Auld Lang Syne: European Courts and the Right to Be Forgotten

by Nomad

One of Internet's biggest stories of the year went practically unnoticed in the American press. A European court ordered Google to provide a means for individuals to control what has been written online about them.
At least, the ruling says, search engines cannot help search engine users find that information.

The desire to be remembered is, generally speaking, something most of us aspire to. However, when it comes to our online footprint, there are a lot of people who would strongly prefer to be forgotten. Although the event cannot entirely be erased from the vast public forum known as the Net, then at least we can try to separate our names (and our reputations) from the information. 

Should that photo of you when you weighed as much as a Volkswagen be a burden you must carry forever? Must a teenage shoplifter who has changed her ways in adulthood have the details of her pop up every time she looks for a new job? Should an admitted wife-beater have one incident ruin the rest of his life? What about a convicted bank embezzler who has served his time, does he have the right to be forgotten?

Making good use of a seasonal reference, we might ask:

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Washington District Court Judge Landmark Ruling: You Are Not Your IP Address

by Nomad

A Washington judge's ruling in a copyright infringement case may have profound implications on the ability to prosecute cybercrime and to issue surveillance warrants by the NSA.

According to Judge Robert Lasnik, a United States federal judge, on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, evidence made up purely of IP addresses does not meet the legal requirements of pleading standards for pursuing the case against online pirates. He has ruled that IP address alone do not provide a sufficient means of identification.  

According one source:

The fact of the matter and the law is that it is almost impossible to associate piracy based on the IP address and the IP address alone. The actual culprit might have been a family member, guest, or even a hacker. At the very least, the subscriber with that IP address can be scolded for not safeguarding his or her home computer.

In other words, the evidence may show that a particular IP was used but that doesn't mean that the accused in the courtroom is the one who used that IP address. 

That's really not news. The big law firms who have made a fortune bounty hunting for large media giants, have been successful using this prosecutorial method for years. 

Courts have been not questioned it. But they are starting to wake up, it seems.

Slimy and Dark Arts: Texas GOP State Chairman Munisteri's Desperate Database Deception

by Nomad
The Wall Street Journal reported last week about a fundraising letter by the Texas GOP state chairman, Steve Munisteri.

Although you might not have heard of him, as an activist for conservative grassroots movements, Munisteri has been around forever. According to his bio:

As State Chairman of the Texas chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, Munisteri begun the practice of issuing legislative rankings for members of the Texas House of Representatives and State Senate. In 1980, Munisteri founded Young Conservatives of Texas, a group which continues to produce the future generations of our conservative leaders and elected officials in college campuses across the State.

Most recently he was elected to chair the Republican Party of Texas in 2010. For a conservative in Texas, the future looks rather grim. 

Texas is slowly but surely turning from a conservative red to a decidedly liberal blue. Apparently, as Texas slips from the Republican fingers, Munisteri is ready to pull out all stops; hence the letter. 

That letter, aimed at poaching the last dollar from the Texas rich, was full of the predictable fear-mongering about Democrats “ coming to take away your guns,” and more than that, “they’re coming to hijack your rights and freedoms.” 

He called the new Democratic voter-mobilization effort, Battleground Texas, “a clear and present threat to you and your family.” 

It’s the kind of rhetoric that doesn’t hold up to too much analysis or critical thinking but, to a certain type of Texas Republican, it really tends to stir the blood. To outsiders, it just smells like the sour BO of desperation. (At least the Texas Democrats behind Battleground thought so.)

However, there was another detail in the article about the letter that caught my eye.

To fight back, the GOP letter urges Republicans to give anywhere from $15 to $5,000 so the party can “immediately undertake our own effort to identify thousands of Texas conservatives.”

The letter warns that the former Obama operatives “have become masters of the slimy ‘dark arts’ of campaigning: creating massive databases; collecting information on every voter and non-voter; and then using that information to do whatever it takes to drive these voters away from Republican candidates and principles.”

That’s a rather interesting claim for Munisteri to make against the Democratic Party. While there is nothing illegal about collecting information in “massive databases,” Munisteri is playing on the ignorance of his constituents about modern political campaigning. As Mr. Munisteri well knows, these so-called dark and slimy arts have become a long feature of the Republican campaigns since the Bush administration. 

Privacy Laws and Citizen Journalism: ACORN and Romney's 47% Speech

by Nomad

I wanted to take a moment to follow up on a post I recently wrote on James O'Keefe III and the ACORN scandal.

In a somewhat related story, CBS has reported details about that notorious secret recording of Mitt Romney last year. The controversial video became known as the "47%" speech.

As it turns out, the recorder of that video was not a reporter (even self-designated like O'Keefe) but a bartender who worked at the site in Florida where the speech was given. 

In the speech he told his audience of wealthy campaign contributors that 47% of the population would never vote for him. That percentage of the population was politically unimportant to him. 

"My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

On the surface, he had a point. And the results of the election confirmed it. The problem was the background to those remarks, who spoke them and to whom they were addressed. These factors behind his speech accounted for in the decline in his popularity of the candidate. He was none to popular in the first place.

I saw one comment that interested me since I had recently investigated the James O'Keefe case in which he was sued by a former ACORN employee for recording him without permission.

The comment  points out that since O'Keefe was arrested on Invasion of Privacy Laws, the law should apply to the bartender as well. The comment reads:

This guy should be brought up on charges for filming someone without there knowledge. If the Acorn fiasco taught us anything, it was that it was illegal to film anyone without there knowledge. Then the people in power get a video that was to there advantage and the rule dosnt [sic] apply. Figure that. Illegal is only illegal when? The line is getting pretty blurry.

It's a valid argument and something that troubled me when I wrote the post. 

The US and Greece: Does the Public Have a Right to Know What Politicians are Hiding?

by Nomad

No matter how cynical Americans are about their politicians and the political process, nothing can compare to the Greeks. Most Greeks you ask on the street would tell you that their government has been corrupt for as long as they can remember.

And that way of thinking goes back to the ancient times too. The philosopher Anacharsis once said,

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them. 

If the Greek public weren’t already by their nature skeptical about the politics, the austerity measures imposed on Greece by the European Union have pushed that cynicism to the breaking point. Mass protests have erupted into violence throughout Greece as European Union leaders in Brussels have attempted to pull the nation back from the edge of bankruptcy.

The Lost LaGarde List

When journalist and HOT DOC magazine editor, Kostas Vaxevanis, published a list of 1,991 people who had 1.95 billion in deposits in the Geneva, Switzerland HSBC bank branch, many were enraged but few were totally surprised.

According to Greek law, there is nothing illegal about having a Swiss bank accounts as long as they are declared and taxes are paid on them. The editor stressed that people on the list should not be considered tax evaders unless it is proved they did not pay taxes on the deposits.

What was interesting was the names on that list which reported included “several politicians, an advisor to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, well-known businessmen, journalists, doctors, lawyers and engineers, actors and civil servants – some of them working at the Finance Ministry.” The list contained names, not only of Greeks, but foreign nationals who had apparently emptied their accounts from Greek banks and transferred them to HSBC.

The list contains also the names of three former ministers, of whom one died sometime ago. Also the names of owners of enterprises that have gone bankrupt. But also students studying abroad, pensioners and housewives.