UK Terrorism Bill appears to impact ISPs

A "Terrorism" bill in UK Parliament, as amended in the House of Lords on January 25, 2006, looks like it could have considerable impact on ISPs. The first section of the bill, titled "Encouragement of terrorism," makes it a crime to publish a statement or cause another to publish a statement with the intended effect (or with recklessness to the possibility of such an effect) of directly or indirectly encouraging members of the public "to commit, prepare or instigate acts of terrorism or Convention offences." "Indirect encouragement" means "the making of a statement describing terrorism in such a way that the listener would infer that he should emulate it."

The second section of the bill, titled "Dissemination of terrorist publications," is more problematic. It makes it a crime to disseminate terrorist publications "with the intention of directly or indirectly encouraging or inducing the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, or of providing information with a view to its use in the commission or preparation of such acts" (or with recklessness to the possibility of such an effect). The definition of "dissemination of terrorist publications" is extremely broad, and includes those who "provide a service to others that enables them to obtain, read, listen to, or look at such a publication, or to acquire it by means of a gift, sale, or loan" and anyone who "transmits the content of such a publication electronically" or "has such a publication in possession with a view to its becoming the subject of conduct" falling within any of the preceding sections (including transmission).

This means that mere possession of such material isn't a crime, but possession with intent to transmit (e.g., hosting or having it in a location shared via P2P) is a crime, as is the transmission itself (if done with intent or recklessness).

The proposed statute provides that someone accused of this crime has an affirmative defense by showing that the material does not express their views and did not have their endorsement and that it was "clear, in all circumstances of the conduct" that those two conditions were met--except in the case of a notification from a constable in section 3 (which applies sections 1 and 2 to "Internet activity").

This notification provision is similar in many respects to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States--if a constable provides notification to a "relevant person" that he is hosting "terrorist publications," that person has two working days to take down the material, or else it is then deemed to have endorsed the publication (unless they have a "reasonable excuse" for their failure to take it down). Unlike the DMCA, there is no counter-notice provision.

The section about Internet activity doesn't define how the constable determines who to notify, or who is responsible for material located downstream of an ISP. If providers are responsible for anything downstream, then this could force an upstream provider to blackhole a server IP that provides many websites to many customers because of illicit content provided by one person. It's also not clear whether a provider could be held responsible for material that it transmits but does not host--in which case this would force ISPs operating in the UK into acting as managed content filtering service providers for the UK government any time a constable designates online material as a "terrorist publication."

The offense carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years.

Offensive radio

Now that Howard Stern has gone to Sirius Satellite Radio and been replaced in the Phoenix market by Adam Carolla, the station has changed its name from "The Zone" to "Free FM" (apparently intended to distinguish itself from pay satellite radio--the result is that it makes me think of Howard Stern every time I hear the name).

I don't have satellite radio in my car, so I occasionally listen to "Free FM," though I believe I'll discontinue that habit. Today on the way to lunch I heard an incredibly obnoxious and offensive commercial--the most blatant Christian evangelizing I have ever heard on a non-Christian radio station.

The spot began by saying something like "Have you ever seen a dead animal in the road and wondered what it was thinking?" (No, as a matter of fact, I haven't.) It went on to say that being in the "middle of the road" is not where God wants you to be, and you need to choose to be on one side or the other, that God has a plan for you, etc. Listeners were directed to Groundwire.net for more information. The spot I heard was apparently a 30-second variant of this spot called "The Squirrel." It was offensive on multiple levels--the evangelizing, the horrible attempt at being cool, and the implication that animals get hit by cars out of their own stupidity (as opposed to ignorance) or inability to make decisions.

Groundwire.net is an apparently new ministry of Sean Dunn of Champion Ministries, based in Castle Rock, CO. I don't know anything about his theology, but his marketing is apparently supposed to be hip and edgy. His website has a bogus story about Albert Einstein which falsely portrays him as a theist (and suggests with its close, "IT IS TIME FOR THE CHRISTIANS TO BE HEARD," that he was an advocate of Christianity). This story is a piece of nonsense that has been circulating the Internet--so Dunn's not only incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, he's presenting an email legend as though it's his own material.

Einstein, by the way, was an atheist or agnostic.

UPDATE (May 12, 2008): A 1954 letter from Einstein to philosopher Eric Gutkind says:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
...
For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

Net Neutrality

Larry Lessig's blog has linked to an article by Bill Thompson on the BBC's website arguing for "net neutrality," a position that favors FCC regulations to prohibit providers from blocking access to competitors' services and (in some cases, as in Thompson's) prohibit them from charging content providers for access to different classes of service.

I agree that providers shouldn't be able to block access to competitors' services (except, e.g., when necessary for security reasons, or as part of a service like content filtering being provided to a customer who wants it--but see below for my opinion on putting the FCC in charge of enforcement), but I don't think I agree on the latter point. Thompson argues that classes of service beyond the distinctions which providers currently offer based on overall bandwidth are unnecessary. But he's clearly wrong on that point--as more and more services which are sensitive to latency are added to the network (like real-time voice and video), the argument for putting those services into a higher class of service becomes stronger. Given the fact that there are currently several million compromised machines which are regularly used to engage in denial of service attacks, it is trivial for ordinary Internet bandwidth to be saturated--taking anything riding over that bandwidth out of service.

More and more people are depending on Internet access for voice services, including emergency 911 service. If those services are set up without separating them from ordinary Internet traffic in some way, the risk is created that those services may be unavailable when critically needed. Throwing more bandwidth at the problem doesn't help when you're also throwing more bandwidth to that same set of compromised machines, which can multiply that added bandwidth in an attack. One way or another--and likely through a combination of methods, including better filtering mechanisms and separation of different kinds of services into separate virtual channels--action needs to be taken to protect critical services from such attacks.

One thing that tends to be glossed over by proponents of "Net Neutrality" is that the most likely way of the policy being enforced is through regulatory action by the FCC. That, I think, is a huge mistake--these are the same people who can't create regulations to enforce a relatively simple statute like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) without creating loopholes for telemarketers that are not permitted by the statute (e.g., allowing prerecorded or automated voice messages to deliver advertisements when there's an existing business relationship), and the same people who think it's more important to take action in response to carbon-copied indecency complaints from the Parents Television Council than to take action against telemarketers actively engaged in fraud.

Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute makes some excellent arguments against putting "Net Neutrality" into effect through FCC regulation. Part of the problem is the vagueness of what's being asked for. If it's going to be set in place through the law, I would strongly favor that it be done as simply as possible through a statute that gives a private right of action (through injunctive relief or civil penalties for each day that access to a service is blocked for illegitimate reasons) and leaves the FCC out of it. The worst possible thing that could happen would be for the FCC to be given authority to maintain standards of access and turn it into an authority to maintain standards of content--and if you look at who's running the Commission and how they deal and are planning to deal with content in other realms, you can see that this is a real concern.

Disclosure: I work in network security for a global telecommunications company--one which is not an RBOC or cable provider. Our network (like that, I suspect, of most major Internet backbone providers) uses classes of service internally to differentiate voice, video, IP-VPN, and ordinary IP traffic. If the network didn't use classes of service, the more sensitive classes of traffic would be vulnerable to periodic disruption by Internet denial of service attacks.

Dan Savage on Brokeback Mountain and End of the Spear

Dan Savage has a great op-ed at The New York Times on these two movies, neither of which he's seen. A key paragraph, in which Savage points out the inconsistency of evangelical Christians who have complained about gay actor Chad Allen portraying a missionary in the latter movie:

Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Schneier and Paulos on automated wiretapping

Security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier gave a talk yesterday to the ACLU Washington's membership conference at which he argued that massive automated wiretapping generates too many false alarms to be useful, as described in the Seattle Times. As a commenter on Schneier's blog notes, mathematician John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, both of which I highly recommend), writing in a New York Times op-ed titled "Panning for Terrorists," makes the same point.

The problem is essentially the same one that makes it pointless to engage in programs of blanket drug-testing of grade school children or mandatory HIV testing in order to obtain a marriage license--the population being tested contains such a small number of people who meet the criteria being tested for, which means that even a highly accurate test returns vastly more false positives than true positives.

Paulos points out that a 99-percent-accurate sorting mechanism for detecting terrorist conversations, on a population of 300 million Americans that includes one-in-a-million with terrorist ties (300) will identify 297 of them, along with 3 million innocent Americans. That's 297 true positives and 3 million false positives, producing a new sample population that is .009% terrorists and 99.99% innocent Americans who may be wrongly investigated.

"Dick is a Killer"

As you already know if you pay attention to the mainstream media, VP Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old man with a shotgun while hunting quail with him in Texas. His hunting partner, Harry Whittington, is in stable condition in a hospital in Corpus Christi, after being sprayed in the face (fortunately not in the eyes) and chest with shotgun pellets.

Whittington, a lawyer who was appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush to the Texas Funeral Services Commission, now has a great story to tell his grandchildren.

(BTW, the title is a reference to a song here.)

UPDATE: Pharyngula points out that the type of "hunting" Cheney engaged in back in 2003 involved having pen-raised animals released for his shooting pleasure. 500 farm-raised pheasants were released for the Cheney party's entertainment, and they killed at least 417 of them, along with an unknown number of captive mallard ducks. I haven't seen an indication that this quail hunting incident was of pen-raised quail, but that seems to be common.

Happy 197th to Charles Darwin!

Today would be Darwin's 197th birthday... as part of the Darwin week events at Arizona State University, tomorrow is a public lecture on "Creationism and Evolution in America: World Views in Conflict" by Regents Professor Geoffrey A. Clark of the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change. The event will take place from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Murdock Hall, room 101 (I remember that room well from my undergraduate days in computer science).

The event is sponsored by the Secular Freethought Society (the "Secular Devils"), which has a 2006 event calendar online.

Police protest police behavior at police demonstration

It seems that when police themselves are demonstrating (off-duty NYPD officers at rallies and protests regarding a contract dispute with the city), they don't care for the standard ways that police deal with protesters. NY police and the Police Benevolent Association are suing the NYPD for "spying" and videotaping them, and for intimidation tactics.

Fetal pain

While we're legislating what abortion facilities must tell patients about fetal pain, how about also requiring them to tell them that fetuses aborted before the "age of accountability" are guaranteed entry to heaven, while those which are born who grow up to reach such an age may end up spending eternity in hell (not to mention that such unwanted children may be more likely to become criminals)?

Cartoon on the Muslim cartoon controversy

From your cousin Vito by way of jwz.