In New Mexico, anyone can work as an interior designer. But it is a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in prison, to list yourself on the Internet or in the Yellow Pages as, or to otherwise call yourself, an "interior designer" without being certified as such. Those who favor this censoring of truthful commercial speech are a private group that controls, using an exam administered by a private national organization, access to that title.

Who benefits? Creating artificial scarcity of services raises the prices of those entitled to perform the services.

This discussion and the linked editorial should resonate with people who are concerned about HB 504.

The Volokh Conspiracy - George Will on Rent-Seeking:

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

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The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

My National Security Letter Gag Order - washingtonpost.com

Jim Channon, creator of the First Earth Battalion, and New Age motivational speaker for the DoD, has written another book. The best way I can think to describe this, is a New Age take on Globalism, among other things.. I'm not sure of another way to describe this... I'm not sure there is a way to describe this.

Go Planet! | Speaking of The First Earth Battalion | Jim Channon

The Congressional Research Service is well known in policy circles -- especially defense policy circles -- for writing some of the smartest, sanest analyses you could ever hope to get in Washington. Their reports are non-partisan. They present dissenting points of view. And they are unclassified -- meaning, everyone is allowed to read them.

Now, however, "in what is being characterized by subordinates as an act of 'managerial dementia,' the Director of the Congressional Research Service [Daniel Mulhollan] this week prohibited all public distribution of CRS products without prior approval from senior agency officials," Secrecy News says.

Sounds like a great way to facilitate making less informed decisions.. The trend of secrecy uber alles we have been seeing the past several years needs to stop.

Danger Room | 'Demented' Research Chief Isolates Agency

An Iranian naval patrol seized 15 British sailors who had boarded a vessel suspected of smuggling cars off the coast of Iraq, military officials said.

The British government immediately demanded the safe return of its troops and summoned Tehran's London ambassador to explain the incident.

The Royal Marines and ordinary naval officers were believed to have been apprehended by up to six ships from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy who claimed they had violated Iranian waters.

British military patrols have been given authority to board vessels in Iraqi waters under United Nations mandate and with the permission of the government in Baghdad.

He said the captain of the merchant vessel had been cleared to proceed and the two British inflatable patrol boats were readying for departure when they were surrounded by the Iranian navy and taken into Iranian waters.

Lambert said there is "absolutely no doubt in my mind" that the marines were in Iraqi waters. But, he said, "The extent and the definition of territorial waters in this part of the world is very complicated... We may well find, and I hope we find, that this is a simple misunderstanding at a tactical level," he said.

"There hopefully has been a mistake that's been made, and we'll see early clarification and early release of my people."

CNN's Aneesh Raman in Tehran said there had been no mention of the incident on Iranian TV and calls to officials had not been answered.

It was not immediately clear where in Iran the British personnel were taken.

This is exactly the type of thing that could spin out of control quickly..

Update: The CounterterrorismBlog has posted some questions in regard to this:

Questions: Is this an intentional act approved by senior Iranian leadership in response to findings of the British personnel, or possibly in reaction to the upcoming U.N. vote against Iran? The official IRNA news site includes a story complaining that the White House is throwing up a last-minute obstacle to the issuance of a visa for President Ahmadinejad to take part in the U.N. Security Council meeting Saturday on the Iran sanctions resolution - could that be the reason for this action? Is this a provocation similar to the Hezbollah seizure last year of Israeli soldiers, which led the Israelis into invading Lebanon, to test how the British and Americans move military assets in advance of armed action? Is this a calculated measure due to Iranian claims that the waters are, in fact, Iranian and not Iraqi (a 1975 treaty gave the waters to Iraq, but Iran disputes Iraq's jurisdiction)? Or is this the action of a local commander, unauthorized by leadership, and due to anything from bad navigation equipment (hard to believe but it happens), one too many drinks, or a misinterpretation of orders? Recall that (a) Iranian forces did something like this in 2004 and held British servicemen for three days, then released them, and (b) local commanders' mistakes have had devastating consequences, such as the accidental American shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988.

Iran 'seizes' 15 British sailors - CNN.com

The videos of the talks at Outerz0ne have been posted.

Of the lot, I suggest watching Acidus live-hack a bank in New Zealand:

Outerz0ne Video's posted

Congress' efforts to muzzle pornography on the Web were dealt another serious setback on Thursday, when a federal judge ruled a 1998 law was unconstitutional and violated Americans' First Amendment rights.

U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed in Philadelphia permanently barred prosecutors from enforcing the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, saying it was overly broad and would undoubtedly "chill a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech for adults." The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Even though politicians enacted COPA nearly a decade ago as part of an early wave of Internet censorship efforts, the courts have kept it on ice and it has never actually been enforced. The law makes it a crime for commercial Web sites to make "harmful to minors" material publicly available, with violators fined up to $50,000 and imprisoned for up to six months.

Net porn ban faces another legal setback | CNET News.com

It's no secret that some content owners don't seem to understand how the DMCA works—that, or they simply don't care when sending mass takedown notices. This seems to be the case with the recent saga of legal maneuvers between the National Football League (NFL) and Brooklyn Law School professor Wendy Seltzer. The two have been going back and forth with DMCA-related "requests" since early February—with YouTube stuck in between—and in the process, the NFL itself appears to have violated the DMCA.

This is really interesting. It looks like the NFL screwed up, large..

This article is a good summary. You can also read Wendy's account of the situation on her blog.

NFL fumbles DMCA takedown battle, could face sanctions

And now, for your morning dose of strange..

One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.

The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?

This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis.

References to some of the unlikely origins of US military PsyOp technique have been mentioned here before:

According to the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by journalist Jon Ronson, Channon spent time in the seventies with many of the people credited with starting the New Age movement and subsequently wrote an operations manual for a First Earth Battalion. Rather than using bullets and munitions, Channon envisaged that this new force would attempt to conquer the hearts and minds of the enemy using positive vibrations, carrying lambs symbolic of peace and employing unconventional but non-lethal weapons to subdue others. Lethal force was to be a last resort. Members would practise meditation, use yogic cat stretches and primal screams to attain battle-readiness, and use shiatsu as battlefield first aid.

Some ideas proposed in the writings of Channon later found their way into military procedures for psychological warfare. Ronson specifically cites the First Earth Battalion manual's proposal to use music to effect "psychic mind-change" as one. However, the American military has adopted loud sound as a psychological weapon, not to win hearts and minds. For example at Waco, Texas, repeating the techniques used four years earlier in an attempt to drive Manuel Noriega from his sanctuary, an earsplitting cacophony of noise was played at the compound 24/7, that included the sound of rabbits being slaughtered, chanting Tibetan monks, roaring jet engines, and the Nancy Sinatra hit, "These Boots Were Made For Walking."

Music as torture/Music as weapon

MySpace, the Web’s largest social network, has gradually been imposing limits on the software tools that users can embed in their pages, like music and video players that also deliver advertising or enable transactions.

At stake is the ability of MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, to ensure that it alone can commercially capitalize on its 90 million visitors each month.

“The reason why I am so bummed out about MySpace now is because recently they have been cutting down our freedom and taking away our rights slowly,” wrote Tila Tequila, a singer who is one of MySpace’s most popular and visible users, in a blog posting over the weekend. “MySpace will now only allow you to use ‘MySpace’ things.”

Ms. Tequila, born Tila Nguyen, has attracted attention by linking to more than 1.7 million friends on her MySpace page. To promote her first album, she recently added to her MySpace page a new music player and music store, called the Hoooka, created by Indie911, a Los Angeles-based start-up company.

Yet another thing that we were predicting is coming about... 3rd party services are being squeezed out of MySpace.

MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users - New York Times