archives

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space. In the mean time, I have had the luxury of having a web site which I have write access, and I've used tools like Amaya and Nvu which allow direct editing of web pages. With these, I haven't felt the urge to blog with blogging tools. Effectively my blog has been the Design Issues series of technical articles.

That said, it is nice to have a machine to the administrative work of handling the navigation bars and comment buttons and so on, and it is nice to edit in a mode in which you can to limited damage to the site. So I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools. So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Last week, John Gilmore had a chance to convince the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that he should be allowed to board commercial aircraft without showing ID. And perhaps more importantly, he argues that if there is a government rule requiring an ID, then the full extent of that rule/law should be made public. Gilmore claims that the rule requiring presentation of ID is an unreasonable search under the 4th Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague (violating his 5th Amendment due process rights) because the law isn’t even publicly available. The Department of Justice (defendant in this case) counters that courts have already accepted that searches at airports are acceptable under the 4th Amendment (see US v. Davis, 482 F.2d 893 (CA9, 1971)) and that the rule requiring searches need not be made public. While the Justice Department has not acknowledged the existence of any rules, it did offer to present something to the judges (though not to Gilmore) in a secret session.

There’s certainly a fundamental 4th Amendment question here, but what about our right to know the laws and rules under which we’re governed? In the world of Internet security, cryptographers generally accept Kerckhoffs’ law, holding that the security of a cryptographic algorithm must not be dependent on the secrecy of the ciphering method. That is, the mathematical process used in any coding system must be publicly visible. (Of course there will be secret keys that make the algorithm work, these need not be made public.) Kerckhoffs asserted this view because he believed that an algorithm should strong enough that it remains secure if an adversary discovers it. Modern computer security thinking has extended this law to the more general principle that security mechanisms ought to be able to be subjected to public scrutiny so that we have the best chance of catching unintended flaws in the mechanism. So where does this leave these ID rules? Is it enough that we simply know they exist (Gilmore and the rest of us know the basics of their operation from going through airport screening. We know we can’t get on a plane without showing ID.) Or, is there some practical and/or principled reason why we should know the full extent of the rules.

The government asserts that even if the rule requiring presentation of ID exists, citizens have no constitutional right to see if. The trial court accepted the government’s argument that such a rule is a law enforcement procedure and as such need not be disclosed. The court reasoned that the substance of the rule is quite apparent by the practice of requiring ID presentation so there’s no need to see the details. The Justice Department’s brief likens the rule (if it exists), to a drug dealer profile used by border guards to catch potential drug smugglers. This is a rule to which we’re all subject in that when we cross the border manifesting traits that are on the profile, we’re going to be stopped and searched, but we have no right to see the actual profile. In fact, most people would probably agree that disclosing the details of the drug dealer profile could harm law enforcement effors without any significant enhancement of civil liberties.

Gilmore, on the other hand argue that in a free society there are simply no secret laws. In the case of ID checks or other law enforcement rules, how much transparency is enough?

Hear the oral arguments through this WMA link from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals website.