End the War on Freedom

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire

Kevin Tuma - International Criminal Court - cartoon commentary on the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in the light of earlier happennings in Mr. Annan's home country. Too true to be funny.

Will Cate - Keep Hope Alive - Will finished reading Hope, the new book from L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman about which I raved a little while back. He liked it. Not surprising, since he's a member in good standing of the choir.

Harrumph! - When I am queen - Heather likes the toilet paper installed the wrong way. Phooey. Good thing she ain't the queen. [wes]

The Libertarian Enterprise has a new issue, "Let's Secede!":

• Letter from Jack Jerome - An anti-eulogy for Katherine Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post.

  The TV and Radio are full of the fruits of Kate Graham's diligent work, slanted yellow journalism, agenda based reporting, tabloid style ignorance of facts and data, and the lessons of history again forgotten. Remember Ms. Graham's legacy, the raping of liberties for societies' own good, lest history repeat itself, yet again.

• Buying a Book by Chuck Bridgeland - another good example of how the world would be if the first amendment were as infringed upon as the second.

  What? Guns are dangerous and books aren't? You can meet God in a book. Or Ayn Rand. There ain't nothing more dangerous than that.

• Announcement: The Free State Project by Jason P Sorens - Mr. Sorens wants to gather liberty-minded people in a single small state, take over the state government by voting, and shut down its government. Could it work? Don't know. But we can dream, can't we?
• The Changing Face of Gun Control by Erich Pratt - a reminder that the goal of Handgun Control, Inc., now called the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is the complete elimination of handgun ownership by non-police. Always was.

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Congress Sends Billions Overseas - Dr. Paul laments the recent round of summer appropriations, which sent at least $17 billion overseas, every penny of it unconstitutional. He managed to get 60 colleagues to support an amendment which would have blocked funding the commU.N.ists, but that wasn't nearly enough.

Peter Schrag at the American Prospect - A Quagmire for Our Time - A good piece on beachheads in the war against the war on freedom, er... some drugs. Viva la "subversive criminal movement". Completely deregulate all drugs today. Release the prisoners. All 300,000 of them. My body belongs to me. I may put anything into it I so desire, and it ain't nobody else's business. No discussion possible.

But the feds don't get it, or pretend not to get it. There's too much money and too many jobs in the drug war, and being "tough" on drugs is politically safer than the uncertain ground of moderation. And so federal resistance to reform remains as adamant as ever. In 1988, following an extended review of the research, Francis L. Young, an administrative law judge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, issued a voluminous ruling that marijuana "has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would therefore be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record." But despite Young's decision, as well as a string of other appeals and scattered attempts in Congress to move marijuana into the DEA's Schedule II category of drugs--a class that doctors may prescribe and that includes morphine and other narcotics--the DEA has refused to reclassify marijuana. It remains a Schedule I drug, a classification that means it is officially a substance with a high potential for abuse and no proven medicinal use, and thus is treated as contraband except for research under extremely restricted circumstances.

Jo McIntyre and Scott Hogenson of CNSNews via NewsMax - Norton to Release Water to Klamath Farmers - Interior secretary Gale Norton will order the release of irrigation water for the Klamath Basin. Yay! She's doing it for the wrong reason, however. She's doing it because the water level in the lake is higher than expected, not because the farmers have a right to the water.

Second Amendment Sisters - TRT Protest Rally - a report on the July 14 rally near the United Nations building. Includes photos.

ZeroPolitics - The Continuing Argument With a Statist - An email exchange with Phillip Giannikas, a lawyer for U.S. Department of Labor. [zero]

City of LaVerkin - U.N. Free Zone Ordinance - the text of the ordinance banning the commU.N.ists from an Idaho city.

Declan McCullagh at Wired - Release the Russian, Adobe Says - The EFF and protesters convinced Adobe to ask the feds to release Sklyarov, but the feds have not yet done it. [wired]

JonKatz at SlashDot - Travesty: Dmitry Sklyarov's Arrest - Compares the DMCA with the Pentagon papers. Lots of comments. [/.]

Cryptome - Bruce Schneier on Dmitry Sklyarov Arrest - A renowned crypto expert comments on the latest corporate/government tyranny. [grabbe]

I attended Dmitry Sklyarov's talk at DefCon. What he did was legitimate security research. He determined the security of several popular E-Book reader products and then notified the respective firms of his findings. His company Elcomsoft published, in Russia, software that circumvented these ineffectual security systems. His DefCon talk was a clear and evenhanded presentation of the facts. He said, in effect: "This security is weak, and here's why." (One particular company he mentioned stored the password in plaintext inside the executable. So, anyone with Notepad and a few minutes of scrolling could have the book modified for easy distribution.)

The FBI nabbed him at the request of Adobe Systems, Inc. for breaking the security on Acrobat's E-Reader API, and held him without bail.

...

During those debates I was often asked about the NSA's strategy. Wasn't it doomed? Yes, it would eventually fail. But from the NSA's point of view, every day they could delay the failure was a day of victory. Maybe the Export Control regulations (they were never laws) were unconstitutional. Maybe preventing publication of this and that was prior restraint. Maybe pressuring companies to install back doors into their software was illegal. But if it worked for a while, it was a win. The NSA was fighting a holding action, and they knew it.

The entertainment industry is behaving in the same way. The DMCA is unconstitutional, but they don't care. Until it's ruled unconstitutional, they've won. The charges against Sklyarov won't stick, but the chilling effect it will have on other researchers will. The entertainment is fighting a holding action, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt are their weapons. We need to win this, and we need to win it quickly. Please support those who are fighting these cases in the courts: the EFF and others. Every day we don't win is a loss.

NewsForge - KDE on Cygwin releases beta - Cygwin is a free Unix-like environment for Microsoft Windows. There's a beta of KDE 1.1.2 available on top of it. Haven't tried it, but it sounds cool. [newsforge]

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