From the New York Times

Broad Domestic Role Asked

for C.I.A. and the Pentagon

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

ASHINGTON, May 1 — The Bush administration and leading Senate Republicans sought today to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon far-reaching new powers to demand personal and financial records on people in the United States as part of foreign intelligence and terrorism operations, officials said.

The proposal, which was beaten back, would have given the C.I.A. and the military the authority to issue administrative subpoenas — known as "national security letters" — requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries and a range of other organizations to produce materials like phone records, bank transactions and e-mail logs. That authority now rests largely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the subpoenas do not require court approval.

[and there is more]

1:54:09 PM    

Suppose you are a professor, a publisher, or a software/hardware company that provides materials used for instruction in a college (private or public), technical college, or university.  Suppose further that the legislature passes a law requiring you to provide, on ten days notice, an electronic version of those materials so that students who are "print access disabled" can access the material (and, there electronic version can have no differences in content/context from print version). 

What would you do?

See HB 1020 of the Georgia General Assembly.

1:51:41 PM    

Shades of Net Force!

Chris Gulker is researching a crawler called Cyvelliance. He thinks it's working for the music industry and watching sites of their critics, including this site. [Scripting News]

1:41:04 PM    

Some material for the e-book study...

"Free Science, Engineering and Medical Books Online" [Daypop Top 40]

10:04:57 AM    

From Scripting News, Don Park is working on some aggregator ideas -- but has some really cogent thoughts on aggregation in general.

8:14:23 AM    

Return to sender.  Insufficient postage.

Want to stop spammers? Charge 'em. CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh says spam isn't so much a technological or legal problem as an economic one. So if you want to change spammers' cost-benefit calculations, raise their costs. [CNET News.com]

8:07:42 AM    

Some of the schemes discussed and being researched would definitely incur civil if not criminal penalties if tried on state networks.  Theft of services, vandalism, even violation of the USA PATRIOT Act.  RIAA and MPAA should tread carefully.

NY Times: Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy. Some of the world's biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives. [Tomalak's Realm]

6:33:36 AM