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Old 29-04-15, 07:27 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 2nd, '15

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"I do agree with law enforcement that we live in a dangerous world. And that's why our founders put in the Constitution of the United States—that's why they put in the Fourth Amendment. Because they understand that an Orwellian overreaching federal government is one of the most dangerous things that this world can have." – U.S. Representative Ted Lieu, (D-CA)


"I'm an EPB customer that had to sit on the sidelines while Comcast sued my city to halt the fiber rollout... I'm glad they lost as it was a total win for the community here. I have EPB's 1/1Gbps service at home, and to be honest after all the shenanigans [Comcast] pulled here keeping our city tied up in court for the longest time trying to hold onto their monopoly, I wouldn't go back to them on principle alone." – cdclndc


"This is a night and day difference since switching from AT&T. Everything that AT&T did wrong, this small local company is doing right." – Dave Mortimer






































May 2nd, 2015




U.S. Senator Rand Paul Moves to Block New 'Net Neutrality' Rules

U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican presidential hopeful, on Wednesday introduced a resolution to block new regulations on Internet service providers, saying they would "wrap the Internet in red tape."

The "net neutrality" rules, which are slated to take effect in June, are backed by the Obama administration and were passed by the Democratic majority of the Federal Communications Commission in February. AT&T Inc and wireless and cable trade associations are challenging them in court.

Paul's resolution, if adopted, would allow the Senate to fast-track a vote to establish that Congress disapproves of the FCC's new rules and moves to nullify them.

The move marks the most proactive position yet by Paul, a libertarian from Kentucky, on net neutrality, the principle that Internet providers should treat all Web traffic equally. The issue has grabbed national attention and prompted a record 4 million comments to the FCC, many of them from regular Americans calling to restrict Internet providers.

Paul's position, shared by anti-regulation conservatives, pits him against net neutrality advocates in the technology and startup communities.

"The Internet has successfully flourished without the heavy hand of government interference," Paul said in a statement. "Stated simply, I do not want to see the government regulating the Internet."

The rules ban Internet providers from blocking or slowing down any websites and from striking deals with content companies for smoother downloads. Internet providers say they oppose not those principles themselves but the FCC's decision to set those rules by dramatically changing the regulatory regime, which gives the agency much wider authority over the Internet.

The rules have also faced opposition from Paul's rival Republican presidential candidates, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has called them "Obamacare for the Internet," and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

Paul's resolution is almost certain to face a veto from President Barack Obama. Republican leaders of key technology committees have been trying to negotiate with Democrats to write a new law to counter the FCC's rules.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0XQ1UB20150429





Entire Broadband Industry Seeks Immediate Halt to Title II Classification

Cable, wireless, and telco trade groups ask for stay while lawsuit is pending.
Jon Brodkin

Four major trade associations representing broadband providers today asked for an immediate halt to the Federal Communications Commission decision to reclassify the providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

One petition for a stay came from two cable groups, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the American Cable Association (ACA). Another petition came from the CTIA Wireless Association on behalf of mobile carriers and USTelecom on behalf of telcos including AT&T and Verizon. AT&T and CenturyLink also signed on to the CTIA/USTelecom petition.

The petitions were filed with the FCC, which is unlikely to approve them, but the providers are required to petition the FCC before they can ask for a stay in court. Broadband providers have already sued to overturn the rules, but a stay would take them off the books pending resolution of the court case. USTelecom asked the FCC to act by May 8 "to allow adequate time for a judicial stay determination, if necessary." The groups can file for a stay in court if the FCC denies the petition or does not act on it.

The FCC declined comment today, but Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has previously said he thinks Internet providers will have a tough time gaining a stay.

The broadband providers are trying to make their request more palatable by asking only for a partial stay while leaving in place net neutrality rules that forbid blocking or discrimination against traffic. However, the FCC had to reclassify the providers in order to impose those rules because of a ruling on a previous lawsuit filed by Verizon.

One reason the providers fear common carrier status is that it will make it more difficult to charge network operators and content providers for direct connections to their networks. Just today, Verizon agreed to provide free peering to Cogent rather than risk a complaint to the FCC.

"[T]he order claims FCC control over peering agreements involving broadband Internet access providers, inserting the FCC into Internet peering for the first time," USTelecom said in its announcement. "This claim of control raises concerns that this area of the Internet would be subject to governmental delays and second guessing, harming investment and innovation. Since the order was adopted, some companies have already threatened to initiate FCC enforcement actions to achieve peering arrangements favorable to them, no matter what the balance of traffic is between providers. In the past, agreements were negotiated party-to-party without any government involvement."

The common carrier reclassification, which is scheduled to take effect June 12, would also let home Internet customers complain about unjust and unreasonable charges. Broadband providers oppose this as well.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...lassification/





Comcast Can Blame Us All for Sinking Its Time Warner Deal
Klint Finley

COMCAST OFFICIALLY ABANDONED its plans to acquire Time Warner Cable earlier today. But the nation’s largest cable provider didn’t simply decide it wasn’t interested in the $45.2 billion dollar deal any longer. Signals from the Department Justice and the Federal Communications Commission made clear that the merger wouldn’t be approved, and Comcast decided to cut its losses.

Some claim the move is a victory for the Obama Administration, which has long promised to crack down on antitrust violations and mega-mergers. But in 2011, the FCC and the DOJ approved the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, another coming together of two massive media companies that raised serious questions about conflicts of interest.

Does that mean federal regulators have toughened up since then? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is for certain: the rest of us have. The world is paying attention to internet policy in a way that it never has before. And with that attention comes pressure that will force the government’s hand on everything from network neutrality to antitrust as the internet becomes increasingly central to the lives of everyone.

A Different Perspective

One of the most obvious changes to the political landscape since the Comcast-NBC deal is the appointment of former telco lobbyist Tom Wheeler as FCC chairman in 2013.

Wheeler has brought a very different perspective to the FCC, says Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation, a think tank that has generally been skeptical of government regulation.

“I think the current FCC has a way of looking at things that is more suspicious of the internet service providers than I think is warranted,” he says, pointing to the rise of wireless internet services and high-speed fiber networks as potential competitors to established cable and DSL providers. He also says the growing power and wealth of content providers such as Facebook, Google and Netflix could have served as checks on the power of a combined Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

May thinks that suspicion of ISPs has played out in other recent decisions as well. For example, the agency recently redefined broadband as 25 megabits per second, up from just four megabits per second. “By doing that they magically, or ipso facto, increased the ‘broadband’ marketshare of Comcast and Time Warner Cable substantially,” he says.

Only Itself to Blame

But the appointment of Wheeler as FCC chairman can’t be the full explanation for the government’s shifting stance on mega-mergers. After all, the DOJ also approved the NBC deal. John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that promotes network neutrality and broadband access, points out that most of the staff of the two agencies has actually stayed the same over the past few years. “The FCC and DOJ staff don’t turn over as quickly as you might think,” he says.

Bergmayer says the way Comcast handled itself following the NBC deal doomed its effort to get another major acquisition approved. The FCC and the DOJ imposed a number of conditions on Comcast in effort to prevent the NBC Universal merger from harming consumers. But, he says, Comcast didn’t always follow the rules.

For example, in 2012 the FCC fined Comcast for not honoring its agreement to provide stand-alone broadband after the merger. In 2013, the agency issued another fine, saying Comcast violated “neighborhooding” agreements by failing to group together competing channels — for example, Bloomberg and MSNBC — on television dials.

Bergmayer also says that although Comcast agreed to honor the principles of network neutrality as part of the deal, the company has imposed bandwidth caps that its own services were able to bypass in what amounted to less-than-neutral discrimination against other content providers.

Even when Comcast did follow the rules of the agreement, Bergmayer says, those rules didn’t always have the results that regulators expected. “Being litigious, always looking for loop holes, and the conditions not really having the pro-competitve effect intended all reduced the appetite among policy makers to negotiate with Comcast this time around,” Bergmayer says.

The Price of Freedom

But in a way, seeking to give credit or cast blame is beside the point. The one overwhelming difference between today and 2011 is the dramatically heightened interest in the policies and companies that impact our access to the internet. Net neutrality went from esoteric geek issue to John Oliver rallying cry. And while everyone was watching, Comcast couldn’t seem to avoid acting like a mustache-twirling villain over and over again.

There was Comcast’s perpetual low rankings in customer satisfaction. There were the news reports of company reps changing customer names to “asshole brown” and “superbitch”. Then there were the apparently ghostwritten letters of support for the Time Warner merger.

At the same time, the public has become more sophisticated about internet policy debates in general.
Bergmayer credits that interest to this year’s campaign to protect network neutrality by reclassifying broadband providers as public utilities. The surge in public engagement might go back even further to the widespread campaigns against the SOPA and PIPA bills that would have required broadband providers to block access to content deemed to infringe copyrights. Regardless of what has spurred this heightened attention, the public is paying closer attention to how the government regulates the internet, and that scrutiny is clearly influencing decision-making.

And that need for public vigilance hardly comes to an end now that the Comcast-Time Warner deal is off. Charter Communications is already eying Time Warner Cable for itself, and thanks to Comcast, it now has a playbook for what not to do. Google, meanwhile, could emerge as a major player in both content and broadband access thanks to Google Fiber. As we all become more dependent on the internet, the companies that provide access to it become more powerful. The best way to keep that power in check is to keep paying attention.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/comcast...e-warner-deal/





Comcast’s Week-Long Unraveling of TWC Deal Was Months in the Making
David McLaughlin, Todd Shields, Alex Sherman, Gerry Smith

The collapse of Comcast Corp.’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable Inc., which played out in public over the course of a week, was months in the making.

When Comcast announced its $45.2 billion bid 14 months ago, Chief Executive Officer Brian Roberts promised the new company would transform how Americans experience entertainment. But opponents stepped up their offensive in recent months. Government officials told executives they worried the new cable giant could stifle competition on the Internet.

While the chances of getting the deal past regulators were narrowing, Comcast executives still held out hope when they met Wednesday with officials from the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission. As regulators set out firm objections to the deal, Comcast envoys quietly took notes. A Justice Department staffer invited them to come back soon to see a more senior antitrust official. Comcast never set up the meeting, and by the end of the next day, Roberts’s audacious bid to gain control of more than 50 percent of U.S. broadband was dead.

Descriptions of the unraveling of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, provided by several people familiar with the negotiations, suggest there was no single turning point that doomed the merger of the two biggest U.S. cable companies. Justice Department officials began telling Philadelphia-based Comcast of their reservations about the deal early this year, said a person familiar with their thinking.

Final Days

Even so, into the deal’s final days, Comcast and Time Warner Cable remained optimistic that it would get done, saying the tie-up was good for consumers and the government had no case for blocking it. When the Justice Department’s sentiment on the deal was first made public on April 17, executives at New York-based Time Warner Cable were taken by surprise, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The Justice Department and FCC spent a year examining the merger from legal, regulatory and engineering angles. Among the questions: whether the deal would give the new Comcast, with almost 30 percent of the residential video market, an unfair advantage in negotiating for programming, either by paying lower prices than its competitors, or by demanding exclusive deals that could keep programming off other services.

Comcast’s message from the start was that the merger wouldn’t lessen choice for consumers, because it doesn’t compete with Time Warner Cable for video subscribers.

Broadband Market

That argument began to fray as regulators concluded the merger was more than simply a marriage of video providers, said one of the people. The deal’s center of gravity lay in the broadband market, where the combined company would have a 57 percent share of residential customers. Regulators worried that Comcast could have the incentive and ability to interfere with online video offerings -- like those from Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. -- that compete with the cable giant’s own programming.

At the FCC, Chairman Tom Wheeler offered a blunt warning.

“Broadband providers have both the economic incentive and the technological capability to abuse their gatekeeper position,” he said during a Feb. 26 public hearing as the agency passed net neutrality rules that guarantee fair treatment of Web traffic.

The Justice Department’s opposition to the deal began to coalesce at the start of the year, said one of the people familiar with its thinking, and the agency’s concerns were relayed to Comcast. By March, attorneys at the antitrust division were backing a lawsuit to block it, this person said.

Legal Challenge

People in the division then went to Attorney General Eric Holder to lay out their case that the merger would give Comcast too much power to act as gatekeeper for Internet video being delivered to consumers. Holder said he’d back a challenge to the deal, said one of the people.

Still, the first public indication that the government was leaning against the deal came last week. As recently as Monday, there was a feeling at the two companies that an accord could be reached, after Comcast CEO Roberts spoke with the FCC’s Wheeler, one of the people said.

The final blows came Wednesday afternoon. At a Justice Department satellite office in downtown Washington, officials didn’t say they would sue to block the merger, according to a person familiar with the situation, but their message was clear: The government was against it.

No Remedies

Later in the day, on a Potomac-view conference room at the FCC’s offices across town, officials led Comcast and Time Warner Cable executives through their own objections. The combined company would have several ways to throttle competing online video -- through its contracts with programmers, controls over set-top streaming boxes or retail pricing -- the officials said. There would be no way to devise conditions that would effectively keep such a company from restraining competition, the person said.

Comcast representatives expected to have an opportunity to push back on those concerns and discuss concessions but decided regulators didn’t want to approve the deal under any circumstances and that there was nothing they could do to change their minds, according to a person familiar with the talks.

Then came what was essentially the death knell: FCC officials told the executives that the agency was prepared to send the merger for an administrative hearing that would hash out the risks to customers. Such a hearing would take months, and similar threats have killed deals before: In 2011, AT&T Inc. abandoned its bid for wireless provider T-Mobile US Inc. only after the FCC proposed a hearing, almost three months after the Justice Department sued to block the merger.

Growing Gloom

Comcast officials didn’t respond to FCC and the Justice Department invitations to meet with more senior officials, said the people familiar with the talks.

By Thursday, people inside Comcast and Time Warner Cable were spreading the word that the deal was off, say people familiar with the situation. Many senior level executives at Time Warner Cable were despondent, said two people familiar with the matter, because the deal’s failure meant they wouldn’t receive severance packages. Other employees had already made plans to move on to new jobs, they said.

The gloom at Time Warner Cable was partially lifting by the time Comcast officially called off the deal on Friday, according to the two people. Advisers for the No. 4 U.S. cable company, Charter Communications Inc., had already reached out to Time Warner Cable to begin talks on an acquisition, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Later on Friday, Attorney General Holder -- whose replacement, Loretta Lynch, will be sworn in Monday -- celebrated the outcome during a going-away speech delivered to a crowd filling the floor and balconies of the Justice Department’s Great Hall.

“We heard today that a merger that I think would have been extremely anticompetitive -- and would not have been in the best interest of the American consumer -- has been abandoned,” Holder said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...nths-in-making





The FCC Chairman is a Former Cable Lobbyist. And He Just Helped Kill the Comcast Merger.
Brian Fung

Nobody can claim that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is an industry puppet anymore.

Comcast's spectacular failure to close its $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable undercuts the age-old Washington wisdom that money and political connections — of which Comcast has a great deal — are the keys to power.

But it also upends a longstanding narrative about the tendency of private sector officials like Wheeler to favor their former colleagues when they enter public service.

The collapse of the Comcast merger is a landmark moment for Wheeler, a former chief lobbyist for a leading cable industry association. Seventeen months into his tenure, Wheeler's FCC has emerged as one of the most aggressive regulators the industry has ever seen.

"It is a tribute to Tom Wheeler for demonstrating willingness to take on the politically powerful cable industry," said Andrew Schwartzman, a law scholar at Georgetown University. "There has been, and there [will] be, a lot of political heat for doing this."

Many consumer advocates were on edge when Wheeler, who declined to be interviewed for this article, took office. They believed he would begin pushing policies that would benefit the industry he once represented. Instead, Wheeler took a series of surprising actions that have now culminated in the collapse of the biggest cable merger regulators have ever faced.

Over a matter of months, analysts say, FCC officials effectively foreshadowed their efforts to block the Comcast merger. In September, Wheeler gave a speech in which he said the country lacked sufficient competition in the broadband industry, pointing out that most people had only two providers to choose from when purchasing the fastest types of Internet service.

Then, in January, the FCC raised the threshold for what is considered "high-speed" Internet. Under that new baseline, Comcast's merger with Time Warner Cable would have given it control of more than half the U.S. broadband market.

The prospect of so many Internet subscribers living under one company did little to reassure regulators who worried the deal was bad for competition and not in the public interest, according to a senior FCC official.

Finally, the FCC in February slapped new restrictions on Internet providers as part of its net neutrality rules, handing a major defeat to cable companies, including Comcast. The new rules banned broadband companies from unfairly slowing down or blocking consumers' access to Web sites. And it made it illegal to speed up Web sites in exchange for payments from content providers.

Although Wheeler had previously floated a less aggressive proposal — prompting critics to accuse him of selling out — his ultimate move was far more ambitious than many expected.

Given that track record, it would have been difficult for the FCC to approve the Comcast merger, analysts said.

Industry officials had initially hailed Wheeler's nomination in 2013 as an "exceptional choice." Comcast itself commended Wheeler's "vast knowledge" and "proven leadership."

But on the nation's most divisive technology questions, the results of the past year have stunned many who come into contact with the FCC. Wheeler has consistently defied categorization; people who have worked closely with him describe him as an independent thinker who does not shy away from a fight.

Those who predicted Wheeler would favor industry interests "misunderstood him from the beginning — the notion that because he had represented various industries, he was suddenly in their pocket never made any sense," said one industry lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he represents clients before the FCC.

Wheeler, 69, does not need to seek another job when he departs the FCC, and that freedom enables him to make the decisions he thinks is right, according to people close to the chairman.

On the day the FCC approved the rules, Wheeler told reporters he had made a clean break from his past as chief executive of CTIA, the top trade group for the cellular industry, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the leading association for the cable industry.

"When I was at CTIA and NCTA, I was an advocate for those interests and I hope I did a very good job as an advocate for them," Wheeler said. "Today, I have a different client. My client is the American people, and I want to be the best damn advocate they can get."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-biggest-deal/





Comcast-Time Warner Cable Deal’s Collapse Leaves Frustrated Customers Out in the Cold
Hilary Stout

In the vast realm of unhappy cable customers, Time Warner Cable subscribers stand out as an especially miserable bunch.

The company, which has near monopolies in some of the country’s largest markets, including parts of New York City, scores dead last on consumer satisfaction surveys, not only for cable but for all industries.

Now, with Time Warner Cable back in play after Comcast abandoned its $45 billion takeover last week, many of the company’s more than 15 million subscribers are resigned to frustration, stuck for now with the company they love to hate and wondering if any future deal could be any better.

It is an apprehensive time for cable customers in general. Despite regulators’ objections to the huge Comcast deal, analysts say they expect continued consolidation in an industry where single carriers already dominate most regions.

No sooner had the door shut on the Comcast deal last Thursday than reports emerged that Charter Communications, the regional cable operator controlled by the billionaire John C. Malone, was exploring a new bid for Time Warner Cable, its second in less than two years.

Some predict consumers will lose no matter who buys whom.

“If you’re selling consumers something they can’t live without, and you’re subject to neither oversight nor competition, consumers aren’t going to be happy,” said Susan P. Crawford, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

The plight of Time Warner Cable customers showcases the frustration. It is why despite the overpowering opposition to the Comcast deal from consumer and corporate groups, lawmakers and regulators, there were also disappointed sighs from people like Candice Kilpatrick of Brooklyn after the proposed merger collapsed.

Ms. Kilpatrick said her neighborhood had no cable and broadband service provider other than Time Warner Cable and that its service was “so terrible” that she downgraded her package to just Internet, which she needed for her job and which she still found slow and expensive. (The quality of her Internet service was even an issue in a relationship, she said. “A guy I was dating never wanted to come over because he couldn’t stream.”)

Comcast is no model of customer service either, scoring just above Time Warner Cable on those customer service surveys, but Ms. Kilpatrick said she had hoped the combined company would somehow provide more “juice.”

“I had some hope that the Comcast merger would have an increase in quality of service,” she said, “but I guess I’m just going to keep living in the 1990s of Internet and cable service with TWC.”

Some of the frustration with big, expensive cable television packages has helped to fuel the trend of cord-cutting and increasing competition from different services, with newcomers like Apple TV, Hulu and Amazon, and single-channel offerings like HBO Go. Still, users need strong Wi-Fi and Internet access, pressuring Time Warner Cable, Verizon and others to improve the delivery of streaming services.

Analysts say that the ill-fated Comcast deal could lay the groundwork for significant improvements in customer service and satisfaction at Time Warner Cable.

The company spent the last year preparing its network to be turned over to Comcast in the best shape possible. Today, said Richard Greenfield, a media and technology analyst at BTIG: “Broadband speeds are higher. Customer service has improved. I think they’ve gone out of their way to invest in their consumer experience to position for if the deal didn’t happen they could simply move forward.”

In an interview, Robert D. Marcus, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, listed improvements to customer service he said the company began in the last year. They include introducing TWC Maxx — which has significantly faster Internet speeds (up to six times faster in some cases), “enhanced DVR” with more storage and more on-demand video choices — to roughly 10 markets, including New York and Los Angeles, which he called a “tremendous improvement of customer service across the board.”

Mr. Marcus said that the company was focused on increasing broadband speeds to industry-leading levels, and that Time Warner Cable’s standard tier of service was faster than Comcast’s standard tier. He also said the company was committed to making “meaningful” improvements to its video product, with more video on demand and digital offerings. And he said the company had enhanced its phone product recently, with free calls to more foreign countries, including Mexico, Canada, China and India.

“We are firing on all cylinders,” Mr. Marcus said. “Customer service is getting way better as well.”

Whether Charter will have more success than Comcast in acquiring Time Warner Cable is not at all clear. Time Warner Cable rejected a cash-and-stock offer from Charter of $132.50 a share in January 2014 but as back-and-forth continued between the companies, Comcast swooped in with its offer.

This time, everyone agrees Charter will have to do better. Since the first offer, as it prepared for the merger, Time Warner Cable’s balance sheet improved, and its stock climbed. On Friday it closed at $155.26 a share, a jump of 4.37 percent.

But if the companies do combine, Amy Yong, an analyst at Macquarie Capital, said Charter held promise for Time Warner Cable subscribers.

“I don’t think Time Warner Cable will remain stand-alone for too long,” Ms. Yong said. “I think Charter is still very interested and very motivated to do that deal.”

“And from a consumer standpoint, there’s a lot of potential,” she added, citing areas where she said Charter did better — interface, search and discover, speed.

But Ms. Crawford warned of a cost-cutting culture. “John Malone was famous when he was running TCI for squeezing out costs wherever he can. And customer service is a cost center,” she said. “I don’t think anybody should expect any other cable industry suitor would make customer service any better.”

Mr. Greenfield said Time Warner Cable was now positioned well to be a strong, independent company. “I don’t think they are at all in a situation where they are desperate for a suitor,” he said.

In fact, he added: “I think Time Warner Cable could be an acquirer going forward. They control some of the most important markets in the country and have a strong balance sheet.”

None of this is particularly encouraging to customers like Jane Santucci of Terre Haute, Ind. “I live in a town where we only have one option now, unless you want Dish,” she said. “If you want Internet you are stuck with TWC and their horrible service. It is dangerous for our country to have so few choices.”

Ms. Santucci said that for a few years her Time Warner Cable service would go out every time it rained and she would have to call a technician to fix it.

Service has been better recently, she said. But she said she still paid a lot, nearly $200 a month for cable television, Internet and DVR. “I’m definitely relieved that merger did not go through,” she said. “It just would have made them stronger: ‘Ha-ha! We can do what we want.’ ”

But, she added, “It still doesn’t leave us with any more options.”

Emily Steel contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/bu...-the-cold.html





Comcast Brings Fiber to City that it Sued 7 Years Ago to Stop Fiber Rollout

Comcast offers 2Gbps in Chattanooga, where it lost bid to squash competition.
Jon Brodkin

In April 2008, Comcast sued the Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB) to prevent it from building a fiber network to serve residents who were getting slow speeds from the incumbent cable provider.

Comcast claimed that EPB illegally subsidized the buildout with ratepayer funds, but it quickly lost in court, and EPB built its fiber network and began offering Internet, TV, and phone service. After EPB launched in 2009, incumbents Comcast and AT&T finally started upgrading their services, EPB officials told Ars when we interviewed them in 2013.

But not until this year has Comcast had an Internet offering that can match or beat EPB's $70 gigabit service. Comcast announced its 2Gbps fiber-to-the-home service on April 2, launching first in Atlanta, then in cities in Florida and California, and now in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

"Comcast today announced it will offer residential multi-gigabit broadband service for up to 200,000 customers in Chattanooga beginning in June, and expects to expand availability locally over the next several months," Comcast said.

There's no word on Comcast pricing yet, but it could vary depending on the level of competition in each city. AT&T, for example, charges $70 a month for gigabit service in cities that have Google Fiber and as much as $40 more in cities that don't have Google.

Comcast has charged a whopping $399.95 a month for its existing 505Mbps service but says it will charge less for the 2Gbps plan, which it intends to roll out to 18 million homes nationwide by the end of this year.

Comcast had little interest in upgrading its Chattanooga network when it faced no real competition. "I think we would have welcomed the incumbents to come into town and to have done some of this work, but frankly no one was interested in doing it," EPB communications VP Danna Bailey told Ars long before Comcast announced its fiber intentions.

At least one customer who remembers Comcast's attempt to squash the EPB project will not be switching. An Ars reader known as "cdclndc" in our forums told us that he has EPB's gigabit service.

"I'm an EPB customer that had to sit on the sidelines while Comcast sued my city to halt the fiber rollout... I'm glad they lost as it was a total win for the community here," cdclndc told Ars, adding that Comcast has struggled to maintain Chattanooga customers since the EPB rollout. "I have EPB's 1/1Gbps service at home, and to be honest after all the shenanigans [Comcast] pulled here keeping our city tied up in court for the longest time trying to hold onto their monopoly, I wouldn't go back to them on principle alone."

EPB still faced another complication after fending off Comcast's lawsuit, in the form of a Tennessee state law that prevents it from expanding outside its electric service area, even though surrounding communities have requested Internet service. The law protects Internet providers from competition, but EPB petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to preempt that state law and won its case in February.

"EPB is an island of competitive high speed broadband service surrounded by areas for the most part with single or no provider of advanced broadband," FCC wireline competition official Gregory Kwan told commissioners before they voted to preempt the state law.

The fight isn't over, as Tennessee filed a lawsuit to overturn the FCC decision.

Comcast isn't necessarily finished with its attempts to fight off competition, either. Last year, CenturyLink accused Comcast of trying to prevent it from gaining reasonable franchise agreements in multiple cities where Comcast operates. Just this week, CenturyLink won approval to compete against Comcast in Minneapolis, but city officials indemnified the city against lawsuits in the franchise agreement in case Comcast decides to sue.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...fiber-rollout/





When AT&T Promises Broadband—But Delivers Only 300Kbps

For new homeowners, accurate information from Internet providers is hard to find.
Jon Brodkin

Dave Mortimer went house shopping in 2013, and he made Internet speed a top priority. His standards weren’t incredibly high—he just wanted 20Mbps or so to make sure he could avoid some trips to the office.

“I work in IT, so fast speeds are essential for me to work at home,” Mortimer told Ars. “I called AT&T on three separate occasions to verify that this home had U-verse capabilities or, at the very least, 20Mbps. I was told every single time ‘Yes, that service is available at that residence.’” (When contacted by Ars, AT&T was unable to comment on what company representatives told Mortimer in 2013.)

Mortimer also plugged the address into AT&T's U-verse availability checker. The system reported that the home could get the service he wanted, Mortimer said.

But Mortimer learned the truth after moving into the house in Lowell, Michigan, a city of about 4,000 residents. Instead of AT&T’s U-verse fiber-to-the-node service, which could have provided up to 45Mbps, the best AT&T could actually offer him was up to 768Kbps download speeds over DSL lines.

Since it was the only wired Internet option available, Mortimer subscribed. He soon found that the "up to" in AT&T's description was there for a reason; Mortimer said he could only get about 300 to 400Kbps, a fraction of the 25Mbps download speed that meets the US definition of "broadband."

“Half the time, websites won’t even load,” he said. At those speeds, streaming video is out. Downloading files was difficult not only because of the low bit rate but also because the connection was often unstable, dropping many times a day.

Mortimer’s job involves helping employees with problems and maintaining the network.

“I go to an office most of the time but I’m on call at home, and the office is 30 minutes away,” he said. Getting work done at home requires logging in to a remote desktop. With AT&T, what should be 5-minute fixes could take 45 minutes, he said. Just restarting a server felt impossible from his home connection, so Mortimer made a lot more trips to the office than he'd like.

Fiber to 100 cities, but none in Michigan

In more lucrative areas than Mortimer's town, AT&T has made sure to bring fiber closer to homes. In 100 cities, all outside Michigan, AT&T says it is considering building fiber-to-the-home gigabit service, more than 2,000 times faster than the real-world speeds it delivered to Mortimer.

“Before we moved out here we had Netflix and Hulu and played online games, and now we don't do any of that,” Mortimer said. “We had to cancel a lot of subscriptions.”

Mortimer complained to AT&T and even to the state Public Service Commission and Federal Communications Commission about what he believes to be deceptive statements made by the Internet provider. Though he never got better Internet service from AT&T, the company eventually updated its website so that it no longer promised fast broadband to his residence. "After my complaint and their site evaluation, they corrected it on their website," he said.

Mortimer has appeared in front of the Lowell City Council to argue that the city should build its own fiber network, and he started a group called the Lowell Fiber Initiative to pursue that goal.

Spurned homeowners have little recourse

Ars first spoke with Mortimer in January. His situation recently took a turn for the better when, after much trouble, he was able to get usable wireless service at his house (more on that later).

The frustrations he experienced illustrate a risk taken by new homeowners, particularly in areas where Internet coverage is spotty. Even when home buyers call local broadband companies to find out whether service is available, they sometimes get incorrect information.

In Kitsap County, Washington, a man whom we wrote about last month said he was told by both Comcast and CenturyLink that he could get service at his house, only to find out that neither company could deliver. Comcast wanted him to pay $60,000 in exchange for extending their network to his house; instead, he decided to sell his house and move.

Last November, we wrote about Jesse Walser of Pompey, New York. His family uses a cellular hotspot for all its home Internet needs, because Time Warner Cable wanted him to pay $20,000 for construction costs.

Similar stories keep cropping up. “When I moved to my house in Florida, I knew Comcast was all over the neighborhood, and my new house even had a Comcast pedestal in the driveway,” telecommunications consultant Doug Dawson wrote on his blog last week. “But it took what felt like 40 calls to Comcast to get them to come out and give me a 40 foot drop wire. We started out with them not knowing if they serve my neighborhood until finally they decided to charge me $150 to verify that I could get service. Even with that, it took me over a month from the first call until I had working broadband—and a lot of people are not willing to suffer through that ordeal. I know it soured me on Comcast, and no matter what good they ever do for me, I will always have in the back of my mind how I had to practically threaten them to get them to give me service.”

Kimberly McCain, a small business owner in Tennessee, reported similar problems with AT&T. McCain attempted to switch from Comcast to AT&T, but after ordering DSL service and getting a self-install kit delivered, she was unable to get service. After weeks of back-and-forth with AT&T—during which she relied on a mobile phone hotspot because she had already canceled her Comcast Internet—“I was transferred to a ‘lead’ customer service rep that told me sternly, service was not offered in my area, period,” she wrote.

If providers prove unreliable, customers might hope that accurate information can at least be found from neighbors or previous owners. That's not always the case, either. McCain wrote that she lives in a very populated area, and she decided to subscribe to AT&T on the advice of neighbors who had the service, including one just five houses down the street. That made it all the more perplexing when service wasn’t available at her home.

In Mortimer’s case, the previous owners were a retired couple who apparently had no service, he said. Mortimer purchased the house in an estate sale. "The neighbors were elderly and didn't use the Internet, I guess,” Mortimer said. “One said they heard of a wireless service called Red Frog, but they actually don't exist anymore. AT&T said they offered it, but I didn't think I had to do their job for them and survey the neighbors to see if service actually existed.”

Laws that favor Internet providers limit broadband availability

Broadband availability is a problem in many cities and towns where private companies face no competition and don't believe it's worth building out better infrastructure. Even when local governments want to build their own networks to fill in the gaps left by private industry, they are often stymied by state laws that limit their rights to offer broadband to residents. The laws serve little purpose other than to protect private companies from competition, and the FCC has claimed authority to preempt the laws. Still, most of them remain on the books.

Such laws limiting availability of community broadband networks exist in about 20 states, including Michigan, where Mortimer lives, and Louisiana, where another resident who spoke to Ars encountered troubles getting Internet service.

Robert Swann purchased a newly built house in Port Allen, Louisiana, in 2010, thinking he could get cable Internet.

“The listing on the house said it was cable-ready so it was sort of deceptive advertising,” Swann, a chemical engineer, told Ars. “It was cable-ready but not cable-available.”

Cox told Swann that it could provide cable service, he said. But “when a tech came out to my house he was like, ‘you don't have Internet, the nearest cable is about a mile away.’”

Swann’s only option was to pay Cox the amount it says was required to extend its network to his house: $30,000.

“I told them I'd run down to the C & W [a hardware store] and go buy them some switch gear if they needed it. It would be significantly shy of $30,000,” Swann said.

Cox confirmed the price when contacted by Ars.

“The $30,000 estimate is accurate due to the significant construction required to reach this resident in a low density area,” a Cox spokesperson told Ars. “The potential customer is closer to two miles from the nearest cable plant and our costs to build this out would be north of six figures and would require crossing a privately owned sugar cane field (permission required from landowner).” Port Allen has about 5,000 residents.

Swann said one Comcast representative also told him he could get Internet access, but “it turned out we weren't even in their service area.” Comcast told Ars that “our closest plant is 50 miles from this address.”

There was no DSL service to the home, either, leaving Swann’s options as satellite and cellular. Swann hasn’t gotten satellite because he figured the quality would be poor, and so far he's been able to get by with Verizon Wireless service through a mobile hotspot. He and his wife pay about $170 a month for the cellular service.

“I'm on an unlimited data plan which is fortunate for me,” he said. Swann no longer hosts game servers, as he did back when he had wired broadband, and he hasn’t pursued any of the “smart home” technologies he’s interested in. But Verizon’s cellular network is good enough for just about everything else he needs.

“I can't fault Verizon, they have a very good network,” he said. “If we weren’t able to have found the Verizon hotspots, we would have moved.”

Even with a workaround, the situation continues to frustrate. Swann said he contacted the FCC and the members of Congress from Louisiana to little effect thus far.

Massive billing error was the final straw for Mortimer

Mortimer adopted the same strategy back in Michigan. “I’ve complained to just about everybody, the FCC, the FTC, the Michigan Public Service Commission,” Mortimer said. “I got a call back from the office of the president of AT&T responding to my FCC complaint. All I got was, ‘sorry, Mr. Mortimer, the speeds are the fastest available at this time.’”

Since Ars first spoke with Mortimer in January, he suffered several more frustrations with AT&T. In one incident, his Internet service was shut off after an auto-payment error, he said. In another mishap, AT&T raised his bill from $33 to $89.40 after adding a phone line to his Internet service, even though he never asked for phone service.

“Accurate and reliable billing is a priority, and we’ve apologized to this individual for the experience and inconvenience,” an AT&T spokesperson told Ars, regarding the billing mistake. “We’ve worked with the customer to resolve any additional charges.”

Mortimer also says one AT&T representative told him that the company is phasing out DSL service in his area. This may have just been a misinformed employee, but across the country many customers of AT&T and Verizon have complained that the companies are not properly maintaining an infrastructure that is less profitable than cellular and fiber networks.

AT&T told Ars, “We continue to offer DSL service in the areas where it is available. We’re also focused on enhancing and expanding our wireless and wireline networks where there is demand. In fact, we invested more than $1.7 billion in our Michigan networks from 2012 to 2014 alone.”

Mortimer finally “cut the cord” and switched to a wireless Internet provider called Vergennes Broadband earlier this month. He tried getting service from Vergennes once before, but “when they originally came up to my home, they couldn't get anything because of the tree coverage. There was no signal.”

Mortimer decided to try Vergennes again. Ultimately, he was so fed up with AT&T that he canceled his DSL service even before he knew for sure that Vergennes would be able to provide Internet access to his home. "I'd rather have no Internet than have to deal with AT&T," he said.

For a few days, Mortimer relied just on his cell phone (which is also connected to AT&T—he plans to cancel when his contract expires) and then got Vergennes out to his house again.

“I had them come out to try again, and they couldn’t get anything at the house itself, so me and the installer got a little creative,” Mortimer said. “We got a good signal with line of sight down by the road so we attached the dish to a tree, then buried the line, and in order to get it to my house over the driveway we had to snake it through some cracks in my driveway and cover it with dirt.”

For $60 a month, Vergennes is delivering 3Mbps downloads and 1Mbps uploads to Mortimer’s property. The company, which serves wireless Internet to a few rural towns from more than 30 towers, is also building out a fiber network. That offering could eventually reach Mortimer’s home.

While AT&T only delivered half its advertised speed, Mortimer gets the full 3Mbps from Vergennes, he said. Doing work over a remote connection is still slow, but it's usable. “YouTube works great but HD streaming isn't happening unless I upgrade to a faster and more expensive package [about $100],” he said. "It's not perfect, but I love supporting local business, and they are working on rolling out fiber to the home."

Mortimer is still well short of the 25Mbps download speed that qualifies as “broadband” as defined by the Federal Communications Commission. He’s even short of the old 4Mbps definition of broadband that was on the books until the FCC changed it in January 2015, saying 4Mbps was no longer fast enough to meet modern needs.

But after nearly two years of frustration with AT&T, Mortimer is finally happy with his Internet provider.

“This is a night and day difference since switching from AT&T," he said. "Everything that AT&T did wrong, this small local company is doing right.”
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...-only-300kbps/





Dropbox Debuts Comments to Bring Social to File-Sharing

Dropbox wants you to read the comments.
Klint Finley

In a new feature unveiled today, you can now leave comments on Dropbox files much in the same way that you can comment on news articles like this one. Except instead of trolling, Dropbox is hoping you’ll use these comments to get something done.

Dropbox’s premium Dropbox for Business service has long featured collaboration tools such as access permissions and an activity log. But this is the first time that Dropbox has enabled users to actually comment on shared files, pitching the option as a way to get work done without needing to open or download a file at all. And while commenting will probably be most useful for businesses, the feature will be available to all users.

Dropbox says the comments will appear in a new comments pane when previewing files online. To help you keep up with discussions, Dropbox will send you an email notification for each comment left on one of your files unless, of course, you opt out, and you can invite anyone to comment on a file you share, even if they’re not Dropbox users. The company is also adding a Twitter-style “@ mentions.” When you “@ mention” someone in a Dropbox comment, they’ll get an email notification.

And if you don’t want to deal with comments at all, you can disable the feature on particular files.

Dropbox has long been one of the easiest ways to store files in the cloud and synchronize them across multiple devices. But competitors like Amazon and Google have slashed prices and increased storage limits in recent years, forcing Dropbox to do the same. With an IPO likely imminent, Dropbox has been buffing up its collaboration features in an attempt to show that it’s more than a one-feature pony in a race to undersell some of the world’s biggest tech companies.

For example, last year the company forged a partnership with Microsoft to integrate the service directly into Office. And last January, Dropbox acquired a mobile document creation and editing company called CloudOn. And now it’s testing its own text editor for users to collaborate on Dropbox-linked documents.

In every case, the idea is to show that Dropbox is about more than just extra gigabytes in the cloud. Beyond just storing and syncing files, Dropbox wants to show it can help you do useful stuff with them.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dropbox...cial-comments/





Is Downloading Really Stealing? The Ethics of Digital Piracy
Christian Barry

Many millions of people throughout the world will illegally download the fifth season of Game of Thrones, released on April 13 by HBO. Legally speaking, what they will be doing is a violation of intellectual property rights, or "piracy." But will they be doing anything morally wrong?

It might seem obvious that what they will do is wrong. After all, it is illegal. But there are many things that have been illegal that people don't think are morally wrong. Same-sex relationships, divorce and many other practices that are now widely accepted as morally acceptable were once outlawed and criminally sanctioned.

Few people think they were wrong just before they were legalized. Rather, they tend to think the laws governing these behaviors were unjust. So appeal only to the illegality of downloading doesn't settle whether it is okay, morally speaking.

Opposing Views

Two rival camps dominate public discussion around the ethics of illegal downloading. On the one hand, there are what might be called "fundamentalist libertarians." These think that all ideas and artistic creation should be held in common and be freely accessible to all.

In their view, intellectual property, in the form of copyright and patents, unfairly restricts access to ideas and expression. They consider illegal downloading to be victimless crime, and do not think it imposes significant cost on anyone. In their view, the serious criminal sanctions that sometimes attach to illegal downloading are draconian and unjustified.

On the other hand, there are what might be called the "fundamentalist protectors." This camp thinks that illegal downloading is equivalent to common theft.

This view is vividly expressed in the aggressive message that often precedes films in Australia:

You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a television, you wouldn't steal a movie. Downloading pirated films is stealing.

According to fundamentalist protectors, owners of intellectual property deserve just as much protection and means for redress as those who have had their handbags or televisions stolen, including civil and criminal sanction against those who have violated their intellectual property.

For them, the massive penalties that are sometimes attached to illegal downloading are important because they send a clear message that this practice should not be tolerated. This seems to be the view of much of the entertainment industry, as well as public officials and legislatures in countries that produce and export a lot of intellectual property.

In a recent speech, for example, U.S. President Barak Obama claimed:

We're going to aggressively protect our intellectual property […] Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people […] It is essential to our prosperity. But it's only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can't just steal that idea and duplicate it.

Excluding Theft

Despite their currency, both of these positions are overdrawn and seem at odds with moral common sense. The fundamentalist protector position is problematic because there are clear and morally relevant differences between stealing someone's handbag and illegally downloading a television series.

In common theft, the owner of property is entirely deprived of its use, as well as their ability to share it and dispose of it as they choose. Common theft is zero-sum: when I steal your handbag, my gain really is your loss.

The same is not true when I download a digital file of your copyrighted property. In downloading your film, I have not excluded you from its use, or your ability to benefit from it. I have simply circumvented your ability to exclude me from its use. To draw an analogy, this seems more like trespassing on your land than taking your land away from you.

Criminal sanctions seem warranted in thefts where one person's gain is very clearly another person's loss. But things are not so clear when the relationship between gain and loss are more complex.

And of course there are ways that owners of intellectual property can gain, overall, from infringements of their rights. The more accessible their products become, the more people may want to consume them. This certainly seems to be the case with products like Game of Thrones, a fact recognized by its producers.

Protecting Public Goods

On the other hand, the fundamentalist libertarian position is problematic because it treats all intellectual property infringement as a victimless crime. For one thing, intellectual property rights are an important means by which people gain profit from the effort that they put into the production of creative works.

That they can profit in this way provides an important incentive—aside from the intrinsic value of the productive activity itself—for them to engage in socially useful productive activity.

This is evident in other fields, such as research and development of medical treatments: firms have little reason to invest the time and resources in developing vaccines and other public goods if they cannot benefit from their distribution.

Thus, not protecting the rights of the producers in some meaningful way is bad for everyone. Infringing intellectual property rights can also increase cost to those do pay for the good, in the form of higher prices. Those who pay for intellectual property are effectively subsidizing its use by those who do not pay for it. In most cases this seems unfair.

A Different Kind of Theft

The question of the morality of illegal downloading is so difficult because it takes place in an environment in which the penalties attached to this behaviour ordinarily seem to be overkill, but where there are pretty clear social costs to engaging in it.

What, then, should be done? For starters, it seems important to stop treating intellectual property infringement as common theft, and to develop different legal remedies for its protection. Various kinds of property are different, and warrant different forms of protection. This is hardly a novel idea.

In his fascinating book, Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age, the legal philosopher Stuart Green has pointed out that treating all infringement of property as theft subject to the same legal rubric is a relatively new development.

Prior to the 20th Century, theft law consisted of a sort of ad hoc collection of specific theft offences and specific kinds of property that were subject to theft. Different rules applied to different offences, and intangible forms of property, like intellectual property, were not included in theft law at all. We may need to return to rules that are well suited to protecting different forms of property.

In the meantime, it seems incumbent on consumers to try to respect intellectual property unless doing so imposes unreasonable cost on them. Refraining from accessing patented essential medicines that are inaccessible due to price does seem unduly costly. Refraining from watching the latest season of Game of Thrones, the ardor of its fans notwithstanding, does not.

At the same time, we should also strongly resist massive penalties levied on downloaders when they are caught. The practice of "speculative invoicing"—whereby people are sent threatening letters that offer the opportunity to pay a sum to prevent legal action seeking vast sums—is seriously objectionable. Even if what the downloaders have done is wrong, it is much worse to over-punish them.

Originall published in The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/is-downl...l-piracy-39930





Piracy App Popcorn Time Ordered Blocked by U.K. Court
Todd Spangler

Popcorn Time — the piracy app that’s as easy to use as Netflix — has been dealt a blow, although it’s surely not fatal.

On Tuesday, a United Kingdom chancery court approved an order requiring major U.K. Internet service providers to block access to four Popcorn Time variants.

The Motion Picture Assn. of America cheered the ruling. “As stated in the written judgment, Popcorn Time has no legitimate purpose and it only serves to infringe copyright,” the MPAA said in a statement. “Court orders are a proportionate and effective measure to tackle sites dedicated to facilitating and promoting online copyright infringement.”

The MPAA continued: “The film and TV industry is comprised of hundreds of thousands of men and women working hard behind the scenes to bring the vibrant, creative stories we enjoy to the screen; content theft undermines that hard work.”

Netflix, for one, is paying attention to Popcorn Time. In its fourth-quarter 2014 letter to shareholders, the company included a link to this graph on Google Trends, showing a surge of searches for Popcorn Time in the Netherlands relative to Netflix and HBO starting last fall.

“Piracy continues to be one of our biggest competitors,” CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells wrote, calling the search data “sobering.” Worldwide, Google searches for “Popcorn Time” have been trending upward over the past few months, but there hasn’t been a dramatic increase.

The ruling this week applies only in the U.K., so the battle continues.

For media companies, stamping out Popcorn Time has been a virtually impossible task. The free, open-source apps, originally created by an anonymous group of developers in Argentina, are now hosted on multiple sites and allegedly have several hundred volunteer programmers working on various iterations, including mobile versions of the apps.

“We aren’t sponsored by anyone, we don’t have a paid team of people behind the project, we aren’t a business, and we don’t have any affiliations,” someone calling himself “KsaRedFx” wrote in a blog post last month. “We are a community.”
https://variety.com/2015/digital/new...rt-1201482873/





Music Streaming Service Grooveshark Shuts Down to Settle Infringement

Online music streaming service Grooveshark shut down its operations as part of its settlement agreement with major record companies, according to a message posted on the website, putting an end to a four-year legal battle.

Grooveshark will wipe clean all of the record companies' copyrighted works and hand over ownership of its website, mobile apps and intellectual property, including patents and copyrights, the company said. (tny.gs/1DOxbYO)

"Despite best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service," Grooveshark said.

Grooveshark and its parent Escape Media Group were not immediately reachable for comment.

A U.S. judge ruled last week that Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark's copyright violations on nearly 5,000 songs were "willful" and made "in bad faith."

Nine record companies including Arista Music, Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings, and Warner Bros Records, sued Escape Media Group for infringement in 2011.

In court papers, they called Grooveshark a "linear descendant" of Grokster, LimeWire and Napster, all of which had been shut down because of copyright infringement.

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0NM3DP20150501





The Power of Backroom Lobbying: How the Recording Industry Got Their Copyright Term Extension
Michael Geist

The government’s unexpected budget decision to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings came as a surprise to most copyright watchers, but not the music industry lobby. Music Canada (formerly the Canadian Recording Industry Association) was ready within minutes with a press release, backgrounder, and quotes from musicians that were previously critical of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. How did the industry seemingly know this was coming?

The monthly lobbyist communications reports tell the story as beginning last fall, Music Canada registered lobbyist David Dyer met almost monthly with Patrick Rogers, the Director of Policy for Canadian Heritage Minister Shelly Glover. The meetings began in November at roughly the same time as Universal Music began expressing concern about the Canadian distribution of public domain Beatles records. The lobbyist registry lists meetings on November 10, November 26, December 5, February 17, and March 18. In addition, there was a meeting with James Maunder, Chief of Staff to Industry Minister James Moore on November 28th, though it is clear that Canadian Heritage had the lead on the issue.

Near monthly access to Rogers paid off with promise to extend the term of copyright despite the absence of public consultation on the issue, increased consumer costs, and reduced choice. By comparison, Europe spent years of study and intense debate over whether to extend the term of copyright, with numerous experts reports warning against it and many European countries opposing the measure. Rogers was apparently an excellent internal advocate, particularly given his experience with the Prime Minister’s Office. Rogers is the former Manager of Parliamentary Affairs with the Prime Minister’s Office. If the name is familiar, it may be because he is named in the RCMP allegations against Senator Mike Duffy. Indeed, the RCMP evidence indicates that he was involved in meetings and emails related to the Duffy affair and recent reports indicate that he may be called to testify at the Duffy trial.

I asked Canadian Heritage officials to comment on the nature of the discussions between Music Canada lobbyists and ministry officials. Their response simply stated “It is not our practice to comment on the content of meetings with stakeholders.” In this case, there is no need. The outcome says it all.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/04/t...erm-extension/





France’s Intelligence Bill: Legalising Mass Surveillance

The French government claims its new Intelligence Bill is defined in opposition to the American and British models – but this just doesn't hold once the text is examined. Quite the contrary.
Félix Tréguer

On 19 March , French Prime Minister Manuel Valls organised a press conference to announce the Intelligence Bill that his government had just adopted and was presenting to Parliament. Confronting the media, Valls sought to dismiss growing concerns that the bill, the contents of which had been leaked to the press a few days earlier, would undermine the right to privacy. “This has nothing to do with the generalised surveillance of citizens”, Valls said to journalists. He even went on to claim that the bill would “forbid” mass surveillance.

This posture came all the more naturally to the French Government as it has kept its head down and weathered the storm since the Snowden disclosures began almost two years ago. Even when documents exposing the cooperation between the French General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) and the NSA and other Five-Eyes agencies (the LUSTRE agreement) came to light, public officials either refrained from any comment or issued denials. Today, the Valls government is claiming that the bill is simply a matter of securing the legitimate intelligence collection practices of the French security services, which hitherto lacked a proper legal framework.

These reassurances, however, do not survive proper scrutiny. A close reading of the Bill shows that it authorises the government to engage in preventive surveillance of private communications and public spaces for a broad range of motives – from terrorism to economic espionage and the monitoring of social movements – without proper ex ante control. It also orchestrates the legal whitewashing of mass surveillance, and legalizes tools and policies that directly echo those of other surveillance superpowers, like the US, the UK or Germany. Three examples are particularly telling.

Black boxes: legalizing “plug-and-spy” surveillance devices

The most fiercely debated item of the bill relates to so-called Internet “black boxes” aimed at detecting terrorist threats. Article 2 makes provision for the Prime Minister to require telecom operators and online platforms to install technical devices on their infrastructure (networks or servers) that will use custom algorithms to detect suspicious online behaviour.

According to examples quoted by government ministers and high-ranking officials in the intelligence community, the goal is to detect the use of particular encryption protocols or web browsing habits. Though the government denies this is the case, there is every indication that these black boxes will deploy some kind of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology.

From a British and American perspective, these black boxes are hardly news. In the UK, a similar provision was debated as early as 2000, and eventually subsumed in the Regulatory Investigative Powers Act, section 12. More recently, documents leaked by Mark Klein – a former AT&T employee turned whistleblower – revealed that the NSA had implemented DPI technologies to monitor Internet traffic on US soil.

Of course, the technology will be provided by the private sector. Mark Klein's documents showed the NSA's DPI gear was built by a division of Boeing. In France, a likely candidate to manufacture these black boxes is the home-grown Qosmos, a worldwide expert in DPI technology. Qosmos has nurtured close ties with the French intelligence services and even received public funding through the French sovereign fund in 2011. The company is also at the centre of an investigation by a Parisian judge specialised in crimes against humanity for its role in providing censorship and surveillance tools to the Libyan and Syrian dictatorships.

Quite daringly, the government claims such black boxes have nothing to do with mass surveillance, arguing that they will only scan “anonymous” metadata, while only a small portion of suspicious data will trigger further investigations. From a legal perspective, however, it is clear that these devices amount to a massive processing of personal data, including that of people for whom there is no suspicion of direct or indirect relationship to a crime. As such, they run counter to the case law of the EU Court of Justice and that of the European Court of Human Rights.[1] Moreover, as leading computer experts have long argued, such data-mining systems are bound to be ineffective when it comes to finding “the needle in the haystack”, leading to huge amounts of false leads and investigative dead-ends.

International surveillance: negating the universality of human rights

In article 3, the French Intelligence Bill defines “international surveillance measures” as communications “sent or received abroad” and then goes on to establish a minimal framework for the surveillance of such international communications. The bill's rapporteur, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, argues this is a major step forward since until now international surveillance was left unregulated.

However, as was implicitly recognised by the head of the DGSE in parliamentary hearings, surveillance activities carried on beyond French borders will remain completely unregulated. The provision is actually drafted in a way that makes it only applicable to the interception of international communications when conducted from French territory. In sum, French agencies will be able to massively tap into global communications networks located under French jurisdiction or anywhere else in the world, and then legally store, retrieve and analyse collected data on French territory.

In that regard, the provision echoes the collection practices at the heart of the unfolding BND scandal in Germany (authorized under the G-10 law that regulates the surveillance activities of intelligence agencies) as well as section 702 of the US FISA law. Considering that most of French residents' online communications are “made or received abroad” – particularly in the US or in other European countries where the servers of the largest online service providers are located – it will be used against national citizens and residents, much like FISA section 702 for “US-persons”. Intelligence agencies will therefore use it to circumvent the protections provided for national surveillance, such as the ex ante opinion issued by the intelligence oversight commission. As for foreigners, they will remain completely “fair game”.

So why are the bill's advocates completely confident that the provision is compliant with human rights standards? In their defence, they quote a recent study on “fundamental rights in the digital sphere” conducted by the Council of State – the French supreme court for administrative justice. The latter invoked the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights to back up a contested legal premise according to which “(...) the fact that there are lesser safeguards surrounding the interception of communications when it is located abroad rather than on the [national] territory is justified”.

Traditionally, such a dual regime distinguishing national and international surveillance has been justified by the practical limitations to the ability of states to engage in mass surveillance outside of their territory. But in the age of global and digital communications networks, where whole civilian populations have become subject to systematic surveillance, this outdated “laissez-faire” approach does not only completely negate the universality of human rights when it comes to foreigners. It also leads to opportunistic strategies where the cross-border nature of communications is used to bypass the checks-and-balances that protect the state's own citizens, all within the comfort of the national territory.

Secret trials: procedures for unaccountability

Finally, the government alleges that the bill brings more protection to fundamental rights by opening the possibility of legal redress. According to the text, any person who thinks they might be subject to preventive surveillance will be able to have their day in court by appealing to the Council of State.

But this new procedure has many loopholes. First, it is unclear how individuals will be able to demonstrate that they have “a direct and personal interest” in bringing a case against what are by definition clandestine operations. More importantly perhaps, the procedure heavily relies on secrecy, as intelligence agencies will be able to submit classified material to judges and make oral arguments during closed-door in camera sessions. In the name of national security, these evidence and arguments will remain inaccessible to claimants and their lawyers.

Once again, this provision seems modelled on other surveillance superpowers. They particularly bring to mind one of the most worrying trends in British law: the growing resort to “Closed-Material Procedures” (CMPs) in national security cases. According to a
recent EU Parliament study on the use of secrecy in courts (as discussed on openDemocracy), such secret procedures come with important challenges:

“(...)The use of information and materials provided by intelligence communities, which are kept secret and not disclosed to the defendants in the name of national security, not only sparks debate in terms of respect for fair trials, equality of arms and fundamental rights. It also poses important questions linked to the changing practices of the intelligence communities and the extent to which materials provided by these services in courts is properly scrutinised by judicial authorities.”

Although the secret procedures created by the French bill have a much narrower scope than British CMPs – they are limited to cases of alleged illegal surveillance –, they also come with less protections. For instance, there will be no security-vetted lawyers allowed to access secret material and participate in closed-door hearings so as to defend the claimants' interest (so-called “special advocates”). This is all the more worrying considering the institutional arrangements undermining the independence of the Council of State: half of its judges are directly designated by the President and many go back and forth between the Council's benches and high-ranking jobs in the executive branch during the course of their career. Such proximity only reinforces the risk that magistrates will uncritically rely on intelligence information based on a presumption of good faith, thereby protecting government interests in cases of illegal surveillance.

Can the French political system resist mass surveillance?

These three examples reveal only some of the many dangers contained in France’s Intelligence Bill. But they clearly show how untruthful the public relations strategy of the Valls Government is. The notion that France’s surveillance apparatus is defined in opposition to the American and British models just does not hold good once the text is examined in detail. Quite the contrary: we see similar technical, legal and procedural devices being used to subject whole populations to surveillance, while sheltering the reason of state from appropriate checks and balances.

Manuel Valls is confident the bill will sail through Parliament. The terrorist threat and the collective trauma ensuing from the Paris attacks is of course playing into the hands of the government. Many leaders of the main opposition party, the UMP (conservative) are engaging in a securitarian horse-race, warning that they will oppose any measure hindering the power of the intelligence services. As for his own majority, Valls knows he can rely on the bill's rapporteur, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, one of his most loyal allies in the Socialist Party, who is a member of several intelligence oversight agencies and one of the bill's key architects.

Finally, though the government quite paradoxically claims the law was not “dictated by circumstances”, it has chosen to trigger a fast-track parliamentary procedure, allowing only one reading of the bill in each chamber of Parliament. From this perspective, the adoption of the Intelligence Bill is a matter of weeks (after adopting a few amendments mid-April, the National Assembly will hold a formal vote on May 5 before the bill goes to the Senate floor, probably in June).

Yet, opposition to the bill is unprecedented. Digital rights groups, international human rights organisations as well as judges and lawyers unions are teaming up. They are joined by prominent institutions like the data protection authority as well as media and international organisations. Several officials of the Council of Europe or the United Nations also came out strongly against this law. Even the president of the CNCIS – the French intelligence oversight commission – denounced the legalisation of mass surveillance practices as amounting to “trawl fishing” rather than “targeted harpooning”.

If the government were to get the approvals of the Parliament and the French constitutional court despite this near-unanimous opposition, it would be yet further evidence of the profound crisis of a political system determined to distort the truth if necessary, to break away from the rule of law.
https://opendemocracy.net/digitalibe...s-surveillance





White House Takes Cybersecurity Pitch to Silicon Valley
David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth

President Obama’s newly installed defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, toured Silicon Valley last week to announce a new military strategy for computer conflict, starting the latest Pentagon effort to invest in promising start-ups and to meet with engineers whose talent he declared the Pentagon desperately needed in fending off the nation’s adversaries.

Mr. Carter immediately acknowledged, though, the need to rebuild trust with Silicon Valley, whose mainstays — like Apple, Google and Facebook (whose new headquarters he toured) have spent two years demonstrating to customers around the world that they are rolling out encryption technologies to defeat surveillance. That, of course, includes blocking the National Security Agency, a critical member of the military-intelligence community.

“I think that people and companies need to be convinced that everything we do in the cyber domain is lawful and appropriate and necessary,” Mr. Carter told students and faculty at Stanford.

He urged the next generation of software pioneers and entrepreneurs to take a break from developing killer apps and consider a tour of service fending off Chinese, Russian and North Korean hackers, even as he acknowledged that the documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, “showed there was a difference in view between what we were doing and what people perceived us as doing.”

Mr. Carter’s careful appeal was part of a campaign last week by government officials trying to undo the damage of Mr. Snowden’s revelations. While Mr. Carter got a respectful hearing, Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, and a group of other government officials ran into a buzz saw of skepticism at the world’s largest conference of computer security professionals, just 30 miles to the north.

Those officials argued for some kind of technical compromise to allow greater security of electronic communications while enabling the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies to decode the emails and track the web activities of suspected terrorists or criminals. Yet many among the computer security professionals at the conference argued that no such compromise was possible, saying that such a system would give Russians and Chinese a pathway in, too, and that Washington might abuse such a portal.

Not long after Mr. Johnson declared that “encryption is making it harder for your government to find criminal activity and potential terrorist activity,” large numbers of entrepreneurs and engineers crammed into the first of several seminars, called “Post-Snowden Cryptography.” There, they took notes as the world’s best code makers mocked the Obama administration’s drive for a “technical compromise” that would ensure the government some continued access.

Ronald Rivest, one of the inventors of a commonly used encryption algorithm, took on the arguments by Mr. Johnson and other senior officials, including John P. Carlin, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, that the best minds in Silicon Valley could find a way to ensure legal government access while still assuring users that communications and data stored in their iPhones and the cloud are safe.

“There are lots of problems with these ideas,” Mr. Rivest said. “We live in a global information system now, and it’s not going to be just the U.S. government that wants a key. It’s going to be the U.K., it’s going to be Germany, it’s going to be Israel, it’s going to be China, it’s going to be Iran, etc.”

It was clear all week that the Snowden revelations, while fading in memory across much of the country, have not been forgotten in the rapidly growing computer and encryption communities here.

One of Mr. Johnson’s deputies, Phyllis Schneck, projected colorful graphics on a screen that showed the government’s plans for real-time monitoring and blocking of malware flowing through the Internet, urging private industry to help.

“We want you to make money,” said Ms. Schneck, a former chief technology officer at McAffee Inc., known for its virus-protection software. Many in the crowd, though, said they worried whether the government would turn any malware-monitoring system to other uses.

Mr. Obama’s cybercoordinator, Michael Daniel, who has been trying to preside over the unwieldy administration debate over encryption rules, was meeting executives in private and calling in public for “cybernorms of behavior” that could constrain the kind of hackers who attacked American corporations, the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon. But he acknowledged that this was an area where the grindingly slow wheels of diplomacy were being outpaced by technological development.

“The government fears its own obsolescence,” said retired Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, who left the Navy in 2012 and is now an executive at iSight Partners, a cybersecurity firm.

Mr. Carter, in his Stanford talk, noted that past wars were fought state to state. But in computer conflict, he said, the most sophisticated threats and weapons are seen by banks, security firms and Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook that serve as conduits for the world’s communications. That is data Washington most needs.

Yet nearly two years after the Snowden revelations, many companies are as reluctant as ever to give the government any information unless they are compelled to do so, particularly as they try to convince foreign customers in global markets that they are doing everything they can to keep Washington at a distance.

The new defense secretary received what was probably the warmest welcome of government officials on the tour through Silicon Valley. Mr. Carter, who did graduate work at Stanford, returned for much of last year, until Mr. Obama pulled him back to Washington. That time gave him a new appreciation, he said, for how ill suited the Pentagon’s lumbering procurement system is in taking advantage of new technology and start-ups.

At Facebook, he talked with Sheryl Sandberg, a former colleague from the Clinton administration, about using social media to connect the troops — and the challenges it poses as terror groups become adept at exploiting it. On Friday, he went to a venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, to meet with the founders of a series of relatively new ventures.

“He really just wanted to explore how their technologies might be applied to current problems at the Pentagon,” said Margit Wennmachers, a partner at the firm, who joined the session.

During the meetings, Mr. Carter spoke with an executive of Github, an Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company, which China recently targeted in a cyberattack intended to keep Western news reports out of the hands of the Chinese public.

Mr. Obama, on a trip to Stanford in February, had expressed sympathy with those who were striving to protect privacy, even while saying it had to be balanced against the concerns of the F.B.I. and other agencies that fear “going dark” because of new encryption technologies. (Apple says that with its new iPhone operating system, it has no way to decode data in phones, even if given a court order.) Mr. Obama’s aides say decisions about how to resolve these differences are still months away.

With so much more data at stake, and attacks so frequent, cryptographers say the need for encryption is greater than ever.

One proposal, by Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, is to develop a split-key system in which companies hold half and the government, or some outside agent, holds the other half of the key to unlock encrypted communications. The two would be put together only with approval of a court. But many computer security experts reject that idea, saying it would leave too much room for theft and would motivate other governments to require the same.

“The amount of information that intelligence officials are collecting — even if some sources go dark — is dramatically more than it has been in history,” Paul Kocher, a cryptographer, said Wednesday. “The idea that we need to stop rolling out technology to keep our industries and businesses safe, to keep a few sources from going dark, is certainly not a trade-off.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/us...on-valley.html





Your Complete Guide to the 5 Cybersecurity Bills in Congress
Eric Geller

The U.S. government and the American business community are understandably worried about cybersecurity. Last year was a big one for cyberattacks and data breaches. In response to this threat, the Republican-controlled Congress is debating five bills designed to make it easier for businesses to share information about cybersecurity threats with the government.

Because of lobbying by businesses and the U.S. intelligence community, the bills are structured to protect the corporations more than their customers. They include language shielding companies from consumer lawsuits that result from improperly shared data. Civil-liberties groups have also criticized the bills for not adequately protecting personal information embedded in cyberthreat data and for shrouding the data from public-records requests.

At press time, the House had passed two cybersecurity bills, one Senate bill had been passed out of committee and reported to the full chamber for a final vote, and a third House bill and a second Senate bill were awaiting review by the appropriate committee.

The two House bills that passed earlier this week will be combined and sent to the Senate, but the Senate won't take up them up directly; instead, it will vote on its own two bills.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) told Politico that cybersecurity legislation would have to wait until senators had addressed a global trade deal and Iranian nuclear negotiations. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) said that the upper chamber would probably vote on one of its two bills, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, "before Memorial Day."

Here are the five major cybersecurity bills working their way through Congress, along with brief explanations of their distinguishing features.

1) Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (S.754)

Sponsor: Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee

Status: Reported by the committee to the full Senate

CISA orders the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to establish a process for the federal government to share data on cyberattacks with state and local government agencies and private companies that could be affected. This includes both indicators of future threats and data on active cyberattacks.

The bill also lays out how entities other than the federal government can track and respond to cyberthreats without government involvement as well as how and with whom they can share information about these threats.

Responses to cyberthreats are called "defensive measures," and civil liberties groups consider the vagueness of CISA's defensive-measures provision one of the bill's most troubling elements. It is not completely clear what kinds of defensive measures CISA would permit a company to legally employ against the source of a cyberattack.

CISA also allows state, tribal, and local governments to use cyberthreat data—without the permission of the entity that shared said data—to prevent serious harms like terrorist attacks, economic catastrophes, or imminent violent threats.

CISA creates exceptions to federal antitrust laws to let private companies exchange data on cyberthreats without being punished for collusion. Businesses still cannot coordinate to fix prices, divvy up sections of a shared market, or engage in any other monopolistic behaviors.

CISA places significant responsibility on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop a process that lets the federal government collect businesses' cyberthreat data and distribute it throughout the government.

In addition, CISA offers companies "liability protections" that shield the companies from certain kinds of lawsuits relating to data sharing. These protections are another point of contention for civil-liberties watchdogs.

2) Cyber Threat Sharing Act (S.456)

Sponsor: Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee

Status: Referred by Sen. Carper to the committee

Like CISA, CTSA allows private businesses to share information about cyberthreats with partners in the private sector and in the government. The central government clearinghouse for such threat data is the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC).

Sen. Carper, CTSA's sponsor, has said that his bill shares many features with CISA. But unlike CISA, this bill puts the DHS at the center of cyberthreat data sharing; Carper has urged the House to incorporate "a strong role" for the DHS in its cybersecurity bills.

Under CTSA, the DHS would select a private company to design standards for how other companies would share cyberthreat data.

CTSA, like CISA, offers companies liability protections, the idea being that they will be more likely to share data if they aren't worried about consumers suing them for doing so inappropriately.

Unlike CISA, there is no language in CTSA authorizing private companies to use defensive measures to counter cyberthreats.

Also unlike CISA, CTSA includes a provision that limits how the government can use threat data to regulate a company. Under CTSA, the government cannot use threat data shared by a company as part of a regulatory action against that company. (If the government lawfully acquires the data from another source, it can use it in regulatory actions.)

CTSA carries a five-year sunset provision.

3) Protecting Cyber Networks Act (H.R.1560)

Sponsor: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

Status: Passed by the House 307-116 on April 22

PCNA's main purpose—directing the DNI to establish procedures for sharing cyberthreat data and allowing businesses to craft and execute their own response plans—mirrors that of CISA and CTSA.

Under PCNA, however, entities outside the federal government are not allowed to share cyberthreat data with the Department of Defense (DOD), which contains the National Security Agency (NSA).

When the House passed PCNA, the chamber approved all but one amendment with a voice vote, meaning the vote-counters knew there was sufficient support to bypass the typical recorded vote. The one amendment that required a recorded vote was Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.)'s seven-year sunset provision. Chairman Nunes and the business community opposed this amendment, but it passed 313-110.

One notable amendment that passed on a voice vote was the manager's amendment, which is essentially a hybrid amendment containing provisions from multiple legislators. The PCNA manager's amendment removed a provision from the bill that exempted certain cyberthreat data from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A similar provision in CISA recently attracted the ire of civil-liberties groups and privacy-minded senators.

Jack Langer, Rep. Nunes' communications director, told the Daily Dot in an email that Nunes' bill mirrored key elements of the bill being worked on by the Homeland Security Committee, led by Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas).

"Chairmen Nunes and McCaul coordinated their efforts closely as they were writing their respective bills so that they would be compatible," Langer said. "The main difference is that the [Homeland Security Committee] bill identifies the DHS as the host for the information-sharing portal, whereas our bill does not designate a specific portal, i.e. portals could be established at many different departments and agencies."

In this respect, PCNA and NCPAA are comparable to CISA and CTSA, in that each chamber's Homeland Security Committee produced a bill that gave the DHS a starring role in cybersecurity data sharing, while the Intelligence Committee in each chamber left this task to the collective agencies involved.

4) National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act (H.R.1731)

Sponsor: Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee

Status: Passed by the House 335-63 on April 23

As mentioned above, NCPAA is very similar to PCNA except that it establishes the DHS as the central repository for cyberthreat data. NCPAA, like CTSA, directs the NCCIC to coordinate the sharing of such data and authorizes the center to establish information-sharing agreements with private companies.

Like CISA, NCPAA offers companies liability protections for data sharing and exempts such sharing between companies from antitrust scrutiny.

When the House passed NCPAA, it also passed a resolution ordering that the bill be attached to the end of PCNA, effectively merging the two pieces of legislation. This document from the Congressional Research Service compares the similarities and differences between the NCPAA and the PCNA.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member on the house Homeland Security Committee, told Politico on Thursday that he planned to work with Chairman McCaul to refine the combined bill's liability-protection language, which he called "overly broad."

5) Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R.234)

Sponsor: Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee

Status: Referred by Rep. Ruppersberger to the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice

CISPA began life as a House bill in November 2011, and its many House and Senate rebirths have repeatedly been scuttled as public outcry mounted over what privacy watchdogs considered worrisome provisions. CISA was created in response to concerns over a previous version of CISPA.

The latest version of CISPA, introduced at the beginning of the 114th Congress, calls for the president to designate two cyberdata coordinators: one within the DHS for receiving cyberthreat data and one within the Department of Justice (DOJ) for receiving cybercrime data.

The bill also calls for the Director of National Intelligence to facilitate data sharing between the U.S. intelligence community and businesses with certain security clearances.

As in other cybersecurity bills, there is liability protection for companies that share data with the government.

CISPA carries a five-year sunset provision.

The most likely outcome of the congressional cybersecurity debate is as follows:

1. The two House bills that have passed will be formally combined and will retain the name PCNA.
2. The Senate will pass CISA.
3. House and Senate negotiators will go to conference to resolve differences between CISA and PCNA.
4. President Obama will sign the conference bill that results from these negotiations.

The White House has expressed reservations about portions of the two House bills, but the administration has refrained from issuing a veto threat on either of them. Barring drastic changes in conference negotiations, the president would probably sign a conference bill that combined CISA and PCNA.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/con...sa-cispa-pcna/





Protecting Users’ Location Data From An Unconstitutional Search
Eric Gundersen

Editor’s note: Eric Gundersen is the CEO of Mapbox.

Location data is highly sensitive. It contains information about where we live, our daily habits and our network of friends. We discover new places to go; avoid traffic on the way there; swipe to meet new friends once we’ve arrived; and even turn up the thermostat before we get home. When data knows this much about us it requires careful protection.

The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is likely just weeks away from a major ruling on whether the Fourth Amendment protects a user’s data, and developers need to be prepared for whatever decision comes down.

There are clear technical approaches to securing location data. Data must not only be anonymized and aggregated, but also secured with techniques like on-device encryption and tamper-proof hardware security keys. Measures like these can protect against unauthorized access. But what happens when the authorities tell you to remove those safeguards, unlock those keys and look at that data?

We live in a climate of heightened government interest in personal data. We need to recognize this, and to design our systems with unavoidable government intrusion in mind. An ACLU records request of 250 police departments nationwide found that “virtually all” respondents said they track cell phone location data maintained by cellular companies, and “only a tiny minority reported consistently obtaining a warrant and demonstrating probable cause to do so.”

The hard work of law enforcement officials protects our safety and security, but this type of data seizure is unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment requires police to get a warrant before searching private places or documents for everything short of major emergency scenarios. The warrant requirement ensures that officials demonstrate “probable cause” to an independent judge before conducting a search, in a process that mandates a specific description of the information they’re seeking.

Law enforcement officials argue that location data held by third parties should not be afforded Fourth Amendment protections. But in a world where over half of the 1.3 million published iOS apps are location-enabled, location data has to be protected, regardless of where it’s stored, if our constitutional rights are to have any meaning.

The most important thing developers can do to secure user data is to only store it in highly aggregated and anonymized forms – If you don’t have something, there is no reason for someone to break your door down to get it. But even in anonymized datasets there are little details that, when combined with other datasets, can leak information. It’s therefore essential that we protect user data both technically and legally.

Developers who deal with location data have a responsibility to protect user information to the full extent of the law, and to never disclose it to law enforcement officials except in response to a probable cause search warrant, or in case of a life-threatening or similarly dire emergency.

Every American developer should update their law enforcement guidelines and say clearly that they will only disclose user location information in response to a probable cause search warrant.

Studies from Google and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimate that the geolocation space is growing 30 percent each year. We’ve only begun to understand the potential of location data and how it will influence our lives. The benefits will be enormous, and we can deliver them without a cost to users’ privacy — if we’re careful.

Most users are choosing to share their location data in exchange for those benefits. It is now the responsibility of developers to safeguard their users’ privacy. The way we manage this data today is critical to our collective future.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/01/pro...tional-search/





Effort by Japan to Stifle News Media Is Working
Martin Fackler

It was an unexpected act of protest that shook Japan’s carefully managed media world: Shigeaki Koga, a regular television commentator and fierce critic of the political establishment, abruptly departed from the scripted conversation during a live TV news program to announce that this would be his last day on the show because, as he put it, network executives had succumbed to political pressure for his removal.

“I have suffered intense bashing by the prime minister’s office,” Mr. Koga told his visibly flabbergasted host late last month, saying he had been removed as commentator because of critical statements he had made about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Later in the program, Mr. Koga held up a sign that read “I am not Abe,” a play on the slogan of solidarity for journalists slain in January at a French satirical newspaper.

The outburst created a public firestorm, and not only because of the spectacle of Mr. Koga, a dour-faced former top government official, seemingly throwing away his career as a television commentator in front of millions of viewers. His angry show of defiance also focused national attention on the right-leaning government’s increased strong-arming of the news media to reduce critical coverage.

Many journalists and political experts say the Abe government is trying to engineer a fundamental shift in the balance of power between his administration and the news media, using tactics to silence criticism that go beyond anything his predecessors tried and that have frustrated many journalists. These have included more aggressive complaints to the bosses of critical journalists and commentators like Mr. Koga, and more blatant retaliation against outlets that persist in faulting the administration. At the same time, Mr. Abe has tried to win over top media executives and noted journalists with private sushi lunches.

The prime minister, who arrived in the United States on Sunday for a weeklong visit, has also appointed a new chairman to the national public broadcaster, NHK, who has declared that the network will not deviate too far from the government’s views. Members of the Abe government have openly hinted at revoking the broadcasting licenses of overly critical networks under a law that requires that TV news reports not intentionally twist facts.

Mr. Abe’s efforts have had a chilling effect on coverage at a time when he is pushing ahead with a conservative agenda to dismantle the nation’s postwar pacifist consensus and put forth more positive portrayals of Japan’s World War II-era behavior. Experts warn that muzzling the press makes it easier for the government to make big changes that might not enjoy broad popular support, such as rewriting the pacifist Constitution, or even restarting the nation’s stalled nuclear industry.

“The Abe government is showing an obsession with the media that verges on paranoia,” said Keigo Takeda, a former editor in chief at Newsweek Japan who is now a respected freelance journalist. “I have never seen this level of efforts to micromanage specific newspapers and TV programs.”

While government officials deny that they are trying to curtail free speech, many journalists, commentators and media experts say the government campaign has already tempered coverage of the Abe government. They say that even once feisty outlets like Hodo Station, the news program that had used Mr. Koga as a commentator, are now censoring their own coverage or removing critical voices to avoid drawing official ire.

Some criticism has also fallen on news outlets for rolling over without a fight, particularly since some of these tactics are considered routine in other democracies, like the United States. Many major news organizations have been accused of self-censorship, bringing renewed attention on what experts here say is a weak tradition among the Japanese press of serving as a watchdog on power.

The governing party is acting “like a bully who says, ‘Hey, I don’t like what you said, so meet me behind the gym,’ ” said Yukio Edano, a senior opposition lawmaker. “And the ones who meekly obey also lack self-respect as press organizations.”

This is a point conceded by many Japanese journalists, who say they have no choice but to get along with a prime minister who appears set to remain in power for several years in the absence of credible opposition. Other journalists say they do not want to suffer the fate of The Asahi Shimbun, a liberal newspaper that came under fierce criticism last fall and seemed to capitulate by cutting back on critical, investigative coverage of sensitive issues like the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.

Scholars describe a mood of fear spreading beyond the news media into the broader society, including in education where the Abe government is pressing textbook publishers to adhere more closely to the official line on topics like the 1937 Nanjing massacre and the use of so-called comfort women in wartime military brothels.

“These unprecedented attacks on The Asahi and other media are creating a closed conformity in which the whole society is becoming afraid to say something different,” said Tatsuro Hanada, a professor of media studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. “Abe is adeptly using this for his own political ends.”

Mr. Koga’s accusations offer a rare glimpse of how a formerly hard-hitting news program appears to have toned down its coverage.

While never a favorite of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, Hodo Station felt the pressure rise after a show in late January in which Mr. Koga criticized Mr. Abe’s handling of a hostage crisis in Syria that resulted in the deaths of the two Japanese captives. Mr. Koga and employees of the network that airs Hodo Station, TV Asahi, who asked not to be identified because they were still working there, said that before the program was even over, the network’s political reporters were getting angry calls and emails from political secretaries in the prime minister’s office.

They said the tactic seemed to succeed in turning network reporters against Hodo Station, which has a separate production staff. The reporters and their editors demanded that the program show them its scripts beforehand to ensure that coverage was “balanced,” something Hodo Station’s producer resisted. The government stepped up the pressure against the show again in February, when a top official in the Abe government, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, used an off-record briefing with journalists to speak scathingly of the “completely mistaken” comments about the hostage incident by a “television commentator.”

According to a transcript of the Feb. 24 briefing, Mr. Suga warned that the network might have broken the law by airing the comments. “If it were me, I’d tell them that they violated the broadcast law,” Mr. Suga said, laughing, according to the transcript.

Mr. Koga and others said the transcript had made its way to TV Asahi’s chairman, Hiroshi Hayakawa. “This was a warning to TV Asahi to get rid of me,” Mr. Koga said. “Suga knew this memo would be seen by all major news outlets, and be shown to Chairman Hayakawa.”

Mr. Koga said that that was exactly what happened. In February, after three and a half years of appearing at least once a month as a commentator on Hodo Station, he found out that he would no longer be back on the show. At about the same time, another critical commentator and a producer who had refused to give in to the political pressure were also removed from the show.

Mr. Koga said that move led to his outburst on March 27, his final appearance as commentator.

The network refused interview requests. Its chairman, Mr. Hayakawa, denied in a news conference that political pressure had played a role in what he called a routine decision to change the lineup of commentators. Mr. Suga has told reporters that Mr. Koga’s charges of political pressure were “baseless.”

Still, the governing party is keeping up the pressure, summoning TV Asahi executives two weeks ago to explain how Mr. Koga was allowed to make his accusations on live television. The party explained the summons by saying that those accusations may themselves have violated the broadcast law.

“Some don’t like his method, but Mr. Koga did draw public attention to the Abe government’s pressure on the media,” said Takashi Uesugi, a media critic and one-time researcher at The New York Times who runs an independent online news program. “This was an inconvenient truth for both the government and the self-censoring journalists.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/wo...s-working.html





Presenter Sacked for 'Despicable' War Tweets, Huge Debate Unfolds on Twitter
Jenni Ryall

An Australian sports presenter has been sacked after he wrote a stream of "disrespectful" tweets about WWI soldiers on Anzac Day on Saturday.

Australia's public broadcaster SBS fired Scott McIntyre after the station said he breached the social media guidelines of the company. His series of tweets — sent on the 100th anniversary of Australian and New Zealand troops (Anzacs) landing at Gallipoli during WWI — spoke of Anzacs committing war crimes.

The cultification of an imperialist invasion of a foreign nation that Australia had no quarrel with is against all ideals of modern society.

— Scott McIntyre (@mcintinhos) April 25, 2015

Wonder if the poorly-read, largely white, nationalist drinkers and gamblers pause today to consider the horror that all mankind suffered.

— Scott McIntyre (@mcintinhos) April 25, 2015

Remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these ‘brave’ Anzacs in Egypt, Palestine and Japan.

— Scott McIntyre (@mcintinhos) April 25, 2015

Not forgetting that the largest single-day terrorist attacks in history were committed by this nation & their allies in Hiroshima & Nagasaki

— Scott McIntyre (@mcintinhos) April 25, 2015

Innocent children, on the way to school, murdered. Their shadows seared into the concrete of Hiroshima. pic.twitter.com/DQOGXiKxEb

— Scott McIntyre (@mcintinhos) April 25, 2015

SBS Managing Director Michael Ebeid and Director of Sport Ken Shipp released a statement on the SBS website on Sunday, stating McIntyre's position has become "untenable" due to his "inappropriate and disrespectful" comments.

"SBS has taken decisive action to terminate Mr McIntyre’s position at SBS, with immediate effect," the company wrote. "SBS apologises for any offence or harm caused by Mr McIntyre’s comments which in no way reflect the views of the network. SBS supports our Anzacs and has devoted unprecedented resources to coverage of the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings."

At an internal meeting on Monday, The Guardian reported McIntyre was in fact only sacked after refusing to delete the inappropriate tweets.

Australia's Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull also became involved in the debacle. He labelled the tweets "despicable" and spoke to SBS management directly. In the face of widespread criticism over a minister getting involved in such an issue, Turnbull released a statement on his website.

Difficult to think of more offensive or inappropriate comments than those by @mcintinhos. Despicable remarks which deserve to be condemned.

— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) April 25, 2015

He admitted he spoke to Ebeid, but that the management of SBS was responsible for staffing decisions and not the government. Some believe Turnbull's influence may have played a part in the decision to fire McIntrye and that he is policing the Internet, yet he denies this is the case.

"The comments were so offensive that they deserved the widespread condemnation that they received," Turnbull wrote. "Mr McIntyre, as a private citizen, is entitled to express his political views, but in his capacity as a reporter employed by SBS he has to comply with, and face the consequences of ignoring, the SBS social media protocol, a number of provisions of which were breached by him with his offensive tweets."

One prominent Channel 10 journalist, Hugh Riminton, who is also on the board of a soldier support initiative Soldier On, stood up for McIntyre on Twitter saying there were other options the company could have taken besides firing him.

#ScottMcIntyre's tweets were untimely, immature and in one case offensively wrong. But lest we forget, Our Diggers also died for free speech

— Hugh Riminton (@hughriminton) April 26, 2015

Wrong call @michaelebeid. You had options other than sacking him.

— Hugh Riminton (@hughriminton) April 26, 2015

Ebeid responded directly to the criticism on Twitter.

@hughriminton Hugh, this has nothing to do with free speech. It's not tenable to remain on air if your audience doesn't respect or trust you

— Michael Ebeid (@michaelebeid) April 26, 2015

The situation eventually became a battle between those proclaiming the right of free speech and those disgusted by McIntyre's comments.

The sacking of @mcintinhos is a low point in media independence in Australia. A journalist challenged national psyche only to lose his job.

— Dominic Bossi (@DomBossi) April 27, 2015

History is complex. Twitter is not a platform with the space for nuance unfortunately, yet nuance is what history requires. #ScottMcIntyre

— Adam Spence (@AdamSpenceAU) April 26, 2015

Absolutely no respect for the land whereby you are able to express your free will and speech. You're a wanker #ScottMcIntyre

— Tabbetha Senior (@tabbetha1987) April 26, 2015

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Scott McIntyre was deliberately insensitive and had to go. #auspol #sbs

— Sean Garman (@SeanSJG) April 26, 2015

@ABCthedrum The trouble with McIntyre's tweets is he does not discriminate btween good & bad soldiers-all are tarred as criminals

— Hot Rats (@jarro56) April 27, 2015

@BriggsJamie @SBS so what exactly does #freedomofspeech mean? McIntyre was giving Australians a view of history most don't want to hear!

— Julie Library (@julie_library) April 26, 2015

But writer Geoff Lemon, who has researched both wars, put it best. First in a twitter stream, and then in an article for The Guardian. He detailed the reasons that may be behind McIntyre's tweets, the reason for the reaction and the reasons for the fallout.

"McIntyre breached the general public accord: not in saying hateful things about people who might suffer as a consequence, but in how we collectively view ourselves and our past," Lemon wrote.

"As much as I think his comments were factually flawed and deliberately designed to inflame, nothing says that I should then send him messages of rage and hate, or that he doesn’t deserve to have a job that is in no way related to those opinions."

The abuse poured on him is alarming: politicians and shock jocks sensing an easy target, rousing people who have very partial information.

— Geoff Lemon (@geofflemon) April 26, 2015

Describing all Anzacs as criminals is as ignorant as describing them all as pure noble heroes. They were individuals, all different.

— Geoff Lemon (@geofflemon) April 26, 2015

Having a clearer picture of who we’re commemorating, and why, and what happened to them, would be the most respectful act of remembrance.

— Geoff Lemon (@geofflemon) April 27, 2015

He was backed by the host of the ABC’s Media Report program Richard Aedy, who told Mumbrella, the grey area in social media policies for journalists is beginning to cause issues.

"Journalists are now expected to use social media to promote their work, to seek information and to interact with their audiences. It is OK to have opinions, especially about things that don’t really matter, like sport, or reality TV," he told the website.

"I don’t believe he should have lost his job for expressing an opinion that other people find upsetting. If SBS wanted to punish him, there are other avenues."

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance agrees, releasing a statement saying social media policies are beginning to infringe on the private lives of media professionals, dictating what they can and can't say in private.

"MEAA believes that employers must recognise that their employees are entitled to a private life, with their own beliefs and opinions; opinions that should be able to be expressed without heavy-handed retribution by the employer," the organisation wrote.
http://mashable.com/2015/04/27/scott...-tweets-anzac/





The Sun Newspaper Launches Anonymous Tor-Based WikiLeaks-Style SecureDrop
Mark Wilson

The Sun newspaper launches anonymous Tor-based WikiLeaks-style SecureDrop

The likes of Julian Assange's WikiLeaks have set the standard for blowing the lid on huge stories based on tips from anonymous sources. Whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden have brought to public attention stories which would otherwise have been kept hidden from the public, and it has been with the help of newspapers such as the Guardian that this information has been disseminated around the world.

Other newspapers are keen to ride on the coattails of those blazing a trail in the world of investigative journalism, and the latest to join the party is The Sun. Today, Murdoch-owned News Corp's newspaper and website launches SecureDrop -- a way for whistle-blowers to anonymously leave tip-offs that can be further investigated.

The cloud service provides a means of getting in touch with journalists at The Sun without giving up anonymity -- something which is particularly important when making revelations about companies and governments. The site provides a basic guide to getting started with the SecureDrop service, starting off with pointing would-be users in the direction of the Tor Browser Bundle. Once downloaded and installed, take a quick visit to nodd5fyasyj4jqgp.onion.

Anyone with information or documents that need to be submitted is invited to do just that. Although the service is anonymous, users are assigned a 7 to 10 word codename -- and the advice is to memorize rather than write it down. Files of up to 500MB can be uploaded to the cloud, and The Sun suggests that users might like to use GPG to add an extra layer of protection. With the codename, it is possible to log back into the same account and check for replies from a journalist.

SecureDrop is being launched at the same time as The Sun's Whistleblowers' Charter, which aims to "uncover the secret stories being kept under wraps by the authorities that YOU have a right to know".

WikiLeaks recognized the launch, suggesting that other sites under the News Corp banner might soon follow suit:

Murdoch's The Sun adopts WikiLeaks methods. Not as good, but close. Likely most News Corp pubs will move to adopt. http://t.co/KuGj6JhhFc

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 27, 2015

Talking about anonymous tips, The Sun assures potential users that "our reporter only reads them on a ring-fenced laptop not linked to the Internet". There's also the assertion that "information shared through SecureDrop will go through the same rigorous journalistic process as other tip-offs to ensure it is correct before publication," but it remains to be seen if the service manages to gain the same level of trust as WikiLeaks or the network of sources journalists use.

While it is possible that SecureDrop has been launched with the best of intentions, it could also be seen as a retaliation against legal action taken against The Sun and its journalists after law enforcement agencies tapped reporters' phone without permission.
http://betanews.com/2015/04/27/the-s...le-securedrop/





Surveillance Forces Journalists to Think and Act Like Spies
Tom Lowenthal

Once upon a time, a journalist never gave up a confidential source. When someone comes forward, anonymously, to inform the public, it's better to risk time incarcerated than give them up. This ethical responsibility was also a practical and professional necessity. If you promise anonymity, you're obliged to deliver. If you can't keep your word, who will trust you in the future? Sources go elsewhere and stories pass you by.

Grizzled correspondents might recall this time with nostalgia. For many young journalists, it's more like historical fiction--a time when reporters could choose not to give up a source, gruff editors chain-smoked cigars, and you could spot a press hack by the telltale notebook and card in the brim of a hat.

The experience of a new generation of news writers tells a different story. Whether you choose to yield a source's name is secondary. Can you even protect your source to begin with? Call records, email archives, phone tapping, cell-site location information, smart transit passes, roving bugs, and surveillance cameras--our world defaults to being watched. You can perhaps achieve privacy for a few fleeting moments, but, even then, only with a great deal of effort.

Yet this is journalism's brave new world. In the United States, the National Security Agency, otherwise known as the NSA, seeks to listen to every electronic communication sent or received. In the U.K., the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has succeeded in intercepting and storing every peep that passes over the wires. Commercial spy software FinFisher (also called FinSpy) monitors citizens in at least 20 other countries, according to a report by The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. Global Information Society Watch's global report details the state of communications surveillance in plenty more. Even Canada's spy agency may be watching Canadians illegally, though the GISWatch report could not say so conclusively.

If a journalist can protect the identity of his or her sources at all, it's only with the application of incredible expertise and practice, along with expensive tools. Journalists now compete with spooks and spies, and the spooks have the home-field advantage.

Shadowy worlds of subterfuge and surveillance should not be a journalist's habitat. The time a journalist spends learning to play Spy-vs.-Spy could be better spent honing his or her craft. Every hour spent wrangling complex security tools could be an hour spent researching and writing. All the staff on a newsroom's security team could be writers and editors instead. Each geeky gizmo and air-gapped computer (a computer that is never connected to a network) could be another camera or microphone, or the cost could be spent on payroll. All the extra labor and logistics dedicated to evading espionage is a loss.

This poses sometimes-steep financial costs on newsrooms. If journalists and media organizations are to protect themselves, they must buy more tools and adopt practices that limit their efficiency. Robust security practices are complex and time-consuming, imposing logistical costs. The psychological toll of constant surveillance leads to exhaustion and burnout. Few journalists do their best work when they know that government thugs could break down the door at any moment--as they did at the home of independent New Zealand reporter Nicky Hager in October 2014, according to The Intercept.

Many have worked to slow the swing of the pendulum from privacy to panopticon, increasing development of anti-surveillance tools and advice for journalists. The response to widespread knowledge of the long arm of the surveillance state has been gradual but impressive. Developers have increased work on surveillance-resistance projects and anonymous tip lines. Experts have put together numerous digital security guides and training programs, all intended to help reporters from falling under the focused gaze of government surveillance.

Perhaps the flagship of this proliferation is SecureDrop, a secure and anonymous submission system for journalists. First pioneered by the former hacker and current digital security journalist Kevin Poulsen and the late programmer and political activist Aaron Swartz under the moniker DeadDrop, SecureDrop is intended to allow a potential source or whistleblower to get in touch with journalists without leaving any dangerous records of his or her identity.

SecureDrop combines several pieces of security and privacy software into an integrated system, ensuring that only the journalists can read anonymous tips. Messages are protected with PGP, the tried-and-true gold standard for this task. Sources' anonymity is provided by Tor, the anonymity network that underpins private communications for everyone from the U.S. Navy and CIA to large businesses and survivors of domestic abuse. The result is safely encrypted messages and no metadata trail. With SecureDrop, journalists don't just choose not to reveal a source's identity. Unless a source chooses to reveal his or her identity, the reporters could not unmask the source even if they tried.

Initially just an idea and some prototype code, SecureDrop was mostly theoretical until early 2013. The first major deployment was at The New Yorker. The project was soon adopted by the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation, which was founded with the specific mission of facilitating journalism that governments oppose. FPF, as the foundation is known, soon took over SecureDrop's development and maintenance, as well as outreach and funding. More than a dozen other news organizations and prominent journalists have now deployed SecureDrop. With an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, FPF plans to bring it to many more.

SecureDrop works hard to evade even targeted attacks and surveillance. Making use of cutting-edge technology and contemporary security best practices, SecureDrop separates different tasks onto different computers. Each machine only performs part of the puzzle, so it's very difficult to compromise the whole system at once.

This makes SecureDrop quite expensive to deploy. FPF estimates that a single SecureDrop installation would set a newsroom back around $3,000, which is a lot to ask for a tool designed to protect the most important of tips from the most advanced of snoops.

Other organizations have developed and distributed best practices and training materials. Universities have deepened their research into the threats journalists face. The Citizen Lab, already discussed in this piece, is dedicated to deep research about how technology and security affect human rights and is the source of some of the most detailed and comprehensive technical reports of recent years. If you want to know about the threats facing journalists and human rights groups, Citizen Lab is the place to go.

Yet, as deep as Citizen Lab's work goes, it is as likely to induce security nihilism as it is to produce savvy security practices. An August 2014 report tells of terrifying new tools for state attacks on the media. Called "network injection appliances," these devices insert malicious software into otherwise innocuous traffic. Used right, one can modify an online video, adding malware that takes over a journalist's computer. If a journalist is using a service such as YouTube or Vimeo, session cookies allow the journalist to be targeted precisely. This makes these attacks very difficult to detect and prevent.

With this new technology, journalists don't have to make a mistake to be compromised. Gone are the phishing days of opening a malicious attachment or clicking a suspicious link. There's no trap to notice and avoid. Just browsing the Web puts one at risk, and avoiding online video is an impractical ask of a journalist conducting research. Network injection appliances have likely already been deployed in Oman and Turkmenistan, according to Citizen Lab, and because they're commercially developed by private companies, the price of these devices will only continue to drop as their capabilities expand.

Another Citizen Lab paper paints a disturbing picture of government cyberattacks. Journalists, among the principal victims of this sort of technological espionage, face state-level threats while lacking the funds and expertise to protect themselves. Attacks on computer systems can reach across borders into seemingly safe locations, allowing attackers to disrupt communications and impairing journalists' ability to do their core work. Sometimes attacks are simply a nuisance or a resource drain; at other times they present major risks to individuals' safety.

It's all but impossible for journalists to learn the strategies of the state and appropriate countermeasures on a shoestring budget. Websites and service providers are often better positioned to protect journalists from these attacks. Securing the everyday tools of the trade works much better than does demanding that journalists jump through arcane hoops to stay safe. Simple measures can go a long way. Just enabling secure HTTPS rather than insecure HTTP can make a huge difference. The New York Times has called on all news sites to adopt this very measure by the end of 2015.

As noted security expert The Grugq puts it: "We can secure the things people actually do, or we can tell them to do things differently. Only one of these has any chance of working."

Since we first saw Edward Snowden's face, in 2013, computer-security guides for journalists have multiplied, but using computers safely is hard when a government is trying to get the drop on you. Many guides only scratch the surface, detailing basic--but important--steps. Turning on automatic software updates or using password managers and two-factor authentication for online accounts make a big difference. These first steps make journalists slightly harder to attack.

In fact, simple practices probably have a greater impact than do more complex ones. Esoteric security strategies are a lot of work and sometimes only inconvenience a savvy attacker. Simple measures completely stymie simple attacks and force advanced attackers to change their tactics. A sophisticated attacker will never use an advanced technique when a simple one will do. More sophisticated attempts require more work, cost more, and are more prone to detection. Changing the game by forcing attackers to use scarce resources helps everyone stay safe.

Other guides delve deeply into advanced principles of operational security. Abbreviated "OPSEC," the term is military jargon for measures taken to keep critical information out of hostile hands. If the phrase sounds more at home in a spy thriller than in a journalism manual, that's a hint at the problems posed by press surveillance. Mainstream journalists and press organizations openly acknowledge their need to learn spies' tactics and techniques to stay a step ahead.

The adoption of military tactics and an espionage mindset has a substantial downside. The Grugq explains: "OPSEC comes at a cost, and a significant part of that cost is efficiency. Maintaining a strong security posture ... for long periods of time is very stressful, even for professionally trained espionage officers."

Yet even in apparently free democratic societies, compromising a free press is the day-to-day work of the security services.
Intelligence services sometimes target journalists for surveillance, even when the missions of the agencies involved are ostensibly centered around foreign intelligence. Iranian spies orchestrate elaborate campaigns to bamboozle journalists; they even pose as journalists when targeting think tanks and lawmakers, Wired has reported. The FBI has also admitted using the latter tactic and actually defended it publicly when criticized. In the U.K., security services have abandoned restraint when it comes to surveillance of journalists and civil society, Ryan Gallagher wrote in The Intercept, summarizing: "An investigative journalist working on a case or story involving state secrets could be targeted on the basis that they are perceived to be working against the vaguely defined national security interests of the government."

*****

Some journalists have risen to this challenge. After meeting with Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald realized that traditional newspapers and media groups were not well suited to this world of watchers. They needed a new sort of organization--one ready to play spy games with professional spies from the very start.

They founded the First Look Media group with help from fellow investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and funding from eBay mogul Pierre Omidyar. First Look's flagship online magazine, The Intercept, is dedicated to exposing the abuses of the surveillance state. Choosing such powerful foes meant that The Intercept had to stay one step ahead from the start.

Micah Lee is The Intercept's resident security expert. Formerly a staff technologist at technology civil rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Lee was on The Intercept team from the beginning. He designed and implemented the security measures that Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill--and now a team of 20--use to stay safe. When asked about the infrastructure needed to protect the publication, he frankly admitted: "When we think it'll make us safer, we normally just buy another computer or device. We're willing to spend money on these things when there's a clear security benefit."

Lee was referring to security practices typically only needed when one is facing adversaries with the sophistication of governments. Protecting important information on separate air-gapped computers is a common practice at The Intercept. Lee and other technologists are fond of a security principle called "defense in depth," an approach that assumes that some security measures will fail and calls for systems that remain secure even when that happens. In the planning for defense in depth, a process should become insecure not when one security measure fails but instead when dozens do.

Systems built this way demand more hardware than do those where security is more brittle. Several computers ensure that the compromise of one will leave the others safe. Smartcards protect cryptographic keys even when other things go wrong. All of this tech costs money and requires experienced technologists like Lee to design and operate.

In keeping with this level of prudent paranoia, Lee and his colleagues often eschew regular smartphones in favor of the CryptoPhone. These $3,500 devices, made by German manufacturer GSMK, don't just provide encrypted calls; they're heavily customized and locked-down Android devices loaded with a whole host of custom software. They even try to detect anomalies in cellular networks that might be indicative of an attack or targeted surveillance.

These practices and this technology are the best that media organizations can buy. It's a far cry from the James Bond-esque gadgetry that one might see at MI6 or the CIA, but, used correctly, it can keep the spooks at bay long enough for you to meet with sources and write the stories that need to be written.

Staff at The Intercept use PGP for email encryption by default. Lee estimates that more than 80 percent of the emails he sent in the last six months were encrypted in this way. For most people who aren't security experts, PGP is a niche tool with a notoriously steep learning curve. Getting started requires hours of training and practice to wrap one's head around complex and unintuitive principles of public-key cryptography. The process takes even longer if one doesn't have an experienced guide.

Between building sustainable long-term security strategies and jetting around protecting the magazine's VIP writers, Lee quickly ran out of the time needed to show each new hire how to use PGP. But he noticed that he wasn't always needed: "Folks learn PGP the same way they do any other tricky technical thing--they Google it, or they ask their nerd friends, and sometimes they get bad advice," he said. At The Intercept, new hires were learning PGP from folks already there--journalists and editors as well as technologists.

The Intercept had developed what Lee calls a "security culture," an operational security term that has its roots in activism. In a "security culture," a community adopts customs and norms that protect its members. It's a wholesale adoption of operational security practices into the everyday work and activities of the group. The Intercept team considers security a core value, so people there are willing to work together to protect one another, even when that's outside their usual work.

"Of course, having Erinn in New York helps, too," Lee joked, referring to Erinn Clark, the most recent member of First Look's security team. Clark came to First Look from the Tor Project, the nonprofit group responsible for developing Tor. Another security virtuoso, Clark is more than familiar not only with the nitty-gritty of security tools but also with the adoption of secure practices across an organization. In technology circles, the Tor Project is famous both for the exotic ways in which states have tried to infiltrate and attack it and for the extreme security measures its members have adopted to protect themselves.

Leading the incredible heavy hitters of First Look's security team is Morgan "Mayhem" Marquis-Boire. A security superstar, Marquis-Boire worked on Google's security incident-response team, and he is a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab. This incredible brain trust isn't just there to keep just First Look safe. Once First Look's basic security needs are met, the group plans to branch out. "We want the security team to start developing tools and hardware and doing bigger research." Lee said. The team members plan to use their skills and expertise to help other organizations that can't afford their own elite security teams.

The challenge is always resources. First Look has a billionaire on call to pay for the latest technology and fancy technologists. This is a rarity. Other journalists may face a stark choice between hard-hitting stories and staying safe.

What does information security look like at publications that don't have First Look's billionaire funding? FPF regularly sends technical experts to help newsrooms install, set up, and upgrade SecureDrop. Every time they set foot in a newsroom, FPF techs find themselves flooded with security questions from reporters and editors. Questions aren't just about SecureDrop or FPF; news teams want to know about everything from the ins and out of other tools, such as OTR and Tails, to the sort of advanced operational security measures that can help them keep their heads above water when spies come snooping.

Runa A. Sandvik, a member of FPF's technical team, said, "Even if you wanted to use these tools and had all the patience to learn them, there's still so much conflicting information--it's very confusing, very intimidating." And though few media organizations have the ability to hire technologists to work with their reporting staffs, Sandvik notes that the situation for journalists not affiliated with a major organization is even bleaker: "If you have a technologist, someone to help you, that's one thing. If you're freelance and not overly technical, I don't know how you're going to work this stuff out." She added, "Many feel overwhelmed; they don't know who to ask for help."

Just having a technologist to help with analysis and security may not be enough. The newsroom has to commit to understanding the issues and taking good advice. Barton Gellman, who currently writes for The Washington Post, was one of the recipients of the document cache Snowden assembled, and he knew that he didn't have the technical skills to work on the documents alone. He brought prominent security researcher Ashkan Soltani (now chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission) on board to help. Soltani bolstered Gellman's security practices and helped Gellman analyze and understand the more technical material in the collection.

To make matters worse, intelligence agencies encourage confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to secure tools and practices. They try to associate a need for privacy with wrongdoing. This association makes it even harder for journalists to protect themselves and their sources. Persuading a source to protect him- or herself is harder when the tools of safety are associated with suspicion. In some cases, making secure tools seem suspicious actively endangers sources who live in less tolerant environs, such as dissidents in mainland China who use Tor. This doublethink is a strange flip side to the surveillance state: First, watch everyone, always, then vilify any attempt to recover some privacy. This is especially disruptive to journalists and their ability to serve as watchdogs.

Even without state propaganda and unforced errors, covert action takes a substantial toll on the press's ability to hold leaders accountable. Espionage targeting journalists and their sources impairs the healthy function of the states where it occurs. And these practices are not just a feature of regimes known to be restrictive or autocratic.

In 2013, David Miranda was detained for most of a day while making a connection between flights at Heathrow Airport in London. Miranda was changing planes on a journey from Germany to Brazil on which he was transporting documents and video footage between Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. British police held him under measures designed to combat terrorism. Their reasoning? Miranda was promoting a "political or ideological cause."

In July 2013, surveillance agency GCHQ destroyed computers at the Guardian newspaper in London. The security agency had already threatened the newspaper's editors, demanding that the Guardian stop reporting on government surveillance. A security service literally knocked on the doors of a prominent and critical newspaper in Western Europe. They ground a computer into pieces with the use of power tools. All of this was done in a vain attempt to prevent the publication of more articles on a topic that discomfited the government.

These are the tools the state has at its disposal to discourage dissent. It is understandable that, for some, the risk of challenging this authority is simply too great. When these are the consequences of hard-hitting reporting, sticking to "safe" topics and innocuous pieces is a reasonable response.

But even for those who choose to continue the hard work of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, evading the panopticon comes at a tremendous cost. There are the costs incurred in avoiding simple tools in favor of secure ones. The costs of using extra hardware to protect sensitive materials. The costs of hiring elite security teams instead of extra editors. The costs of worrying that you've made a mistake in your security measures. The costs of wondering whether your hotel room will be undisturbed when you get back. The costs of hoping that today isn't the day that a government agent knocks at the door and asks to destroy your work, or worse.

When journalists must compete with spies and surveillance, even when they win, society loses.

DISCLOSURE: The author previously worked at the Tor Project, the non-profit organization responsible for developing and maintaining the Tor software and network
https://cpj.org/2015/04/attacks-on-t...like-spies.php





You Can’t Backdoor a Platform
Jonathan Mayer

According to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, encryption should come with a backdoor. It’s not a new policy position—it dates to the Crypto Wars of the 1990s—but it’s gaining new Beltway currency.

Cryptographic backdoors are a bad idea. They introduce unquantifiable security risks, like the recent FREAK vulnerability. They could equip oppressive governments, not just the United States. They chill free speech. They impose costs on innovators and reduce foreign demand for American products. The list of objections runs long.

I’d like to articulate an additional, pragmatic argument against backdoors. It’s a little subtle, and it cuts across technology, policy, and law. Once you see it, though, you can’t unsee it.

Cryptographic backdoors will not work. As a matter of technology, they are deeply incompatible with modern software platforms. And as a matter of policy and law, addressing those incompatibilities would require intolerable regulation of the technology sector. Any attempt to mandate backdoors will merely escalate an arms race, where usable and secure software stays a step ahead of the government.

The easiest way to understand the argument is to walk through a hypothetical. I’m going to use Android; much of the same analysis would apply to iOS or any other mobile platform.

An Android Hypothetical

Imagine that Google rolls over and backdoors Android. For purposes of this post, the specifics of the backdoor architecture don’t matter. (My recent conversations with federal policymakers have emphasized key escrow designs, and the Washington Post’s reporting is consistent.) Google follows the law, and it compromises Android’s disk encryption.

But there’s an immediate problem: what about third-party apps? Android is, by design, a platform. Google has deliberately made it trivial to create, distribute, and use new software. What prevents a developer from building their own secure data store on top of Android’s backdoored storage? What prevents a developer from building their own end-to-end secure messaging app?

The obvious answer is that Google can’t stop with just backdooring disk encryption. It has to backdoor the entire Android cryptography library. Whenever a third-party app generates an encrypted blob of data, for any purpose, that blob has to include a backdoor.

Now there’s another problem: what about third-party apps that don’t rely on the Android cryptography library? It’s already common practice to use alternatives. Maybe the government could require some commercial libraries, like Facebook Conceal, to incorporate backdoors. Federal authorities certainly won’t be able to reach free, open source, international1 libraries, like OpenSSL, NaCl, or Bouncy Castle. The jurisdictional obstacles to regulation are insurmountable. What’s more, there would be serious First Amendment issues, since a cryptography library is largely math (i.e. speech).

So, how can the government make sure that Android apps use only backdoored libraries? Direct regulation of app developers wouldn’t be enough, since many developers are outside the reach of the American legal system. And, if Google wanted, it could allow developers to submit apps anonymously.2

The solution would have to be intermediary liability, where Google is compelled to play gatekeeper.

One option: require Google to police its app store for strong cryptography. Another option: mandate a notice-and-takedown system, where the government is responsible for spotting secure apps, and Google has a grace period to remove them. Either alternative would, of course, be entirely unacceptable to the technology sector—the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system is widely reviled, and present federal law (CDA 230) disfavors intermediary liability.

This hypothetical is already beyond the realm of political feasibility, but keep going. Assume the federal government sticks Google with intermediary liability. How will Google (or the government) distinguish between apps that have strong cryptography and apps that have backdoored cryptography?

There isn’t a good solution. Auditing app installation bundles, or even requiring developers to hand over source code, would not be sufficient. Apps can trivially download and incorporate new code. Auditing running apps would add even more complexity. And, at any rate, both static and dynamic analysis are unsolved challenges—just look at how much trouble Google has had identifying malware and knockoff apps.

Continue with the hypothetical, though. Imagine that Google could successfully banish secure encryption apps from the official Google Play store. What about apps that are loaded from another app store? The government could feasibly regulate some competitors, like the Amazon Appstore. How, though, would it reach international, free, open source app repositories like F-Droid or Fossdroid? What about apps that a user directly downloads and installs (“sideloads”) from a developer’s website?

The only solution is an app kill switch.3 (Google’s euphemism is “Remote Application Removal.”) Whenever the government discovers a strong encryption app, it would compel Google to nuke the app from Android phones worldwide. That level of government intrusion—reaching into personal devices to remove security software—certainly would not be well received. It raises serious Fourth Amendment issues, since it could be construed as a search of the device or a seizure of device functionality and app data.4 What’s more, the collateral damage would be extensive; innocent users of the app would lose their data.

Designing an effective app kill switch also isn’t so easy. The concept is feasible for app store downloads, since those apps are tagged with a consistent identifier. But a naïve kill switch design is trivial to circumvent with a sideloaded app. The developer could easily generate a random application identifier for each download.5

Google would have to build a much more sophisticated kill switch, scanning apps for prohibited traits. Think antivirus, but for detecting and removing apps that the user wants. That’s yet another unsolved technical challenge, yet another objectionable intrusion into personal devices, and yet another practice with constitutional vulnerability.

Stick with the hypothetical, and assume the app kill switch works.6 Secure native apps are gone.

What about browser-based apps? It’s possible to build a secure data store or messaging app that loads entirely over the web, from the user interface to the cryptography library, and gets saved on the user’s device. The requisite web standards are already in place. This is not a good engineering design, to be clear—it should only be a last resort—but it is possible. And it circumvents the Android cryptography library, Google Play restrictions, and the app kill switch.

That leaves just one option.7 In order to prevent secure data storage and end-to-end secure messaging, the government would have to block these web apps. The United States would have to engage in Internet censorship.

Are Criminals Really That Smart?

It’s easy to spot the leading counterargument to this entire line of reasoning. I’ve heard it firsthand from both law enforcement and intelligence officials.

“Sure,” the response goes, “it’s impossible to entirely block secure apps. Sophisticated criminals will always have good operational security. But we don’t need complete backdoor coverage. If we can significantly increase the barriers to secure storage and messaging, that’s still a big win. Most criminals really aren’t so smart.”

That response isn’t convincing. We’re already talking about the smart criminals here.8 Android and iOS continue to allow for government access to data by default.

In order to believe that backdoors will work,9 we have to believe there is a set of criminals who are smart enough to do all of the following:

• Disable default device backups to the cloud. Otherwise, the government can obtain device content directly from the cloud provider.
• Disable default device key backups to the cloud, if the government retrieves the device. Otherwise, the government can obtain the key from the cloud, and decrypt the device.
• Disable default device biometric decryption, if the government retrieves the device and detains its owner. Otherwise, the government can compel the owner to decrypt the device.
• Avoid sending incriminating evidence by text message, email, or any other communications system that isn’t end-to-end secure. Otherwise, the government can prospectively intercept messages, and can often obtain past communications.
• Disable default cloud storage for each app that contains incriminating evidence, such as a photo library. Otherwise, the government can obtain the evidence directly from the cloud provider.

That’s quite a tall order. And yet, these same criminals must not be smart enough to do any of the following:

• Install an alternative storage or messaging app.
• Download an app from a website instead of an official app store.
• Use a web-based app instead of a native mobile app.

It’s difficult to believe that many criminals would fit the profile.

Will These Apps Really Get Built?

There’s a slightly different counterargument that I’ve also heard. It’s less common, and it focuses on app developers rather than criminals.

“Sure,” the thinking runs, “it’s impossible to entirely block secure apps. But we don’t need a complete technology ban. We just need to disincentivize building these apps, by making them more difficult to design, distribute, and monetize. The best developers will walk away, and the best secure apps will disapper. That would still be a big win.”

Not so fast. Many secure software developers aren’t incentivized by financial reward. In fact, much of the best secure software is free, open source, and noncommercial. And for those developers who do wish to monetize, there are a plethora of viable options.10

As for app design and distribution, that was the discussion earlier. Unless the government is prepared to adopt technology sector regulation that is politically infeasible, inconsistent with prior policy, and possibly unconstitutional, it just can’t do much to obstruct secure apps.

Concluding Thoughts

The frustration felt by law enforcement and intelligence officials is palpable and understandable. Electronic surveillance has revolutionized both fields, and it plays a legitimate role in both investigating crimes and protecting national security. The possibility of losing critical evidence, even if rare, should be cause for reflection.

Cryptographic backdoors are, however, not a solution. Beyond the myriad other objections, they pose too much of a cost-benefit asymmetry. In order to make secure apps just slightly more difficult for criminals to obtain, and just slightly less worthwhile for developers, the government would have to go to extraordinary lengths. In an arms race between cryptographic backdoors and secure apps, the United States would inevitably lose.
http://webpolicy.org/2015/04/28/you-...or-a-platform/





FBI Slammed on Capitol Hill for 'Stupid' Ideas About Encryption
Patrick Howell O'Neill

A new crypto war is underway.

At a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the FBI endured outright hostility as both technical experts and members of Congress from both parties roundly criticized the law enforcement agency's desire to place so-called backdoors into encryption technology.

Amy Hess, the FBI's executive assistant director for science and technology, reiterated to the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform the bureau’s decades-old fear of “going dark” because encryption will make criminal investigations more difficult.

“We’re certainly not going to go dark,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) responded. “And in many ways we’ve never been brighter.”

"Creating a technological backdoor just for good guys is technologically stupid," said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer science graduate. "That's just stupid."

Lieu blamed the NSA's vast surveillance apparatus, saying the agency "violated the Fourth Amendment rights of every American for years" and has caused a vast public reaction.

"Our founders understood that an Orwellian overreaching government is one of the most dangerous things this world could have," Lieu said.

When asked if the FBI ever tracks Americans’ geolocation without a warrant, Hess reluctantly answered yes but declined to provide details to the public despite Chaffetz encouraging her to do so.

The FBI obtains historical cell tower geolocation records, cell tower dumps, and uses Stingrays, all without a warrant.
— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) April 29, 2015

But, also, DOJ pretty clearly gets at least site/sector level geolocation data without a warrant.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) April 29, 2015

Hostility to Hess came from multiple angles, including from Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas), who said he sees no practical way to implement the FBI’s proposal of encryption backdoors. He predicted other countries would become havens and provide strongly encrypted phones, creating a black market for encryption that would be difficult or impossible to control.

Farenthold asked the panel of witnesses if anyone thought it was possible to build a technically secure “golden key.” No one raised their hands.

Hess emphasized that the FBI “fully supports encryption” and even said it was good advice for people to encrypt cellphones. Hess echoed Massachusetts District Attorney Daniel Conley and Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Illinois), who said, “there is a balance to be struck here."

The technical experts and almost every other congressperson didn't think the balance proposed by the FBI was possible from technical, legal, and policy perspectives.

"I, for one, am not willing to give up every bit of privacy for security; so how do we find that balance?" Chaffetz asked. "It's impossible to build a backdoor for just the good guys. I worry about unintentional vulnerabilities.”

Conley made the most colorful remarks of the day, including saying that he didn’t believe technical experts who said building backdoors is impossible.

“Did John Kennedy say we couldn’t go to the moon?” Conley asked. “He said no, we’re going to go because it’s the hard thing to do.”

“I’m a proud and patriotic American, too,” Farenthold responded. “But maybe the proper analogy would be if Kennedy said ‘We’re going to go the moon and no one else is ever going to go. Ever.’”

Conley cited upskirt photos, child pornography, and even the Boston Marathon bomber criminal case as reasons to forbid encryption without a backdoor, though he didn’t provide support in his brief remarks.

Conley also said Apple and Google are "protecting those who rape, assault, and kill" with their encryption policies. Both companies encrypt their mobile operating systems by default.

Leiu took exception to those remarks and said he was offended by Conley's assertions. Conley then proposed that a backdoor be implemented on personal devices but corporate networks be allowed to keep strong encryption with no "golden keys."

The state of computer security is “an emerging national crisis,” Matthew Blaze, a professor of information science at the University of Pennsylvania, said. And strong encryption is one of the few solutions in existence.

The FBI’s ideas would “weaken our infrastructure,” Blaze insisted. “The ultimate beneficiaries are criminals and rival nation states.”

“The FBI's proposal to require encryption backdoors is a threat to fundamental human rights of privacy and free expression," Carey Shenkman, a human rights and technology lawyer, told the Daily Dot. “That is the reason why free speech and privacy organizations around the world, including [United Nations] experts, adamantly say 'no' to backdoors.”

“Back doors also are counterproductive—they undermine our safety, because they put holes in systems that any attacker or hacker can exploit,” Shenkman added. “And, they make our businesses less competitive because other markets will not trust U.S. digital exports.”
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/sec...ng-washington/





Irate Congressman Gives Cops Easy Rule: “Just Follow the Damn Constitution”

Rep. Ted Lieu lambasts gov't request for more access to encrypted devices.
Cyrus Farivar

Despite the best efforts of law enforcement to convince a Congressional subcommittee that technology firms actually need to weaken encryption in order to serve the public interest, lawmakers were not having it.

Daniel Conley, the district attorney in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, testified Wednesday before the committee that companies like Apple and Google were helping criminals by hardening encryption on their smartphones. He echoed previous statements by the recently-departed Attorney General, Eric Holder.

"In America, we often say that none of us is above the law," Conley wrote in his prepared testimony. "But when unaccountable corporate interests place crucial evidence beyond the legitimate reach of our courts, they are in fact placing those who rape, defraud, assault and even kill in a position of profound advantage over victims and society."

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), who described himself as a "recovering computer science major," provided one of the most forceful counter-arguments. (He is just one of four House members with computer science degrees.) Lieu also is a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force Reserves and served for four years as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

"It is clear to me that creating a pathway for decryption only for good guys is technologically stupid, you just can't do that," he said, underscoring that he found Conley’s remarks "offensive."

He argued:

Quote:
It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Why do you think Apple and Google are doing this? It's because the public is demanding it. People like me: privacy advocates. A public does not want a an out of surveillance state. It is the public that is asking for this. Apple and Google didn't do this because they thought they would make less money. This is a private sector response to government overreach.

Then you make another statement that somehow these companies are not credible because they collect private data. Here's the difference: Apple and Google don't have coercive power. District attorneys do, the FBI does, the NSA does, and to me it's very simple to draw a privacy balance when it comes to law enforcement and privacy: just follow the damn Constitution.

And because the NSA didn't do that and other law enforcement agencies didn't do that, you're seeing a vast public reaction to this. Because the NSA, your colleagues, have essentially violated the Fourth Amendment rights of every American citizen for years by seizing all of our phone records, by collecting our Internet traffic, that is now spilling over to other aspects of law enforcement. And if you want to get this fixed, I suggest you write to NSA: the FBI should tell the NSA, stop violating our rights. And then maybe you might have much more of the public on the side of supporting what law enforcement is asking for.

Then let me just conclude by saying I do agree with law enforcement that we live in a dangerous world. And that's why our founders put in the Constitution of the United States—that's why they put in the Fourth Amendment. Because they understand that an Orwellian overreaching federal government is one of the most dangerous things that this world can have. I yield back.
Fundamental misunderstanding

When Ars contacted Lieu after the Wednesday hearing he said that he was not surprised at the testimony of Conley and others in law enforcement.

"They have a job to do and it is in their interest to make access to data by law enforcement as easy as possible," he told Ars by e-mail.

"But I was surprised at their rhetoric stating that companies seeking to protect and encrypt Americans’ data from unconstitutional government intrusion are implicitly helping terrorists and criminals," he said. "That view reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Private-sector technology companies are responding to the American people’s demand that our current out-of-control surveillance state be brought under control."

When asked to elaborate on his "technologically stupid" comment regarding backdoors, Lieu wrote:

Backdoors create unnecessary vulnerability to otherwise secure systems that can be exploited by bad actors. Backdoors are also problematic because once one government asks for special treatment, then other governments with fewer civil liberties protections will start asking for special treatment. In addition, computer code is neutral and unthinking. It cannot tell if the person typing on a keyboard trying to access private data is the FBI Director, a hacker, or the leader of Hamas as long as that person has the cryptographic key or other unlocking code. The view that computer backdoors can only be used by "good guys" reflects a lack of understanding of basic computer technology.

But, when asked what steps Lieu takes in his personal or professional life to protect his digital security, he simply responded: "That’s private."

The entire hearing, which runs two hours and 15 minutes, is viewable below.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-constitution/





David Letterman Reflects on 33 Years in Late-Night Television
Dave Itzkoff

In a single bound, David Letterman seemed to leap the full length of the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, racing from backstage as if he’d been thrust forward by the fanfare played by his longtime bandleader, Paul Shaffer, and his CBS Orchestra, and by the rumble of his announcer, Alan Kalter, bellowing his name — “Daaaaay-vid Leh-terrrr-maaaaaaaan!”

It was a routine Mr. Letterman, 68, has performed countless times but will repeat no more after May 20, when he will preside over his last episode of “Late Show,” the CBS franchise he established and has hosted since 1993. Like the veteran slugger who comes to the ballpark for batting practice, he was here on this April afternoon partly to warm up his swing on a few easy pitches, but mostly to put on a show.

No home viewers were watching as he twirled his microphone around like a Wild West lasso, walked it across the floor like a dog and leaned on an expensive broadcast camera. This was a pretaping ritual Mr. Letterman was doing only for the few hundred audience members in the theater. Or maybe he was doing it only for himself.

“Everything O.K. at home?” he asked the crowd. “Everything O.K. at work?” Met with mostly cheers, he laughed and added: “You don’t find yourself filled with some kind of emotional longing? Are we emotionally stable?”

But how could these fans not be riddled with angst, knowing that in a few weeks, Mr. Letterman would bid a heartfelt good night to all of this, after a run of more than 33 years in late-night television — even longer than the three-decade tenure of his mentor, Johnny Carson. After that last show, he will head home to his wife, Regina, and 11-year-old son, Harry, and try to figure out what comes next.

Late-night television will feel the loss of Mr. Letterman, one of its most innovative and unpredictable broadcasters, who in 1982 took a sleepy NBC time slot following Carson’s “Tonight” show and transformed it into a ceaseless engine for Top 10 Lists, Stupid Pet Tricks and a decade’s worth of pioneering comedy bits.

With almost no blueprint to follow, Mr. Letterman showed that late-night TV could offer more than a what’s-in-the-news monologue and witty banter with celebrity guests (though he was capable of doing all that, as well). He made his show a home for misfits and oddballs, for Andy Kaufman’s slap fights and Larry (Bud) Melman’s shrill soliloquies, where champion bird callers or his own mother were deemed as important as Hollywood ingénues or rising rock bands.

Mr. Letterman proved he could reinvent himself, too: When he was passed over as Mr. Carson’s heir in favor of Jay Leno, he packed up for the uncharted territory of CBS and became a more inclusive — if still idiosyncratic — master of ceremonies.

But Mr. Letterman is leaving a late-night biosphere very different from the one he helped thrive. Hosts like Jimmy Fallon (who ultimately replaced Mr. Leno at “Tonight”) and Jimmy Kimmel (at ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live”) are dominating with their own ingenious energy, their Internet savvy and their visible youth, and Mr. Letterman is about to be replaced by Stephen Colbert, the politically astute smart aleck of “The Colbert Report.”

Not that any of these issues appeared to be on Mr. Letterman’s mind during his preshow set. Asked by an audience member from Newberg, Ore., if he had any advice for that city’s impending graduates, Mr. Letterman replied, “Treat a lady like a whore, and a whore like a lady.” After some laughter at this seemingly un-Letterman-like joke, the host chuckled to himself and said: “I don’t know why I would say something like that.”

“What do you care?” Mr. Shaffer said.

But no matter how hard he has tried to hide it over the years, Mr. Letterman does care. As he said, more sincerely, to the man who had asked for graduation advice, “If you do good things for people, it will never stop making you feel good about yourself.”

Upstairs in his “Late Show” offices a few hours later, a contemplative Mr. Letterman emerged, dressed in khakis and a T-shirt that said “Genetically Engineered Trout Is Safe!” to reflect on all that he has learned along the way. In these edited excerpts from that conversation, he offered his unguarded and unsparing assessments of his heroes, his colleagues, his would-be successors and himself.

Q. As your last show approaches, have there been times when you’ve thought: I’m leaving too soon?

A. Yeah, I’m awash in melancholia. Over the weekend, I was talking to my son, and I said, “Harry, we’ve done like over 6,000 shows.” And he said, [high-pitched child’s voice] “That’s creepy.” And I thought, well, in a way, he’s right. It is creepy. Every big change in my life was full of trepidation. When I left Indiana and moved to California. When Regina and I decided to have a baby — enormous anxiety and trepidation. Those are the two biggest things in my life, and they worked out beyond my wildest dreams. I’m pretending the same thing will happen now. I’ll miss it, desperately. One of two things: There will be reasonable, adult acceptance of transition. Or I will turn to a life of crime.

In the time since you made your announcement, the consensus is that you seem more relaxed and the show feels looser. Is that how you see it?

I couldn’t make that observation, but I certainly feel it. Because I think there’s a difference between regular-season hockey and playoff hockey. And I’m not in the playoffs. Yeah, I do notice a difference. When I was watching those interim shows they did on “The Late Late Show,” and I saw John Mayer hosting one night, I thought, “Ohhhh, now I see exactly what the problem is.” Because he’s young. He’s handsome. He’s trim. He’s witty. He was comfortable. So then I realized, I got nothing to worry about. I know I can’t do what Jimmy Fallon’s doing. I know I can’t do what Jimmy Kimmel is doing. There’s nothing left to be worried about. It’s all over, Dad, you’re going to be just fine. You’re going to a new place. They’ll be very nice to you, Dad. You’ll make a lot of friends.

The late-night TV landscape has changed so much in the time you’ve been on the air. Do you think you’ve left a lasting impact on it?

I see that things are certainly different. A lot of what we did was dictated by Carson. A guy named Dave Tebet, who worked for NBC and was like a talent liaison — in the same that way that Al Capone was a beverage distributor — he came to us and he said: “You can’t have a band. You can have a combo. You can’t do a monologue. You can’t do, like, Aunt Blabby. You can’t do Tea Time Movie Matinee.” There were so many restrictions. So that was the framework we were handed, which was fine, because then they gave us an excuse not to think of that thing to do.

You were innovating out of necessity?

I never knew if the stupider things we did or the more traditional things we did would work. I didn’t know if the stupid stuff would alienate people. I didn’t know if the traditional stuff would be more appealing. And then, when I look back on it now, of course the answer is, you want to do the weird thing.

Did the ascent of hosts like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel push you out of the job?

No, they didn’t push me out. I’m 68. If I was 38, I’d probably still be wanting to do the show. When Jay was on, I felt like Jay and I are contemporaries. Every time he would get a show at 11:30, he would succeed smartly. And so I thought, This is still viable — an older guy in a suit. And then he left, and I suddenly was surrounded by the Jimmys.

It seems like there’s an increasing emphasis, at least with your network competitors, to create comedy bits that will go viral on the Internet. Did you make a conscious choice to stay out of that arms race?

No, it just came and went without me. It sneaked up on me and went right by. People on the staff said, “You know what would be great is if you would join Twitter.” And I recognized the value of it. It’s just, I didn’t know what to say. You go back to your parents’ house, and they still have the rotary phone. It’s a little like that.

Did you have any involvement in choosing Stephen Colbert as your successor?

No. Not my show. When we sign off, we’re out of business with CBS. I always thought Jon Stewart would have been a good choice. And then Stephen. And then I thought, well, maybe this will be a good opportunity to put a black person on, and it would be a good opportunity to put a woman on. Because there are certainly a lot of very funny women that have television shows everywhere. So that would have made sense to me as well.

But you were not consulted?

[shakes head no] Mm-mmm.

Did that bother you?

Yeah, I guess so. Just as a courtesy, maybe somebody would say: “You know, we’re kicking around some names. Do you have any thoughts here?” But it doesn’t bother me now. At the time, I had made the decision [to leave] and I thought, O.K., this is what comes when you make this decision.

Their selection of Stephen Colbert came very quickly.

They didn’t have to put much thought to it, did they? I think it was the very next day. [laughs] But if you’re running the show with Jimmy Fallon, that’s a certain dynamic. Jimmy Kimmel, a completely different dynamic. And now Stephen Colbert will add a third, different dynamic to it. I think it will be very interesting to see what he will do.

Have you offered him any advice on how he should run his show?

No. We chatted when the announcement was made. And that was about it. I don’t think he needs — he’s not a kid. He’s not a beginner. He’s had pretty good success.

You’ve often talked about Johnny Carson as a mentor and a creative hero. Do you feel you’ve lived up to his standard?

Whenever I see clips from his old show, I’m reminded of what I always knew about him, which is that the highs and lows on that show are just about like that: [moves his hand in a straight line] There are funny moments, but he doesn’t lose control. If things aren’t going well, that’s fine, too. There’s a consistency about his presence that is very satisfying. I never felt that way. I always felt like [panting heavily] “We’ve got to do this, and we’ve got to do that.” Carson, whether he knew it or not, was doing exactly what TV is supposed to be. Just let it go. Because it’s 11:30, and people are just looking for a pleasant experience. And I wish I could do that.

You don’t think you can be that relaxed?

I think now, more than ever. But certainly not in the beginning. When we got a show on right after Carson, I’m thinking, Oh, God, I’m going to be compared to Carson back-to-back. And then when we went head-to-head with Jay, I never had the confidence. But now that the consequences have disappeared, yeah, what do I care? At some point, all of a sudden, people in show business that I never knew before would say to me on the show, “Oh, it’s such an honor to be here.” And I would think, What are you talking about? It’s just a goddamn TV show. And then I realized, this is what happens when you get to be older and you’ve been around for a while, people succumb to this artificial reverence. It was always kids that had only been in show business a couple of years. I just thought, Oh. I know. Your grandparents used to watch.

You don’t think their praise was sincere?

I’m sure it was sincere. But it was artificially generated. The same thing happened to me. I can remember sitting next to Johnny Carson for the first time, and I’m thinking, Holy God, this is like looking at Abraham Lincoln. You’ve seen him forever on the $5 bill. And now all of a sudden he’s here. And that was too much for me. I’m not saying it happened in like measurement, but I understand the dynamic.

When you moved to CBS, so much was made of your rivalry with Jay Leno. In retrospect, do you feel like this was overblown?

No, I don’t think so. It would have happened if I’d have gotten the “Tonight” show, and he would have come here. I think people are curious to see, well, what will happen? And we prevailed for a while, and then I lost my way a little bit. Quite a little bit. And at that point, there was not much I could do about it. People just liked watching his show more than they liked watching my show.

You feel that something, philosophically, at your show, caused this viewership shift?

Yeah. And it’s just my judgment. Before, I felt pretty confident in what we were up to, because there was no competition to speak of, whatsoever. In the beginning [at CBS], we came out of the chute, going a million miles an hour. And then when that was all done, we just sort of said, “Really, can we go a million miles an hour again?” And we tried, and we couldn’t. I think we had gone way down the road, maybe way down the wrong road.

How did you get back on the right track?

I don’t know that we ever did get back the right way. It didn’t start to settle down until it couldn’t be more clear that Jay was the more popular show. And when we all realized that there’s not much we can do here — you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube — then we started going our own way again. I think it was just inevitability. The guy in the race who spends more time looking over his shoulder, well, that’s the mistake. For two years, I made that mistake. We ran out of steam.

But you came in and continued to do the job.

Well, that was the other thing. I was always surprised that they didn’t let me go. Wait a minute — wouldn’t you like me to go home now? Well, no. Next thing you know, I’ve been here 23 years.

Were there times in your CBS tenure when you thought you might not have control over when you’d leave?

It’s a blur to me now, but when we came over from NBC, it was Howard Stringer running the show. He brought us here, and paid a lot of money to remodel this theater and really made the commitment. And then when he left, that commitment, I was worried about that leaving, too. Those were the days when CBS was really doing poorly. They lost [N.F.L.] football. And I just thought to myself, this can’t be good for us. Then [Les] Moonves came in and turned the place into Disney World.

When you had your heart surgery in 2000, did you fear you might never come back to the show?

I was concerned that I’ll never be able to run again — that was my big concern. Because I had so relied on running, all my life, to get myself clearheaded. And of course, I was worried that somebody would go on while I was off with my heart surgery, and be good enough that they didn’t want me back. As I’m trying to recover from quintuple bypass surgery, I’m paranoid that my life is ending. And then, six weeks after the surgery, I ran for five miles. So let’s face it, I am a hero. There’s no two ways of looking at it.

What about in 2009, when you revealed that you were the target of an extortion attempt stemming from your sexual relationships with female staffers?

Oh, yes. My sex scandal. That’s right.

Did you think that was going to be the end of your career?

Looking at it now, yes, I think they would have had good reason to fire me. But at the time, I was largely ignorant as to what, really, I had done. It just seemed like, O.K., well, here’s somebody who had an intimate relationship with somebody he shouldn’t have had an intimate relationship with. And I always said, “Well, who hasn’t?” to myself. But then, when I was able to see from the epicenter, the ripples, I thought, yeah, they could have fired me. But they didn’t. So I owe them that.

Did you think people were surprised to hear you talk about these matters so candidly?

I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t think of a really good lie.

How do you feel about your reputation that you simply aren’t a warm person?

I understand that. I think it’s genetic. I don’t want to blame it on my parents and my grandparents. But you don’t need to be all that warm when you’re born and raised in Linton, Ind., and working in a coal mine. They weren’t hiring coal miners on the basis of their personalities. Inside, I feel like everything’s firing properly. And then when I look at a videotape, I just think, What the hell is Dave [angry] about? When in fact I’m not [angry]. We used to do that with my mom. We’d say, “Mom, are you all right?” Because she’d sit there looking dour. And she’d say [shouting], “I’m fine!” It’s the Golden Rule. I try to be nice to people who are nice to me. I like doing nice things for people. It makes me feel good. But I think it’s legitimate.

It’s a fair assessment?

Let’s blame Jack Paar. Years and years and years ago, before the late-night shows, he said to me [whispery Jack Paar voice]: “You know what, pal? It’s O.K. to let people know you’re upset about things.” And so I thought, well, maybe there’s some wisdom to that. I might have used that to my own disadvantage, sometimes.

Has doing the show taught you how much of yourself to give to an audience?

Absolutely right. In the beginning, you think, I can’t wait to get on television. I’m going to straighten it out. Then people will be saying, “God bless you, Dave Letterman, we have been waiting for somebody to take care of television.” That’s how you feel. And now, I don’t feel that way.

Have you decided what you’ll do in your very last show?

I have decided what I will do, yes. And I know of other things that are being worked on. My only concern is mine. What will I do? And I now know exactly what I will do.

Will you be taking your cues from Johnny Carson’s final “Tonight” show?

That was fantastic. I can remember when he signed off that night, it just left you [with] a nagging sense of loss. This doesn’t apply here. I want it to be a little more cheery. And I want it to be upbeat, and I want it to be funny, and I want people to be happy that they spent the time to watch it. Of course, Johnny’s last show was historic. This one won’t be. [laughs] This one, people will say: “Ah, there you go. When’s the new guy starting?”

Even though you won’t be on CBS at 11:35 p.m. anymore, do you think you might come back in another form fairly quickly?

It just depends on the number of bridges I’ve burned. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but Jane Pauley is now on the CBS “Sunday Morning” show. Perfect fit. So I thought, by God, good for Jane. That’s a lovely thing for her to have now. So maybe one day, something of that level will happen to me.

The last “Late Show” airs on a Wednesday. What will you do Thursday morning?

I will be completely in the hands of my family. I will be going, later in the month, to the Indianapolis 500. And then beyond that, for the first time since Harry’s been alive, our summer schedule will not be dictated by me. It will be entirely dictated by what my son wants to do. And I think that’s pretty good. After you take a good, solid punch to the head, you’re just a little wobbly. I think in that state it would be good to have others making my decisions. That’s how he’s describing his retirement. A good solid punch to the head.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/ar...elevision.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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