I haven’t posted in a while, so here are some remaindered thoughts and links about security, cyber-liberty, and the extent to which misguided people do misguided things.

From Bruce Schneier in the Star Tribune, an excellent op-ed condemning “unchecked police and military power” as a threat to US security.

The United States is admired throughout the world because of our freedoms and our liberties. The very rights that are being discussed within the halls of the Supreme Court are the rights that keep us all safe and secure. The more our fight against terrorism is conducted within the confines of law, the more it gives consideration to the principles of fair and open trial, due process and “innocent until proven guilty,” the safer we all are.

Unchecked police and military power is a security threat — just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.

Need an example of this rampant expansion of police power? Look no further than Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004, or the INDUCE Act, a ridiculous new bill introduced by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) that would functionally ban p2p networks.

Commentary on this misconceived embarrassment is pervasive. Ernest Miller offers an Obsessively Annotated Introduction to the INDUCE Act that refutes, in rigorous detail, each of the arguments advanced by Hatch in his eight-page introduction to the bill. Lawrence Lessig agrees - “even I can’t believe this,” he wrote on his blog.

To help illustrate the extent to which INDUCE would “harm innovators and consumers,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a mock complaint against Apple (pdf) for manufacturing the iPod, against c|net for reviewing it, and against Toshiba for making the hard drives used in the iPod.

As part of their INDUCE Action Alert, the EFF has summarized the bottom line nicely in a standardized “letter to your Senator:”

Our country has a long tradition of allowing companies to make information tools, even if those tools can be used to infringe copyrights. This freedom has fueled decades of innovation and created thousands of jobs. The Induce Act would stall our nation’s engine of innovation and drastically upset our copyright balance. I urge you to fight it.

In a related story, Amazon is selling a DRM version of the US Constitution that can be printed only twice a year. Lessig filed this one under “just plain silly” and I have to agree. As Cory at BoingBoing quips, “It would only take 7 years to get copies out to the 13 colonies. Even with the primitive means the colonists had, it only took a few months to distribute the constitution.” Progress is sweet, isn’t it?