The ACLU has spent years in court trying to get a look at a top-secret FBI interrogation manual that referred to the CIA’s notorious KUBARK torture manual. The FBI released a heavily redacted version at one point — so redacted as to be useless for determining whether its recommendations were constitutional. However, it turns out that the FBI agent who wrote the manual sent a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright in it — in his name! (Government documents are not copyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would vest with the agent’s employer, not the agent himself). A Mother Jones reporter discovered the unredacted manual at the Library of Congress last week, and tipped off the ACLU about it. Anyone can inspect the manual on request. Go see for yourself! The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI’s counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What’s particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted. “A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright,” says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t violate the copyright because you don’t have the document. It isn’t available.” “The whole thing is a comedy of errors,” he adds. “It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance.” Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: “Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositories—and, by the way, aren’t copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?” You’ll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual [Nick Baumann/Mother Jones] ( via Techdirt ) ( Image: FBI , a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 10542402@N06’s photostream )
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FBI agent tries to copyright super-secret torture manual, inadvertently makes it public
Kembrew writes, “I saw your post in Boing Boing today about Pee-Wee, and coincidentally, I just published a piece on Pee-wee’s Christmas Special . I think it’s the first time Paul Reubens has been interviewed about the upcoming remastered Pee-wee’s Playhouse DVDs that will come out next year.” I previously invoked the term “eye-popping” to describe Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but starting next year, viewers will run the risk of having their eyeballs permanently dislodged from their sockets. “The Christmas Special is going to come out, along with the entire Playhouse series, on Blu-ray,” Reubens tells me. “It’s being remastered now.” “The show was never seen on film,” he says. “The show was shot on film and transferred to tape and edited on tape, and all the effects were done on tape. Then the entire show was put on another tape to broadcast, so there are three or four generations of quality that are lost on every episode. So we went back to the original film elements, and the company I’m working with has recreated every edit in every single show, and recreated all the effects from all the original elements—which we were lucky to have kept.” “It looks unbelievable. It’s so extreme, people are going to freak out when they see it,” Reubens adds. “The detail and clarity and color is amazing.” This means that Gary Panter’s set design, the stop motion animation and other details will come alive in psychedelic high definition. It’s the kids show equivalent of being upgraded from cough syrup to mescaline. Pee-wee’s (remastered) Christmas Adventure: An interview with Paul Reubens [Kembrew McLeod/Little Village] 
The maintainers of the security-conscious FreeBSD operating system have declared that they will no longer rely on the random number generators in Intel and Via’s chips , on the grounds that the NSA likely has weakened these opaque hardware systems in order to ease surveillance. The decision is tied to the revelations of the BULLRUN/EDGEHILL programs, wherein the NSA and GCHQ spend $250M/year sabotaging security in standards, operating systems, software, and networks. “For 10, we are going to backtrack and remove RDRAND and Padlock backends and feed them into Yarrow instead of delivering their output directly to /dev/random,” FreeBSD developers said. “It will still be possible to access hardware random number generators, that is, RDRAND, Padlock etc., directly by inline assembly or by using OpenSSL from userland, if required, but we cannot trust them any more.” In separate meeting minutes, developers specifically invoked Snowden’s name when discussing the change. “Edward Snowdon [sic] — v. high probability of backdoors in some (HW) RNGs,” the notes read, referring to hardware RNGs. Then, alluding to the Dual EC_DRBG RNG forged by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and said to contain an NSA-engineered backdoor, the notes read: “Including elliptic curve generator included in NIST. rdrand in ivbridge not implemented by Intel… Cannot trust HW RNGs to provide good entropy directly. (rdrand implemented in microcode. Intel will add opcode to go directly to HW.) This means partial revert of some work on rdrand and padlock.” “We cannot trust” Intel and Via’s chip-based crypto, FreeBSD developers say [Dan Goodin/Ars Technica] 
