These airlines secretly supplied passenger information to government contractors, which is of questionable legality:

*JetBlue
*Northwest
*American Airlines

For more info, see the EFF’s blog:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001470.php

Don’t fly on these airlines, and start getting angry about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) controversial CAPPS II air passenger-profiling system.

The issue came up because I’m speaking at this conference at UPenn on Friday, June 18th, and they’re going to fly me back East from my internship at the EFF this summer. The conference is called Knowledge Held Hostage, and you should seriously come! Among others, Siva Vaidyanathan of New York University will be speaking there.

The organizer of the conference said, “Just a reminder that any of the Swarthmore people who worked with you on Diebold or who have a particular interest in the scholarly fair use issue are welcome to register and come to the conference. That includes friends and professors.” He also said that if you’d be coming from far away and you need some travel/hotel assistance, they might be able to help you out a little. Budgets are tight though, as always.

Hm… this site is linking to FreeCulture.org:

http://www.russ.ru/culture/network/20040426.html

Putting it into Babelfish causes an error, so I can’t tell what the article is about.  At least with languages that use Roman characters I can make some guesses as to what they’re saying.  This Cyrillic alphabet is a pain in the butt.  Can somebody who reads Russian check the page out and at least tell me what the gist of the article is and what kind of a site it’s on?  Thanks a gazillion!

P.S. This Livejournal community also mentions us:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/za_lib_ru/58701.html

That works in Babelfish and I kind of get what’s going on.  The poster makes an interesting point at the end, according to Babelfish: “American students are concerned, first of all, by access to the music and the films. In Russia The situation Is another: as it is assumed to the most reading people, on the agenda – the protection of right to reading. However it seems to us there is to what to learn in the Americans – both in the plan of line of reasoning and in the plan of organization.”  The right to read!  Richard Stallman talks about that!  I’m not sure exactly what they mean by that though, it’s probably not what RMS means… do they mean they fear government censorship, and that’s why filesharing is important for them?  Are they worried because they can’t buy books, so they’re anxious to find free learning/reading material online?

I’d like to contribute to the discussion, but of course I can’t.  Can somebody who understands the scdc and FreeCulture.org go in there and make sure they understand who we are?  One thing I would like to emphasize is that it really is an international student movement, and once we have some good, high-quality articles on the site in English, we will start up a wiki for each language, so that non-English-speakers can join in and help contribute.

Update:  I posted about the results of my sleuthing in the brand spanking new freeculture community!