The rsync.net warrant canary

You aren't allowed to say if you've received a National Security Letter. But there's no law that says you can't say that you haven't received one.

Thus, rsync.net has a "warrant canary"--they periodically post a cryptographically signed statement that they have not, to date, received any PATRIOT Act warrants or had any searches and seizures. If they stop updating the statement, then you can draw your own conclusions.

The second of these library signs uses the same principle: "The FBI has not been here [watch closely for removal of this sign]."

(Via jwz's blog, where some commenters question whether the recent Washington Post piece by the recipient of a National Security Letter is truthful. Note that the ACLU has a lawsuit going on about this case, which I previously noted back in 2005.)

NIST's 9/11 Investigation FAQ

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster has produced a FAQ about the causes of the WTC building collapses (along with other FAQs and factsheets):

NIST conducted an extremely thorough three-year investigation into what caused the WTC towers to collapse, as explained in NIST’s dedicated Web site, http://wtc.nist.gov. This included consideration of a number of hypotheses for the collapses of the towers.

Some 200 technical experts—including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia—reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse.

Based on this comprehensive investigation, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New York Police Department aviation unit during a half-hour period prior to collapse—support this sequence for each tower.

Their study doesn't support the "pancake" hypothesis of floor-by-floor collapse:

NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system—that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns—consisted of a grid of steel “trusses” integrated with a concrete slab; see diagram below). Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.

And the FAQ responds to "controlled demolition" claims:

NIST’s findings also do not support the “controlled demolition” theory since there is conclusive evidence that:

• the collapse was initiated in the impact and fire floors of the WTC towers and nowhere else, and;

• the time it took for the collapse to initiate (56 minutes for WTC 2 and 102 minutes for WTC 1) was dictated by (1) the extent of damage caused by the aircraft impact, and (2) the time it took for the fires to reach critical locations and weaken the structure to the point that the towers could not resist the tremendous energy released by the downward movement of the massive top section of the building at and above the fire and impact floors.

Video evidence also showed unambiguously that the collapse progressed from the top to the bottom, and there was no evidence (collected by NIST, or by the New York Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department or the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors as the top building sections (including and above the 98th floor in WTC 1 and the 82nd floor in WTC 2) began their downward movement upon collapse initiation.

In summary, NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to Sept. 11, 2001. NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers. Instead, photographs and videos from several angles clearly show that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward until the dust clouds obscured the view.

There's lots more in the NIST FAQs.

My National Security Letter Gag Order

Yesterday's Washington Post prints a first-hand anonymous account from the head of a small ISP who received a National Security Letter from the FBI, which was an apparent abuse of authority:

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

More at the Washington Post.

Trent Franks defends Egyptian blogger

Although I'm not generally a fan of Arizona's U.S. Rep. Trent Franks (R-District 2), I have to give him compliments for his stance on this issue. He's one of only two Congressmen who has reached out to the Egyptian ambassador to the United States on behalf of Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Soliman (also known as Kareem Amer), who was arrested, beaten, held in solitary confinement, and sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing his government in his blog. As the other Congressman is Massachusetts' Rep. Barney Frank (D-District 4), this is about as bipartisan as it gets.

Kudos to Franks and Frank.

(Via Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front.)

Daily Show on Viacom v. Google lawsuit

Here's Demetri Martin on the Daily Show commenting on the Viacom lawsuit against Google. This is one that's better to watch on YouTube than on Comedy Central...



(Via Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front.)

Former Arizona governor endorses extraterrestrial spacecraft hypothesis

In a CNN interview, former Arizona governor and current pastry chef Fife Symington says he saw the "Phoenix lights" in 1997 and believes that the cause was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The CNN coverage fails to offer any alternative explanations (see the "Skepticism" section of the Wikipedia entry on the Phoenix lights and Tony Ortega's 1998 New Times story), or to note that Symington was the second Arizona Republican governor of the 1980s to be indicted on criminal charges, impeached, and removed from office.

Also see the Arizona Republic's coverage.

Derivative musical works and copyright

This morning on the Howard Stern Show, there was some discussion of Timothy English's book, Sounds Like Teen Spirit: Stolen Melodies, Ripped-Off Riffs, and the Secret History of Rock and Roll, along with playing some pairs of songs that had very strong resemblances. I didn't realize that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" was a derivative work, with the main guitar line closely resembling that in Spirit's "Taurus"--and Spirit used to open for Led Zeppelin. (Apparently a lot of Led Zeppelin's songs are derivative works.)

An example of this kind of borrowing that I recognized myself was when Nirvana's "Come As You Are" first started getting airplay--I immediately thought that the main guitar riff sounded almost exactly like that in Killing Joke's "Eighties."

It's not clear which of these borrowings are intentional and which are accidental, but as English's book makes clear, this is an extremely common occurrence. Some of these have led to successful copyright infringement lawsuits, but most haven't--at least in the past. The Dr. Demento Show, which I used to listen to every week back in high school, used to have a regular feature called "Damaskas' Copycat Game" which would play short bits of songs in sequence, demonstrating their similarity.

Spider Robinson wrote a short story in 1983 called "Melancholy Elephants" which is a story about a woman who tries to persuade a Senator to oppose an extension of the term of copyright into perpetuity on the grounds that there are finite permutations of notes that are perceived as distinct musical melodies, and thus that the bill would result in an end to creation of new works. In the story, she succeeds in persuading him to kill the bill, while in reality, the equivalent bill--the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998--passed, and Larry Lessig and Eric Eldred failed to overturn it at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 (Eldred v. Ashcroft). While this didn't extend copyright to "in perpetuity," it has an economic effect virtually indistinguishable from copyright of infinite duration (as Justice Breyer's dissent recognized).

In 2005, arguments over the practice of sampling music came to a head, when the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that no sampling could take place without a license--not even for a 1.5-second, three-note guitar riff that N.W.A.'s 1990 song "100 Miles and Runnin'" sampled from Funkadelic's "Get Off Your Ass and Jam." This decision led to a protest in the form of a collection of songs composed solely of that sample. [The Downhill Battle organization's website has been down since November 2007, but can be found on the Internet Archive. -jjl, 6 Jan 2009.]

(Related: An excellent short video documentary about the use of a six-second drum sample from The Winstons' "Amen Brother.")

UPDATE (December 27, 2011): The Economist, Dec. 17-30, 2011 year-end issue features an excellent article, "Seven seconds of fire," about the Amen break.

UPDATE (May 18, 2014): The estate of Randy California, of Spirit, is suing Led Zeppelin over "Stairway to Heaven" being a derivative work of "Taurus."

The site whosampled.com has a list of songs which have sampled "Amen, Brother."

I should have noticed that the Killing Joke/Nirvana riff is also very close to an earlier (1982) riff in The Damned's "Life Goes On" (I certainly listened to the album "Strawberries" enough times...).

Arizona rises to #7 in the nation for mortgage fraud

Arizona has risen from #23 for reported mortgage fraud in 2005 to #7 in 2006, based on number of fraud cases out of the total number of home loans in the state:

The top 10 states for 2006:

1. Utah
2. Florida
3. California
4. New York
5. Idaho
6. Michigan
7. Arizona
8. Georgia
9. Minnesota
10. Illinois

Flatland: The Movie

Edwin A. Abbott's classic story has been turned into a movie, and it's received a rave, 5-star review from Film Threat.

It's going to be available this spring on a DVD which includes the original text (though you can also find that online, as it's in the public domain). This animated film features the voices of Martin Sheen as Arthur Square, Kristen Bell as Hex, Tony Hale from Arrested Development as the King of Pointland, and Michael York as Spherius. Joe Estevez, Martin Sheen's brother, is Abbott Square--although he's been doing tons of movies (IMDB shows 160 titles, 22 of which are dated 2006 or 2007), I haven't seen any since MST3K covered 1990's "Soultaker."

If you check out the movie website, you can register for a discount on the DVD when it becomes available.

UPDATE (March 20, 2007): Thanks to Gourami118, who points out in the comments that there are two Flatland movies. The five-star Film Threat review is of this movie by Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., which completed in January and is already available on DVD in a limited run of 1,000 copies. Call this one "Flatland: The Film" (based on its website), while the Martin Sheen one is "Flatland: The Movie."

The political reasons behind the firing of the U.S. Attorney from Arizona

Radley Balko reports at the Agitator on the political reasons behind the firing of U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton of Arizona.

The only reason for his filing in documents released from the Justice Department is that former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert complained that Charlton refused to pursue marijuana cases unless they involved at least 500 pounds of marijuana. This seems like a reasonable strategy for something that shouldn't even be illegal in the first place, and certainly should be a lower priority than other issues.

But it also seems that the White House was not happy that Charlton and one of the other fired U.S. Attorneys were not pursuing obscenity cases that were being sent to them by the Justice Department. The Justice Department's "porn czar," Brent Ward, sent a memo to recently resigned DOJ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson titled "Obscenity Cases" which said:

We have two U.S. Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix (this is urgent) and Dan Bogden in Las Vegas. In light of the AG's [Attorney General's] comments at the NAC to 'kick butt and take names', what do you suggest I do? Do you think at this point that these names should go through channels to reach the AG, or is it enough for me to give the names to you? If you want to act on what I give you, I will be glad to provide a little more context for each of the two situations."

Adult Video News did further investigation, and found that Charlton had taken an obscenity case, but it would be far-fetched to call it a "good case." It was an obscenity case against an adult video store in Arizona, while simultaneously another video store chain was selling and renting the same titles that the first video store was indicted for selling. The reason the second chain wasn't also prosecuted? It had recently declared bankruptcy and was being run by trustees from the federal government. And it appears that this inequity in treatment may be the reason why Charlton declined to pursue the original case, after it was brought to his attention by attorneys from the indicted store.

More details and links at The Agitator.

And there's more on the other attorney firings at TPM Muckraker.

UPDATE (March 26, 2007): Balko has further comments on Charlton's firing based on the emails that have been released from the DOJ. Charlton was the #1 prosecutor in the nation for number of cases, and had the backing of Sen. Jon Kyl, but was fired anyway. Was it for his refusal to prosecute low-level pot cases, for his investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi, or was it because he was promoting the idea that the FBI should videotape interrogations and interviews of suspects, an idea which was scuttled because the FBI and DOJ didn't want juries to see what actually happens in such interrogations.

UPDATE (April 27, 2007): The New York Times editorialized yesterday about the connection between Charlton's firing and his investigation of Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi:

Congressman Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican, was locked in a close re-election battle last fall when the local United States attorney, Paul Charlton, was investigating him for corruption. The investigation appears to have been slowed before Election Day, Mr. Renzi retained his seat, and Mr. Charlton ended up out of a job — one of eight prosecutors purged by the White House and the Justice Department.

The Arizona case adds a disturbing new chapter to that scandal. Congress needs to determine whether Mr. Charlton was fired for any reason other than threatening the Republican Party’s hold on a Congressional seat.

Mr. Renzi was fighting for his political life when the local press reported that he was facing indictment for a suspect land deal. According to The Wall Street Journal, federal investigators met unexpected resistance from the Justice Department in getting approval to proceed and, perhaps as a result, the investigation was pushed past the election.

TPM Muckraker reports that Renzi failed to disclose a $200,000 payment he received, in violation of House ethics rules. This is in addition to his other issues, previously reported here.