WASHINGTON -- Rep. Rick Boucher is finally ready to try and dismantle a key part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain "fair uses" of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology.
In an interview on Thursday, Boucher said he now has sufficient support -- from the tech industry, librarians, and Internet activists -- to feel comfortable introducing his bill "in the next month."
"If I had introduced it six months ago, you wouldn't have seen this kind of support," said Boucher.
As soon as it's introduced, Boucher's proposal seems certain to be targeted for defeat by content lobbyists including Hollywood, the recording industry and the publishing industry.
Boucher plans to rewrite section 1201 of the DMCA, which says, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
It doesn't require that the person bypassing the scheme is doing it to infringe on someone's copyright. Boucher believes that people should be allowed to circumvent technological protection for research, criticism or fair use purposes, such as reading an encrypted e-book on another computer.
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Wiretap mystery: Terrorists were slamming jets into American landmarks last year, anthrax letters shuttered Capitol Hill and hundreds of suspected al-Qaida sympathizers were arrested and held incommunicado.
But, according to the Justice Department's annual report released this week, the number of secret wiretaps and surveillance orders actually decreased from 2000 to 2001.
Those figures left Washingtonians scratching their heads. Common sense seemed to indicate that either the data is inaccurate, the FBI was napping during the biggest crisis in decades or the numbers don't tell the whole truth.
David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center speculated that the low number -- 934 orders -- was due to new anti-terrorism laws. Sobel said the USA Patriot act lets the feds obtain "orders which allow one warrant to be served on multiple service providers."
The Washington Post said in an editorial that future government reports "should include data on the number of physical searches conducted, the number of wiretaps, the number of Americans targeted and the raw number of individuals targeted."
The annual report does not cover traditional wiretaps, but only those approved by a shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) that meets in secret.
Congress created the seven-judge FISA court in 1978 to oversee foreign intelligence investigations that were too sensitive to take through the normal process. The FISA judges review the Justice Department's requests and, with the exception of one or two cases, have always approved them.
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Freedom isn't: Ex-FBI director Louis Freeh is back.
This week, Freeh told Canada's CBC News that companies such as Microsoft must be legally obligated to hand over the keys needed to decipher encrypted messages.
According to CBC News, Freeh believes such a move "could prevent al-Qaida from maintaining encrypted communication over the Internet."
FBI director Freeh was the Clinton administration's most ardent foe of encryption, and told Congress as recently as 1999 that he has "not given up on encryption." A few years before, one House committee approved a bill to ban encryption products -- including SSH and Web browsers -- without backdoors for the feds.
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Snoop tech: The Nevada Supreme Court says that cops may plant tracking devices on or underneath people's cars without a search warrant.
In a decision last week, the court said GPS-tracker transmitters could be used because the defendant "had neither a subjective nor an objective expectation of privacy in the bumper of his vehicle."
Nevada isn't the first court to decide it's perfectly OK to use such devices without a warrant.
In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said pretty much the same thing, ruling the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply.
In that case, cops trespassed on a suspect's property, planted a GPS bug under his Toyota 4Runner while it was parked in his driveway, followed him around for a while, then arrested him on marijuana charges.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't have a problem with it. A 1983 case, U.S. v. Knotts, says that a beeper-transmitter could be used without a warrant: "The beeper surveillance amounted principally to following an automobile on public streets and highways. A person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements."
