Re: It's obvious that violent video games de-sensitize.
Unless a person is insane, they know the difference between killing characters in a video game and actually killing people IRl. It would be unethical to create an experiment to determine if video games had any real effect in desensitization to real violence. One would expect, as violent video games become more common, that there would be an increase in the rate of violence in any particular culture. That is quite different than just a correlation between violent people and those folks use of violent video games. Also, I think those in the military though would see a change in how soldiers react to their first taste of combat.
I can see that violent video games might offer enough desensitization to those who are assigned UAV control duty and have to fire missiles remotely.
The woman who died thought she was doing a transaction with a Canadian on-line pharmacy. I don't think Canada is intending on shutting down all their on-line pharmacies. Even if the PROTECT IP act is passed and denies these pharmacies the majority of their customers, who are Americans, there will still be a market for on-line pharmacies in Canada. At the very least, those people, like Marcia Mooty, who live in remote places with no easy access to brick and mortar pharmacies. A rogue pharmacy, posing as a Canadian pharmacy, may hope to do a lot of business with Americans. Even if that market is eliminated by this new U.S. law doesn't mean that such rogue pharmacies will entirely disappear. Are you suggesting that U.S. law can control what happens on the internet completely outside of the U.S.? Canada does have its own top level domain (.ca) and that rogue pharmacy may have been using it.
Is she being manipulated? Maybe, if so, they have done a damn good job of getting her to be a mouthpiece. This is her letter to the editor of the local paper:
Glenda Billerbeck's letter on the FIghtOnlineTheft website is either deceptive or just ignorant. She writes:
"The worst part is that Marcia’s death could have been prevented had the government been given the tools to root out online counterfeiters. That is exactly why I support the efforts in Washington to enact legislation to cut off these sites from the U.S. market, such as the PROTECT IP Act (S. 968), that was introduced last May."
Well, Marcia Mooty was living in Canada at the time, so how would a U.S. law have prevented her death? If Glenda was truly conscientious about preventing this again she would have mentioned what this article did"
"Marshall Moleschi, registrar of the College of Pharmacists of B.C., said any B.C. pharmacy selling drugs online must publish its name and address on its site -- and the college's phone number, which people can call to verify the site is legitimate."
I imagine their might be a similar way to do this in the U.S., or is there? At any rate since it appears that most online pharmacies used by Americans are Canadian, the same method of calling to verify can be used by Americans.
"The biggest customers for online Canadian pharmacies are Americans, who pay high prices for many drugs."
Cisco has a wide variety of products. Software based routers, including those of Vyatta, can replace only a portion of their products. The increase in computing power of CPUs and GPUs, and the addition of multi-core has allowed such routers to become capable of displacing part of the hardware-forwarded based routers. I worked on such a router before Vyatta's existence and have followed Vyatta with interest. However, I take exception to their claim that their most capable product is an enterprise level router. There is still a place for hardware forwarding routers that do indeed come priced at a premium. Cisco is the leader but is definitely not the only player. I know people at Cisco, I have worked with people who formerly worked at Cisco and I may yet work at Cisco someday. I have to say this story leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I agree, spoofing a MAC is easy. You just have to remember to do this in situations where the MAC address is potentially logged. This will become more problematic as use of IPV6, with incorporated MACs, becomes more widespread. For most people at home, the MAC address associated with them will be the one assigned to their router or router/DSL modem.
"wiping", although not really a technical term, has been taken to mean overwriting all sectors on a hard drive. It is true that using your OS to "delete" files, normally only deletes the directory entries and leaves the files contents intact. I use PGP software on my Windows machine which hooks into the delete command and actually wipes the file.
Don't forget, that wireless hotspot may have logged the MAC address from your computer. This MAC address is most likely stored on ROM or FLASH associated with your NIC. Also, multiple erase passes, such as the Gutmann method, has not been necessary for a decade. One pass will do on modern drives that are much more dense than before. The threshold size associated with this density is 15GB.
The article states:
"Neither the Registry nor State Police keep tabs on the number of people wrongly tagged by the system."
They do have the total number of people who were tagged by the system and they do have the number of licenses revoked. If anyone there can subtract, they would immediately have the number of people wrongly tagged. I can see that they would rather not keep track of this problematic number, however, I will attempt to make an estimate.
Massachusetts is using L-1 Identity Solutions' facial recognition system. L1 claims in their website that one of their facial recognition systems (all their products may be based on the same algorithms) came out as "best all around performer" in a National Institute of Standards (NIST) evaluation of facial recognition algorithms in 2006. Unfortunately, it is not clear from the names which one of these is L1's algorithm. Keep in mind that the algorithms may have been improved since 2006. I don't know. This was NIST's most recent facial recognition shootout. Here is the link: http://www.frvt.org/FRVT2006/docs/FRVT2006andICE2006LargeScaleReport.pdf
The two most important characteristics of biometric identification algorithms are False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). In this case, FAR covers those cases where two photos of the same person are not identified as identical. FRR applies to cases where the photos from two different people are wrongly identified as identical. It is usually the case that tweaking the algorithm to favor on rate makes the other worse. NIST reports that the best algorithms had an FRR of .01 while holding the FAR at .001. The FAR is a percentage of the total multiple license fraud cases. .001 X (>1000 cases) means there was on average 1 or 2 fraud cases that went undetected. They might have decided to improve this by tweaking the algorithm with the side effect of making the FRR worse. This is actually reasonable considering they further vet the flagged cases with human evaluation. It is interesting to note that the NIST evaluation shows that humans are worse than the algorithms at recognizing that two pictures belong to the same person when that person is not familiar to them. The further vetting that the RMV does probably involves other information than looking at the pictures. The FRR rate given was .01 for the best algorithms. FRR would be a percentage of the total number of licenses issued. It is independent of the fraud rate. The number of licensed drivers in Massachusetts is 4,645,705 (www.statemaster.com). Licenses are renewed every 5 years. Doing the math: .01 X (4,645,705 / 5) = 9291. This is a low number as Massachusetts is also vetting the entire licensed driver database during the next 3 years. It is not clear how much human evaluation reduces this number. There is a potential that thousands of innocent licensed drivers are inconvenienced by having to verify their identity again.
I would suggest, at the very least, that Massachusetts, and any other state doing such facial recognition, be required to officially serve notice (i.e. process serving) when a license is to be revoked
A side note: The NIST 2006 evaluation also covered Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE). This involves using the iris of the eye for biometric identification. What is interesting is that this report, from a government agency, hints that patents discourage innovation.
"Because of the Flom and Safir patent and the lack of a publicly accessible dataset of images, there was limited research in iris recognition for most of the decade following the publication of Daugman’s algorithm. With the expiration of the Flom and Safir patent, and the availability of the CASIA dataset and the ICE 2005 challenge problem and dataset, research activity in iris recognition has greatly increased in recent years."
One of the reasons given to support the existence of this system is prevention of terrorism. That reason would seem to be the primary one behind the $1.5 million grant from the DHS to Massachusetts . A terrorist wants the legitimacy granted by the possession of a driver's license credential. A terrorist may use some sort of fraud to be issued a license or to make a counterfeit license. This facial recognition process is limited to registering for a driver's license and will not uncover counterfeit licensing. If a terrorist already has a license, why would they need another one? That would be an unnecessary and silly risk. Registration requires you to show up, in person, and get your picture taken. What sorts of fraud will be caught by a facial recognition check, outside of duplicate licenses to the same person? An identity theft situation, where the terrorist does not resemble the person with an existing license, could be caught by the registrar, who is facing you, checking the database for the same name. This leaves identity theft where the terrorist does resemble an existing license holder. First, the terrorist has to find a license holder they resemble and use a change of address or gender to justify issuing a new license. Normally, the terrorist would then have a window of opportunity of up to a year (average of 6 months) before the real person has to renew car registration and uncover the theft because of the changes now affecting them. Applying the facial recognition system reduces that window to however long it takes someone in the DMV to get around to looking over the flagged license by hand and then issue a notice to validate identity. In this situation, why wouldn't the terrorist wait until the couple of days before their terrorist action and steal that person's physical license rather than their identity?
It doesn't make sense to justify vetting licenses via facial recognition software as a defense against terrorism. It seems more likely that some bureaucrat(s) blindly advocated facial recognition license vetting as a weapon against terrorism because it fit into their "one person, one license" mantra and didn't think it through.
My guess is that 1500/day number was the result of a misunderstanding of a question by the reporter or the reporter's misunderstanding of the statement by the registrar. It probably is the number of suspensions for any reason, not just a picture conflict.
When the system flags a 1000 (obviously a rounded number) matches, that represents at least 2000 licenses. They will be revoking both licenses if they figure it is fraud and a single person has multiple licenses.
In the Apple store example, the installed program just took photos at regular intervals, whether a customer was there or not. What I understood, was that the photos were only transmitted if the software identified a face as being in the photo. Is there still enough artistic input for copyright to apply for photos taken by a timer by a webcam that you neither own or configure as to position or framing? It gets even less clear if you consider a security camera, and the photos or videos it takes. This could actually be an issue because there are security camera videos that became viral on the internet. A recent case is the video of the thief of the Picasso drawing in S.F.. There is certainly some point for recorded images where there isn't enough artistic input for copyright to involved. Exactly what is that point?
Noam Chomsky would have more of a copyright, or rather trademark, issue with the name Nim than Robert O'brien would. I saw the movie, "The Secret of NIMH" with my son when he was almost 3. He thought it was too scary. I thought it was just strange, probably because I did an internship at NIMH while I was in college. I was involved with a study on human schizophrenics, but a friend of mine was doing a study which made cocaine addicts out of monkeys. I forget which type of monkey, but they were not Macaques.
A Macaque monkey taking a self-photo doesn't fit in with the subject of Project Nim. Firstly, Nim Chimpsky was a chimpanzee. There are larger differences between a chimpanzee and a Macaque than between humans and chimpanzees. Secondly, the documentary discusses the lack of scientific rigorousness of the "experiment" which was somewhat abusive of Nim.
I would appreciate Google releasing their source code related to WI-FI data collection. It would make me trust them more. I don't think they should be forced, legally somehow, to reveal it.
The 3rd-party audit that Google had done on this code showed, to me, that Google didn't have to collect the body of data frames for mapping WI-FI access points but they did anyway. The script used to control the code had a set of flags to use which determined which type of frames were collected (control, management, and data). You could either collect a type of frame or discard it without saving a copy. However, only for encrypted data frames was there a flag for discarding the body as opposed to header information. For unencrypted data frames, if you collected them there was no option to discard the frame body. That tells me that Google's collection of this data was not accidental. I do not see any nefarious use of this information because it was partial. Google was not spending time monitoring any specific access point or host. It does show that Google was not very concerned about a perceived invasion of privacy. They should be, at the very least for the PR benefit.
Re: This ain't "art": it's computer aided snooping.
I am not looking for the role of Google apologist nor am I completely trustful of everything the NSA might be up to, however, I must point out the NSA is not a law enforcement agency and they do have a computer security hat in addition to their surveillance hat. The partnership between Google and the NSA could be just one of cooperation to find technical solutions to Aurora vulnerabilities (the alleged Chinese spearfishing expedition). Then again, the NSA is being awfully cagey, or is that just complete stonewalling, in disclosing any details about the relationship. This is their response to EPIC's FOIA related lawsuit.
The judge laid out what was necessary as the criteria for making a decision. He knew he was dealing with a law that didn't take into account WIFI technology so he had a very careful set of steps to follow to figure out how to apply the law given there was an inherent ambiguity. He followed those steps methodically. If the decision, so far, against Google doesn't seem to follow common sense, it does follow the law. Judge Ware is practically screaming for this law to be updated so that WIFI communications can be properly put into the G1 exception.
There is absolutely nothing in this decision that indicates a bias against Google. I don't think your argument is a red herring only because I, certainly most people here, and probably Judge Ware think that Google should not be considered to have committed wiretapping. The current law is wrong in relation to WIFI technology, however, "Google hate" is irrelevant to this case.
My "irrational" bias against Google has to do with my experience with the Google Toolbar. I downloaded it to check it out and the disabled it because I did not want all the URL's sent out by my browser ending up in a Google database. At a later time, when I was using the Wireshark packet sniffer for something else, I noticed a lot of unexpected traffic going to an IP address within the Google range. Even though I had completely disabled the Google Toolbar via the add-on controls, it was still sending all my URLs to Google. There was nothing accidental about that. Google provides great tools but they don't come free. You are paying for them by giving up your privacy. The Google Toolbar example demonstrates that I was intentionally misled by Google so that they could continue to collect personal data concerning me. Google may consider that benign and not evil but when they are deceptive in their privacy practices I do consider that evil.
The government did think outside the box here. The trouble is they haven't though it through. Let's suppose the court allows them to maintain their seizure of the trademark. According to trademark law the government will have to actually use the trademark or they will lose it after a period of time. I don't believe the federal government intends to use it, although, it's fun to imagine them using the logo as part of the uniform for federal agents involved in VIPR checkpoints on roadways.
Enforcement of their ownership of the trademark will turn trademark law upside down. Here you have a group of people that, I am fairly certain, have exclusively used this logo for a number of years. The courts would have to throw all the normal considerations of previous usage by the motorcycle gang and usage, or rather non-usage, by the current trademark holder (the feds) out the window. Additionally, trademark law would not prevent any gang members from identifying themselves as Mongols. It would also be a stretch to say they couldn't wear the logo, although they made the clothing themselves and were not selling it. Maybe we can all agree that the planet would be better off without the Mongols motorcycle gang's existence. However, I don't agree the goal of eliminating them justifies the twisting of law into an ugly distortion. Why can't federal law enforcement be content with prosecuting them for real crimes. In prison they won't be wearing that logo and a condition of parole could be the prohibition of associating with gang members and the wearing of gang identifying clothing.
A similar tactic is using gang injunctions to prevent gang members from associating and restricting their movement within a fairly large "zone". It can also include restrictions on wearing gang clothing within that zone. This goes against the grain of the U.S. constitution including the 1st amendment (freedom of assembly). This is the equivalent of imposing parole restrictions on a convict but without the necessity of requiring someone to be convicted of a crime. Gangs are an ugly reality in many areas. People who are affected by them see any attempt to control or eliminate them as justified. Once, in a comment on a gang injunction article in the S.F. Chronicle (the newspaper referenced for this story), I suggested that gangs should form Political Action Committees (PACs) to defeat any injunctions. I am not really sure that would work but I am sure gangs aren't smart enough to do that. At any rate, my comment was greatly despised.
On the post: And Here Comes The Video Game Backlash Due To The Norway Tragedy
Re: It's obvious that violent video games de-sensitize.
I can see that violent video games might offer enough desensitization to those who are assigned UAV control duty and have to fire missiles remotely.
On the post: And Here Comes The Video Game Backlash Due To The Norway Tragedy
Re: Citation?
http://blogs.forbes.com/johngaudiosi/2011/07/24/norway-suspect-used-activisions-call-of-duty-t o-train-for-massacre/
This is the link that is posted in this article. Did you miss it, or do you not consider Forbes mainstream?
On the post: And Here Comes The Video Game Backlash Due To The Norway Tragedy
Re:
On the post: US Chamber Of Commerce Continues Duplicitous Campaign To Conflate Counterfeit Drugs With Copyright Infringement
Re:
On the post: US Chamber Of Commerce Continues Duplicitous Campaign To Conflate Counterfeit Drugs With Copyright Infringement
Re:
http://www.reinbeckcourier.com/page/content.detail/id/503646/Letter-to-the-editor.html?nav =5003
On the post: US Chamber Of Commerce Continues Duplicitous Campaign To Conflate Counterfeit Drugs With Copyright Infringement
a bit of deception
"The worst part is that Marcia’s death could have been prevented had the government been given the tools to root out online counterfeiters. That is exactly why I support the efforts in Washington to enact legislation to cut off these sites from the U.S. market, such as the PROTECT IP Act (S. 968), that was introduced last May."
Well, Marcia Mooty was living in Canada at the time, so how would a U.S. law have prevented her death? If Glenda was truly conscientious about preventing this again she would have mentioned what this article did"
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=a16c39c9-0cc7-468f-a3d0-c1fe022649c3
"Marshall Moleschi, registrar of the College of Pharmacists of B.C., said any B.C. pharmacy selling drugs online must publish its name and address on its site -- and the college's phone number, which people can call to verify the site is legitimate."
I imagine their might be a similar way to do this in the U.S., or is there? At any rate since it appears that most online pharmacies used by Americans are Canadian, the same method of calling to verify can be used by Americans.
"The biggest customers for online Canadian pharmacies are Americans, who pay high prices for many drugs."
On the post: How Cisco & The Justice Department Conspired To Try To Destroy One Man's Life For Daring To Sue Cisco
Re:
On the post: Arresting People Associated With Anonymous Unlikely To Have The Impact The Feds Expect
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"wiping", although not really a technical term, has been taken to mean overwriting all sectors on a hard drive. It is true that using your OS to "delete" files, normally only deletes the directory entries and leaves the files contents intact. I use PGP software on my Windows machine which hooks into the delete command and actually wipes the file.
On the post: Arresting People Associated With Anonymous Unlikely To Have The Impact The Feds Expect
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: The Failures Of Facial Recognition Software: Drivers Losing Licenses For Looking Like Terrorists
Lack of numbers, FAR and FRR.
"Neither the Registry nor State Police keep tabs on the number of people wrongly tagged by the system."
They do have the total number of people who were tagged by the system and they do have the number of licenses revoked. If anyone there can subtract, they would immediately have the number of people wrongly tagged. I can see that they would rather not keep track of this problematic number, however, I will attempt to make an estimate.
Massachusetts is using L-1 Identity Solutions' facial recognition system. L1 claims in their website that one of their facial recognition systems (all their products may be based on the same algorithms) came out as "best all around performer" in a National Institute of Standards (NIST) evaluation of facial recognition algorithms in 2006. Unfortunately, it is not clear from the names which one of these is L1's algorithm. Keep in mind that the algorithms may have been improved since 2006. I don't know. This was NIST's most recent facial recognition shootout. Here is the link:
http://www.frvt.org/FRVT2006/docs/FRVT2006andICE2006LargeScaleReport.pdf
The two most important characteristics of biometric identification algorithms are False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). In this case, FAR covers those cases where two photos of the same person are not identified as identical. FRR applies to cases where the photos from two different people are wrongly identified as identical. It is usually the case that tweaking the algorithm to favor on rate makes the other worse. NIST reports that the best algorithms had an FRR of .01 while holding the FAR at .001. The FAR is a percentage of the total multiple license fraud cases. .001 X (>1000 cases) means there was on average 1 or 2 fraud cases that went undetected. They might have decided to improve this by tweaking the algorithm with the side effect of making the FRR worse. This is actually reasonable considering they further vet the flagged cases with human evaluation. It is interesting to note that the NIST evaluation shows that humans are worse than the algorithms at recognizing that two pictures belong to the same person when that person is not familiar to them. The further vetting that the RMV does probably involves other information than looking at the pictures. The FRR rate given was .01 for the best algorithms. FRR would be a percentage of the total number of licenses issued. It is independent of the fraud rate. The number of licensed drivers in Massachusetts is 4,645,705 (www.statemaster.com). Licenses are renewed every 5 years. Doing the math: .01 X (4,645,705 / 5) = 9291. This is a low number as Massachusetts is also vetting the entire licensed driver database during the next 3 years. It is not clear how much human evaluation reduces this number. There is a potential that thousands of innocent licensed drivers are inconvenienced by having to verify their identity again.
I would suggest, at the very least, that Massachusetts, and any other state doing such facial recognition, be required to officially serve notice (i.e. process serving) when a license is to be revoked
A side note: The NIST 2006 evaluation also covered Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE). This involves using the iris of the eye for biometric identification. What is interesting is that this report, from a government agency, hints that patents discourage innovation.
"Because of the Flom and Safir patent and the lack of a publicly accessible dataset of images, there was limited research in iris recognition for most of the decade following the publication of Daugman’s algorithm. With the expiration of the Flom and Safir patent, and the availability of the CASIA dataset and the ICE 2005 challenge problem and dataset, research activity in iris recognition has greatly increased in recent years."
On the post: The Failures Of Facial Recognition Software: Drivers Losing Licenses For Looking Like Terrorists
Is this about terrorism?
It doesn't make sense to justify vetting licenses via facial recognition software as a defense against terrorism. It seems more likely that some bureaucrat(s) blindly advocated facial recognition license vetting as a weapon against terrorism because it fit into their "one person, one license" mantra and didn't think it through.
On the post: The Failures Of Facial Recognition Software: Drivers Losing Licenses For Looking Like Terrorists
Faulty numbers
When the system flags a 1000 (obviously a rounded number) matches, that represents at least 2000 licenses. They will be revoking both licenses if they figure it is fraud and a single person has multiple licenses.
On the post: Photographer David Slater Claims That Because He Thought Monkeys Might Take Pictures, Copyright Is His
Re:
On the post: Photographer David Slater Claims That Because He Thought Monkeys Might Take Pictures, Copyright Is His
Re: Saying it was an "accident."
On the post: Photographer David Slater Claims That Because He Thought Monkeys Might Take Pictures, Copyright Is His
Re: Re: Re: Re: Planet of the Apes
On the post: Photographer David Slater Claims That Because He Thought Monkeys Might Take Pictures, Copyright Is His
Re: Re: Re: Planet of the Apes
On the post: Microsoft Opens Its WiFi Data Collection Source Code; Why Doesn't Google Do The Same?
Re: Re: Glenn Beck style
The 3rd-party audit that Google had done on this code showed, to me, that Google didn't have to collect the body of data frames for mapping WI-FI access points but they did anyway. The script used to control the code had a set of flags to use which determined which type of frames were collected (control, management, and data). You could either collect a type of frame or discard it without saving a copy. However, only for encrypted data frames was there a flag for discarding the body as opposed to header information. For unencrypted data frames, if you collected them there was no option to discard the frame body. That tells me that Google's collection of this data was not accidental. I do not see any nefarious use of this information because it was partial. Google was not spending time monitoring any specific access point or host. It does show that Google was not very concerned about a perceived invasion of privacy. They should be, at the very least for the PR benefit.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//googleblo gs/pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf
On the post: Secret Service Descends on Artist For Mildly Creepy Public Photography
Re: This ain't "art": it's computer aided snooping.
http://epic.org/2011/02/epic-v-nsa-foia-lawsuit-nsa-wi.html
A summary of speculation about the relationship:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/188581/the_googlensa_alliance_questions_and_answers.ht ml
and EPIC's statement to congress:
http://epic.org/privacy/cloudcomputing/google/EPIC_Cybersecurity_Statement.pdf
From Consumer Watchdog's report you might find out why Google owns a fighter jet.
http://insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf
Finally, this is Consumer Watchdog's humorous take on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's testimony before congress, though I get the feeling CW doesn't really think it's all that funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBMPphy9gFg&feature=player_embedded
On the post: Judge Who Doesn't Understand Technology Says WiFi Is Not A Radio Communication
Re: Google Hate
There is absolutely nothing in this decision that indicates a bias against Google. I don't think your argument is a red herring only because I, certainly most people here, and probably Judge Ware think that Google should not be considered to have committed wiretapping. The current law is wrong in relation to WIFI technology, however, "Google hate" is irrelevant to this case.
My "irrational" bias against Google has to do with my experience with the Google Toolbar. I downloaded it to check it out and the disabled it because I did not want all the URL's sent out by my browser ending up in a Google database. At a later time, when I was using the Wireshark packet sniffer for something else, I noticed a lot of unexpected traffic going to an IP address within the Google range. Even though I had completely disabled the Google Toolbar via the add-on controls, it was still sending all my URLs to Google. There was nothing accidental about that. Google provides great tools but they don't come free. You are paying for them by giving up your privacy. The Google Toolbar example demonstrates that I was intentionally misled by Google so that they could continue to collect personal data concerning me. Google may consider that benign and not evil but when they are deceptive in their privacy practices I do consider that evil.
On the post: Feds Still Trying To Abuse Trademark Law (?!?) To Stop Motorcycle Gang
Re:
Enforcement of their ownership of the trademark will turn trademark law upside down. Here you have a group of people that, I am fairly certain, have exclusively used this logo for a number of years. The courts would have to throw all the normal considerations of previous usage by the motorcycle gang and usage, or rather non-usage, by the current trademark holder (the feds) out the window. Additionally, trademark law would not prevent any gang members from identifying themselves as Mongols. It would also be a stretch to say they couldn't wear the logo, although they made the clothing themselves and were not selling it. Maybe we can all agree that the planet would be better off without the Mongols motorcycle gang's existence. However, I don't agree the goal of eliminating them justifies the twisting of law into an ugly distortion. Why can't federal law enforcement be content with prosecuting them for real crimes. In prison they won't be wearing that logo and a condition of parole could be the prohibition of associating with gang members and the wearing of gang identifying clothing.
A similar tactic is using gang injunctions to prevent gang members from associating and restricting their movement within a fairly large "zone". It can also include restrictions on wearing gang clothing within that zone. This goes against the grain of the U.S. constitution including the 1st amendment (freedom of assembly). This is the equivalent of imposing parole restrictions on a convict but without the necessity of requiring someone to be convicted of a crime. Gangs are an ugly reality in many areas. People who are affected by them see any attempt to control or eliminate them as justified. Once, in a comment on a gang injunction article in the S.F. Chronicle (the newspaper referenced for this story), I suggested that gangs should form Political Action Committees (PACs) to defeat any injunctions. I am not really sure that would work but I am sure gangs aren't smart enough to do that. At any rate, my comment was greatly despised.
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