The cheap cialis in canada risk of recurrence is higher for people with advanced breast buying cheap cialis alternatives professional cancer at the time of their initial diagnosis than those order atenolol with early-stage breast cancer. The dosage a healthcare professional uses buy cheapest arcoxia for certain radiology exams also depends on certain factors. If cialis in malaysia you're breastfeeding or planning to do so, it's important to buy clomid online consider how Wegovy may affect you and your child. Doctors dexamethasone cost prescribe angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors to treat certain heart and buy generic nasonex kidney conditions. Doctors may suggest treatments, such as rhythm control find arcoxia without prescription therapy, to prevent the recurrence of lone AFib. Stem cell buy methotrexate online cheap transplantation, or bone marrow transplantation, is a treatment option for buy generic clomid leukemia and other blood cancers. However, these types of tinnitus where to order cialis are rare and less common than subjective tinnitus without a buying cipro clear cause. A physical or occupational therapist may help someone with.

That’s the title of a short piece I wrote that appears in the Boston Herald this morning.

That’s the term the Electronic Frontier Foundation is using to describe the data collection methods it yesterday sued the federal government to stop. Dragnet fishing involves scooping up everything, and throwing back everything except the particular fish you were looking to catch; dragnet surveillance is collecting data on everyone, and then sifting through it to identify the bad guys. Here, from the lawsuit against the National Security Agency, the President, and various other parties, is a summary description of what it alleges the government is doing.

8. The core component of the Program is Defendants’ nationwide network of sophisticated communications surveillance devices, attached to the key facilities of telecommunications companies such as AT&T that carry Americans’ Internet and telephone communications.

9. Using this shadow network of surveillance devices, Defendants have acquired and continue to acquire the content of a significant portion of the phone calls, emails, instant messages, text messages, web communications and other communications, both international and domestic, of practically every American who uses the phone system or the Internet, including Plaintiffs and class members, in an unprecedented suspicionless general search through the nation’s communications networks.

10. In addition to using surveillance devices to acquire the domestic and international communications content of millions of ordinary Americans, Defendants have unlawfully solicited and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions of customers (including communications records pertaining to Plaintiffs and class members), communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for how long, among other sensitive information.

The “Program” is what President Bush called the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” instituted shortly after the 9/11 attacks and only revealed in 2005. The plaintiffs are various ordinary citizens who object to the NSA reading their ¬†mail and listening to their phone calls without a warrant or probable cause, as provided in the Fourth Amendment. There is, I expect, no reason any of them should be under suspicion of plans to terrorize anyone.

I had an argument over dinner last night with a staunch Republican who was convinced that one of the reasons to vote for McCain was that McCain would appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court. I asked him if he thought a strict interpretation of the Fourth Amendment would allow this sort of surveillance of citizens, or the warrantless search and seizure of laptops at the border about which I wrote earlier. His non-response was that this sort of thing had been going on for years, even under Clinton. I am amazed that conservative originalists so readily forget that the Constitution was premised on the realization, based on hard experience, that governments can’t be trusted. The restraints on government power are as much a part of the Constitution as their favored interpretation of the Tenth Amendment.

As has been widely reported online, someone managed to access personal email accounts of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. ¬†Wired Magazine’s blog has a clear summary of the contents. That account and a number of other reports suggest that the governor was using her private account to conduct government business in order to avoid public-records laws.

What was retrieved (by no means all the email that was in the account) you can¬†download yourself from the Wikileaks site. Go ahead — you’ll feel a little naughty, and it will make you think. How many copies of those emails do you now suppose are out there? Those bits are not going away, ever.

Wikileaks anonymously posts documents that have been “classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public,” and are “of political, diplomatic, ethical or historical significance” (in the view of whatever anonymous soul runs the site). Of course, the documents may have been illegally obtained; that is the first thing the McCain campaign shouted. (How about a comment on government business happening on Yahoo! mail, and whether that’s the way the open, transparent new Washington government we’ve been promised will be run?)

We have a long history in this country of illegally obtaining documents that reveal illegal or unethical behavior. Thinking back on the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, I am moved to ponder how much simpler it would be today. The question of prior restraint would have been moot before it could even have been raised, had someone scanned them in and posted them to Wikileaks.

How did the account get compromised? No one is saying, but I noted some of the problems with password security a few days ago. There are some speculations; perhaps someone tricked the service into revealing her password (most unlikely, as passwords are ordinarily encrypted at the server). Or resetting it (more possible — remember that Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account was compromised because the name of her dog was the answer to the I-forgot-my-password-give-me-a-new-one security question). But still improbable for a Yahoo! mail account. She might have been the victim of a phishing attack (but if she is so credulous that she fell for one of those “this is your account manager speaking, please type your password here so we can verify it” scams, heaven help us if she winds up negotiating with Putin).

I would tend to look for a simpler strategy if I were trying to break in. Try a password like “Todd.” A lot of people still use them, even though most services demand that passwords be more complicated than that.

P.S. This example makes it clear what it means to say that the president needs to understand information technology. He doesn’t need keyboarding dexterity or familiarity with Excel macros. He needs to be able to understand this blog!

Google’s YouTube is huge, much huger than any other video sharing service. Like Google’s search service, it has become the place to go for a certain kind of information — a kind of information that is rapidly becoming a part of daily life for millions of people, especially the young. Like Google search, there is absolutely no barrier to someone starting a competing service, except for the quality of the product and the snowball effect — people tend to use the service they know other people are using, especially for sharing information.

So when information becomes unavailable on YouTube, it’s interesting to notice, and to wonder what principles govern the decision to remove material at the request of a complaining party. Two recent examples of YouTube takedowns:

The first is an Air Force recruiting video someone posted to YouTube. A blogger for the online edition of Wired Magazine, Kevin Poulsen, linked to it from a short piece about the fight against cyberterrorism. The Air Force issued a DCMA takedown notice to Poulsen, and if you go to the original post and try to play the video, you discover it’s no longer available. The curious thing about this one is that the people of the U.S. own that video. In fact, the Air Force web site on which the video appears (it’s still available there) states,¬†”Information presented on the Air Force Recruiting website is considered public information and may be distributed or copied.” This is a simple abuse of copyright law, a club that the powerful use to whack those who use their creations for no other reason than to comment on them. Even when they don’t have the legal right they claim, the DCMA is an effective tool against small players who would have to hire lawyers to defend themselves.

The second example is a video documentary about Sarah Palin’s church, which YouTube removed not, apparently, because of a copyright complaint, but just because a bunch of people complained about it. It contains some odd segments (“cell phone anointing”?) but there is no apparent fraud; as far as I can see no one claims that the shots are not of what they seem to be. In this case the video is still visible, though not at YouTube (click the link to the article).

Private censorship. It’s perfectly legal; none of us owes YouTube anything, and they can post or take down whatever they want. And they have absolutely no obligation to tell us why they take things down or when they would resist a request to take something down. I would guess that the rule is pretty simple, and it’s like what we say about search engines in Blown to Bits: The objective is to make as many people happy as much of the time as possible, with the ultimate goal of making as much money as possible for as long as possible. Nothing wrong with any of that, but we shouldn’t get carried away with grand thoughts about “digital democracy” and the “triumph of popular culture.” Nonsense — business is business.

The ubiquitous distribution of bits raises serious issues about children’s access to pornography, a matter we discuss in Chapter 7. As WiFi becomes available in more and more public places, it becomes harder and harder not to be confronted by the prurient interests of others who share those spaces with us. Denver airport, which offers free WiFi (hurray!), adopted a no-offensive-material policy. Who thought that airport officials would wind up in the censorship business?

But now it gets more complicated. American Airlines and other airlines are testing in-the-air WiFi, and the flight attendants’ union wants a similar no-offensive-material policy enforced — filtering the offending bits before they reach the passengers, so the attendants don’t have to adjudicate disputes between bored businessmen on their second martinis and the mothers of teenage boys sitting next to them. There is likely to be some pushback from those paying $9.95 or $12.95 for the service, especially if the filtering is too aggressive (it’s not just porn that would be filtered, apparently — “porn or other offending material,” which might cover a lot of music videos).

What people should be allowed to see is not a simple question for companies in the business of pleasing people, when people have such different views on what they and others should be allowed to see.

CNet’s Declan McCullagh reports a very important story:

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The “IP Traceback” drafting group would alter the underlying Internet protocols so that the origin of communications could be identified. Leaked documents from the group cite suppression of political opposition as one of the uses of the technological innovation.

Formal requirement of such technologies in the U.S. would presumably be illegal under the Constitution, but the U.S. National Security Agency is participating in the talks. There are ways other than blanket legal requirements to make such surveillance technologies the accepted norm in practice.

The economic power of China gives it new power. This could be a critical first case in which the world shifts its practices away from openness and toward government control in deference to the economic power of China.

Hal, Ken, and I wrote an opinion piece called Campaigning for Our Digital Future, raising some “bits” issues that the next president should think about. It was published recently in the Providence Journal.

A teenage train enthusiast reports that he was exchanging text messages with the engineer of the train that crashed Friday, killing 25 people. The teenager, Nick Williams, responded to the engineer, Robert Sanchez, at 4:22 PM and received no response, about a minute before the train drove through a red light and crashed into a freight train.

A similar speculation, about cell phone use while driving, arose about the driver of a Boston MBTA train that crashed last summer, killing the conductor. But that theory was laid to rest by the evidence.

Evidence there will be in this case as well. A timestamped record of the engineer’s texting exists and has doubtless already been acquired by forensic investigators.

Saturday is usually the weak newspaper day. Embarrassing news that must be revealed some time generally gets announced on Friday afternoon. Large parts of the newspaper staff are sidetracked to getting the Sunday paper ready.

But for some reason, to bits-oriented readers today’s New York Times is full of interesting stuff:

In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion. A good report on the entirely unsurprising fact that digital files tend to get purged, either because people don’t realize they are important to preserve, or because new administrations tend to want to make a clean sweep and start afresh. It’s hard to put a high priority on archiving when the money could be used in some politically more expedient way. This all relates to our observations at the end of Chapter 2 about how digital information can last forever, but that’s no guarantee that it will even when you want it to.

Stuck in Google’s Doghouse. A great Joe Nocera piece on the mysteries of Google’s quality metrics and the plight of those trying to make a living through Google ads. Lots here that will make sense to readers of our Chapter 4.

Virginia: Spam Law Struck Down on Grounds of Free Speech. A great example of how hard it is to get Internet law right, as we discuss in Chapter 7. Virginia tried to control spam. A fine idea; spam is not only full of swindles, it uses enormous amounts of network bandwidth and processing locally at the machines receiving it. Unfortunately, according to the Virginia Supreme Court, the law is

unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The conviction of a big-time spammer was overturned and he is free to prey on us all — in Virginia at least. I am sure that anti-spam laws in other states, and the federal statute, are being examined today in light of this decision.

Three big-time bits stories in one Saturday. And that’s not even counting the claim in the sexy front-page story that the Internet is contributing to the total collapse of the morality of Chilean 14-year-olds.

United Airlines is the company whose stock lost most of its value — a billion dollars, give or take a few — when Bloomberg News posted a headline of an old article stating that UAL had declared bankruptcy. UAL had indeed declared bankruptcy, but that was six years ago. The misleading headline triggered a sell-off that nearly wiped out the entire value of the company’s stock in a few minutes. Hal blogged this a few days ago.

People lost a lot of money because of this mistake. Who’s responsible, and is anyone liable?

Google returned the old article in response to a query for “bankruptcy 2008.” Not clear why that happened, but I’ve been noticing some old articles turning up in response to Google Alerts the past few days. Maybe they are doing some re-indexing. Whatever — it’s hard to hold Google responsible for what happened later, and you certainly couldn’t consider them liable. They make no promises about their search results. Bloomberg and the service that fed the article to Bloomberg misused the information that came back from Google.

It feels like Bloomberg should be on the hook. They posted the headline without checking its accuracy, as would have been trivially easy to do. But they aren’t liable, because of the provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Good Samaritan Clause. As we explain in detail in Chapter 7, this clause says:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This law was meant to encourage Web site operators to make their sites child-friendly without running the risks a print publisher would incur if they missed something obscene or slanderous. But it’s a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card for businesses like Bloomberg, which post things others have reported.

So the folks who lost that billion dollars can’t collect from Bloomberg. Ironically, Hal described what happened in slightly incorrect language, saying that the selloff happened because of “Bloomberg News Wire printing a one-line note.” Not printing actually, but posting online. If Bloomberg had actually printed it on paper, CDA Section 230 would not apply, and Bloomberg might be in big, big trouble!

Thanks to a poster from the Volokh Conspiracy for pointing this out.