[JackSpratts]

Protecting Content with Electronic Patterns
Tomohisa Takei

Media firms and creators are looking at a distribution system applying electronic fingerprints and electronic watermarks to identify content, enabling them to collect the fees that are due to them.

Research into pattern recognition technology for use on audio, video and other signals has been attracting considerable attention lately. Specifically, these are technologies such as electronic fingerprints and electronic watermarks, under research for the last decade. As one researcher in the electronic fingerprint field explained, "The rise in applications designed to analyze the signals from voice, video or other data, identify the content and use that information in rights management has occurred just as firms developing electronic fingerprinting, electronic watermarks, etc, have found ways to survive copying to analog data."

Hollywood film companies are also getting interested in technologies to identify imagery. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of the US and Motion Picture Laboratories Inc of the US performed public video identification tests for several months from the end of 2006, with participation by no less than ten groups, including Audible Magic Corp of the US, Gracenote Inc of the US, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp (NTT) of Japan, and Vobile Inc of the US.

The objectives of the tests were not revealed, but a source at one firm participating in them commented, "I think they are hoping to put their material on video sharing and similar sites, and wanted to evaluate the technologies to see whether they are really ready for commercial roll-out."

Fingerprints, Watermarks

Video sharing sites such as MySpace (MySpace Inc of the US) and Soapbox (Microsoft Corp of the US) are already using electronic fingerprinting technology, and Google Inc of the US has announced that it will develop its own flavor; there is no doubt that it is entering practical use in a big way. MySpace, for example, uses the electronic fingerprinting technology for voice developed by Audible Magic to automatically make it impossible to repost content that has already been taken down once for copyright issues, with the "Take Down Stay Down" function announced in May 2007.

Distribution can occur without the authorization of the rights holder for several reasons: (1) terrestrial broadcasting, audio compact discs (CD) and other non-encrypted content, (2) copying through analog interfaces, recording through displays or speakers, etc, and (3) security holes, such as the public release of the encryption key. Conventionally, digital rights management (DRM) was intended to cover all of these possible abuses through encryption, verification and other technologies, limiting the scope of viewing, copying and other access.

YouTube and similar content distribution systems, however, do not fit well with this type of approach, because it is difficult to allow users to freely copy, edit or otherwise access content. As a result, there is increased need for a framework that applies electronic fingerprints, electronic watermarks or similar technologies to identify, analyze and otherwise mark video content uploaded by users, making it possible to return appropriate value to them.

Electronic Fingerprinting

Electronic fingerprinting technology can identify specific content, for example video or voice. Information such as who created the content and which company owns distribution rights, for example, could control distribution of revenues from advertisements, views or other means. "Instead of encrypting the file with DRM technology, DRM is implemented throughout the entire network distribution framework," said Audible Magic president and chief executive officer (CEO) Vance Ikezoye.

Normally, electronic fingerprints use the characteristics of the signal actually perceived by the user, whether the file is audio, video or whatever. The system detects content similarity in the same way that people do. For example, for a video the system can convert content characteristics like luminance signals and chrominance signals into patterns, or left and right channel signals if the source is audio. This pattern is the "fingerprint" and is determined by the actual content.

With a fingerprinting technology utilizing the actual video, audio or other signals, it is possible to identify a given file as being the same, even if it has been converted to analog and redigitized, or converted to different encoding, resolution or whatever. The signal is analyzed complete with noise, so the comparison cannot be 100%, but results are more than adequate for identifying content.

Identification of Clips

One of the groups developing such electronic fingerprinting technology is NTT Communication Science Laboratories of Japan, which has been involved in research and development (R&D) in high-speed search technologies for audio, video and other data for ten years. According to Kunio Kashino, senior research scientist, Recognition Research Group, Media Information Laboratory there, "We have improved robustness with respect to noise by extracting the characteristics on a coarse level, instead of comparing the fine details of the signal." Video search is based on photographs taken with a miniature camera from the image as displayed on the monitor, and audio is searched in a server by transmitting music played through a speaker via a mobile phone as a standard voice call. One of the NTT group companies is already deploying services using these research results.

For audio, for example, a signal of a certain length (say, 1s) is divided in the frequency and time domains, and the amplitude of the signal in each domain determined. Sharp differences in intensity and other characteristics are detected, and those portions quantized coarsely. This pattern can then be used to search through an existing database to extract possible matches. This process is repeated at a certain interval (say, 10ms) for perhaps five seconds, and the record with the highest match selected.

The basic approach is the same for video, except that the domains are split into horizontal and vertical directions, and the luminance and other signals determined for each region on a single-frame basis. The characteristics are quantized in the same manner. The laboratory has used the search technology to identify three tunes mixed into a single signal, and identified a video rephotographed with an object obscuring part of the picture, for example.

The characteristic information for the complete content is stored in the database, so search is possible even for a clip of a shorter length. As Junji Yamato, group leader, Recognition Research Group, Media Information Laboratory at NTT Communication Science Laboratories revealed, "We can almost always search effectively with a 5-second sample."

Fingerprints at User Site

Some firms are proposing implementations other than having the server detect electronic fingerprints of content uploaded to shared sites. Vobile's VideoDNA electronic fingerprint, for example, proposes that the user detect the fingerprint personally, assuming that there is a continuing increase in distribution of content via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and similar means.

When non-encrypted content downloaded from P2P networks, etc, is played by a user, a player capable of detecting VideoDNA is used. The player transmits the fingerprint to a server via the Internet, identifying the content. This identification makes it possible to transmit advertisements to the user based on user, content and other information. It would be possible to divide revenues gained from content access with content creators.

The question, of course, is how to get users to buy players that display advertising. Vobile suggests heightening the value of the players by (1) providing additional information on titles, performers, etc, (2) improving the user experience through metadata, such as scene previews, and (3) providing special video content that can only be played on compatible players.

Electronic Watermarking

Electronic watermarking technology embeds significant information into signals of some sort, whether audio, image, video or whatever. This embedded information can only be detected by people, equipment, etc specifically looking for it. It cannot normally be perceived by human beings, so the content can be accessed without even noticing it. A number of proposals are on the table for utilizing electronic watermarks to identify content, determine where content has been played or copied, and other tasks.

Most of the proposals related to content identification are for handling revenue sharing from content distributed through, for example, video sharing sites, by embedding specific identifiers into the distributed content. Another suggested use is embedding extra information that only special equipment can detect, enhancing the user experience during play, or ensuring that the equipment obeys regulations on actions like play or copy.

The site of an action is determined to suppress unauthorized distribution. It makes it possible to determine who obtained the content, and through what route, making users think twice before trying to obtain content illegally. Such information can be embedded into file headers or other locations, but headers can be easily lost in file type conversion. As a result, electronic fingerprinting is being considered as an alternative approach.

For example, the projector in a movie theater could be used to embed information such as the theater name or show time into the film. If a pirated copy was later analyzed it would be possible to determine when and where it was made. Likewise, the set-top box used to decode a distributed video signal could also embed user-specific information when the image signal is played.

This type of watermarking may encounter fierce resistance from consumer groups, just as conventional DRM technologies have, because it could become an invasion of privacy, revealing who accessed which content. Any commercial rollout will probably require practical measures to alleviate this, such as ensuring that personal information is not recorded, or ensuring informed consent.

Offsets in Time, Space

One important point when using electronic watermarks in rights management is ensuring that they can be detected even when noise increases, such as in analog copies. If a monitor image is recaptured through a camcorder, for example, frames may be offset from the original image, or the image tilted. Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK) of Japan and Mitsubishi Electric Corp of Japan have jointly developed an electronic watermarking technology that withstands the signal degradation caused by recapture.

An algorithm detects spatial offset by sensing image distortion, using a time-domain pattern embedded in the source image to first correct the time offset. Information embedded in the source at regular intervals is sensed, and used to analyze statistical 0/1 data per unit time. The final 0/1 judgment is made depending on whether it exceeds preset thresholds. Even when noise increases, say the firms, detection is possible with a high accuracy. NHK and Mitsubishi Electric are working on a system to make final data judgments based on comparison with similar watermarks, using an analysis of portions thought likely to cause detection errors.

Detection from Encoding

Many electronic watermarks are embedded in the video signal itself, so that after embedding the watermark is encoded, decoded and then detected. KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc of Japan has developed an electronic watermarking technology that minimizes the accompanying processing load. Called MPmark, it is capable of detecting watermarks without decoding the video data, and supports Moving Picture Coding Experts Group (MPEG) video encoding schemes such as MPEG Phase 2 (MPEG-2) and MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC)/H.264. The technology is intended for use in detecting embedded watermarks in large quantities of content.

MPmark data is embedded into the macroblock, which is used in MPEG-based encoding schemes. When the macroblock luminance signal is processed using discrete cosine transform (DCT), a portion of the resulting 8x8 DCT component difficult for human eyes to perceive is converted to serve as a judgment criterion: for example, if the value is greater than a specific element of the adjacent macroblock DCT component. This data is detected for several frames, yielding statistical data such as totals. Judgment is 1 if the data is greater than a threshold, and 0 otherwise. This approach improves robustness to noise introduced by analog copying, etc. Information on when the data is written and to which macroblocks, and what the judgment criteria are, is shared by the embedding and detecting parties.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article...080428/151135/





A Faster, Cheaper Way to Catch Criminals

Antibody profiling could help more quickly ID murder victims
Todd Dvorak

Federal researchers say they've developed a human identification test that's faster and possibly cheaper than DNA testing.

It would be a handy new weapon in the arsenal for detectives, forensic experts and the military, though no one expects it to replace DNA analysis — and its promoters say it is not intended to.

The new method analyzes antibodies. Each person has a unique antibody bar code that can be gleaned from blood, saliva or other bodily fluids. Antibodies are proteins used by the body to fend off viruses or perform routine physiological housekeeping.

"DNA is a physical code that describes you ... and in many ways so are your antibodies," said Dr. Vicki Thompson, a chemical engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory who's been working with other researchers to perfect the test for the past 10 years.

The scientists say an antibody profile can yield results faster and more cheaply and be performed in the field with minimal training. National lab administrators have licensed the technology exclusively to Identity Sciences LLC in Alpharetta, Ga.

The Georgia startup plans to begin rolling out test kits and training to law enforcement, the military and forensic and medical labs around the globe by fall of 2009. Ken Haas, vice president of marketing, says the test is not intended to supplant DNA testing, the recognized gold standard in human identification.

But Haas says the value of antibody profiling is as a screening tool to help make sense of a crime scene, sort out the blood trails or spatter from multiple victims or more quickly identify body parts on a battlefield or at the scene of a disaster like the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

It may also reduce the number of DNA tests required in an investigation, potentially saving time and money and easing the growing backlog, he said. Results from tests on blood serum or dried blood can be ready in two hours, a fraction of the time it takes to run similar tests for DNA matches.

However, a major drawback for now is the lack of a national antibody database. That's one of the reasons antibody testing is not likely to be used at the outset of an investigation to link suspects to crimes or establish probable cause to justify issuing an arrest warrant.

'A lot of potential'
Company officials say beta testing by forensic scientists at simulated crime scenes at seven locations across the country has produced positive results and reinforced the notion that an eager market awaits. The company declined to say where the testing occurred, citing nondisclosure agreements with participants.

The company has not yet put a price tag on the field kits. But executives say their product will be significantly cheaper than DNA analysis, which can run anywhere from $500 to $3,000 per sample because it requires sophisticated equipment and lab time.

"We don't see this yet as a product to take to court," said Gene Venesky, vice president of Identity Sciences. "But we do see this as a way to get the case moving forward toward a final, legal resolution."

Still, some forensics experts say that kind of scrutiny may be unavoidable, especially if the test takes on a bigger crime-fighting role.

"There is a lot of potential here," said Lawrence Kobilinsky, a DNA expert and chairman of the Department of Forensic Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "Any time you can develop a quick and easy screen for something ... that is a good thing."

But Kobilinsky and others caution that it takes time for any new forensic test to gain acceptance where it matters most — state and federal courthouses. If the new tests begin appearing in police reports, defense attorneys can be expected to challenge their validity.

"If these tests are going to get to the courtroom, which I think is inevitable, they are not going to be admissible as evidence until they can be proven reliable, accurate" and trustworthy, Kobilinsky said. "My bet is that a crime scene unit is going to be very careful about using this if it's not going to be of any benefit in litigation."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24354674/





Microsoft Device Helps Police Pluck Evidence from Cyberscene of Crime
Benjamin J. Romano

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the device, which Microsoft provides free.

"These are things that we invest substantial resources in, but not from the perspective of selling to make money," Smith said in an interview. "We're doing this to help ensure that the Internet stays safe."

Law-enforcement officials from agencies in 35 countries are in Redmond this week to talk about how technology can help fight crime. Microsoft held a similar event in 2006. Discussions there led to the creation of COFEE.

Smith compared the Internet of today to London and other Industrial Revolution cities in the early 1800s. As people flocked from small communities where everyone knew each other, an anonymity emerged in the cities and a rise in crime followed.

The social aspects of Web 2.0 are like "new digital cities," Smith said. Publishers, interested in creating huge audiences to sell advertising, let people participate anonymously.

That's allowing "criminals to infiltrate the community, become part of the conversation and persuade people to part with personal information," Smith said.

Children are particularly at risk to anonymous predators or those with false identities. "Criminals seek to win a child's confidence in cyberspace and meet in real space," Smith cautioned.

Expertise and technology like COFEE are needed to investigate cybercrime, and, increasingly, real-world crimes.

"So many of our crimes today, just as our lives, involve the Internet and other digital evidence," said Lisa Johnson, who heads the Special Assault Unit in the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.

A suspect's online activities can corroborate a crime or dispel an alibi, she said.

The 35 individual law-enforcement agencies in King County, for example, don't have the resources to investigate the explosion of digital evidence they seize, said Johnson, who attended the conference.

"They might even choose not to seize it because they don't know what to do with it," she said. "... We've kind of equated it to asking specific law-enforcement agencies to do their own DNA analysis. You can't possibly do that."

Johnson said the prosecutor's office, the Washington Attorney General's Office and Microsoft are working on a proposal to the Legislature to fund computer forensic crime labs.

Microsoft also got credit for other public-private partnerships around law enforcement.

Jean-Michel Louboutin, Interpol's executive director of police services, said only 10 of 50 African countries have dedicated cybercrime investigative units.

"The digital divide is no exaggeration," he told the conference. "Even in countries with dedicated cybercrime units, expertise is often too scarce."

He credited Microsoft for helping Interpol develop training materials and international databases used to prevent child abuse.

Smith acknowledged Microsoft's efforts are not purely altruistic. It benefits from selling collaboration software and other technology to law-enforcement agencies, just like everybody else, he said.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...msftlaw29.html





Microsoft Denies Handing Law Enforcement 'Backdoor' Keys
Jacqueline Emigh

Some bloggers this week are suggesting that Microsoft is handing out "backdoor keys" to Windows security to police officers. Although Microsoft is denying the bulk of the rumors, a full explanation still seems a bit elusive.

In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, a Microsoft spokesperson denied that a technology unveiled at a law enforcement conference in Seattle on Monday would be used to equip officers and investigators with "backdoors" into Windows systems, as various blogs and news sources have since speculated.

"COFEE does not circumvent Windows Vista BitLocker encryption or undermine any protections in Windows through secret 'backdoors' or other undocumented means," reads Microsoft's explanation to BetaNews today.

During that Monday conference, a Microsoft executive introduced attendees to a new tool called the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), saying that Microsoft has distributed the USB drive to about 2,000 law enforcement officers in 15 countries since its introduction last June.

According to a transcript of the talk at the Law Enforcement Technology Conference 2008, posted on Microsoft's Web site, Brad Smith, Microsoft VP and general counsel, described COFEE as "a Swiss Army knife [for] law enforcement officers."

Smith went on to say that the USB fob contains 150 software tools aimed at helping police with the job of forensics, or crime investigation.

"It can be programmed to do all of the work automatically, in which case it can do what it needs to do in about 20 minutes, instead of four hours. But we also designed it to be a platform, if you will, so you are your colleagues can customize it further, if you like," according to the general counsel.

On Tuesday, the Seattle Times published an article based on an interview between Smith and Benjamin J. Romano, a technology reporter at the newspaper.

"The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer," Romano wrote in his article.

Soon afterward, a blogger for Techdirt posted an entry, evidently based on an e-mail from a Techdirt reader, which seemed to blow COFEE's capabilities out of proportion.

"Apparently, they're giving out special USB keys that simply get around Microsoft's security, allowing the holder of the key to very quickly get forensic information (including internet surfing history), passwords and supposedly encrypted data off of a laptop," wrote Techdirt's Mike Masnick. He went on to refer to the pathway Microsoft was allegedly making available to law enforcement as a "backdoor," adding that the fact that it's giving law enforcement a key to this door is validation that such a door exists.

"Now you have more evidence as to why trusting Microsoft's 'security' isn't such a good idea," Masnick added.

The key presumption here was that the security which Microsoft was helping law enforcement officials to break through, was Microsoft's own security rather than to the dozens of other possible password caches in third-party Windows software.

Others then jumped on the "backdoor" bandwagon. "The security specialists at Microsoft, not satisfied with just how insecure their operating systems have turned out, have unveiled a USB dongle that plugs into a computer, bypasses any Windows passwords or encryption, and quickly downloads sensitive data such as your Web browsing history," according to a posting in Valleywag.

But although Romano did mention password decryption in his Seattle Times article, he didn't say anything about any other type of encryption or decryption -- such as the BitLocker encryption included in Vista for encrypting users' hard drives -- or anything specifically about a "backdoor." Nor did Romano talk about a "backdoor."

Similarly, Microsoft's Smith didn't touch specifically on encryption or decryption in his speech to the police. He did bring up "backdoors," but with regard to online criminal exploits rather than anything law enforcement would use.

According to Smith, new exploits are being produced consisting of "a mixture of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 technologies as people create new sorts of efforts to create backdoors, to drop code onto people's PCs, and to keep those backdoors there, and then use other Web sites to send instructions to people's machines. [This is] also leading to new forms of phishing, if you will."

In more recent updates to his article in the Seattle Times, Romano tried to cut through some of the confusion. "Today's story on a Microsoft device that helps law enforcement gather forensic evidence from a crime suspect's computer has garnered lots of attention and raised questions about [exactly how] it works and what it is able to do," he wrote.

"It sounds to me that like the device doesn't do anything that a trained computer forensics expert can't already do. This just automates the execution of the commands for data extraction," according to Romano.

Romano further updated his story with excerpts from a written statement he received from a Microsoft spokesperson, which reportedly stated that "COFEE is a compilation of publicly available forensics tools, such as 'password security auditing technologies' used to access information 'on a live Windows system.' It 'does not circumvent Windows Vista BitLocker encryption or undermine any protections in Windows through secret 'backdoors' or other undocumented means.'"

Today, Microsoft sent BetaNews another statement, which similarly denies both a "backdoor" and any circumvention of BitLocker encryption. But the statement given to BetaNews contains no mention of the kinds of "password security auditing technologies" that might conceivably be used to recover (or uncover?) user passwords.

When asked by BetaNews for comment on the use of password auditing technologies in COFEE, the spokesperson said only that Microsoft would be "back in touch when there is more information to share" on this question.

Presented to BetaNews as Microsoft's most current word on the subject of COFEE, the statement reads as follows:

COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) is a framework for first-responders to customize a set of common forensic tools. It is a framework that law enforcement can use to leverage publically available forensic tools to access information on a live Windows system operating from a USB storage device. The tool allows law enforcement to run over 150 commands on a live computer system and save the results for later analysis, preserving information that could be lost if the computer had to be shut down and transported to a lab.

COFEE is designed for use by law enforcement only with proper legal authority. COFEE is not new forensic tools, but rather the creation of an easy to use, automated forensic tool at the scene. It's the ease of use, speed, and consistency of evidence extraction that is key.

COFEE does not circumvent Windows Vista BitLocker encryption or undermine any protections in Windows through secret 'backdoors' or other undocumented means.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Micr...eys/1209582561





Security Companies Criticize Defcon Virus Contest

Hackers' event, Defcon, will hold a contest to see who can develop the best virus to beat antivirus software; prizes range from "Most elegant obfuscation" to "Most deserving of beer"; antivirus vendors upset

There will be a new contest at the Defcon hacker conference this August, one that antivirus vendors already hate. Called Race to Zero, the contest will invite Defcon hackers to find new ways to beat antivirus software. Contestants will get some sample virus code that they must modify and try to sneak past the antivirus products. Awards will be given for "Most elegant obfuscation," "Dirtiest hack of an obfuscation," "Comedy value," and "Most deserving of beer," contest organizers said. The contest was announced Friday. Security vendors began panning it immediately, saying it will simply help the bad guys learn some new tricks. Computerworld's Robert McMillan quotes Paul Ferguson, a researcher at antivirus vendor TrendMicro, to say that "It will do more harm than good. Responsible disclosure is one thing, but now actually encouraging people to do this as a contest is a little over the top." Some compared the contest to a controversial 2006 Consumer Reports review of antivirus software. In that article, the magazine created 5,500 new virus samples based on existing malware, and it was roundly criticized by antivirus vendors for contributing to the rapidly expanding list of known malware. McMillan writes that security companies are already having difficulty keeping up with the torrent of new malware. With antivirus vendors already processing some 30,000 samples each day, there is no need for any more samples, said Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG Technologies. "It's hard to see an upside for encouraging people to write more viruses," he said via instant message. "It's a dumb idea."

Contest organizers say that they are trying to help computer users understand just how much effort is required to skirt antivirus products. "The point behind the contest is to illustrate that antivirus [technology] alone is not a complete defense against malware," said one of the contest's organizers, who identified himself only as "Rich," in an e-mail message he sent McMillan. The Race to Zero sponsors hope to present the contest results during Defcon, Rich said. The contest is not organized by Defcon, but is one of the unofficial events that the show's organizers have encouraged attendees to arrange. Defcon will run 8-10 August at the Riviera Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
http://hsdailywire.com/single.php?id=6047





Malware Authors Turn to EULAs to Protect Their Work
Joel Hruska

Selling botnets for particular attacks, black markets for stolen identities, and malware construction kits are all now par for the course for the increasingly commercial malware industry. Discovering that malware authors have actually turned to End-User License Agreements (EULAs) in an attempt to protect their own intellectual property, however, most definitely qualifies as something new, different, and beautifully ironic.

Symantec security researcher Liam OMurchu has details on this latest development. The help section of the latest version of the Zeus malware states that the client has no right to distribute Zeus in any business or commercial purpose not connected to the initial sale, cannot examine the source code of the product, has no right to use the product to control other botnets, and cannot send the product to anti-virus companies. The client does agree to "give the seller a fee for any update to the product that is not connected with errors in the work, as well as for adding additional functionality." Modern license agreements take a great deal of (deserved) fire for being absurdly draconian, but even the likes of Adobe and Microsoft don't claim that purchasing a version of their respective products locks the user into buying future editions.

It's obviously difficult for the manufacturers of an illegal product to threaten legal sanctions against an infringer, but the Zeus authors give it their best shot. According to the EULA, "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies." Frankly, "We'll blow your kneecaps off and feed them to you," might be a bit more effective as a threat, but I suppose it's a bit hard to carry out that threat over the Internet.

If the folks behind Zeus are serious—and they seem to be—they've obviously got a rather warped sense of reality. Data thieves and malware authors aren't going to win any "Most Likely to Respect Intellectual Property" competitions, and they may not be particularly intimidated by a promise to turn their work into anti-virus companies, seeing as they can do the same thing to the original author of the malware in question. The prospect of a fully commercialized malware distribution system isn't an idea anyone in security IT relishes, but watching illegal businesses attacking each other over illegal modifications to illegal products could be downright hilarious.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...heir-work.html





FBI Bulks Up Digital Forensic Network
Layer 8

The FBI this week said it was opening two new US Regional Computer Forensics Laboratories where examiners are conducting a growing number forensic examinations of digital media, in support of an investigation and/or prosecution of a federal, state, or local crime.

With the addition of the new facilities in Los Angeles and Albuquerque, the FBI will have 16 RCFLs nationwide.

RCFLs are a network of digital forensics labs sponsored by the FBI and staffed by local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. These labs are available-free of charge-to 4,750 law enforcement agencies across 17 states.

The additional labs are needed because in its annual report, the RCFL chief said that a digital forensics services shortfall continues. It is important to note that as the capacity of electronic devices continues to increase, examiners must review more data. Therefore, even if the number of requests decreases, the workload either remains steady or actually increases in many cases, the report stated. T

he number of investigations the RCFLs have handled has grown from 987 in 2003 to 4,634 in 2007, so the need for addition support is there. The labs have been instrumental in solving a host of digital and no-digital crimes. For example:

* During 2007, RCFL experts conducted 4,634 exams, processing 1,288 terabytes of information.

* RCFLs provided assistance to 685 agencies (608 were state and/or local).

* A total of 76,581 digital devices were examined (the most popular media by far-CDs, coming in at 37,424; followed by hard disk drives at 17,378; floppy disks at 11,781; and DVDs at 4,374).

* An interesting trend: the number of CDs, cell phones, and flash media devices examined doubled from the previous year.

* A total of 9,762 law enforcement personnel were trained, and, for the first time, RCFL instructors traveled overseas to share their expertise with approximately 169 government representatives.

During 2007, RCFLs conducted forensic exams in a number of successful local, national, and international cases, including:

* The alleged plot by six foreign nationals to attack the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey;

* The apprehension of the so-called "Bike Path Rapist," who terrorized female bikers in Buffalo for two decades;

* "Operation Remaster," an undercover investigation believed to be the largest-ever manufacturing case in U.S. history involving high-quality counterfeit movie CDs and DVDs;

* The arrest of the individual responsible for posting an online message threatening to kill San Diego State University students, just one day after the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech; and

* The indictment of two California men in a China-related economic espionage case involving the theft of trade secrets on computer chip design and development.

As with all RCFLs, the FBI provides start-up and operational funding, training, and equipment, the FBI said. Participating law enforcement agencies provide their own forensic examiners, as well as additional staff for operating the RCFL. Participating agencies receive access to expert digital forensics examination and advisory services from the examiners on staff. The examiners from outside the FBI will also have access to sophisticated technical training and will receive FBI Computer Analysis Response Team (CART) certification. Examiners would receive continuing state of the art computer forensic instruction after certification is obtained, the FBI said.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27339





Declassified NSA Document Reveals the Secret History of TEMPEST
Ryan Singel

It was 1943, and an engineer with Bell Telephone was working on one of the U.S. government's most sensitive and important pieces of wartime machinery, a Bell Telephone model 131-B2. It was a top secret encrypted teletype terminal used by the Army and Navy to transmit wartime communications that could defy German and Japanese cryptanalysis.

Then he noticed something odd.

Far across the lab, a freestanding oscilloscope had developed a habit of spiking every time the teletype encrypted a letter. Upon closer inspection, the spikes could actually be translated into the plain message the machine was processing. Though he likely didn't know it at the time, the engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether.

Call it a TEMPEST in a teletype.

This story of how the United States first learned about the fundamental security vulnerability called "compromising emanations" is revealed for the first time in a newly-declassified 1972 paper TEMPEST: A Signal Problem (.pdf), from the National Security Agency's secret in-house journal Cryptologic Spectrum.

"There has always been speculation about TEMPEST coming out of the Cold War period," says Joel McNamara, author of Secrets of Computer Espionage: Tactics and Countermeasures, who maintained for years the best compilation of public information on TEMPEST. "But the 1943 Bell Labs discovery is roughly ten years earlier than I would have expected."

The unnamed Bell Telephone technician was the Alexander Graham Bell of a new, secret science, in which electronic eavesdroppers -- as far away as hundreds of feet from their target tune into radio waves leaking from electronic equipment to steal secrets.

Building on the breakthrough, the U.S. developed and refined the science in an attempt to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War. And it issued strict standards for shielding sensitive buildings and equipment. Those rules are now known to government agencies and defense contractors as TEMPEST, and they apply to everything from computer monitors to encrypted cell phones that handle classified information.

Until now, little has been known about when and how the U.S. government began trying to protect itself from this threat, and the NSA paper tells the story well.

Bell Telephone faced a dilemma. They had sold the equipment to the military with the assurance that it was secure, but it wasn't. The only thing they could do was to tell the [U.S. Army] Signal Corps about it, which they did. There they met the charter members of a club of skeptics who could not believe that these tiny pips could really be exploited under practical field conditions. They are alleged to have said something like: "Don't you realize there's a war on? We can't bring our cryptographic operations to a screeching halt based on a dubious and esoteric laboratory phenomenon. If this is really dangerous, prove it."

So the Bell engineers were place in a building on Varick Street in New York. Across the street and 80 feet away was Signal Corps Varick Street cryptocenter. The engineers recorded signals for about an hour. Three or four hours later, they produced about 75% of the plain text that was being processed--a fast performance, by the way, that has been rarely equaled.

Oddly, the lessons were forgotten at the close of the World War II -- even as the Soviets seemed to have learned to insulate their machines. In 1951, the CIA told the nascent NSA that they had been playing with the Bell teletype machines and found they could read plain text from a quarter mile down the signal line.

In 1962, the Japanese, then our allies, attempted just that by aiming antenna on top of a hospital at a U.S. crypto center, according to the article. And the Russians did the same -- planting not just the famous 40 microphones in the U.S.'s Moscow embassy, but also seeding mesh antenna in the concrete ceiling, whose only purpose could have been stealing leaked energy pulses.

The principal of the TEMPEST attack is deceptively simple. Any machine that processes information -- be it a photocopier, an electric typewriter or a laptop -- have parts inside that emit electromagnetic and acoustic energy that radiates out, as if they were tiny radio stations. The waves can even be picked up and amplified by nearby power lines, telephone cables and even water pipes, carrying them even further. A sophisticated attacker can capture the right frequency, analyze the data for patterns and recover the raw information the devices were processing or even the private encryption keys inside the machine.

Decades ago the FCC has set standards prohibiting electrical devices from interfering with other ones, concerned merely about noise. These days we know that computer monitors, audio cables and other information machines like credit card machines in restaurants actually emit sensitive information.

Outside of the government, almost nothing was known about how such eavesdropping worked until 1985, when a computer researcher named Wim van Eck published a paper explaining how cheap equipment could be used to pick up and redisplay information from a computer monitor. The first mentions of TEMPEST began in the mid 60s, and Gene Hackman introduced the Faraday cage to the public in the 1970s in the classic eavesdropping movie The Conversation.*

In addition to explaining how the U.S. discovered compromising emanations, the declassified NSA document provides a surprising historical snapshot of Cold War espionage techniques, says McNamara.

"It is ... interesting that CIA rediscovered the vulnerability in 1951 and work on countermeasures soon followed," he says. "One can assume that the U.S. Intelligence Community also begin using the electronic surveillance technique against foreign powers during this same time frame. From the 1953 and 1954 dates mentioned in the document, it seems the Russians were aware of the vulnerability by then, and were taking measures to secure their communications equipment.

Pennsylvania University science professor Matt Blaze also expressed some amazement at the Bell researchers discovering as early as 1943 that digital equipment leaked information.

"The earliest reference to emissions attacks I'm aware of ... is Peter Wright's recollections, in his book Spycatcher, of following around spies in 1950's London by tracking the local oscillators of their radio receivers," says Blaze. "But that's analog, not digital."

The NSA did not declassify the entire paper however, leaving the description of two separate, but apparently related, types of attacks enticingly redacted.

One attack is called "Flooding" and the other "Seismic."

The idea of being able to steal plain text of an encrypted message using earthquake sensors? Stinkin' cool.

THREAT LEVEL anxiously awaits the back story on that attack to be told.

*Professor Matt Blaze questions whether Hackman was in a Faraday cage in The Conversation, since Hackman was able to transmit out. He was definitely in some sort of metal cage, but I may have jumped to conclusions about its Faraday-ness.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...leases-se.html





Beating the Codebreakers with Quantum Cryptography

Quantum cryptography may be essentially solved, but getting the funky physics to work on disciplined computer networks is a whole new headache.

Cryptography is an arms race, but the finish line may be fast approaching. Up to now, each time the codemakers made a better mousetrap, codebreakers breed a better mouse. But quantum cryptography theoretically could outpace the codebreakers and win the race. Forever.

Already the current state of the art in classical encryption, 128-bit RSA, can be cracked with enough raw, brute force computing power available to organisations like the US National Security Agency. And the advent of quantum computing will make it even simpler. The gold standard for secret communication will be truly dead.

Quantum cryptography solves the problem, and it will overcome the remaining stumbling block, the distribution of the code key to the right person, by using quantum key distribution (QKD).

Modern cryptography relies on the use of digital ‘keys’ to encrypt data before sending it over a network, and to decrypt it at the other end. The receiver must have a version of the key code used by the sender so as to be able to decrypt and access the data.

QKD offers a theoretically uncrackable code, one that is easily distributed and works in a transparent manner. Even better, the nature of quantum mechanics means that if any eavesdropper – called Eve in the argot of cryptographers – tries to snoop on a message the sender and receiver will both know.

That ability is due to the use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which sits at the heart of quantum mechanics. The principle rests on the theory that the act of measuring a quantum state changes that state. It is like children with a guilty secret. As soon as you look at them their faces morph plausibly into ‘Who, me?’

The practical upshot for cryptography is that the sender and receiver can verify the security of the transmission. They will know if the state of the quanta has changed, whether the key has been read en route. If so, they can abandon the key they are using and generate a new one.

QKD made its real-world debut in the canton of Geneva for use in the electronic voting system used in the Swiss general election last year. The system guaranteed that the poll was secure. But, more importantly perhaps, it also ensured that no vote was lost in transmission, because the uncertainly principle established there was no change to the transmitted data.

The end of the beginning
The canton election was a demonstration of the work done by researchers for the SECOQC project, an EU-funded effort to develop an international network for secure communication based on QKD.

The test of the technology demonstrated that QKD worked for point-to-point communications between two parties. But the demonstration was just the beginning of the SECOQC’s overall goal.

“We want to establish a network wide quantum encryption, because it will mean it works over much longer distances,” explains Christian Monyk, co-ordinator of the SECOQC project and head of the quantum-technologies unit at the Austrian Research Centres. “Network quantum encryption and QKD mean that many parties can communicate securely, not just two. Finally, it also means quantum encryption could be deployed on a very large scale, for the insurance and banking sectors, for example.”

Moving the system from point-to-point communications to a network is an order of magnitude more difficult.

“The quantum science for cryptography and key distribution is essentially solved, and it is a great result,” Monyk says. “But getting that system to work across a network is much more difficult. You have to deal with different protocols and network architectures, develop new nodes and new interfaces with the quantum devices to get it to a large-scale, long distance, real-world application.”

Working at a distance
Getting the system to work over long distances is also a challenge because QKD requires hi-fidelity data transmission over high-quality physical networks like non-zero dispersion shifted fibre optics.

“It was not one big problem, it was many, many small computing science and engineering problems,” says Monyk. “We had to work with a large number of technologies. And we have to certify it to experts.”

But SECOQC’s researchers believe they have solved the network issue. The researchers are currently putting the final touches to a demonstration of the technology to be held this October in Vienna, Austria. Industry has shown great interest in the technology. Still the technology is not quite ready for prime time.

“From a technical point of view, the technology will be ready in one or two years,” says Monyk.

And that means that the race will be won, finally, by the codemakers.
http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/i...tures/ID/89694





Prosecutor Calls Indicted Private Eye a 'Well-Paid Thug'
Greg Risling

Private investigator Anthony Pellicano was a "well-paid thug" who dug up dirt through wiretaps and other illegal means to benefit his Hollywood A-list clientele, a federal prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

In his closing argument, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Saunders said jurors had been taken inside Pellicano's world during the two-month trial and shown how he illegally collected information for clients to use in legal and other disputes.

"Tires get slashed, computers get hacked, houses get broken into," Saunders said. "And of course, people's phones get wiretapped."

Saunders was scheduled to continue his argument Tuesday, with defense attorneys to follow.

Pellicano, 64, and four co-defendants have pleaded not guilty to a variety of charges. Pellicano, who is acting as his own attorney, is accused of leading a criminal enterprise that raked in more than $2 million by spying on Hollywood's rich and famous then supplying the dirt to their rivals.

Saunders said the government had proven its case by presenting documents, testimony from clients and alleged victims, and perhaps most importantly recordings made by the private investigator.

"When you get recordings of defendants engaging in criminal activity, there's not a whole lot they can do to get away from it," Saunders said.

Nearly all those recordings involved discussions between Pellicano and clients. Only one allegedly wiretapped call was played during the trial.

Saunders explained that computers weren't seized during the first of several searches of Pellicano's office because the warrant did not target the alleged wiretapping.

When authorities returned later with another warrant, "Mr. Pellicano had cleaned house," Saunders said.

Saunders called former Los Angeles police Sgt. Mark Arneson, a co-defendant in the case, a "dirty cop" who sold his badge for the $2,500 a month Pellicano paid him to run names through law enforcement databases.

Saunders showed jurors copies of checks to Pellicano from clients or law firms. He then compared the dates of the payments to a police audit showing when names were run through databases by Arneson. In some cases, names were processed on the same day a payment was given to Pellicano.

U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer expects closing arguments to take about two days, with the jury likely to get the case later this week.

Comedian Chris Rock and one-time power agent Michael Ovitz testified during the trial about using the services of Pellicano. Both said they knew nothing about his tactics.

Comedian Garry Shandling, an alleged victim, also took the witness stand.

Pellicano was accused of wiretapping the phone of Sylvester Stallone, but the "Rocky" star did not testify.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080429/...OVP.tG9vBH2ocA





Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
David Barstow

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Marine colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/wa...0generals.html





Military Propaganda Pushed Me Off TV
Jeff Cohen

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism.

No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed. Or fire Phil Donahue. Or smear weapons expert Scott Ritter. Or blacklist former attorney general Ramsey Clark. It was top NBC/MSNBC execs, not the Feds, who imposed a quota system on the Donahue staff requiring two pro-war guests if we booked one anti-war advocate — affirmative action for hawks.

I’m all for a Congressional investigation into the Pentagon’s Iraq propaganda operation — which included an active-duty general exhorting ex-military-turned-paid-pundits that “the strategic target remains our population.”

But I’m also for keeping the focus and onus on CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, even NPR — who were partners in the Pentagon’s mission of “information dominance.” And for us to see that American TV news remains so corrupt today that it has hardly mentioned the Times story on the Pentagon’s pundits, which was based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents acquired by a successful Times lawsuit.

It’s important to remember that at the same time corporate TV outlets voluntarily abandoned journalistic ethics in the run-up to Iraq, independent media boomed in audience by making totally different journalistic choices. Programs like Democracy Now! featured genuine experts on Iraq who — what a shock! — got the facts right. Independent blogs and websites, propelled by war skepticism, began to soar.

As for the major TV networks, they were not hoodwinked by a Pentagon propaganda scheme. They were willingly complicit, and have been for decades. As FAIR’s director, I began questioning top news executives years ago about their over-reliance on non-debate segments featuring former military brass. After the 1991 Gulf war, CNN and other networks realized that their use of ex-generals had helped the Pentagon dazzle and disinform the public about the conduct of the war.

CNN actually had me debate the issue of ex-military on TV with a retired US Army colonel. Military analysts aren’t used to debates, and this one got heated:

ME: You would never dream of covering the environment by bringing on expert after expert after expert who had all retired from environmental organizations after 20 or 30 years and were still loyal to those groups. You would never discuss the workplace or workers by bringing on expert after expert after expert who’d been in the labor movement and retired in good standing after 30 years. . . . When it comes to war and foreign policy, you bring on all the retired generals, retired secretaries of state.

THE COLONEL (irritably): What do you want, a tax auditor to come in and talk about military strategy?

ME: You hit it on the nail, Colonel. What you need besides the generals and the admirals who can talk about how missiles and bombs are dispatched, you need other experts. You need experts in human rights, you need medical experts, you need relief experts who know what it’s like to talk about bombs falling on people.

Before the debate ended, I expressed my doubts that corporate media would ever quit their addiction to unreliable military sources: “There’s this ritual, it’s a familiar pattern, a routine, where mainstream journalists, after the last war or intervention, say, ‘Boy, we got manipulated. We were taken. But next time, we’re going to be more skeptical.’ And then when the next time comes, it’s the same reporters interviewing the same experts, who buy the distortions from the Pentagon.”

A few years later, during the brutal US-NATO bombing of Serbia, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed CNN vice-president and anchor Frank Sesno:

GOODMAN: If you support the practice of putting ex-military men, generals, on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion in times of war, to be sitting there with the military generals, talking about why they feel that war is not appropriate?

SESNO: We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don’t bring them in as advocates.

It’s clear: War experts are neutral analysts; peace experts are advocates. Even when the Pentagon helps select and prep the network’s military analysts. Shortly after the Iraq invasion, CNN’s news chief Eason Jordan acknowledged on-air that he’d run the names of potential analysts by the Pentagon: “We got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

Of all the excruciating moments for me — after having been terminated by MSNBC along with Phil Donahue and others — the worst was watching retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, NBC’s top military analyst, repeatedly blustering for war on Iraq. Undisclosed to viewers, the general was a member (along with Lieberman, McCain, Kristol and Perle) of the pro-invasion “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.”

A leading figure in the Pentagon’s pundit corps, no one spewed more nonsense in such an authoritative voice than McCaffrey — for example, on the top-notch advanced planning for securing Iraq: “I just got an update briefing from Secretary Rumsfeld and his team on what’s the aftermath of the fighting. And I was astonished at the complexity and dedication with which they’ve gone about thinking through this.”

After the invasion began, McCaffrey crowed on MSNBC: “Thank God for the Abrams tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle.”

No federal agency forced NBC and MSNBC to put McCaffrey on the air unopposed. No federal agency prevented those networks from telling viewers that the general sat on the boards of several military contactors, including one that made millions for doing God’s work on the Abrams and Bradley.

Genuine separation of press and state is one reason growing numbers of Americans are choosing independent media over corporate media.

And independent media don’t run embarrassing promos of the kind NBC was proudly airing in 2003:

Showdown Iraq, and only NBC News has the experts. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, allied commander during the Gulf War. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, he was the most decorated four-star general in the Army. Gen. Wayne Downing, former special operations commander and White House advisor. Ambassador Richard Butler and former UN weapons inspector David Kay. Nobody has seen Iraq like they have. The experts. The best information from America’s most watched news organization, NBC News.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/28/8560/





Doc Makers Say Unique Voices Being Silenced by Rights Battles
CBC News

Documentary filmmakers say it's getting tougher to make independent productions because of growing restrictions on what images and sounds they can use.

The battle over rights issues was a hot topic of discussion at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival, where a session last week about fair use was packed with filmmakers from around the world.

Many filmmakers fear they'll soon no longer be able to fully document our pop culture and mixed media age because of the high cost of using footage and sound, and the consolidation of rights to this material in a few hands.

Toronto filmmaker Stuart Samuels has been working on a documentary called 27, which mixes archival footage of the lives of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

It hasn't been easy, he told CBC News.

"What's changing now is everyone is much more understanding that copyright or the products they own mean money," he said.

"The prices right now are all relevant. Half of my budget is rights clearances, if you can get them."

Image archives and sound libraries are getting snapped up by larger companies and consolidated in a few hands.

It's both more difficult and more expensive to get rights, Samuels said. Yet without the keen eye of documentarians to parse pop culture, the age of media could become a monoculture, he said.

"Because of the consolidation, what you're having are intellectual ghettos in a sense," he said. "So the Murdoch group has this stuff, and these studios are going here. So what they do is make in-house documentaries that have the pretense of objectivity but are basically restricted by 'what you own is what you see.'"

Even more difficult in EU

Italian filmmaker Marco Visalberghi says overlapping laws and sky-high costs have made documentary creation difficult in the European Union.

Anything covered with copyright "belongs to the big libraries that cost a fortune," he said.

"Freedom of speech is basically impossible in this world that is made up of pictures."

As a result, directors are abandoning anything with a hint of pop culture content, Visalberghi told fellow filmmakers in Toronto.

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor ran into the clearance quicksand working on a film about copyright.

"We tried to get a clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger dropping a puck on a NHL game, because Schwarzenegger came up to Canada to lobby the government about outlawing camcorders in movie theatres," he said.

"But CBC wouldn't release it unless the NHL agreed. And the NHL wouldn't release it unless Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed."

Schwarzenegger didn't agree and the clip was never used.

Creative Commons one way to share

Gaynor is backing a Creative Commons for documentary makers — a source of footage and sounds that is not controlled by a major corporation.

His website opensourcecinema.org promotes sharing among filmmakers.

Many Canadian documentary makers are getting on board the Creative Commons movement, which involves filmmakers making their work available to others and setting the terms for reuse of their own work.

Samuels says its necessary for filmmakers to have the freedom to put archival images and material together in new ways.

"If we don't dissect and deconstruct our pop culture about how it is and how it influences us and changes us, then basically we're one big channel. We're one global village, but we're all singing the same note."
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/20...e-commons.html





Hollywood May Not be Able to Handle Hard Times
Gregg Kilday

With "Iron Man" set to blast off Friday and jump-start the high-flying summer moviegoing season, Hollywood is tuning up to launch into a spirited chorus of "We're in the Money!"

The expected outpouring of box office dollars comes just in the nick of time. Year to date, only one movie, Fox's "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" has topped the $100 million mark. Although total domestic grosses for 2008 are running just 2% behind last year, that's thanks to the Christmas releases; the spring slate actually lagged 18% behind last year's numbers. Meanwhile, the specter of recession is bearing down on the United States, gas prices are rising and consumers are feeling the pinch.

But as folks consider cutting back on their Starbucks lattes, Hollywood is convinced that movies will ride out the down times.

"In the past four decades, there have been seven recession years in this country, and box office climbed strongly in five of those years," John Fithian, president and CEO of industry trade group the National Assn. of Theater Owners, said last month. "Consumers cut back on expensive purchases during recessions but also typically shift what discretionary spending money they have left to affordable activities, such as going to the movies."

But, brother, can you spare a dime's worth of straight talk? Ginger Rogers might have put a happy face on hard times as she pig-latined her way through the lyrics of "We're in the Money" in "Gold Diggers of 1933," but by then Hollywood was truly whistling in the dark.

In fact, Hollywood was not immune to the Depression at all. Box office and studio profits, which were riding high in 1930 as audiences flocked to the talkies, plunged precipitously by 1932 and hit rock-bottom in 1933 as the combined studios posted net losses and several were forced into bankruptcy.

Theaters responded by cutting ticket prices -- from about 25 cents in 1929 to 24 cents in 1935. (That might sound like chump change, but 24 cents in 1935 dollars is the equivalent of $3.74 today.) They were forced to resort to gimmicks like dish giveaways to lure moviegoers back to the Bijoux.

Now, nobody is predicting that the current economy is about to plunge over a Depression-era cliff. But last week, market research company NPD Group reported that 37% of Americans expect to spend less on entertainment products and devices in 2008 than they did in 2007. Big "tentpole" pictures still might enjoy hefty openings, but if thrill-seekers do start parceling out their dollars, it certainly could impact the repeat business that used to fuel the biggest blockbusters.

Will the fanboys who rush to "Iron Man" go back for a second viewing or opt to spend their spare cash on "Grand Theft Auto IV," which arrives in stores Friday? Will nostalgic boomers who shell out for the new boxed DVD set of the previous "Indiana Jones" adventures -- which also hits shelves Tuesday -- pay more than one visit to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" when it hits screens May 22? The movies face a much more competitive landscape -- of Hollywood's own devising -- than existed during previous recessions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...19838020080429





Foreign DVD Sales Bolster DreamWorks’ Profit
Brooks Barnes

Can movie studios count on the international DVD market to pick up the slack for softening sales at home?

Judging by DreamWorks Animation SKG’s first-quarter results, the answer could be yes. Foreign DVD sales of “Shrek the Third” were stronger than anticipated, helping DreamWorks report a 69 percent increase in quarterly profit on Tuesday.

The news was a hopeful sign for media investors worried about the health of Hollywood’s crucial home entertainment business. In 2007, total domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent to $15.9 billion, according to Adams Media Research, which said it was the first annual drop in the medium’s history. A flooded marketplace and competition for leisure time were the primary reasons.

Now the tattered economy is prompting concern that consumers will think twice before tossing that nonessential DVD into their shopping carts.

“Everybody is somewhat worried about the recession that we may or may not have,” said Lew Coleman, the president of DreamWorks, in an interview. “We still believe that our industry provides relatively cheap entertainment and people still need to be entertained,” he added.

The international DVD market is less of a puzzle, at least for now. Sales in countries like Brazil and Russia are “growing quite fast,” Mr. Coleman said. Meanwhile, most of the “Shrek the Third” sales came from France and Italy, two markets where growth has recently leveled off.

DreamWorks, based in Glendale, Calif., said that net income totaled $26.1 million, or 28 cents a share, compared with a profit of $15.4 million, or 15 cents a share, during the first three months of 2007. Analysts had predicted a profit of 23 cents a share.

Revenue in the quarter rose to $156.6 million from $93.7 million. Overseas box office receipts and domestic DVD sales for “Bee Movie” also contributed to the results.

The company now turns its attention to the release of “Kung Fu Panda,” featuring the voices of Jack Black, Jackie Chan and Angelina Jolie, and the December arrival on Broadway of the company’s first live entertainment effort, “Shrek the Musical.”

After viewing portions of “Kung Fu Panda,” about a slacker who must save his neighborhood from a villainous snow leopard, Goldman Sachs media analyst Ingrid Chung on April 7 increased the six-month price target for DreamWorks Animation to $32 from $30, saying she had “increased confidence” that the film could be a sequel-spawning franchise.

“Kung Fu Panda” arrives in theaters on June 6 and is expected to benefit from little competition from other family-oriented films — at least until “Wall-E,” the Walt Disney Company’s robot love story, arrives on June 27.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/bu...a/30dream.html





MPA Distributes File Sharing Education Booklet

Mumbai: The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) will distribute 300,000 copies of an educational booklet outlining the dangers of illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to 300,000 students studying at the country's top universities.

The booklet titled Respect Creativity, Use Legally was developed to warn young people that users of P2P file-sharing services risk exposing their computers to harmful viruses, worms, Trojan horses and annoying pop-ups, and risk data loss and identify theft. Around the world there have been a number of high-profile leaks from government and corporate computer networks over the past few years due to inadvertent uploading of confidential data by P2P network users.

The first batch of 300 booklets was distributed to students attending an IPR presentation by Renmin University commissioner of the general administration of press and publication Liu Binjie on 22 April. The remaining copies will be distributed to welcome new students at universities throughout China in August this year.

On the following day, MPA and China Association for Educational Technology (CAET) jointly launched an anti-piracy campaign designed to challenge the creativity of students aged between 6 to 15 years in China's elementary, middle, and junior high schools.

Established in 1991, CAET is a state corporation approved by China's Education Ministry. Its main tasks are to organize, promote and coordinate research relating to educational technology and academic activities to strengthen international cooperation. CAET is active in a wide range of disciplines including foreign languages, medicine, educational technology, educational software and movies.

The competition runs from April to June 2008 and entries can take a wide range of formats, limited only by the creativity of the students, including posters, graphic design, animation, photographs, poetry, music and movies. Entries can also be filmed debates, exhibitions or interviews on IPR-related topics. An estimated one million students across China are expected to participate in this competition.

The campaign challenges young people to take a fresh look at the value of intellectual property to society and to individuals and judges will assess the extent to which entries achieve that goal. The creator of the best piece of work will be invited on a trip to Hollywood to visit MPA member company film studios.

Both events are part of the MPA's efforts to mark World Intellectual Property Day in China.

World IP Day is an initiative of the World Intellectual Property Organization and has been celebrated annually on 26 April since its inception in 2001. The day is primarily a chance to reflect on the importance of human innovation and celebrate the important role that IP plays in our daily lives.

"One of the best ways to help improve understanding of the value of intellectual property is to invite people to create work of their own," said MPA president and managing director, Asia-Pacific Mike Ellis.

"It is good for China's brightest young people – the creators of tomorrow – to reflect on the value of intellectual property and I am particularly pleased that through this collaboration with CAET, respect for copyright can be further enhanced in China's young students."

"These young people should also be aware of the risks involved when they use P2P file sharing networks," Ellis added. "The booklets we are distributing with IFPI will serve as a guide, and will also highlight that cumulative effects of individuals downloading pirated music and movies are just as damaging as syndicated intellectual property theft."
http://www.businessofcinema.com/news.php?newsid=8073





J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz
Orson Scott Card

Can you believe that J.K. Rowling is suing a small publisher because she claims their 10,000-copy edition of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a book about Rowling's hugely successful novel series, is just a "rearrangement" of her own material.

Rowling "feels like her words were stolen," said lawyer Dan Shallman.

Well, heck, I feel like the plot of my novel Ender's Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling.

A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world.

This paragraph lists only the most prominent similarities between Ender's Game and the Harry Potter series. My book was published in England many years before Rowling began writing about Harry Potter. Rowling was known to be reading widely in speculative fiction during the era after the publication of my book.

I can get on the stand and cry, too, Ms. Rowling, and talk about feeling "personally violated."

The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote.

Mine is not the only work that one can charge Rowling "borrowed" from. Check out this piece from a fan site, pointing out links between Harry Potter and other previous works: http://www.geocities.com/versetrue/rowling.htm. And don't forget the lawsuit by Nancy K. Stouffer, the author of a book entitled The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, whose hero was named "Larry Potter."

At that time, Rowling's lawyers called Stouffer's claim "frivolous."

It's true that we writers borrow words from each other - but we're supposed to admit it and not pretend we're original when we're not. I took the word ansible from Ursula K. LeGuin, and have always said so. Rowling, however, denies everything.

If Steven Vander Ark, the author of Lexicon, had written fiction that he claimed was original, when it was actually a rearrangement of ideas taken from the Harry Potter books, then she'd have a case.

But Lexicon is intended only as a reference book for people who have already paid for their copies of Rowling's books. Even though the book is not scholarly, it certainly falls within the realm of scholarly comment.

Rowling's hypocrisy is so thick I can hardly breathe: Prior to the publication of each novel, there were books about them that were no more intrusive than Lexicon. I contributed to one of them, and there was no complaint about it from Rowling or her publishers because they knew perfectly well that these fan/scholar ancillary publications were great publicity and actually boosted sales.

But now the Harry Potter series is over, and Rowling claims that her "creative work" is being "decimated."

Of course, she doesn't claim that it's the Lexicon that is harming her "creative work" (who's she borrowing from this time?); it's the lawsuit itself! And since she chose to bring the suit, whose fault is it? If she had left Vander Ark alone to publish his little book and make his little bit of money, she wouldn't be distracted from her next novel.

But no, Rowling claims Vander Ark's book "constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work."

Seventeen years? What a crock. Apparently she includes in that total the timeframe in which she was reading - and borrowing from - the work of other writers.

On the stand, though, Rowling's chief complaint seems to be that she would do a better job of annotating and encyclopedizing her own series.

So what?

Nothing prevents her from doing exactly that - annotating and explaining her own novels. Do you think that if there were a Harry Potter Annotated by the Author, Vander Ark's book would interfere with her sales in any way?

This frivolous lawsuit puts at serious risk the entire tradition of commentary on fiction. Any student writing a paper about the Harry Potter books, any scholarly treatise about it, will certainly do everything she's complaining about.

Once you publish fiction, Ms. Rowling, anybody is free to write about it, to comment on it, and to quote liberally from it, as long as the source is cited.

Here's the irony: Vander Ark had the material for this book on his website for years, and Rowling is quoted as saying that when she needed to look up some 'fact" from her earlier books, she would sometimes "sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter."

In other words, she already had made personal use of Vander Ark's work and found it valuable. Even if it has shortcomings, she found it useful.

That means that Vander Ark created something original and useful - he added value to the product. If Rowling wants to claim that it interferes with her creativity now, she should have made that complaint back when she was using it - and giving Vander Ark an award for his website back in 2004.

Now, of course, she regrets "bitterly" having given the award.

You know what I think is going on?

Rowling has nowhere to go and nothing to do now that the Harry Potter series is over. After all her literary borrowing, she shot her wad and she's flailing about trying to come up with something to do that means anything.

Moreover, she is desperate for literary respectability. Even though she made more money than the queen or Oprah Winfrey in some years, she had to see her books pushed off the bestseller lists and consigned to a special "children's book" list. Litterateurs sneer at her work as a kind of subliterature, not really worth discussing.

It makes her insane. The money wasn't enough. She wants to be treated with respect.

At the same time, she's also surrounded by people whose primary function is to suck up to her. No doubt some of them were saying to her, "It's wrong for these other people to be exploiting what you created to make money for themselves."

She let herself be talked into being outraged over a perfectly normal publishing activity, one that she had actually made use of herself during its web incarnation.

Now she is suing somebody who has devoted years to promoting her work and making no money from his efforts - which actually helped her make some of her bazillions of dollars.

Talent does not excuse Rowling's ingratitude, her vanity, her greed, her bullying of the little guy, and her pathetic claims of emotional distress.

I fully expect that the outcome of this lawsuit will be:

1. Publication of Lexicon will go on without any problem or prejudice, because it clearly falls within the copyright law's provision for scholarly work, commentary and review.

2. Rowling will be forced to pay Steven Vander Ark's legal fees, since her suit was utterly without merit from the start.

3. People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.

It's like her stupid, self-serving claim that Dumbledore was gay. She wants credit for being very up-to-date and politically correct - but she didn't have the guts to put that supposed "fact" into the actual novels, knowing that it might hurt sales.

What a pretentious, puffed-up coward. When I have a gay character in my fiction, I say so right in the book. I don’t wait until after it has had all its initial sales to mention it.

Rowling has now shown herself to lack a brain, a heart and courage. Clearly, she needs to visit Oz.
http://www.linearpublishing.com/RhinoStory.html





Mariah Makes Another Road - Trip Flick

Seven years after making what is widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever, Mariah Carey is back with another road-trip flick.

But her new movie, "Tennessee," has little in common with 2001's "Glitter."

Premiering at New York's Tribeca Film Festival last Saturday, it follows two brothers seeking their estranged father. On their travels, they meet Krystal, a waitress played by Carey.

"Mariah said, 'This is going to be refreshing for me; this is actually something that I want,' even knowing that it was a gritty, hard shoot," director Aaron Woodley told Reuters in an interview. "Some people even told me that they forgot it was Mariah Carey when they were watching the film."

In 2001, Carey released the semi-autobiographical film "Glitter," which was a commercial and critical flop. She also appeared on MTV's Total Request Live, nearly disrobing in front of a baffled Carson Daly, amid rumors of a nervous breakdown.

Carey, 38, has spent the years since atoning.

"The whole 'Glitter' experience was very, very hard to go through, but I learned a lot from it," she said in a statement.

In 2005, the Long Island, New York native made a big comeback with her multiplatinum album "The Emancipation of Mimi" and won rave reviews for her performance in "WiseGirls," a comedy-drama that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

"She's not a diva and she came to work -- and work hard she did," said "Tennessee" producer Lee Daniels, who acknowledged: "People do feel negatively about her as an actor."

But that didn't stop him from offering her the lead female role. Daniels, producer of the Oscar-winning film "Monster's Ball," said he saw Carey in "WiseGirls" and decided "it was clear that she's a very talented actress."

Carey's new album, "E=MC2," shot to No. 1 on the U.S. pop chart, debuting with 463,000 sales in the week ended April 20, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. That was the best debut sales week of her career and the strongest of any artist this year. Figures for the week ended April 27 are out on Wednesday.

Carey's latest single, "Touch My Body," is her 18th U.S. No. 1 -- taking her past Elvis Presley -- and just behind the Beatles, who managed 20 No. 1 songs.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...47097420080429





RIAA: Digital Brings In 23 Percent of U.S. Music Revenue
FMQB

New 2007 year-end shipment statistics published by the RIAA show that digital formats now account for 23 percent of U.S.-based recording revenues. Not surprisingly, that number represents continuos growth year-over-year, as the figures from 2006 show digital revenue at 16.1 percent and it was 9 percent in 2005. The RIAA numbers also showed that mobile formats, including ringtones, mobile downloads and ringbacks, moved 361 million units, which marks a 14.6 percent gain over 2006.

Also in 2007, CD shipments dropped 17.5 percent to 511.1 million units, or $7.45 billion in revenues. The CD drop represents a 20.5 percent slide from 2006. However, CD singles are actually on the rise, as 2.6 million units were shipped in 2007, which is up 51.5 percent over 2006. CD singles brought in $12.2 million in revenue, which is up 59 percent year-over-year.

Meanwhile, paid downloads of digital singles moved to 809.9 million, a 38.1 percent gain over 2006. However, this was softer than a year-ago jump of 59.8 percent. Full album downloads moved 42.5 million, which marked a 54 percent gain year-over-year.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=677079





Capitol Music Group Restructures
FMQB

EMI under the new leadership of Terra Firma, has continued its restructuring process with several undisclosed changes today in its U.S operations. With deference to the company’s wishes given the nature of the changes today, individual names have not been officially released and will not be published at this time. However, according to sources familiar to the situation, FMQB has learned the conceptual model that is the result of today’s changes.

In January of 2007, the merger of Capitol and Virgin Records was announced under the leadership team of Jason Flom as Chairman/CEO, Lee Trink as President and Jeff Kempler as COO. At the end of February of 2008, Greg Thompson was brought in as EVP of Promotion for this merged group named the Capitol Music Group. Prior to today, there were dedicated promo teams for both the Capitol and Virgin labels.

What transpired today is the assemblage of one central promotion team by which Thompson will continue to oversee. Again, the composition of this central group, which includes a national executive team for every radio format and a field staff, has yet to be officially unveiled by the company. The function of this central promo team will be to service the following labels: the Capitol Music Group including Capitol and Virgin; all the imprints in the Bluenote Label Group including Bluenote, Angel, Manhattan, MetroBlue and Back Porch; the Caroline Music Group and Astralwerks. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. The team will also work in conjunction with the Nashville office for Country crossovers and the EMI Christian Music Group for crossover artists as well. The U.S. Latin label is not part of this initiative.

Greg Thompson will continue to report to President Lee Trink, and he and his team will support and service all of the promotion efforts for the aforementioned label groups.

The purpose of the restructure is symmetric with the global effort that EMI has embarked on to keep their marketing and promotion focus on artists relative to today’s market conditions.

There were layoffs today with some positions being eliminated. The company is not prepared to release any official information about the individual changes at this time.
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=670490





‘Rock the Cradle’ All Ignorant About Kate Bush!
jimf

Music has always been a big deal to me — from the time I used to sing along to Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” in the backseat as a 2-year-old. Every time I dropped the needle on a new record as a kid (everything was vinyl then), it felt like another chapter in the on-going, ever-evolving story of rock & roll. But history and tradition in music seem increasingly lost now in a more disposable culture. I mean, rock gods have pretty much morphed into…“Idols.”

This whole trip is my lead-in to something a little less lofty: What’s up with “Rock the Cradle”? Let me explain —

In last week’s episode (oh, whatever, watch it online), Lil B. Sure, son of Al B. Sure, mis-attributed his song selection, “This Woman’s Work,” to Maxwell. Yes, it’s true that the guy who isn’t D’Angelo did, in fact, cover the track back in 2001 — impressively so, stretching his vocals and showcasing one mean falsetto (skills, by the way, that were in short supply when Lil B. took to the “RTC” stage. Oof). But ain’t no way around it: boy seemed a bit ignorant for not knowing that the song was originally recorded, in 1989, by killer songstress Kate Bush. Aside from “Woman’s Work,” Kate’s best known to American audiences as Peter Gabriel’s duet partner on “Don’t Give Up” (off Gabriel’s 1986 monster So) –- and now she’s being name-checked by the newer generation of indie talent.

What made the gaffe so glaring, though, was show host Ryan Devlin, who, in a move more infuriating than Donald Trump’s boardroom overdubs, totally backed up Lil B.’s misinformation. Poor cute-as-dimples Devlin! Dude, we know this is a big gig for you. But your street cred just took a serious hit with the guyliner crowd!

So what do you guys think? Should Devlin atone for his mistake by personally covering “Hounds of Love” on this Thursday’s installment of the show? Or am I just a nit-picking music snob?
http://newsroom.mtv.com/2008/04/15/r...out-kate-bush/





Running Up That Hill (Placebo)
Rachel Baker

Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill arguably has the most beautiful and lustful lyrics of any song of the last 30 years. It is a classic and it’s impossible for any good band to go wrong when covering this song. This is witnessed in Within Temptation’s version in which Sharon den Adel does her best Kate Bush impression to great effect.

However, den Adel loses all the illicit lust and sexuality conveyed by Molko and Bush and it’s really just a showcase of her impressive vocal range with a gorgeous video.

An excellent cover version, needs to be a journey, identifying how it has developed from the original. Brian Molko is responsible for some of the best, most perceptive and intelligent lyrics in music. It is interesting that he has covered such a pure song about female desire and made it into a lustful and desperate plea of eroticism by using exactly the same lyrics.

Bush’s original encompasses the whole performance, it is full of musicality as she sings every note in a heartfelt manner. Her video is a body to body balletic expression of attraction.

Molko doesn’t so much sing the lyrics, but annunciate them staccato and at times makes them sound like a threat. He then breaks down half way through with a begging crescendo: “If only I could make a deal with god, I’d get him to swap our places.” He fills that line with more angst and passion than Bush ever manages.

Male vocals give this song more impact and sincerity. The gendered versions emphasise the differences between men and women’s desire for lust. Molko is loved for his ambiguous sexuality and androgynous looks and Placebo are known for their seedy sound which oozes sex. Placebo bring this song to life in a way that Bush didn‘t manage.

When Placebo play this song live, they leave the stage before the encore with the intro to this song playing, like teasing foreplay! They then end the song with the most cacophonous climax of feedback and distortion.

The build up of Placebo’s version is so climactic you need a post coital cigarette afterwards to come down from that intense, melancholic yet euphoric high. It is 7 minutes and 43 seconds of pure, self indulgent, eroticism, sexuality, desire, lust and bliss!
http://www.the-dish.co.uk/2008/04/02...t-hill-placebo





Coldplay Previews New Eno-Produced Album With Free Download

Coldplay previewed its fourth album Tuesday with a free download of its new single, “Violet Hill.”
Greg Kot

The song was made available as an MP3 file on the multimillion-selling band’s Web site in the early afternoon, and processing was slow. I submitted my email address and zip code as instructed and the Web site acknowledged receiving them, promising that instructions for the download would be sent. But an hour later I still hadn’t received any info from Coldplay headquarters (despite removing certain spam filters as the Web site suggested). The song was much more conveniently available on peer-to-peer networks. And the music industry wonders why it’s losing listeners to rogue file-sharing?

As for the song itself:

I was eager to hear what the U.K. quartet had done with Brian Eno, who produced the new album, "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," due out June 12. Eno has a reputation for pushing artists out of their comfort zones and into new territory.

“Violet Hill” rolls in with about 40 seconds of ambient hum, not unlike the intro to U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” (another Eno production). Chris Martin’s voice and piano then break into a stately ballad, only to be interrupted by unusually strident electric guitar and thumping kick drum.

Martin sings about a broken relationship (“If you loved me/Why’d you let me go”), which should provide fodder for gossip rags musing about his relationship with actress Gwyneth Paltrow. But the real news here is the sheer aggression of the track until the final seconds, when it returns to more reassuring Coldplay territory: The sound of lonely Chris Martin at his upright piano, pining for his ex.

It’s not the radical shift in sound that Eno’s involvement might’ve suggested. Instead, the band has dressed up its trademark sensitivity (did someone say wimpiness?) in slightly harder-edged armor.

Coldplay, in a giving mood apparently, will usher in the new album with free shows June 16 in London and June 23 at Madison Square Garden in New York. A third free show (at a date to be determined) will be performed in Barcelona, Spain, where most of the album was recorded, Martin said Tuesday.
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.c...ay-previe.html





Radiohead Says No More Music Freebies

It was a pivotal moment for the music industry which many thought sounded the death knell for recorded music sales, but Radiohead won't be repeating its initiative to let fans pay what they want for their downloads, The English rock band's frontman said Tuesday.

"I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation," Thom Yorke said of the band's decision last October to let viewers pay what they wanted for digital downloads of the new album "In Rainbows."

"Yes. It was a one-off in terms of a story. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don't think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time," Yorke told the Hollywood Reporter.

Radiohead's decision to allow fans to pay into the online equivalent of an honesty box for the album came shortly after it walked away from troubled record label EMI, sparking acres of comment about the future direction of the music industry and the dwindling revenue pot from CD sales.

The band has remained quiet about whether the experiment was a success, with many fans thought to have downloaded the album without paying anything at all. "In Rainbows" was later released conventionally as a CD, and topped the U.S. and U.K. charts.

The groundbreaking move towards potentially free music has been adopted by a number of artists including Prince and Nine Inch Nails. Most recently fellow English rockers Coldplay said Monday that they would give away its new single "Violet Hill" free of charge, resulting in the group's Web site crashing the next day due to demand.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...37610420080430





Lost: Roger Waters' Pig

Organizers of a major California music festival are offering a $10,000 reward and four festival tickets for life in exchange for ex-Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters' two-story inflatable pig, which was lost on Sunday night.

Waters' signature pig was seen floating away during his closing set at the three-day Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival, held in the desert east of Los Angeles.

The giant flying pig, part of Pink Floyd's stage show since their 1977 album "Animals" featuring the song "Pigs on the Wing," broke free from its tethers above the Coachella crowd and drifted off.

It's not the first time Waters has lost his flying pig. Back in 1977, it floated away on the second day of a photo shoot at the Battersea Power Station in London and was later recovered and used for an album cover.

Waters was a member of British rock band between 1965 and 1985. He and the band continued to use the pig as a stage prop even after he quit, and at Coachella Waters played classic Pink Floyd songs including "Mother," "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," "Have a Cigar" and "Dark Side of the Moon."

Coachella was named one of the top three festivals in the country by music magazine Billboard. Last year, the festival attracted more than 186,000 music and art lovers, and grossed $16.2 million, according to the magazine.

Anyone with information on the lost pig, should email lostpig@coachella.com.

(Reporting by Syantani Chatterjee; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Todd Eastham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...34219420080429





Found
AP

A giant helium-filled pig didn't drift off to hog heaven after it was released into the night sky during Roger Waters' performance at the Coachella music festival. It's been found -- in pieces.

Two couples found tattered halves of the inflatable swine in their yards, a few miles from festival grounds in the Southern California desert.

Concert organizers had offered a $10,000 reward for the pig's return. On Tuesday, pieces of the plastic carcass were examined.

''That's definitely our pig,'' producer Bill Fold said.

Susan Stoltz found a plastic heap in her driveway Monday, but said she didn't know what it was until she read about the missing pig in the Desert Sun newspaper.

''My kids are going to think I'm so cool,'' she said.

Another resident of the same neighborhood, Judy Rimmer, said she found a piece of the pig draped over a front-yard plant.

The two couples will split the cash reward, Fold said.

As tall as a two-story house and as wide as two school buses, the pig was led from lines held on the ground Sunday as Waters played a version of Pink Floyd's ''Pigs'' from the 1977 anti-capitalist album ''Animals.''

Then it just floated away.

''It wasn't really supposed to happen that way. I don't have the details,'' festival spokeswoman Marcee Rondan said.

The pig displayed the words ''Don't be led to the slaughter'' and a cartoon of Uncle Sam holding two bloody cleavers. The other side read ''Fear builds walls'' and the underside read ''Obama'' with a checked ballot box for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...Flying-Pig.php
















Until next week,

- js.



















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