“The goals of the jour­nal are to pro­mote shar­ing of high-​​quality sci­en­tific soft­ware (e.g. there must be a test suite with 100% code cov­er­age), pro­mote dis­cus­sion of best prac­tice in research soft­ware devel­op­ment, and to enable researchers to be rewarded through pub­li­ca­tion for the time spent on devel­op­ing soft­ware tools for oth­ers to use.”

“In a land­mark deci­sion issued today in the crim­i­nal appeal of U.S. v. War­shak, the Sixth Cir­cuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the gov­ern­ment must have a search war­rant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email ser­vice providers. Closely track­ing argu­ments made by EFF in its ami­cus brief, the court found that email users have the same rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.”

“But the pri­vacy divide is deeper than that. Are the poor beg­ging for extra help­ings of pri­vacy? No, not much, not even where they could use it. Poll­sters in Eng­land have found that when they ask peo­ple in hard-​​up com­mu­ni­ties what things would improve their lives, the top three items almost always include more closed-​​circuit TV cam­eras on the streets. The peo­ple who get worked up about uni­ver­sal ID cards, DNA data­bases and CCTV mon­i­tor­ing are almost always the wealthy elite.
It’s the poor who are forced to live with crime, vio­lence, harass­ment from unsta­ble and mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple — exactly the sort of stuff that these sup­pos­edly privacy-​​invading con­ve­niences are designed to pre­vent. When your life is hard, pri­vacy equals iso­la­tion equals death. If you con­sider it a right, it’s a pretty good sign that you’ve got too much money and too lit­tle to worry about.”