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  From: Matt Norwood <mrn2101@columbia.edu>
  To  : <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:47:06 -0500

Re: GOP secretly gathering data

The Windows mindset of finding a CD slipped under your door, popping it
into your computer, and allowing it to auto-run binary executables is
the culprit here. It would be nice if people knew not to do this. Given
that they don't, some kind of legislative action against this kind of
attack would be appropriate.

Like so many problems at the intersection of technology and law, it
could be prevented with either legal protection or trivial technical
safeguards. Both should be in place, but the legal protections should be
narrowly tailored and intent-based to avoid interfering with innovation
and free speech.

It would be nice to think that Microsoft could be sued for their
incompetent approach to desktop security. Allowing a piece of suspect,
removable storage to automatically run a binary executable of unknown
provenance and open network connections to unknown remote servers
doesn't seem like such a great default behavior for an operating system.
But I'm not holding my breath for that lawsuit to materialize.

Matt Norwood

On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 10:56 -0500, Pamela Kellet wrote:
> So I've been kind of following this story in spurts and I thought that I 
> should probably share it with the group. It turns out that the GOP in 
> Minnesota is collecting political data about people via an interactive CD. 
> The data is not anonymous and apparently users are not told that it is 
> being collected into a giant database.
> 
> Here was one of the initial stories I read:
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11653284/
> 
> Here is an outraged editorial on the story:
> http://thinkprogress.org/2006/02/28/the-minnesota-gops-stealth-attack-on-privacy/
> 
> Finally, here is an example of how people can crack the code (apparently 
> without much trouble) and get access to the information that the GOP is 
> gathering.
> http://www.publicradio.org/columns/minnesota/polinaut/archive/2006/02/major_security.php
> 
> 
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