When the first message on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s Internet) was sent by UCLA programmer Charley Kline, on October 29, 1969, the message text was the word “login”; the letters “l” and the “o” were transmitted, then the system crashed.

Forty two years later, the Internet is everywhere and rapidly becoming embedded in every device. Kevin Kelly sees the Net as evolving into a single “planetary computer” with “all the many gadgets we possess” as “windows into its core.” The Internet Society’s slogan is “The Internet is for everyone,” but Vint Cerf (who co-developed the TCP/IP network protocol that connects everything on the Net today) now prefers “The Internet is for everything.”

The world-wide adoption of a decentralized network that connects everything creates continuous technical, social and policy challenges that no one could have foreseen in 1969. Even as we take the Net for granted, the way we do the air that we breathe, decisions are being made by policy-makers, technologists and end-users that shape its future.

The success of the Internet has had a great deal to do with the development of open standards — often by volunteers — in groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Decisions in Working Groups (WG) of the IETF are reached by consensus on the group mailing list so that anyone active on that list can be part of the process.

The need to add capacity is a constant challenge. What balance of public and private funding, regulation or deregulation are appropriate, and which types of infrastructure (centralized vs. decentralized; fiber, cable, wireless) warrant investment are subject to ongoing debate.

The Net has provided a platform for incredible innovation and economic growth. How to reward innovation and creativity while encouraging the widest dissemination of new content and technologies? How to encourage disruptive technologies while mitigating their potentially negative impacts?

Does there have to be a conflict between freedom and privacy on one hand and security on the other? How can users safely share personal information using social media which rely on the sale of their personal data as a business model? What legal and technical protections are necessary for businesses to securely move into the cloud?

Internet users have continuously influenced key technology innovations and policy decisions. But keeping them in the decision-making loop as they increasingly take the Net for granted presents an ongoing challenge.

On June 14, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will address these questions as keynote speakers for the INET Conference in New York City, sponsored by the Internet Society and the Internet Society of New York. [Disclaimer: As President of the Internet Society of New York I will deliver opening remarks.]

There will also be panels featuring industry leaders, members of civil society organizations, open source software advocates and government officials. The conference is open to the public although advance registration is required. It will also be streamed live.

Just as a democracy is never the rule of the people, but rather the people who participate in the process, the Internet has evolved through the efforts of technologists and activists — many who have volunteered their time to develop open standards, open source software and to advocate for an open Internet. It’s your call: What kind of Internet do you want?

The temporary shutdown in Egypt of Internet and other telecommunication services, as well as similar interruptions in other Middle East countries experiencing large-scale protests and rebellions, has galvanized hackers and human rights activists as well as U.S. foreign policy makers. The consequences may be not be what anyone expected.

The technologies for secure, private, fault tolerant communication via the Internet exist but have not yet been widely implemented or bundled together in a single, user-friendly system.

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf was asked in a recent interview whether there was technical solution to a government shutdown of the Net. The Internet “is controllable by the government, [so] it’s possible to turn off the Internet,” he said. The solution, mesh networking, “can be done without benefit of things like routers provided by Internet Service providers.”

Mesh networking makes each device on a network capable of routing data to any other device, with the ability to rapidly change paths in the event of an interruption or blockage.

A current project of Cerf’s, the Interplanetary Internet, designed to overcome the delays and interruptions to communications during space exploration, could also be adapted to handle a partial shutdown of Net communications by an authoritarian government during a political crisis.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and software freedom advocate, first proposed the Freedom Box – a tiny device that could provide private, secure, fault-tolerant Internet access using mesh networking – at an Internet Society of New York event in February 2010. He has since founded the Freedom Box Foundation, has some early prototype software and expects to have a fully working device available for under $100 in twelve months. Another project, diaspora, was inspired by Moglen’s proposal and is developing a more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook. The Freedom Box and diaspora both use a decentralized, peer-to peer model for improved security and to give the user more control.

On February 15, Hillary Clinton’s gave her second annual Net Freedom Speech, which denounced the Egyptian government for its Net shutdown. The State Department now has a number of initiatives and grants for the development of Internet censorship circumvention technologies.

But governments often have different agendas and policies for different situations. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarek was viewed as a “force of moderation” before he became a “dictator” when the geopolitical winds shifted. As Clinton was making her speech, Wired reported that the FBI Pushes for Surveillance Backdoors in Web 2.0 Tools and an antiwar protestor in Clinton’s audience was roughed up when he turned his back to her. Would he have been unscathed if he had tweeted his protest?

Even with the best intentions, high-profile Internet freedom initiatives by nation-states can have unexpected consequences. Evgeny Morozov says of Clinton’s speeches:

Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don’t talk about promoting Internet freedom.

The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far from perfect before Clinton’s initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those countries’ fraught relations with the United States.

Today, foreign governments … are now seeking “information sovereignty” from American companies … Internet search, social networking, and even email are increasingly seen as strategic industries that need to be protected from foreign control.

The U.S military has developed open source software for secure, private communication on the Internet, however. The Tor project, which develops Tor, a tool for private, encrypted communication on the Internet, is used by many dissidents in authoritarian countries, as well as by Wikileaks, and was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

But not every such project has been as successful. The Haystack program, designed to help Iranian dissidents, actually endangered them because it was easily intercepted by the Iranian authorities due to flaws in its design. It received a huge amount of hype but the developer, Austin Heap, refused to allow security experts to examine it. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury Department granted Heap an Office of Foreign Assets Control license to export the software to Iran, in effect endorsing it. By the time it the software bugs became publicly known, the damage had been done.

Open source software advocate and cyberliberties activist Eric Raymond was also helping Iranian dissidents connect to the outside world at that time. He reflects:

… to protect your network, and yourself, you have to accept that you are going to have relatively little information about what your network partners are doing and what their capabilities are …. my rationally-chosen ignorance left me unable to form judgments about whether people in my network were lying to me. More subtly … it left me unable to form judgments about whether they were lying to themselves.

I don’t mean to excuse whatever lies Austin Heap may have told, but I do mean to suggest he may well have been his own first victim.

Open source software, where the inner workings of a program are available for public scrutiny, is essential when developing tools for secure communication in a highly insecure environment.

But open source is not a panacea. Take the case of OpenBSD, an open source operating system bundled with thousands of applications, which has been optimized for security by a team of the world’s best security experts. OpenBSD is sponsored by a nonprofit foundation and many of the programmers volunteer their time.

At one point the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) gave OpenBSD a grant, then rescinded it when OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt made remarks critical of the Iraq war.

In December 2010, de Raadt received an email alleging the FBI had paid some OpenBSD ex-developers to insert backdoors into the software. He was skeptical but immediately made the email public and invited an independent review of the relevant program code. A few bugs were fixed but no evidence of a backdoor was found. So even though the allegations turned out to be false, they succeeded anyway – as an act of psychological warfare – by destroying trust in the OpenBSD project.

George Orwell said:

… ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance…. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

At first it would seem that a social networking service like twitter, recently used by many protesters in the Middle East, would fit Orwell’s definition of a “simple weapon” that “gives claws to the weak”. But in fact the situation is much more ambiguous. Twitter is a for-profit corporation which must maintain large data centers and a complex infrastructure. And they are subject to many financial, legal and political pressures.

Internet freedom initiatives must be independent of political connotations, run on a decentralized infrastructure, and use technology that is subject to public review by security experts. Most importantly, users must have complete trust in the skills and integrity of the people providing those tools and services.

If they don’t the cure could prove worse than the disease.

Note: Wikipedia has a good list of other anti-censorship software.

Protesters fed up with political repression, corruption and poverty (particularly recent food price inflation) toppled the government of Tunisia. They threaten to do the same in other countries throughout the Mideast as pundits hail the “Twitter and Facebook revolution.” But repressive governments have as much compunction about shutting down communication services as they do about torturing dissidents.

Egypt has cut all Internet access and most mobile phone service as huge protests threaten to topple that government. For a while the ISP Noor remained online — largely because it connects the country’s Stock Exchange and many offices of foreign companies to the outside world. Noor has now been cut off as well.

Interestingly, Egypt and Tunisia have some of the largest percentages of the population online in Africa. Egypt’s Communications Minister, Tarek Kamel, was secretary and co-founder of the global Internet Society’s Egyptian Chapter (which is no longer active). He is still listed as a member of the Board of Trustees on the Internet Society’s website. The Internet Society has strongly denounced the Internet shutdown.

Kamel is widely recognized as the person who brought the Internet to Egypt. He has publicly supported the open development of the Internet. His bio on the Internet Society’s website states that in the early years of the development of the Internet in Egypt, “Kamel’s work extended into liberalization issues such as a tax reduction for ISPs as well as a government/private sector partnership to serve the Egyptian Internet community. He has actively participated in the establishment of community centers in remote areas to bring the Internet to the have-nots.” His role in the shutdown is unknown, although he wasn’t among the cabinet members removed in the shakeup of the Egyptian government in the wake of the protests.

Cutting off most communication with the outside world for an extended period would be economic suicide for any modern, developed country, but temporary interruption — long enough to kill or imprison a large number of protesters without too much visibility for squeamish foreign allies — is viable for a poor country ruled by an elite supported by gifts of military technology from wealthier countries.

The protesters’ vulnerability is relying on highly centralized communication networks and services while fighting an overly centralized political system. The younger ones probably don’t have any memory of being without mobile phones and the Internet and may have taken them for granted.

To succeed in the face of violent repression and the shutdown of Internet and phone service, they must quickly develop low-tech strategies that are as fast and flexible as the ones that have been lost.

Another approach is to build communication services that cannot be intercepted or shut down. Human rights activists and hackers are already starting to do it with combination of low-cost commodity hardware and free open source software:

• Landlines still work in Egypt and a French ISP FDN offers free dialup Internet to Egyptians. Instructions to connect to foreign ISPs via dialup with a mobile phone are also being circulated for those who can use them.
• For Egyptians who are still able to use their mobile phones, there is Sukey, “a security-conscious news, communications and logistics support service principally for use by demonstrators during demonstrations.”
• Tech entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar put a call out on Twitter for volunteers to help construct self-configuring unblockable mobile ad hoc networks to prevent government caused blackouts during future protests worldwide.
• We Rebuild, a Europe-based group working for free speech and an open Internet is developing non-Internet modes of communication, including amateur, shortwave and pirate radio as well as a fax gateway, to assist protesters and humanitarian relief efforts. Information on these efforts can be found on their Telecomix news site.
• Remaining Internet activity is certainly being monitored. The Tor network of anonymous, encrypted proxies has seen a huge increase in Egyptian traffic.

Efforts like these could be the tipping point for the uprisings. In 1989 Czech student protesters received a gift of then state of the art 2400 baud modems from a mysterious man who may have been from the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. Modems were illegal but the most Czech police didn’t even know what they were. The students set up BBS systems to coordinate actions throughout the country and successfully overthrew the Soviet communist backed dictatorship.

If you think the problems people in Egypt have could never happen here, you might want to think again. In the U.S. the “Internet kill switch” bill in Congress would allow interruption of Internet services in a “national cyberemergency.” Senator Joe Lieberman, who introduced the bill in the Senate, has described the Internet as a “dangerous place” and promised the bill would protect against “cyber terrorists.”

Some of our current political leaders, hanging on every word of their consultants and pollsters, and terrified of harsh criticism, might consider hostile online commentary more of an “emergency” than something trivial like say, a collision with an asteroid.

General Douglas MacArthur said, “No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.” Today that vigilance means learning to build and modify the technology that we use rather than being passive consumers of it.

As virtually everyone is aware, the Internet has changed the way people do business and how they live their lives. It has also changed the way people do activism.

Gary Franchi, who helped Aaron Russo found Restore The Republic in 2007, spoke at the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum on how to use Internet technologies for political activism.

Along the way, he also explained his relationship to award-winning filmmaker and libertarian political activist Aaron Russo, and how, despite being an outspoken activist who regularly questions the government, he got a top secret security clearance.

“I recently went to a top secret military facility called the National Reconnaissance Office,” Franchi said during his speech. Reading from a book, Top Secret Tourism, which explained that the NRO “coordinates all of America’s spy satellite operations,” he said that he had been invited to a retirement party being held at the NRO, but needed a security clearance to get in.

“It was really weird,” he said. “The security to get in that building was less than the TSA at the airport.” Franchi went on to say that if someone like him could get a security clearance, then “what’s to be afraid of? . . . Don’t have any fear about what you do.”

Franchi explained several ways for activists to use Internet technologies such as forums, social networking sites, and more, to advance activism. I’ll let you watch the video to judge them for yourself.

You haven’t done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” The United States doesn’t hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does kill them.

So why worry about surveillance, if you are honest? As the Miranda saying goes, anything can be used against you in a court of law. Law enforcement’s job is to come up with things to use against you, and the most innocent bits of data, combined together in ways you might not expect, can paint the most honest, innocent person as a criminal. Someday you could find yourself on trial for a crime you never committed, for instance, or you could be detained for hours every time you try to board an airplane or cross the border.

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Surveillance Self-Defense project, an online guide for protecting your private data against government spying. EFF created the guide, it said in a news release, “to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.”

After all, data the government doesn’t have can’t be used against you. I presume, of course, that you are innocent of wrongdoing, and it is for innocent people that this guide is designed: activists who use their First Amendment rights to lobby for changes in government policy, for example, or ordinary Americans who get caught up in a criminal investigation due to a computer error, or simple human mistake such as police serving a warrant at the wrong house. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens far too often.

“Despite a long and troubling history in this country of the government abusing its surveillance powers, most Americans know very little about how the law protects them or about how they can take steps to protect themselves against government surveillance,” said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “The Surveillance Self-Defense project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.”

The site explains the law in the United States as it applies to what data the law enforcement and intelligence communities can obtain about you and how they obtain it. It then covers in depth how to protect your personal data on your computer, as it is in transit over the Internet, and while it is held by third parties. Importantly, it also provides an easy to understand overview of what security is and how to assess your personal security risks so that you can implement security measures which make sense for your own circumstances. Finally it covers specific security measures and technologies which you can use to protect yourself.

I’ve reviewed the site myself and I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest possibility of being targeted by the government for any reason. And, unfortunately, that means every single individual, since, but for happenstance, the next person who gets their house mistakenly raided and their dog shot to death by a SWAT team could be you. Protecting your privacy using these techniques won’t guarantee your security, of course, but it will certainly reduce the likelihood of becoming the next victim of government surveillance.

Ask Internet users what they hate more than anything else online, and invariably the answer will be spam.

I get more spam than most, and I just hit the Junk button for most of it. But when spam comes in with my real name attached, then I give the spammer a few minutes of extra attention. Usually this results in their web hosting and advertising accounts being canceled.

In the case of a spam I received Monday, it might result in someone losing his cushy federal government job.

It appears that on Monday morning someone at the Overseas Security Advisory Council came into work early, and by early I mean six in the morning, sat down at workstation “dsi200w2k3a41,” and started sending spam. The spam is typical of get rich quick schemes, advertising a Web site I won’t link to that wants $44.95 for a copy of the same web site and the ability to send 1,000,000 more spam messages per day — or 2,500,000 per hour, depending on which piece of hype you believe — to rake in $44.95 from hapless Internet users from the buyer’s copy of the site, and so on.

I don’t know what the penalties are, if any, for a federal government employee sending spam from a government computer, but I’m sure there’s a rule somewhere that covers it.

It’s possible that instead of this being an employee actively sending spam from his office computer, that it is instead a Trojan of some kind installed on the workstation sending spam. Though this raises the question of how did such a Trojan get there? Did someone put it there or were the IT staff asleep at the switch?

I contacted OSAC Monday morning and have so far received no response.

OSAC, part of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, exists “to promote security cooperation between American business and private sector interests worldwide and the U.S. Department of State,” according to its Web site. OSAC should start promoting security on its own internal network.

Perhaps the webmaster at Lamperd Less Lethal needs an electric shock.

The Sarnia, Ont.., based defense company told the Washington Times last week that it had removed from its Web site a letter from a Department of Homeland Security official who the department claimed was receiving death threats.

The 2006 letter, from Paul S. Ruwaldt of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, requested information on a “Security Bracelet” which could be used for “restraint of large numbers of individuals” in “prisoner transportation, detainee control and . . . it is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes.”

The letter, accompanying a video on the company’s web site which shows a theoretical use in which every airline passenger would be forced to wear a bracelet capable of delivering a powerful electric shock, received national attention a month ago after being posted on a Washington Times blog.

Many on both sides of the political fence who heard of the story were outraged at the idea of strapping an electric shock device to airline passengers. The company’s EMD Security Bracelet is capable of storing personal information about a passenger, matching each passenger to his or her luggage, tracking passengers as they move through an airport or other large area, and delivering an electro-muscular disruption to individual bracelets on command. The electric shock, more powerful than a standard Taser, is capable of immobilizing a person for several minutes.

Although DHS spokesman John Verrico said that the department was not considering using the bracelet for airline passengers, the attention resulted in Ruwaldt receiving threatening phone calls at home, and the company receiving hate mail, according to Lamperd Less Lethal CEO Barry Lamperd.

“We decided we certainly didn’t want him to get more threats, so we took [the letter] off,” Lamperd told the Times.

Yet the letter remains on the company’s Web site as of this afternoon. It appears the company removed some links to the letter, but not the letter itself. (See for yourself: Page 1, Page 2) Despite being notified a week ago that the letter was still online, the company has not actually removed the letter and it remains available for download.

Removing the links which point to a document on the Internet doesn’t actually remove the document; it can still be accessed by anyone who knows the Web address or through any links from third-party sites and search engines. Biofilm, Inc., manufacturer of Astroglide personal lubrication products, learned this lesson the hard way last year when it leaked 260,000 customer records by publishing the records on its Web site and then blaming the search engines for doing what they naturally do.

No word on whether the bracelet will be used for the other suggested purposes of detaining illegal immigrants and transporting prisoners.

Transportation Security Administration rules are to blame for the conditions leading up to an accidental discharge of a US Airways pilot’s pistol during landing, say airline pilots familiar with the program.

On March 22, pilot James Langenhahn was stowing his Heckler & Koch USP .40, issued to him by the Department of Homeland Security under the Federal Flight Deck Officer program, while his co-pilot prepared to land the plane. As he was placing the pistol, locked in its holster, into his flight bag, it discharged a single shot which exited the left side of the plane, doing little damage.

Outside the cockpit, no one heard the gunshot, and Flight 1536 from Denver to Charlotte, N.C., landed safely. But Langenhahn has been suspended without pay, according to an airline spokesman.

Some 10,000 pilots participate in the program, which allows for pilots, co-pilots and flight engineers to carry firearms in the cockpit during flights, and according to the TSA this is the first time a gun has been discharged. But some pilots say it was an accident waiting to happen.

At issue is a highly unusual TSA requirement that pilots remove the guns from their belts and lock them up using a government-provided combination padlock before leaving the cockpit, a requirement that pilots say creates unsafe conditions.

“The pilot was trying to lock his gun and remove the holster in an airplane going 300 miles per hour in preparation for landing and the padlock depressed the trigger,” said a federal flight deck officer who declined to be identified. “TSA knew this could happen but didn’t get rid of the requirement.”

“Every other federal law enforcement officer in the air and on the ground carries his gun concealed on his person where he can control it. And he never touches it except in an emergency, because the less it is handled, the better,” said David Mackett, president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance. “TSA’s got these pilots taking off and putting on their guns 10 times a day. It’s a recipe for disaster and that’s why no other agency does it.”

Paul Huebl, a former Chicago police officer turned private investigator, created a video which shows how the accident happened and why the TSA’s requirement is unsafe.

The holster has a hole in it through which the padlock is meant to pass. When installed, the padlock should lie behind the trigger. However, if the gun has become loose in the holster, which can happen through normal handling, the lock ends up in front of the trigger, which can cause the gun to discharge.

It’s pretty obvious that nobody who knows anything about firearms had anything to do with setting up these procedures, because they would have instantly rejected them as unsafe. James Langenhahn is to be commended, though, for ensuring the safety of his aircraft even in the face of procedures designed to make it unsafe, by following the normal firearm safety rules, to wit: Always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. This is why the bullet hit nothing important as it exited the aircraft.

Pilots have been unable to criticize this arrangement publicly because the TSA had classified it; however, a group of federal air marshals met with the TSA last year to recommend that pilots carry their pistols in the same way that air marshals do, not to mention everyone else who carries a firearm safely. “We said, ‘Just use the same procedures you use for your own air marshals,’” said one federal flight officer. “How hard is that to understand?” The TSA took no action on the recommendation.

It was not clear whether the pistols issued in the FFDO program had external safeties. On the H&K USP the external safety can be removed by a gunsmith and the pistol can be delivered from the factory without it.

“We have to have the FFDO program since screeners miss so many weapons at checkpoints and air marshals will never protect more than 1% or 2% of flights,” Mackett said, adding that the TSA’s requirement has also resulted in numerous guns being lost or stolen. “But, TSA can’t continuously ignore standard procedures proven over thousands of other law enforcement officers and then blame the pilot when it goes wrong.”

Lawmakers on the House Homeland Security Committee were to be briefed on the incident this week. Perhaps the TSA can explain to Congress why it created such bizarre and unsafe firearm handling rules for airline pilots. Further, let’s hope the TSA finally takes the air marshals’ recommendation and changes these rules before the government’s stupidity gets someone killed.

The 2008 New Hampshire Liberty Forum, for me, was three action-packed, fun-filled days of meeting great people, hearing some of the best speakers anywhere, and partying hard late into the nights.

In the middle of all this I had the additional work of shooting videos and trying to get them on the Internet in some kind of reasonable timeframe. This I didn’t manage to accomplish. First, the Internet connection in my hotel room died, then my video editing software started acting strangely, (and it still is acting strangely) and to top it all off I shot so much video that I ran out of hard drive space, which meant I couldn’t render the videos from Saturday and Sunday until I got home where I left my external hard drive.

And still, when I got home I was so exhausted from running around and having fun that I simply fell asleep, meaning I missed even more fun when current.tv descended on Murphy’s Taproom last night. I really wanted to go to this, but I couldn’t have possibly stayed awake. I hear something is going on there tonight, which I will certainly attend. And then there’s Tuesday, the day of the primary here in New Hampshire, a long day of getting people to the polls and then a victory party with Ron Paul in the evening.

So the fun isn’t over yet, but I want to take a moment to recap the Liberty Forum. Thursday night I met up with a nice and attractive young woman and Ron Paul supporter from Texas who is planning to move up to New Hampshire for the Free State Project. We spent some time in my hotel room watching the Iowa caucus returns and heckling Barack Obama. I was up until around 3 in the morning. And that was a relatively quiet evening compared to the rest of the weekend.

That night there were literally dozens of people wandering around the hotel openly carrying their sidearms, something we freedom lovers like to do whenever possible. It appears that some of John McCain’s staff, who were also staying in the hotel, complained, and the hotel asked us not to openly carry them. After hearing that, some people disarmed themselves, but most, including myself, simply concealed their firearms.

I was so upset after hearing this that Friday morning I filmed one of the McCain staffers and immediately put that online, with my own complaint about McCain’s apparently not caring about our Second Amendment rights. From that point through the rest of the weekend, McCain’s staff avoided everyone with a camera that they could, and at one point on Saturday night physically shoved one videographer out of the elevator that McCain was in.

Friday I watched the opening ceremonies and then rushed through lunch so I could get back and upload the videos I’d already shot. Then I took a nap and managed to miss all the afternoon panel sessions. I’m kind of upset about this because I really wanted to hear Peter Christ from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and a couple of the other Friday afternoon sessions. But I woke up in time for the cocktail hour and the dinner and keynote address from Bernard von NotHaus. Excuse me, Captain Roughseas.

After his address, I took some people from the New York City Meetup group to Murphy’s Taproom where a few hundred Operation Live Free or Die activists were hanging out, and we had a few beers and enjoyed the place. Here I ran into David Weigel from Reason and clued him in on a Ron Paul event for undecided voters on Saturday which wasn’t on any published schedule. I think he blogged it afterward. Then it was back to the hotel room to once again post and upload some videos. I was up until 3 am again.

Saturday I yanked myself out of bed around 9 am and went back to work on more videos. It really takes forever to process these things, when you’ve shot hours of video and have to render them on a laptop. At home I can use a small render farm of three computers to speed things up, but on the road it takes longer.

I got to lunch at noon and managed to meet up with Peter Christ there and chatted with him. (I decided not to shoot any video at lunch; I wanted to concentrate on eating.)

Then it was off to see Barry Cooper, yet another person I really wanted to see. I don’t really do illegal drugs, but I recognize that drug prohibition has caused so many problems with our society that it must be stopped, and current efforts to stop the drug war are not doing enough, that we need some more aggressive approaches, and Barry Cooper certainly has some aggressive ideas. They might even work. Only time will tell.

I also got some short video of Bernard von NotHaus hallmarking copper and silver Liberty Dollar pieces, including three that I bought for myself. These things will sell on eBay if I ever really need the money.

After I shot those videos, it was back up to the hotel room to download it all off the camera. I did so much of that that I missed yet more afternoon sessions I would have liked to attend. I think next year I’ll bring someone with me to do all this grunt work so I can have fun.

Saturday night was John Sununu’s keynote speech. He wasn’t as warmly received as many other speakers, despite being considered the most libertarian Senator, and there was even a small protest outside the hotel. When he came in, I handed him my business card and the expression on his face when he read “Homeland Stupidity” was priceless. Regrettably, my video camera was off at the time. That would have been a YouTube moment.

Sununu made a short self-promotional speech and I’m not sure I really got my money’s worth on that one. Fortunately it was short, so I could leave and go watch the debates. While I filmed the whole thing, as I said, it really wasn’t worth watching; however, I have posted a short clip of a Ron Paul joke he made during the speech. Depending on your perspective, it’s either the high point or the low point of his speech.

I ran into Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache from CNET News.com again and took them to Murphy’s Taproom, where Ron Paul supporters were mixing it up with Barack Obama supporters, and from the idle talk I heard, were actually converting some of them into Ron Paul supporters. Declan bought me a couple of beers and expensed them, but then again I introduced him to several interesting people in the liberty movement here.

When I got back to the hotel, near 1 am, a party was in full swing in the lobby. We got thrown out and promptly retired to the rooms of Ian and Mark from Free Talk Live, one of which became the cigar smoking room, and the other of which became the room for smoking things other than cigars. Barry Cooper, who announced on Free Talk Live Saturday night that he is a marijuana smoker and that it saved his life, was in the latter room. Gardner Goldsmith dropped in and brought beer and wine with him. It’s no wonder everybody likes him. I finally got to bed at around 4 am.

Sunday morning I was up at 9 am yet again, and realized why I stopped smoking marijuana all those years ago. Combined with alcohol it gives me serious headaches. Or maybe that was all the cigar smoke rather than the other smoke. I can’t tell. Fortunately the headache was short-lived and after some coffee I was mostly functional again. I filmed the closing ceremonies, including Ron Paul. And just today remembered that my name was announced to win a free Bureaucrash T-shirt, but I was so tired I forgot to claim it.

Afterward I went off to find food. In the hotel bar I found Jason Osborne from Sakal CAI, Barry Cooper and some other people watching a football game while I ate and tried to work with some video.

Unfortunately at the time I didn’t realize I was low on hard drive space and that that’s why I couldn’t get anything to work right. Didn’t figure that one out until this morning.

All in all it was a hell of a time, and despite it being utterly exhausting I wish it had gone on longer. The people who believe in freedom so strongly that they’re even thinking about moving across the country to get more of it, let alone the people who have already done so, are some of the best people you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting.

Thursday afternoon I arrived at the Crowne Plaza Hotel here in Nashua, N.H., to attend this year’s New Hampshire Liberty Forum. And I would have posted this yesterday morning, if it weren’t for Comcast.

Checking in was a breeze, unlike last year when the event was at a different hotel. That hotel inexplicably demanded government issued photo ID, which almost became a real problem.

I would have had this posted yesterday, except for a couple of technical problems. The first one was Comcast. The hotel provides free Internet service, with Wi-Fi in the common areas, and wired Ethernet in every room, provided by Comcast. And when something goes wrong, well, you have to call up Comcast. Friday morning I woke up, and sure enough, the wired Internet connection in my room was dead. And the Wi-Fi doesn’t reach quite as far as my room. It took three hours and two phone calls to Comcast’s technical support line somewhere in East Asia to get it fixed.

Then I discovered my non-linear video editing software has decided it wants to be buggy and not let me work with the clips I shot. So the videos I’ve published here today are closer to Dave Ridley style (he’s here, too) and are consequently of somewhat lower quality than I’d otherwise have. I still haven’t gotten that fixed, and don’t have time to do so until long after this event is over. So bear with me on the videos.

I dropped off my stuff and grabbed the video camera, and promptly went back downstairs to see who was already here. Immediately I ran into Declan McCullagh, who is libertarian enough that he would have come here on his own, even if he wasn’t writing for CNET News.com. Liberty Forum organizer Chris Lawless cracked the “DEC LAN” joke. I reminded him that it was “DECnet,” a technology I’ve actually had the displeasure of using, and would rather forget. Jon Maltz explained to Declan some of the details of the Ron Paul Revolution here in New Hampshire.

Then it was down the hall, where Ian Bernard was setting up the remote equipment to broadcast three consecutive nights of his nationally syndicated radio show (and podcast) Free Talk Live.

Then it was off to the reception, hosted by Sakal/CAI, where owner Jason Osborne told me about the Free Talk Live engraved iPod he’s giving away to one lucky person at the Liberty Forum. You can hang out here with the people I hung out with: Libertarian Party presidential candidate George Phillies, State Rep. Dan Itse (R-Rockingham), talk radio host and author Gardner Goldsmith, science fiction/horror author F. Paul Wilson who wrote the Repairman Jack series, and over the course of the weekend, many more. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is around here somewhere, too, though I haven’t run into him yet.

Still more to come this weekend, including Friday’s events, which I should have up later today.