Since the announcement of Christopher Soghoian’s fake Northwest Airlines boarding pass generator, someone talking with Soghoian via instant message says that Soghoian was visited by the FBI. Wired reports Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) has called for Soghoian’s arrest. ABC News quotes a statement from Markey:

The Bush administration must immediately act to investigate, apprehend those responsible, shut down the website, and warn airlines and aviation security officials to be on the look-out for fraudsters or terrorists trying to use fake boarding passes in an attempt to cheat their way through security and onto a plane.

According to Boing Boing:

Calls and emails I made to the 24-year-old computer science student after learning of the reported FBI visit were not returned. An iChat transcript provided to BoingBoing shows Soghoian claimed the FBI was at his door between 345 and 350pm PST. He stopped responding to incoming IM messages at that time, and has not responded to other incoming messages since.

FBI special agent Wendy Osborne declined to confirm whether Soghoian had been visited or if an investigation was taking place, citing FBI policy, but said “We will confirm that he has not been arrested.”

Soghoian’s fake boarding pass generator has been taken offline.

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Torrentfreak has the scoop:

23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for the work he put in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents.

I’m not in favor of this outcome, but now that a standard is set I hope we’ll keep this in mind the next time a corporation is convicted of copyright infringement because we’ll have to decide what international body should use unreasonable pressure to compel that country to adopt law which makes copyright a criminal offense (instead of a civil matter as it used to be in the US), determine how much of a fine should be paid (3 million francs is hardly a slap on the wrist for Microsoft, but $3,000 can be significant for an individual real person), and who should be chosen to go to prison and then suffer some kind of detention. Of course, we have to pick someone because corporations have no body to incarcerate and no soul to save, as the saying goes.

Somehow, I think it will be forgotten or ignored like the press conveniently did for that Microsoft copyright infringement story was in 2001.

Or perhaps we’ll institute a different copyright regime that respects what people apparently want to do and distinguishes between commercial infringement and non-commercial verbatim copying and distribution. Some countries actually let people copy and share; if I recall correctly, this one was one sore spot about Canadian copyright law American broadcasters didn’t like.

Make your own boarding passMake your own boarding pass and find out. That site

will produce a boarding pass good enough to get anyone past TSA, and thus, into the “secure” gate areas of the airport terminal.

Note that this will not be a valid pass, so it will not get you on the airplane. For that, you need to actually buy a ticket.

Why would you want one of these?

1. To meet your elderly grandparents at the gate
2. To ‘upgrade’ yourself once on the airplane – by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you’re already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.
3. Just to demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

And read on for recipes to skirt the no-fly list.

Spend your time on the plane contemplating who benefits from the so-called “war on terror” and why it, like the American “war on drugs”, will never end and has nothing to do with keeping you safe.

hypebot’s got the scoop on the latest radio pay-for-play scam:

Just months after the major labels settled the NY payola probe, two Universal distributed labels (Blackground and the band Nickleback on Roadrunner) reportedly tried to influence chart positions by buying late night ads on NY radio that feature more than 60 seconds of the song. This practice which tricks computerized airplay reporting tools was specifically band[sic—banned] in the recent settlement.

Who were we, the ostensible owners of the public airwaves, to distrust that self-regulation works? Why charge the broadcasters rent when they’re doing us such favors?

Alexander Cockburn dispels the myths of the microloan which have gotten so much press lately due to Mohammed Younus winning a Nobel prize. Cockburn asks basic questions about the effectiveness of the microloan including why the countries that have them aren’t bringing people out of poverty, where the money to repay microloans comes from and goes, and what is the future of the microloan when state-owned and commercial banks offer microloans.

As the economist Robert Pollin put it pithily when I asked him what he thought of the award to Younus , Bangladesh and Bolivia are two countries widely recognized for having the most successful micro credit programs in the world. They also remain two of the poorest countries in the world.

In the statistical tables of human development Bangladesh ranks 139th, worse than India, with 49.8 per cent of its population of 150 million below the official poverty line. In the homeland of the Grameen Bank, about 80 per cent of the people live on less than $2 a day. A UN Development Program study in the early 1990s showed that the total microcredits in Bangladesh constituted 0.6 per cent of total credit in the country. Hardly a transformation.

Boing Boing reports the Los Angeles chapter of the Boy Scouts of America is now offering a “merit patch” (they don’t call it a merit badge) for “respecting copyright”. One wonders what’s being taught to get this patch.

Boing Boing is highly suspicious that there will be much left out, with good reason:

The merit badge patch in “respecting copyright” will almost certainly not include any training on fair use, anything about the fact that the film industry is located in Hollywood because that was a safe-enough distance from Tom Edison that the its founders could infringe his patents with impunity; that record players, radios and VCRs were considered pirate technology until the law changed to accommodate them; or that the entertainment industry enriches itself without regard for creators, who are routinely sodomized through non-negotiable contracts and abusive royalty practices. I’m sure it won’t mention the anti-competitive censorship masquerading as the Hollywood “rating” system, or the way that the studio cartel’s copyright term extensions have doomed the majority of creative works to orphaned oblivion, since they remain in copyright, but have no visible owner and can’t be brought back into circulation.

Not to mention the effect of the monopolistic studio-owned theater system which kept competition from locally-owned smaller theaters at bay; if a smaller theater ran a hit movie that movie was months past its popularity and most audiences had already seen it at the studio-owned theaters. Most of the time hit movies were simply not distributed to smaller theaters.

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Joshua Frank’s article in Counterpunch (or on his blog) caught my eye, particularly because it helps to begin answering the question I implicitly asked when I wrote about Cindy Sheehan before—what will she do when it comes time to make an electoral decision? Frank gives her credit for restarting the moribund anti-war movement which took some time off to champion pro-war Sen. John Kerry during his run for US President. Frank also links to another worthwhile article in Counterpunch from John Walsh. The PDA, or Progressive Democrats of America, are based on the idea that they can rebuild the Democrats from within; offering the Democrats support will somehow transform the Democrats into making better votes (not that their website offers challenge to Democrats voting records). Medea Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan serve on the PDA Advisory Board.

From the article:

I’m not sure how working to elect “progressive” Democrats to office, which [Medea] Benjamin and Sheehan are now attempting to do with the PDA, will ever help build an alternative to the two pro-war parties. Nor am I convinced that electing Democrats to office will ever end the war in Iraq — as John Walsh recently explained in Counterpunch, even if the Democrats pick up the necessary 15 seats to reclaim the House, their overall position on the war will not be changing, as no new Democratic House contenders actually oppose the war.

Perhaps Cindy Sheehan has fallen into the vicious trap of non-profit activism, where she cannot truly speak her mind without being fearful that her liberal supporters will pull their funding from the groups she aligns with. Or maybe Sheehan just doesn’t get it. Maybe she doesn’t understand that elections are a great place to go after the war enablers for all of their awful habits and evil deeds.