Byron Sonne: the thin line between terrorist and gardener

Denise Balkissoon

Fertilizer, corned beef or bomb? Potassium nitrate contains multitudes. And it’s just one of the many chemicals found inside Byron Sonne’s house during a police search after the security consultant’s pre-G20 arrest in June 2010.

After spending almost a year in pre-trial custody and sitting through a three-week hearing as to whether his Charter rights were violated during his arrest and detention, the 39-year-old’s criminal trial finally began this week. Sonne and his lawyers lost that one—on December 12, Superior Court Justice Nancy Spies ruled that although the search of Sonne’s home did violate his Charter rights, by excising the bad parts of the search warrants and amplifying the good, she could admit the evidence seized during the search into the trial proper. Sonne’s lawyers had also fought to have his interrogation by Detective Tam Bui kept out of the proceedings, but Spies decided that most of Sonne’s statements had been voluntary. She cut out some parts (mostly referring to how he used his credit cards) but largely let the interview stand.

The star witness this week was Dr. Crawford John Anderson, the head of Military Engineering for Defence Research and Development Canada. Anderson spends much of his time looking into what types of improvised explosive devices are trending on the internet, and building them himself to see if they actually work. He was here to opine as to whether the chemicals found in Sonne’s house could have been combined into a bomb.

No one disputes that Sonne had a lab in his basement, stocked with glassware and neatly labelled containers (see photos here). There was potassium permanganate, potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, iron oxide and zinc oxide. There was stearine, copper sulfate, urea, hydrogen peroxide and aluminum powder, as well as dextrin, sulfamic acid, hexachloroethane, charcoal, potassium silicate and sodium bicarbonate. Sonne had plastic bags full of wax shavings and PVC shavings, and a container of hexamine tablets next to his camp stove. There was acetone, methyl hydrate and hydrochloric acid in his garage. In his furnace room, he had an electrochemical setup where he seemed to be turning potassium chloride into potassium chlorate, a shiny white crystal that is, Anderson said, a well-known ingredient in improvised explosives like TATP (triacetone triperoxide) and HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamlene).

Most of these chemicals have multiple uses. Urea and ammonium nitrate are fertilizers, and police photographed stacks of seeds from Martha Stewart Living. “That’s the difficulty with a lot of this,” Anderson said. “It can be done with ordinary kitchen stuff.” Some have no explosive properties at all. Copper sulfate can be used to grow “beautiful blue crystals,” beakers of which were found during the search.

Anderson said that none of the chemicals had been combined—what he saw were “precursors,” not a bomb. Still, the expert was sober, pointing out that there were enough precursors in the Forest Hill home to make eight to 10 kilos of explosives, enough to “blow apart the back of a bus.”

“I haven’t seen any evidence that something explosive was made,” Anderson said. “But it’s my opinion that the materials there, the kit, not just the chemicals but the materials to put them together, I can’t see any reason other than to at some point make some sort of localized explosive.” The next day, defence lawyer Peter Copeland took Anderson through the chemical list again. Acetone is crucial to both TATP and HMTD, and Anderson agreed that he didn’t know whether the containers found in Sonne’s garage were full. But even one kilogram would be a significant explosion. The lawyer and bomb expert went through the step-by-step process of making each of the explosives up for discussion: TATP and HMTD, plus the less-powerful ANFO (which is a crude mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) and HDN (hexamine dinitrate). It would take about four hours to make 200 grams of TATP, which would then need to be dried. It would take about the same time to make 50 grams of HMTD, which would also need to be dried. Anderson agreed that Sonne had a limited amount of small glassware. Making the full London-bombing haul of explosives would take a very long time, if done by an amateur, by hand. Copeland had Anderson reiterate that none of these explosives were in the process of being made when police entered Sonne’s home three days before the G20 summit began.

In lawyerly Latin, “mens rea” means “guilty mind.” In other words, intent—the goal of the accused is a factor, which is how murder becomes manslaughter, or vice versa. Sonne says his intent was to build model rockets, and to do so within the bounds of the law. He was a member of the Canadian Association of Rocketry, and says he suspended all his experiments when the president of the association told him he needed a license to mess with stuff like potassium chlorate. Copeland and Anderson went back and forth about whether bomb-precursor chemicals are also rocket propellants. The bag of wax shavings could be used to form chemicals into a solid rocket fuel, Anderson agreed, and the drill press in the garage could be used for the same purpose. He also said, over and over, that rockets aren’t his speciality. Near the end of December 15th's testimony, Copeland posed Anderson another question. “If someone were interested in testing the system, to see whether they could raise flags with the people in authority who regulates chemicals,” the lawyer said, “could that be one reason for acquiring some chemicals in that collection?”

“It’s possible,” said Anderson. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

The trial resumes March 19.

In group decision-making, ignorance promotes democracy

By Kate Shaw

How do groups of animals make collective decisions? Last week, we learned that bees reach consensus by headbutting those with opposing views. But in many other species, the decision-making process is a bit more democratic. In cases where social animals are unrelated and have different self-interests (such as our own), contrasting opinions are common. But it can be just as common for individuals to either be uninformed about the options, or simply not care much about the decision.

Researchers have long wondered how the dynamics of decision-making work in these cases. Some evidence suggests that those who are ignorant or naïve are subject to manipulation by a loud, opinionated minority. If this is true, uninformed individuals are detrimental to democratic decision-making, since they can turn over power to a minority. However, a new study in this week's Science shows that, under certain conditions, uninformed individuals actually shift the balance toward the majority, enabling a democratic process where the majority rules.

First, the researchers created a simple computational model in which a group of virtual animals had the option of moving to one of two locations. There were few rules: virtual animals were attracted to each other and tended to travel in the same general direction. Based on these rules, the individuals acted like members of a rudimentary social group. Then, the researchers varied the number of animals that wanted to go to each location and the strength of their convictions.

In the first set of models, all the individuals had a preference for either one location or the other, with varying degrees of conviction. Not surprisingly, when the majority of animals had a strong preference to move to one location, the group moved there. Even when the majority’s preference was equal in strength to the minority’s preference, the majority won out. However, when the strength of the minority's preference was increased past a certain threshold, the minority could dictate the group’s behavior. These results suggest that an opinionated minority can win out over a majority with weaker convictions.

Things got more interesting when the researchers added animals without a preference to the model. Under these conditions, even when the minority's preference was extremely strong, the presence of the "uninformed" individuals actually returned control to the majority. The more uninformed individuals there were, the stronger this effect became (up to a point; eventually noise took over).

The researchers then used an experimental approach to ask the same questions using golden shiners, a very social species of fish known for their schooling behavior. Some fish were trained to swim to a yellow target in the tank, and some were trained to move toward a blue target. Intrinsically, the fish preferred the yellow target—even after training, their preference for the yellow target was stronger than their preference for the blue target. This created an natural way to test the researchers’ theories.

The results from these lab tests mirrored the findings of the computational model. When the minority of fish in the tank were those trained to go to the yellow target (meaning they had a strong preference for the option), they won out and the group went there. When untrained fish were introduced into the tank, however, the majority regained control, even though their preference for the blue target was weaker. When the majority of the fish in the tank were trained to go to the yellow target, the presence of untrained fish had no effect.

Under these conditions, the presence of ignorant or naïve individuals actually tends to lessen the influence of a strongly-opinionated majority. Clearly, these experiments are simplistic compared to the conditions under which many collective decisions are actually made in nature (or in our electoral system). Additionally, in this study, only two options were being considered. In real life, there are often multiple possibilities. In other words, it’s probably not realistic to predict or explain our upcoming elections with these results. But they're a good start to understanding the dynamics of collective decision-making.

Science, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1210280 (About DOIs).

UMG claims "right to block or remove" YouTube videos it doesn't own

By Timothy B. Lee

Universal Music Group has responded to Megaupload's request for a temporary restraining order barring the music giant from further interference with the distribution of its "Mega Song." UMG insists that it had a right to take down the video—not under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as Megaupload had assumed, but under a private contractual arrangement between UMG and YouTube.

UMG's filing raises more questions than it answers. Most obviously, the firm has not explained why it took down the video in the first place. But the filing also raises deeper questions about UMG's effort to essentially opt out of the DMCA takedown rules. UMG seems to believe it can take down videos even if it doesn't hold the copyright to them, and that when UMG takes a video down from YouTube, the owner of that video can't avail herself of even the weak protections against takedown abuse provided by the DMCA.

A different kind of takedown

As we discussed on Thursday, UMG casts Megaupload as a major villain in the war over illegal file-sharing. Last week, Megaupload sought to bolster its image by releasing a pop-star-studded promotional video. UMG's takedown request was an unexpected publicity coup. Megaupload took full advantage, suing UMG on Monday and asking the judge for an immediate restraining order to prevent UMG from further interfering with the video's distribution.

UMG's response, filed late on Thursday, focuses on the narrow question of whether Judge Claudia Wilken should grant such a restraining order. The recording giant makes two principle arguments in opposition.

First, UMG says such a restraining order is not authorized by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA's notice-and-takedown safe harbor includes a provision for monetary damages against copyright holders who abuse the takedown process, but it does not give the courts the power to block copyright holders from sending takedown requests.

But more importantly, Universal argues that its takedown is not governed by the DMCA in the first place. In a statement supporting Megaupload's complaint, CIO Kim Dotcom had stated "it is my understanding" that Universal had invoked the DMCA's notice-and-takedown provisions. But UMG says Dotcom got it wrong: the takedown was sent "pursuant to the UMG-YouTube agreement," which gives UMG "the right to block or remove user-posted videos through YouTube's CMS based on a number of contractually specified criteria."

In other words, when UMG removes a video using YouTube's CMS, that might be a takedown, but it's not a DMCA takedown. And that, UMG argues, means that the DMCA's rule against sending takedown requests for files you don't own doesn't apply.

"Not limited to copyright infringement"

UMG underscored the point by including a letter UMG lawyer Kelly Klaus sent to YouTube on Wednesday. In that letter, Klaus wrote:
Your letter could be read to suggest that UMG's rights to use the YouTube "Content Management System" with respect to certain user-posted videos are limited to instances in which UMG asserts a claim that a user-posted video contains material that infringes a UMG copyright. As you know, UMG's rights in this regard are not limited to copyright infringement, as set forth more completely in the March 31, 2009 Video License Agreement for UGC Video Service Providers, including without limitation Paragraphs 1(b) and 1(g) thereof.

This appears to be a reference to the agreement underlying the VEVO partnership between Google and UMG announced in April 2009. As far as we know, the agreement isn't public, so we can only speculate on what's in Paragraphs 1(b) and 1(g). But we plan to ask Google for a copy.

UMG's response also sheds some light on another mystery: why Monday's issue of Tech News Today was yanked from YouTube. When UMG removes a video via YouTube's CMS, a "reference file" is created that "in theory is supposed to identify other instances of postings of the same content." UMG speculates that this "reference file" system was responsible for the accidental removal from YouTube of a Tech News Today episode featuring the Megaupload video.

The recording industry is currently lobbying for passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would create a DMCA-style takedown regime for advertising and credit card networks. Critics may question whether it's wise to give new takedown powers to copyright holders that demonstrate such a cavalier attitude toward the rights of others.

As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit

By Adrianne Jeffries

Can't pay? Well, what about your friends?

Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”?

A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.

“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”

And in the last year or so, financial institutions have started exploring ways to use data from Facebook, Twitter and other networks to round out an individual borrower’s risk profile—although most entrepreneurs working on the problem say the technology is three to five years away from mainstream adoption.

“Credit score is a lagging indicator,” said Brett King, a tall, puffy Australian with white blond hair who is the founder of the online-only bank Movenbank and author of BANK 2.0: How Customer Behavior and Technology Will Change the Future of Financial Services. “At best, your credit score is about 60 days behind. What we’re trying to do is look for things that reflect the likelihood of a future default, rather than what’s happened in the past.”

Movenbank is an online bank in private alpha release that replaces plastic credit and debit cards with a mobile device such as an iPad or smartphone. Mr. King is a major proponent of the questionable young science of using social media to evaluate creditworthiness.

When it comes to online privacy, Mr. King subscribes to the Mark Zuckerberg school of thought: standards are evolving, and the world will be better for it. (As long as you’re connecting and sharing, only good things can happen to you!) “Our view of what ‘private’ is, is changing,” Mr. King said. “We make friends with people we barely know!”

He predicts that banks will soon start asking customers to verify their social media profiles. Not everyone has a social media presence, of course, so submitting your Twitter handle will first be pitched as a way to provide customer support or account alerts, which will later open the door for “more complex products,” Mr. King said.

Employers have already started using social media to evaluate potential candidates, and in 2009 a woman in Quebec stopped receiving disability payments for major depression after Manulife decided, based on beach vacation photos on Facebook, that she seemed happy enough to work after all. “I’m sure that insurers now are looking at Facebook profiles and saying, ‘You’ve said you’re not a smoker? Well how come in three of these ten photos where you’re out with friends, you’re smoking?’” Mr. King said.

That means that tweet, “Just got fired, man. Spending my severance at the bar!” may have been ill-considered.

Mr. King is especially interested in identifying customers who can evangelize the service to a sizable crowd of cloud-friends. Movenbank requires users to connect their Facebook accounts upon registering, data from which will be baked into a proprietary “CRED” score, a number that determines which rates and products are available. The exact recipe is still being written, but eventually Movenbank will boost your CRED as you hook it up to your accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and even eBay, which calculates a reputation score based on buyer feedback. It’s not the only metric, Mr. King said, but a strong Twitter presence could tip the scale in favor of a marginally risky borrower.

Much of this is driven by enterprising techies looking for the next big sector of the economy to disrupt with a social twist. Back in July, the 34-year-old internet pundit, angel investor and startup entrepreneur Kevin Rose, best known as the founder of Digg, sat down in front of his webcam in a t-shirt and baseball cap to talk to the internet about credit cards. “This might be potentially the dumbest, least-vetted idea I’ve ever put out there,” he said. “What if we could make credit cards a little more social?”

Mr. Rose was just spitballing, and his idea seemed innocuous enough. But there’s a nightmare scenario: if banks learn how to use social media, they could gather information they aren’t allowed to ask for on a credit application—including race, marital status and receipt of public assistance—or worse, to redline segments of the social graph.

In other words: choose your online friends wisely, for they may one day determine your APR.

Lenddo, a Hong Kong-based microlending startup incubated in New York’s FinTech Innovation Lab, calls itself “the first credit scoring service that uses your online social network to assess credit.” The first thing Lenddo asks for is a Facebook account; then it wants access to Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live. The Observer was given a respectable score of 470. But when we tried to apply for a loan, we were told “you need at least 3 connections with scores above 400 in your Lenddo trusted network.” (We wouldn’t have been able to get a loan anyway: Lenddo is only available in the Philippines, although it recently hired an ex-Googler to head up the Americas.)

The company’s algorithm is proprietary and secret, said CEO Jeff Stewart, but the primary metric is what Lenddo knows about the people you’re friends with. “We think that in the age of the internet you should be able to establish your reputation and your identity through your social graph, through your on- and offline community, and use that to get access to financial products and information,” he said.

If Lenddo sees one of your best Facebook buddies took out a loan and paid it back, there’s a good chance you will too. “Our backgrounds are in machine learning and pattern recognition,” Mr. Stewart said. “It’s some serious math.

“There’s no reason there shouldn’t be thousands of engineers working to assess creditworthiness.”

In another nifty but nefarious innovation, Lenddo reserves the right to broadcast your loan status if you fall into default. As the site warns: “Failure to repay will negatively impact your Lenddo score, as well as the score of your Lenddo friends. Lenddo MAINTAINS THE RIGHT TO NOTIFY YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY if the borrower fails to repay, however, this is only done after several notifications to the borrower and an attempt to work out a payment plan.”

“I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best,” Mr. Stewart said. “Every industry will be in fact impacted by social.”

Banks have been curious about using social media to gauge risk for at least a year, said Matt Thomson, VP of platform at Klout, which calculates “influence” based on a user’s social media activity. Determining creditworthiness is not a core product of Klout’s, he said, but banks have approached the startup to ask about it. He wouldn’t name names. “It’s really like the who’s who of banking,” he said.

(Mr. Stewart of Lenddo also said his startup is approached “regularly” by major banks curious about the algorithm.)

Klout, arguably the leader in developing a metric for social media power users, has taken a beating from bloggers for being spammy and potentially insecure. The New York Times wrote about shocked parents who discovered Klout had autogenerated skeleton profiles for their children, based on what it had gathered from their connections to others; the science fiction writer Charles Stross called the service “the internet equivalent of herpes.” R. Ethan Smith, who blogs as The Startupist, recently wrote a critique of Movenbank’s projected partnership with Klout. “Klout claims that I am influential about New Jersey, coffee, and iPads,” he wrote, noting that he has no real expertise in any of the three and doesn’t even own an iPad. “Now, let’s assume that King is completely serious about using online social profile data to determine a Movenbank user’s influences, which will essentially determine their ability access a line of credit… To stake tangible dollars on what seems to be a relatively easily manipulable algorithm is not something I would characterize as ‘good business sense.’”

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff dismissed the idea that social media credit scoring is a serious erosion of privacy, mostly because there’s nothing left to hide. “We’re already in the nightmare scenario,” he wrote in an email. “They already know everything about you—more than most of us realize. If anything, the addition of social networking information to this data mining will help us come to some understanding of how much more these companies know about us than we know about ourselves.”

The precise formula for FICO, the most widely used credit score, is secret and proprietary to the Fair Isaac Corporation, a publicly traded company. Experian and TransUnion, two of the three national credit bureaus, did not respond to requests for comment on this story; Equifax, the third, did respond. “Our corporate development professionals are very aware of the opportunities to enhance our proprietary data and partner with companies who add value to the accuracy of our reporting, which helps our customers make better decisions prior to lending,” a company rep said in an email, adding that Equifax can’t comment on future strategies because it’s a public company.

This new use for social media data could turn out to be empowering, Mr. Rushkoff pointed out, if it leads to people lending to one another. A reputation score based on the social graph could lower the barrier to entry for peer-to-peer lending startups. “Instead of everyone outsourcing their savings, investments, and borrowing to truly evil institutions who use what information they about us simply as an excuse to drain more money from us,” Mr. Rushkoff said, “we would invest in one another.”

Snow is falling lightly outside as Mr. Bailey logs off of PotterBank.com. Suddenly, a bell rings. It’s his iPhone: a text message from Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lending startup based in San Francisco. His friends saw his Tumblr post with photos of the coveted apartment, and forwarded it to friends of friends. Collectively, they’ve pledged to invest over and above the needed deposit. He looks up, smiles; looks back at his phone, and taps out a tweet: “No man is a failure who has friends!”

US Bans Loud Commercials

On Tuesday, the FCC passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM. It's a law that states all commercials must run at the same volume as network newscasts. The same applies to network promos. The responsibility falls on cable providers like Comcast or charter. The law will not take effect until next year which leaves it plenty of time to be challenged in court by cable providers or advertisers.

Universal has 'Tech News Today' episode yanked from YouTube for reporting on MegaUpload promo video

By Nilay Patel

We're still not sure what to make of the strange war that's erupted between file sharing service MegaUpload and Universal Media Group after MegaUpload posted a promo video that appears to feature Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and others, but we do know that it's starting to leave some ugly collateral damage: Universal had Monday's episode of Tech News Today pulled off of YouTube for simply reporting on the controversy. Host Tom Merritt and crew played two clips of the "Mega Song" video while discussing the issue and MegaUpload's pending lawsuit Monday afternoon, which was too much for Universal: it filed a copyright dispute and had the episode pulled from YouTube by Monday night. Never mind that news reporting and commentary are core elements of the traditional fair use analysis, of course — or that no audio from the video was even played during first clip.

Tom tells us he wasn't informed of the video's removal until a fan told him on Twitter, and that the episode was promptly restored when he complained using YouTube's automated dispute process — but Universal followed up with an official DMCA takedown request on Tuesday morning, and the show is currently down. Tom's filed YouTube's corresponding DMCA counter-dispute and the video will go back up in 10 days unless Universal decides to go full-on crazy and actually file a lawsuit, but at this point the damage has been done. As Tom says, "In 10 days a daily news show is worthless, so Universal was able to censor this episode of Tech News Today."

What makes all of this particularly egregious is that it's not even clear Universal has the necessary rights to initiate this sort of takedown — the entire dispute between MegaUpload and Universal is about who owns those rights, and MegaUpload's lawsuit against Universal is entirely about having the "Mega Song" video pulled from other video sites on false infringement grounds. That Universal decided it was acceptable to go after legitimate news organizations for reporting on the dispute is utterly perplexing — both MegaUpload and Universal look somewhat shady in all of this, but only Universal looks like a floundering bully. We'll see if Universal or YouTube wise up and restore the TNT episode.

Sometimes a purse is just a purse

Try telling that to TSA. And introducing the American Hysteria Hall of Shame

By Patrick Smith

That’s the thing with airport security and TSA. There is always something funny to write about.

And in place of “something funny” you may substitute the words “exasperating” or “troubling” or “a national embarrassment.”

The latest from the Department of You Can’t Make This Up involves a teenage girl who was not allowed to carry a purse onto a flight in Norfolk, Va., because it was embroidered with the design of a handgun.

That’s right, embroidered. According to reports, 17-year-old Virginia Gibbs was told by Transportation Security Administration that bringing such a purse through the checkpoint constitutes a federal offense. She was given the option of giving up the purse or sending it along as checked luggage.

TSA says the problem is that such designs can be mistaken by scanners for the real thing, resulting in checkpoint closures and delays. On the one hand that is not unreasonable (though it does make us think that if you can’t tell the difference between a purse and a gun, how good is this technology at identifying explosives?). On the other, more logical hand, once they saw and realized it was a purse, what would the harm have been in giving it back to the girl and letting her through? If there was going to be a closure or a delay, it already happened. Confiscating the bag no longer served a purpose.

A ban on replica weapons makes sense. We get it. But this wasn’t a replica weapon. It was a purse. There is nothing remotely dangerous about what is essentially a drawing of a firearm, and TSA should not be able to deny the carriage of harmless private property.

Meanwhile, what bothers me about the CNN.com story is that it implies this is all OK. “Flying fashionistas with a thing for the Second Amendment,” it begins, “may want to leave their gun-themed purses and other paraphernalia at home, lest they be flagged as a security risk and miss their flights.” Rather than worrying about the Second Amendment, where is the more urgent concern over security run amok? And things like this aren’t just silly or intrusive. They waste time, they waste money and they draw valuable security resources away from more useful deployment. In other words, they’re making us less safe, not more safe.

I think the time has come to put together what I’m calling the American Hysteria Hall of Shame, a compilation of our more ludicrous overreactions since the terror attacks of 2001. It’s hard to say which incident belongs at the top. Up there with Danger Purse is the story of the pilot and the butter knife, and the one about the 57-year-old man who accidentally walked through an emergency exit door at Kennedy Airport, causing the entire terminal to be evacuated and getting himself arrested.

And let’s not forget my personal favorite, Operation Barf Bag: In 2004, on board a United Airlines 747 flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, a discarded airsickness bag was found in a lavatory with the letters “BOB” scrawled across it. For reasons that defy explanation, somebody decided that the letters stood for “Bomb On Board,” and the plane went all the way back to Sydney for a precautionary landing, jettisoning thousands of gallons of fuel in the process. Never mind that there was no precedent to suspect “BOB” referred to anything aside from a person’s name; we were asked to believe that terrorists would actually advertise the imminent detonation of an explosive device by means of a cryptic acronym scrawled on a barf bag.

Our Hall of Shame needs a logo too. I’m imagining an intoxicated eagle clutching a shredded Bill of Rights — half in its beak, the other half in its talons — above some frightened-looking Americans draped with a flag. At the bottom it should have some words — a motto. How do you say, “The Terrorists Have Won” in Latin?

The pirates of YouTube

The real villains of YouTube are the multinational companies cashing in on public domain footage they claim is their own

Cory Doctorow

YouTube offers very little help for FedFlix

When you hear about "piracy" in connection to YouTube, perhaps you think of the billion-dollar lawsuit brought by Viacom against the Google division, claiming that Google should have the duty to police all of its users' uploads to determine that they don't infringe copyright.

Google does something very close to this already, of course: the company offers a service to rights holders called "ContentID" that is meant to automatically police copyrights on their behalf. Rights holders upload copies of their copyrighted works to YouTube and identify themselves as the proprietors of those works, and YouTube scours its files for videos or audio that appear to be connected with those copyrights.

Rights holders get to decide what happens next: they can ask Google to automatically remove matching files (Google then notifies the user that her files generated a copyright match and offers them the opportunity to contest it), or they can "monetise" the video by asking Google to display ads whenever it is played back. The revenue from these ads goes to the rights holders.

ContentID does a lot more than US copyright law requires of rights holders. Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, services like YouTube enjoy a "safe harbour", that shields them from liability for copyright infringement. In order to maintain this safe harbour, YouTube must "expeditiously" respond to notices of copyright infringement by removing the offending works. But the law does not require YouTube to proactively search for infringements and remove them. Running ContentID isn't a legal duty, it's an olive branch extended by YouTube to the audiovisual industries.

ContentID is contentious for many reasons. Viacom says it doesn't match enough of its works, and complains that it shouldn't have to tell Google which copyrights it owns – Google should just figure this out and block Viacom's works a priori.

But one titanic problem with ContentID has received little attention: the use of ContentID by those who falsely or incorrectly assert ownership over public domain works – works that have no copyright at all – and then either block access to the videos, or collect the advertising revenue from these videos.

FedFlix is a charitable project launched by Carl Malamud, a "rogue archivist" who raises funds to digitise and upload videos created at US government expense. Under US law, government creations are in the public domain and can be freely used by anyone, but the US government is remarkably lax about actually making its treasures available to the public that owns them.

Malamud's group pays the fees associated with retrieving copies from the US government – sometimes buying high-priced DVDs that the government issues, other times paying to have unreleased videos retrieved from government archives – and posts them to YouTube, the Internet Archive and other video sites, so that anyone and everyone can see, download, and use them.

Malamud's 146-page report from FedFlix to the Archivist of the United States documents claims that companies such as NBC Universal, al-Jazeera, and Discovery Communications have used ContentID to claim title to FedFlix videos on YouTube. Some music royalty collecting societies have claimed infringements in "silent movies".

These companies' claims – there are hundreds of them – have the potential to generate black marks on FedFlix's YouTube account, and these black marks could lead to automated punishment from YouTube. Accounts that generate claims can be suspended or deleted, or lose the right to mark videos as being available as Creative Commons or public domain files.

YouTube offers very little help for FedFlix. ContentID's dispute resolution mechanism allows FedFlix to contest these claims under only three circumstances: first, ContentID has generated a false match (that is, the video isn't what ContentID thinks it is); second, the uploader has the right to the file, as demonstrated by written permission from its proprietor; or third, the use is acceptable under the US doctrine of fair use, or its counterpart in other laws, fair dealing.

But FedFlix can't contest on any of these bases. ContentID isn't mistaken – the files are exactly what ContentID thinks they are. But no rights holder can send a written permission notice to YouTube about these files, because they have no rights holders – they are in the public domain. The posting of these files isn't "fair use". Fair use is a copyright infringement that is lawful because it serves some allowed purpose. FedFlix's posting of public domain files is not a copyright violation, so they can't be fair use.

Malamud's report documents these troubles in Kafkaesque detail. It's frustrating reading. The American public paid to produce these videos, and they own them, lock, stock and barrel. Multinational companies – the same ones who cry poverty and demand far-reaching laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act – have laid title to them, "homesteading the public domain", and they are abusing Google's copyright peace offering to steal from the public.

And unfortunately, there is no organised lobby for the public domain to demand the kind of stiff sanctions for Universal and co that other copyright infringers face at their behest.

Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a “Rogue Label”

Earlier today, Megaupload released a pop video featuring mainstream artists who endorse the cyberlocker service. News of the controversial Mega Song even trended on Twitter, but has now been removed from YouTube on copyright grounds by Universal Music. Kim Dotcom says that Megaupload owns everything in the video, and that the label has engaged in dirty tricks in an attempt to sabotage their successful viral campaign.

This morning we published an article on a new campaign by cyberlocker service Megaupload.

Site founder Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak he had commissioned a song from producer Printz Board featuring huge recording artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige. These and others were shouting the praises of Megaupload.

By this afternoon #megaupload was trending on Twitter as news of the song spread. Little surprise interest was so high; Megaupload is described as a rogue site by the RIAA and here are some of their key labels’ artists promoting the service in the most powerful way possible – through a song.

And then, just a little while ago, the music stopped. Visitors to YouTube hoping to listen to the Mega Song were met with the following message.

TorrentFreak immediately contacted Kim to find out what was happening.

“Those UMG criminals. They are sending illegitimate takedown notices for content they don’t own,” he told us. “Dirty tricks in an effort to stop our massively successful viral campaign.”

So did Universal have any right at all to issue YouTube with a takedown notice? Uncleared samples, anything?

“Mega owns everything in this video. And we have signed agreements with every featured artist for this campaign,” Kim told TorrentFreak.

“UMG did something illegal and unfair by reporting Mega’s content to be infringing. They had no right to do that. We reserve our rights to take legal action. But we’d like to give them the opportunity to apologize.”

“UMG is such a rogue label,” Kim added, wholly appreciating the irony.

A few minutes after this exchange Kim contacted us with good news. After filing a YouTube copyright takedown dispute, the video was reinstated. But alas, just seconds later, it was taken down again.

“We filed a dispute, the video came back online and now it’s blocked again by UMG and the automated YouTube system has threatened to block our account for repeat infringement,” Kim explained.

TorrentFreak spoke with Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director at EFF, who says this type of copyright abuse is nothing new.

“This appears to be yet another example of the kind of takedown abuse we’ve seen under existing law — and another reason why Congress should soundly reject the broad new powers contemplated in the Internet Blacklist Bills, aka SOPA/PIPA.

“If IP rightholders can’t be trusted to use the tools already at their disposal — and they can’t — we shouldn’t be giving them new ways to stifle online speech and creativity,” McSherry concludes.

Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director at Public Knowledge, worries that this type of sweeping power would only be augmented with the arrival of the SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US.

“If UMG took down a video it has no rights to, then what we have here is exactly the sort of abuse that careless, overzealous, or malicious copyright holders can create by abusing a takedown law,” he told us.

“What makes this even worse is that UMG, among others, is pushing to expand its power to shut people down by fiat–SOPA lets rightsholders de-fund entire websites with the same sort of non-reviewed demand that removed this video,” he concludes.

Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom informs us that he has now submitted an international counter notification to YouTube, informing them that UMG has no rights to anything in the video and that the label abused the YouTube takedown system to sabotage the company’s business.

“It’s ridiculous how UMG is abusing their intervention powers in YouTube’s system to stop our legitimate campaign. They are willfully sabotaging this viral campaign. They own no rights to this content,” Kim insists.

“What UMG is doing is illegal. And those are the people who are calling Mega rogue? Insanity!”

Streisand Effect, here we come again. Update: “The fact that this expression could be silenced by a major label — without any apparent infringement — should be seriously troubling to anyone who cares about artists’ speech rights,” says Casey Rae-Hunter, Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition. “If this can happen to Snoop Dogg and others, it can happen to anyone.”

Hilary Clinton tells world leaders, "hands off the Internet"; US government prepares its own censorship regime

By Cory Doctorow

Mrs. Clinton, in her remarks, also cited efforts by countries to change the way the Internet — now largely self-regulated and globally interconnected — is governed. Although she did not name the countries, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan introduced a draft resolution at the United Nations this year that would allow greater government control over the Internet in individual countries. The United States opposes the resolution.

Mrs. Clinton said such a proposal would undermine the very nature of the Internet. “They aim to impose a system, cemented in a global code, that expands control over Internet resources, institutions and content and centralizes that control in the hands of the government,” she said.

Meanwhile, the US government is set to pass SOPA, a censorship law that gives America the power to censor and shutter any website in the world. In case you're wondering how that might work, have a look at what happened with Dajaz1.com.

Dajaz1.com is a hiphop blog that was seized by ICE and the Justice Department a year ago, on the basis of incompetent research by a new hire fresh out of college and some lying affadavits from the RIAA (who claimed, among other things, that they represented the copyrights of companies who are not RIAA members).

Dajaz1.com was sent music by hiphop labels, who begged them to post it -- they even got requests from the VP of one label -- and was a powerhouse in the hiphop world, appearing on Vibe's list of top hiphop blogs.

ICE and Justice got it wrong with Dajaz1.com, taking down the site and posting a big notice explaining that the site had been seized because its owners were crooks. For a year, the government refused to allow any hearings or appeals to their decision, using a secretive sealed procedure to get the courts to extend the period during which they could keep the seized property without a hearing. Dajaz1.com's lawyers were never informed of these sealed procedures, and were not allowed to participate in them.

Now, a year later, the feds have given Dajaz1.com back, without apology or compensation.

If that sounds like madness -- if it sounds like the kind of high-handed, censorious BS that Hilary Clinton is telling the world leaders to eschew -- then consider this: SOPA makes this routine. It makes it easy. It makes it universal. It will magnify this sort of criminal injustice a thousandfold, and then multiply it again.

Fundamental human rights -- the right to free speech and free assembly -- should not be subordinated to the entertainment industry's desire to maximize their profits. If Hilary wants to keep the Internet free, let her talk to Congress first.

Could online 'warriors' in Call of Duty be forced to obey the Geneva convention?

By Rob Waugh

Earlier this year, game maker Activision counted up that 62 billion people had been 'killed' virtually in online games of Call of Duty: Black Ops - including 242 million stabbed to death at close range.

That's just one title among hundreds of modern war games - most of which lack any kind of 'surrender' button bar switching the machine off.

Now, a committee of the Red Cross is debating if gamers might be violating the International Humanitarian Law as they slaughter each other online.

'While the Movement works vigorously to promote international humanitarian law worldwide, there is also an audience of approximately 600 million gamers who may be virtually violating International Humanitarian Law,' said the committee's site.

'Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of this law in video games.

'There is, however, an overall consensus and motivation to take action.'

Whether or not gamers who had won the longest 'killstreaks' - an uninterrupted run of kills in online games - could be prosecuted is another question.

The committee's action is aimed more towards developers: as war games become more realistic, do they have a responsibility to add humanitarian elements to their games?

Oblivious Supreme Court poised to legalize medical patents

By Timothy B. Lee

The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that raises a fundamental question: whether a physician can infringe a patent merely by using scientific research to inform her treatment decisions.

Unfortunately, this issue was barely mentioned in Wednesday's arguments. A number of influential organizations had filed briefs warning of the dire consequences of allowing medical patents, but their arguments were largely ignored in the courtroom. Instead, everyone seemed to agree that medical patents were legal in general, and focused on the narrow question of whether the specific patent in the case was overly broad.

This should make the nation's doctors extremely nervous. For two decades, the software industry has struggled with the harmful effects of patents on software. In contrast, doctors have traditionally been free to practice medicine without worrying about whether their treatment decisions run afoul of someone's patent. Now the Supreme Court seems poised to expand patent law into the medical profession, where it's unlikely to work any better than it has in software.
Sorry, that correlation is patented

The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient's blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical "indicate a need" to raise or lower the drug dosage.

The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn't act on the patent's recommendations.

This extraordinary claim prompted a broad coalition of public interest groups to write amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to invalidate the patent and others like it. The American Association of Retired Persons and the American Civil Liberties Union both wrote briefs arguing the patent should be invalidated. The ACLU brief argued that regulating doctors' thoughts runs afoul of the First Amendment. A coalition of three libertarian think tanks filed a brief (which, full disclosure, I played a small part in drafting) warning that legalizing medical patents will cause the same kinds of problems in the medical profession that it has in the software industry.

Also opposing the patent was a broad coalition of medical providers led by the American Medical Association. "If claims to exclusive rights over the body's natural responses to illness and medical treatment are permitted to stand, the result will be a vast thicket of exclusive rights over the use of critical scientific data that must remain widely available if physicians are to provide sound medical care," the medical organizations' brief argued.

"Conscientious physicians will be unwilling and unable to avoid considering all relevant scientific information when reviewing test results," the doctors wrote. "Thus, as medical knowledge accumulates, patent licenses increasingly will be required for physicians to conduct even well established diagnostic tests."
"Everybody agrees with that"

Unfortunately, the justices seemed oblivious to these arguments. And the man who should have been making them, Mayo counsel Stephen Shapiro, completely ignored them. Instead, he seemed to concede the legality of medical patents in general, and focused on nitpicking the details of Prometheus's patent. Specifically, he noted that the patent covers a broad range of metabolite levels and applies for many different autoimmune diseases, and argued that this made the patent invalid.

Asked by Justice Kennedy if a more specific and complex diagnostic technique involving "two or three different drugs" could be eligible for patent protection, Shapiro said yes. "If it leaves room for others to have their own tests with different numbers and different procedures so that it isn't just one test for the whole country, then yes, if it's specific enough," he said. "The specificity is the key."

Justice Scalia pointed out that making patent-eligibility turn on how complex the diagnostic strategy was, or on how many diseases it claimed to address, was totally unworkable. Shapiro's proposal, he said, was "not a patent rule that we could possibly apply."

Justices Scalia and Breyer showed some skepticism that patents could cover the use of scientific correlations in medical practice. But the other justices expressed no such skepticism. At one point, Justice Kagan offered some advice to Prometheus's lawyer. "What you haven't done is say at a certain number you should use a certain treatment, at another number you should use another treatment," she said. "I guess the first question is why didn't you file a patent like that? Because that clearly would have been patentable. Everybody agrees with that."

Of course "everyone" does not agree with that. In particular, the American Medical Association (and, presumably, many of the nation's doctors) doesn't. Neither does the ACLU, the AARP, or the Cato Institute. Yet if any members of the high court disagreed with Kagan, they didn't speak up.

We've long argued that the Supreme Court should overturn the lower courts' de facto legalization of software patents. Instead, the Supreme Court appears poised to take a step in the opposite direction and expand patent law to cover the medical profession. And they seemed oblivious to how dramatic a step that would be.

We really hope the justices will read some of those amicus briefs before they make their ruling.

Welcome to the Age of Overparenting: How I learned to let my kids be kids

By Katherine Ozment

WHEN BOSTON WAS HIT by last winter’s barrage of blizzards, my two oldest kids, then ages eight and five, spent their snow days lounging around the house in their pajamas, occasionally dabbling at the computer. “Mom,” they said, “we’re bored.” Finally, I suggested they go outside — but not too far and not for too long and they should remember to wear layers or they’d surely end up in the hospital receiving treatment for frostbite. Oh, and did they need a snack or have to go to the bathroom first? As they trudged out the front door, I was simultaneously relieved to have them out of the house and terrified that they would be kidnapped or hit by a bus. I opened our living room window and sat beside it, working on my laptop. Every 20 minutes I’d crane my neck and yell, “You guys all right out there?”

[sidebar]I went outside an hour later and found them looking at me plaintively from our tiny garden, where they’d built “forts” that were really just shallow ditches in the snow. “We’re cold,” they said. “Can we come in now?”

My heart sank. How times had changed. I still remember the time my two older brothers built an igloo in our front yard. It had a domed roof and arched entrance, and they strung an overhead work lamp from the ceiling and laid out a small rug so we could all sit in it for hours. Witnessing my children’s paltry fort-making skills, I thought, Is this what our kids will remember of winter — digging little holes in the snow as their mother hovered nearby? Where has the childhood I once knew gone?

In my nine years as a parent, I’ve followed the rules, protocols, and cultural cues that have promised to churn out well-rounded, happy, successful children. I’ve psychoanalyzed my kids’ behavior, supervised an avalanche of activities, and photo-documented their day-to-day existence as if I were a wildlife photographer on the Serengeti. I do my utmost to develop their minds and build up their confidence, while at the same time living with the constant low-level fear that bad things will happen to them. But lately, I’ve begun to wonder if, by becoming so attuned to their every need and so controlling of their every move, I’ve somehow played a small part in changing the very nature of their childhood.

I know that if I continue on this path, not only will my kids never have the wherewithal to build an igloo after a snowstorm, they won’t even have the freedom or imagination to try. Watching them play halfheartedly in their meager little forts, I knew I had to change.

I'M NOT SURE when I decided that I was going to be a better parent than my own parents had been. The truth is my mother and father did great by me and I love them dearly. But like a lot of kids in the ’70s and ’80s, my childhood was marked by divorce, latchkey-kid-dom, and a nonstop diet of Twinkies and television. Today, I marvel at the freedom I enjoyed — walking alone to the bus stop, roaming my neighborhood unattended, hours at home with no one asking me what I was doing. But much of the time back then, I also felt disconnected, like no one was looking out for me.

When my mother wasn’t working or out with her friends, she kept to herself — making crafts, gardening, or listening to music. She was there but not there. After the divorce, a series of moves had me in and out of five different schools in the span of four years. And so I vowed that if I ever had kids, I would never get divorced and uproot them. They would have one home, with two parents in it. And from there, a notion of how I would parent began to take shape. Where my own parents had espoused us being seen and not heard, I would engage. Where they were laissez faire about helping me develop my talents, I would take charge. Where they epitomized the “good enough” model of parenting, so common at the time, I would be extraordinary.

By the time I was ready to start having kids, the era of extraordinary parenting had already begun. Many in my admittedly privileged cohort had studied up on the attachment theories of William Sears and Penelope Leach, who held that parents, particularly mothers, should bond with their babies and toddlers through near-constant physical contact. We slept with our infants, nursed around the clock, and wore BabyBjörns everywhere we went. Our kids grew, and when we weren’t driving them to soccer games and Kindermusik, we were slipping love notes into their lunchboxes. At times, I felt caught up in a collective consciousness. We seemed aware that we were rewriting the rules in order to create rich childhoods for our children. But at what cost? I decided to find out.

“We’re in the midst of a giant social experiment,” child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd tells me when I visit him in his cozy Harvard office. Weissbourd is the author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development, and I’ve come to him for advice on how to regain some sanity in my own parenting. “Historically, parents have been concerned with things like obedience, manners, and respect for authority. We’re the first parents in history who really want to be their kids’ friends. Some parents even talk about wanting to be their kids’ best friends.” Parents today, he says, are so focused on bonding with their children that it can undercut their authority and derail normal development. Treating kids as equals doesn’t allow them to idealize their parents and learn to adopt their values. Parents need to let their children separate in adolescence, of course, but that’s much harder if Mom and Dad have come to depend on them for close friendship.

I think of how I ask my kids how they feel more times in a day than my own parents asked me in a year. “What’s wrong?” I say at any look of discomfort on their faces. “How do you feel?” I calmly intone over their cries. Lately, my son, who’s now nine, has responded to my queries with “I’m not trying to be mean, but could you please leave me alone?” And the other day, when I tried to break up a fight between him and his nearly six-year-old sister, she said, “Don’t worry, Mama. We’re fine.” Even our toddler sometimes squirms from my embrace. Maybe I’m the one who’s not fine.

My friends experience a similar yearning for engagement. One mom told me that she once berated her daughter, a first grader, in the car on the way home from school for not telling her about her day — yelling, “I don’t see you all day and now you’re not going to talk to me!” And when I was out with a group of friends last summer, someone told the story of how her mother had spent the weekend with her and her two young daughters. At the end of the visit, her mother asked, “Do you always talk to them so much?”

We all laughed: “Of course we always talk to them so much! That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

But are you? And who decides? I posed the question to Weissbourd.

“The need for closeness can be more about you than about your kids,” he replies, and I suddenly find myself slinking down in my chair. The question we have to ask ourselves when it comes to interacting with our kids, he says, is “When is this about me, and when is it about you? And that’s a hard thing to do.”

Yes it is, and I need help.

MY QUEST TO UNTANGLE has led me to an Arlington middle school cafeteria, where I’m surrounded by about 80 parents who have come to hear author Michael Thompson talk about his forthcoming book, Homesick and Happy: How Time Away From Parents Can Help a Child Grow. It’s not lost on me that all of us here tonight are so wrapped up in the lives of our offspring that we’ll set aside an evening to hear a parenting sage impart some child-rearing wisdom. And his basic message? That what we really need to do as concerned moms and dads is…disengage a little from our children.

Thompson works as the supervising psychologist at the Belmont Hill School, and tells us that he set out to write his book after noticing that parents were refusing to let their kids go on school-sponsored overnight trips. He explains that we’re so determined to make our children happy that we’ve come to think that the only way we can do so is if we’re with them all the time. “This is an incredibly dedicated generation of parents,” he says. “But we think we can make them happy and we can’t. We can love and cherish them, but we can’t make them happy.”

In the course of his research, Thompson continues, he discovered a huge drop in summer-camp attendance, and learned that an increasing number of parents are instead choosing weeklong skills-based camps. And those parents who do opt for a longer overnight scenario are struggling to say goodbye to their kids. In response, some camps now provide a constantly updated stream of online photos for these “child-sick” parents. One even hired a full-time staffer to cull hundreds of photos each day, posting only those in which every child is smiling.

I saw the effects of this firsthand last summer, when my husband and I had dinner at our friends’ house a few days after their son, who was 10, had gone off to overnight camp. Throughout the evening, the mother kept leaving the room to scan her inbox for updated photos. Toward the end of dinner, she yelled, “It’s here! Come see! He has a weird look on his face.” We huddled around the screen deciphering their son’s grimace, then spent dessert debating what should be done.

The truth, Thompson tells us, is that kids who go to camp often thrive. “When kids are away from their parents, their achievements are their own,” he says. Time apart allows them to develop independence and character, and it also bolsters their self-esteem. And then, to drive the point home, Thompson asks us to think back to the childhood moment when we were the happiest. “Okay, now raise your hand if there was an adult with you in that moment,” he says. Only a few hands go up. The room is silent, a nervous realization dawning.

“Eight out of 80, about 10 percent,” Thompson says. “That’s pretty typical. Here’s the thing: Modern parents feel that more time with Mom and Dad is always a positive — this is the single biggest change in American childhood — but the truth is that more time with you isn’t always a positive. In fact, it’s annoying.”

I flush with recognition. So that’s why my son’s been telling me to leave him alone?

“The modern parent thinks he or she is always value added,” Thompson says calmly, then delivers the shiv: “But you aren’t. At some point you realize you’re a burden to your kids.”

BEFORE THAT EVENING in the cafeteria, I’d never considered myself a burden. I’d bought into the self-esteem dogma — the idea that bathing our children in good feeling and positive reinforcement arms them with the confidence they need to lead better lives. Which is why my husband and I have been so hopped up on doling out praise that the first time our son was able to walk down the stairs, we stood at the bottom like courtiers awaiting their king. The child paused mid-flight, clapped, and said to us, and I guess to himself, “I’m so proud of you!”

But according to Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, all of this praise can be counterproductive. Dweck says that when we tell kids that they are gifted, rather than hard-working, they can develop a fear of failing that leads to an unwillingness to take the risks necessary for true learning. Kids who are told they’re hard workers, in contrast, are more willing to take on challenges and better able to bounce back from mistakes. The psychological community now holds that incessant praise actually works against parents’ intentions. You don’t gain self-esteem first, then achieve great things. You work hard, fail, pick yourself up, try again, accomplish something new, and then feel pretty good about yourself.

And yet so much of our efforts go toward positive reinforcement. “When your kid has trouble with homework and you jump in right away, you’re worried about your kid’s experience with failure,” says Harvard’s Richard Weissbourd. “The irony is that, rather than securing self-esteem, that level of micromanaging usually undermines it.”

I cringe as I think of all the times I’ve done exactly what he mentions. The many times I’ve told our daughter how smart she is in an attempt to brush a strong sense of self onto her, as if painting on a thick ceramic glaze. In fact, in our house, the phrase “Good job!” is so pervasive that it has lost all meaning. I have uttered it to our kids for getting themselves into the car, eating dinner, and brushing their teeth. Our community is all too happy to pitch in: Our son has so many YMCA basketball trophies that he’s taken to giving them to his little sister. Recently, when surveying his completed math homework, I told him: “That’s amazing.” He replied, “No it’s not. This was easy.”

Chastened, I tried for one day not to say, “Good job!” to anyone in our house. I failed by mid-afternoon.

ACCORDING TO University of California at San Diego economists Valerie and Garey Ramey, between 1990 and the early 2000s, college-educated mothers came to spend an average of nine hours more per week with their children than their own mothers had spent with them; fathers spent an average of five more hours. But what were they doing during all that extra time? The Rameys found that the bulk of it involved coordinating their kids’ extracurricular activities in a mad dash to get them into good colleges.

I know this all too well. Our kids are in so many activities that we’ve taken to scheduling swaths of “downtime” on weekends. The wife of my husband’s colleague stopped working temporarily because she was overwhelmed by the private school application process. One mother told me, “When it was time to find a kindergarten for my daughter, I put as much or more effort into it as I put into finding a college for myself.” These examples may be extreme, but they’re hardly uncommon. Our willingness to invest so much effort into what the Rameys call “The Rug Rat Race” stems in part from genuine worries about the future. Are our children destined to tough it out through high school and college only to end up jobless and occupying Wall Street?

Margaret Nelson, a Middlebury College sociologist and the author of Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times, makes the point more personal when I ask why we’re all so frantic: “What are you going to do if your three children don’t turn out to be professionals?” she asks me. I don’t really have an answer for her. We’ve come to lavish so much attention on our children, she explains, because we’re fearful that they’ll fail. “You probably don’t even know what your children should be to secure the same lifestyle that you’ve been able to provide them with. So you have to stay on top of those kids. And that’s a lot of work.” Sweet relief! Maybe, I think, I’ve simply been worrying too much about worrying.

But then I read a study by Columbia University psychology professor Suniya Luthar. It turns out that pushing kids can be just as bad for them as attending to their every desire. Luthar found that the children of upper-class, highly educated parents in the Northeast are increasingly anxious and depressed. Children with “high perfectionist strivings” were likely to see achievement failures as personal failures, Luthar wrote. And, she found, being constantly shuttled between activities — spending all that time in the SUV with Mom or Dad — ends up leaving suburban adolescents feeling more isolated from their parents.

IF IT'S TRUE that our kids are depressed and anxious, maybe they’re learning it from us. Overparenting takes a toll, particularly when you consider the steady stream of nerve-rattling information we get hourly, from toy recall notices to Amber Alerts. Richard Weissbourd tells a story about how, years ago, his 11-year-old daughter and several of her friends were planning an overnight campout with some younger neighborhood kids in his backyard. Before the big night, the parents of the younger kids began scouring his lawn for nails and shards of glass. “It just seemed like, Whoa, what is going on with this anxiety?” Weissbourd recalls. The problem wasn’t just the parental anxiety itself — it was how it was actually reshaping the experience for those kids: “I felt like these 10- and 11-year-old girls were so conscientious and these parents came and undermined them.”

It’s nearly impossible to keep abreast of all the hidden dangers out there just waiting to hurt your son or daughter, not that I’ve let that keep me from trying. After our first baby was born, I found myself hanging out in the dark corners of the Web where all the hypochondriacs congregate. When our pediatrician commented on how fast our baby’s head was growing, I spent hours Googling “big baby head” and got a crash course in a rare disorder called hydrocephalus. After a night of fretting about “water on the brain,” my husband and I agreed to an ultrasound. We huddled over our infant as the technician ran the goopy wand over his feather-soft hair. As it turned out, all our baby had was a big head.

In the years since his birth, technology has only helped me discover more things to worry about. Last month, for example, I noticed a baby-product recall alert for our jogging stroller on my Twitter feed. I found the notice online and discovered that a label on the stroller’s canopy could be detached and choked on. No baby had actually choked on one, but plenty had come close. I’ve become an expert at digging up these kinds of notices, and I always make sure to read the various warnings that adorn toys and baby equipment. I’ve bought the lead-test strips and run them across my children’s lunchboxes (clean), purchased a radon detector to suss out conditions in our basement (fine), and installed car seats with the focus and determination of a NASA engineer (secure).

But all this hand-wringing is making our kids more fearful and less inclined to take risks. Consider one study of playgrounds in North Carolina, which found that kids were 45 percent less likely to be active when a parent was present, meaning they were less apt to engage in the sort of vigorous play psychologists believe is important for proper development — to say nothing of the lost opportunity for good old-fashioned exercise.

All of which gets me worried all over again about my kids’ inability to build a proper snow fort. So I call Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist at Boston College who edited the spring 2011 issue of the American Journal of Play. Gray explains that free, unstructured play helps children learn how to get along with others and control their emotions, and it also lets them develop their imagination. But since the 1950s, he says, there’s been a steady decline in the time American children spend playing on their own. He points to a study by the University of Maryland’s Sandra Hofferth, which found that from 1981 to 1997, American kids ages six to eight spent 25 percent less time engaged in free play, this while their time in the classroom was up by 18 percent. Meanwhile, their homework time increased by 145 percent, while time spent shopping with parents was up by 168 percent. When Hofferth updated her research in 2003, free time continued to decline, while study time increased another 32 percent. Why does this matter?

“If you think of this from the viewpoint of natural selection,” Gray says — which I haven’t until this moment — “free play is a marvelous biological solution to the big problem that human beings have, which is that we are both selfish and social. We depend on cooperating with other people, and yet we are also looking out for number one. Children are constantly negotiating that balance in their play.”

The key for parents, he says, is backing off and letting kids play among themselves. Kind of like we used to do.

IN THE ARLINGTON middle school cafeteria, Michael Thompson asks if anyone wants to share their sweetest memory from childhood. I raise my hand and tell the group how, when I was eight, my friends and I discovered a frozen pond way back in the woods. We raced home to get our ice skates and laced them up in the hollowed-out trunk of a towering tree. And then, accompanied only by the sounds of our voices, laughter, and the scratching of our blades, we skimmed the ice, unsupervised, for hours.

“Why,” Thompson asks me in front of all the parents, “is that memory so sweet?”

Without thinking, I say, “Because my parents didn’t know where I was.”

“Your parents didn’t know where you were. So that experience was wholly your own,” he says. Then: “Would you let your own children do that?”

“I don’t even let my kids out of the house,” I blurt.

Everyone laughs, including me. (I do let them out of the house, by the way.) It’s a funny line, but the truth is our kids have but a shred of the freedom we enjoyed growing up. They have other things, of course. For example, my children know how to play team sports. They’ve gone to science camp and studied still lifes at the MFA. They compost and take educational family vacations to Washington, DC. At night, the older two like to laze about and ask my husband and me things like who the first person was and what happens when you die. We’re always there with some answer.

But what calling up my sweetest memory made me realize is that while today’s middle- and upper-middle-class children have an unprecedented array of opportunities, their experiences are often manufactured by us. For them, ice skating takes the form of 30-minute lessons at a city rink. Playing with friends involves checking calendars and pre-set finish times. Nearly everything they do is orchestrated, if not by their parents, then by some other adult — a teacher, camp counselor, or coach. But their experiences aren’t very rich in the messier way — in those moments of unfettered abandon when part of the thrill is the risk of harm, hurt feelings, or struggle. In our attempt to manage and support every moment of our children’s lives, they become something that belongs to us, not them.

Nine years into this parenting gig, I’ve begun to see that maybe our generation doesn’t have it all right and our own parents didn’t have it all wrong. Maybe it’s just time for some middle ground.

After a recent snowfall, my husband and I took our kids out to a huge hill on a Saturday afternoon to go sledding. When I saw that the hill was lined with trees, I confess I envisioned a concussion in our immediate future. And as our two oldest children wedged themselves onto our thin plastic toboggan, I wanted more than anything to climb aboard and steer them to safety. But I reminded myself of my quest to change. And so, without speaking, I crouched down and gave them a shove. Then I stepped aside and let them go.

Copyrights vs. Human Rights

By Cory Doctorow

December 10 is Human Rights Day, as designated by the U.N. General Assembly and observed all over the world. In honor of the occasion, I want to address the human rights implications associated with something central to all of us in the publishing industry: copyright policy.

For human rights, 2011 has been a tumultuous year. It is the year of the Arab Spring and the “Occupy” movements. It’s also been a year of atrocities and shameful exercices of power, from Tahrir Square, Syria, and Libya to UC Davis, Berkeley, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It is also the year that saw the introduction of SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), a bill recently introduced by representatives Lamar Smith (R-Tex.); John Conyers (D-Mich.); Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.); and Howard Berman (D-Calif.).

SOPA has the support of the American Association of Publishers, along with many of its member companies, including my own publishers. And despite an outpouring of public opposition, the bill is being fast-tracked to pass before Christmas. For a Congress that can’t seem to come together to pass anything, passage of SOPA seems entirely possible. The list of those invited to testify at the bill’s recent hearing comprised, almost entirely, supporters, mostly representatives from the so-called “creative industries,” like the Motion Picture Association of America.

SOPA’s opponents, however, call the bill “the worst Internet law in American legislative history,” and it has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations across the U.S. and around the world.

If the fights of 2011 have shown us anything, it’s that the Internet and the quest for human rights are inextricably linked. The Internet is where human rights fights are rescued from obscurity and brought to the world’s attention—whether Ustreams of Occupy protestors being forcibly evicted, Lt. John Pike’s pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis, or YouTube footage of Tahrir Square or the Syrian protests. Yet even as America’s leaders chastise their foreign counterparts for censoring the Internet, with SOPA they are laying the groundwork for an expansive, copyright-based regime of domestic censorship.

Censorship

What’s wrong with SOPA? For starters, SOPA would create a new standard for “intermediary liability,” in other words, liability borne by companies and entities that are in the chain between someone accused of violating copyright and the audiences, such as Web hosts, payment processors, and operators of technical infrastructure, like the Domain Name System. Under SOPA, these intermediaries could be ordered to censor or block access to, and funding for, any site accused of copyright infringement, without due process, without a jury or the right to rebut accusations.

Such orders would emanate from the State Department, which would be vested with new power to demand Web sites be delisted from domain name servers, the millions of servers that translate human readable addresses (like www.thepiratebay.org) into machine-readable numerical ones like 194.71.107.15). It could also demand that payment processors cut off access to funds for these sites and demand that advertisers and ad brokers sever ties with the accused. And finally, these addresses would be added to a new national “firewall”—similar to the ones used in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China—a filter that would censor the Internet and prevent American citizens from accessing files that no court has found to be unlawful.

But SOPA doesn’t just arrogate these unconstitutional powers for government—it hands them over to entertainment giants. Through a misleadingly named “market-based” system, SOPA would allow private entities to produce enemies lists of sites that offend them, and to give these lists to DNS providers, ISPs, payment processors, and ad brokers, who would then be required to remove the accused sites within five days. It also encourages payment processors to engage in self-censorship, by pre-emptively severing ties with firms they believe are likely to cause a complaint, before any such complaint is received.

As bad as this is, it gets worse: SOPA would also expand the definition of copyright infringement to include hosting a single link to a site that is alleged to contain infringing material. Thus, if an author’s blog, or a book discussion group, attracts a single post that contains a single link that goes to a site that someone accuses of copyright infringement, that site becomes one with the alleged infringer, and faces all the same sanctions—without any proof required, or due process.

CSIS head urged government to fight ban on information obtained through torture

By CATHERINE SOLYOM


Canada’s spy agency was so reliant on information obtained through torture that it suggested the whole security certificate regime, used to control suspected terrorists in the country, would fall apart if they couldn’t use it. That’s the essence of a letter written in 2008 by the former director of CSIS, Jim Judd, obtained by The Gazette.

Canada’s spy agency was so reliant on information obtained through torture that it suggested the whole security certificate regime, used to control suspected terrorists in the country, would fall apart if they couldn’t use it. That’s the essence of a letter written in 2008 by the former director of CSIS, Jim Judd, obtained by The Gazette.

Canada’s spy agency was so reliant on information obtained through torture that it suggested the whole security certificate regime, used to control suspected terrorists in the country, would fall apart if they couldn’t use it.

That’s the essence of a letter written in 2008 by the former director of CSIS, Jim Judd, obtained by The Gazette.

It suggests a disturbing acceptance by the national security agency of torture as a legitimate strategy to counter terrorism.
CSIS memo shows Canada's reliance on torture

The letter, dated Jan. 15, 2008, was sent from Judd to the minister of public security just as the government was finalizing Bill C-3, legislation to replace the security certificate law which was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in February 2007.

The government had been given a year to come up with new legislation that would respect the charter rights of those targeted by the certificates.

In the letter, Judd urges the minister to fight an amendment to C-3 proposed by Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh that would prohibit CSIS and the courts from using any information obtained from torture or “derivative information”: information initially obtained from torture but subsequently corroborated through legal means.

“This amendment, if interpreted to mean that ‘derivative information’ is inadmissible, could render unsustainable the current security certificate proceedings,” Judd writes.

“Even if interpreted more narrowly to exclude only information obtained from sources and foreign agencies who, on the low threshold of ‘reasonable grounds’ may have obtained information by way of torture, the amendment would still significantly hinder the Service’s collection and analysis functions.”

Despite Judd’s opposition, the amended Bill C-3 was adopted in February 2008.

But the letter calls into question CSIS’s previous assurances that it did not countenance torture abroad. And observers wonder whether anything has changed in CSIS’s approach since C-3 was adopted.

Johanne Doyon, who successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down the original security certificate law on behalf of Adil Charkaoui, said that after C-3 was passed the government immediately issued five new security certificates.

CSIS had not had time to re-analyze the evidence it was presenting, Doyon said. “The government was well aware before signing the certificates that they were based on information derived from torture,” Doyon said. “They just closed their eyes and signed.”

Doyon is now arguing for a stay of proceedings in the case of Mohamed Mahjoub and for his release from house arrest next week.

In his case, a federal court judge ruled in June 2010 that ministers and special advocates for Mahjoub had to sift through the evidence in the Security Intelligence Report and exclude any that may have been obtained through torture.

Justice Edmond Blanchard also said the approach taken by CSIS to filter information so as not to use any derived from torture was not effective.

“It’s shocking and it’s worrisome for society in general,” Doyon said. “It’s illegitimate, illegal and unconstitutional to (use information derived from torture). Who in the name of Canada can be above the law this way? And it’s not just in one case, but in so many, and with Canadian citizens, too – Maher Arar for example (who was sent to Syria and tortured with CSIS complicity). Just where will it lead?”

In an email message Friday, a CSIS spokesperson did not address the 2008 letter from the director. But Tahera Mufti said: “We oppose in the strongest possible terms the mistreatment of any individual by any foreign entity for any purpose. We do not condone the use of torture or other unlawful methods in responding to terrorism and other threats to national security.” Mufti also said CSIS uses “appropriate caveats or instructions when sharing information” and that its activities are subject to review by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which has access to all CSIS “foreign arrangement files. “

In the 2008 letter, the CSIS director says part of the difficulty facing the agency lay in not being able to adequately assess which information came from where – foreign agencies do not often divulge the source of their information.

For Judd, the worst-case scenario was that the federal court, in reviewing a security certificate, would ask CSIS to certify that intelligence was gathered without resort to torture, or render inadmissible “any and all information provided by agencies in countries whose human rights records are in question – of which there are many.”

Amnesty International’s 2007 State of Human Rights Report, referenced but redacted in Judd’s letter, lists 102 countries which that year had cases of torture and ill-treatment by security forces, police and other state authorities, including the United States.

Judd does not express any concern about the reliability of such information, however. Rather he suggests an alternative amendment to the bill, which would read “the judge may receive into evidence anything – other than a statement obtained under torture – that in the judge’s opinion is reliable and appropriate.”

Asked to comment Friday on the substance of the letter, Reem Bahdi, a law professor at the University of Windsor, said the more she learns, the more worried she becomes about the state of national security in Canada. “The agencies tell us they don’t use torture or support torture on the one hand, and on the other hand they appear to be promoting torture – promoting it as a form of information gathering,” Bahdi said.

“I worry not only because information derived from torture is not reliable, but also because of the ramifications around the world that this kind of support for torture can have. What’s taking place in the Middle East is very interesting – these are repressive societies built on torture and our agencies are helping to legitimize those regimes through their practices, their relationships with the regimes and their justifications.”

Bahdi said the prohibition on torture was part of Canadian law long before the C-3 amendment. But CSIS needs to be made accountable, she said. “There has to be a cultural shift in CSIS so they take seriously the prohibition on torture and understand it’s not there to tie their hands behind their backs so they can’t do their work, but to ensure that their work has some integrity. … If torture produced national security, the regimes in the Middle East would be the safest places in the world.”

Audrey Macklin, a professor of law at the School for Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, said it's not surprising CSIS would warn of the end of the security certificate regime, because so many of them depend on information obtained through torture.

"But it's worth asking why do we have the security certificates?" Macklin said. "Before 9/11 we didn't have provisions in criminal law addressing anti-terrorism - now we do. If they are good enough for citizens why are they not good enough for non-citizens?"

Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal

One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.

In Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.

In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.

The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.

Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that.

Distribution method or not, the entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.

“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.

The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money. To reach this conclusion, the researchers extrapolated the findings of a study conducted by the Dutch government last year, since the countries are considered to be similar in many aspects.

The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.

The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.

The Swiss report then goes on to review several of the repressive anti-piracy laws and regulations that have been implemented in other countries recently, such as the three-strikes Hadopi law in France. According to the report 12 million was spent on Hadopi in France this year, a figure the Swiss deem too high.

The report further states that it is questionable whether a three-strikes law would be legal in the first place, as the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right. The Council specifically argued that Hadopi is a disproportionate law that should be repealed.

Other measures such as filtering or blocking content and websites are also rejected, because these would hurt freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. The report notes that even if these measures were implemented, there would be several ways to circumvent them.

The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die. They see absolutely no need to change the law because downloading has no proven negative impact on the production of national culture.

Aside from downloading, it is also practically impossible for companies in Switzerland to go after casual uploaders. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP-addresses of file-sharers, making it impossible for rightsholders to gather evidence.