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Travel writer Sean O’Neill went to the trouble of getting his Department of Homeland Security file, with records of information collected as a result of his international files. His report is here, and if you click on the image of a page, you can see what his record looks like. DHS redacted some of its internal annotations, and O’Neill has redacted his passport number and the like, but you can see a few interesting details — for example, that the airlines retain, and then pass on to the Feds for inclusion in their database, the IP address from which the reservation was made. Perhaps some help after the fact in tracing his movements and movements of funds if O’Neill does something evil, but a bit creepy for those of us who wonder how useful these dossiers are for preventing anything.

As Bruce Schneier emphasizes in the book I blogged about recently, bad guys almost never get caught at the airport as the result of security screenings. They get identified ahead of time by old-fashioned police work. Whatever is in the dossier that got O’Neill pulled aside for questioning — as has happened to him — the dossier doesn’t reveal it.

The article gives very precise instructions for getting a copy of your own file. Not sure I really want to know what’s in it, but I should!

We passed another milestone on the road to digital copyright sanity yesterday when Apple announced that it would be removing Digital Rights Management (DRM) from the music in the iTunes Music Store catalog by the end of the first quarter. Along with that, Apple backed off its insistence that all tracks should cost the same: big hits will cost more in the new pricing scheme.

So in a couple of months, there will be 10 million iTunes songs available for purchase on line, songs that can be freely copied from one player to another. This plays out the scenario that began two years ago with Steve Jobs’s public letter to the recording industry proposing that they relax the licensing restrictions that required iTunes to implement DRM. We’ve come a long way since February 2007, when the recording industry’s response was to flat-out reject Jobs’s proposal was ‚Äúcompletely without logic or merit,‚Äù in the words of Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman.

Yesterday’s announcement was welcome news, but not a big surprise. Apple had already been offering a limited number of DRM-free tracks; consumers had shown a preference for them and were even willing to pay a premium for them. And of course, the big breakthrough, as documented in Blown to Bits, came in the fall of 2007 when Amazon began selling DRM-free tracks.

I’ve never bought any music from the iTunes store. I didn’t want to include tracks in my music library where I have to worry about whether I can move them between my iMac and my PC and my GNU/Linux box, copy them to my portable MP3 player or my cell phone, or extract a few seconds of music for a sound effect or background to a video. But once Apple switches over, I’ll happily become an iTunes Music Store customer.

I bet I’m not alone in this reaction. The New York Times article that reported the announcement included:

The music companies are hoping that their eagerly awaited compromise with Apple will give a lift to digital downloads. They will be able to make more money on their best-selling songs and increase the appeal of older ones.

Hallelujah! After a decade of fighting the Internet and Internet users, the recording industry is finally getting the message: Letting go of restrictions on the use of your product can make your product more valuable and more popular, to the degree that you’ll end of making more money, even allowing for an increase in ‚Äúleakage‚Äù when the restrictions are lifted. Hopefully, we’ll see that scenario play out with on-line music.

The next group that needs to get the ‚ÄúDRM is dumb‚Äù message is the movie industry. And despite the encouraging developments in music, this will still be a long haul. As we explained in B2B, DRM is the muscle behind the studios effective control over digital video consumer technology, letting them veto new features that they don’t like. Weaning them away from that privileged position will be tough.

As always, the group that most needs to get the message is Congress, whose Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with its anti-circumvention provision, is the lynch-pin of the entire anti-technology, anti-competitive contraption. That damper on innovation is precisely what we don’t need at a time when it’s more important than ever to to foster competitiveness. As we wrote in B2B, the Internet does not have to become your enemy ‚Äì unless you make it your enemy. We’re seeing a truce emerge around music. Video is still a ways away, but we can expect that the realities of the marketplace will let rationality emerge there, too. But Congress has never been a paragon of rationality, and laws passed in the grip of copyright hysteria and not easily overturned.

I have been saying recently that my nightmare scenario is free, web-based facial recognition software. It would mean that someone could say “this is Harry” (tagging a single photo of me) and then “Please go to Flickr and find other photos in which Harry appears.” Those would include both other photos taken and uploaded by members of my family, and also completely unrelated photos taken by people I don’t even know, who were photographing something else and happened to catch me in the background. Say, someone snapping his own family at a restaurant in San Juan, while I just happened to be dining with my Puerto Rican girlfriend at the next table, when I told my wife I was going to New York on business. Oops!

Well, the new release of Apple’s IPhoto is getting awfully close to making this a reality. It will do tagging in your own album anyway based on face recognition. My nightmare scenario can’t be far behind.

QRS, a company in Buffalo, NY, has made its last player piano roll, after more than a century in the business. Readers of Blown to Bits, Chapter 8, will know that George Antheil famously realized that a player piano roll was a generalized digital code that could be used to control communications equipment as well as a musical instrument.

Like the controllers in virtually all communications equipment, piano rolls have been replaced by other digital media. According to the Buffalo News story, QRS “is now a leading manufacturer of digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs.”

I wonder if Antheil used QRS pianos for his compositions.

Because the Internet is like so many different technologies in different ways, it incites a variety of anxieties, and a corresponding variety of responses. Governments’ responses are often poorly thought out over-reactions — poorly thought out and little discussed. The past week’s news gives two astounding examples.

In India, a law innocuously called the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill 2006″ allows the government to intercept any form of electronic communications — email, text messages, or cell phone conversations — in order to investigate “any offence.” This is a post-Mumbai anti-terrorism measure, but like the USA PATRIOT Act, it is utterly lacking in provisions that would restrain the abuse of government authority. It was passed quietly, after little debate. Here is a blogger’s account of the bill (India sleepwalks to total surveillance”), and here is an editorial from the Times of India that backs up the blogger’s horrified reaction (“License to Snoop,” which begins, “Big Brother could¬†really¬†be watching”).

Meanwhile, the Times of London reports:

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

Now it’s not clear what that actually means (are the police going start sending malware via email, just like the bad guys do to steal your account information and passwords?). But the trend is unmistakable: Even in major democracies, law enforcement so fears what people are saying over the Internet that it wants complete access to all of them, with only the cops deciding whether the surveillance and searches are justified.

The price is too high for such measures to be adopted without public discussion. In the U.S., let’s hope for better.

About an hour ago, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the RIAA has fired MediaSentry. That’s the company, as explained in B2B, that the RIAA has been using for gathering evidence in the lawsuits against accused file sharers.

One case mentioned in the book was that of Jammie Thomas, who was fined $222,000 in October 2007 for allegedly sharing 24 songs. The judge in the case subsequently set aside the jury’s verdict, as I noted in this blog last September. Thomas is currently awaiting retrial. Only this time, the RIAA would have to prove that she actually distributed music from her computer, not merely that there were music files on her hard drive (which was basis for setting the original verdict aside). Going along with this, the RIAA has claimed that it’s stopped filing new lawsuits, although suits already filed are still ongoing.

As hinted in chapter 6 of the book, we may be on a path to de-escalation in the copyright wars, at least in music, now that there are an increasing number of legitimate ways to obtain DRM-free tracks. Of course, the film industry still seems ready to continue the “file sharing as threat to civilization” drumbeat, and Congress still seems all too willing to listen.

Excellent book (really a collection of Bruce Schneier’s columns over the past half-decade or so). It’s repetitive in places, and the format (most pieces are a page or two in length) makes it hard to get into the depth of anything. But there are some wonderful facts and anecdotes about security of all kinds, not just cybersecurity. Two of my favorites:

1. Airlines generally resist security measures, because they are costly, reduce ridership, and in the grand scheme of things don’t repay their costs since air terrorism is so rare. But they welcomed the practice of checking IDs to make sure the passenger flying is the one whose name is on the boarding pass. (Yes, there was a time when you could get on an airplane with just a ticket.) Why was this initiative welcomed? Because airlines didn’t like the aftermarket in discount coupons. They would send selected passengers a coupon good for a reduced price flight or a companion ticket, and people would sell them. Can’t do that now, since the TSA checks the boarding pass against a government issued ID. (Actually, you can do it, though I don’t recommend it. It’s not hard to produce a bogus boarding pass that matches your drivers license so you can get past security, and then use a different, valid boarding pass in someone else’s name to board the plane.)
2. Campaigns urging ordinary people to speak up when they see or hear anything suspicious are a bad idea. They produce far too many false positives, which are disruptive and costly — once something is reported, the authorities have to respond. (We had a perfect example of this in Boston a few days ago, when a Muslim family was forced to leave an airplane, delaying the flight for everyone, when someone heard them discussing whether it was safer to be seated in the back of the plane or over the wings.)

A few months ago, my local Stop and Shop added three more self-service checkout lines, thereby reducing the number of lines that had supermarket employees doing the scanning and bagging for you. I was annoyed, because I don’t like the self-service lines — not because I need to have someone else do the work for me, but because only in the staffed lines can I avoid the privacy tax without disclosing my identity. In Massachusetts, if you say to the clerk, “Please use your card,” they’ll give you the loyalty card discount. No way to do that at the self-checkout counters.

It wasn’t so bad, because the lines weren’t that bad, and there always seemed to be enough people in the self-service line who didn’t know English words such as “avocado” that they tended to slow down those lines anyway. And those lines have terrible interfaces, because the technology is cobbled together: the monitor for the scanner (where you have to punch in the item numbers for un-bar-coded items such as avocados) is separate from the credit card interface, which is separate from the signature pad, which is separate from the place where the receipt gets printed.

When I went in on New Year’s Day, there was a further innovation: hand-held scanners. You get one by — guess what — scanning your loyalty card and agreeing to several screensful of unreadable terms (which basically say you won’t steal the scanner and you understand that your purchases may be checked before you leave). You grab a supply of bags if you didn’t bring your own. Then you wander the aisles, scanning purchases as you bag them. You can cancel an item if you change your mind.

You can check prices, so if you are alert, you are less likely to be overcharged by mistake. Every so often, a cash register ring tone alerts you to the fact that the handheld scanner is displaying a discount coupon for another item in the neighborhood of one you recently selected.

Of course there is no reason to worry about those loyalty card discounts — you couldn’t have gotten the scanner in the first place without scanning your card, so you get the discount automatically. At the cashier (in either kind of line), you scan a bar code at the console, return the scanner, and pay the bill.

Now they seem to have closed more of the staffed lines, and the few remaining staffed lines seem to be really long. Gentle pressure to stop fighting for my privacy. And, of course, if the Stop and Shop can get me to do the work they used to have to hire people to do, they save money. I had gotten to know one of the baggers, a developmentally challenged woman in her 30s. I didn’t see her on my last trip to the store; I wonder if she now has employment challenges as well.

I am quoted in Men’s Health magazine on how men can buff up their social networking profiles to become more successful at picking up women.

As Hal pointed out to me privately, this makes me an heir to the tradition of George Antheil, for reasons explained in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits.

A new law in Georgia requires that registered sexual offenders give their usernames and passwords to the state so that authorities can read their email. The objective is to protect children. Is this reasonable?

Perhaps anyone convicted of a sexual crime can be considered to have sacrificed his right to privacy. But the category is actually fairly squishy. Recall the way UK censors labeled a ’70s LP album cover as “child pornography,” and the fact that until yesterday a woman could be arrested in Massachusetts for indecent exposure or lewd conduct — with a requirement that she register as a sexual offender — if she breast-fed her baby in public.

And if sexual offenders are a real risk of using email to harm children, surely corrupt stockbrokers are a risk of using email to scam customers, etc., etc. Why not make a general rule that if anyone is convicted of a crime, the state gets to monitor all their communications?

Is that the direction we want to go in the name of protecting ourselves?