This morning I put a few more of my Subway Search Information cards out on the subway. Sticking them on the sides of existing advertising. (I stay away from the maps and anything remotely like a PSA - no need to block any of those.) People always look at me funny when I do it. I always assume it’s because they figure I’m trying to sell something. So I usually do it right before I get off the train or late at night when there’s not a lot of people around, but this time it wasn’t in the middle of the morning rush hour. We had just pulled into Jay St and while everyone was rushing on and off of the train I slipped the cars out of my pocket and put two on one side of the car and two on the other. Except while I was putting the last one up (in a vacant ad spot near the door) a guy grabbed my hand and took the card away from me.
I had my headphones on, so I just looked at him.
He took the card and flipped it over, read the front for a while. (You know, the side with a big picture and the phrase “Did you know you can refuse a subway search?”) and then flipped it over and took some time reading the back. The seat next to him was empty so I sat down, took off an ear of my headphones and said he could keep it.
The people in front of us kept looking at me, and then up at the other post card I had put near the ceiling. I’m glad I put it back side facing out so they could read what it’s about. I don’t think many people bother to turn them over and I don’t think people need a pretty picture to get the point. I mean the back has a lot more to it and is probably more interesting during the boring commute to work. They guy finished up and put the card back up where I was trying to stick it. Nodded at me and then just stared forward like everyone else. I put my head phones back on sat back and enjoyed the ride.
A few stops later someone new was in front of me and grabbed the card from behind me. He picked it up and spent a few minutes reading over the back. The people who had seen me put it up started looking at me again, I just smiled and sat back. The guy flipped it over a few times and then he pocketed it! I couldn’t help but grin a little. I’m not so sure about the first guy, but this second one obviously was learning something. He seemed genuinely interested which makes me wonderfully happy. =)
Despite my personal thoughts on Security Theater (that’s actually a good link) this card is kept generally neutral and doesn’t question if the subway searches keep us safer or not. (They don’t!) They do explore why you don’t have to be searched and take the position that giving up your rights needlessly is a bad idea. I’ll have other cards that talk about why bad security is worse then none at all. Which is an idea I’ve gotten a lot of resistance to. I’d rather know something is unsafe then to think something is safe and be wrong.
In the meantime there are at least two people in the subway today that know they have Fourth Amendment Rights and know how to safely execute their rights when asked to give them up with out probably cause.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I never posted these. Sorry to dredge up old drafts, but I’m not in the mood to write at the moment.
It took a few hours to assemble about 300 throwies. But the pizza (some hard liquor) and cookies (courtesy of Becky) were good and everyone was good to go around 8 or 9.
Dear Flexyorurights.org,
Just to let you know I’ve compiled your pdf on refusing a subway search into a postcard. I just recently ran a print of 100 of them and honestly I’m not sure what to do with them. I’ll get them distributed to my fellow straphangers one way or another. One of the most surprising reaction to the cards was from a friend who objected to them. He asked what propaganda site I got them from that lead me to believe that warrantless searches are a bad thing. He argued that sporadic security was better then no security at all. I argued that it was a false sense of security and that it would catch no real threats while imposing on mostly innocent people. Especially since any “terrorist” would probably be smart enough to easily avoid detection.
I’ve attached the front and the back of the postcards, you may use them if you like. The front photo is from Runnx on flickr and I’ve attributed to him which is all his CC license requires. I think my next card is going to say why you might want to refuse a subway search.
(The video player wont load from the rss feed. So if you’re reading from there, you’ll have to click though to the post. Also I ditched the crappy flv version - never mind this is crappy quality anyway, it’s using some quicktime foolery so it should even be nice on an iphone - unless you’re on edge, in which case your iphone will request the extra crappy version)
I just registered for the three day computer security.. well Hacker Conference “HOPE: Hackers of planet Earth”. So far they have a few keynote speakers listed including Adam Savage and of course Kevin Mitnick. Adam Savage is well known as a Mythbuster, maker, and lover of wonderful things. I even saw him at last years Mermaid Parade. I’ve emailed him to find out what he’s doing at The Last Hope, because while I’m sure he’ll find it cool, I don’t know why he’d be a keynote speaker.
Also presenting is a very interesting guy named Barry Wels who when not professionally testing locks for security flaws, (I’d be lying if I said it was about the money for this guy) writes for his blog Black Bag and runs a group called Toool. The saying goes that to get good at lock picking you have to practice over and over and over again. The 3rd O is for that extra “over”. Even more noteworthy, he got his government to hold off on electronic voting because of how obviously easy the machines were to hack. The mayor of Anderdam took notice of his groups efforts and made it illegal to use the flawed machines. Bary is another person I widely admire.
Hope isn’t as large as Def Con the Las Vegas based annual convention. But I couldn’t afford to goto that anyway.
So I’ve got 3 days for my $75 and I’m sure I’ll enjoy the crap out of it. I probably wont spend all three days there, but until they release a schedule I’ll have to just assume everything will be interesting and plan for that. I’m going to bring a mostly empty laptop and my camera, and maybe a bag of tricks.
While I’m sure I’ll meet people there, is anyone interested in going with me? We’ve got a home field advantage, most of the people there are staying 7 to a room at the cheapest hotel they can find. We’ll be well rested, well fed and not scared of New York.
At least not anymore then we should be.
Update!
Adam Savage wrote back to me. He’ll be speaking about
I got a small pack of stickers from The Anti-Advertising Agency. A guy named Steve Lambert made them and he’ll give some out to anyone who asks and sends them an envelope. All he asks is that you send him some photos of your work.
All photo credits (she’s much better with cameras that aren’t cell phones) goto Caroline, who’s website is forthcoming.
I found this piece of music a little while back. You can click the little play button to play it now. Noriko Version
It was made for a Gizmondo competition by “Noriko” - Composed with sounds of a failing Hitachi hard-disk. I lost his link, but you can probably google for it. It’s really quite beautiful and peaceful. Though once I was diagnosing a laptop and this song came on and freaked me out. You never want want to hear these sounds coming from your computer.
Oh and if you ever do hear these sounds coming from your computer, turn it off (pull the plug) and call me. ;-)
I’ve been developing this site for a few days using wordpress and some plugins. I’ve hacked out a decent looking theme and made it more mine. You don’t need to register to comment and your comments should show up now. (Some, a few actually as I asked around got caught up in spam filtering and I didn’t even see them.) Also if you have an openID your comment should go through immediately. Until spammers start using it anyway.
Andrew gave me a neat idea for the header. Never mind I already did a lot of work for what’s up there, I’m going to try something out to make it a little more interesting.
I also need to integrate the gallery into it again. My old robot isn’t a random gallery image. ;-)
Now on every page you’ll get a different banner. Every single photo is taken by me (to the best of my knowledge - if you took it that will teach you to borrow my camera!) hand picked out of my gallery and then cropped and edited by me too to fit. I used iPhoto to crop the photos to get the aspect ratio (quick and easy) and then wrote a quick script to resize everything to fit.
And that resized everything. I wrote a quick rand with a sprintf to generate the url. It’s not automatic - it wont detect new photos but I can take the time to edit the range the next time I take the time to edit hundreds of photos.
The real joy was finding a 97×14 swash of image I wanted to show. I’m not being sarcastic either. Everything looks different when put though constraints. It highlights parts of the photo that would otherwise be lost. Street signs stick out the most, I’ll have large photo of trees and I’ll have picked out a swash of photo I want to show and the street sign will be sticking up off to the side, but it stands way out where I didn’t even know it was there before. There is even one photo where I took two swashes out of, there were two different photos I wanted to show.
sarah on 
Frank on 
