Digitizing the Bill of Rights
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The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from conducting "unreasonable searches" of our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" without a warrant.  The First Amendment, of course, protects our right to free speech.
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A new tool aimed at circumventing Internet filters used by some governments was released Friday, offering hopes for freer access to information for activists, journalists and others.
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A few notes on the NY Times outline... 1. I switched it back to the frequency sort, having tried it as an alphabetized list for about 18 hours. Now I want to see what happens with it flipped around so the most frequent keyword bins appear first. 2. Not sure, but I think it will empty out later this afternoon, as yesterday's stories expire, and before tomorrow's stories ship.  3. It seems that at least some people have bookmarked the site and are refreshing it. If so, I'm glad -- because that's the way these pages are most useful, they tell you something about what changed. Remember this is "news" not olds. 4. The outline view is something like TechMeme for the Times news flow. Not exactly because the keywords are assigned by people. Unseen news mavens. Where do they reside? Are they on the upper floors or in the basement of the NY Times skyscraper on 8th Ave, or somewhere inbetween? Maybe they work out of their homes. My mind wants to visualize these people, but I have nothing to cling to. It's not an algorithm that's determining where things sort out, it's people. Otherwise known as editors? Or are they librarians? 5. Do you bookmark the outline or the river? I'm a river guy for sure. I wonder about other people. 6. Francine Hardway twitted at me: "Times River is awesome on my iPhone! Was reading it while waiting for eye surgery and it was very distracting." Amen. That's the big secret. I wish there were a way to get everyone to look at the river on their cell phone. Eyes would open. 7. Thinking about integrating the two views, cross-relating them. Not sure exactly what I'll try first. That's why I wanted to let it settle in for a bit before moving in a other directions. 8. Of course, I know that if this ever becomes a "real" product, the user is going to control the view he or she wants to be the default. But for right now I'm experimenting. I want to see what people think. Enough people were asking for an alpha view that I wanted to see what would happen when I gave it to them, and if anyone would scream. Screaming isn't a bad thing, it's data.
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Science & environment: William the Conqueror's great census is made available free on the internet
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By American News, Aberdeen, S.D.  Sep. 17--Giving citizens the ability to search and track federal spending through an Internet Web site is a wonderful idea.   Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that will do just that.
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I noted yesterday that there seems to be some media fanfare surrounding Amazon's launch of a digital book tablet. It occurred to me that the markets surrounding media such as books, music and movies bear more than a passing resemblance to financial markets, and as such, perhaps they were amenable to a similar method of analysis. Being the owner of a sizable collection of paper books, this led me to consider the drawbacks one faces when Digital Rights Management restrictions are put in place.
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When everything gets an API then everything you can imagine will be possible if you can write a script.  And sometimes, to give you an idea, all that has to happen is that a wall come down. The latest, most intriguing such wall was the paywall at the NY Times. Now all of a sudden we find the wealth of information published by the NY Times over many decades is available without tariff. More important, we can point into the archive. We've gotten so accustomed to the wall, that you actually have to think when it may be possible to go in there, as if it left behind a wall in our minds, even after the wall on the web is gone. For example, the first episode of Ken Burns's The War, an epic series about World War II from the American perspective, cited several NY Times articles. If you looked carefully you could see the dates, and the actual headlines, and then if you have a browser handy, as I do (I have an iPhone) you can actually read the article while the narrative continues. Today this is mostly a gimick, but I suspect as we get used to having history so available (like having a library microfilm machine, which I used to spend whole days playing with when I was a kid) it will change our sense of information, perhaps as much as anything else that's ever been on the web. Take movie reviews for example. What a thrill to be able to read a review of a movie that I love that came out in 1932! The reviewers back then were more forgiving, less sarcasting, more enthusiastic. Consider their review of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, a favorite of mine that I've only seen once (I'd pay for a DVD, if it were available). They loved audible movies (that's what they called them) as if the term "talkie" was as elusive as "podcast" was in the summer of 2004. Again, we've just scratched the surface. Wouldn't you like to have NY Times movie reviews integrated with Netflix? Or have Yahoo's movie rating service available on the NY Times site. And I have to wonder whether they really have gone all the way. You can't see the reviews unless you're logged in. Can Google's robots, therefore, see the movie reviews? Unless the've made some special arrangements, it seems not.  It would be helpful to get a technical guide to the newly hatched NY Times on the Web, or (as in the old days of software) a reviewer's guide, so we get some ideas of what to look at. Clearly a lot of work went into opening up the Times archive. I'm going to be in NY the week of October 8 and will have some time toward the end of the week. If anyone at the Times would be willing to spend some time with me reviewing what's now open, that would be helpful. In any case, at least the Times today is somewhat more available to be integrated into the fabric of the web. That's some progress. How much, remains to be seen. Postscript: Kottke did a great job of skimming the surface of the newly opened Times when it first came online, just one week ago today.
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BillâGatesâisâonâhisâwayâout.âNowâit's upâtoâRayâOzzieâtoâreviveâthe flaggingâgiant -- andâgetâitâreadyâfor theâpost-desktopâera. By Fred Vogelstein from Wired magazine.
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(InfoWorld) - A coalition of voting rights groups on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic voting machines to have printers attached as a way to audit the touch-screen results. But the lack of a paper trail for many e-voting machines was only one problem among many during the 2006 U.S. elections, said speakers at the Elections: Looking Forward conference, sponsored by Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other groups. Many of the problems attributed to e-voting machines were caused by a lack of training for poll workers or administrative mistakes, said Efrain Escobedo, director of voter engagement at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Poll workers observed by his group didn't know how to change the paper in machines with paper trails or didn't know how to reboot machines, he said. Participants in the event also described several other problems not related to e-voting: poll workers demanding photo identification when it wasn't required by law, polling places lacking voting materials in languages other than English, polling places inaccessible to disabled people, and long lines. But several speakers called on Congress to pass the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which would require paper trail printouts with touch-screen e-voting machines. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the bill Feb. 5, after a similar piece of legislation failed to pass during the 2005-06 congressional session. The Holt bill has 183 cosponsors, close to half of the House of Representatives. Congress needs to act in the next six to eight months for the legislation to affect the 2008 elections, said Ralph Neas, president and chief executive officer of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. Neas pointed to the 2006 vote in Sarasota Country, Florida, where e-voting machines did not record a vote from more than 18,000 people in a congressional race decided by less than 400 votes. "Sarasota was a disgrace," Neas said. "Eighteen thousand votes ... inexplicably disappeared into cyberspace. But it's a teachable moment. We've got 18,000 faces now that we can put on the problem." Not all speakers agreed that Congress should move ahead immediately with paper trails. Many visually impaired voters were able to vote without assistance on touch-screen machines for the first time in 2006, said Christina Galindo-Walsh, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. Paper trail printouts would again create a two-tier voting system in which some disabled people don't have access to the same information as other voters, she said. Galindo-Walsh and Jim Dickson, vice president for government affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, also said it was too late for Congress to mandate paper trail ballots by the 2008 presidential election. E-voting machine vendors wouldn't be able to produce enough printers by 2008, Galindo-Walsh said. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, mandated standards for voting machines, and those standards are just being completed now, Dickson added. Those standards still need to be tested, and new machines meeting those standards need to be built, he said. "Either you lower the standards for the election equipment, or you live with the timeline that looks like 2010," he said. "You cannot have it both ways." But many voters now question e-voting systems, added Melanie Campbell, executive director and CEO of the Coalition for Black Civic Participation. "The reality is voters are losing confidence in the system," she said.
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By Alfonse D'Amato  The Fair Media Council posted a Media Bill of Rights on its blog recently, and it requires reprinting in good old-fashioned ink. In the interest of complete accuracy, it's really not about the media's rights, which are pretty much covered under the First Amendement.
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Blog: The Software Freedom Law Center is offering a free day of open source legal education.  Send your counsel.  This is a must-attend event.
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Westminster goes all Web 2.0 A House of Commons committee meets tomorrow to gather evidence on the wisdom of giving electronic petitions the same status as paper petitions.â¦
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The dusty shelves of your local library are going high-tech with tagging chips. Civil liberties groups warn of a privacy nightmare.
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Polishing memorandum of understanding
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InfoWorld - A coalition of voting rights groups on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic voting machines to have printers attached as a way to audit the touch-screen results.
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In the digital age, there are few black-and-white rules. Rather, we live in an era of gray when it comes to technology and the law.  A federal case that was recently dismissed before it reached trial is the latest example.
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The government has many tools at its disposal to poke around in your business in search of criminal behavior. You have basically only one weapon in your defense - The Bill of Rights.