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Old 29-01-14, 08:17 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 1st, '14

Since 2002


































"Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel Peace Prize." – AP


"Call him the artist formerly known as 'Plaintiff'." – TMZ






































February 1st, 2014




Dutch ISPs Drop Pirate Bay Blocks After Court Rules Them 'Ineffective'
Vlad Savov

The Netherlands has been at the forefront of battling online piracy through the enforcement of banning orders on internet service providers, and now the country's also leading the way in admitting that the strategy is not as effective as had been hoped. As Tweakers reports, a court in The Hague has ruled that blocks on The Pirate Bay have proven ineffectual in curbing P2P traffic and permitted local ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo to lift their ban on the file-sharing website. A spokesperson for XS4ALL has told Tweakers that the block has now been removed, though it will take some time for the DNS changes to propagate fully.

Today's judgment marks a successful appeal from the Dutch ISPs against a lower court ruling in 2012 instructing them to block access to The Pirate Bay. Initiated by the local anti-piracy group BREIN, the original lawsuit was seen as a victory for intellectual property advocates and was accompanied by similar demands being put on UK ISPs. With today's reversal, BREIN will have to pay 326,000 euro in damages to the affected broadband providers. Other Dutch ISPs like UPC and KPN that weren't subject to this ruling are maintaining their blocks for now, but it seems like a foregone conclusion at this point that they'll be following suit.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/28/53...em-ineffective





Record Company Sues Vietnamese File-Sharing Site
Victor Li

A record company has filed suit against a Vietnamese file-sharing site, accusing it of copyright violations.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Vietnamese entertainment company Lang Van had filed a complaint against several venture capital companies that own or have invested in file-sharing site Zing.vn. The complaint was filed on Jan. 22 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Massachusetts-based International Data Group, its venture capital arms IDG Ventures and IDG Ventures Vietnam, and Vietnam-based VNG Corp. The lawsuit accuses Zing.vn of offering 3,000 of Lang Van’s songs for free downloads in violation of the record company’s copyrights.

“The U.S.-based fund IDG Ventures directly contributed to the exponential growth of Zing.vn's website as well as the launch of the Zing Music website, bringing expertise, guidance and financial backing to help VNG grow its business,” Lang Van argued in its complaint. According to the complaint, Lang Van is seeking damages of $150,000 for each of the 3,000 alleged infringements on the site, for a maximum of $450 million.

The AP reports that Zing.vn has come under fire for alleged copyright violations in the past. The U.S. Trade Representative has put the site on its list of “notorious” copyright abusers. Meanwhile, Zing.vn lost two major advertisers when Samsung and Coca-Cola pulled their ads off the site over copyright concerns in 2012

VNG's head in Vietnam declined comment to the AP. IDG Ventures Vietnam released a statement saying that it had sold its shares in VNG in 2009.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/artic..._sharing_site/





Prince Sues 22 Fans For $1 Million Each For Linking To Bootlegs In Laughably Confused Complaint
Mike Masnick

There was a time, not even that long ago, when it seemed like Prince might have been the first musician to actually "get" the internet. He had done a few things that seemed really focused on embracing the internet, spreading his music more widely, and making revenue from alternate streams, such as concerts, sponsorships and fan clubs. But... it quickly became apparent that he was going in the other direction, and in an extreme manner -- in part, because it seemed like for all of his ideas, he failed at following through on most of them. Then, rather than blaming his own lack of execution, he seemed to lash out at the internet in almost every way possible. He insisted that the internet was over and that he'd never put any of his music online. He even claimed that digital music was bad for your brain.

He's also gone legal a bunch of times, suing a bunch of websites, threatening fan sites for posting photos and album covers on their sites, suing musicians for creating a tribute album for his birthday, issuing DMCA takedowns for videos that have his barely audible music playing in the background and 6-second Vine clips that are clearly fair use.

Given that, many may not be surprised about his his latest lawsuit against 22 fans who posted links to apparent bootleg recordings of Prince concerts, suing each of them for $1 million. However, the lawsuit takes it all up a notch from the insanity of his earlier actions. The lawsuit was first spotted by Antiquiet and got some attention from Spin, though neither seem to understand just how nutty the lawsuit actually is. Spin, incorrectly, claims he's suing "webmasters," but even that's not true. He's suing a bunch of users of Google's blogger platform and Facebook for linking to apparent bootlegs.

And that's not even the most bizarre part of the lawsuit. The lawyer who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Prince, Rhonda Trotter, claims to be an expert in copyright law, but you wouldn't get that from reading the lawsuit. First off, the main charge is for direct copyright infringement, but nothing in the complaint actually describes direct copyright infringement. At best (and even this is a stretch), you could argue that linking to files, all hosted on other sites, represents indirect infringement. Multiple courts have repeatedly made clear that linking is, at best, indirect infringement. And this lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of California, meaning it's in the 9th Circuit, which decided the Perfect 10 v. Amazon case that very clearly says that linking is not direct infringement. You'd think a copyright lawyer -- especially one based in the 9th circuit -- would know that.

Then there's the fact that Prince is suing each of the defendants for $1 million. The complaint seems quite confused about what it can ask for. While it does point to 17 USC 504, which lays out the damages that an infringer may be liable for, Trotter doesn't seem to understand how that section of the law works. It's pretty clear upfront that you get to ask for either "actual" damages or statutory damages. Most people ask for statutory damages, which can range from $750 to $150,000 per work infringed. Note that this is less than $1 million. How Trotter gets this up to $1 million seems to be... well... by magic:

In addition, Prince has suffered and is continuing to suffer damages in an amount according to proof, but no less than $1 million per Defendant and, in addition, is entitled to recover from Defendants costs and attorneys' fees pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 505.

Prince is also entitled to recover statutory damages pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 504 in an amount according to proof, but no less than $1 million per Defendant.


So... that first paragraph suggests there's some made up formula, by which they're going to claim that he's suffering actual damages over $1 million -- an argument that would almost certainly be laughed out of court, because proving actual damages in copyright infringement is no easy feat -- especially when it's a fan linking to a bootleg, where the "damage" is likely to be next to nothing. But then the lawsuit seems to incorrectly suggest that they can also get statutory damages. But you can't. The law is pretty explicit that it's an either-or thing. A copyright lawyer should know that. A copyright lawyer should also know that the limit on statutory damages is $150,000 per work. It is true that some defendants are listed as linking to multiple songs, so you could try to add up the $150k on each to get over a million, but at least one of the defendants is only accused of sharing 3 songs, which would cap the possible damages at $450k. But not in this lawsuit.

Oh yeah, and to get over $30,000, of course, you have to show willful infringement. The lawsuit claims that the "defendants' actions are and have been willful within the meaning of 17 U.S.C. § 504(2)." That's interesting and all, especially since there is no such section in the law. Trotter almost certainly means 17 USC 504(c)(2), but leaving out the (c) kind of shows just how ridiculously confused and sloppy the entire lawsuit is.

But even stepping back from how poorly drafted the complaint is, let's take a step back and ask the basic question: what sort of musician, in this day and age, thinks it makes sense to sue nearly two dozen fans for sharing bootlegs of their music on the internet -- an action that tends to be both the pinnacle of fandom, combined with almost certainly no actual loss of revenue. Fans interested in bootlegs tend to be the kinds of fans who buy everything and spend tons of money on live shows as well.

Once again, this seems to just be the nutty mind of Prince in action, concerning his ridiculous desire to control absolutely everything combined with someone who is not entirely in touch with reality. Every time I hear a story like this about Prince, I'm reminded of Kevin Smith's absolutely hilarious story about his experience with "Prince World."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...omplaint.shtml





Prince DROPS $22 Million Lawsuit Against Alleged Music Bootleggers [Update]

Call him the artist formerly known as "Plaintiff" ... 'cause TMZ has learned Prince has officially DROPPED his $22 MILLION lawsuit against 22 "bootleggers" who allegedly posted footage of his concerts online.

Prince has only filed the original lawsuit less than 2 weeks ago ... going after 22 anonymous bloggers (for $1 mil-a-piece) who posted concert footage on Facebook and other websites without Prince's permission.

But after news of the lawsuit went public ... it only took a few days before Prince decided to end his crusade on the bootleggers.

TMZ has obtained legal documents filed in federal court in California to dismiss his lawsuit ... but it's without prejudice, which means he could refile the suit if he feels like it. .


6:53 AM PT -- Prince's lawyer has issued a statement to TMZ explaining why the singer decided to drop the lawsuit: "Because of the recent pressure, the bootleggers have now taken down the illegal downloads and are no longer engaging in piracy."

"We recognize the fans craving for as much material as possible, but we’d prefer they get it from us directly than from third parties who are scalpers rather than real fans of our work."
http://www.tmz.com/2014/01/28/prince...#ixzz2rtuUPy3r





Quentin Tarantino Sues Gawker Over Hateful Eight Script Link

Quentin Tarantino says he will no longer produce The Hateful Eight as a film after the leak

US director Quentin Tarantino has sued gossip website Gawker for contributory copyright infringement after it posted a link to a leaked screenplay.

A link to The Hateful Eight script remained on Gawker's Defamer blog on Monday despite demands from Tarantino's lawyers to take it down.

They argued the site had effectively cost him royalties he might earn from the eventual publication of the script.

But Gawker said posting a link was part of its job to provide information.

"News of the fact that it existed on the internet advanced a story that Tarantino himself had launched, and our publication of the link was a routine and unremarkable component of our job: making people aware of news and information about which they are curious,'' the site's editor-in-chief John Cook said.

In a post, Gawker added it would be fighting the case, adding that, to its knowledge, "no claim of contributory infringement has prevailed in the US over a news story".

The lawsuit seeks damages of $1m (£603,000) against Gawker as well as $1m against the anonymous file-sharing site where the leaked script was hosted.
'Project abandoned'

Tarantino has previously published scripts of his films, a practice that in the past has earned him hefty royalties and advances.

"There was nothing newsworthy or journalistic about Gawker Media facilitating and encouraging the public's violation of [Tarantino's] copyright in the screenplay, and its conduct will not shield Gawker Media from liability for their unlawful activity," the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit also alleges the leak was originally only limited to a few people, and The Hateful Eight script did not appear online until after Gawker posted an item encouraging anyone who had a copy to leak it to them.

The writer-director blasted the leak last week in an interview with entertainment industry website Deadline.com and said he would abandon the project as a film.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25923343





U.S. Justice Department Files Lawsuits Over Counterfeit Apps
Zach Miners

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed its first lawsuits over counterfeit smartphone apps, charging four men who now face up to five years each in prison.

”These crimes involve the large-scale violation of intellectual property rights in a relatively new and rapidly growing market,” Mythili Raman, acting assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s criminal division, said in a statement Friday.

”While this represents the first counterfeit apps case by the Department of Justice, it exemplifies our longstanding commitment to prosecute those who steal the creative works of others,” she said.

The lawsuits, filed Thursday and Friday in the Northern District of Georgia, charge the four men with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. One lawsuit names Kody Jon Peterson, 22, of Clermont, Florida; while the other is against Thomas Allen Dye, 21, and Nicholas Anthony Narbone, 26, both of Orlando, Florida; and Thomas Pace, 38, of Oregon City, Oregon, the DOJ said.

In each case, the men are accused of conspiring to copy Android apps and distributing more than a million copies of them through online markets they set up called Snappzmarket and Appbucket. The markets were shut down last year—the first time domains involving mobile app marketplaces had been seized, the DOJ said.

The defendants acted without permission from the developers of the apps, which are otherwise sold through legitimate sites like Google Play, the DOJ said. It didn’t say which apps were involved. A DOJ spokesperson, citing court records, said the accused charged a subscription fee for the online markets.

Snappzmarket operated between May 2011 and August 2012, and Appbucket between August 2010 and August 2012, the DOJ said. Court records show that during a five-month period in 2010, Narbone allegedly received more than $60,000 in subscriptions to Appbucket, the DOJ spokesperson said.

Google’s Android is the most widely used mobile operating system, and the lawsuits show how smartphone apps have become a target for counterfeiters.

”We are committed to protecting copyright owners, and we will continue to vigorously prosecute those who steal all forms of copyrighted work,” U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of the Northern District of Georgia said in the statement.

Peterson was arraigned Thursday; Dye, Narbone, and Pace were arraigned Friday, the DOJ said.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20913...feit-apps.html





The FCC is ‘Beta Testing’ a Next-Gen Telephone Network
Brian Fung

Federal regulators have taken their first major step in accelerating the country's move toward high-capacity, fiber optic phone networks. In a unanimous vote Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission approved a program of trials designed to study the effects of shifting consumers onto next-generation infrastructure that will be able to carry advanced services like HD voice calls and video.

The trials will be set up in select places around the country by participating carriers as a prelude to a much larger transition that will have the nation's phone calls routed using the same Internet Protocol that powers the Web. The move led some at the FCC to draw comparisons to a sexier industry, software development.

"Sandbox thinking is very popular among start-ups in Silicon Valley, but why not put it to use in Washington?" said FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. "Testing big ideas in a small way is a good way to understand the consequences of our policy choices and the impact on consumers before unleashing them on the world at large."

Among the announced projects so far are an experiment to see whether emergency communications will be disrupted by the IP transition, and how the new networks might help deliver high-speed broadband to rural America. Other studies will examine how to assign new phone numbers in an "all-IP" world. And phone companies themselves are being encouraged to submit their own proposals before a deadline of Feb. 20. The FCC plans to evaluate those submissions and approve or reject them in its May open meeting.

Another commissioner, Ajit Pai, called the plan a necessary "beta test" before the country can consider switching off the old telephone network later this decade.

U.S. consumers are gradually abandoning the old, copper-based phone network for other services already. More than a third of adults use cellphones as their only form of phone service, up from just 5 percent a decade ago. Because federal regulations require phone companies to maintain the plain, old telephone system even as they continue building out advanced networks, many in the industry argue that the arrangement imposes costs and holds back investment in the future.

Meanwhile, consumer advocates caution that moving too quickly to an IP-based phone network could leave some Americans behind.

"We want to make sure that this is an upgrade for everybody, not an upgrade for some and a downgrade for others," said Harold Feld, senior vice president at the public interest group Public Knowledge.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...phone-network/





The Buck Stops at the FCC
Michael Copps

Since the DC Court threw out the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet rules last week, “network neutrality” is a glaring problem that demands prompt action. The good news is that the solution is pretty simple. It doesn’t require a new telecommunications statute replete with time-consuming years of legislative horse-trading and special interest lobbying. All it requires is an FCC big enough to own up to its previous mistakes and courageous enough to put our communications future back on track. The solution: reclassify broadband as “telecommunications” under Title II of the Communications Act.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals pointed the way out of the dilemma created when the FCC reclassified broadband as an “information service” over ten years ago. The Court held that the Commission has authority to make decisions on broadband and that these decisions are entitled to considerable deference by the judiciary. The FCC could have decided on a different path and still garnered court approval. Importantly, it can also change course if it justifies the reasons for the change. What the judges said last week was that the Commission justified its Open Internet rules the wrong way. Had the agency just kept treating advanced telecommunications as “telecommunications,” its Internet Freedom rules would have passed muster. But by calling broadband an “information service,” the FCC put it beyond the reach of Title II which applies to telecommunications. And Title II is where such things as consumer protections, privacy guarantees, public safety, and ubiquitous build-out requirements pertain. Who, other than the big companies trying to gain market power over broadband, would ever have argued that Congress intended broadband communications to be stripped of such elemental consumer and public interest protections?

The time is now for the FCC to classify broadband as Title II. Without this step, we are playing fast-and-loose with the most opportunity-creating technology in all of communications history. Without this step, we are guaranteeing an Internet future of toll-booths, gatekeepers and preferential carriage. Without this step, we stifle innovation, put consumers under the thumb of special interests, and pull the props from under the kind of rich civic dialogue that only open and non-discriminatory communications can provide

Saying that the solution is simple is not the same as saying it is easy. No matter what course the Commission chooses, powerful forces will contest it. If the Commission, instead of reclassifying broadband as what it is, attempts some new and novel reading of the statute, it is just inviting more years of detour and delay. And every month of delay only gives the big telephone and cable companies more time and opportunity to make the Internet…theirs.

Some argue that the best way out of the dilemma is for Congress to enact a new Telecommunications Law. Last week, the House Subcommittee on Communication and Technology held a hearing on the adequacy of the current statute, the Telecommunications Act of 1996. I had the honor to testify there. I believe the testimony of that hearing is pertinent to the challenge of how we should proceed to guarantee an Open Internet and to ensure that every American has access to it.

Some say that simply because the Act is old, it must be obsolete -- that no matter how well it has served us, an act written 18 years ago cannot possibly have relevance in today’s world. (The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written long ago, too, yet we still find them relevant.) While it is praiseworthy to ponder changes to the law, I would suggest, firstly, that the framework of the current statute remains in many ways strong and, secondly, that the current Act’s provisions can still do much to improve our communications landscape, to enlarge economic and social opportunity for all of us, and to nourish the kind of civic dialogue upon which successful self-government inevitably depends.

It is impossible for me to see the stars aligned to produce a new law -- especially a good new law. I discussed this in my testimony. The last Telecommunications Act rewrite in 1996 resulted from a unique political constellation that aligned a sufficient and sundry number of stakeholders across sectors and constituencies who were able to negotiate a compromise statute that, while far from perfect, at least envisioned delivering to all American -- no matter who they are, where they live, or the particular circumstances of their individual lives -- the most advanced communications technologies and services feasible, at reasonable and comparable prices, replete with consumer protections, rights of privacy, and assurances of public safety.

But the ink was hardly dry on the new law before some of the very interests who helped negotiate it went to work undermining it instead of implementing it. The statute called for competition, but the big companies worked day-in, day-out to make sure smaller providers were squeezed out (or bought up and made part of the consolidated giants). They went to work on the FCC, too, extracting industry-friendly decisions to drive competitors out. As a Commissioner, I testified in front of Congress many times to voice my dissent on Commission decisions involving the reclassification of communications services, industry consolidation across both our telecom and media sectors, the elimination of policies that had long safeguarded the public interest, and the heavy toll thereby exacted on consumer choices, consumer prices, and slowing the deployment of competitive, low-cost, high-speed broadband -- this century’s most important infrastructure.

Truth is, our country isn’t blazing many trails when it comes to getting high-speed, low-cost, open broadband out to all our people. I know there are some who argue that America is a veritable broadband wonderland, a triumph of free market entrepreneurship that puts us at the forefront of high-tech nations. But stubborn facts belie their easy optimism. The United States, originator of so much of the technology behind the Internet, has fallen from leader to laggard in broadband penetration. According to the OECD, our country is 16th in wired broadband connections per 100 residents. Worse, comparative research shows that Americans are paying more and getting less than wired broadband consumers in competitor countries. The Department of Justice has noted that the local wireless marketplace offers consumers little in the way of choice, even as mobile data plans are saddled with data caps that harm consumption and innovation alike. And once again, for the third time, the FCC found itself unable to certify that we enjoy a competitive wireless marketplace. Surely the time is now for proactive and pro-consumer measures to make quality broadband universally affordable once and for all.

While I don’t write today to rehash all those decisions, let us recognize that our present statute has been interpreted and implemented in ways not originally intended and that many of its constituent parts are still relevant, workable, and consumer-friendly. There is a statute to enforce, and putting that job on hold while we consider changing it is not a good option. Placing it on-hold only gives telecom and media giants more time to take broadband and Internet technologies down the road to further consolidation and gatekeeper control.

Finding a new correlation of interests that can come together to forge the Communications Act of 2015 or 2020 would be even more challenging than the jockeying that gave birth to the current law. And, since the power of money has grown exponentially even since 1996, any proposed legislation that actually advanced would likely be measurably worse than the current law. As the world races ahead, we have a duty to make the best possible use of the laws we have in order to achieve the ongoing goals Congress laid out. These remain powerful instruments. A statute that invokes “the public interest” over 100 times; that highlights universality of service, competition, and consumer protection; and that underlines the necessity for media that informs communities and engages citizens cannot be all bad.

I always come back to democracy, because this is what concerns me most. Our country is in trouble, reminiscent in many ways of the severity of the economic, global and social crises it faced in the 1930s, and there are no guaranteed happy outcomes. I just do not see how citizens can be expected to navigate through all these issues and come out with smart decisions for our nation’s future when the telecommunications tools we need are not available to all and in a media environment where community outlets have been short-circuited, investigative journalism hangs by a life thread, and wherein we expect some invisible hand to produce those things that the market itself no longer produces and which, over the course of our history, the market alone has never produced. Communications are vital to our economy. Even more importantly, they are the life-blood of our democracy. They must be available to all, open to all, never the exclusive province of the affluent or the few, always alive to the common good. We should not see our communications world as part telecom, part media or part traditional media and part “new” media. We have one communications ecosystem and our job is to make it work for everyone. I know of no greater challenge that confronts the Congress, the Commission, or the country.

So the time for action is now. Soon a coalition of citizens will deliver petitions to the FCC calling on the agency to take the obvious step of reclassifying broadband to protect consumers, innovation, and online free speech. Hundreds of thousands of everyday people from across the land have already signed on, and there is still time to add your name. Do it today -- then ask your friends to do the same.
http://benton.org/node/172880





Kansas Legislature Wants To Stop Any Other Kansas Cities From Getting Google Fiber
Kate Cox

The Kansas state legislature is currently considering a bill that would prohibit municipalities in that state from building out their own municipal broadband networks. Completely coincidentally of course we’re sure, Kansas City is home to the country’s first Google Fiber municipal network.

The bill, called the “municipal communications network and private telecommunications investment safeguards act,” has as its stated goals to:

• Ensure that video, telecommunications and broadband services are provided through fair competition … in order to provide the widest possible diversity of sources of information, news and entertainment to the general public
• Encourage the development and widespread use of technological advances in providing video, telecommunications and broadband services at competitive rates
• Ensure that video, telecommunications and broadband services are each provided within a consistent, comprehensive and nondiscriminatory federal, state and local government framework

To that supposed end of increased competition and innovation in the broadband marketplace, the bill (PDF) specifies:

Except with regard to unserved areas, a municipality may not, directly or indirectly:

(1) Offer to provide to one or more subscribers, video, telecommunications or broadband service; or

(2) purchase, lease, construct, maintain or operate any facility for the purpose of enabling a private business or entity to offer, provide, carry, or deliver video, telecommunications or broadband service to one or more subscribers.


The exemption for “unserved areas” isn’t much of an exemption. Rather than being for underserved areas, where competition and increased speeds would still be very welcomed, the exemption for unserved areas has a very specific and limited definition. An unserved area is “one or more contiguous census blocks within the legal boundaries of a municipality” where 9 out of 10 households don’t have access to fixed broadband, mobile broadband, or satellite broadband at the “minimum transmission speed” defined by the FCC–currently a download speed of 3 Mbps.

The proposed law would not apply retroactively to existing networks, meaning that Kansas City would be allowed to keep its Google Fiber, but that no other city in the state would be able to make the same leap.

Kansas City laid out significant incentives for Google to come hook up their city to a speedy, reliable network. Existing broadband providers like Time Warner Cable did not particularly appreciate Google’s receiving those incentives. Cable companies in general are not exactly fans of municipal networks. And yet the added competition among broadband carriers, or even the specter of it, works out well for consumers.

A law that claims to protect competition by prohibiting competitors from entering the field? That’s an interesting trick. In its very limited expansion so far, municipal fiber doesn’t seem to end competition as much as it seems to increase it.

Other states have attempted similar legislation in recent years; a bill barring municipal broadband in Georgia failed to pass in 2013.
http://consumerist.com/2014/01/30/ka...-google-fiber/





Time Warner Cable's Profit Up as Internet Subscribers Rise

Time Warner Cable Inc, which recently rejected a takeover offer from Charter Communications Inc, posted better-than-expected quarterly results as its high-speed data subscribers opted for expensive plans.

In the fourth quarter, the U.S. cable operator added 39,000 net residential Internet subscribers, a turnaround from a weak third quarter when it lost 24,000 subscribers.

The company said residential subscriber activity improved sequentially each month in the quarter and continued to improve in January.

Cable operators in the United States are increasingly depending on Internet customers for growth as they face rising programming costs and continue to lose cable TV subscribers to telecom and satellite companies.

Time Warner Cable, which ranks second to Comcast Corp in the U.S. cable market, has attracted takeover interest from John Malone's Liberty Media Corp, the largest investor in Charter.

Net income attributable to Time Warner Cable rose 5 percent to $540 million, or $1.89 per share, in the fourth quarter, from $513 million, or $1.68 per share, a year earlier.

Revenue rose about 2 percent to $5.58 billion. The company said it lost 217,000 residential video customers in the quarter.

Analysts on average expected earnings of $1.73 per share on revenue of $5.56 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Shares of the company closed at $132.10 on Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Neha Alawadhi in Bangalore; Editing by Savio D'Souza)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A0T0Q220140130





What the "Spoiled Onions" Paper Means for Tor Users
phw

Together with Stefan, I recently published the paper "Spoiled Onions: Exposing Malicious Tor Exit Relays". The paper only discusses our results and how we obtained them and we don't talk a lot about the implications for Tor users. This blog post should fill that gap.

First, it's important to understand that 25 relays in four months isn't a lot. It is ultimately a very small fraction of the Tor network. Also, it doesn't mean that 25 out of 1,000 relays are malicious or misconfigured (we weren't very clear on that in the paper). We have yet to calculate the churn rate of exit relays which is the rate at which relays join and leave the network. 1,000 is really just the approximate number of exit relays at any given point in time. So the actual number of exit relays we ended up testing in four months is certainly higher than that. As a user, that means that you will not see many malicious relays "in the wild".

Second, Tor clients select relays in their circuits based on the bandwidth they are contributing to the network. Faster relays see more traffic than slower relays which balances the load in the Tor network. Many of the malicious exit relays contributed relatively little bandwidth to the Tor network which makes them quite unlikely to be chosen as relay in a circuit.

Third, even if your traffic is going through a malicious exit relay, it doesn't mean that everything is lost. Many of the attacks we discovered still caused Firefox' infamous "about:certerror" warning page. As a vigilant user, you would notice that something isn't quite right and hopefully leave the site. In addition, TorBrowser ships with HTTPS-Everywhere which by default attempts to connect to some sites over HTTPS even though you just typed "http://". After all, as we said in the past, "Plaintext over Tor is still plaintext".

Finally, we want to point out that all of these attacks are of course not limited to the Tor network. You face the very same risks when you are connecting to any public WiFi network. One of the fundamental problems is the broken CA system. Do you actually know all the ~50 organisation who you implicitly trust when you start your Firefox, Chrome, or TorBrowser? Making the CA system more secure is a very challenging task for the entire Internet and not just the Tor network.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/wha...eans-tor-users





Did this Tor Developer Become the First Known Victim of the NSA's Laptop Interception Program?
sosadmin

Last night Andrea Shepard, a core Tor developer living in Seattle, posted this message to Twitter:

You'd think #NSA shipment 'interdiction' would be more subtle... pic.twitter.com/KVCscLbdgG

— Andrea (@puellavulnerata) January 24, 2014

The image she linked to shows the shipment tracking details for a computer Shepard ordered from Amazon, the global internet superstore and cloud computing giant that in late 2013 secured a $600 million contract with the CIA. Here's the image; click to enlarge it.

As you can see, the tracking details are highly unusual. Instead of shipping the computer directly from the Amazon storage facility in Santa Ana, California, to Shepard in Seattle, the package was first dispatched to Dulles, Virginia. From Dulles, it moved another four times around the military and intelligence belt in suburban Washington DC, finally landing in Alexandria at 11:03 am on January 23.

Contrary to Amazon's shipment tracking summary, Virginia is not the package's final destination. Shepard does not live in Alexandria and told Amazon to ship the computer to a Seattle, Washington address. You can see this for yourself in the top right hand corner of the image.

At the end of December 2013, journalists working for the German newspaper Der Spiegel published information about a top-secret arm of the NSA, called the Tailored Access Operations division. TAO does highly targeted surveillance, a world apart from the indiscriminate, mass surveillance that happens under other NSA and FBI programs. One of the more alarming things we learned in the TAO story is that the NSA intercepts computers ordered online and installs malware on them, before sending them on to their final destination.

Could this be what happened to Shepard's computer, ordered on Amazon and delivered to Alexandria, instead of to Seattle? Could Amazon have made a mistake in notifying Shepard about this extra journey, which was likely meant to stay a secret? If this really is an example of the TAO laptop-interception program in action, does this mean that companies like Amazon are made aware of the government's intention to "look after" consumer products ordered by their customers? Or did Shepard receive this weird notice only after some sort of glitch in the NSA's surveillance matrix?

If this indeed is evidence of the NSA intercepting a laptop to install spyware on it, it's yet more proof that, even when the spying is highly targeted and precise, the NSA isn't necessarily using its powers to only go after terrorists or dangerous criminals. Shepard is neither a criminal nor a terrorist. She's a developer, an activist, and a free speech supporter.

Is that all it takes to become a victim of the NSA's targeted spying? Someone should ask Amazon and the NSA what happened here, so we can get to the bottom of this bizarre situation. If in fact the NSA is installing malware on the computers of activists and coders working to protect internet anonymity, the government has a lot of explaining to do. If this is the case, it shows that even highly-targeted surveillance can be wildly abused, if agencies are left to fester in the dark to do whatever they want.
http://privacysos.org/node/1311





If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox
Kevin Poulsen

While investigating a hosting company known for sheltering child porn last year the FBI incidentally seized the entire e-mail database of a popular anonymous webmail service called TorMail.

Now the FBI is tapping that vast trove of e-mail in unrelated investigations.

The bureau’s data windfall, seized from a company called Freedom Hosting, surfaced in court papers last week when prosecutors indicted a Florida man for allegedly selling counterfeit credit cards online. The filings show the FBI built its case in part by executing a search warrant on a Gmail account used by the counterfeiters, where they found that orders for forged cards were being sent to a TorMail e-mail account: “platplus@tormail.net.”

Acting on that lead in September, the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau’s own copy of “data and information from the TorMail e-mail server, including the content of TorMail e-mail accounts,” according to the complaint (.pdf) sworn out by U.S. Postal Inspector Eric Malecki.

The tactic suggests the FBI is adapting to the age of big-data with an NSA-style collect-everything approach, gathering information into a virtual lock box, and leaving it there until it can obtain specific authority to tap it later. There’s no indication that the FBI searched the trove for incriminating evidence before getting a warrant. But now that it has a copy of TorMail’s servers, the bureau can execute endless search warrants on a mail service that once boasted of being immune to spying.

“We have no information to give you or to respond to any subpoenas or court orders,” read TorMail’s homepage. “Do not bother contacting us for information on, or to view the contents of a TorMail user inbox, you will be ignored.”

In another e-mail case, the FBI last year won a court order compelling secure e-mail provider Lavabit to turn over the master encryption keys for its website, which would have given agents the technical ability to spy on all of Lavabit’s 400,000 users – though the government said it was interested only in one. (Rather than comply, Lavabit shut down and is appealing the surveillance order).

TorMail was the webmail provider of choice for denizens of the so-called Darknet of anonymous and encrypted websites and services, making the FBI’s cache extraordinarily valuable. The affair also sheds a little more light on the already-strange story of the FBI’s broad attack on Freedom Hosting, once a key service provider for untraceable websites.

Freedom Hosting specialized in providing turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by those seeking to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – human rights groups and journalists as well as serious criminal elements.

By some estimates, Freedom Hosting backstopped fully half of all hidden services at the time it was shut down last year — TorMail among them. But it had a reputation for tolerating child pornography on its servers. In July, the FBI moved on the company and had the alleged operator, Eric Eoin Marques, arrested at his home in Ireland. The U.S. is now seeking his extradition for allegedly facilitating child porn on a massive scale; hearings are set to begin in Dublin this week.

According to the new document, the FBI obtained the data belonging to Freedom Hosting’s customers through a Mutual Legal Assistance request to France – where the company leased its servers – between July 22, 2013 and August 2 of last year.

That’s two days before all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting , including TorMail, began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page, on August 4.

Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to de-anonymize users with slightly outdated versions of Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. Though the FBI hasn’t commented (and declined to speak for this story), the malware’s behavior was consistent with the FBI’s spyware deployments, now known as a “Network Investigative Technique.”

No mass deployment of the FBI’s malware had ever before been spotted in the wild.

The attack through TorMail alarmed many in the Darknet, including the underground’s most notorious figure — Dread Pirate Roberts, the operator of the Silk Road drug forum, who took the unusual step of posting a warning on the Silk Road homepage. An analysis he wrote on the associated forum now seems prescient.

“I know that MANY people, vendors included, used TorMail,” he wrote. “You must think back through your TorMail usage and assume everything you wrote there and didn’t encrypt can be read by law enforcement at this point and take action accordingly. I personally did not use the service for anything important, and hopefully neither did any of you.” Two months later the FBI arrested San Francisco man Ross William Ulbricht as the alleged Silk Road operator.

The connection, if any, between the FBI obtaining Freedom Hosting’s data and apparently launching the malware campaign through TorMail and the other sites isn’t spelled out in the new document. The bureau could have had the cooperation of the French hosting company that Marques leased his servers from. Or it might have set up its own Tor hidden services using the private keys obtained from the seizure, which would allow it to adopt the same .onion addresses used by the original sites.

The French company also hasn’t been identified. But France’s largest hosting company, OVH, announced on July 29, in the middle of the FBI’s then-secret Freedom Hosting seizure, that it would no longer allow Tor software on its servers. A spokesman for the company says he can’t comment on specific cases, and declined to say whether Freedom Hosting was a customer.

“Wherever the data center is located, we conduct our activities in conformity with applicable laws, and as a hosting company, we obey search warrants or disclosure orders,” OVH spokesman Benjamin Bongoat told WIRED. “This is all we can say as we usually don’t make any comments on hot topics.”

(Hat-Tip: Brian Krebs)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/tormail/





Don’t Be Surprised If Your TV Soon Seems to Know Everything About Your Politics
Brian Fung

By now, you're probably aware that much of your online behavior is tracked, logged and probably sold to third parties so that marketers can better target you with ads. Targeted advertising has become a fixture of the Web, in part because Internet browsing generates a wealth of useful data that's easily studied.

Television is a bit of a different story. Take traditional, over-the-air broadcast. For advertisers, it's the media equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun: not terribly accurate, but extremely effective when it does find the mark. Now, however, targeted advertising on television has taken a big leap forward. And it could represent the next evolution in data-empowered politics.

Dish Network and DirecTV on Monday announced a plan to jointly give political advertisers the ability to microtarget their ads down to the household level. That means that any of over 20 million homes in the United States will soon start getting highly personalized campaign spots that were meant just for them.

Here's how it works: While your set-top box is idle, it'll tune into a channel that's playing the ad you're meant to see. It'll record the ad using DVR, then insert it into your regular programming while you're watching a show — replacing or bumping the ad that was supposed to air instead. This can be replicated for any household that subscribes to Dish or DirecTV, so a political strategist can pick you out and feed you a unique message.

Some TV targeting is possible already. Individually, Dish and DirecTV have offered "addressable advertising" on their own networks for about two years. But, says Carol Davidsen, a former media targeting director for President Obama's 2012 campaign, it's never been available at this scale. That's why political operatives find this exciting: It gives them access to a far larger pool of potential test subjects for their material. That's right: Satellite TV subscribers are about to be subjected to the same rigorous testing that informed the Obama campaign's use of catchy e-mail headers.

Though this might inspire fantasies of a different ad that's custom-made each for seniors, soccer moms and single youths, the reality is that most campaigns won't be able to afford it. It's simply too expensive for your average campaign to get actors or B-roll for multiple ads.

"It's more for testing creative and testing the persuasiveness of an ad" than trying to convince undecided voters, said Davidsen in an interview.

For now at least, addressable advertising will be mainly used on a small scale to evaluate two versions of the same ad before a campaign embarks on a much larger media buy. Most likely, strategists say, the ads will be followed by phone calls asking viewers about the impact of what they saw — adopting what are essentially polling methods. That's actually a major improvement over the current method of focus grouping content in small, less-standardized settings. The benefit of smushing Dish and DirecTV's customer base together is that the combined sample size is much larger than before, and more representative.

But in the long run, statewide campaigns will also be using the feature to better target that core message to the people they really want to reach, all while ignoring those that can't be persuaded. Think of it this way: If you know that a certain neighborhood is home to 100 people, a quarter of whom are on your side already and a quarter of whom are voting for the other guy, that leaves 50 people who might be susceptible to your message. Rather than blanketing the whole neighborhood with your ad and hoping it reaches the right 50 people, it's more useful to know with certainty which homes you ought to target. Once you do, you can follow up and identify who will be more easily swayed in future rounds, and the whole system repeats itself.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...your-politics/





Retailers Ask: Where Did Teenagers Go?
Elizabeth A. Harrisjan

Luring young shoppers into traditional teenage clothing stores has become a tough sell.

When 19-year-old Tsarina Merrin thinks of a typical shopper at some of the national chains, she doesn’t think of herself, her friends or even contemporaries.

“When I think of who is shopping at Abercrombie,” she said, “I think it’s more of people’s parents shopping for them.”

Sales are down across the shelves of many traditional teenage apparel retailers, and some analysts and others suggest that it’s not just a tired fashion sense causing the slump. The competition for teenage dollars, at a time of high unemployment within that age group, spans from more stores to shop in to more tempting technology.

And sometimes phones loaded with apps or a game box trump the latest in jeans.

Mainstays in the industry like Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters and Aéropostale, which dominated teenage closets for years, have been among those hit hard.

The grim reports of the last holiday season have already proved punishing for senior executives at the helm of a few retailers. In a move that caught many analysts by surprise, the chief executive of American Eagle, Robert L. Hanson, announced he was leaving the company last week. And on Tuesday, Abercrombie announced they were making several changes to the company’s board and leadership, including separating the role of chief executive and chairman.

Aside from those shake-ups, analysts are saying they do not expect much improvement in this retail sector any time soon.

According to a survey of analysts conducted by Thomson Reuters, sales at teenage apparel retailers open for more than a year, like Wet Seal, Zumiez, Abercrombie and American Eagle, are expected to be 6.4 percent lower in the fourth quarter over the previous period. That is worse than any other retail category.

“It’s enough to make you think the teen is going to be walking around naked,” said John D. Morris, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. “What happened to them?”

Paul Lejuez, an analyst at Wells Fargo, said he and his team put out a note in May on the health of the teenage sector and department stores called “Watch Out for the Kid With the Cough.” (Aéropostale was the coughing teenager.) Nonetheless, he said, “We ended up being surprised just how bad things got so quickly. There’s really no sign of life anywhere among the traditional players.”

Causes are ticked off easily. Mentioned often is the high teenage unemployment rate, reaching 20.2 percent among 16- to 19-year-olds, far above the national rate of 6.7 percent.

Cheap fashion has also driven a more competitive market. So-called fast-fashion companies, like Forever 21 and H&M, which sell trendy clothes at low prices, have muscled into the space, while some department stores and discount retailers like T. J. Maxx now cater to teenagers, as well.

“You can buy a plaid shirt at Abercrombie that’s like $70,” said Daniela Donayre, 17, standing in a Topshop in Manhattan. “Or I can go to Forever 21 and buy the same shirt for $20.”

Online shopping, which has been roiling the industry for years, may play an especially pronounced role in the teenage sector, analysts say. A study of a group of teenagers released in the fall by Piper Jaffray found that more than three-fourths of young men and women said they shopped online.

Not only did teenagers grow up on the Internet, but it has shaped and accelerated fashion cycles. Things take off quickly and fade even faster, watched by teenagers who are especially sensitive to the slightest shift in the winds of a trend.

Matthew McClintock, an analyst at Barclays, pointed to Justin Bieber as an example.

“Today, if you saw that Justin Bieber got arrested drag-racing,” Mr. McClintock said, “and you saw in the picture that he had on a cool red shirt, then you can go online and find that cool red shirt and have it delivered to you in two days from some boutique in Los Angeles.

“Ten years ago, teens were dependent on going to Abercrombie & Fitch and buying from the select items that Mike Jeffries, the C.E.O., thought would be popular nine months ago.”

Just last week, Mr. Bieber’s mug shot from his arrest showed him in a red jail-like top.

And this week, Mr. Jeffries lost one of his titles, chairman, which he held since 1996. He will continue on the board as a director and as the company’s chief executive.

In other shuffling, Abercrombie announced that the chief financial officer, Jonathan E. Ramsden, would become the chief operating officer, which is a new position at the company.

The announcement about Mr. Jeffries along with the elimination of the company’s shareholder rights plan — which is designed to prevent potential buyers from acquiring too much control of the company — was greeted favorably by the stock market when it was announced.

Earlier, Brian P. Logan, Abercrombie’s vice president for finance, released a statement in response to questions about the company’s health and the sector’s difficulties. In the statement, Mr. Logan said Abercrombie was “pleased” with its holiday performance, during which sales fell 6 percent over the previous year, because the company expected it to be worse.

Another factor chipping away at teenage retailers may be the shifting priorities among young people. Where clothing was once the key to signaling a teenager’s identity, other items may have become more important and now compete for their dollars.

“Probably the most important thing a teenage boy has is his smartphone,” said Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. “Second, is probably his sneakers. Third, maybe, we get to his jeans.”

What may trump all of those, Mr. Jaffe said, are gaming systems, especially over the last few months, because Xbox and PlayStation both released new game consoles in 2013. That may have taken a bite out of what teenagers had to spend on clothes.

But analysts also point to other broad factors, like still limited discretionary spending on the part of some parents, or too many store locations.

More immediately, it could be an issue of fashion. Last year was also a year that came and went without any must-have trends that might have helped nudge teenagers toward the mall, as brightly colored pants did in the previous years.

Many companies have had their own unique mix of challenges. The Urban Outfitters brand, for example, which focuses on teenagers more than the company’s other stores, Free People and Anthropologie, blamed a 1 percent dip in third-quarter sales on fashion misses.

At Abercrombie, analysts say, part of their problem is almost the opposite — that they do not focus on fashion enough, and what is on the racks does not substantially change.

“I was a fan, in middle school,” said Ava Tunnicliffe, 20. “I feel like style has moved on, and Abercrombie hasn’t.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/bu...nagers-go.html





FileZilla Has an Evil Twin that Steals FTP Logins

A deftly rendered, malicious version of the most-popular open-source FTP client looks just like the genuine article.
Kevin Fogarty

On the same day the world discovered Western intelligence agencies were siphoning user information from Angry Birds and other popular smartphone apps, a leading antivirus developer revealed hackers are doing the same thing with one of the most popular open-source applications on the Internet.

Maliciously modified versions of the popular file-transfer protocol (FTP) application FileZilla look and act just like the real thing, but include extra code that steals the login data typed in by users and sends it to an unauthorized server using the same FTP operation launched by the user without going through a firewall that might spot what it’s doing, according to an alert posted this afternoon by antivirus developer Avast Software.

FileZilla is the ninth most-downloaded application from the open-source site SourceForge, with 256.8 million downloads over its lifetime and almost 600,000 this week alone.

The malicious version is fully functional, uses the same graphical interface and component file names as the original, and masks itself further by avoiding any suspicious entries in the system registry, overt attempts to communicate with outside servers or other changes, according to the Jan. 27 alert from Avast.

The most obvious differences are that the poisoned version of filezilla.exe is 6.8MB smaller than the real thing and there are two DLL libraries included in the fake that are not present in the original. They are labeled ibgcc_s_dw2-1.dll and libstdc++-6.dll, according to Avast.

The official version’s Nullsoft installer is v2.45-Unicode; the evil twin uses v2.46.3-Unicode.

Automatic updates also fail on the poisoned version “which is most likely a protection to prevent overwriting of the malware binaries,” according to Avast.

Under the covers, however, something naughty is going on.

The evil twin includes a set of hardcoded functions that grab copies of the username and password every time a user logs in to an FTP site, converts it to the format “ftp://username:password@ftp.domain.com:port,” encodes it using a base64 algorithm and sends it to the attacker’s using a custom-installed user agent and the WS2_32.send API interface.

The attacker’s site uses the IP address of a German server that is linked to sites in Russia registered by Russian domain-name registrar NAUNET, which has been accused of harboring servers distributing malware, spam, or acting as part of criminal botnets.

“The whole operation is very quick and quiet. Log in details are sent to attackers from the ongoing FTP connection only once,” according to the report. “Malware doesn’t search bookmarks or send any other files or saved connections.”

The biggest danger is that the malware version of the FileZilla client doesn’t do anything that would raise a user’s suspicions, so each version could be in use for a long time. Because the infection is in an application designed specifically to connect to secure servers and exchange files, malicious versions of FTP software could spread itself to otherwise secure servers and use permission to use FTP to upload “whole webpage source code containing database login, payment system, customer private information, etc.,” according to the report.

The best way to avoid the evil twin is to make sure downloads come only from trusted sites, avoid sites using custom downloaders and avoid installers that have adware or other add-on application installed as well, the report recommends.

Malicious versions of the FileZilla client use the following IDs, though they may not be limited only to the following:

Malicious Installer v3.5.3:
SHA256: 595D954C7CE574337C97A0801E779BC3DCA94FC92AFAE8F483DCDD1A053C 5C24

Malicious FileZilla.exe v3.5.3
SHA256: 525E9ED135C1435772A774D7AD7168CECCD225E354118E621482DB61174F 6734

Malicious Installer v3.7.3
SHA256: B9A12F9B6827144D84E65EF2BA454D77CB423C5E136F44BC8D3163D93B97 F11F

Malicious FileZilla.exe v3.7.3
SHA256: 2451599C03B136C1848F538184F0F266973B65AFC8DD25F272A7E6B0555B 657A

http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter...ls-ftp-logins/





Some of the Biggest Names in Cryptography Condemn NSA Spying in Open Letter
Andrea Peterson

Some of the biggest names in cryptography and computer science just released an open letter condemning the surveillance practices of the U.S government. "Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features," said a statement posted to masssurveillance.info. "As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed."

In a speech last week, President Obama addressed concerns related to NSA's 215 domestic phone records collection program, but he did not remark on reports that the U.S. government had weakened encryption as part of its practices.

Among the group that signed the letter are more than 50 experts in the field. Several are ex-federal employees, including Ed Felten, now the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and who was the Federal Trade Commission's first chief technologist. The FTC's second chief technologist, Steve Bellovin, who is now a professor at Columbia University, also signed the letter.

Some signers have received funding from defense agencies for research, including Bryan Ford, an assistant professor at Yale University whose CV lists multiple DARPA awards, and MIT professor Nickolai Zeldovich, who lists DARPA among the supporters of his research. Another signer, Georgia Institute of Technology professor Lee Wenke, lists funding from DARPA, the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office.

Others have fewer government ties but are significant figures in computer science or cryptography fields, including MIT professors Hal Abelson, who was the founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, and Ron Rivest, one of the pioneers of modern public key cryptography.

The signers of the letter say they are united by their dismay at the recently revealed NSA actions, which they believe threaten the technological infrastructure of society. "The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy," they explain."The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...n-open-letter/





Issa, Five Other Congressmen Call For DNI Clapper’s Removal
Dennis Fisher

A group of six Congressmen have asked President Barack Obama to remove James Clapper as director of national intelligence as a result of his misstatements to Congress about the NSA’s dragnet data-collection programs. The group, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said that Clapper’s role as DNI “is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs”.

In March, Clapper, the country’s highest-ranking intelligence official, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and was asked by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) whether the NSA collects information in bulk on Americans. The hearing took place three months before the Edward Snowden leaks began, and Clapper responded that the agency does not collect such information, at least not knowingly.

“No sir,” Clapper said at the time. “Not wittingly.”

In early July, weeks after the Snowden leaks began, Clapper sent a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the intelligence committee, saying that he had made a mistake in his testimony in March. Clapper said that he was confused by Wyden’s question and thought the senator was asking him about a different program.

“That said, I realized later that Senator Wyden was asking about Section 215 metadata collection rather than content collection. Thus my response was clearly erroneous–for which I apologize,” Clapper said.

Clapper is the former head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and has been DNI since 2010. In their letter to Obama, the group of Congressmen calling for his ouster said that he lied to Congress and should no longer be in office.

“The continued role of James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs and ensuring the highest level of transparency. Director Clapper continues to hold his position despite lying to Congress, under oath, about the existence of bulk data collection programs in March 2013. Asking Director Clapper, and other federal intelligence officials who misrepresented programs to Congress and the courts, to report to you on needed reforms and the future role of government surveillance is not a credible solution,” the letter from Issa, Ted Poe, Paul Broun, Doug Collins, Walter Jones and Alan Grayson says.

The Congressmen sent the letter to Obama on Monday, 10 days after the president gave a much-anticipated speech on the NSA’s role and some new limits he wants to place on the scope of its data collection. Security experts and privacy advocates were not enthusiastic about the changes Obama announced, which included a recommendation that a third party hold phone metadata records, which are now stored by the NSA.

One issue that Obama didn’t address in his speech was the agency’s alleged subversion of cryptographic standards and algorithms. In their letter, Issa and his colleagues urged Obama to address this issue.

“While the collection of bulk telephone records (meta-data) under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has understandably garnered the most significant public debate over government overreach, considerable concern has been raised about the govemment’s exploitation of the Internet through circumvention of encryption. The Review Group recognized the potential hazard created by exposing vulnerabilities in encryption data and recommended that your Administration support, rather than undermine, efforts to protect the integrity of these systems.3 However, your January 17′th speech failed to address the future of encryption related programs. Internet freedom is indispensible, and reports regarding the govemment’s treatment of encryption protocols underscore the need to provide leadership and clarity beyond the collection of telephone records,” the letter says.
https://threatpost.com/issa-five-oth...removal/103890





A Grassroots Campaign Wants to Use the Fourth Amendment to Shut Off the NSA’s Water Supply
Tristan James

While President Obama has proposed some minor changes to mass surveillance, a grassroots campaign, Off Now, has its own major proposition to reduce the NSA’s activities. The apolitical campaign, supported by the Tenth Amendment Centre and the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, essentially plans to starve the NSA out. Through state legislation, they want to ban local governments from providing NSA facilities with basic services like water, electricity, and waste management.

The NSA’s metaphorical Eye of Sauron is powered by supercomputers that get super-hot creeping on all that data, and to avoid bursting into flames they require massive amounts of water-cooling. Without the water, these computers literally crash and burn. And as Michael Boldin,the founder and executive director of the Tenth Amendment Centre told me, turning off the tap is theoretically fairly easy to do: “In theory, if they don't have water, electricity, wastewater treatment, and all kinds of other daily needs, they're going to have a pretty hard time operating.”

Off Now are leading the charge with a state-level bill, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act. If adopted, it would effectively nullify all NSA facilities within that state by refusing to provide them with crucial day-to-day services. It's now been introduced in ten states (though predictably stalled at various points along the way), and the campaign has also given birth to other related actions—adopting a similar strategy, a campaign to cut off the NSA’s juice in Washington State has received over 18,000 signatures of their 20,000-strong goal. By targeting individual facilities, Off Now believes the NSA’s accumulative power can be significantly reduced.

The campaign draws upon Federalist 46, an essay written by fourth US president James Madison way back in 1788. It’s one of 85 essays written by the founding fathers calling for united ratification of the constitution. It declares that states are rightful to oppose unconstitutional programs or ones that prove “unpopular in particular States.” The current legal doctrine of "anti-commandeering” is linked to this—the federal government has no way of forcing states into participating in federal programs.

It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened, either. In the 1850s, some Northern states banned the use of various jails that held captured runaway slaves, and other states stripped lawyers of their licence if they defended slavery in rendition cases.

A key focus of the campaign is the NSA’s magnum opus of data collection centres in Bluffdale, Utah. Nicknamed Bumblehive, the $1.7 billion data collection and storage facility is the first purpose-built facility supporting the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative’s questionable methods to keep America safe. The facility’s exact purpose is classified but sources suggest it will be used to store phone records, emails, Google searches and assorted “pocket litter.”

Under Bumblehive’s hood is a 512-qubit quantum computer capable of learning, imitating brain function and reprogramming itself. There’s a trunk with enough storage space for billions of gigabytes and Bumblehive requires 1.7 million gallons of water every day to operate.

Conveniently for Off Now though, Bumblehive drinks from the Jordan Valley River Conservatory District, which is a political subdivision of the state of Utah. As such, a state law could be passed banning this partnership, and Bumblehive would become useless if it didn’t find water elsewhere quick.

Michael stressed that the plan to make a stand against the NSA goes beyond partisan thinking. “We've come together to lead this important transpartisan coalition because we believe that there are times for people to set aside their political differences and get something done,” he said. “The dangers of unlimited surveillance make this one of those times.”

Being confined to state-by-state verdict, it’s unlikely that the campaign would ever tackle the NSA in its entirety, and the prospect of any services actually being cut still seems rather fantastical. In that way, Off Now may not exactly achieve what it is desires, but it at least bolsters the idea that the NSA can be opposed at a grassroots level
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-g...s-water-supply





Edward Snowden Says NSA Engages in Industrial Espionage

Ex-NSA contractor cites German engineering firm Siemens as one target

The U.S. National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a German TV network.

In text released ahead of a lengthy interview to be broadcast on Sunday, ARD TV quoted Snowden as saying the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security and he cited German engineering firm, Siemens as one target.

"If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to U.S. national interests — even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security — then they'll take that information nevertheless," Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia where he has claimed asylum.

Snowden also told the German public broadcasting network he no longer has possession of any documents or information on NSA activities and has turned everything he had over to select journalists.

He said he did not have any control over the publication of the information, ARD said.

Questions about U.S. government spying on civilians and foreign officials burst into the open last June when Snowden, leaked documents outlining the widespread collection of telephone records and email.

The revelations shocked Germany, a country especially sensitive after the abuses by the Gestapo during the Nazi reign and the Stasi in Communist East Germany during the Cold War.

Reports the NSA monitored Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone have added to the anger in Germany, which has been pushing for a 'no-spy' agreement with the United States, a country it considers to be among its closest allies.

NSA software could help hackers

Snowden's claim the NSA is engaged in industrial espionage follows a New York Times report earlier this month that the NSA put software in almost 100,000 computers around the world, allowing it to carry out surveillance on those devices and could provide a digital highway for cyberattacks.

The NSA planted most of the software after gaining access to computer networks, but has also used a secret technology that allows it entry even to computers not connected to the internet, the newspaper said, citing U.S. officials, computer experts and documents leaked by Snowden.

The newspaper said the technology had been in use since at least 2008 and relied on a covert channel of radio waves transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards secretly inserted in the computers.

Frequent targets of the program, code-named Quantum, included units of the Chinese military and industrial targets.

Snowden faces criminal charges after fleeing to Hong Kong and then Russia, where he was granted at least a year's asylum.

He was charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national security information and giving classified intelligence data to an unauthorized person.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/edward-...nage-1.2511635





This New Snowden Leak Will Scare You Away from 'Free' Airport Wi-Fi
Dell Cameron

One of Canada’s top spy agencies reportedly tested powerful surveillance software over a two-week period at a major airport.

According to classified documents obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and released Thursday evening by CBC News, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) used software to target travelers, including Canadian citizens, through the airport’s Wi-Fi connection. The software continued to track them throughout the city, even days after they’d left the airport.

Using the same software, CSEC was also apparently able to track citizens “back in time,” which provided the intelligence agency with details on where targets were before arriving at the Canadian airport.

The program was only in effect for a period of two weeks while CSEC was performing a “trial run” of the program, according to the documents. The software was being developed in partnership with the U.S. National Security Agency and was to be shared between Canada, the U.S., Britain, New Zealand and Australia, known collectively as the “Five-Eyes.”

Canadian spymaster John Forster previously told reporters that the CSEC was not tracking Canadian citizens, at home or abroad. In light of these new revelations, the CSEC was forced to clarify its position to mean that “No Canadian communications were (or are) targeted, collected or used."

Forster’s statements are reminiscent of those made by last year by James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, who told a sitting U.S. senator that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of American citizens. Clapper was also forced to clarify his response after additional documents were leaked that contradicted his statements.

Noted security researcher Ronald Deibert told CBC News that the type of surveillance detailed in the top secret documents is “almost certainly illegal,” as the CSEC is prohibited from placing anyone inside the country under surveillance without a judicial warrant.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/sno...-airport-wifi/





Edward Snowden Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Two Norwegian politicians say NSA whistleblower's actions have led to a 'more stable and peaceful world order'
AP

Edward Snowden will be one of scores of names being considered by the Nobel prize committee. Photograph: The Guardian/AFP/Getty Images

Two Norwegian politicians say they have jointly nominated the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel peace prize.

The Socialist Left party politicians Baard Vegar Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen said the public debate and policy changes in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing had "contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order".

Being nominated means Snowden will be one of scores of names that the Nobel committee will consider for the prestigious award.

The five-member panel will not confirm who has been nominated but those who submit nominations sometimes make them public.

Nominators, including members of national parliaments and governments, university professors and previous laureates, must enter their submissions by 1 February.

The prize committee members can add their own candidates at their first meeting after that deadline.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...el-peace-prize
















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