The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying
people's everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the
default rather than the exception. Cellphone-location
data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more
are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored in vast databases. Data about a typical American is collected in
more than 20 different ways during everyday activities, according to a Wall
Street Journal analysis. During the past
five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than
$50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from
sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Ga., pop. 23,000—for automated
license-plate recognition systems. A
2010 study estimates that more than a third of large U.S. police agencies use
automated plate-reading systems. The
information captured is considerable. Through
a public-records act request, The Journal obtained two years' worth of plate
information from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department in California. From Sept. 10, 2010, to Aug. 27, 2012, the
sheriff's cameras captured about 6 million license-plate scans.
The Federal Voting Assistance
Program
at the Pentagon and other groups have been working recently to make it easier
for overseas Americans and those in the military to register to vote online and
to download their ballots. The question
is whether it's safe to return the voted ballot online. Some election officials say it's a trade-off
between security and convenience. Bob
Carey, director of FVAP, told a group of bloggers in October that there are
risks to online voting, but also "inherent security risks with the current
system," such as people not getting their ballots on time and losing the
opportunity to vote. Carey added that
"there's not going to be any electronic voting system that's ever going to
be 100 percent secure, but also the current paper-based system is not 100
percent reliable either." The
Pentagon is exploring the possibility of expanding e-voting opportunities for
the military and overseas Americans. A
handful of states are also considering pilot programs that would allow voters
to vote directly online, as West Virginia did in 2010. The District of Columbia had to cancel its
online voting plans in 2010 after University of Michigan computer experts were
able to infiltrate the system and remotely change votes. http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/03/29/149634764/online-voting-premature-warns-government-cybersecurity-expert
In June 2010, the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation announced
that it had been selected by the District of Columbia Board of Elections and
Ethics (BOEE) to support a project to allow Internet voting for military and
overseas voters, starting with the upcoming September primary. The BOEE had optimistically planned a
"public review period" in advance of the primary in which everyone
was invited to try to attack the system in a mock election. While the system was not ready for the
primary, a public test was eventually scheduled to run from September 28 to
October 6, with midterm election voting scheduled to begin October 11 or 12.
The break-in. By October 1
people testing the system reported hearing the University of Michigan fight
song following a 15-second pause after they submitted their ballots. A
Michigan team had taken over the system within 36 hours of the start of the
tests by exploiting a shell-injection vulnerability, thereby gaining almost
total control over the BOEE server. The
attackers remained in control for two business days, until the BOEE halted the
test after noon on October 1. An
attacker intent on subverting a real election would not leave such an obvious
calling card. The delay between the
break-in and the shutdown of the system reveals how difficult it is to
determine that a break-in has occurred, even when the "culprits"
announce themselves with music. Read
entire article, Internet Voting in the U.S. byat: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/10/155536-internet-voting-in-the-us/fulltext
A federal judge on October 10 threw out a copyright infringement
lawsuit against universities that participated in a massive book-digitization
project in conjunction with Google without permission from rights holders. U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of New York
dismissed an infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other
writers’ guilds, saying the universities had a fair use defense. The guild accused the University of
California, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, Cornell University and
University of Michigan of wanton copyright infringement for scanning and
placing the books into the so-called HathiTrust
Digital Library. The trust consists
of 10 million digital volumes, 73 percent of which are protected by copyright. The trust provides full-text searches only
with a rights holder’s permission, and gives full-text access for readers with
“certified print disabilities,” Baer said.
Google has scanned the books for the universities as part of its Google
Books project. The Authors Guild is
suing Google in related litigation, which is stalled on appeal. Several publishers, also suing Google, settled
with Google last week for undisclosed terms. Fair use is a defense to copyright
infringement and may be invoked for purposes such as criticism, commentary,
news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research, the judge noted. He said the Americans With Disabilities Act
(ADA) also played a major factor.
Tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court’s busy agenda this fall is a little-known case that could upend your ability to resell
everything from your grandmother’s antique furniture to your iPhone 4. At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley &
Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and
then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture as well as CDs
and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those
products. Under the doctrine, which the
Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without
worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale. Put simply, though Apple has the copyright on
the iPhone and Mark Owen does on the book “No Easy Day,” you can still sell
your copies to whomever you please whenever you want without retribution.
That’s being challenged now for
products that are made abroad and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate
court ruling it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that
has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you
permission to sell it. http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-10-04/finance/34240922_1_copyright-iphone-john-wiley-sons
The Facts So Far
from http://facethefactsusa.org/facts-so-far/ "Face
the Facts USA delivers provocative facts about big issues to help Americans
debunk myths, hold better conversations, get involved, and make choices as
smarter citizens." See 100 facts
unfold leading up the election.
A federal appeals court ruled October 11 http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0359p-06.pdf
that Ohio boards of elections must count provisional ballots with errors caused
by poll workers. The ruling by the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was the second major voting-related
court decision in as many days. On October
10, a special three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., blessed
South Carolina’s voter new identification law but suspended its enforcement
until after the 2012 elections, to give the state time to educate voters and
fully implement the measure. The Ohio
ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by a union and two community groups in June
seeking to block enforcement of a law that, as interpreted by the state’s
Supreme Court, allowed elections boards to throw out provisional ballots cast
in the wrong precinct. A federal judge
ruled in August that the measure was likely unconstitutional, prompting the
state to appeal to the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit. Voters can cast provisional ballots if their
name isn’t on the voter registration list in their precinct on Election Day. The state counts them later, when the voters’
information is verified. The appeals
court ruled that the state must count provisional ballots cast in the wrong
precinct but at the right polling place, as long as the error was the fault of
a poll worker. (Some polling places
serve voters from several precincts.) A
federal district court found that Ohio rejected more than 14,000 wrong-precinct
ballots in 2008 and 11,000 more in 2010.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/10/11/sixth-circuit-ohio-must-count-votes-cast-in-wrong-precinct/?mod=djemlawblog_h
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