"The police department hired a law firm, which concluded that the towing arrangement broke no rules or laws."

Aha. The John Yoo defense, where you get your own lawyer to say you are not a criminal. If this is valid, it's sort of surprising that *anyone* is in prison.

anyone who thinks american fascism will arrive one day when they round up 8 million citizens needs to conduct some experiments with frogs and boiling water.

Step 0. Write your own software to do all this, or use open source software and audit every line of code in it.

If you're using closed source software you have no way to tell if it is, say, encrypting your name with the NSAs public key and watermarking it into every image you save. That may seem paranoid, but color laser printers have done it for years -- why should you assume software doesn't?

I'm having trouble getting outraged about this. Presumably these parking lots are private property and it's perfectly legitimate to make rules about photography on private property. If you don't like that, don't go to Disneyland. I'm saving my outrage for police who demand camera licenses on public streets.

What surprises me is that anyone cares about this particular case; I had been under the impression that the sort people who actually went to Disneyland were the most sheep-like demographic of Americans who would happily accept any arbitrary rule.

AVRAM, I am familiar with common carrier law, and AT&T is certainly a common carrier in terms of their telephone service. Whether common carrier law applies to internet service is unclear, and many ISPs are actually arguing that they are not -- for example, Comcast would have been flagrantly violating common carrier law by disrupting bittorrent, but they claim it is within their rights to do so.

#!/usr/bin/perl-wusestrict;if(!-e'1-2000.tx
t'){system("wgethttp://www1.harenet.ne.jp/~
waring/vocab/wordlists/1-2000.txt");#thisgu
ylikes\rinsteadof\n.wtf.system("perl-pi-e's
/\r/\n/g'1-2000.txt");}my%dict;open(T,'1-20
00.txt')ordie;while(my$l=){my($w)=split(
"\t",$l);my$nv=$w;$nv=~s/[aeiou]//g;$dict{$
nv}=$w;}while(my$l=lc){chomp($l);my@
a=split(/\s+/,$l);map{$_=$dict{$_}if$dict{$
_}}@a;printjoin('',@a),"\n";}

--snp--.

nw, bvsly, ths dsn't rlly wrk. y'd nd t cmpt 2-grm r 3-grm mdl f bngbng cmmnts nd s tht t rslv mbgty, nd 'd rthr jst g s frm tht dsn't cnsr ppl wh dsgr. bt lk n th brght sd... t wld b whl lt sr thn wrtng prl scrpt t rntrdc th rtnlty nt bngbng dtrs. srsly. yr "t's my bll, cn tk t nd g hm" plcy bsclly sys tht t wld b ttlly cl fr t&t t drp pckts f pltcl spch t dsgrs wth.

-cslsr.

p.s. jst wt ntl ppl fgr t tht thy cn pst thngs lk " thnk tht lnx s jst s gd s wndws", " thnk tht wmn dsrv t vt", " thnk tht gng nt rq ws bd d", nd pr-dsmvwll thm. tht'll b lgh.

This works one of two ways: the people watching the cameras either (1) didn't care anyway (2) have you arrested for being a terrorist for trying to subvert their security systems.

If you're actually trying to get away with something in the view of security cameras, you're probably better off (1) wearing the most generic possible clothes for the area with no distinguishing markings (2) wearing a hat and not looking up.

This is sort of like what most actual intelligence types say about james bond-type gadgets -- "you really want to try explaining why you were carrying *that* to the secret police?"

Are you just posting this because makers have a fetish for LEDs?

This was on fark a few days ago... I am actually sort of surprised how much attention it got. A tall isolated pointy grounded object such as that is bound to get struck by lightning frequently, and this is hardly a compelling photograph. If someone who lived near there set up a good camera with a tripod and automatic trigger during a nighttime thunderstorm I'd expect it wouldn't be too hard to get a much better photo.

Cory, I see you've been taking bomb detection lessons from the Boston PD. Good work.

At what point do we have to start considering people like this to be trolls and ignoring them? Certainly if somebody were actually being *sued* over something like this it would be newsworthy.

However, it is entirely possible that the "(1) post absurd and unenforceable legal threats (2) tell some bloggers (3) look stupid but gets tons of free traffic" strategy will be used intentionally for business purposes. The linked-to blog didn't even rel=nofollow the link to these bastards. I bet their site's search engine rankings are about to go through the roof.

Seriously. You guys are bragging about not just going to their website, but viewing the source and reading that too. Don't you feel like you're being used?

This is all well and good, but supposing you *do* have a file because you contributed to moveon.org, protested the RNC, are Islamic, are a maker of "hoax devices", posted snarky comments on boingboing, etc, what assurance do you have that any of these agencies will be forthcoming about it? I mean, if the NSA were really in the business of giving everyone a copy of their file, wouldn't the EFF be having a much easier time with their lawsuit? Do you seriously believe the FBI is just going to mail you the evidence that they have been engaging in surveillance of your political activities?

I think in the current political climate it is much more likely that they just deny that you have a file by default -- for national security reasons, obviously -- and put you on a list of "undesirable persons" for being interested in it.

An interesting experiment would be to get half your friends who fly a lot to do this and see if there is a correlation between requesting your FBI file and having SSSS show up in the corner of your future airline boarding passes.