I’m sure I’m not the only person to see Bomb Or Not? Training For Government Agents! and wonder how long it will be before they get a cease-and-desist threat.

My guess, it won’t be HotOrNot, who can recognize a good parody when they see one, but the Department of Homeland Security, which tends to see humor as a security risk.

DHS has already raised trademark claims against the Federation of American Scientists for ReallyReady.org, a critique-by-improvement of DHS’s anemic Ready.gov. They could even crib from this href="http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?NoticeID=578">White House complaint about use of the Presidential Seal.

We need a bit of Franklin D. Roosevelt here: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Or as Bruce Schneier puts it, “The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized.”

Unfortunately, I don’t have confidence that the filtering techniques being used on warrantless interceptions and datamined communications will be any more accurate than the algorithm that placed this AT&T ad above a story on “Telecoms let NSA spy on calls.” The story does feature AT&T prominently, just not in a way that has me rushing to buy service from them…

If you care about politics or media, you owe yourself a viewing of Good Night, And Good Luck, the new film on Edward R. Murrow and his fight to expose Joseph McCarthy. The film, shot in black and white with McCarthy playing himself via old news footage, powerfully captures the horror of McCarthy’s witch hunt. Equally important, it reminds us of journalism’s power — and its obligation — to educate and lead.

Unfortunately, that is a reminder we urgently need. The closing speech of Murrow’s McCarthy broadcast, quoted verbatim in the film, is timeless:

[T]he line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Good night, and good luck.

Participate’s “Report It Now” works to translate those ideals into action by modern citizen journalists. Xeni Jardin collects more good resources at BoingBoing, including the entire Murrow address that bookends the film.

It’s clearly time for someone to update this 1981 cartoon from Paul Conrad:
On which item have the courts ruled that manufacturers and retailers be responsible for having supplied the equipment?

The NYT reports:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - The House of Representatives delivered the gun lobby a cherished victory today, overwhelmingly approving a bill to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits by crime victims.

only weeks after this from CNet News

Twenty members of Congress are calling for the reinstatement of the “broadcast flag,” a controversial form of copy prevention technology for digital TV broadcasts. In a letter Thursday, the politicians called for rapid approval of a federal law adopting the broadcast flag, which would outlaw over-the-air digital TV receivers and computer tuner cards that don’t follow strict anticopying standards.

All only months after the Grokster court ruled makers of filesharing software could be sued for “inducing” copyright infringement.

It’s time to trade our national obsession with electoral-vote.com for a new craze — maps visualizing where the votes really came from. The Big Picture has assembled a collection of maps with population, geography, and a bit of political black humor.

The most compelling explanatory map is the Washington Post’s topography, with mountainous blue cities and rolling red plains. (click for larger version) Via IP.

In a feeble attempt to relate this to copyright, how would the fact that these images were “just lying around the internet gathering dust anyway” factor into a fair use analysis (for the maps that have sufficient expressive content to be copyrightable in the first place)?

All the polls, predictions, and futures markets come down to 15 or so hours today. It’s still looking close, which means that more than ever, every vote counts. Make sure yours does by following these tips from David Dill on the e-voting experts weblog.

1. Prepare before going to the polls. Mark your votes in advance on
   the sample ballot that was mailed to you.

   Why?

   • We’re getting reports of long lines during early voting. This

     will make voting faster.

   • A few voters have reported that some offices were not on their
     screens, and that they didn’t discover it until they had returned
     to their home or car. If they had the list with them, any problem
     could have been detected immediately, in time to save their votes
     and perhaps get a witness to the problem.

   … more …

More e-voting resources from EFF’s Deeplinks and Verified Voting.

Access Denied. That’s the message W’s campaign is sending to visitors attempting to reach his website, http://www.georgewbush.com/, from out of the country.

Heaven forbid any furriners (or Americans abroad, not to mention those involuntarily so) should want to see what the U.S. President is running on. (More on BoingBoing; this screenshot obtained using the tor anonymizing proxy with a German exit node.)

The American public should send the same message to G.W.Bush this November 2. He wants four more years in the White House? Access Denied. Please get out to vote and help replace Bush with a team that can help bring this country forward.

John Perry Barlow gets it exactly right in his latest missive, BarlowFriendz: Supporting Kerry Anyway…:

Right here, right now, somewhere over the Atlantic, I’m having a moment of clarity. I realize the obvious. I realize that, along with a lot of other people, I have fallen prey to the peculiar American frailty which has given us so many bad presidents. I refer to our national tendency to treat presidential elections as though we were all high-schoolers choosing a Prom King.

…
We all need to get a grip and quickly. Whatever it has been traditionally, this Presidential race should not be a personality contest. I say this as much to myself to myself as I do to you. I have to snap out of it and remember we are not electing our new best friend here. We were electing a set of ideologies, cultural predispositions, policies, practices, and beliefs - many of them religious - that may literally affect the fate of life on earth. And one thing I will say for George Bush, he has disabused me of my old belief that it doesn’t really matter who’s President.

Please, vote for a president who won’t rush headlong into unconsidered wars, alienate our allies, and eviscerate our Bill of Rights. Vote for Kerry because it’s the only way to keep this country free for the next four years.

VOTE or NOT? should not be a question you ask yourselves this election. Ranking beautiful people may be fun, but choosing the next President or Congress is serious business — if you can participate, please do. If you’re eligible to vote but haven’t yet registered, register now. Then show that you plan to vote by joining the crazy contest from Jim and James at HotOrNot, who are giving away $200,000.

We want you, and every person that is eligible, to vote. This is something we feel passionate about. We know we’re just 2 guys, but we believe that 2 guys with a good idea who are willing to work hard and put their time and money where their mouths are can make a difference.
…
In a nutshell, we’re doing this because we care, and because we can. We also like the idea of doing this because nobody else has done it before, and we like to do crazy, new things.

Yes, it’s viral marketing, but it’s for a good cause. We need to raise voter participation beyond its past, dismal levels. If Jim and James can put up $200,000, the least we all can do is fill out their sign-in form and get to the polls (or absentee ballots, if you don’t trust your county’s electronic voting systems).

According to Wired News, the FCC is using the “terrorism” excuse to deny the public information about the reliability of wireless network infrastructure.

The FCC began collecting information about the phone network in 1991 and made the information public, precisely because the regulators thought the public had a valid need for that information.

But since Sept. 11, the need to protect against highly skilled, well-educated terrorists who use the Internet to examine infrastructure outweighs the advantages of full disclosure, according to an FCC official.

In the name of vague, indefinite fears, with no end in sight, the government is taking information out of the public market. The carriers love it, because it gives them one fewer area in which they need compete — a form of legally sanctioned collusion — the government puts another check mark next to “doing something,” and the public loses yet another government service.

We have always been at war with Oceania.