Attn. MPAA: There are much worse ways to copy movies than with a computer.

In 2007 prosecutors in Anchorage Alaska accused 34 year old stripper Mechele Linehan of plotting a murder based on the 1994 movie "The Last Seduction". Life so closely imitated art, said prosecutors, that they even tried to have the movie played for the jury.

Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto

In 2008 a teenager confessed that he was trying to imitate scenes from the video game "Grand Theft Auto" when he robbed a murdered a taxicab driver in Bangkok Thailand. Movies like "The Deer Hunter" (1978) are even believed to have inspired several "copycat" suicides in the late 1970's and early 80's.

All of this may seem like fodder for censorship advocates, but that debate has largely come and gone in favor preserving the First Amendment's right to free speech. Wise as the framers of the U.S. Constitution may have been, few would accuse them of being clairvoyant. After all, who could have predicted the impact the Internet would some day have on both the precept of free speech and the concept of privacy?

Though many speak of the "right to privacy", it is not, at least as far as the U.S. Constitution is concerned, a right at all. It is, nonetheless, an ethos that has long been coveted by Americans, and is implicit in the Fourth Amendment's:

...right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...

Of course, mention the term "search" to most people today, and it's far more likely to conjure thoughts of friends lists", home pages and e-books, than actual people, houses and papers. And while, in just the past few years, popular culture has come to embrace the sharing of intimate, private and personal details with virtual strangers, the desire to remain "secure" seems to be very much alive in the 21st Century. In fact, more than any other, the Fourth Amendment has played a central, albeit contested, role in the litigation of hi-tech criminal evidence.

I know what you watched last summer...

So, what does all this have to do with your Netflix queue? Though Americans, and many other people around the world, may be willing to voluntarily divulge personal information, either in trade for modern conveniences and services, or increasingly, for a sense of online significance, we're not quite as enthusiastic when it's taken from us and shared without any tangible return. It's no longer a secret that the monetary value of data has been pre-calculated into the return on investment (ROI) of so many of today's business models, but consumers still tend to expect a certain level of security. In recent years the bar has been set pretty low. Still, it may surprise many to learn that "anonymous" usage data can be deciphered into personally-identifiable intelligence, as proven by a pair of researchers at the University of Texas using what was thought to be anonymous user data provided to contestants in the three-year $1 million "Netflix Prize" to improve the site's recommendation results.

The UT's results brought both unwanted attention from the Federal Trade Commission and a lawsuit from a private firm, resulting in Netflix's decision last week to cancel a planned sequel to the prize awarded last year.

It's not hard to imagine how this sort of data could be exploited to peddle shoes to people who have rented all six seasons of "Sex in the City", or BestBuy ads targeted at fans of NBC's "Chuck".

Dreamworks Minority Report (2002)

It's no longer extraordinary to see similar data exploited in the process of investigating crimes either. Certainly the viewing interests and habits of the individuals mentioned above have been considered relevant discovery by law enforcement. In these cases, there's little, if anything, to decipher.  Anything that Netflix knows about you, your account, and your viewing habits, is subject to a warrant, and, with or without much imagination, could be incriminating. How many of us haven't seen a good fictional car case, a well-written murder plot, a scripted street-fight, or a perfectly executed crime? The consumption of such fiction could be hazardous to your defense, if it proceeds similar accusations.

Now, imagine the same evidence available to anyone, without a warrant, subpoena, or probable cause. Perhaps someone at the FTC had the movie "Minority Report" in their queue.

How Google might know what you did last summer -- even if you forgot.

Google Latitude is a service that allows users to see and share their location on a Google map live and in real-time. The service runs on most smart-phones, regardless of service provider, including Apple's iPhone, Windows Mobile, the Palm Pre, and, of course, Google's Android. Latitude relies on a combination of GPS, cellular tower triangulation, and wi-fi triangulation. Having brushed-up on the service for a recent National Public Radio (NPR) Interview, I have since considered Latitude one-part creepy, and two-parts cool. However, the creepy / cool ratio may be shifting.

This week Google introduced a new and improved Google Latitude -- with enhanced features like "Location History".  With Location History Latitude users can go back in time retrace their footsteps, and even see where they stayed-put, and for how long. Kind of cool...yet, very creepy. But practical?

Imagine, for example, you're the owner of a Palm Pre on Sprint's 3G Now Network , having trouble remembering where your were when you told your spouse you were somewhere else? Now, there's a map for that!

But wait -- there's more! How about "Location Alerts"? Certainly, a application that would alert you when a particular individual, say a family member, has left work or school, would be very practical. After a while of being alerted every time someone is, or has arrived, exactly where you would expect them to be, however, could get old. So, Google's geniuses stepped it up a notch. According to Google, Latitude will learn user's patterns and behavior so that alerts can be issued when a person has strayed from their routine -- left at a different time, or arrived at a different place.

For example, if you decide to  staycation with your mistress, you can receive a handy alert when your spouse leaves the office earlier than usual. Or, if traffic is particularly light, Latitude will let you know when it's time for a quick window-exit.

Best of all, when the jig is up, no one has to know, because -- for now -- Google is making all these free services available to you, and no one else... at least, without subpoena powers.

This is deception... on the Now Network.

Recently, I had a wonderful opportunity to play a game of hi-tech "phone tag" on the streets of San Francisco with Reporter Martin Kaste from NPR's "All Things Considered". Late last Summer I was  asked if I would be willing to sit down for an interview for a story he was researching about location privacy. But, instead of agreeing to meet Kaste, I told him he had to find me.

With the aid of his GPS-equipped smart-phone, some software, a little patience, and a good pair of walking shoes, he was able to "tag" me sipping a latte outside a coffee shop on Market St. Of course, with my own GPS, and software-equipped smart-phone, I was able to see him coming. What follows are the fruits of that encounter:

Digital Bread Crumbs: Following Your Cell Phone Trail

Jeff Fischbach is a little bit like those guys in The Matrix — when he puts on his shades and looks at the world, he sees data.

Walking down the street in San Francisco, he points out all the devices that record people's comings and goings: digital parking meters, apartment intercom systems, digital security cameras...

Audio and transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114241860&ft=1&f=1019

How Twitter says they'll hide your location from twits with subpoenas.

Recently, Twitter announced that they would be adding geolocation features to their service, allowing users to embed their physical location in their Twitter feed. As not to alarm: Twitter has always maintained that this would be an opt-in feature. But, frankly, any web site you visit is privy to some information about your physical location by virtue of the IP address assigned to your computer by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) from a group of IP addresses reserved for your neighborhood. The logs kept by a web server, combined with a subpoena to the appropriate ISP, usually yield a street address for the subscriber assigned that IP address.

SmarterWare's Gina Trapani (formerly of Lifehacker.com) is attending the Twitter Conference in LA. She's posted updates explaining how Twitter plans to deploy this service and how they intend to protect its Twitter geolocation users from subpoenas. According to Gina, "Twitter will scrub geo-data stored in tweets more than 14 days old to avoid getting subpoena’d about a user’s location in the past. They will outright delete the location information from their database, not just anonymize."

She also reports that while,

"Twitter usually encourages developers and applications to cache data, in the case of geo, they recommend dropping historical location data so that application developers don’t become a subpoena target, either. They also recommend 'fuzzing' location and time data, so that instead of knowing that Joe Smith was at 8th avenue and 15th street at 2:11PM Eastern time on March 7, 2008, you only show that Joe was in Brooklyn on that day. The geodata-scrubbing isn’t a permanent solution. They are looking into ways to store this data in a 'safe' (anonymized?) way in the future, so they won’t always scrub +14 day old data, just at first."

Purging data that isn't mission critical, but likely to be subpoenaed makes a lot of sense. After all, no one writes "Satisfy search warrants in a timely, efficient, and effective manner" into their corporate mission statement.

While I'm convinced that Twitter's motivation is for the sanctity of the corporation, rather than its user-base, it is a step in the right direction. In fact, the direction is so right that one has to wonder why all personally identifiable user data isn't "scrubbed" every 14 days from most online services. Of course, Twitter's raison d'être, is -- among other things -- to give it's user's messages some life and legacy. It's likely that most of those users would also like to take credit for their various flashes of 140 character brilliance.

Not so, however, every time an individual fires off an instant message (IM), or searches Google. Most instant messaging services, for instance, don't store messages after they are sent, but they do store the sender and recipient's IP addresses, with their account information, and the time they logged in. While Google relies on demographic data, such as geography, income, and search interests, in order to sell ads, it doesn't need to be personally attributable to me. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace and AOL are not in the subpoena response business. But, all of these companies employ subpoena compliance personnel, who add to the cost of doing business, but contribute nothing to the bottom-line. Worse yet, where nearly every individual in these companies, in some way, does something, either directly or indirectly, to add to the end-user experience, subpoena compliance often works in direct opposition to that objective.

As many companies learn when they're sued, subpoena compliance is often so expensive that it's cheaper to settle. A company can't be forced to produce what they don't have. And, with some significant exceptions, a company can't be forced to archive what they don't need.

By the way, I'm not just an end-user of all the services listed above, I'm also one of the twits writing the subpoenas.

Source: Wikipedia

In a match between Bird-brain vs. broadband, you might be surprised to see who wins.

An old friend of mine pointed out what sounded like an interesting story out of South Africa. Tired of slow download speeds, a South African call center pitted a racing pigeon against Telkom South Africa Ltd.’s ADSL data service to see which could move a 4GB file faster. In total it took just under three hours for the bird to fly approximately 50 miles--about 30 times faster than the ADSL service, which had only downloaded 4% of the file in the same time.

I'm afraid we're not really comparing apapane to apapane, or even apapane to ostriches. I doubt, for instance, that the pigeon would fair quite as well over, say, a 500 or 5000 mile "data run".

The experiment, however, raises what is perhaps a more relevant conclusion: You probably couldn't find a more secure method for moving data than via carrier pigeon. While all Internet traffic is subject to both warranted, and illicit intercept and monitoring at multiple gateways, routers, interconnection points, and hosts, one would be hard pressed to serve a warrant on--or even physically intercept--a carrier pigeon. Not to mention, even if they occasionally drop a "packet", it's hard to argue with their wireless range.

It's certainly something to think about.

Thanks Ron!

More at:

Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=aB5JSWQt0XYY)

News.com.au (http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,28348,26053119-5014239,00.html)

Gordon Bell (Source: Gizmodo)

Every time Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell takes a dump he learns something about himself. For instance, he know knows that he's visited 221,173 web sites in the last 8 years, and written or received 156,041 emails. He also knows how well his heart is pumping, how many miles he's walked, where he's been, and even with whom he's spoken and visited. In fact, from what most of us consider a waste product, Bell can even decipher how many songs he's listened to, and see pictures videos of the places he's been and the things he's seen.

Fantastic as this may sound, Bell is not the only person on earth who can do this. The same product is flushed from nearly every person every day in North America, and other industrialized nations. More significantly, while most of us are ignorant or deny the very possibility, the government and large corporations are secretly extracting much the same information from each of us that Bell collects himself.

SenseCam (Source: Microsoft)

What bell flushes he calls MyLifeBits. It's a Microsoft Research project inspired by an idea that dates back to 1945. The modern iteration of the memory index (memex) uses a variety of ever-shrinking devices to capture, store, and index an individual's daily life into what some call a lifelog.

To some extent, many of of us have become lifeloggers through a variety of mechanisms including blogs and social networking. What's notably different about Bell's approach, compared to social networking, life-streaming, life-blogging, or what Toronto Professor Steve Mann has termed Sousveillance, is that MyLifeBits is a personal storage and indexing mechanism, as opposed to a social interaction or broadcast. It is, if you will, a diary of perspective, but not of opinion.

Whereas social networks provide a platform for one to share thoughts, experiences, feelings, opinions and emotions with others, Bell's objective appears to be a personal one, devoid of any of these attributes. Few, if carefully considered, would argue that social networks produce factual content. To the contrary, these memes allow individuals to represent themselves, not as they are, but as they might like the world, or even just a few individuals, to see them--at least, at that moment.

I'm going to be unabashedly honest: "Eye in the Sky", by the Alan Parsons Project (1982), never made much sense to me. Sure, I understand it's an homage to George Orwell's, "1984", but the lyrics make no sense to me. You know what else makes no sense to me? Mayor R. Rex Parris' project: an "eye in the sky"--a 24/7 arial survellance system to be flown by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department 5000 feet above Lancaster, California.

Parris says, on the city's web site:

“This technology is nothing short of remarkable,” said Parris. “I entered my address, and within seconds the camera had focused so well on my property that I was able to see both of my dogs and identify which was which – all from five miles away. This type of technology has the potential to drive criminals completely out of our community.”

My guess is he'll drive some of the citizens out as well--if they don't drive him out first.

At just 2.8 x 2.9-mm (smaller than the head of a matchstick, and thinner than a stick of gum), Epson's Infineon XPOSYS Assisted-GPS chip could literally bug the heck out of you. Smaller and more powerful than any A-GPS before, it can even track indoors. On the plus-side, you may never loose another left-sock again.

See it @ Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/12/epsons-tiny-gps-receiver-will-make-everything-location-aware/

The first set of mass-production plug-in electric vehicles are slated to arrive this year. Among other incentives, they won't pay a dime in fuel tax. Looking to head-off that shortfall, several states, including California, Oregon, and Missouri have investigated charging by the mile, instead of by the gallon.

Why not simply base mileage on a vehicle's odometer? Beside the obvious tampering concerns, a state has no right to collect for out-of-state mileage. In the past, it had always been assumed that anyone traveling interstate would eventually need to fill-up with taxable liquid fuel at a regulated pump, thus contributing to each state's highway improvement budget.

Not so, in this modern era. Electric vehicles, like GM's Volt, can be charged from any conventional outlet, or faster via a dedicated higher-voltage charger. Though, theoretically, taxes will be paid on the energy consumed, those taxes don't directly contribute to things like highway improvement.

Now comes the increasingly ever-depreciating GPS with the ability, not only, to collect state and interstate road-usage data with a fair degree of accuracy and tamper-resistance, but also the ability to transmit that data wirelessly on-schedule, on-demand, or even in real-time.

It's that last feature that has many up in arms. How else could this data be used? It could, for instance, report traffic violations to municipalities without involving a law enforcement officer, even as they occur. It could also be used to prove that someone was speeding, or is a habitual speeder, after the fact. Perhaps as evidence in a traffic accident. Or for the purposes of increasing one's insurance premium. It could be used to automatically alert authorities when a suspect returns to their jurisdiction, or to the "scene of the crime". For that matter, it could be used after an incident to locate all individuals who were in the area, and even retrace their path. Spouses could subpoena the data as evidence of infidelity. Ex-spouses could use it to collect child or spousal support.

Some have suggested that such a system would come with built-in privacy mechanisms. For instance, it might only record the mileage in each state, and not specific location data. The biggest problem with that is, now you have no way to audit the accuracy of the figures, or the system as a whole. It presents the possibility of systemic inaccuracies or even gross abuse. In other words, much like electronic voting, how do citizens patrol their government?

Read more @ Kansas City Star