Federal law enforcement agents raided US Senator Ted Stevens’ Alaska home in Girdwood, hauling off undisclosed items from inside and taking extensive pictures and video. Officials wouldn’t say what they were looking for or what they found.All I can say is that agents from the FBI and IRS are currently conducting a search at that residence,
Dave Heller, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Anchorage office
The British Government has rejected extending copyright for sound recordings. This is an important development in the face of trends to extend copyright duration, although it leaves British copyright protection for music recordings at a shorter duration than for written works. The decision came despite fierce lobbying from the large British music industry. The music industry will now lobby directly to the European Commission, but without the support of the national government, its position is significantly weakened. British copyright for music recordings therefore remains at 50 years after the date of release of a recording, in contrast to 95 years in the US and 70 years in Australia — via Slashdot
Tuesday, there wasn’t even a fuss. Wednesday, the world was a little different. By executive order, the Secretary of the Treasury may now seize the property of any person who undermines efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq. The Secretary may make his determination in secret and after the fact. The UK’s Guardian has an article explaining how the new authority will only be used to go after terrorists — via Slashdot
The New South Wales Transport Minister, John Watkins, is calling on the Federal Government to offer tax exemptions to public transport users. Speaking at the Australian Rail Summit in Sydney, Mr Watkins has drawn attention to what he calls a bias in the current tax system towards private car users. The Minister has told the forum that people who salary package their cars and drive them to work attract tax exemptions which are not available to public transport users. Mr Watkins says the tax exemption should be extended to people who buy public transport tickets
EFF has obtained FBI documents showing years of chronic problems with its use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The issue first drew widespread attention four months ago, when the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a report revealing extensive misuse of NSLs in a sampling of four FBI field offices. These findings were, unfortunately, not surprising to critics of the Bureau’s NSL power. Before the USA PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001, the FBI could unilaterally issue these demands only to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. Under the changes made by the controversial anti-terrorism law, however, the FBI can now use NSLs to get telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records about anybody — without any court approval — as long as it believes the information could be relevant
to an authorised terrorism or espionage investigation
A political battle is raging in Russian cyberspace. Opposition parties and independent media say murky forces have committed vast resources to hacking and crippling their web sites
The BBC has been accused of forcing people to use Microsoft operating systems and has been threatened with a complaint to the European Commission. The charge concerns the use of Microsoft technology in the corporation’s forthcoming DRM iPlayer. The BBC has said it does intend to allow access to its content from computers with other operating systems
The UK government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum. It has also defined Intelligent Design
, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with creationism
Recognising the threat of China’s growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be purified
, and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns. One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content,
said Julien Pain, who monitors Internet freedom issues for Reporters Without Borders
The union movement’s hard men are babes alongside John Howard’s mob. Really. Profanity in a blue singlet is meaningless, comparatively. The real goons in public life are mostly in parliamentary politics, whatever their ideological allegiance, and not on the shop floor. There is a stunning quote in the book The Hollow Men that says: We assume politicians are without honour. Not that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political life.
The quote comes from a woman, Adrienne Rich, and is quoted by Nicky Hager in his book on New Zealand politics published last year. It is Hager’s book which details how involved in the 2005 New Zealand election were Australia’s Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor, Howard’s two favourite political machine men for hire. Crosby Textor’s New Zealand client, the National Party, failed only narrowly to defeat Helen Clark’s Labour Government.
Three days ago, on the eve of our Federal Parliament going into its winter recess for six weeks, Labor’s Anthony Albanese tried to force an urgency debate the instant the House of Representatives assembled for the day’s business. What the Opposition wanted was the Government to come clean
on the secret propaganda machine
of six to eight taxpayer-funded staffers whom that morning’s issue of The Bulletin claimed have worked “under the radar” for seven years in the Sydney CBD ministerial office of Howard’s Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock.
It was the same day the Herald’s Phillip Coorey wrote a front-page story headlined, Exposed: the secret business plot to wreck Labor. Coorey told of a confidential
three-page document which outlined how the Coalition’s chief pollster, Mark Textor
, had been hired by the Business Council of Australia to devise and co-ordinate
an advertising campaign costing at least $6.5 million
to support the Howard Government’s contentious industrial relations laws.
In Parliament, Albanese’s attempt to force an urgency debate listed 10 key points the Opposition wanted Ruddock to detail to Parliament, including the relationship between
the secret political unit
in his office and the federal secretariat of the Liberal Party and the Crosby Textor
political research organisation. The Government would have none of it.
It used its numbers, in a series of three votes, to kill the debate. Later, during question time, Howard batted away three questions on the Coorey story without answering any of them. Instead he spent his time trashing the union movement and insisting that Crosby and Textor, as heads of a private business, are entitled to do work for clients other than the Liberal Party
— via The Sydney Morning Herald
As many as 1500 Pentagon computers were brought offline on Wednesday in response to a cyber attack. Defence Secretary Robert Gates reported of the fallout both that the attack had no adverse impact on department operations
and that there will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences
. When asked whether his own e-mail had been compromised, Gates responded, I don’t do e-mail. I’m a very low-tech person
— via Slashdot
Prime Minister John Howard is pledging fast coverage for 99 per cent of Australians as he prepares to unveil the Government’s new broadband strategy today. Mr Howard says prices in the cities and the regions will be comparable. But Opposition communications spokesman Stephen Conroy says Mr Howard will create a two-tier system
Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt told the Examiner that the newspaper ad he took out last week offering a million-dollar bounty for evidence of illicit sexual activity with lawmakers has yielded about 200 tips so far. He said he’ll let them continue to trickle in over the next two weeks or so before his team begins to follow up on them.
Said Flynt: We’ll be lucky if we get 2 to 4 percent hard leads that could yield a payout
China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet, Yahoo said on Monday — one day after the mother of a jailed Chinese reporter announced she was suing the US company for helping officials imprison her son. Yahoo criticised China in a brief statement that didn’t specifically mention the case of jailed journalist Shi Tao, whose mother visited Hong Kong on Sunday. Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2005 after sending an e-mail about Chinese media restrictions
Korea has just finished negotiating a free trade agreement with the US that is a complete disaster on copyright. Korea has agreed to give up all fair use to copyrighted works, and has agreed to shut down many of its web-hosting businesses. So much for Korea’s power as a global Internet leader. It was nice while it lasted — via Boing Boing
Germany has just passed a new law that adds more anti-hacker
provisions to the German criminal code. Although the new rules are meant to apply narrowly to hacking, critics are already complaining that they may prevent necessary security and network research. The new rules tighten up the existing sanctions and prohibit any unauthorised user from disabling or circumventing computer security measures to access secure data. Manufacturing, programming, installing or spreading software that has the primary goal of circumventing security measures is verboten, which means that some security scanning tools might become illegal. In theory, this applies only to illicit programs like trojans, but some groups worry about how the new criteria will be applied
Australia has backed a plan by St Vincent and the Grenadines to hunt humpbacks as part of its subsistence whaling quota. A consensus vote at the International Whaling Commission meeting has cleared the Caribbean nation to kill four whales a year over a five-year period. Mick McIntyre from the International Fund for Animal Welfare says he is disappointed Australia did not oppose the plan, given its opposition to Japan’s plans to add humpbacks to its scientific cull program
Sydney faces more disruption from the APEC leaders meeting in September, with the Prime Minister announcing three major bilateral meetings will be held in the city either side of the summit. A public holiday has been declared on the opening day of the APEC meeting, Friday, 7 September, and large areas of central Sydney will be shut down during the three day meeting. The New South Wales Police Minister, David Campbell, says police will try to keep disruption to a minimum. He says Sydney residents will be advised of any security arrangements for the leaders’ extended stay. But he says no plans beyond the APEC summit days have yet been prepared
A Darth Vader mask has been tendered as evidence as the Darwin Magistrates Court hears charges against Lord Mayor Peter Adamson. The charges relate to the purchase of a $900 fridge and $1,800-worth of gift vouchers which he bought in June last year, then claimed reimbursement from the mayoral donations fund. The prosecution alleges the vouchers were used to buy a number of items including make-up, clothes and a Darth Vader voice changer
The Federal Opposition says it will demand answers in Senate Estimates hearings about the cost of the latest Government advertising campaign on industrial relations. The Senate starts a fortnight of hearings today and Labor says it will use them to question the Government on its plans for areas including nuclear power and APEC as well as advertising
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