Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: “The next stop along the slippery slope.” One of the first things to strike me when the United States began its terrorism craze was, “great – now that terrorism is double-super-illegal, we need to worry about what actions are defined as terrorism.” Well guess what? Your public servants are being trained to classify peaceful assembly as terrorism.
If I may quote from the amendments to the US Constitution:
“Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Regarding that last part – the part about assembly and petition? That’s terrorism. See, the reason you can’t protest anymore is that if you do, you’re an enemy of the state, and you’re not protected by the constitution if you’re not really a citizen. Isn’t that a clever way of getting around the constitution?
What? You have a problem with that? Well you certainly can’t protest about it. You want to disappear to Cuba and get tortured? I didn’t think so, citizen.
The Department of Defense is training all of its personnel in its current Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual Refresher Training Course that political protest is “low-level terrorism.”
The Training introduction reads as follows:
“Anti-terrorism (AT) and Force Protection (FP) are two facets of the Department of Defense (DoD) Mission Assurance Program. It is DoD policy, as found in DoDI 2000.16, that the DoD Components and the DoD elements and personnel shall be protected from terrorist acts through a high pirority, comprehensive, AT program. The DoD’s AT program shall be all encompassing using an integrated systems approach.”
The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, “Knowledge Check 1″ section reads as follows:
Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?
Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.
We love the EFF, and they can practically do no wrong. The SSD Project is just another stand-up example of their public service. Keep up the great work!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.
Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?
After an introductory discussion of how you should think about making security decisions – it’s all about risk management – we’ll be answering those two questions for three types of data:
First, we’re going to talk about the threat to the data stored on your computer posed by searches and seizures by law enforcement, as well as subpoenas demanding your records.
Second, we’re going to talk about the threat to your data on the wire – that is, your data as it’s being transmitted – posed by wiretapping and other real-time surveillance of your telephone and Internet communications by law enforcement.
Third, we’re going to describe the information about you that is stored by third parties like your phone company and your Internet service provider, and how law enforcement officials can get it.
Here on RTFA, we’ve been following the “printer yellow dots” story for some time… and it seems like other people have been, as well. I was tipped off to a really great project that has been trying for MONTHS to get Lexmark to confirm their yellow dots, and the punchline is that they DID confirm it, they’re not stopping the yellow dots program, and they’ll give you a refund if you complain enough.
Brahm’s blog has turned out a lot of new findings, and it’s a wealth of information. Great work! …and definitely check it out. I’ve linked to the final post in the series, but I recommend reading through all of them.
I am happy, however, that I jumped through all of these hoops and produced some consumer-centred documentation on how to pursue manufacturers (or at very least, Lexmark) if you are dissatisfied with the forensic dot technology.
It’s my hope that people can find these pages useful, and that during my five-month consumer rights crusade I contributed something useful to this particular issue.
Here’s a short summary of my most useful learnings:
1. ALL Lexmark colour laser printers have this tracking dot technology. It’s probably accurate to say that any modern colour laser printer you buy will have it as well.
2. You CANNOT disable this technology, at least not by any practical means. It’s deeply embedded in the hardware of the printer, don’t bother trying!
3. Entry-level tech support does NOT know that this technology exists. Don’t even try to get help from them, though you may end up with free photoconductor.
4. Lexmark Canada and Lexmark International (based in the USA) both have Privacy Offices:
USA:
privacy@lexmark.com
Privacy Mailbox
740 West New Circle Road
Lexington, Kentucky 40550
U.S.A
Canada:
canadaprivacy@lexmark.com
Attention: Privacy Officer Inc.
50 Leek Crescent
Richmond Hill, ON
L4B 4J3
5. 1-800-663-7662 is a verified and often-not-published phone number for Canadian Support, according to Google it is a link to their Service Dispatch team.
6. Suzanne Deland in the Canadian office may be able to help you, if you call 1-905-763-5544. This number doesn’t show up on Google or Yahoo.
7. If you are persistant, a refund of your printer is definitely possible. You just have to keep poking around until you get in touch with the right people – while I had terrible luck contacting Lexmark by phone, I had excellent luck contacting them by snail mail.
So, that’s it! Good luck with your own consumer battles, and thanks for reading! If you leave me a comment, I can and will respond to it, but I expect this to be my last post on this issue.
MEXICO CITY, Mexico (CNN) — A recently retired Mexican army general whose bullet-riddled body was found Tuesday near Cancun had taken over as the area’s top antidrug official less than 24 hours earlier, officials said.
Retired Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñonez, his aide and a driver were tortured before being killed, said Quintana Roo state prosecutor Bello Melchor Rodriguez y Carrillo. He said there was no doubt Tello and the others were victims of organized crime.
“The general was the most mistreated,” Rodriguez said at a Tuesday night news conference monitored by El Universal newspaper. “He had burns on his skin and bones in his hands and wrists were broken.”
An autopsy revealed Tello also suffered broken knees and was shot 11 times, Mexico City’s Excelsior newspaper said.
Google announced a promising toolkit for tracking Internet Service Providers, and the quality of service they provide. Certain ISPs have been caught red-handed performing content-based filtering, such as the Comcast bittorrent situation. The previous link explains how to circumvent Comcast’s filtering, but Google seeks a broader solution. The Measurement Lab can be used to identify new instances of filtering, or perhaps new ways that ISPs might dream up for interfering with your communications.
When an Internet application doesn’t work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else? It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today.
Last year we asked a small group of academics about ways to advance network research and provide users with tools to test their broadband connections. Today Google, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are taking the wraps off of Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools.
Researchers are already developing tools that allow users to, among other things, measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications. These tools generate and send some data back-and-forth between the user’s computer and a server elsewhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, researchers lack widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity. This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another.
M-Lab aims to address these problems. Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on. M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish.
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Murano Glass: My main browser is Firefox because I like the feature that they offer remembering the username and passwords that you have registered or key in the browser. The second best browser...
