August 5th, 2008

Email and Cell Phone Privacy Threatened in Two Separate Court Cases

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in two key propecia contraindications electronic privacy cases that threaten to expand the government's spying authority.

In the first case, Bunnell v. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), EFF filed a brief with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that federal wiretapping law protects emails from unauthorized interception while they are temporarily stored on the email servers that transmit them. This case was brought against the MPAA by the owners and operators of TorrentSpy, a search engine that let Internet users locate files on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. After a business dispute, one of TorrentSpy's independent contractors hacked into the company email server and configured it to copy and forward all incoming and outgoing email to his personal account and then sold the information to the MPAA. However, the federal district court ruled that because the emails were stored on the mail server for several milliseconds during transmission, they were not technically "intercepted" under the federal Wiretap Act. In its amicus brief filed Friday, EFF argues that this dangerous ruling is incorrect as a matter of law and must be overturned in order to prevent the government from engaging in similar surveillance without a court order.

"The district court's decision, if upheld, would have dangerous repercussions far beyond this single case," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "That court opinion — holding that the secret and unauthorized copying and forwarding of emails while they pass through an email server is not an illegal interception of those emails — threatens to wholly eviscerate federal privacy protections against Internet wiretapping and to authorize the government to conduct similar email surveillance without getting a wiretapping order from a judge."

The second case concerns a request by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to a federal magistrate judge in Pennsylvania for authorization to obtain cell phone location tracking information from a mobile phone provider without probable cause. The magistrate instead demanded that the DOJ obtain a search warrant based on probable cause, and the DOJ appealed that decision to the federal district court in the Western District of Pennsylvania. In an amicus brief filed Thursday, EFF urged the district court to uphold the magistrate's ruling and protect cell phone users' location privacy.

"Location information collected by cell phone companies can provide an extraordinarily invasive glimpse into the private lives of cell phone users. Courts have the right under statute — and the duty under the Fourth Amendment — to demand that the government obtain a search warrant based on probable cause before seizing such sensitive information," said Bankston. "This is only the latest of many cases where EFF has been invited to brief judges considering secret surveillance requests that aren't supported by probable cause. We hope this court recognizes the serious Fourth Amendment questions that are raised by warrantless access to cell phone location information and affirms the magistrate's denial of the government's surveillance request."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU-Foundation of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) also joined EFF's brief.

For the full amicus brief in Bunnell v. MPAA:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Bunnell_v_MPAA/BunnellAmicus.pdf

For the full amicus brief in the cell phone records case:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/celltracking/LenihanAmicus.pdf

For more on cell phone tracking:
http://www.eff.org/issues/cell-tracking

July 29th, 2008

When you're snapping photos, sharpness is everything. Whether it's digital or film photography, the absence of focus can ruin a Kodak moment. But, if you follow the easy tips below, you'll be on your way to capturing some great pictures. Let's get started!

Avoid Camera Shake

This is the first thing you need to take care of. Most times, camera shakes lead to blurred images and not the other way around. The best way to avoid camera shaking is to always use a tripod. In cases when you don’t have one, place your camera on any solid surface you can find. You can also use the self-timer function to lessen your chances of shaking.

Check Your Images

You should get in the habit of checking the photos you take with the LCD display and by zooming in a little bit. What you see on your LCD screen might look good, but when you zoom in, that’s how you'll know if the picture is properly focused or blurred. For example, if you're photographing a person, zoom in on their eyes to make sure they’re as sharp as possible. For everything else, try to look at the subject more than the foreground or background. That is, unless you want to keep all three (subject, foreground and background) in focus. Once you zoom in, if you see that the image isn’t properly focused, you have time to shoot again for better results.

Get Your Physics Right

Whether it's film or digital photography, one thing hasn’t changed a bit: the optics of lenses. When it comes to your camera's lens, there's one key component you should be aware of: hyper focal distance. When the lens is focused on the hyper focal distance, the depth of field extends from half the hyper focal distance to infinity. If you're using a shorter focal length lens, you need to focus one-third of the way into your photo with a smaller aperture setting. If you do that, you'll end up achieving maximum depth of field. If you're using a focal length lens (a telephoto lens, for example), you can apply the same rule.

Make a Calculated Move

There are precise ways to calculate hyper focal distance whether you use a point-and-shoot camera or an SLR. The best way to get an idea of what the hyper focal distance is for your camera at different settings is to make use of a depth of field calculator. If you’re interested in researching this, I recommend applying the following mathematical equation to tell exactly how far you need to go for a sharp focus. Hyper focal focusing is valuable in several situations, including photojournalism, street shooting or even when you’re shooting moving objects and you don’t have time to refocus.

The hyper focal distance formula goes like this:

H=F square divided by NC + F where
H is hyper focal distance
F is focal length
N is f-number
C is the circle of confusion limit

If you don’t want to do any calculating, just shoot between f/8 and f/11. Those tend to be the sharpest points for a lot of lenses and they cover a depth of field deep enough to put most of your picture in focus. If you’re shooting in lower light and you open your aperture to decrease the shutter time, you're also decreasing your depth of field and increasing your chances of more blur than you want.

Know Your Sweet Spot

Certain lenses, especially zooms, have "sweet spots" that will give you total sharpness. With most cameras, you can get pin-sharp images at f/8, but much less so at f/4 or f/22.

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Image Stabilization

The secret to razor-sharp images is to turn off any image stabilization. Why? Well, because the tripod will take care of stabilizing the camera. That's all there is to that!

Aperture Settings

Set your aperture further than one or two stops away from the limits. For example, if your lens goes to f/22, don’t go any further than f/16. Similarly, if your lens goes to f/2.8, don’t go any wider than f/4.

Zoom Lens

If you’re using a zoom lens, don’t take it all the way out. If followed throughout, that could make a big difference in the quality of your photographs.

Shutter Speed

Make sure you use a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the action. As a rule of thumb, standing subjects can stay still for about 1/30 to 1/60sec. On the other hand, walking requires 1/120 and running 1/250 to 1/500. Of course, it all depends on your distance from the subject, so feel free to experiment.

Minimal Focusing Distance

If you're not able to take sharp close up shots, one reason could be that you're using your lens under the minimal focusing distance. The solution is to back away a bit from the subject until the lens is back to focusing at its best.

And Finally…

The more sharpness you demand and the bigger prints you need, the shorter the depth of focus actually becomes. Therefore, be moderate in your calculations and don’t go to extremes. Have fun!

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely–as a matter propecia blood pressure of course–seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.)

This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.

Here's a guide to customs-proofing your laptop that we published in March.

It's true that any reasonable person would probably agree that Customs agents should be able to inspect travelers' bags for contraband. But seizing a laptop and copying its hard drive is uniquely invasive–and should only be done if there's a good reason.

Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called the DHS policies "truly alarming" and told the Washington Post that he plans to introduce a bill that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches.

But unless Congress changes the law, DHS may be able to get away with its new rules. A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that an in-depth analysis of a laptop's hard drive using the EnCase forensics software "was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."

At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches–but not necessarily seizures–as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, "absent individualized suspicion," seize electronic gear: "Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity."

Outside entity presumably refers to government contractors, the FBI, and National Security Agency, which can also be asked to provide "decryption assistance." Seized information will supposedly be destroyed unless customs claims there's a good reason to keep it.

An electronic device is defined as "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form" including hard drives, compact discs, DVDs, flash drives, portable music players, cell phones, pagers, beepers, and videotapes.