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Old 10-06-15, 07:34 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 13th, '15

Since 2002


































"It’s judges like these that will be taken out back and shot." – Alan


"That's the first stages, I believe, of a gateway into the dark side." – Andy Archibald


"The high level of public support for internet openness hasn’t dissuaded hardcore anti-net neutrality GOP lawmakers—many of whom have received mountains of cash from the broadband industry—from repeatedly seeking to torpedo the new rules." – Sam Gustin






































June 13th, 2015




Filesharing “a Gateway into the Dark Side” Says UK Police Chief

And claiming "piracy is theft" is a gateway to even more absurd statements.
Glyn Moody

Unauthorised filesharing can be a "gateway" to online crime, according to Andy Archibald, deputy director of the National Cyber Crime Unit at the National Crime Agency. Speaking at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, Archibald said: "If you think about the illegal downloading of music, of videos and DVDs, I think that practice is more common than we might imagine within the youth of today," the Press Association reports. "That's criminality. It's almost become acceptable. That's the first stages, I believe, of a gateway into the dark side."

Although Archibald is quite right that unauthorised downloads are commonplace among young people, as a police officer he must surely know that this is not "criminality": it is an infringement of an intellectual monopoly. According to the UK government's Web page on copyright infringement, only "deliberate infringement of copyright on a commercial scale may be a criminal offence," but in general it is a civil matter.

A widespread recognition of the dishonesty of trying to to re-frame unauthorised downloads as "theft" has led to a general disregard for the law, particularly among young people, and is one reason why illegal downloads have become "acceptable," as Archibald says. The common view that such filesharing is not harmful to creators is backed up by a growing body of research, which finds that the unauthorised downloads generally boost legal sales.

That's not really so paradoxical. Filesharing is a form of free marketing: the more people share, the greater the awareness of the work, and the greater likelihood that more people will buy a copy. Forward-thinking companies recognise this too: as Ars reported last week, Netflix's CEO said quite openly that Spain's rampant piracy makes it easier for his company to introduce a legal service by preparing the ground and creating demand Netflix can fill with superior and more convenient offerings.

It's not so surprising that a force called the "National Cyber Crime Unit," which sounds like something out of the 1990s, is stuck in the past, and continuing a long and dishonourable tradition of "cyber"-scaremongering. Perhaps Andy Archibald thinks he is still surfing the Information Superhighway.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...-police-chief/





2 States Look for Collusion Between Apple Music and Major Labels
Brian X. Chen and Ben Sisario

While Apple was preparing a splashy introduction for a new service that would stream music over the Internet for a fee, the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut were quietly investigating the Silicon Valley giant’s negotiations with music companies in search of potential antitrust violations.

The attorneys general wanted to know whether Apple pressured the music labels — or whether the labels conspired with Apple and one another — to withdraw support for popular “freemium” services offered by companies like Spotify in favor of Apple’s paid music subscriptions.

A freemium service typically starts free and is supported financially by advertising. Companies with freemium business models hope a free service is compelling enough to persuade consumers to pay for a more sophisticated offering — one typically free of ads.

Universal Music Group on Tuesday confirmed it was cooperating with the industrywide investigation, a continuing effort led by the attorney general of New York, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the attorney general of Connecticut, George Jepsen.

The first written response to the antitrust inquiry came from Universal Music Group a day earlier when the company’s legal firm, Hunton & Williams, sent a letter to the attorneys general. The letter said Universal Music Group has no agreements with Apple or music entities like Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group that would impede the availability of free or ad-supported services.

The music company added that it “shares the attorneys general’s commitment to a robust and competitive market for music streaming services in the mutual best interest of consumers, artists, services and content companies alike — and we have a long track record to that effect.”

A spokesman for Mr. Schneiderman said the attorney general was looking into Apple’s negotiations with music labels to preserve the benefits consumers have enjoyed from these new streaming services.

“It’s important to ensure that the market continues to develop free from collusion and other anticompetitive practices,” said the spokesman, Matt Mittenthal.

Mr. Jepsen, the attorney general of Connecticut, said in a statement that his office was satisfied with Universal’s response, before adding, “We will continue to monitor that market to ensure that consumers and competition are protected.”

The European Commission is also looking into Apple’s negotiations with the music labels.

This is the second time both Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Jepsen have pursued Apple on antitrust grounds.

In 2013, a federal judge said Apple violated antitrust law by colluding with book publishers to raise e-book prices above Amazon’s standard $9.99 pricing for digital books, after the publishers settled.

The attorneys general, who were both involved in the e-books price-fixing investigation, appear to be pre-emptively looking into the terms of Apple’s new music service for any signs of industry collusion before Apple Music is available to consumers at the end of this month.

Unlike Spotify and other streaming music services, Apple does not offer a free version of Apple Music. But the company offers a three-month free trial period and says it will let artists and record companies make various kinds of content, including songs and videos, available for free on Connect, a promotional section of its service.

The so-called freemium model used by services like Spotify has been at issue over the last year.

Last fall, the singer Taylor Swift removed her music from Spotify in a dispute over its free version, In recent months top executives at the major record labels have been sharply critical of free services, arguing that they do not generate enough money and they give consumers no incentive to pay for music.

Yet Spotify, which started in 2008, has been by far the fastest-growing subscription music service, with 60 million users, 15 million of whom pay. Last year, the company had $1.3 billion in revenue, and 91 percent of that money came from subscriptions. However, Spotify, which is privately held, also reported a net loss of $197 million.

But some artists and executives at independent labels have defended the freemium model.

Last month, Stephen Cooper, the chief executive of the Warner Music Group, the smallest of the three majors, warned that “before people conclude that freemium should be burnt at the stake, we should think very carefully about the consequences.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/te...or-labels.html





Apple Music and the Terrible Return of DRM

Give me convenience or give me death
Nilay Patel

My Amazon Echo just arrived, months after I pre-ordered it. I'd totally forgotten about it until I got a ship notification the other day, and then it was there, a strange little tube promising yet another peek at a future that never seems fully within grasp.

After two days with it, it's mostly useful as a sort of permanent Siri: we've set kitchen timers with it, asked it for the weather, and otherwise generally ignored it. It seemed destined to be yet another foolish gadget buy, until I randomly asked it to play some music for me.

And then it was magic. All of the stress and panic I feel when I have to pull out a smartphone and open an app and pick a playlist and select my AirPlay or Bluetooth speakers and wait for it all to work is gone. I just ask for music, and it's there. Great.

But it's also super depressing, because it's just another example of how the rise of streaming media has brought crazy digital rights management back into our lives. We've completely traded convenience for ecosystem lock-in, and it sucks.

"We've completely traded convenience for ecosystem lock-in, and it sucks"

Right now, the Echo can play music from Amazon's Prime Music service, Pandora, and whatever random music I've uploaded to my Amazon cloud locker. This means that the music selection is pretty bad! I stopped buying music around the time I started using Spotify, so I don't have much new stuff to upload, and Prime Music has a fairly thin catalog compared to Spotify. Basically this thing can play my 2000s-era iTunes collection at me, which means I'm listening Wilco and The Clash way more than I have in the past few years. Is that good? It might be good.

But next week Apple is probably going to launch another streaming service, and if history is any guide, it's only going to work with Apple products. That means I'll have yet a fourth music service in my life (Spotify, Google Play Music, Prime, and Apple Music) and a fourth set of content exclusives and pricing windows to think about instead of just listening to music.

In 2007, Steve Jobs wrote a fiery essay on Apple.com called "Thoughts on Music." The essay is now gone from Apple's site, but it remains as powerful as ever, a straightforward examination of the state of digital music and the pros and cons of applying digital rights management to purchased music files — there were no streaming services back then. The labels had forced Apple to use DRM in the early days of iTunes, and Jobs clearly recognized that although Apple and the iPod had emerged as the early winners in digital music, the effort required to maintain DRM over time (or license Apple's DRM to other companies) would be better spent making new products and services.

"If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music," wrote Jobs. "If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies."

But it's no longer the labels pushing DRM on the music services; it's the services themselves, because locking you into a single ecosystem guarantees you'll keep paying their monthly subscription fees and hopefully buy into the rest of their ecosystem. Google Play Music is an objectively better experience on an Android phone than an iPhone, because it can download files in the background and purchase music not available for streaming. Apple Music might be available on Android, but it probably won't be as good, because Apple wants you to buy an iPhone. Playing Spotify through Bluetooth or AirPlay on iOS requires a trip through a totally superfluous screen promoting Spotify Connect. YouTube is the best way to find and share a single song on a desktop computer, but it remains a strange little island, disconnected from almost every other service. I used to love playing MP3s on my Xbox 360 while gaming, but there's no Spotify app on the Xbox One, so those days are over.

"There's not even a single standard playlist format to make switching services easier"

There's not even a single standard playlist format to make switching services easier, like the old .m3u playlist files my friends and I used to swap back and forth between iTunes and WinAmp and whatever else. There's just lock-in, endless lock-in.

Is this what we wanted? Am I really despairing for the days when I maintained a huge collection of legal and not-so-legal MP3 files that could play on any device I owned without any hassle? I don't know.

All I know is that I'm listening to a lot of Wilco on my Amazon Echo.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/5/87...-return-of-drm





Tim Cook's Attacks on Google and Facebook Reveal a Giant Problem for Apple's Future
Jay Yarow

Apple CEO Tim Cook has yet again unloaded on Silicon Valley technology companies that collect data about users.

"Our privacy is being attacked on multiple fronts," Tim Cook said earlier this week. "I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be."

While he didn't name names, the clear implication was that he was talking about Facebook and Google.

Ben Thompson, an independent writer/analyst, thinks Cook is being disingenuous at best, and at worst setting up Apple for trouble in the long run.

Basically, the future of tech will rely on collecting data, and if Apple doesn't plan to do that, it's going to have a hard time competing with Google.

"It’s simply not true to say that Google or Facebook are selling off your data: what they are doing is promising advertisers they will display their ads to a particular type of customer as defined by the advertiser using Google or Facebook’s provided parameters," Thompson wrote in his newsletter. "This may sound like semantics but the difference is significant: Google and Facebook do know a lot about individuals, but advertisers don’t know anything — that’s why Google and Facebook can charge a premium!

In Thompson's opinion, saying Google just collects your data is the same as saying Apple just makes overpriced gadgets. It's an unfair oversimplification.

If this was simply Cook trying to market Apple as a privacy-centric alternative to Google, that would be one thing. Google owns Android, which is the biggest threat to the iPhone, so it makes some sense to try to bash the Google business model.

However, there are two flaws in this.

First, people have demonstrated they don't mind trading off a little data for a fantastic, free service like Facebook or Google. Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly users. Google has over a billion people using Gmail, and over a billion people using Android. These people aren't dupes. They rightfully trust Google and Facebook to handle their data. If Google and Facebook screw up treatment of people's data it is easy to move to another internet service.

Second, and more important, there's a much bigger problem for Apple if it really wants to avoid collecting data on its users. The future of computing will rely on careful collection of data from users.

Here's a slightly longer excerpt from Thompson, but it's important to include the whole thing to understand what he's saying.

He first cites a blog post from Apple writer John Gruber, who said Apple shouldn't be marketing with privacy first, but with quality first when it comes to competing with Google on internet services like Google Photos:

John Gruber admitted that privacy alone isn’t a selling point:

Apple needs to provide best-of-breed services and privacy, not second-best-but-more-private services. Many people will and do choose convenience and reliability over privacy. Apple’s superior position on privacy needs to be the icing on the cake, not their primary selling point.

It’s a nice sentiment, but in truth the private handling of data is at odds with the level of machine-learning required to deliver superior services. It’s exceptionally difficult to see how Apple prioritizes both sides of an either-or choice.

If your response is that Apple will anonymized the data, well so do Google and Facebook (and, as I noted above, whatever is not anonymized is never exposed to 3rd-parties, and not for reasons of principle but for reasons of business model). Therefore to be different Apple needs to collect less data. But to collect less data is to, in the long run, deliver a worse product — and that would be antithetical to Apple’s mission.

What he's saying here is that Google and Facebook's ability to collect data then process it allows those companies to offer services that are superior to Apple.

If Apple says it won't collect data then it is limiting what the company can do. We'll see this manifest itself next week at Apple's developer conference, WWDC.

Apple is expected to announce a new feature that it's calling "proactive" internally, according to Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac.

On Thursday, Gurman was on a podcast I do with Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times. We talked about WWDC. The episode will be up around noon on Friday.

He said the new feature would show you custom points of interest based on your location. You will be able to get a new panel that looks like Google Now. You'll have calendar events and alerts to remind you of things. It will show suggestions for where to go for lunch based on the best restaurant reviews.

However, this product will be "very limited," says Gurman. "They wanted to go much bigger; they wanted to create an API, but they're keeping this in house. They're afraid Siri will send the wrong data to the wrong app, so they are killing the Siri API. They're making it smaller. They're dumbing it down with a huge focus on privacy."

If Apple was okay with collecting more data, services like Siri would be better for users. Services like Apple Maps would be better. And so on down the line.

For now, Apple is doing well. But in the long run, this could be a problem. As Thompson says, "to collect less data is to, in the long run, deliver a worse product — and that would be antithetical to Apple’s mission."
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple...em-2015-6?op=1





Team Prenda Gets Hit Hard With Contempt Sanctions For Lying To Court
Mike Masnick

It looks like Team Prenda has been smacked around once again. This is in the Lightspeed case -- which is one of the rare earlier cases where they were actually representing a real third party, rather than a made up entity that they really owned themselves. This was the case where they tried to drag Comcast and AT&T into the lawsuit and it all failed terribly. If you don't recall, in late 2013, the district court smacked them around as judge Patrick Murphy clearly figured out what was going on: "The litigation smacked of bullying pretense." Yup, you got that right. The defendant, Anthony Sweet, represented by Prenda killers Booth Sweet, asked for attorneys' fees and got them at the end of 2013, with the court ordering Team Prenda to pay up $261k, saying that Team Prenda "flat-out lied" to the court.

In response, Team Prenda pleaded poverty, saying they couldn't pay up, but the court found them in contempt, arguing that even the financial statements they had filed with the court appeared to be submitted with the intent to deceive the court. Following that, Booth Sweet issued subpoenas trying to reveal more information on how Team Prenda had been hiding their money, leading Prenda mastermind John Steele to tell various banks that the subpoenas had been quashed when they had not been. That, as you may imagine, is not a good idea.

So it was somewhat surprising, last November, when the court failed to add more sanctions, saying that while it didn't trust Team Prenda, Booth Sweet hadn't presented enough evidence to make its case, despite all of the issues uncovered previously. However, late last week, the court changed its mind. After seeing more evidence, it believes that Team Prenda, once again, lied to the court and obstructed the discovery process. Steele and Paul Hansmeier tried to defend themselves, but the court doesn't buy it. Paul Duffy didn't even bother to respond to the court, so it assumes that he was "intentionally obstructive."

First up, we have the bogus claims by Steele that the subpoenas about his financial info had been quashed:

This new information demonstrates that, on January 29, 2014, Steele informed JP Morgan he intended to file a motion to quash subpoenas issued by Smith requesting Lightspeed’s counsel’s financial records. The following day, Steele sent a copy of said motion to JP Morgan without a file stamp. Several days later, JP Morgan requested a file stamped copy from Duffy. Duffy finally supplied a file stamped copy of the motion to quash on March 3, 2014 - two weeks after the Court had denied the motion and allowed discovery to proceed. Without any defense from Duffy, the Court takes his actions as intentionally obstructive, as he had reason to know the motion to quash had been denied at the time he relayed it to the bank.

Smith also points to communications in the record between Steele and Sabadell United Bank on April 16, 2014..., in which Steele said the subpoena matter was stayed on April 4, 2014. Just five days before, Steele acknowledged that the Court’s stay order did not pertain to the subpoenas, but rather a joint motion for contempt that had been filed by Smith weeks earlier. Steele agreed to resolve any misunderstandings about the subpoenas being withdrawn, but he clearly did not do so based on his April 16th email to Sabadell Bank. Despite Steele’s explicit knowledge that discovery of his financial records had not been stayed, he proceeded to inform the bank that a stay was in place. This demonstrates his knowing interference in Smith’s discovery efforts.

Based on the above, the Court finds that Duffy and Steele both engaged in unreasonable, willful obstruction of discovery in bad faith. As such, discovery sanctions are warranted as to Duffy and Steele.


Next up, a discussion of how Steele and Hansmeier insisted they had no assets at all and couldn't pay the sanctions... while at the same time Steele was doing tons of renovations on his home and claiming (in his divorce proceedings...) that he had assets of over $1 million.

Smith also provides the Court with newly discovered financial evidence to support his assertion that, despite their pleas of insolvency, Steele and Hansmeier had sufficient assets to satisfy the Fee Order. On January 29, 2014 Steele and Hansmeier both signed and filed memoranda claiming the Court’s sanction posed a “crippling financial liability” on them.... Similarly, at a hearing on February 13, 2014, they asked the Court for leave to show inability to pay....

With regard to Steele, new evidence reveals that, in the two months before he filed his memorandum on January 29, 2014, he deposited over $300,000 into a new bank account with Sabadell Bank.... Moreover, within a month of asking the Court for leave to show his insolvency, Steele wrote checks totaling nearly $200,000, some of which were written to himself, for expenses related to home renovations. Between April and September of that year, Steele had deposits in that account totaling over $100,000. Steele briefly held a second account with Sabadell between September and October, into which he deposited $50,000, most of which he paid out to himself. Smith additionally points out that the value of Steele’s home more than doubled from April 2013 (when he purchased it) to October 2014 (when it was on the market). Further, on November 12, 2014, Steele still pled insolvency. Yet, just one month later, he represented in his divorce proceeding that his assets approached $1.3 million


Then there's Hansmeyer. It appears that Booth Sweet figured out the shell company where he's been hiding his money as well:

As to Hansmeier, Smith presents evidence that, in the years leading up to the judgment against him, Hansmeier had transferred nearly half a million dollars to a company called Monyet LLC..., of which Hansmeier was the sole member, manager, and signatory for its accounts .... In a debtor’s exam of a related proceeding in June 2014, Hansmeier admitted that Monyet, LLC was set up as a trust for his son for purposes of estate planning .... However, documents from Scotttrade, Inc. reveal that Monyet, LLC was not solely associated with estate planning, as the bulk of its assets went towards expenses such as payment of appellate bonds and attorney’s fees, investments in Liverwire Holdings, LLC, and loans to his Class Justice LLC law firm .... Said expenditures occurred throughout the 2013 year and up to May 2014, demonstrating that Hansmeier had access to the Monyet funds both before and after he pled insolvency to the court.

In light of the above facts, the Court finds Steele and Hansmeier in contempt. The Court finds that the newly discovered evidence directly contradicts their claims of insolvency.


Yup. At the same time that Hansmeier was pleading insolvency to the court, he was using his own shell company to give himself money to set up his big ADA trolling operation, financed with the funds he was hiding from his copyright trolling operation.

Given all of this flat out deceit, it's actually a bit anti-climactic that the court then orders sanctions of just $65,263 against Steele and Hansmeier for contempt of court over the lies. As for the obstruction of discovery, the court orders Duffy and Steele to pay Booth Sweet's costs, which the lawyers are told to submit. Some people (including us...) are still reasonably wondering why none of this pattern of deceit, lying and abusing the court system still have not resulted in anything more serious. However, these court records are likely to be useful for those facing either Steele or Hansmeier in their new careers as ADA trolls...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...to-court.shtml





Library of Congress Chief Leaving After Nearly 3 Decades
Michael D. Shear

James Hadley Billington, a leading Russia scholar in 1987 when President Reagan nominated him to be the 13th Librarian of Congress, will step down from his post on Jan. 1 after nearly three decades leading the world’s largest library, officials announced on Wednesday.

In a statement, Mr. Billington said he had informed President Obama and members of Congress of his intentions to leave an institution that is one of the central repositories of American cultural history.

“Over the years I have been asked if I have been thinking about retiring; and the answer has always been ‘not really,’ because this library has always been not just my job, but my life,” Mr. Billington said in the statement. “However, I have never had more faith in the leadership and staff of the Library of Congress.”

The move comes after Mr. Billington, who turned 86 on June 1, presided over a series of management and technology failures at the library that were documented in more than a dozen reports by government watchdog agencies.

In a 2013 audit, the library’s inspector general warned that millions of items, some from as far back as the 1980s, remained piled up in overflowing buildings and warehouses, virtually lost to the world. In addition, just a fraction of its 24 million books are available to read online, 200 years after Thomas Jefferson laid the foundation for a vast national library by selling Congress his personal collection of books after the War of 1812.

The latest government investigation, delivered in March, accused the library of “widespread weaknesses” in managing its technology resources and cited a “lack of strong, consistent leadership” in that area. That report, and other recent complaints about Mr. Billington’s leadership, had recently caught the attention of the library’s congressional patrons.

“I am aware of the concerns that have been raised,” Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said in a statement before Mr. Billington’s retirement was announced. “We will be looking into this and other aspects of the library operations in the coming months.”

In addition, there has been mounting criticism from former staff members and other libraries that the Library of Congress, which has long occupied a singular place as the premier institution responsible for collecting and cataloging the world’s intellectual and cultural knowledge, is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the digital age.

“All librarians sense is a vacuum, a lack of leadership that concerns the whole world of learning,” Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and a former colleague of Mr. Billington’s when they taught at Princeton.

Before Wednesday’s announcement, Mr. Darnton said: “I think that James Billington should resign. We should have a new librarian of Congress.”

In interviews, current and former library employees and others who have worked with Mr. Billington over the decades say they no longer recognize the charismatic, energetic librarian they once knew. They say he has slowed down so much that he rarely comes in before noon or works a full week in his majestic, sixth-floor office overlooking Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court. Co-workers said that he does not use email and that they often communicate with him through a fax machine at his house.

But Mr. Billington’s supporters say he has continued to carry out the library’s missions with vigor. David McCullough, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime friend, called Mr. Billington a “man of infinite interests and extraordinary ideas.”

In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Billington said that he had no intention of retiring, and that the criticism of him has come from rivals and disgruntled former employees.“Let me emphatically say that I am still involved in every major decision at the library,” Mr. Billington said. “I don’t know where you are getting this kind of gossip.”

In a statement announcing his departure, the library noted that Mr. Billington had created two online portals for the library, including the World Digital Library, with about 11,000 items. The statement noted that collections grew from 85.5 million items in 1987 to more than 160 million items today.

The statement said Mr. Billington is “recognized for having brought the world’s largest library into the digital age.”

But Mr. Darnton and other university librarians insist that Mr. Billington is stuck in a past era and has resisted their entreaties to cooperate on a large-scale digitization of the library’s 160-million item collection. They say the vast majority of the library’s archives remain largely closed off from digital information seekers, stored on physical shelves the way they have been for decades.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/us...3-decades.html





Elected Autocrats Help the Media Learn its Place
John Lloyd

The ruler of Turkey the past dozen years suffered a setback this week when his party lost its absolute majority in parliament.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, until last year prime minister, now president, has been the most consequential Turkish political figure since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk forged a republic out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and 1930s. Through one victory after another, he got used to winning.

Whereas Ataturk laid down a strict secular regime — most religious symbols were banned from public view — Erdogan, whose AK Party expresses Muslim values, relaxed the rules. He won, and kept, the support of the Muslim masses. Moving deliberately, avoiding a direct confrontation with the once-interventionist generals and the secular establishment, he had by the end of the 2000s established political hegemony.

That was cut back in the past week’s parliamentary elections. The vote for the AK Party dropped below 50 percent. The right-wing Nationalist Movement Party gained and is the most likely coalition partner for the AK Party. The big surprise was the surge of the People’s Democratic Party, a liberal, leftish group with roots in the large Kurdish minority. As president, Erdogan has more limited powers than he did as prime minister. His plans to change that went out the window with his party’s losses. But in preparation for his transition to the new thousand-room presidential palace, he weakened the prime ministerial powers and counts on the loyalty of the party he created.

In his 12 years in power, Turkey, with a population of nearly 80 million, has prospered, and its weight in the world has increased. Erdogan reached out to the Kurds, gave the majority greater religious freedom and poured money into health, housing and welfare, which benefitted the poor. But in one thing, Erdogan both led and followed a trend, common among countries where democracy is either recent, or shaky, or both. He saw the news media as enemies, attacked them and confined them in a smaller space than they had occupied in his early, more liberal years.

He led the trend because his contempt and dislike was so evident and proactive. In his past few years as prime minister, he found newspapers and the news channels intolerable, as they probed corruption allegations against his colleagues and his family, broadcast widespread protests and criticized his policies.

Many journalists were jailed on a variety of charges. In 2013, 49 were in jail, more than in any other country. But he then found a better way. Big corporations with diverse interests either owned, or were pressured into buying, media properties – and were left in no doubt that if their media operations didn’t support the government, there would be no state contracts.

Leaked transcripts of phone conversations between Erdogan and the corporate bosses and media executives make grim reading, as the latter reveal their craven obedience to his angry demands that protests be ignored and opposition leaders kept off the screens.

One phrase he used time and again: “know your place,” directed at both the Turkish media but more commonly at foreign reporters working for the Economist, the Guardian, the New York Times and others. For him, the possession of a political mandate was everything; the “place” of the news media was far below that of political power. He believes that media should be largely confined to supporting the government because, after all, the people had.

That stance is increasingly common, and in that sense Erdogan is a follower as well as a pioneer. It informs the attitude of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has also pressured media proprietors to curb a journalism already hemmed in by tougher press laws. He has “a winner take all approach to governing,” with his confidence resting on a two-thirds majority in parliament.

It’s the natural response of South African President Jacob Zuma, who excoriates the press for reporting on the country’s many murders and rapes, and who has said in several speeches that the only motive the press has for its existence is to make money. In a speech to journalism students, he said that though journalists pretend to work in the public interest, “they were never elected.”

His view is shared by Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez, who has pointedly asked if freedom of speech “belongs to corporations or to ordinary citizens.” It’s a good question in itself, but one designed, in this context, not to empower public speech but to silence that of her critics, especially those employed by the Clarin media group.

The past master at this — and a friend of Erdogan’s — is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has confined the opposition media to a few radio and TV channels — small and poor — and a handful of publications. For him, as for Zuma and Fernandez, the media are just a business, and thus have little democratic standing, certainly nothing to rival presidents and governments with the strong backing of the public, as Putin has.

We may be seeing another powerful leader limbering up to dismiss the news media in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After a year in office, he has yet to hold a press conference. He detests the news media because journalists, especially from English-language TV channels, insist on asking questions about the 2002 riots and massacres in Gujarat when he was a newly elected chief minister there. He was held by many to be complicit or negligent, though the supreme court cleared him of these allegations. Modi, however, is a compelling speaker, and an aficionado of social media.

Like many other leaders, including President Barack Obama and China’s Xi Jinping, he has his own channels of influence and disdains journalism. More than that, corporations that need state patronage, as in Turkey, increasingly enfold the media into their embrace, not for profit, for there are more often losses, but for leverage over government.

Turkey leads and follows the trend: a disturbing one for journalism. The combination of media corporations that need governments, and governments that no longer need the mainstream media, render the central, self-defined task of journalism — holding power to account — archaic. If journalism is to retain, or recover, something of that mission, it must again make the case for its democratic necessity, for its responsibility as a necessary civic bulwark against authoritarianism and corruption.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...arn-its-place/





The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling
Natasha Lomas

A new report into U.S. consumers’ attitude to the collection of personal data has highlighted the disconnect between commercial claims that web users are happy to trade privacy in exchange for ‘benefits’ like discounts. On the contrary, it asserts that a large majority of web users are not at all happy, but rather feel powerless to stop their data being harvested and used by marketers.

The report authors’ argue it’s this sense of resignation that is resulting in data tradeoffs taking place — rather than consumers performing careful cost-benefit analysis to weigh up the pros and cons of giving up their data (as marketers try to claim). They also found that where consumers were most informed about marketing practices they were also more likely to be resigned to not being able to do anything to prevent their data being harvested.

“Rather than feeling able to make choices, Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened,” the authors write.

“By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable. Moreover, the futility we found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties not just for individuals but also — over time — for the institution of consumer commerce.”

“It is not difficult to predict widespread social tensions, and concerns about democratic access to the marketplace, if Americans continue to be resigned to a lack of control over how, when, and what marketers learn about them,” they add.

The report, entitled The Tradeoff Fallacy: How marketers are misrepresenting American consumers and opening them up to exploitation, is authored by three academics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is based on a representative national cell phone and wireline phone survey of more than 1,500 Americans age 18 and older who use the internet or email “at least occasionally”.

Key findings on American consumers include that —

• 91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that “If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing”
• 71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that “It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.”
• 55% disagree (38% of them strongly) that “It’s okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me.”

The authors go on to note that “only about 4% agree or agree strongly” with all three of the above propositions. And even with a broader definition of “a belief in tradeoffs” they found just a fifth (21%) were comfortably accepting of the idea. So the survey found very much a minority of consumers are happy with current data tradeoffs.

The report also flags up that large numbers (often a majority) of U.S. consumers are unaware of how their purchase and usage data can be sold on or shared with third parties without their permission or knowledge — in many instances falsely believing they have greater data protection rights than they are in fact afforded by law.

Examples the report notes include —

• 49% of American adults who use the Internet believe (incorrectly) that by law a supermarket must obtain a person’s permission before selling information about that person’s food purchases to other companies.
• 69% do not know that a pharmacy does not legally need a person’s permission to sell information about the over-the-counter drugs that person buys.
• 65% do not know that the statement “When a website has a privacy policy, it means the site will not share my information with other websites and companies without my permission” is false.
• 55% do not know it is legal for an online store to charge different people different prices at the same time of day.
• 62% do not know that price-comparison sites like Expedia or Orbitz are not legally required to include the lowest travel prices.

Data-mining in the spotlight

One thing is clear: the great lie about online privacy is unraveling. The obfuscated commercial collection of vast amounts of personal data in exchange for ‘free’ services is gradually being revealed for what it is: a heist of unprecedented scale. Behind the bland, intellectually dishonest facade that claims there’s ‘nothing to see here’ gigantic data-mining apparatus have been manoeuvered into place, atop vast mountains of stolen personal data.

Stolen because it has never been made clear to consumers what is being taken, and how that information is being used. How can you consent to something you don’t know or understand? Informed consent requires transparency and an ability to control what happens. Both of which are systematically undermined by companies whose business models require that vast amounts of personal data be shoveled ceaselessly into their engines.

This is why regulators are increasingly focusing attention on the likes of Google and Facebook. And why companies with different business models, such as hardware maker Apple, are joining the chorus of condemnation. Cloud-based technology companies large and small have exploited and encouraged consumer ignorance, concealing their data-mining algorithms and processes inside proprietary black boxes labeled ‘commercially confidential’. The larger entities spend big on pumping out a steady stream of marketing misdirection — distracting their users with shiny new things, or proffering up hollow reassurances about how they don’t sell your personal data.

Make no mistake: this is equivocation. Google sells access to its surveillance intelligence on who users are via its ad-targeting apparatus — so it doesn’t need to sell actual data. Its intelligence on web users’ habits and routines and likes and dislikes is far more lucrative than handing over the digits of anyone’s phone number. (The company is also moving in the direction of becoming an online marketplace in its own right — by adding a buy button directly to mobile search results. So it’s intending to capture, process and convert more transactions itself — directly choreographing users’ commercial activity.)

These platforms also work to instill a feeling of impotence in users in various subtle ways, burying privacy settings within labyrinthine submenus. And technical information in unreadable terms and conditions. Doing everything they can to fog rather than fess up to the reality of the gigantic tradeoff lurking in the background. Yet slowly, but slowly this sophisticated surveillance apparatus is being dragged into the light.

The privacy costs involved for consumers who pay for ‘free’ services by consenting to invasive surveillance of what they say, where they go, who they know, what they like, what they watch, what they buy, have never been made clear by the companies involved in big data mining. But costs are becoming more apparent, as glimpses of the extent of commercial tracking activities leak out.

And as more questions are asked the discrepancy between the claim that there’s ‘nothing to see here’ vs the reality of sleepless surveillance apparatus peering over your shoulder, logging your pulse rate, reading your messages, noting what you look at, for how long and what you do next — and doing so to optimize the lifting of money out of your wallet — then the true consumer cost of ‘free’ becomes more visible than it has ever been.

The tradeoff lie is unraveling, as the scale and implications of the data heist are starting to be processed. One clear tipping point here is NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who, two years ago, risked life and liberty to reveal how the U.S. government (and many other governments) were involved in a massive, illegal logging of citizens’ digital communications. The documents he released also showed how commercial technology platforms had been appropriated and drawn into this secretive state surveillance complex. Once governments were implicated, it was only a matter of time before the big Internet platforms, with their mirror data-capturing apparatus, would face questions.

Snowden’s revelations have had various reforming political implications for surveillance in the U.S. and Europe. Tech companies have also been forced to take public stances — either to loudly defend user privacy, or be implicated by silence and inaction.

Another catalyst for increasing privacy concerns is the Internet of Things. A physical network of connected objects blinking and pinging notifications is itself a partial reveal of the extent of the digital surveillance apparatus that has been developed behind commercially closed doors. Modern consumer electronics are hermetically sealed black boxes engineered to conceal complexity. But the complexities of hooking all these ‘smart’ sensornet objects together, and placing so many data-sucking tentacles on display, in increasingly personal places (the home, the body) — starts to make surveillance infrastructure and its implications uncomfortably visible.

Plus this time it’s manifestly personal. It’s in your home and on your person — which adds to a growing feeling of being creeped out and spied upon. And as more and more studies highlight consumer concern about how personal data is being harvested and processed, regulators are also taking notice — and turning up the heat.

One response to growing consumer concerns about personal data came this week with Google launching a centralized dashboard for users to access (some) privacy settings. It’s far from perfect, and contains plentiful misdirection about the company’s motives, but it’s telling that this ad-fueled behemoth feels the need to be more pro-active in its presentation of its attitude and approach to user privacy.

Radical transparency

The Tradeoff report authors include a section at the end with suggestions for improving transparency around marketing processes, calling for “initiatives that will give members of the public the right and ability to learn what companies know about them, how they profile them, and what data lead to what personalized offers” — and for getting consumers “excited about using that right and ability”.

Among their suggestions to boost transparency and corporate openness are —

• Public interest organizations and government agencies developing clear definitions of transparency that reflect consumer concerns, and then systematically calling out companies regarding how well or badly they are doing based on these values, in order to help consumers ‘vote with their wallets’
• Activities to “dissect and report on the implications of privacy policies” — perhaps aided by crowdsourced initiatives — so that complex legalize is interpreted and implications explained for a consumer audience, again allowing for good practice to be praised (and vice versa)
• Advocating for consumers to gain access to the personal profiles companies create on them in order for them to understand how their data is being used

“As long as the algorithms companies implement to analyze and predict the future behaviors of individuals are hidden from public view, the potential for unwanted marketer exploitation of individuals’ data remains high. We therefore ought to consider it an individual’s right to access the profiles and scores companies use to create every personalized message and discount the individual receives,” the report adds.

“Companies will push back that giving out this information will expose trade secrets. We argue there are ways to carry this out while keeping their trade secrets intact.”

They’re not the only ones calling for algorithms to be pulled into view either — back in April the French Senate backed calls for Google to reveal the workings of its search ranking algorithms. In that instance the focus is commercial competition to ensure a level playing field, rather than user privacy per se, but it’s clear that more questions are being asked about the power of proprietary algorithms and the hidden hierarchies they create.

Startups should absolutely see the debunking of the myth that consumers are happy to trade privacy for free services as a fresh opportunity for disruption — to build services that stand out because they aren’t predicated on the assumption that consumers can and should be tricked into handing over data and having their privacy undermined on the sly.

Services that stand upon a futureproofed foundation where operational transparency inculcates user trust — setting these businesses up for bona fide data exchanges, rather than shadowy tradeoffs.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/06/the...is-unraveling/





Life After Snowden: Journalists’ New Moral Responsibility
Alan Rusbridger

Journalism after Snowden? Two very big questions linger on—one about whether the very technologies Edward Snowden revealed are compatible with independent, inquiring reporting; and one crucial question about journalism itself, which could be boiled down to: “What is it supposed to be, or do?”

The technologies first. Any journalist with even a cursory understanding of the Snowden stories published by The Guardian and The Washington Post would have come to an understanding that states—even liberal democracies—have the ability to intercept, store and analyse virtually all forms of electronic communication. Faceless people in shadowy agencies (not to mention the police) can, if they want, read your text messages and emails. They can see who or what you’ve been searching for. They can divine what you’re thinking. They can access all your contacts. And they can follow you.

James Graham’s play, Privacy, at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2014, dramatized some of these capabilities by exploiting some information the theatre-going audience had volunteered in the act of applying for tickets online, or by having their phones and wifi connections switched on during the performance.

At one point in the first act members of the audience with iPhones were asked to go through a number of steps—flipping through Settings> Privacy > Location Services > System Services> Frequent Locations. Within a few seconds there was a collective gasp as half the stalls and circle occupants discovered the extent to which their phones had been tracking and storing their every moment. There was the evidence in front of their eyes: the maps showing the addresses they had visited over previous weeks or months, together with precise timings. The log of their lives.

These were audiences of reasonably sophisticated theatre-goers with a self-declared interest in the subject of the play—privacy. Most, I guess, vaguely suspected that mobile phones were capable of betraying information about their calls and even movements. But there was something stark and shocking about being confronted—in public—with the incontrovertible and precise evidence of their movements.

Over the six-week run many journalists went to see the play. How many, I wonder, altered their behavior as a result? The theatre critic may have felt she had nothing to hide and changed nothing about her life. But what of reporters whose job involved speaking to, or meeting, sources? Did the penny drop that no source can truly be regarded as confidential if their identity can be quickly obtained by searching through the electronic trail we all leave behind us?

“If you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and your personal life you have nothing to fear,” said the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague in June 2013 after the early Guardian revelations about the extent of the mass collection and monitoring of information by state agencies. He added that these innocent people had “nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the contents of your phone calls or anything like that.”

Of course, most journalists and most sources are precisely that—law-abiding citizens doing nothing wrong. Equally, much of the most worthwhile work they do relies on people being prepared to talk confidentially about things of which they have direct knowledge.

Confidentiality means nothing if a third party can easily work out to whom a journalist has been talking—through their phone logs, contacts lists, emails, texts or by working out who else was in a certain location at a certain place.

Nor can journalists take much comfort in Hague’s assurance that the British state is not listening to the “contents” of their phone calls. A police officer or spook doesn’t need to access the “content” of any communication to work out the identity of a whistleblower or source. Welcome to the world of metadata—the accompanying information—not content—often accessible with no form of warrant or judicial oversight, and which tells so much about us.

Pre-Snowden, a knowledgeable minority would certainly have known about metadata. Post-Snowden, there’s no excuse for anyone in journalism (or the law, or medicine, or any profession involving confidentiality) not to know what metadata is. The agencies themselves have been quite open about the value of knowing the who-whom-where-when questions. Stewart Baker, the former general counsel of the NSA, said in a 2013 discussion hosted by The Guardian in New York: “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content…[It’s] sort of embarrassing how predictable we are as human beings.“

Evidence that law enforcement and security agencies do, indeed, help themselves to such data on journalists’ sources is all around—just as we also learned that British spooks don’t have much time for lawyer-client privilege. The Obama administration’s war on leaks has led to an aggressive crackdown on whistleblowers—notoriously including the Department of Justice secretly obtaining two months’ worth of phone records from more than 20 AP reporters and editors. In the UK, two cases came to light in 2014 in which the police had quietly (and without judicial warrant) used anti-terrorism laws to find out who journalists on the Mail on Sunday and The Sun had been talking to. Neither case involved terrorism, or anything like it. The papers—neither of which had been notably sympathetic over Edward Snowden and his revelations—were, of course, outraged.

The agencies are unlikely to change their habits and, as we’ve seen over the past year or so, it is formidably difficult for congresses or parliaments to scale back laws permitting intrusive behavior by the state once they’ve been passed. So, lesson one of the post-Snowden era is that reporters and editors are going to have to change their behavior.

Betraying a source anywhere is a most unforgivable crime. In comfortable democracies it may lead to sources losing their jobs and their careers being wrecked, and it could even lead to prison. In less comfortable parts of the world it can lead to far worse outcomes—including torture or death.

So journalists have a moral responsibility to absorb what Edward Snowden has been telling us. But how many have? My guess is a tiny minority of news reporters have taken the time and effort to read up on what forms of communication are (relatively) safe and how to send and receive encrypted emails. How many news organizations have secure drop boxes for sources wanting safely to submit documents? How many foreign correspondents have changed their habits in terms of the phones or computer equipment they travel with? Some have. My suspicion is that most haven’t.

Which leads to the second, even more profound, question raised by the Snowden coverage—the essence, independence, and purpose of journalism itself.

I felt this question acutely in Britain, if only because quite a few of my fellow editors either did not think that the Snowden revelations were much of a story or, worse, were positively hostile to The Guardian and its behavior.

The security services discreetly briefed journalists about the harm done by Snowden and can hardly have believed their luck at how enthusiastically and unquestioningly so many took the bait. The Guardian was aggressively accused by fellow journalists of endangering British lives and of something like treason or sedition. No fewer than three papers said that journalists could not be trusted to make judgements about the public interest where national security was concerned.

To judge by the outpourings of some colleagues in the press, Snowden made a wise choice in going to The Guardian. Other journalists would have, at best, ignored the story or had him arrested. A former editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst, wrote at the height of the row: “If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I to disbelieve them?” Edward Lucas, a senior correspondent for The Economist, said that, had Snowden brought the documents to him, he would have marched him straight down to a police station.

It seems to me there is an easy answer to the “who am I?’ question posed by Blackhurst: You are a journalist. You are not part of the state or the government. Your job is disclosure, not secrecy. You stand aside from power in order to scrutinize it. Your job is to be fully sensitive to all the public interests raised by the story—and to publish what you judge to be significant as responsibly as you know how. Only then is informed debate possible. As a journalist, you have as much right to balance those public interests as a politician or a policeman or a judge.

These were strange times to live through, particularly when three papers were among the most trenchant critics of any attempt to regulate the press in the wake of the Leveson Report.

On one hand they demanded self-regulation—because the press was a proud and independent estate. On the other hand they effectively argued that the state must have supremacy over the press in determining what could, and could not, be published about modern-day surveillance. This was a confusing argument for editors, of all people, to be making—though, fortunately, editors in most of the rest of the world saw things very differently.

We are used to the state claiming that our journalism has caused harm. That’s what the US government claimed with Daniel Ellsberg over the Pentagon Papers. (Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, described the leak as “a devastating…security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.”) They made similar noises over Wikileaks. In both cases, in time, the claims of harm melted away.

This is not to claim that the Snowden revelations did no harm to the intelligence capabilities of one or two Western powers. We cannot meaningfully test those claims. I have been told on good authority that some of the Snowden revelations did impair some intelligence gathering. I have equally been told—by a number of people on what I would consider equally good authority—that The Guardian’s journalism caused no harm.

Whenever I hear members of the security services claiming the bad guys are “going dark” on them, I think of an essay with that very title by professor Peter Swire, an internet, privacy, and encryption expert who worked at the White House, and was part of President Obama’s review panel into the issues raised by Snowden.

“Due to changing technology, there are indeed specific ways that law enforcement and national security agencies lose specific previous capabilities’” he wrote in his November 2011 essay. “These specific losses, however, are more than offset by massive gains. Public debates should recognize that we are truly in a golden age of surveillance. By understanding that, we can reject calls for bad encryption policy. More generally, we should critically assess a wide range of proposals, and build a more secure computing and communications infrastructure.”

In the Pentagon Papers case the US Supreme Court displayed a clearer grasp of the duties and freedoms of the press than some British editors during this strange period in 2013. Back in 1972 the court supported a standard that would make it virtually impossible for the state to censor the press by claiming harm.

The judgment protected the press unless a proposed story threatened “direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.” Two of the Supreme Court judges went further, believing the First Amendment to be absolute. Justice Black wrote: “in revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.”

The majority 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court echoed some of the language of a judge in an earlier hearing: “The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”

The Pentagon Papers judgment was hugely significant because it removed the threat of prior restraint, or censorship over such stories. In other words, the judges absolutely believed it was appropriate for responsible journalists to make careful decisions about the public interest in publication—and not defer to the state to decide on their behalf.

That, surely, is a proper statement of the role of a truly independent press. But removing the threat of prior intervention is also enormously helpful in allowing journalists and editors to get a sense of any possible harm that might be caused by publication of stories about national security. Take away the possibility that the state will march into newspaper offices and seize material, arrest people, or injunct publication and it’s immediately possible to have a calmer conversation.

The reverse was true in Britain, where the state (after an initial lull) did the opposite: making explicit threats to prevent publication and/or seize the source material (which they did, anyway, using terror laws against Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport.)

That attitude on behalf of the British state—which, of course, can only have been bolstered by the sight of other editors and journalists deciding that the state must, indeed, have the final say—made mature conversations considerably easier in New York and Washington than in London. That’s surely something to ponder in the aftermath of Snowden, and on the assumption that Chelsea Manning and Snowden are unlikely to be the last of the whistleblowers.

The spooks and officials and civil servants will surely also be pondering the question—much discussed during the story itself—of who gets to call themselves a journalist.

At The Guardian, we didn’t spend very much time wondering whether Glenn Greenwald was a proper “journalist” or not. He is someone of strong passions and some rigor. He campaigns, but he also reports. He has strong views and wants to influence the debate but is also deeply knowledgeable about the things that concern, or even obsess, him. He worked very well in conjunction with our (more traditional in every sense) correspondent, Ewen Macaskill.

Other journalist commentators and legislators were not sure that Glenn should be regarded as a “proper” journalist. Too passionate, too keen to sway the argument, too argumentative and so on.

It’s a pretty big issue, and not only for journalists. Parts of the British state and government might have been fed up with The Guardian. But, by insisting that the London-based source material must be destroyed, British officials showed no evidence of thinking through how, or whether, they would deal with Glenn instead. Or even how they would deal with the fact that The Guardian had back-up copies of documents in the offices of Pro Publica and The New York Times.

They made us smash up our hard discs. But we didn’t stop publishing. To some, the image of a gouged-out Guardian computer circuit board was a sinister one. The mayor of Leipzig, when he visited my office, found it a chilling one, for reasons that are still within living memory of millions of Germans.

But, just as there is no single public interest, there can be no single view of what happened during the Snowden affair. Over time I began to find the image of destroyed computers both chilling and an icon of optimism—precisely because we went on publishing.

The internet is the thing they fear. The thing they want to master. The space in which we may all find darkness as well as light. But the very reasons the State wants to tame, penetrate and control the digital universe are the same reasons which make it an instrument of liberty. What was unpublishable in Britain was publishable elsewhere. Infuriating to the British state, no doubt. But, we would all agree, wonderful if the information in question was trying to escape the control of China, or Turkey or Russia or Syria.

So Snowden opened our eyes to multiple, sometimes competing and clashing public interests—including those represented by corporations, civil libertarians, intelligence agencies, lawyers, journalists and politicians.

It feels to me that we still have to do full credit to the full array of things to which Snowden was trying to draw our attention—the full picture of jostling public interests to do with journalism, the law, intelligence, terrorism, international relations, commerce, privacy, politics, oversight, civil liberties, technology, encryption, security, confidentiality, and freedom.

Western politicians—by cleverly reducing the arguments to privacy versus security or free speech versus terror—managed to distract attention away from the substantive issues at the heart of Snowden. But they remain there and they’re important—and I suspect we will still be discussing them in 20 years time.
http://www.cjr.org/opinion/edward_snowden_impact.php





Obama Lawyers Asked Secret Court to Ignore Public Court's Decision on Spying

Justice Department’s national security chief cites six-month transition period in the USA Freedom Act as a reason to turn the bulk surveillance spigot back on
Spencer Ackerman

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

Back from the dead: US officials to ask secret court to revive NSA surveillance

US officials confirmed last week that they would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court – better known as the Fisa court, a panel that meets in secret as a step in the surveillance process and thus far has only ever had the government argue before it – to turn the domestic bulk collection spigot back on.

Justice Department national security chief John A Carlin cited a six-month transition period provided in the USA Freedom Act – passed by the Senate last week to ban the bulk collection – as a reason to permit an “orderly transition” of the NSA’s domestic dragnet. Carlin did not address whether the transition clause of the Freedom Act still applies now that a congressional deadlock meant the program shut down on 31 May.

But Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act’s authorization of data collection as “relevant” to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection.

Carlin, in his filing, wrote that the Patriot Act provision remained “in effect” during the transition period.

“This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government’s application, but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court,” Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called “the better interpretation of the statute”.

The second circuit court of appeals is supposed to bind only the circuit’s lower courts. But the unique nature of the Fisa court – whose rulings practically never became public before whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations – has left ambiguous which public court precedents it is obliged to follow.

“While the Fisa court isn’t formally bound by the second circuit’s ruling, it will certainly have to grapple with the second circuit’s interpretation of the ‘relevance’ requirement. The [court] will also have to consider whether Congress effectively adopted the second circuit’s interpretation of the relevance requirement when it passed the USA Freedom Act,” said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit the second circuit decided.

The second circuit did not issue an injunction stopping the bulk collection. It deferred to the then-ongoing congressional debate over the USA Freedom Act, citing legislation as the more appropriate mode of relief. The ACLU, now confronting a potential return of bulk surveillance via the Fisa court, is considering seeking an injunction in the appropriate federal district court should the Fisa Court grant the government surveillance request.

Yet Carlin’s request to the Fisa court suggested the Obama administration would not consider the second circuit the last word – and might seek to challenge the injunction.

Surveillance reform explainer: can the FBI still listen to my phone calls?

Carlin told the Fisa court that the government was “considering its litigation options in regard to the second circuit’s opinion”, which would have to mean a challenge before the US supreme court.

Carlin added in a footnote: “In the event an injunction of some sort were to issue by the district court, the government would need to assess, in light of the nature and scope of whatever injunction the district court issued, its ability to carry out authority granted under an order issued by this court.”

But the Fisa court must first decide whether the new bulk-surveillance request is lawful.

On Friday, the conservative group FreedomWorks filed a rare motion before the Fisa court, asking it to reject the government’s surveillance request as a violation of the fourth amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Fisa court judge Michael Moseman gave the justice department until this coming Friday to respond – and explicitly barred the government from arguing that FreedomWorks lacks the standing to petition the secret court.

“The only federal appeals court to have considered this surveillance concluded, after very careful analysis, that it’s unlawful. It’s disturbing and disappointing that the government is proposing to continue it,” said Jaffer, of the ACLU.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-phone-records





Exclusive: U.S. Tech Industry Appeals to Obama to Keep Hands Off Encryption
Richard Cowan

Top U.S. tech companies are warning the Obama administration against imposing new policies that the companies say would weaken increasingly sophisticated encryption systems designed to protect consumers' privacy.

In a strongly worded letter to President Barack Obama on Monday, two industry associations representing major software and hardware companies said, "We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool."

The Information Technology Industry Council and the Software and Information Industry Association, representing tech giants, including Apple Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, IBM and Microsoft Corp, fired the latest salvo in what could be a long fight over government access into smart phones and other digital devices.

Obama administration officials have pushed the companies to find ways to let law enforcement bypass encryption to investigate illegal activities including terrorism threats, but not weaken it in a way that would let criminals and computer hackers penetrate the security wall.

So far, however, the White House has not spelled out specific regulatory or legislative steps that it might seek to achieve that objective.

Last week White House press secretary Josh Earnest called this a "thorny policy challenge" that has Obama's attention.

Whilst he recognised tech companies' efforts to protect Americans' civil liberties, Earnest, responding to a reporter's question, added that the companies "would not want to be in a position in which their technology is being deployed to aid and abet somebody who’s planning to carry out an act of violence."

The industry letter to Obama also was sent to FBI Director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other Cabinet heads.

Days earlier, the United States enacted legislation that will curtail the government's ability to scoop up huge volumes of data related to records of Americans' telephone calls.

The government surveillance was an outgrowth of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and was exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The industry groups noted that online commerce has flourished in part because consumers believed their payment information would be secure.

"Consumer trust in digital products and services is an essential component enabling continued economic growth of the online marketplace," the industry wrote.

"Accordingly, we urge you not to pursue any policy or proposal that would require or encourage companies to weaken these technologies, including the weakening of encryption or creating encryption 'work-arounds'."

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0OP09R20150609





U.S. Tech Companies Expected to Lose More than $35 Billion Due to NSA Spying
Patrick Howell O'Neill

U.S. companies will likely lose more than $35 billion in foreign business as a result of the vast NSA-surveillance operations revealed by Edward Snowden, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

"Foreign customers are shunning U.S. companies," the report asserts, causing American businesses to lose out on foreign contracts and pushing other countries to create protectionist policies that block American businesses out of foreign markets.

"When historians write about this period in U.S. history, it could very well be that one of the themes will be how the United States lost its global technology leadership to other nations."

ITIF, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based technology think tank founded my members of Congress, first estimated in 2013 that American losses as a result of the National Security Agency's PRISM program, which centers on the collection of Internet communications from major American technology firms, would tally between $21.5 billion and $35 billion, with the U.S. cloud-computing industry bearing the brunt of the fallout.

The actual losses "will likely far exceed $35 billion," according to the ITIF report, because the entire American tech industry has performed worse than expected as a result of the Snowden leaks.

The massive financial hit is likely one key reason leading major American tech firms, like Apple and Google, to not only include strong encryption in their smartphones, tablets, and services, but to also publicly oppose the outlawing of strong encryption by law-enforcement authorities like James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr.

To reverse the trend, the report’s authors recommend, the U.S. government must follow five key directions, as laid out in the research:

1. Increase transparency surrounding U.S. surveillance activities, both at home and abroad.
2. Strengthen information security by opposing any government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption.
3. Strengthen U.S. mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs).
4. Work to establish international legal standards for government access to data.
5. Complete trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts.

Since the first Snowden leaks became public in 2013, foreign businesses and civilians around the world have repeatedly said in polls that American surveillance will cause them to abandon (or at least be extremely wary of) American tech products. U.S.-based companies, including Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Qualcomm, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, have reportedly suffered sales hits in Asia, Europe, and North America as a result of blowback against NSA spying.

In an effort to counteract the backlash, Amazon, which operates large-scale cloud-computing and online storage businesses, now hosts the data of European customers in Germany in an attempt to assuage NSA-weary customers. Apple, Google, and other American companies have used their opposition to government surveillance and bolstered encryption technologies as a marketing tool, as have European companies.

In particular, European cloud companies, like Cloudwatt, Hortnetsecurity, and F-Secure, proudly boast of their non-American credentials and their resistance to NSA spying against foreigners. And the French government has invested $150 million into two cloud startups designed to keep data out of U.S. hands.

The conflict has also played out in Asia, where the Chinese government has moved away from U.S. tech firms. Beijing has even flirted with a policy of forbidding state-owned banks from buying American-made tech products. Companies that do sell software to Chinese banks must "turn over secret source code, submit to aggressive audits, and build encryption keys into their products," the ITIF report notes.

"When historians write about this period in U.S. history, it could very well be that one of the themes will be how the United States lost its global technology leadership to other nations," the report’s authors, Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn, write. "And clearly one of the factors they would point to is the long-standing privileging of U.S. national-security interests over U.S. industrial and commercial interests when it comes to U.S. foreign policy."

You can read the full report here:
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa...us-tech-firms/





Microsoft Opens EU “Transparency Centre” to Allay Fears Over NSA Backdoors

Governments remain wary over claims of complicity with US government spying.
Glyn Moody

Microsoft has opened what it calls a "Transparency Centre" in Brussels, its second after launching the first in Redmond just under a year ago. According to the company, the new centre "offers participating governmental agencies the opportunity to review the source code of Microsoft products, access information on cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities, and benefit from the expertise and insight of Microsoft security professionals."

The Transparency Centre initiative forms part of Microsoft's Government Security Programme (GSP), which now includes 42 different agencies, from 23 national governments and international organisations worldwide, including the European Commission, the latest to join.

When the GSP was launched in 2003, Microsoft said that its aim was to provide "national governments with controlled access to Microsoft Windows source code and other technical information they need to be confident in the enhanced security features of the Windows platform." The Transparency Centre has the same goal. Speaking at the 50th Munich Security Conference last year, Matt Thomlinson, vice president of Microsoft Security, said that the aim of the new centre was to provide "government customers with the ability to review our source code, reassure themselves of its integrity and confirm there are no back doors."

The issue of back doors and the possibility that software companies have been cooperating with the NSA to undermine the security of their products has become particularly sensitive in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations about the surveillance activities of the NSA and GCHQ. One of the earliest leaked documents concerned the Prism programme, which apparently showed that the NSA had direct access to the systems of all the top US software and Internet companies.

On a presentation slide indicating the dates when Prism began for each "provider," Microsoft is listed as the very first, starting in 2007. In response, Brad Smith, General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft, denied that the NSA had "direct and unfettered access to our customer’s data." He insisted: "Microsoft only pulls and then provides the specific data mandated by the relevant legal demand."

Soon after the Prism story appeared, a report from Bloomberg claimed that Microsoft "provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix." In an article published this week by The Intercept discussing criticisms of Microsoft's BitLocker disk encryption program, the company was asked to respond to Bloomberg's allegations from 2013. A Microsoft spokesperson said that sharing bugs was simply part of the GSP, and that "its intention is to be transparent, not to aid spy agencies in making malicious software."

According to the original Bloomberg article, however, that's exactly what the NSA used them for: specifically, they "allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments." Asked about "instances in which Microsoft built methods to bypass its security and about backdoors generally", the spokesperson also told The Intercept that Microsoft "doesn’t consider complying with legitimate legal requests backdoors."

The opening of the Transparency Centre in Brussels is evidence that Microsoft is worried that some in Europe still have their doubts about whether its software can be trusted. Microsoft's Thomlinson described the move as "the latest step … to enhance the transparency of our software code and continue building trust with governments around the world." He also said that there needs to be "a high level of openness and cooperation between public and private sectors."

When it comes to openness, the highest level is found in free software. Not only can governments and other users review open-source code, just as they can at Microsoft's new facility in Brussels, they can take it, modify it, and use it freely, as long as they comply with the licence. No matter how many Transparency Centres it opens, that degree of openness, and the trust that it engenders, is something that Microsoft will never be able to match until the day when it, too, releases all of its code as open source.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/20...nsa-backdoors/





Congress Didn't Notice the FBI Creating a 'Small Air Force' for Surveillance

Excessive executive branch secrecy and the legislature’s oversight failures
Conor Friedersdorf

Last week, Americans learned that even as the NSA collected information on their telephone and Internet behavior, the FBI was using fictitious companies to secretly operate what the AP called “a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cell phone surveillance technology.”

The news organization reported that surveillance flights may be more than a decade old, and identified “more than 100 flights since late April orbiting both major cities and rural areas.”

The merits of this program will now be debated.

What’s already clear, however, is the anti-democratic nature of keeping it hidden all these years. The U.S. is supposed to be governed by the people. Whether Americans want a federal law-enforcement agency using planes to conduct surveillance on vast swaths of the country is a question properly aired and debated.

It is for Americans to choose.

Instead, an executive branch that has grown alarmingly powerful since the September 11 terrorist attacks, or perhaps even before, imposed its preferred policy in secret. The vast majority of Americans were completely unaware of its choice.

This made voter accountability on the issue impossible.

And many of the FBI’s ostensible overseers in Congress don’t know much more than the public, either. This is evident from letters that legislators have written in recent days. Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, demanded to be briefed no later than this week on “the scope, nature, and purpose of these operations… and what legal authorities, if any, are being relied upon in carrying out these operations.”

Sixteen House members wrote to the FBI, pointing out that the president had just signed a reform ending the bulk collection of phone records. “It is highly disturbing,” they wrote, “to learn that your agency may be doing just that and more with a secret fleet of aircraft engaged in surveillance missions.” They asked for the FBI to identify the legal theory used to justify the flights, the circumstances surrounding them, the technologies on the aircraft, the privacy policy used for data collected, and the civil liberties safeguards that had been put in place.

Senator Al Franken has posed ten questions of his own to the FBI:

1. What technologies are used by the FBI during the course of aerial surveillance? To what extent does the FBI use IMSI-catchers, “DRTBoxes,” “dirtboxes,” or “Stingrays”? To what extent does the FBI use infrared cameras? To what extent does the FBI use video cameras?
2. How frequently does the FBI engage in aerial surveillance that utilizes IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology? In what types of operations does the FBI deploy aerial surveillance utilizing these technologies? More generally, under what circumstances is aerial surveillance using these technologies deployed?
3. Under what legal authority is the FBI acting when conducting aerial surveillance, including aerial surveillance that utilizes IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology? To the extent that the Department of Justice is seeking court approval before deploying any of these technologies during aerial surveillance, is this done on a case-by-case basis or does the Department seek broader authorization? What are judges told about how the technologies deployed work, and the potential impact on innocent Americans? Please provide a representative sample of the applications for these court orders.
4. To the extent that the Department of Justice has developed policies governing the use of IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology during aerial surveillance, please identify the policies and legal processes used. Are different technologies subject to different policies or forms of legal process? If so, please describe the application of these policies.
5. Has the Department of Justice developed policies on the retention of data collected in the course of aerial surveillance that utilizes IMSI-catchers, infrared cameras, or video technology? Has the Department developed policies on the destruction of that data? If so, please describe these policies.
6. How many individuals can be detected, tracked, and/or monitored during each surveillance flight? If IMSI-catchers are being used, how many phones can be detected, tracked, and/or monitored during each flight?
7. Reports indicate that some of the surveillance systems have the capability of blocking phone calls, including 911 and other emergency calls. What steps have been taken to ensure that hone calls of non-targeted civilians are not interrupted by the FBI’s aerial surveillance?
8. To the extent that aerial surveillance has been deployed above large public gatherings, what steps is the government taking to ensure that such surveillance does not chill constitutionally protected conduct, such as political and religious activity?
9. Has the Department of Justice’s Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties conducted a privacy impact assessment or otherwise reviewed the use of technologies utilized during aerial surveillance? Has a review or privacy impact assessment been conducted on the FBI’s use of aerial surveillance more broadly? If so, please provide copies of such assessments or reviews.
10. What safeguards are in place to ensure innocent Americans’ privacy is protected during aerial surveillance utilizing technology that collects data and personal information?

Shame on the FBI for not informing the public and the full Congress about this program. And shame on legislators for being so clueless about surveillance flights run for years by a law-enforcement agency which they are responsible for overseeing. The fact that questions about legal authorities and privacy are just now being raised is yet another indication that legislators have been derelict in their duties.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...llance/395147/





Feds Want to ID Web Trolls Who ‘Threatened’ Silk Road Judge
Andy Greenberg

On Dark Web sites like the Silk Road black market and its discussion forums, anonymous visitors could write even the most extreme libertarian and anarchist statements without fear. The rest of the internet, as a few critics of the US judicial system may soon learn, isn’t quite so free of consequences.

Last week the Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena to the libertarian media site Reason.com, demanding that it identify six visitors to the site. The subpoena letter, obtained and published by blogger Ken White, lists trollish comments made by those six Reason readers that—whether seriously or in jest—call for violence against Katherine Forrest, the New York judge who presided over the Silk Road trial and late last month sentenced Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht to life in prison.

“It’s judges like these that should be taken out back and shot,” wrote one user named Agammamon, in a comment thread that has since been deleted from Reason.com’s story on Ulbricht’s sentencing.

“It’s judges like these that will be taken out back and shot,” answered another user named Alan.

“Why do it out back? Shoot them out front, on the steps of the courthouse,” reads a third comment from someone going by the name Cloudbuster.

The subpoena calls for Reason.com to hand over data about the six users, including their IP addresses, account information, phone numbers, email addresses, billing information, and devices associated with them. And it cites a section of the United States criminal code that forbids “mailing threatening communications.” When those communications threaten a federal judge, they constitute a felony punishable by as much as 10 years in prison. (The average internet user has no such protection.)

“We command you that all and singular business and excuses being laid aside, you appear and attend before the grand jury of the people of the United States,” reads the subpoena signed by US Attorney Preet Bharara and assistant US attorney Niketh Velamoor. In an accompanying letter, Velamoor asks that the subpoena not be publicly revealed: “The Government hereby requests that you voluntarily refrain from disclosing the existence of the subpoena to any third party.”

When WIRED called Department of Justice investigator Maxime Vales, who is named in the subpoena as the intended recipient of the users’ data, he declined to comment. Reason.com didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Forrest surprised many Silk Road watchers with her life sentence for Ulbricht, who was convicted on five felony counts that included a “kingpin” statute for running an organized crime operation. Even the prosecution had asked for only a sentence “substantially more than the mandatory minimum” of 20 years—not life. “Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country,” Forrest told Ulbricht at sentencing. “This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”

The Reason.com incident marks the second such subpoena in the past few months to result from law enforcement’s clash with the Dark Web. In March, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed the “darknetmarkets” forum on Reddit, seeking identifying information about several users who may have been associated with Evolution, another Dark Web black market that followed in the Silk Road’s footsteps.

It’s hard to imagine the Reason.com commenters actually intended violent action against Forrest, so much as the typical trollish provocation that fills so many web comment sections. But that doesn’t make their speech any less illegal under existing statutes about threatening federal officials.

In fact, Forrest has been threatened before on the Dark Web site the Hidden Wiki, and even had her personal information published, including a purported home address. “I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family,” wrote a user named ServingJustice, who also published Forrest’s personal info.

Compared with that “doxing,” Forrest’s more recent critics on Reason’s website made what appear to be only idle threats. But they did so outside of the Dark Web’s anonymity protections. And if Reason coughs up their personal data to Grand Jury investigators, they may come to regret it.
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/feds-wa...lk-road-judge/





Appeals Court Rejects ISP Stay Of Neutrality Rules, Which Officially Go Live Tomorrow
Karl Bode

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has denied the broadband industry's requested stay of the FCC's reclassification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II, meaning the agency's shiny new net neutrality rules will go live tomorrow as scheduled, much to the chagrin of the nation's broadband duopoly. Incumbent ISPs requested the stay last month, claiming the FCC's rules were "arbitrary and capricious," "vague and onerous," and act to create "significant uncertainty about the introduction of new services" while "exposing providers to costly litigation."

According to the court order (pdf), broadband providers failed to provide "the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review," meaning that the FCC's new net neutrality rules will remain in place for the duration of the ISPs assault on the FCC. While the courts have promised to expedite it, a resolution to the case could still take more than a year. FCC boss Tom Wheeler was quick to take to the FCC website to applaud the ruling:

"This is a huge victory for Internet consumers and innovators! Starting Friday, there will be a referee on the field to keep the Internet fast, fair and open," said the Commission boss. "Blocking, throttling, pay-for-priority fast lanes and other efforts to come between consumers and the Internet are now things of the past. The rules also give broadband providers the certainty and economic incentive to build fast and competitive broadband networks."

While net neutrality opponents in the House have been trying all manner of poison pills and other efforts to kill the rules, hamstring the FCC, or curtail the agency's budget, short of a court win -- the only viable way to kill the rules moving forward is a 2016 party shift, FCC leadership change, and subsequent gutting of the agency's order. Annoyed by recent blocked mergers and an uncharacteristically consumer friendly FCC boss bullish on broadband competition, you can be fairly certain that AT&T, Verizon and Comcast lobbyists are already very busy trying to ensure that a more incumbent-friendly scenario comes to fruition.
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneu...tomorrow.shtml





The GOP Is Trying to Nuke Net Neutrality With a Budget Bill Sneak Attack
Sam Gustin

Republicans on Capitol Hill have been scheming to kill the US government’s landmark new open internet policy ever since it was approved—and their latest gambit is a particularly crafty sneak attack.

The House GOP 2016 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill contains three riders buried two-thirds of the way through the 156-page bill aimed at preventing the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing its new net neutrality rules, which are designed to ensure that broadband companies treat internet data equally.

The $20.2 billion budget bill, which was unveiled Wednesday and funds several major government agencies, would prohibit the FCC from implementing the new rules until several industry court challenges have been decided. That could take years and give net neutrality opponents enough time to dismantle the rules permanently under a new administration.

Net neutrality supporters lambasted the House GOP’s tactic as a cynical ploy to add net neutrality-killing language to a must-pass budget bill that funds the Treasury Department, the Judiciary, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and several other agencies.

“That a few members of Congress use backroom deals and backdoor tricks to oppose and undermine common-sense open internet principles shows how little they know or care about the law or the overwhelming support these rules have from businesses, innovators and individual Internet users everywhere,” said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, a DC-based public interest group.

The House GOP’s latest anti-net neutrality effort comes just two days before the FCC’s new rules are scheduled to take effect on Friday, and underscores the growing desperation on the part of anti-net neutrality forces to roll back one of the most significant tech policy shifts in a generation.

The new FCC rules prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization—three concepts that are at the heart of net neutrality. Paid prioritization deals are commercial contracts in which ISPs strike special arrangements with deep-pocketed companies for preferential treatment, potentially snuffing out startups.

“The Appropriations Committee proposal reflects an extremism out of step with the American people, and even with the broadband providers themselves,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a DC-based advocacy group. “Even the carriers opposing the FCC’s decision in federal court have not attempted to stay the three ‘bright line’ net neutrality rules that prevent broadband providers from blocking, degrading or prioritizing content.”

Several months ago, Vox Populi Polling found that 81 percent of voters nationwide—including 81 percent of Republicans—believe that “it is critical to maintain” an internet where service providers cannot block or discriminate against content, or strike paid prioritization deals.

But the high level of public support for internet openness hasn’t dissuaded hardcore anti-net neutrality GOP lawmakers—many of whom have received mountains of cash from the broadband industry—from repeatedly seeking to torpedo the new rules.

Rep. Hal Rogers, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the Appropriations committee, insisted that the bill will maintain “an open marketplace that allows a fair and level playing field for all.”

“While making good use of limited tax dollars, this legislation also makes great strides in reining in wasteful spending, and stopping harmful and unnecessary bureaucratic overreach,” Rogers said in a statement.

The GOP bill also slashes the FCC’s operating budget for next year—a move that open internet advocates call petty retribution against the agency in retaliation for the new policy. The bill allocates $315 million for the FCC in 2016, a $25 million cut from 2015, and $73 million below the agency’s request.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the...l-sneak-attack





Atlantic Broadband Deal Shows Small Operators Seek Growth, Too
Emily Steel

As the big get bigger in the cable business, the small are trying to get a little bit bigger, too.

On Monday, Atlantic Broadband announced a $200 million takeover of the regional cable operator MetroCast Communications of Connecticut, adding about 23,000 customers in Eastern Connecticut to the footprint of the country’s 13th-largest cable operator.

The deal signals how the merger mania sweeping across the industry’s largest players is also infiltrating its more modest tier. Challenged to keep pace with new rivals and frenetic changes in technology, industry executives argue that consolidation will help companies compete.

So far, megadeals like Charter’s pair of deals worth $67.1 billion for Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, and AT&T’s $48.5 billion takeover of DirecTV have captured the headlines. But now, the smaller operators are entering the fray.

The European telecommunications firm Altice, which announced its $9.1 billion acquisition of a controlling stake in the regional cable provider Suddenlink Communications last month, has hinted that it is on the prowl for more deals. Executives at smaller cable operators say they have been approached about potential deals. And Atlantic Broadband said it, too, was interested in pursuing more acquisitions, beyond its deal for MetroCast.

“We absolutely are interested in growing and increasing the size and scope of our business,” said David Isenberg, a president and the chief revenue officer for Atlantic Broadband, adding that the company does not believe that deals are “necessary for survival.”

Atlantic Broadband now has 224,000 subscribers in Western Pennsylvania, South Florida, Maryland, Delaware and South Carolina. Mr. Isenberg said that even though the MetroCast systems were not physically contiguous to the systems it operates, the company can use the additional numbers to increase its technology offerings, which are growing increasingly complex both for television and Internet services. More scale allows the company to pool investments in innovations that it can deploy to a broader customer base.

Some analysts said the wave of deal activity showed that cable operators were seeking growth through acquisitions as business conditions become more challenging. For the first time ever, the number of pay-television subscribers declined in the first quarter this year. And acquiring those subscribers is costing the cable companies more. For the Charter-Time Warner Cable tie-up, for instance, the price equates to about $3,681 per customer. For Atlantic Broadband’s MetroCast tie-up, the price is around $8,695 a customer.

Big cable operators have argued that through consolidation, they will also gain more heft in negotiating with television companies over fast-rising programming rates. But consolidation among smaller cable companies does not typically have such a meaningful impact in negotiations with TV companies, Mr. Isenberg said.

Despite a flurry of merger activity, the cable industry in the United States remains largely fragmented. The country has more than 660 cable operators and 5,208 cable systems, according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

“There is, as you know, significant in-market consolidation opportunities in the U.S.,” Dexter G. Goei, chief executive of Altice, said in a conference call announcing its deal for Suddenlink.

“Everything below Comcast effectively is in consolidation mode, so it makes for a very interesting next six months to two years in terms of what is going to happen from a consolidation standpoint,” he added. “But we clearly expect to be right in the middle of that consolidation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/bu...rowth-too.html





A Music-Sharing Network for the Unconnected
Lydia Polgreen

Over the last two decades, cellphones have ushered in a communications revolution in Africa. The entire country of Mali, for example, has just 120,000 landlines to serve a population of 15 million. But as of 2012 there were enough cellphones in service in Mali for every man, woman and child. The spread of cellphones in this way has driven innovation across the continent. M-Pesa, a text-message-based money-transfer system, has made financial services available for the first time to millions. Another enterprise tells rural farmers by text what their crops might sell for in distant markets; mass-texting campaigns have helped promote major public health initiatives.

Yet for many Africans, the phone is not merely, or even principally, a communications device. You can see this on the sun-blasted streets of Bamako, Mali’s capital, where a new kind of merchant has sprung up along Fankélé Diarra Street. Seated practically thigh to thigh, these vendors crouch over laptops, scrolling through screen after screen of downloaded music. They are known as téléchargeurs, or downloaders, and they operate as an offline version of iTunes, Spotify and Pandora all rolled into one. They know what their regulars might like, from the latest Jay Z album to the obscurest songs of Malian music pioneers like Ali Farka Touré. Savvy musicians take their new material to Fankélé Diarra Street and press the téléchargeurs to give it a listen and recommend it to their customers. For a small fee — less than a dime a song — the téléchargeurs transfer playlists to memory cards or U.S.B. sticks, or directly onto cellphones. Customers share songs with their friends via short-range Bluetooth signals.

This was the scene Christopher Kirkley found in 2009. A musicologist, he traveled to Mali hoping to record the haunting desert blues he loved. But every time he asked people to perform a favorite folk song or ballad, they pulled out their cellphones to play it for him; every time he set up his gear to capture a live performance, he says, “five other kids will be holding their cellphones recording the same thing — as an archivist, it kind of takes you down a couple of notches.” Kirkley has since released compilations of music from what he has called “digital Bamako” and other places across the Sahara, as well as solo albums by artists who appeared on them.

What make its existence possible are not smartphones but so-called feature phones, which do little more than make calls, take highly pixelated pictures and play music. And yet they are indispensable. In 2013, when French troops intervened in Mali to help fight Islamic militants and Tuareg rebels, I arrived in Timbuktu not long after its liberation. The cellphone network had been down for days, so I did not bother to charge my phone. But every night, when the gasoline-powered generators in town rumbled to life, a long line of people formed to charge their cellphones. Why, I wondered, would anyone need a cellphone without a network connection?

It was a question as dumb as my simple Nokia phone. A cellphone is a digital Swiss Army knife: flashlight, calculator, camera and, yes, audio player. Mali’s homegrown, offline digital music has created a space for sharing songs that is in many ways more vibrant than the algorithm-driven way music is so often experienced in the United States — more personal, more curated, more human. The téléchargeurs hark back to the long-gone know-it-all clerks at Tower Records in the East Village. But now that better mobile data connections and cheap smartphones have started to arrive in Mali, will the same communal experience of sharing music remain?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/ma...connected.html





Torrent Madness: UK Cybercrime Official Argues That File Sharing Is A Gateway Drug To Crime
Mike Masnick

Perhaps it's time to make an update to Reefer Madness, entitled Torrent Madness. A totally out of touch and clueless -- but powerful -- UK official, Andy Archibald, who somehow is the deputy director of the National Cyber Crime Unit at the National Crime Agency, is going around spouting nonsense about how file sharing is some sort of "gateway" into more crimes for young people today (found via Ars Technica):

"If you think about the illegal downloading of music, of videos and DVDs, I think that practice is more common than we might imagine within the youth of today.

"That's criminality.

"It's almost become acceptable.

"That's the first stages, I believe, of a gateway into the dark side."

Considering how many people engage in file sharing, if it actually were a "gateway" into further criminal activity, you'd think we'd be in the midst of an incredible crime wave. And yet, here are the stats straight from the UK government:

Obviously, correlation is not causation and yada yada, but doesn't that look like crime rates peaked just as file sharing really started taking off? If it were truly acting as a gateway to more crime, wouldn't that be showing up in the data somewhere?

But, no, good old Andy Archibald isn't troubled by the data. He knows that these evil hacker types are all showing up because of that no good file sharing:

"There are many of our young people, and not only young people, who are becoming highly skilled and capable in a digital environment," he said.

"It's important that they put those skills to good use and are not tempted to become involved, unwittingly in cyber criminality.

"They are members of forums and are exchanging ideas in a marketplace that criminals are looking (at).

"They are looking for people with technical skills who can compliment their criminal business.

"They are looking to recruit those people.

"They try to induce and manipulate them."

Yup. We've moved past the "child predators are grooming your kids" moral panic, into the "evil cybercriminals are grooming those file sharers" moral panic.

And, of course, it's all happening in that scary, scary place known as the "dark web" (boo!)

"When I joined policing ... you had drug trafficking, organised immigration crime, firearms trafficking, you knew where to go to sell stolen property, you knew where to go to hire a hit man, frankly.

"Actually, we could control that and we managed that by covert policing, overt policing and an infrastructure around it.

"All of those things I've just described are now happening in a digital environment in what is loosely termed the dark web.

"On the dark web we have criminals operating there, trading guns, trading drugs.

"That is where the illegal commodities are being traded."

But, he insists, the police don't want mass surveillance. They want "A narrative... that reassures the public." Funny, then, that it appears most of his speech was a bunch of nonsense designed to scare the public, huh?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...to-crime.shtml

















Until next week,

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