illegal prime

In addition to an excellent investigative look at the simultaneously ludicrous and thoroughly chilling methods of “plugging the analog hole” that certain parties are trying to legislate into our electronics, Kathryn Cramer’s article on VEIL technology and legislation contains some most excellent and worthwhile sci-fi allusions. Also, commentors on the post provide some informed technical analyses of the language of the legislation that conjecture as to the nature of the technology itself.

Cramer’s analysis perfectly demonstrates the absurdity of the wide range of attempts to protect “intellectual property” (read: commercial media content) with laws enforcing the use of secret technologies that restrict the abilities of content creators and users alike to interact with cultural substance. This thing in particular is creepy because, as she points out, the secrecy of the technology creates a situation in which a law is being considered despite the fact of its contents (i.e. the nature of the technology to be compulsorily applied to consumer and commercial electronics) being unavailable for public review. The post in full is a must-read.

(via BoingBoing)

While tooling around in a comment thread of a recent slashdot story on Stallman’s rejection of the Creative Commons licenses, I ran across an interesting little comment succinctly analyzing the problem of trying to make the concept of intellectual property viable within a capitalist model.
Znork writes:

Reproduction, copies of information, cannot be usefully sold as it lacks scarcity. That essentially puts it outside of the functional realm of property; any scarcity is purely artificial, and introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole. Creating artificial scarcity is more or less the economic equal of wholesale destruction of wealth and property.

We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole. And as an aside, in comparison with countries where the citizens were not forced to pay for bottled air, workers would cost more, with predictable effects…

[IgnoramusMaximus is] right, of course, the propaganda blanket attempts to throughly confuse the issues. Artificial scarcity is unacceptable, and extra incentive systems must build on methods compatible with a free market. It’s not like it’s hard to do, there are any number of incentive systems that governments around the world use for various purposes. The monopoly systems of copyright and patents are grotesque abberations, not the common standard.

In case the MPAA and RIAA’s tactics didn’t remind you enough of creeping fascism, check out the guy that the MPAA is putting in charge of enforcement. BoingBoing carried the story, which is excerpted here:

The MPAA has appointed a new anti-piracy axeman –the former head of the New Orleans branch of the TSA — an ex-cop from a branch of law enforcement known for abusing its power, and from a city where the police department has been rocked by scandal after scandal. The perfect guy for the job!

An update to the post includes a portion of a speech that Robinson gave as the Director of Michigan state police:

“The IACP’s position on the encryption issue is clear. We strongly believe that the unchecked proliferation of robust, non-recoverable encryption technology poses an enormous danger to effective law enforcement, public safety and to society as a whole. Therefore, the IACP believes that any encryption legislation that is enacted must protect the ability of law enforcement agencies to perform court authorized electronic surveillance and the search and seizure of criminally related information stored in computers.”

Michael Robinson’s career history is mostly an amusing complement to the nature of his new role, but the statement above has serious implications. Uncrippled cryptography is among the only possible modes of preserving any degree of privacy and security in the digital realm. Unfortunately, few average users have adopted conscientious cryptographic practices in their daily communications, largely because it requires a bit of extra effort and many seem to feel that they “have nothing to hide.” There’s little point in harping on the short-sightedness and fallaciousness of that reasoning; rather, it seems more important that the average person recognize the importance of maintaining and developing encryption technology that is not intentionally rendered insecure by the edict of a governing body.

Encryption is like the lock on your front door; if anyone but the people you’ve given keys to want to get in, they should have to try really hard and ideally fail. This includes law enforcement and any other governmental body. A search warrant legally permits executive agents to enter a space, but that doesn’t mean copies of every housekey should be kept by the local constabulary. More to the point, it doesn’t mean that lockmakers should be compelled to build a specific flaw into their products that allows the “right people” (read:pretty much anyone) to defeat their security. Furthermore, the position that Robinson advocates essentially implies that anyone found to have created or be in possession of locks that are not crippled in the prescribed fashion should be considered criminal.

Though Robinson is not stepping into a position of direct legislative authority, his past public “service” and the authority of his new position make him a prime choice for expert testimony before legislative bodies considering laws pertaining to issues like encryption. Organizations like the MPAA have a pretty good history of seeing that their interests are served in national legislation, and with this guy in their back pocket the threat to privacy and the future of privacy rights looms that much more disturbingly.

Inga Chernyak, student president of Free Culture @ NYU, has been fired from her job at an intellectual property law firm for advocating methods of resisting intrusively restrictive copyright-enforcement measures in an interview for the Village Voice. This is hardly the first time someone has been fired for expressing an opinion in print outside of work. However, it does represent a trend towards sanctioning people for simply expressing oppositional views on the issue of DRM.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark’s announcement over at Sysinternals of the Sony/BMG inclusion of a rootkit on their newest CD’s created quite an uproar. The Slashdot discussion covers most of the relevant aspects and implications of this move, but a quick summary of the issue as it has progressed can be found over at Schneier’s. Suffice it to say that people are pissed and that this won’t be the last time. But, interestingly, clever hackers have once again found a way of manipulating systems of control to subvert other ones.

update: A portion of the code used in creating their copy protection is in violation of copyright. It’s stolen from open source code originally used to defeat another DRM scheme, written by Jon Lech Johansen.

Since this blog is to be concerned with efforts to combat, evade, and withdraw from commercial mass culture, the title “illegal prime” seemed appropriate. In 1998, the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyrights Act established legislative basis for the placement of severe and often crippling restrictions on the development and use of communications and media technologies. Under the DMCA, possession or distribution of source code that can be used to create programs that circumvent copy-protection schemes is deemed illegal. In a suit by the Motion Picture Association of America, DeCSS, a program to decrypt copy-protected DVDs for fair-use backups and otherwise, was deemed in violation of the DMCA and thereby its source code became illegal information.

Of course, the idea that pure information in the form of source code can be considered contraband has rubbed more than a few people the wrong way. As Wikipedia notes, many hold that “because source code conveys information to programmers, is written in a language, and can be used to share humour and other artistic pursuits, it is a protected form of communication” under the first ammendment. A number of efforts have subsequently been made to demonstrate how ludicrous such attempts to legislate knowledge out of existence are. And so, in 2001, the first illegal prime number was born.