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Remember when the Bush administration conveniently “lost” 5 million emails? Two public interest groups responded by suing the administration for its “knowing failure to recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications created and/or received within the White House.” Bush’s people, of course, spent the remainder of their time in office trying to get the lawsuit dismissed.

And now that Obama’s people are in charge, they’re doing the same thing:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed. [...]

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department ”apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

Because, you know, transparency in government is for the other guys.

I’ve just discovered why I got stopped by the cops for no reason while walking through the Downtown Eastside last month. Turns out it’s all part of the plan — specifically, the Vancouver Police Department’s 2009 Business Plan:

[There is] a “target” in that plan to increase bylaw ticketing in the Downtown Eastside by 20 per cent to “improve livability by reducing street disorder.”As part of their duties, each cop walking the beat will do a “minimum of four street checks” of pedestrians on every block.

… [T]he B.C. Civil Liberties Association and a number of organizations representing people with AIDS complain that this latest police crackdown will simply drive the most vulnerable people in the area further away from health care and cause them to engage in more risky behaviour, including shooting up with used needles.

… The draft plan landed on the police board agenda and was made available to the public on Jan. 21. But the police actually began their latest ticketing exercise two months earlier, conveniently timed to hit the streets while Sam Sullivan was heading out the door and [Gregor] Robertson and his crowd were making plans to move in.

Looks like I was right: to the cops, simply being in the DTES is suspicious behavior. They can’t seem to do anything about the current wave of gang-related violence, but when it comes to harassing poor people, you can rely on Vancouver cops to get the job done.

And don’t expect our new and improved City Council to do much about it. When Vancouverites think about police crackdowns on poor people, we tend to think of Project Civil City, an initiative of former mayor Sam Sullivan. For those who thought that things would change now that Gregor Robertson and Vision Vancouver are in charge at City Hall, please take a closer look at the article I linked to above. It’s clear that Robertson and Vision are all over the VPD’s odious new business plan.

You can download the VPD business plan here.

Richard M. Stallman was in town earlier this month, lecturing the masses about freedom and information. For those who don’t know, Stallman founded the free software movement back in the mid-1980s.* He wrote the original GNU General Public License and formulated fundamental principles like copyleft and the four freedoms. He is directly responsible for the rich ecology of free and open source software that we enjoy today. (He also invented Emacs, but nobody’s perfect.)

Stallman’s major achievements are behind him. These days he spends most of his time fighting losing battles against people who use different terminology or have a slightly different definition of freedom than he does. When I attended his talk on the ethics of free software, I did so because I respect what he did a quarter-century ago and because I wanted to hear him talk about the stuff he’s famous for, not because I expected to hear anything new. And I got pretty much what I was expecting: Stallman talked about the four freedoms for a while, then turned to those terminological disputes — why you should say “GNU/Linux” instead of just “Linux,” why free software is superior to open source software, why Linus Torvalds is wrong, and so on.

But even so, I came away from the lecture with a renewed appreciation for his position. As it turns out, he’s not just resentful that other people have stolen his limelight.

When we talk about open source software, we are basically taking for granted the position Eric S. Raymond outlined in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Open source software, he says, is better because of how it’s produced. That’s why the Open Source Definition focuses on practical benefits like peer review. In fact, the term “open source” was explicitly invented to make the concept of non-proprietary software palatable to profit-driven corporations by convincing them that open source software is more reliable and bug-free. By contrast, free software (as Stallman defines it) is fundamentally a question of ethics. In his words, proprietary software is a “social problem,” an attack on the “social solidarity” of your community. When companies like Microsoft impose restrictive licenses and lobby governments for stricter “intellectual property” laws, they are directly and deliberately undermining your ability to share stuff with your neighbors — which in turn undermines the entire community.

None of this is news, really. Stallman and others have been talking about these issues for years. But it was refreshing to hear someone make the case — not least because of how it resonates with what I see in my professional life as a systems librarian.

In the library world, open source software is winning the battle against proprietary software. We’re a long way from victory, but there’s a general awareness among library workers — especially among the more technical types — that open source software has some significant advantages. Heck, right now I’m getting paid to help a bunch of libraries in BC make the switch from their proprietary (and expensive) computer systems to a free and open source alternative.

But when library folks talk about non-proprietary software, they almost always mean open source software rather than free software. It’s always about how open source software is more reliable and more feature-rich — and, usually, cheaper. There are, of course, good reasons for taking this approach: libraries are underfunded, so cheaper alternatives are always welcome, and the market for library software is small, so there’s relatively little competition and thus little incentive for serious innovation by the vendors (which is why we’re so often dissatisfied with their proprietary products). And like most bureaucracies, libraries have been infected by an MBA-style crackpot realism that values “outcomes” over principles. We’ve learned to focus on narrow “results” to help justify our existence to the people who control the purse-strings, rather than focusing on our real work of fostering healthy communities by providing free access to knowledge.** In that sort of environment, it’s only natural that we’ve learned to talk about the practical benefits of open source software.

Those practical benefits are perfectly valid reasons for avoiding proprietary software. But under the circumstances, it’s easy to forget that using free software is ultimately an ethical decision. I appreciate the practical benefits of the open source model, but I’m a free software advocate because I believe in the four freedoms. And I’m a librarian because libraries embody those same freedoms.

Public libraries are not neutral institutions. By their very nature, they stand for free access to information — a radically democratic proposition in an age of media concentration and draconian “intellectual property” laws. That’s why librarians are so committed to free speech: we think it’s wrong when people try to suppress ideas just because they don’t agree with them. We think people should be free to share ideas and information, build on them to come up with new ideas and information, and share the results in turn.

And that’s why libraries should use — and advocate the use of — free software. Proprietary software contradicts the fundamental values that libraries stand for. Our principles shouldn’t be confined to our bookshelves: if we’re genuinely committed to them, they matter just as much when it comes to the software we use on our computers.

An Ontario superior court has ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy to subscriber information. If cops have your IP address, the judge says, they don’t need a warrant to get your name and physical address from your ISP.

Not surprisingly, the judge’s ruling is based on a faulty understanding of how the Internet works:

Judge Leitch accepted the arguments of Crown attorney Elizabeth Maguire that the information is similar to what is in a phone book.

“One’s name and address or the name and address of your spouse are not biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state,” Judge Leitch said.

But an IP address is not biographical information. It doesn’t identify me, it identifies my computer on a network. It’s also visible to every website I visit — and the sites I visit, like the books I check out of the library, should be kept private from the state (in the absence of a warrant). Why? Because they reveal a lot of personal information about me, including some information that I would consider no one’s business but mine. If an IP address were biographical information, that would mean you were giving your name and physical address to every website you visit … and I think most people would find that disturbing. Which means there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, quite literally: most people think, quite reasonably, that their online activities should be private.

I wonder how this decision will affect the Conservatives’ forthcoming lawful access bill.

In 2007, five victims of Bush’s extraordinary rendition program filed a suit against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA send them overseas to be tortured. The Bush administration tried to block the suit by claiming the case would reveal state secrets and thus endanger national security — a blatant attempt to use executive privilege to cover up the crimes of the American state.

The case was still going when Obama took office. Within days of his inauguration, Obama signed orders shutting down secret prisons and banning torture. Surely, his supporters said, this showed that he was serious about ending the US government’s disregard for basic freedoms.

Sadly, no. In the Jeppesen case, Obama has explicitly and deliberately upheld Bush’s abuse of the state secrets privilege — much to the dismay of the ACLU:

It isn’t merely that the Obama DOJ is invoking the privilege for this particular case, which contains allegations of torture that are as brutal and severe as any. That’s bad enough. But worse is that they’re invoking the most abusive parts of the Bush theory: namely, that the privilege can be used to block the adjudication of entire cases (rather than, say, justify the concealment of specific classified documents or other pieces of evidence), and, worse still, can be used to prevent judicial scrutiny even when the alleged government conduct is blatantly illegal and, as here, a war crime of the greatest seriousness.

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here.

It gets worse. Not only is Obama upholding Bush’s drastic expansion of executive power, he’s continuing the rendition program:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. [...]

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

How’s that for change we can believe in?