn’t technically make me a murderer. (And even as a human monster and murderer, I have rights that they do not.)

Science fiction scenarios aside, some scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and others are beginning to wonder whether the laws need to change for the benefit of dolphins, chimpanzees, and other highly intelligent animals. Should the law recognize a category of nonhuman persons with rights comparable to (but not necessarily identical to) those of human beings? If so, what would be the consequences and implications, not just for these animals but maybe also for humans?

Persons with blowholes

The eligibility of cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, and whales) for legal recognition as nonhuman beings was the focus of a much discussed session last month at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver. Lori Marino, a behavioral biologist and neuroscientist at Emory University, kicked off the discussion with a review of the abundant evidence for the creatures’ highly developed cognitive abilities.

It’s no secret that dolphins are exceptionally good at solving problems, for example, even ones that involve some level of abstract thinking. They can recognize themselves in mirrors, which seemingly demonstrates a capacity for self-awareness. Cetaceans also communicate amongst themselves with sophisticated vocal utterances that are at least reminiscent of language (though some linguists debate the appropriateness of that label). Recent findings even suggest that dolphins may greet one another with sets of sounds that seem to act as individuals’ names.

Cetaceans also live in groups with complex social dynamics, and at least some of those groups seem to have local “cultures” of behaviors that each generation teaches the next. For instance, some dolphins teach their young how to use sponges as tools while foraging along the seafloor.

Yet notwithstanding cetaceans’ intellectual capabilities, throughout history and around the world, humans have used and abused these animals as a resource. The slaughter of whales for food and oils and of dolphins as bycatch in fishing nets is notorious, Marino said, but the seemingly more benign practice of keeping cetaceans at marine parks for entertainment is also bad: she pointed to research showing that such captivity was harmful to the animals.

Thomas I. White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University who also spoke on the AAAS panel, has argued that living things that demonstrate self-awareness, intelligence and autonomy, experience emotions and treat other individuals with empathic respect deserve to have moral standing as persons. Cetaceans meet all those criteria, in his view.

On those grounds, White, Marino, and others met in Helsinki in May 2010 to draft a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans that affirms their status as persons. Among the 10 provisions in the declaration are calls that “Every individual cetacean has the right to life,” that no cetacean should be held captive or removed from its natural home, and that “Cetaceans have the right to the protection of their environment.” The signers hope that over time enough countries will endorse the document’s principles for it to acquire some international force.

Too human for comfort

Chimpanzees and the other great apes, of course, also stand out as candidates for nonhuman person status because of their high intelligence, their tool use, and their apparent self-awareness. Their evolutionary proximity to human beings also makes it easy to believe that if any nonhuman animals possess some elusive property of “being” that could justify their personhood, the apes do. Indeed, a research paper appearing last October in Current Biology by Michael Krützen of the University of Zurich and his colleagues claimed that manifestations of culture in orangutans, the other great apes, and humans share evolutionary roots.

No one seems to have yet drafted a “Declaration of Rights for Apes” comparable to the Helsinki Group’s cetacean document, but The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (H.R. 1513/S.810) now pending in the U.S. Congress would end the use of chimpanzees in invasive biomedical research. (The U.S. and Gabon are the only countries in the world that still use chimpanzees for such studies.) [Added: But see also the update at the bottom of this page.]

Adding some momentum to that push, the Institute of Medicine released a report in December that concluded, “most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary,” though it fell short of endorsing a full ban. Meanwhile, some scientists are arguing that chimps should not be kept as pets (because they are dangerous) or used unnaturally in commercials or other media (because the practice lulls people into thinking chimps are not endangered).

Nonhumans don’t get to vote

To many people familiar with the scientific evidence for sentience in animals, recognition of dolphins and chimps as nonhuman persons with certain inalienable rights might seem irresistibly logical. It would also seem to afford the creatures more complete and unassailable protection than other piecemeal conservation measures. After all, if corporations can be nonhuman persons, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 in the controversial Citizens United case, why not dolphins?

The idea is more complicated than it might first appear, however, and not all resistance to it is born of unwillingness to accept these creatures as our peers in some way.

For openers, considerable misunderstanding surrounds what granting rights as persons to nonhumans would mean. Some critics have dismissed the idea as absurd because the animals would not be accepting any responsibilities or obligations incumbent on them in return. But nonhuman persons would not be equivalent to humans, Thomas White says: their rights would specifically allow them to live as they historically have, without human interference. As such, their rights would only be obligations on human governments, not on the creatures themselves. (Eric Michael Johnson, author of the excellent book The Primate Diaries, has an outstanding discussion of this point and the sometimes elastic status of personhood on his blog.)

Legal theory can therefore probably support nonhuman persons fine. Yet there may be a Catch-22 problem with putting the idea into practice. The major practical motivation for declaring cetaceans and apes to be persons is to protect them more sweepingly from us. If governments wanted to do more to protect these creatures, however, they wouldn’t be waiting for a declaration of rights or personhood to prompt them. True, if the rest of the world recognized whales as persons, the last few whaling nations might feel shamed into stopping. But they might instead stand pat against the idea as radical and coercive, and use that excuse to justify ignoring more moderate protective measures. The drive for personhood would then be counterproductive.

The other practical problem could be in determining eligibility for personhood. Qualities like intelligence and empathy can be hard to evaluate in creatures very different from humans. Skeptics often point out that the animals being nominated for personhood sometimes engage in behaviors that can only be called beastly: gangs of male dolphins have been observed to rape unreceptive females; dolphins will also sometimes kill porpoises; chimps are not above infanticide and cannibalism. (Let us not forget that humans commit all these crimes as well; the question is whether they are norms of behavior or aberrations.)

Holding animals to strictly human standards of morality is unreasonable. But if we’re hoping to recognize nonhuman persons in part from their capacities for empathy and ethics, we will need to find a way to evaluate those qualities that doesn’t just reshape itself to give whatever answer we want.

A puzzle that won’t go away

The fact that working out good criteria for nonhuman persons may be difficult is no excuse for failing to do it, however. My suspicion — and it is no more than that — is that even if the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans runs out of steam, the questions of whether and how to recognize persons who aren’t Homo sapiens are going to keep coming up. Maybe we’ll face the problem someday with digital intelligences; maybe creations from biotech labs will pose it instead; maybe someone from the stars will compel us to return to it. The sheer number of ways it can pop up makes me think it’s inevitable.

My further hunch is that, notwithstanding the problems, cetaceans and at least some of the great apes will eventually be recognized as persons. In fact, this categorization will someday probably be regarded as so self-evident that future generations will look back on our ignorance of it with the incredulity that we have for societies that kept slaves.

•

Update (3/20): Andrew Westoll, a former primatologist and author of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, reminds me that the philosopher Peter Singer and other members of the Great Ape Project have in fact issued a World Declaration on Great Primates that, like the declaration for cetaceans, calls for the extension of rights to life, individual freedom, and protection from torture to the apes. One difference, though, is that the primates declaration doesn’t explicitly call for them to be regarded as persons.

I’m also moved to add this: Whenever we do start to become comfortable with recognizing nonhuman persons … wait for the fireworks to start. Politicized issues relating to pregnancy and end of life are complicated and cantankerous already. If society starts recognizing new categories of persons, then expect that concept to be brought into those conversations, too — however inappropriately . At that point, we can only be glad the dolphins and the chimps will have the good sense to stay out of the argument.

Greece on the breadline: cashless currency takes off

A determination to 'move beyond anger to creativity' is driving a strong barter economy in some places

In recent weeks, Theodoros Mavridis has bought fresh eggs, tsipourou (the local brandy: beware), fruit, olives, olive oil, jam, and soap. He has also had some legal advice, and enjoyed the services of an accountant to help fill in his tax return.

None of it has cost him a euro, because he had previously done a spot of electrical work – repairing a TV, sorting out a dodgy light – for some of the 800-odd members of a fast-growing exchange network in the port town of Volos, midway between Athens and Thessaloniki.

In return for his expert labour, Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people's accounts.

"It's an easier, more direct way of exchanging goods and services," said Bernhardt Koppold, a German-born homeopathist and acupuncturist in Volos who is an active member of the network. "It's also a way of showing practical solidarity – of building relationships."

He had just treated Maria McCarthy, an English teacher who has lived and worked in the town for 20 years. The consultation was her first tem transaction, and she used one of the vouchers available for people who haven't yet, or can't, set up an online account.

"I already exchange directly with a couple of families, mainly English teaching for babysitting, and this is a great way to extend that," said McCarthy. "This is still young, but it's growing very quickly. Plainly, the more you use it the more useful to you it gets."

Tems has been up and running for barely 18 months, said Maria Choupis, one of its founder members. Prompted by ever more swingeing salary cuts and tax increases, she reckons there are now around 15 such networks active around Greece, and more planned. "They are as much social structures as economic ones," she said. "They foster intimacy and mutual support."

The network is currently busy transforming a disused building owned by Volos university into a permanent exchange and barter space. It will host a daily market from next month at which members can meet and exchange without using cash. Several highly successful open-air markets were held throughout last summer, Choupis said, until the weather got too cold.

"They're quite joyous occasions," she said. "It's very liberating, not using money." At one market, she said, she approached a woman who had come along with three large trays of homemade cakes and was selling them for a unit a cake. "I asked her: 'Do you think that's enough? After all, you had the cost of the ingredients, the electricity to cook ...'

"She replied: 'Wait until the market is over', and at the end she had three different kinds of fruit, two one-litre bottles of olive oil, soaps, beans, a dozen eggs and a whole lot of yoghurt. 'If I had bought all this at the supermarket,' she said, 'it would have cost me a great deal more than what it cost to make these cakes.'"

What rules the system has are designed to ensure the tems continue "to circulate, and work hard as a currency", said Christos Pappionannou, a mechanical engineer who runs the network's website using open-source software.

No one may hold more than 1,200 tems in the account "so people don't start hoarding; once you reach the top limit you have to start using them."

And no one may owe more than 300, so people "can't get into debt, and have to start offering something".

Businesses that are part of the network are allowed to do transactions partly in tems, and partly in euros; most offer a 50/50 part-exchange.

"We recognise that they have their fixed costs, they have to pay a rent and bills in euros," said Pappionannou. "You could say that their 'profit' might be taken in Tems, to be reinvested in the network."

Choupis said she thought the network would have grown even faster that it has if people were not so "frozen, in a state of fear. It's like they've been hit over the head with a brick; they're dizzy. And they're cautious; they're still thinking: 'I need euros, how am I going to pay my bills?' But as soon as people see how much they can do without money, they're convinced."

The Greek parliament recently passed a law encouraging "alternative forms of entrepreneurship and local development", including exchange networks such as Volos's, giving them official non-profit status for tax purposes.

Choupis said there was a new mood abroad in Greece, a determination to "move beyond anger to creativity".

"You are not poor when you have no money," she said, "you are poor when you have nothing to offer – except for the elderly and the sick, to whom we should all be offering."

Liberating America's secret, for-pay laws

By Carl Malamud

[Editor's note: This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making myself liable for nearly $11 million in damages. The box was full of paper, and printed on the paper were US laws -- laws that no one is allowed to publish or distribute without permission. Carl Malamud, Boing Boing's favorite rogue archivist, is the guy who sent me this glorious box of weird (here are the unboxing pics for your pleasure). I was expecting it, because he asked me in advance if I minded being one of the 73 entities who'd receive this law-bomb on deposit. I was only too glad to accept -- on the condition that Carl write us a guest editorial explaining what this was all about. He was true to his word. -Cory]
 

Boing Boing Official Guest Memorandum of Law

To:	The Standards People
Cc:	The Rest of Us People
From:	Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org
In Re:	Our Right to Replicate the Law Without a License

I. “Code Is Law”—Lessig

Did you know that vital parts of the US law are secret, and you're only allowed to read them if you pay a standards body thousands of dollars for the right to find out what the law of the land is?

Public.Resource.Org spent $7,414.26 buying privately-produced technical public safety standards that have been incorporated into U.S. federal law. These public safety standards govern and protect a wide range of activity, from how bicycle helmets are constructed to how to test for lead in water to the safety characteristics of hearing aids and protective footwear. We have started copying those 73 standards despite the fact they are festooned with copyright warnings, shrinkwrap agreements, and other dire warnings. The reason we are making those copies is because citizens have the right to read and speak the laws that we are required to obey and which are critical to the public safety.


When Peter Veeck posted the Building Code of Savoy, Texas on the Web, the standards people came after him with a legal baseball bat. The standards people run private nonprofit organizations that draft model laws that states then adopt as law, through a mechanism known as incorporation by reference.
Peter thought the people of his town should be able to read the law that governed them. But the standards people were adamant that the model building codes were their copyright-protected property and that nobody could post this information without a license, nobody could copy their property without paying the tollmaster.

The U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed, saying that there is a “continuous understanding that ‘the law,’ whether articulated in judicial opinions or legislative acts or ordinances, is in the public domain and thus not amenable to copyright.” Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Circuit, 2002).

II. “If a Law Isn't Public, It Isn't a Law”—Justice Stephen Breyer

Based on the Veeck decision—and a long line of other court opinions that steadfastly maintain that public access to the text of the laws that govern us is a fundamental aspect of our democratic system— Public.Resource.Org has been posting the building, fire, plumbing, and other state public safety codes since 2007. For the last two years, we've taken the public safety codes of California and converted them to HTML. A group of students in the RDC rural mentoring program have converted the formulas and graphics to SVG and MATHML, and we put the whole thing into an open code repository.
 
However, the building, fire, and plumbing codes are just a subset of the technical standards that have become law. Despite the 2002 Veeck decision, standards incorporated by reference continue to be sold for big bucks. Big bucks as in $65 for a 2-page standard from the Society of Automotive Engineers, required as part of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards in 49 CFR § 571. Big bucks as in $847 for a 48-page 1968 standard from Underwriters' Laboratories required as part of the OSHA workplace safety standards in 29 CFR § 1910.

Public.Resource.Org has a mission of making the law available to all citizens, and these technical standards are a big black hole in the legal universe. We've taken a gamble and spent $7,414.26 to buy 73 of these technical public safety standards that are incorporated into the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. We made 25 print copies of each of these standards and bound each document in a red/white/blue patriotic Certificate Of Incorporation stating that the documents are legally binding on citizens and residents of the United States and that “criminal penalties may apply for noncompliance!”

III. Our $273.7 Million Gamble on Print

Why print copies you may ask? Frankly, because we're scared and wanted to take a cautious and prudent first step in duplicating these legal documents. With a print edition, we are able to limit distribution with none of those infinite-copy side effects we know and love about our digital world. Print seemed to be a medium the standards people and the legal people could relate to.

We know from all the copyright warnings, terms of use, scary shrink wrap agreements, and other red-hot rhetoric that accompanies theses documents that the producers continue to believe that copies may not be made under any circumstances. Those of you familiar with copyright math know that statutory damages for unlawful replication of a document is $150,000 per infraction. So, even though we strongly believe that the documents are not entitled to copyright protection, and moreover that our limited print run is in any case definitely fair use, if a judge were to decide that what we did was breaking the law, 25 copies of 73 standards works out to $273,750,000 in potential liability. While whales may make bigger bets, we draw the line at $273 million.

Those copies were bound up in 27.9-pound boxed sets and dispatched to 3 classes of recipients:

• 10 sets were sent to the Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) with a Notice of Incorporation, stating that comments must be received by Public.Resource.Org by May 1, 2012. The recipients include the American National Standards Institute, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Society for Testing and Materials, British Standards Institute, IEEE, International Organization for Standardization, National Fire Protection Association, National Sanitation Foundation, Society of Automotive Engineers, and the Underwriters' Laboratories.
• 7 sets were sent to U.S. government offices, including the White House, Senate (Senators Grassley and Whitehouse), House (Representatives Issa and Lofgren), National Archives, Administrative Conference of the United States, Federal Trade Commission, and the Copyright Office raising 21 points of law and policy ranging from excessive CEO compensation to cahootenizing in restraint of trade.
• The remaining copies have been reserved for public exhibition and legal defense, including copies furnished to EFF, the Harvard Law School faculty, two copies for the Mainstream Media, and one to our legal counselor, David Halperin.

Upon the close of the May 1 comment period, it is our intention to begin posting these 73 standards in HTML and begin the process of providing a unified, easy-to-use interface to all public safety standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. It is also our intention to continue this effort to include all standards specifically incorporated by reference in the 50 states. That the law must be available to citizens is a cardinal principle of law in countries such as India and the United Kingdom, and we will expand our efforts to include those jurisdictions as well.

IV. A Poll Tax on Access to Justice

The argument for the status quo is that it costs money to develop these high-quality standards and that it is the stated public policy of government that these standards shall be developed by the private sector using a voluntary, consensus-based approach. (Having spent a lot of time with these documents, we can vouch that many of these standards are very high-quality technical documents. This is important stuff and groups like ASME and NFPA do a great job.)

All nonprofits need money and SDOs are no exception. But, no matter how you slice the cheese, you can't do this on the backs of the informed citizenry. Access to the law is a fundamental legal right.

Do these organizations need the revenue from standards sales in order to keep making high-quality standards? While SDOs have come to rely on this very lucrative monopoly over pieces of the public domain, a look at their revenue streams and executive compensation levels indicates that perhaps they don't need quite as much as they're getting. They all have a variety of revenue streams in addition to document sales ranging from membership fees to conferences to training and directed research (often done with grants, subsidies, or direct support from government). As 501(c)(3) nonprofits with an explicit goal of making their standards into law, SDOs have moral and legal obligations to make those standards that have already become law available to the public and in no case can they prohibit others from doing so.

The scale of these operations is indicated in Table 1, which lists the CEO compensation for ten leading standards-making nonprofits. (ISO refuses to divulge executive compensation despite their status as a nongovernmental organization based in Switzerland.)

Table 1: Compensation of Major Nonprofits Involved in Standards Setting

Rank	Name of Nonprofit Organization	Name of Leader	Year	Amount
1.	Underwriters' Laboratories	K. Williams	2009	$2,075,984
2.	National Sanitation Foundation	Kevin Lawlor	2009	$1,140,012
3.	British Standards Institution	Howard Kerr	2010	$1,029,161
4.	National Fire Protection Association	James M. Shannon	2009	$926,174
5.	American National Standards Institute	Saranjit Bhatia	2010	$916,107
6.	ASTM International	James A. Thomas	2009	$782,047
7.	IEEE	James Prendergast	2009	$422,412
8.	Society of Automotive Engineers	David L. Schutt	2009	$422,128
9.	American Society of Mechanical Engineers	Thomas G. Loughlin	2009	$420,960
10.	The United States of America	Barack Obama	2011	$400,000

The status quo assumes that the only way to fund a standards-making process is to charge lots of money for the end product. But that is a self-serving self-delusion. The SDOs would actually grow and prosper in an open environment, and they would certainly carry out their mission more effectively. They might need to change their business models, but hasn't the Internet made the rest of us change our business models?

V. “Let Every Sluice of Knowledge Be Set A-Flowing”—John Adams

The Internet was built on open standards that are freely available. Many readers may not realize it, but there were originally two Internets. The one we use is based on TCP/IP and was developed by the IETF and other groups such as the W3C. But, there was another Internet called Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) which was being pushed in the 1980s and early 1990s by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and other SDOs. The OSI Internet was based on very expensive standards and it failed miserably. It was open that won and open that scaled.

It is our contention that the physical standards that we're posting are just as important as Internet standards. By making things like the National Fuel and Gas Code, the standard for safety in wood and metal ladders, or the standards for safety and hygiene in water supplies readily available to all without restriction, we make society better. People can read the standards and learn, they can improve upon them by making searchable databases or better navigational tools, they can build new kinds of businesses.

Innovation and education are just two of the benefits of opening up this world, but at the root are basic issues of democracy and justice. We cannot tell citizens to obey laws that are only available for the rich to read. The current system acts as a poll tax on access to justice, a deliberate rationing and restriction of information critical to our public safety. That system is morally wrong and it is legally unconstitutional.

VI. Supporting Materials

• In response to a petition drafted by Professor Strauss of Columbia Law School, the Office of the Federal Register is taking comments from the public as to whether they should provide greater public access to standards incorporated by reference. You have until March 28 to respond. Please let them know what you think!
• The Administrative Conference of the United States recently considered the issue of Incorporation by Reference, but ended up not taking any significant action. A particularly strong letter of protest was submitted by EFF.
• For makers and doers interested in the craft of public printing, we posted photographs of the construction of these boxes of in our print factory.
• A copy of the packing slip that was in the boxes, including the Notice Of Incorporation, the shipping manifest, and the 7 letters of transmittal to government officials is available for your review as a PDF file as is a sample Certificate Of Incorporation.

Criminal Charges Dropped in Canada Customs Manga Case

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund are pleased to announce that the Crown has withdrawn all criminal charges in R. v. Matheson, the case previously described as the “Brandon X case,” which involved a comic book reader who faced criminal charges in Canada relating to comic books on his computer. The defendant, Ryan Matheson, a 27-year-old comic book reader, amateur artist, and computer programmer has been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing.

The total legal costs of this case exceeded $75,000. After taking the case last summer, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund contributed $20,000 to the defense, and the Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund contributed $11,000. The CBLDF also participated in shaping the defense, including recruiting expert testimony for the trial. The organization is currently seeking funds to help pay off the $45,000 debt Matheson incurred as a result of his case, and to create new tools to prevent future cases. To make a contribution to these important efforts, please visit www.cbldf.org.

After a search of his laptop in 2010, Matheson was wrongfully accused of possessing and importing child pornography because of constitutionally protected comic book images on that device. He was subjected to abusive treatment by police and a disruption in his life that included a two-year period during which he was unable to use computers or the internet outside of his job, severely limiting opportunities to advance his employment and education. Mr. Matheson has agreed to plead to a non-criminal code regulatory offense under the Customs Act of Canada. As a result of the agreement, Matheson will not stand trial. The defense of this case was waged by Michael Edelson and Solomon Friedman of Edelson Clifford D’Angelo LLP. The full Notices of Application detailing Edelson’s defense and outlining the outrageous and unlawful treatment Matheson endured are available here: Charter Notice and Jan 15 12 – Matheson Charter Notice.

Speaking out for the first time, Matheson says, “I’m glad to finally put this awful ordeal behind me. Ever since the beginning I knew I had committed no crime, so I was never willing to accept a plea to any criminal charge. The entire legal process is very traumatizing, and the overzealous bail conditions imposed on me were very difficult to endure. Although my defense was extremely strong, all trials are inherently risky and I value my life too much to risk a potential minimum mandatory sentence. I am very grateful for the spectacular work Michael Edelson and his team put into my case, and to all the generous people who supported me and contributed to my defense. I was able to stand up to the very last day and fight for something I believe in.” Matheson has also written a personal statement about his case that appears on www.cbldf.org.

Edelson, who managed the defense says, “The client, and my firm, are grateful to the members of CBLDF and CLLDF for their invaluable financial and moral support with respect to this case, which was of such critical importance to the client, given the very positive outcome we were able to achieve in an area of the law where, here in Canada, the Crown very rarely exercises its discretion to withdraw charges of this nature. The client will have no criminal record, his name will not appear on the Sex Offender Registry in Canada, or elsewhere.”

The Notices of Application available on CBLDF.org detail for the first time the extreme mistreatment Mr. Matheson suffered at the hands of Canadian authorities. He had his right to counsel and Vienna Convention consular rights violated when he was detained without being properly informed of the reason for detention. He was not granted access to counsel, or to the American Embassy. The Application asserts that Customs officers acted as agents for police and conducted an illegal search of his property. Matheson was also the subject of cruel and unusual punishment, including being denied food and blankets. Matheson was even told by police transporting him to prison that “if you get raped in here, it doesn’t count!” The defense detailed these and other abuses and outlined that the comics at issue are constitutionally protected in the United States, the client’s home country. The comics possess artistic merit and are widely available in Canada, Japan and the United States.

Although the outcome of this case is ultimately positive, comic book readers should be aware that there are still dangers for traveling with comics in Canada. Edelson says, “Aside from the very positive outcome to this story, your members should be cautioned concerning the search and seizure regime here in Canada exercised by the Canadian Border Services Agency. Moreover, they should also be aware that although anime and manga is legal in many areas of the United States and Japan, etc., to possess and utilize, the Canadian authorities may take a different view if this material is found on any laptops or mobile devices when you enter the country. Many of the issues that arise in similar circumstances are thoroughly addressed in our comprehensive Notice of Application.”

Edelson’s firm has created a new advisory on traveling with comics and manga in Canada that is available here: CBLDF – Legal Memorandum – Canada Issues. The CBLDF’s previous advisory, which addresses the issues of traveling with comics through international borders is located here: CBLDF Advisory – Comic Book Art at Intl Borders

“This is a good outcome, and we’re glad we were able to contribute to it,” CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein said. “While one always wants to be able to change the rules in court, those opportunities are rare, and in this case, the defense’s extraordinary effort in persuading the Crown to drop criminal charges is a very positive conclusion. We are now focusing our efforts on raising money to pay off Ryan’s legal debt. We are also working with Ryan and experts in the manga community to create educational tools to help prevent others from needing to go through anything like this themselves. We hope that people will donate to the CBLDF to help us achieve these goals quickly.”

Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund board member Leonard Wong said, “We’re glad this is over for Ryan and want to thank him and his attorneys for their willingness to stand up to our government in this matter. We’re also pleased that the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund were able to assist the defense financially and substantively, and are creating new tools to help prevent these kinds of cases in the future. Unfortunately, this could easily happen again, so we continue our stride to establish the CLLDF as a more active ongoing concern. Our immediate focus will now shift towards raising funds and preparing for any future attacks on comics in Canada.”

Please visit www.cbldf.org today to make a donation in support of paying off Ryan’s legal defense and creating new tools to combat abuses like this from happening in the future. You can also support this effort by becoming a member of the CBLDF. Every contribution helps CBLDF get Ryan back on his feet, and furthers our efforts to protect the First Amendment rights of comics and manga.

About CBLDF
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community. They have defended dozens of Free Expression cases in courts across the United States, and led important education initiatives promoting comics literacy and free expression. For additional information, donations, and other inquiries call 800-99-CBLDF or visit them online at www.cbldf.org.

About CLLDF
The Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1987 to raise money for the defense of a Calgary, Alberta comic shop whose owners were charged with selling obscene materials. The CLLDF has since been maintained on an ad hoc basis to provide financial relief for Canadian comics retailers, publishers, professionals, or readers whose right to free speech has been infringed by civil authorities. Largely dormant since the early 1990s, the CLLDF is reforming to provide support for this case, and reorganizing to ensure that help will be readily available for future cases involving Canadian citizens or authorities. To help the CLLDF in this mission, please go to www.clldf.ca.

$100 to Fly Through the Airport

By SCOTT MCCARTNEY

Hate the full-body scans, pat-downs and slow going at TSA airport security screening checkpoints? For $100, you can now bypass the hassle.

Want to avoid TSA pat downs, long lines and waltz through security with shoes and jackets on, laptops stored and all the soft drinks you can carry? As Scott McCartney explain on The News Hub, there is a way, and it costs just $100. Photo: Reuters

The Transportation Security Administration is rolling out expedited screening at big airports called "Precheck." It has special lanes for background-checked travelers, who can keep their shoes, belt and jacket on, leave laptops and liquids in carry-on bags and walk through a metal detector rather than a full-body scan. The process, now at two airlines and nine airports, is much like how screenings worked before the Sept. 11 attacks.

To qualify, frequent fliers must meet undisclosed TSA criteria and get invited in by the airlines. There is also a backdoor in. Approved travelers who are in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's "Global Entry" program can transfer into Precheck using their Global Entry number.

"It's a completely different experience than what you're used to," said Matt Stegmeir, a platinum-level Delta Air Lines Inc. DAL +3.55% frequent flier who was invited into Precheck when it opened at his home airport, Minneapolis-St. Paul. Besides zipping through security screening quickly and easily, Mr. Stegmeir noticed another difference: TSA agents at the Precheck lane are usually smiling.

"It's really a jarring contrast. It reminds you just how much of a hassle the security procedures in place really are," he said.

Global Entry has been extremely popular with frequent international travelers. Approved travelers get to use a kiosk to enter the country rather than waiting in often-long lines to get their passports stamped and go through Customs inspection.

Consider that in January at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, the average wait in line was 35 minutes between 4 and 5 p.m., and the longest wait was 137 minutes. The wait at Terminal 1 at New York's Kennedy International Airport averaged 44 minutes in January for people arriving between 10 and 11 a.m. Enrolling requires a $100 application fee for a background check, plus a brief interview with a Customs officer.

For domestic travel, Global Entry pays off because it gets you into Precheck. Once TSA announced in the fall that enrollment in Global Entry and CBP's other "trusted travel" programs (Nexus for frequent travel across the Canadian border and Sentri for frequent travel across the Mexican border) would get you into Precheck, applications for Global Entry took off.

In February, for example, 26,602 people applied, more than triple the number of applications in February 2011, according to CBP. And February applications were up 42% from January as more and more travelers catch on.

"We want as many people as possible in the program," said John Wagner, CBP's executive director of admissibility and passenger programs.

TSA says it also wants as many people as possible in Precheck, which is still in pilot-testing phase. Both agencies say the programs can enhance screening of people they know nothing about if they can move low-risk people who submit to background checks out of the main queues.

"We can reduce the size of the haystack when we are looking for that one-in-a-billion terrorist," said TSA Administrator John Pistole.

Mr. Pistole, an FBI veteran who took over TSA in 2010, said that by studying frequent-flier histories as well as conducting background checks, he's confident the U.S. now has the technology and the intelligence information to make less-rigorous, faster screening work. TSA has been trying to move to more "risk-based" security—something critics have suggested for many years.

Once in Precheck, TSA still checks names against terrorism watch lists before every flight, just as it does for other travelers. If a passenger is cleared for Precheck screening, a code is embedded in a traveler's boarding pass.

Precheck members usually get to use security lines set up for first-class and elite-level frequent fliers. But Precheck travelers actually don't know if they will get to use the easy screening until the TSA officer checking IDs actually scans the boarding pass. If the pass has the code, a Precheck passenger is steered to a separate screening lane for what amounts to old-style airport screening.

TSA says Precheck members are selected randomly for regular screening to enhance security. But that unpredictability irks frequent travelers. The agency doesn't make travelers go to the end of the regular screening line, however, but instead slips them into the front of the regular queue.

"I like Precheck, but it would be much more valuable to me if I were able to know before leaving for the airport whether or not I had Precheck approval for that day's flights," said Beth Allen, a University of Minnesota economist and frequent traveler.

Gary Kaminsky, who travels 100,000 miles a year domestically, says he's gotten Precheck screening on about 80% of his trips so far out of Los Angeles International Airport, his home base, on AMR Corp.'s American Airlines. "When it does work, it's phenomenal," he said. "It cuts security screening down to about 30 seconds."

For now, travelers say Precheck lanes are almost always empty—no waiting. In fact, Precheck may be making regular lines longer since equipment and officers are devoted to a little-used lane. Mr. Pistole said that will change as the program expands and the agency collects more data.

Currently, TSA is working with only two airlines, American and Delta, because they were able to handle computing requirements set by TSA for the frequent-flier aspect. Even if you get into Precheck through Global Entry, it will currently only work for you on American and Delta domestic flights at airports with Precheck lanes.

Also, Precheck lanes are in place only at nine airports. Currently, American passengers can use it in Dallas-Fort Worth, New York Kennedy, Los Angeles and Miami. Delta passengers have Precheck access in Atlanta, Detroit and Salt Lake City. Passengers on both airlines can use Precheck in Las Vegas and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Later this month, Precheck is set to expand to Washington's Reagan National Airport for Delta passengers and certain members of the U.S. military, and Chicago O'Hare with American.

By the end of the year, Mr. Pistole said Precheck will be in place at 35 airports and six airlines, covering most major U.S. airports and airlines. Expansion will continue in 2013, but Precheck probably won't be available at all 450 commercial airports, since many have a small number of travelers each day. "The goal is to cover the broadest cross-section of travelers," he said.