Loss of Privacy

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said that she wants to work with state governors to repeal the REAL-ID Act.  REAL-ID is popular within Washington, but the rest of the country has fought against it since its inception.

Napolitano, former governor of Arizona, said she has met with governors of both parties recently “to look at a way to repeal Real ID.” She said she wants to substitute the federal law with “something else that pivots off of the driver’s license but accomplishes some of the same goals. And we hope to be able to announce something on that fairly soon.”

All the videos have a bit of violence in them so, if you can’t handle it, don’t go watch it.  The videos are listed in chronological order at The Guardian’s website.

Considering the wireless CCTV cameras were shut down for the G20 Summit, it’s a good thing that people used their own.

The makers of this video are far more dangerous than any terrorist.  They are helping to create a society in which everyone is paranoid, distrustful, and, quite possibly, delusional.

Writing poetry in the park isn’t terrorism.  Drawing a sketch of a bridge, butterflies, or whatever else is in the park, does not constitute terrorism.  However, according to this video, if you do these things, you will, presumably, be tasered and/or beaten off camera.  The guy in the previous scene can yank at the locks at a secure facility and just walk off.

The fact is, more people die of the flu (20,000) and car accidents (42,116) each year than have been killed by terrorist attacks (~3100) in the US in the last ten years.

Wikileaks has obtained an early copy draft [pdf] of the ACTA treaty, which details the international cooperation on intellectual property between the European Union, United States, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Japan.

The core of the document details how each party should deal with intellectual property matters, including costs, complaint process and legal standards. Where it goes further is with the introduction of set rate penalties based on types of infringement, and further makes no clear distinction (that I could see) between a commercial piracy outfit, and a kid at home downloading a movie on BitTorrent.

While international co-operation on issues such as these isn’t out of the ordinary, it’s the secrecy around the document that has caused alarm so far; and it turns out that it was justified. The net effect of this treaty is to overrule local laws and to increase the severity of intellectual property/ copyright laws in signatory nations. Maybe not police stat level, but in places like Australia and parts of the EU which don’t have as strict an interpretation of copyright (for example, you can legally rip a DVD in Australia), this document could force local laws to be changed.

The problem with these types of treaties (re. NAFTA) is that they are decided upon by the countries with no input from its citizens.  They circumvent their own laws to get what they want and let us know about it later.

The draft itself is a bit blurry and are photographs of the draft, but it is still readable.  I’d suggest downloading it via Tor or SSL and reading it a page at a time so as to not hurt your eyes too much.