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Old 06-11-13, 07:50 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 9th, '13

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November 9th, 2013




RIAA Warns Against Bitcoin, The Pirate Bay in Latest ‘Notorious Websites’ List

Hoping to convince the US federal government to block websites it deems harmful to business, the RIAA has submitted its list of “notorious websites” with an especially notable version which includes a dig at the digital currency bitcoin.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a lobby group working for the benefit of the major record labels and other heavyweights in the music industry, submitted the list with the hope that the US Trade Representative (USTR) will block those sites from the internet - or at least make them harder to access for US users.

RIAA executive vice president Neil Turkewitz wrote that the purpose of the list is “to expose businesses who operate illegally, whether by profiting directly from the sale or other distribution of illegal materials or from facilitating such theft.”

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the RIAA’s counterpart in the United Kingdom, also convinced the British High Court to block 24 sites. The Pirate Bay, Kat, Torrent Reactor, and Extra Torrent were among the “notorious” sites that will be blocked in the UK starting Wednesday.

“Music companies are working hard to build a thriving digital music sector in the UK, offering fans great convenience, choice and value, but these efforts are undermined by illegal sites which rip off artists and contribute nothing to Britain’s vibrant music scene,” BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor told Forbes magazine.

“We asked the sites to stop infringing copyright, but unfortunately they did not and we were left with little choice but to apply to the Court, where the judge considered the evidence and declared that ISPs should not serve access to them,” he continued.

Most of the sites in question provide downloadable links, or torrents, which then redirect a user to a movie, music, video game, or software file. Torrent sites make headlines far less often than Google or Facebook, yet attract nearly as many users. The Pirate Bay, for example, was the 72nd most visited website in the world in October 2013.

“We highlight certain sites that are so central to the activities of a particular society that they almost single-handedly prevent the development of a legitimate online music marketplace,” the RIAA’s Turkewitz said in a statement.

“Others actively champion their supposed subversiveness by proclaiming to be advocates for freedom of expression while undermining the careers of creators whose very existence is based on expression.”

The RIAA also mentioned the growing bitcoin currency as a service contributing to copyright violation. Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer currency transacted using secure digital wallets, and is thus very difficult for law enforcement to track.

Seizing this opportunity, users have kept The Pirate Bay afloat by donating bitcoin to the site. Law enforcement, unable to freeze assets as it would have done if the donations were received in standard funds, has had no choice but to continue playing catch-up with the Swedish site’s current administrators - even after the original founders were convicted of facilitating infringement.

“The true operators of the site remain unknown,” the RIAA wrote in its letter, as quoted by TorrentFreak. The convicted individuals claim the site is owned by a company based in the Seychelles, although no evidence has been provided.

“In April 2013, the site started accepting donations from the public by Bitcoin, a digital currency, which operates using peer-to-peer technology,” the statement continued. “There is no central authority or banks involved which makes it very difficult to seize or trade Bitcoin funds. In May 2013, the site also started accepting Litecoin, another peer-to-peer based internet currency.”

Observers have wondered if copyright enforcers, in trying to undercut the “notorious websites,” have inadvertently supplied them with potential customers.

“This list should not be understood to be comprehensive,” wrote Michael O’Leary, vice president of the RIAA’s sister organization, the MPAA. “It does, however, indicate the scope and scale of global content theft and it introduces some of the ongoing challenges rights holders confront in protecting their intellectual property.”
http://rt.com/usa/riaa-bitcoin-pirat...notorious-993/





Too Much Cash Causes Pirate Admin to Quit, 43K Ebook Dump Imminent
Andy

Faced with unmanageable euro revenues “in six digits” and a reluctance of publishers to legitimize the site, the administrator of a Tor-based download site developed to shake up the eBook market says he has been forced to leave the project. In other knock-on developments, TorrentFreak is informed that the site’s contents – around 43,000 eBooks – will today spill out onto the Internet, free of charge.

In early September we reported on TorBoox, a site on the Tor network providing millions of unauthorized ebooks to the public.

The site made the news when reporters in Germany were subjected to a criminal complaint by publishers who objected to the site being named.

With that complaint withdrawn, TorBoox indicated they were about to take radical action to shake up the ebook market by hurting Amazon. The idea was quite complex, but essentially involved offering all-you-can-eat books to the public for a flat fee – a Spotify for ebooks with eyes on legitimacy.

However, with 1.2 million ebook downloads per day things couldn’t continue the way they were. TorBoox implemented a paywall and asked users for 3.33 euros per month to try and pay for the servers. Around a third of the site’s users left, but according to the site’s operator things went better than expected.

“Every user had to pay € 10.00 with Paysafecard (which is the minimal amount at the stores). We were in need of about € 500 per month but got much, much more. The money we were in need of we got in a few hours. Ordinary German citizens of any age and background went to the petrol stations and asked for a coupon that has no other imaginable purpose than an illegal one,” TorBoox operator Spiegelbest informs TorrentFreak.

“We could easily have deactivated the monthly payments from the start. Just the newcomers would have contributed much more money than we would have needed for books and servers. The initial payment would have be sufficient for a year long membership – at least. My concept was to spend the money before asking for new payments.”

But while things were taking off, they were also getting out of hand.

“I saw the amounts of money steeply rising to five-digit [euro] amounts from the start. And without a lot of imagination a six-digit number of euros will be reached by the middle of November,” Spiegelbest explains.

“If you look at a currency like Bitcoin you can handle it this way or that way. A steep rise in the value of Bitcoins lately helped to tear down any remaining caution and reluctance. A decent and reasonable ending to all this money accumulation became more and more out of sight.”

Running alongside this somewhat unusual financial crisis was TorBoox’s quest for legitimacy and things weren’t looking good there either.

“We tried to get into contact with ‘Börsenverein’ which is the organization of German Publishers. We tried to keep our titles safe from any other site to have something to offer. For us and for me it would have been okay if the people get their books with a legal low-cost flatrate – I am not illegal by principle. But we were ignored completely,” Spiegelbest reveals.

With too much money at hand and no deal with the publishers, Spiegelbest quit TorBoox as an operator.

What will happen with TorBoox now remains uncertain, but TorrentFreak is informed that the archives of TorBoox have been obtained unknown individuals, possibly members of the warez scene. As a result, sometime during today, November 3, TorBoox’s archives – 43,000 ebooks – will flood onto the Internet for the free-of-charge enjoyment of all. An announcement of some kind is expected to be published on Avaxhome.ws during the evening.

“This archive does not belong to TorBoox. It comes from all the sources surrounding it,” a source close to the forthcoming leak told TorrentFreak.

“Sources go back to the early days of scanning. TorBoox was just like a magnet. If anyone has a right to get the archive it is the poeople having done all the work on it in the last year. But even those people didn’t have access to the archive which is very odd indeed and rather paranoic. The operators themselves did not do much work other than keeping the archive locked away.”

Whether the publishers will consider the above developments as good or bad news is a matter for them, but if Spiegelbest is to be believed there is a real demand for a Spotify-for-books, if it comes at the right price. Food for thought.
http://torrentfreak.com/too-much-cas...minent-131103/





MPA Will Begin Norway File-Sharing Crackdown This Month
Andy

After a hiatus of more than two years, anti-piracy companies and rightsholders will begin monitoring Norwegian file-sharers this month. The last time spying on P2P networks was allowed was back in 2011 but in less than 30 days content organizations, including the powerful MPA, will resume their work. BitTorrent users will be the number one target.

For years file-sharers in Norway have had somewhat of an easy rise after it was determined in 2011 that the only entity allowed to monitor and collect data on P2P networks would not longer be permitted to do so.

By May that same year it became clear that the government wouldn’t stand idly by, with a Ministry of Culture announcing amendments to the country’s Copyright Act. The promise was that movie and record companies would be given “the tools they need” to tackle infringement.

On July 1 the new law was passed and along with it a framework that would allow any rightsholder or trade group to spy on file-sharers providing they inform the data inspectorate in advance. After a somewhat slow start, copyright holders are now getting themselves organized and are almost ready to start.

The MPA, the international branch of the MPAA, and its associates including the Norwegian Videograms Association, Norwegian Association of Film Distributors, and the Norwegian Society of Composers and Lyricists, are among the organizations that have recently advised the inspectorate that their monitoring will soon begin.

Of course, all the data gathered will need to be subsequently handled and processed. That task will be carried out by the infamous pirate-hunting lawfirm, Simonsen.

According to Rune Ljøstad, a partner at Simonsen, the project will begin in just over three weeks.

“From 29 November we will be able to process personal data for [the purpose of tracking file-sharers],” Ljøstad explains.

As can be seen from the excerpt from Simonsen’s notification below, the aim of the exercise is to protect the MPA and its members.

Ljøstad, meanwhile, has been explaining that uploaders will be the MPA’s key target.

“Our goal is that most of the uploads and downloads stop and people instead go over to legal alternatives,” Ljøstad told Tu.no.

“To achieve this goal you have to prioritize what is most important. Typically licensees are affected more by uploads than downloads. An upload can provide the basis for 1,000 downloads, while one download is just one download,” he said.

But despite the assurances that this will be an effort aimed at the ‘worst’ offenders, there is a key problem. It is virtually guaranteed that BitTorrent users will be the first targets of the new crackdown and by the protocol’s very nature, every downloader is also an uploader. This effectively puts most of Norway’s file-sharers under the microscope.

The MPA’s next move remains unclear, but several scenarios come to mind. Although it will already be in possession of the data having harvested it from abroad, initially the MPA will suck up as much Norwegian file-sharing data as possible so it can be used officially in local procedures.

That data will be used in several ways. It’s possible that a few hand-picked unlucky individuals will be singled out for punishment, but it seems more likely having come this far that the data will be used for more broad action. There are two likely candidates.

First, the data could be used to justify a letter-writing or “three strikes” style regime, something all rightsholders have expressed an interest in.

Second, the data could be used to show how bad the piracy situation is in order to obtain court orders to have sites like The Pirate Bay blocked at the ISP level. There are already provisions in the new law to block sites and rightholders have signaled they’re ready for it, so expect this outcome sooner rather than later.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpa-will-beg...-month-131107/





Software Developed to Disguise 3D Printing Files Shared Online

London designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez has developed a piece of software that allows users to visually corrupt 3D-print files so they can't be recognised on file-sharing sites.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez's Disarming Corruptor algorithm can be used to transform and disguise STL (STereoLithography) files - which record the outer shape of an object to be printed - in a way that can be only reversed by trusted recipients with the relevant key.

"Thingiverse lets you share 3D files - these get rendered, tagged, and exposed to the whole internet, and you don’t know who might be looking at them in the near future," Plummer-Fernandez told Dezeen. "Patent trolls frighten me, and so do mysterious law enforcement agencies and their web-crawling technologies."

"In a time of prolific online espionage, crackdowns on file-sharing, and a growing concern for the 3D-printing of illegal items and copyright-protected artefacts, Disarming Corruptor is a free software application that helps people to circumvent these issues," he said, adding that the project was inspired by devices such as the Enigma Machine used to encrypt and decode messages during the Second World War.

"People could alternatively just email each other encrypted files if necessary, but I wanted to devise a system where people could utilise the benefits of a sharing site and maintain a level of privacy and personal control."

After downloading Disarming Corruptor, users open the file they want to distort then use slide bars to set seven values that are displayed as an encryption key at the top of the screen.

Pressing Corrupt transforms the shape according to these settings and saves the new file plus an image of the encryption key in the same location as the original. The disguised object can then be uploaded to a public file-sharing site like Thingiverse and the decoding key distributed to a few trusted people.

The last slider controls how much the form is corrupted, so the result can retain some recognisable elements. "This could be useful for instances where you might want simply make functional object inoperative until keys are shared," the designer suggests.

To restore the file to its original form, the recipient needs both the application and the unique seven-digit settings used by the sender. They simply open the corrupted version in the Disarming Corruptor program, move the sliders to generate the correct key in the top bar and click Repair. Entering the incorrect settings to decode the file would just damage it further.

"I know there are a lot of harmless copyright infringements already on Thingiverse," Plummer-Fernandez continued. "Think of all the Yoda Heads out there. These are exposed to all the patent and copyright trolls to dive in and pick out victims, and I'm sure the small print on these sharing services leaves their communities hanging out to dry when they come for them."

"When patent trolls and law enforcement agencies find these files on sharing sites they will only see abstract contortions, but within the trusting community these files will still represent the objects they are looking for, purposely in need of repair," he said.

The software is free and available for Mac OSX, and Plummer-Fernandez is working on exports for Linux and Windows.

Plummer-Fernandez was born in Colombia and now lives in London, where he graduated from the Royal College of Art's Design Products MA in 2009, and creates his own 3D-editing tools for design projects like the 3D-printed vessels made by scanning and manipulating everyday objects that he presented this time last year.
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/04/sof...shared-online/





Jay-Z Sued Over “Run This Town” as Sampling Lawsuits Spread
Jeff John Roberts

Summary: Are the likes of Jay-Z, Robin Thicke and the Beastie Boys rip-off artists who steal others’ copyright? Or is something else going on? A new lawsuit shows the surging problem of “sample trolls.”

A sample troll is stalking Jay-Z over Run This Town, claiming the rapper’s 2009 hit from Blueprint 3 uses sounds from a 1969 track called Hook and Sling by the late pianist Eddie Bo.

A lawsuit, filed in New York federal court, claims that Run this Town uses sounds from Hook and Sling dozens of times, and asks for profits from Jay-Z and his record labels, and an order prohibiting the rapper from distributing the song.

So who exactly filed the lawsuit? Good question. The plaintiff is a company called TufAmerica, which is the same classy outfit that sued the Beastie Boys last year on the same day that one member of the trio, MCA, passed away.

As the New York Times explained, Tuf America “has made a business out of buying the rights to old songs and suing artists who sample them without permission.” A similar type of company is responsible for the highly-publicized lawsuit over Robin Thicke’s summer hit Blurred Lines.

In the bigger pictures, the cases represent a resurgence of the legal forces that chill artistic expression and that almost smothered hip-hop in the 1990′s. As scholars have noted, the cost of clearing sample would make it near impossible today for groups like the Beastie Boys to make sample-based masterpieces like 1989′s Paul’s Boutique.

The new lawsuit (below) may also trigger a debate over whether musicians like Jay-Z aka Shawn Carter are “stealing.” You can decide for yourself; here’s the two songs — and keep in mind any profits from this lawsuit are likely to trickle to investors and lawyers rather than musicians or Eddie Bo’s heirs.
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/07/jay-z-s...wsuits-spread/





The New York Times Endorsed a Secretive Trade Agreement that the Public Can’t Read
Andrea Peterson

The Obama administration is secretly negotiating a treaty that could have significant effects on domestic law. Officially, it's a "free trade" treaty among Pacific rim countries, but a section of the draft agreement leaked in 2011 suggested that it will require signers, including the United States, to make significant changes to copyright law and enforcement measures.

Strangely, the administration seems to be encouraging the public to have a debate on the treaty before they know what's in it. The Office of the United States Trade Representative has solicited comments about the treaty on its Web site, but there is no particularly detailed information about the content of the agreement, or a draft of the current version of the proposal.

Now, as Maira Sutton at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, the New York Times editorial board has endorsed the TPP. While the editorial acknowledges that some are "worried about provisions on intellectual property that could restrict the availability of generic medicines and grant longer copyright protections to big media companies," it nevertheless argues that a "good deal" would "not only help individual countries but set an example for global trade talks."

But as Sutton points out, it seems strange for the Times to be opining on a treaty the public hasn't gotten to see yet. If the Times has gotten a leaked copy of the report, it should publish it so the public can make up its own mind. If it hasn't seen the treaty, perhaps it should reserve judgment until it's learned what's actually in it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...lic-cant-read/





An Attempted Entrapment
George Maschke

In May 2013, I was the target of an attempted entrapment.1 Whether it was a federal agent attempting to entrap me on a contrived material support for terrorism charge or simply an individual’s attempt to embarrass me and discredit AntiPolygraph.org remains unclear. In this post, I will provide a full public accounting of the attempt, including the raw source of communications received and the IP addresses involved.

As background, it should be borne in mind that a federal criminal investigation into providers of information on polygraph countermeasures, dubbed “Operation Lie Busters,” has been underway since at least November 2011, when an undercover U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, posing as a job applicant, contacted Chad Dixon of Marion, Indiana for help on passing the polygraph. In December, 2012, Dixon pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding, for which he has been sentenced to 8 months in federal prison.

Doug Williams of Norman, Oklahoma, a former police polygrapher who has been teaching people how to pass polygraph examinations for some three decades and operates the website Polygraph.com, was also the target of a sting operation and in February 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection executed search warrants on his home and office, seizing business records. He has been threatened with prosecution but to date has not been charged with any crime.

With this in mind, I received a most curious unsolicited communication on Saturday, 18 May 2013 from <mohammadali201333@yahoo.com>. The message was sent to my AntiPolygraph.org e-mail address <maschke@antipolygraph.org> and was titled “help help help please” (155 kb EML file.) The message body was blank, but there was a PDF attachment with a short message written in Persian, the language of Iran:

I know Persian, a fact of which the writer was evidently cognizant. Here is a translation:

Greetings and respect to you, Mr. George Maschke,

I am Mohammad Aghazadeh and have been living in Iraq for five years. I am a member of an Islamic group that seeks to restore freedom to Iraq. Because the federal police are suspicious of me, they want to do a lie detector test on me. I ask that you send me a copy of your book about the lie behind the lie so that I can use it, or that you help me in any other way. I am very grateful to you.

The book to which the message refers is The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, AntiPolygraph.org’s free e-book that, among other things, explains how to pass (or beat) a polygraph “test.” Factors that made me highly suspicious about this message include:

• Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that he’s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?

• Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long he’s been in the country?

• To my knowledge, there aren’t any Iranian-backed Islamic groups seeking to “restore freedom to Iraq.” In fact, Iran and Iraq have good diplomatic relations.

• Why did this person ask me to send a book that is freely available on-line? Note that this message didn’t ask for a “Persian edition” of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.

I suspected the message was a likely attempt to set me up for prosecution on charges of material support for terrorism (or something similar).2 It seemed highly unlikely that the message could be genuine. Nonetheless, about half an hour after receiving the message, I provided “Mohammad Aghazadeh” the same advice I would give to anyone accused of a crime who has been asked to take a polygraph test:

Dear Mr. Mohammad Aghazadeh,

Our advice to everyone under such circumstances is not to submit to the so-called “test” and to consult with a lawyer and comply with applicable laws.

George Maschke

Evidently, that response was not satisfactory, for the following day, Sunday, 19 May, about 24 hours after receipt of the first message, I received the following reply (11 kb EML file):

It reads:

Greetings and great respect, Mr. Maschke,
I am very grateful to you for your reply about the lie detector test.
I am not in circumstances where I can refrain from taking the test.
I saw your book on the Internet, but because I don’t know English, I wasn’t able to use it.
I will be very grateful to you if you would send me the Persian edition of it.
I don’t know how I will pass the test.
They have frightened me greatly. What am I to do????

I replied, “Unfortunately, said book has not been translated to Persian.” I have received no further communication from this person.

I Googled the e-mail address <mohammadali201333@yahoo.com> and found no mentions. Both e-mail messages originated from the same IP address: 159.255.160.115.
This address traces to Arbil (also spelled Erbil), Iraq, where the United States has a consulate.

I checked AntiPolygraph.org’s server access log for the IP address 159.255.160.155, and here is what I found:

9 May 2013

08:24:48 (GMT), someone at this IP address landed on AntiPolygraph.org’s publications page after a search on Google.iq (search terms unknown) using Google Chrome under Windows NT 6.1 (Windows 7).

08:24:59 lands on home page after searching Google.iq for: george maschke antipolygraph.

08:25:37 downloads The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.

10:09:15 fetches The Lie Behind the Lie Detector a second time after searching “george counter polygraph” but this time with Firefox 2.0.0.12 under Windows NT 5.1 en-US (Windows XP 32-bit).

18 May 2013

07:04:18 Lands on home page after unknown search on Google.iq using Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 under Windows NT 6.1 (Windows 7).

07:04:41 Fetches Federal Psychophysiological Detection of Deception Examiner’s Handbook.

07:05:46 Fetches The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.

07:06:27 Fetches DoDPI Law Enforcement Pre-Employment Test Examiner’s Guide.

07:06:55 Fetches DoDPI Interview and Interrogation Handbook.

07:07:29 Fetches DoDPI Numerical Evaluation Scoring System.

11:07:04 Returns to home page using Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 under Windows NT 6.1.

11:07:08 Views recent message board posts. (Note: this action suggests the visitor is familiar with the site.)

11:08:10 Does a message board search (search terms not logged by server).

11:08:25 Searches message board again.

11:08:36 Searches message board again.

11:08:48 Searches message board again.

11:09:27 Searches Google (terms unknown) and lands on message board thread, Al-Qaeda Has Read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.

11:10:02 Gets message board thread, Al-Qaeda Documentation on Lie Detection (which is linked early in the previous thread).

Note that both of the foregoing message threads include accusations against me of disloyalty to the United States.

11:10:34 Gets document Al-Qaeda Documentation on Lie Detection.

11:10:41 Returns to message board thread, Al-Qaeda Documentation on Lie Detection.

11:30:20 Last load of any page.

The browsing behavior documented in the server log does not suggest to me an individual who doesn’t know English. Also, the use of different web browsers and operating systems suggests to me that the IP address might belong to an organization rather than an individual.

I also found a few other visits from other nearby IP addresses (first three numerical blocks of the IP addresses are the same):

On 3 May 2013 at 10:51:20, IP 159.255.160.5 landed on an image of Tyler Buttle after searching Google.iq with an iPhone for “photo+sebel+can+sex”.

On 7 May 2013 at 18:08:25, IP 159.255.160.80 searched Google.iq for unknown terms and landed on the blog post Is Patrick T. Coffey Fit to Be Screening Police Applicants? using Firefox 20 under Windows NT 5.1 (Windows XP).

Twenty-six seconds later, at 18:08:51, the same IP moved on to the blog post Polygrapher Patrick T. Coffey Threatens Lawsuit, Demands Retraction.

I can well understand why someone in Iraq might search for sexy pictures of Sibel Can, a Turkish singer. (The searcher, who misspelled “Sibel,” must have been disappointed to find a picture of Tyler Buttle instead.) But why would anyone in Iraq be interested in Patrick T. Coffey, a private polygraph examiner based in Burlingame, California?

Coffey has done contract work in the Middle East before, and I wondered whether he might have been on contract in Iraq during the relevant period. Coffey lost his contract for pre-employment polygraphs with the San Francisco Police Department in the aftermath of S.F. Weekly’s reporting about bigoted and intemperate remarks he made on AntiPolygraph.org. Coffey clearly despises me, as you’ll observe from comments he posted under the nom de guerre TheNoLieGuy4U in the message thread Al-Qaeda Has Read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector. Those comments begin at page 2 and include a demand to know whether I have “personally ever translated or assisted any person in the translation of anti-polygraph materials or literature into Arabic, Farsi [Persian], or any other language?” (As if that were some sort of a crime. In fact, I haven’t.)

I was able to confirm that Coffey was indeed in Iraq for three weeks, including the relevant period when the visits to AntiPolygraph.org were made and the e-mails were sent. I called him on the morning of 26 May to ask whether he might have enlisted the aid of a Persian-speaking colleague while in Iraq in a personal effort to test and perhaps discredit me. Coffey denied any involvement with, or indeed, any knowledge of, the e-mails. He even refused to confirm that he had been in Iraq.

Coffey did volunteer that he understands from hearsay that the Department of Defense has an “open case” about me with respect to “the countermeasure question.” His implication was that it’s a criminal case. However, I have been out of the Army reserve for nine years and am not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

So was this attempted entrapment part of the U.S. government’s Operation Lie Busters, or the intrigue of a polygraph examiner with an axe to grind, or possibly a combination of both? I don’t know, but I welcome comment from any readers who might.
https://antipolygraph.org/blog/2013/...ed-entrapment/





C.I.A. Is Said to Pay AT&T for Call Data
Charlie Savage

The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company’s vast database of phone records, which includes Americans’ international calls, according to government officials.

The cooperation is conducted under a voluntary contract, not under subpoenas or court orders compelling the company to participate, according to the officials. The C.I.A. supplies phone numbers of overseas terrorism suspects, and AT&T searches its database and provides records of calls that may help identify foreign associates, the officials said. The company has a huge archive of data on phone calls, both foreign and domestic, that were handled by its network equipment, not just those of its own customers.

The program adds a new dimension to the debate over government spying and the privacy of communications records, which has been focused on National Security Agency programs in recent months. The disclosure sheds further light on the ties between intelligence officials and communications service providers. And it shows how agencies beyond the N.S.A. use metadata — logs of the date, duration and phone numbers involved in a call, but not the content — to analyze links between people through programs regulated by an inconsistent patchwork of legal standards, procedures and oversight.

Because the C.I.A. is prohibited from spying on the domestic activities of Americans, the agency imposes privacy safeguards on the program, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because it is classified. Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, but when the company produces records of international calls with one end in the United States, it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and “masks” several digits of their phone numbers, the officials said.

Still, the agency can refer such masked numbers to the F.B.I., which can issue an administrative subpoena requiring AT&T to provide the uncensored data. The bureau handles any domestic investigation, but sometimes shares with the C.I.A. the information about the American participant in those calls, the officials said.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the C.I.A., declined to confirm the program. But he said the agency’s intelligence collection activities were lawful and “subject to extensive oversight.”

“The C.I.A. protects the nation and upholds privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws,” he said. “The C.I.A. is expressly forbidden from undertaking intelligence collection activities inside the United States ‘for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of U.S. persons,’ and the C.I.A. does not do so.”

Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said: “We value our customers’ privacy and work hard to protect it by ensuring compliance with the law in all respects. We do not comment on questions concerning national security.”

The C.I.A. program appears to duplicate work performed by the N.S.A. But a senior American intelligence official, while declining to address whether the AT&T alliance exists, suggested that it would be rational for the C.I.A. to have its own program to check calling patterns linked to overseas terrorism suspects.

With on-the-ground operatives abroad seeking to disrupt terrorist activities in “time-sensitive threat situations,” the official said, the C.I.A. requires “a certain speed, agility and tactical responsiveness that differs” from that of other agencies. “That need to act without delay is often best met when C.I.A. has developed its own capabilities to lawfully acquire necessary foreign intelligence information,” the official said.

Since June, when documents leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden began to surface, an international debate has erupted over the scope of N.S.A. surveillance and the agency’s relationships with American companies that operate networks or provide Internet communications services. Many of the companies have protested that they are legally compelled to cooperate. The AT&T-C.I.A. arrangement illustrates that such activities are not limited to the N.S.A., and that cooperation sometimes is voluntary.

While officials in Washington are discussing whether to rein in the N.S.A. on American soil, governments in Europe are demanding more transparency from the companies and threatening greater restraints. AT&T is exploring a purchase of Vodafone, a European cellphone service provider, and European regulators and politicians have vowed to intensely scrutinize such a deal.

AT&T has a history of working with the government. It helped facilitate the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program by allowing the N.S.A. to install secret equipment in its phone and Internet switching facilities, according to an account by a former AT&T technician made public in a lawsuit.

It was also one of three phone companies that embedded employees from 2003 to around 2007 in an F.B.I. facility, where they used company databases to provide quick analysis of call records. The embedding was shut down amid criticism by the Justice Department’s inspector general that officers were obtaining Americans’ call data without issuing subpoenas.

And, for at least the past six years, AT&T has embedded its employees in federally funded drug investigation offices to analyze call records, in response to subpoenas, to track drug dealers who switch phones. A briefing document for that program said AT&T had records of calls handled by its switches — including “a tremendous amount of international numbers that place calls through or roam on the AT&T network” — dating back to 1987, and described efforts to keep its existence “under the radar.”

The history of the C.I.A. program remains murky. It began sometime before 2010, and was stopped at some point but then was resumed, according to the officials. They said the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed about it.

While the N.S.A. is separately vacuuming up call metadata abroad, most scrutiny in the United States has focused on its once-secret program that uses court orders to domestic phone companies under the Patriot Act to assemble a comprehensive database of Americans’ calls.

Some lawmakers have proposed modifying it to have the phone companies, not the N.S.A., control the data, similar to how the C.I.A. has been operating.

Still, there may be limits to comparisons. The N.S.A. is subject to court-imposed rules about the standard that must be met before its analysts may gain access to its database, which contains records from multiple providers. The C.I.A. appears to have a freer hand, and officials said it had submitted significantly more queries to AT&T for data.

In addition, while both programs analyze cross-border calls of Americans, the N.S.A.’s Patriot Act database does not include purely foreign calls, while AT&T does not use purely domestic calls in analyzing links for the C.I.A., officials said.

Absent an emergency, phone companies are usually legally forbidden to provide customers’ calling records to the government except in response to a subpoena or a court order, and the C.I.A. has a mandate to focus overseas. Lawyers who reviewed the program, officials said, concluded that AT&T’s partial masking of American phone numbers satisfied those restrictions, citing a statutory exception to data privacy laws covering “the acquisition by the United States government of foreign intelligence information from international or foreign communications.”

That same exception has come to public attention before. It was apparently invoked by a still-secret Jan. 8, 2010, memo written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. A 2010 inspector general’s report described the memo as allowing the F.B.I. to obtain call records “on a voluntary basis from providers, without any legal process or a qualifying emergency.”

While the bureau said it would not use that memo, the report warned that the existence of the government’s still-classified legal theory created a “significant gap” in “accountability and oversight” and urged Congress to modify the statute. Lawmakers have not acted on that recommendation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us...call-data.html





No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.
Scott Shane

When Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.

The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Mr. Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Mr. Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the N.S.A.’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)

But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest — now or in the future — should be done. After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?

From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.

Mr. Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of N.S.A. eavesdropping. Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined American officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart. “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.

Since Edward J. Snowden began releasing the agency’s documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has opened the most extended debate on the agency’s mission since its creation in 1952. The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and its foreign intelligence collection. While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans’ privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far broader questions.

If secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits? Should foreign citizens, many of whom now rely on American companies for email and Internet services, have any privacy protections from the N.S.A.? Will the American Internet giants’ collaboration with the agency, voluntary or otherwise, damage them in international markets? And are the agency’s clandestine efforts to weaken encryption making the Internet less secure for everyone?

Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of a 2009 book on the N.S.A., said there is no precedent for the hostile questions coming at the agency from all directions.

“From N.S.A.’s point of view, it’s a disaster,” Mr. Aid said. “Every new disclosure reinforces the notion that the agency needs to be reined in. There are political consequences, and there will be operational consequences.”

A review of classified agency documents obtained by Mr. Snowden and shared with The New York Times by The Guardian, offers a rich sampling of the agency’s global operations and culture. (At the agency’s request, The Times is withholding some details that officials said could compromise intelligence operations.) The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world. To some Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control.

The C.I.A. dispatches undercover officers overseas to gather intelligence today roughly the same way spies operated in biblical times. But the N.S.A., born when the long-distance call was a bit exotic, has seen its potential targets explode in number with the advent of personal computers, the Internet and cellphones. Today’s N.S.A. is the Amazon of intelligence agencies, as different from the 1950s agency as that online behemoth is from a mom-and-pop bookstore. It sucks the contents from fiber-optic cables, sits on telephone switches and Internet hubs, digitally burglarizes laptops and plants bugs on smartphones around the globe.

Mr. Obama and top intelligence officials have defended the agency’s role in preventing terrorist attacks. But as the documents make clear, the focus on counterterrorism is a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an agency with an almost unlimited agenda. Its scale and aggressiveness are breathtaking.

The agency’s Dishfire database — nothing happens without a code word at the N.S.A. — stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case. Its Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases. The fellow pretending to send a text message at an Internet cafe in Jordan may be using an N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers. The Russian businessman who is socially active on the web might just become food for Snacks, the acronym-mad agency’s Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, which figures out the personnel hierarchies of organizations from texts.

The spy agency’s station in Texas intercepted 478 emails while helping to foil a jihadist plot to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. N.S.A. analysts delivered to authorities at Kennedy International Airport the names and flight numbers of workers dispatched by a Chinese human smuggling ring.

The agency’s eavesdropping gear, aboard a Defense Department plane flying 60,000 feet over Colombia, fed the location and plans of FARC rebels to the Colombian Army. In the Orlandocard operation, N.S.A. technicians set up what they called a “honeypot” computer on the web that attracted visits from 77,413 foreign computers and planted spyware on more than 1,000 that the agency deemed of potential future interest.

The Global Phone Book

No investment seems too great if it adds to the agency’s global phone book. After mounting a major eavesdropping effort focused on a climate change conference in Bali in 2007, agency analysts stationed in Australia’s outback were especially thrilled by one catch: the cellphone number of Bali’s police chief.

“Our mission,” says the agency’s current five-year plan, which has not been officially scheduled for declassification until 2032, “is to answer questions about threatening activities that others mean to keep hidden.”

The aspirations are grandiose: to “utterly master” foreign intelligence carried on communications networks. The language is corporate: “Our business processes need to promote data-driven decision-making.” But the tone is also strikingly moralistic for a government bureaucracy. Perhaps to counter any notion that eavesdropping is a shady enterprise, signals intelligence, or Sigint, the term of art for electronic intercepts, is presented as the noblest of callings.

“Sigint professionals must hold the moral high ground, even as terrorists or dictators seek to exploit our freedoms,” the plan declares. “Some of our adversaries will say or do anything to advance their cause; we will not.”

The N.S.A. documents taken by Mr. Snowden and shared with The Times, numbering in the thousands and mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, are part of a collection of about 50,000 items that focus mainly on its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters or G.C.H.Q.

While far from comprehensive, the documents give a sense of the agency’s reach and abilities, from the Navy ships snapping up radio transmissions as they cruise off the coast of China, to the satellite dishes at Fort Meade in Maryland ingesting worldwide banking transactions, to the rooftops of 80 American embassies and consulates around the world from which the agency’s Special Collection Service aims its antennas.

The agency and its many defenders among senior government officials who have relied on its top secret reports say it is crucial to American security and status in the world, pointing to terrorist plots disrupted, nuclear proliferation tracked and diplomats kept informed.

But the documents released by Mr. Snowden sometimes also seem to underscore the limits of what even the most intensive intelligence collection can achieve by itself. Blanket N.S.A. eavesdropping in Afghanistan, described in the documents as covering government offices and the hide-outs of second-tier Taliban militants alike, has failed to produce a clear victory against a low-tech enemy. The agency kept track as Syria amassed its arsenal of chemical weapons — but that knowledge did nothing to prevent the gruesome slaughter outside Damascus in August.

The documents are skewed toward celebration of the agency’s self-described successes, as underlings brag in PowerPoints to their bosses about their triumphs and the managers lay out grand plans. But they do not entirely omit the agency’s flubs and foibles: flood tides of intelligence gathered at huge cost that goes unexamined; intercepts that cannot be read for lack of language skills; and computers that — even at the N.S.A. — go haywire in all the usual ways.

Mapping Message Trails

In May 2009, analysts at the agency learned that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was to make a rare trip to Kurdistan Province in the country’s mountainous northwest. The agency immediately organized a high-tech espionage mission, part of a continuing project focused on Ayatollah Khamenei called Operation Dreadnought.

Working closely with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which handles satellite photography, as well as G.C.H.Q., the N.S.A. team studied the Iranian leader’s entourage, its vehicles and its weaponry from satellites, and intercepted air traffic messages as planes and helicopters took off and landed.

They heard Ayatollah Khamenei’s aides fretting about finding a crane to load an ambulance and fire truck onto trucks for the journey. They listened as he addressed a crowd, segregated by gender, in a soccer field.

They studied Iranian air defense radar stations and recorded the travelers’ rich communications trail, including Iranian satellite coordinates collected by an N.S.A. program called Ghosthunter. The point was not so much to catch the Iranian leader’s words, but to gather the data for blanket eavesdropping on Iran in the event of a crisis.

This “communications fingerprinting,” as a document called it, is the key to what the N.S.A. does. It allows the agency’s computers to scan the stream of international communications and pluck out messages tied to the supreme leader. In a crisis — say, a showdown over Iran’s nuclear program — the ability to tap into the communications of leaders, generals and scientists might give a crucial advantage.

On a more modest scale, the same kind of effort, what N.S.A. calls “Sigint development,” was captured in a document the agency obtained in 2009 from Somalia — whether from a human source or an electronic break-in was not noted. It contained email addresses and other contact details for 117 selected customers of a Mogadishu Internet service, Globalsom.

While most on the list were Somali officials or citizens, presumably including some suspected of militancy, the document also included emails for a United Nations political officer in Mogadishu and a local representative for the charity World Vision, among other international institutions. All, it appeared, were considered fair game for monitoring.

This huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the agency’s “customers,” in government jargon, not only at the White House, Pentagon, F.B.I. and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of State and Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative.

By many accounts, the agency provides more than half of the intelligence nuggets delivered to the White House early each morning in the President’s Daily Brief — a measure of success for American spies. (One document boasts that listening in on Nigerian State Security had provided items for the briefing “nearly two dozen” times.) In every international crisis, American policy makers look to the N.S.A. for inside information.

Pressure to Get Everything

That creates intense pressure not to miss anything. When that is combined with an ample budget and near-invisibility to the public, the result is aggressive surveillance of the kind that has sometimes gotten the agency in trouble with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a United States federal court that polices its programs for breaches of Americans’ privacy.

In the funding boom that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency expanded and decentralized far beyond its Fort Meade headquarters in Maryland, building or expanding major facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington State and Utah. Its officers also operate out of major overseas stations in England, Australia, South Korea and Japan, at overseas military bases, and from locked rooms housing the Special Collection Service inside American missions abroad.

The agency, using a combination of jawboning, stealth and legal force, has turned the nation’s Internet and telecommunications companies into collection partners, installing filters in their facilities, serving them with court orders, building back doors into their software and acquiring keys to break their encryption.

But even that vast American-run web is only part of the story. For decades, the N.S.A. has shared eavesdropping duties with the rest of the so-called Five Eyes, the Sigint agencies of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. More limited cooperation occurs with many more countries, including formal arrangements called Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes and Nacsi, an alliance of the agencies of 26 NATO countries.

The extent of Sigint sharing can be surprising: “N.S.A. may pursue a relationship with Vietnam,” one 2009 G.C.H.Q. document reported. But a recent G.C.H.Q. training document suggests that not everything is shared, even between the United States and Britain. “Economic well-being reporting,” it says, referring to intelligence gathered to aid the British economy, “cannot be shared with any foreign partner.”

As at the school lunch table, decisions on who gets left out can cause hurt feelings: “Germans were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the 9-Eyes group,” one 2009 document remarks. And in a delicate spy-versus-spy dance, sharing takes place even with governments that are themselves important N.S.A. targets, notably Israel.

The documents describe collaboration with the Israel Sigint National Unit, which gets raw N.S.A. eavesdropping material and provides it in return, but they also mention the agency’s tracking of “high priority Israeli military targets,” including drone aircraft and the Black Sparrow missile system.

The alliances, and the need for stealth, can get complicated. At one highly valued overseas listening post, the very presence of American N.S.A. personnel violates a treaty agreed to by the agency’s foreign host. Even though much of the eavesdropping is run remotely from N.S.A.’s base at Fort Gordon, Ga., Americans who visit the site must pose as contractors, carry fake business cards and are warned: “Don’t dress as typical Americans."

“Know your cover legend,” a PowerPoint security briefing admonishes the N.S.A. staff members headed to the overseas station, directing them to “sanitize personal effects,” send no postcards home and buy no identifiably local souvenirs. (“An option might be jewelry. Most jewelry does not have any markings” showing its place of origin.)

Bypassing Security

In the agency’s early years, its brainy staff members — it remains the largest employer of mathematicians in the country — played an important role in the development of the first computers, then largely a tool for code breaking.

Today, with personal computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones in most homes and government offices in the developed world, hacking has become the agency’s growth area.

Some of Mr. Snowden’s documents describe the exploits of Tailored Access Operations, the prim name for the N.S.A. division that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes to leave spy software behind. T.A.O. is increasingly important in part because it allows the agency to bypass encryption by capturing messages as they are written or read, when they are not encoded.

In Baghdad, T.A.O. collected messages left in draft form in email accounts maintained by leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant group. Under a program called Spinaltap, the division’s hackers identified 24 unique Internet Protocol addresses identifying computers used by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, making it possible to snatch Hezbollah messages from the flood of global communications sifted by the agency.

The N.S.A.’s elite Transgression Branch, created in 2009 to “discover, understand, evaluate and exploit” foreign hackers’ work, quietly piggybacks on others’ incursions into computers of interest, like thieves who follow other housebreakers around and go through the windows they have left ajar.

In one 2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the N.S.A. spied simultaneously on an ally and an adversary. Analysts spotted suspicious emails being sent to a government office of great intelligence interest in a hostile country and realized that an American ally was “spear-phishing” — sending official-looking emails that, when opened, planted malware that let hackers inside.

The Americans silently followed the foreign hackers, collecting documents and passwords from computers in the hostile country, an elusive target. They got a look inside that government and simultaneously got a close-up look at the ally’s cyberskills, the kind of intelligence twofer that is the unit’s specialty.

In many other ways, advances in computer and communications technology have been a boon for the agency. N.S.A. analysts tracked the electronic trail left by a top leader of Al Qaeda in Africa each time he stopped to use a computer on his travels. They correctly predicted his next stop, and the police were there to arrest him.

And at the big N.S.A. station at Fort Gordon, technicians developed an automated service called “Where’s My Node?” that sent an email to an analyst every time a target overseas moved from one cell tower to another. Without lifting a finger, an analyst could follow his quarry’s every move.

The Limits of Spying

The techniques described in the Snowden documents can make the N.S.A. seem omniscient, and nowhere in the world is that impression stronger than in Afghanistan. But the agency’s capabilities at the tactical level have not been nearly enough to produce clear-cut strategic success there, in the United States’ longest war.

A single daily report from June 2011 from the N.S.A.’s station in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the intensity of eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a day’s work.

The agency listened while insurgents from the Haqqani network mounted an attack on the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, overhearing the attackers talking to their bosses in Pakistan’s tribal area and recording events minute by minute. “Ruhullah claimed he was on the third floor and had already inflicted one casualty,” the report said in a typical entry. “He also indicated that Hafiz was located on a different floor.”

N.S.A. officers listened as two Afghan Foreign Ministry officials prepared for a meeting between President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Iranian officials, assuring them that relations with the United States “would in no way threaten the interests of Iran,” which they decided Mr. Karzai should describe as a “brotherly country.”

The N.S.A. eavesdropped as the top United Nations official in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, consulted his European Union counterpart, Vygaudas Usackas, about how to respond to an Afghan court’s decision to overturn the election of 62 members of Parliament.

And the agency was a fly on the wall for a long-running land dispute between the mayor of Kandahar and a prominent local man known as the Keeper of the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, with President Karzai’s late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a mediator.

The agency discovered a Taliban claim to have killed five police officers at a checkpoint by giving them poisoned yogurt, and heard a provincial governor tell an aide that a district police chief was verbally abusing women and clergymen.

A Taliban figure, Mullah Rahimullah Akhund, known on the United States military’s kill-or-capture list by the code name Objective Squiz Incinerator, was overheard instructing an associate to buy suicide vests and a Japanese motorbike, according to the documents.

And N.S.A. listened in as a Saudi extremist, Abu Mughira, called his mother to report that he and his fellow fighters had entered Afghanistan and “done victorious operations.”

Such reports flowed from the agency’s Kandahar station day after day, year after year, and surely strengthened the American campaign against the Taliban. But they also suggest the limits of intelligence against a complex political and military challenge. The N.S.A. recorded the hotel attack, but it had not prevented it. It tracked Mr. Karzai’s government, but he remained a difficult and volatile partner. Its surveillance was crucial in the capture or killing of many enemy fighters, but not nearly enough to remove the Taliban’s ominous shadow from Afghanistan’s future.

Mining All the Tidbits

In the Afghan reports and many others, a striking paradox is the odd intimacy of a sprawling, technology-driven agency with its targets. It is the one-way intimacy of the eavesdropper, as N.S.A. employees virtually enter the office cubicles of obscure government officials and the Spartan hide-outs of drug traffickers and militants around the world.

Venezuela, for instance, was one of six “enduring targets” in N.S.A.’s official mission list from 2007, along with China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Russia. The United States viewed itself in a contest for influence in Latin America with Venezuela’s leader then, the leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who allied himself with Cuba, and one agency goal was “preventing Venezuela from achieving its regional leadership objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact U.S. global interests.”

A glimpse of what this meant in practice comes in a brief PowerPoint presentation from August 2010 on “Development of the Venezuelan Economic Mission.” The N.S.A. was tracking billions of dollars flowing to Caracas in loans from China (radar systems and oil drilling), Russia (MIG fighter planes and shoulder-fired missiles) and Iran (a factory to manufacture drone aircraft).

But it was also getting up-close and personal with Venezuela’s Ministry of Planning and Finance, monitoring the government and personal emails of the top 10 Venezuelan economic officials. An N.S.A. officer in Texas, in other words, was paid each day to peruse the private messages of obscure Venezuelan bureaucrats, hunting for tidbits that might offer some tiny policy edge.

In a counterdrug operation in late 2011, the agency’s officers seemed to know more about relations within a sprawling narcotics network than the drug dealers themselves. They listened to “Ricketts,” a Jamaican drug supplier based in Ecuador, struggling to keep his cocaine and marijuana smuggling business going after an associate, “Gordo,” claimed he had paid $250,000 and received nothing in return.

The N.S.A., a report said, was on top of not just their cellphones, but also those of the whole network of “buyers, transporters, suppliers, and middlemen” stretching from the Netherlands and Nova Scotia to Panama City and Bogotá, Colombia. The documents do not say whether arrests resulted from all that eavesdropping.

Even with terrorists, N.S.A. units can form a strangely personal relationship. The N.S.A.-G.C.H.Q. wiki, a top secret group blog that Mr. Snowden downloaded, lists 14 specialists scattered in various stations assigned to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist group that carried out the bloody attack on Mumbai in 2008, with titles including “Pakistan Access Pursuit Team” and “Techniques Discovery Branch.” Under the code name Treaclebeta, N.S.A.’s hackers at Tailored Access Operations also played a role.

In the wiki’s casual atmosphere, American and British eavesdroppers exchange the peculiar shoptalk of the secret world. “I don’t normally use Heretic to scan the fax traffic, I use Nucleon,” one user writes, describing technical tools for searching intercepted documents.

But most striking are the one-on-one pairings of spies and militants; Bryan is assigned to listen in on a man named Haroon, and Paul keeps an ear on Fazl.

A Flood of Details

One N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of the agency’s chronic shortage of skilled linguists. He “ran some queries” to read intercepted communications of certain Lashkar-e-Taiba members, he wrote in the wiki, but added: “Most of it is in Arabic or Farsi, so I can’t make much of it.”

It is a glimpse of the unsurprising fact that sometimes the agency’s expensive and expansive efforts accomplish little. Despite the agency’s embrace of corporate jargon on goal-setting and evaluation, it operates without public oversight in an arena in which achievements are hard to measure.

In a world of ballooning communications, the agency is sometimes simply overwhelmed. In 2008, the N.S.A.’s Middle East and North Africa group set about updating its Sigint collection capabilities. The “ambitious scrub” of selectors — essentially search terms — cut the number of terms automatically searched from 21,177 to 7,795 and the number of messages added to the agency’s Pinwale database from 850,000 a day to 450,000 a day.

The reduction in volume was treated as a major achievement, opening the way for new collection on Iranian leadership and Saudi and Syrian diplomats, the report said.

And in a note that may comfort computer novices, the N.S.A. Middle East analysts discovered major glitches in their search software: The computer was searching for the names of targets but not their email addresses, a rather fundamental flaw. “Over 500 messages in one week did not come in,” the report said about one target.

Those are daily course corrections. Whether the Snowden disclosures will result in deeper change is uncertain. Joel F. Brenner, the agency’s former inspector general, says much of the criticism is unfair, reflecting a naïveté about the realpolitik of spying. “The agency is being browbeaten for doing too well the things it’s supposed to do,” he said.

But Mr. Brenner added that he believes “technology has outrun policy” at the N.S.A., and that in an era in which spying may well be exposed, “routine targeting of close allies is bad politics and is foolish.”

Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.

“I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”

Whatever reforms may come, Bobby R. Inman, who weathered his own turbulent period as N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his hyper-secret former agency a radical suggestion for right now. “My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself,” he said. “It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn’t get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/wo...uming-nsa.html





Google's Schmidt Says NSA Spying Outrageous if True – WSJ

Google Inc Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said widespread U.S. government spying on its data centers would be outrageous and potentially illegal if true, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"It's really outrageous that the NSA was looking between the Google data centers, if that's true," Schmidt said in an interview.

"The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people's privacy, it's not OK."

Schmidt told the newspaper in Hong Kong that Google had registered complaints with the National Security Agency (NSA), President Barack Obama and Congress members.

According to a Washington Post report on Wednesday, the NSA had tapped directly into communications links used by Google and Yahoo Inc to move huge amounts of email and other user information among overseas data centers.

Responding to the report, the NSA said the suggestion that it relied on a presidential order on foreign intelligence- gathering to skirt domestic restrictions imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other laws "is not true."

"I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers," NSA Director General Keith Alexander said at a conference last week. "We go through a court order."

When contacted by the WSJ, the NSA referred to its previous statements that press articles about the NSA's collection had misstated facts and mischaracterized the NSA's activities.

Schmidt said in the interview that the NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be at risk.

"It's just bad public policy…and perhaps illegal," he told the paper. (link.reuters.com/can44v)

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved legislation on Thursday that would tighten controls on the government's sweeping electronic eavesdropping programs but allow them to continue.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9A30BH20131104





As U.S. Weighs Spying Changes, Officials Say Data Sweeps Must Continue
David E. Sanger

The Obama administration has told allies and lawmakers it is considering reining in a variety of National Security Agency practices overseas, including holding White House reviews of the world leaders the agency is monitoring, forging a new accord with Germany for a closer intelligence relationship and minimizing collection on some foreigners.

But for now, President Obama and his top advisers have concluded that there is no workable alternative to the bulk collection of huge quantities of “metadata,” including records of all telephone calls made inside the United States.

Instead, the administration has hinted it may hold that information for only three years instead of five while it seeks new technologies that would permit it to search the records of telephone and Internet companies, rather than collect the data in bulk in government computers. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the director of the N.S.A., has told industry officials that developing the new technology would take at least three years.

Mr. Obama has said nothing publicly about specific steps he is weighing in response to the disclosures of the N.S.A. practices by Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor who downloaded and turned over to journalists tens of thousands of documents concerning the agency.

But protests from business executives, who told Mr. Obama last week at a White House meeting that they feared the N.S.A. revelations would lead to billions of dollars in lost business in Europe and Asia — and angry responses to the revelations that the United States was monitoring the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — have forced a rethinking inside the White House.

A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Caitlin M. Hayden, said Monday that the reviews now underway are intended to assure “that we are more effectively weighing the risks and rewards of our activities.” That includes, she said, “ensuring that we are focused above all on threats to the American people.”

In public testimony, General Alexander and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., have shown little willingness to make major changes, apart from agreeing to more oversight and public disclosure of some decisions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The White House has pressed for more. Nonetheless, the actions contemplated inside the administration seem unlikely to quell the protests in Europe or assuage critics at home.

The details of an intelligence accord with Germany — which German officials seem more enthusiastic to negotiate than their American counterparts — are unlikely to be revealed publicly, or to end the suspicion that the American monitoring of scores or hundreds of German leaders has been discontinued.

Similarly, the government has so far said little about whether it could treat some foreigners, presumably from a short list of allies, more as if they were American citizens, or in the legal language of the intelligence agencies, “U.S. persons.”

“On the issue of U.S. person versus non-U.S. person, that’s an issue we’re giving a lot of thought to now,” Robert Litt, the general counsel to the director of national intelligence, told an American Bar Association conference last week. “That doesn’t mean that we have no protection for non-U.S. persons,” he said, noting that the main protection was that data had to be collected for “a valid foreign intelligence purpose.” But that is a standard the intelligence agencies can define for themselves in the case of foreigners.

Mr. Litt said that the government is now “giving some thought to whether there are ways that we can both introduce a little more rigor into that requirement.” But another American official said there were concerns about whether a decision to effectively extend the constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment to some foreigners would create a precedent the government might later regret.

So far, the sharpest public criticism of the N.S.A. from within the administration has come from one of the chief clients for its intelligence reports: Secretary of State John Kerry. “The president and I have learned of some things that have been happening in many ways on an automatic pilot, because the technology is there and the ability is there,” Mr. Kerry said last week, adding that “some of these actions have reached too far.”

A senior administration official said that Mr. Kerry’s “automatic pilot” reference “went beyond our talking points,” but added that the president agreed and “has already made some decisions,” which have not been announced.

The administration’s reviews are being conducted in secrecy in part because of the secret nature of the N.S.A.’s operations. Initially, the reviews focused on domestic “bulk collection” programs begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which eventually led to the N.S.A. program to collect the billing records of all calls, and, for a while, to collect a large volume of emails as well. (The email program ended, the N.S.A. says, in 2011.) In an interview last month, General Alexander said he was “open” to any alternative to having the government maintain that database of calls.

But General Alexander’s deputy, John C. Inglis, who has spent nearly three decades at the N.S.A. focused on the technology of intercepting and decoding foreign communications, told Congress last week that so far there was no satisfying alternative to a government library of calls and, seemingly by extension, text messages and many Internet searches.

“It needs to be the whole haystack,” Mr. Inglis said. If the United States was looking for the communications of a terrorism suspect, he said, “it needs to be such that when you make a query you come away confident that you have the whole answer.”

White House officials say that changes to the foreign collection programs are easier.

German officials came to the White House last week, and have returned to Washington this week, in hopes of negotiating a deal similar to the kind that Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have with the United States. German officials emerged from last week’s meetings at the White House talking about striking a deal within two months that included a “no spying” accord and greater intelligence sharing.

Discussions are continuing this week, also in Washington, between senior German and American intelligence officials. But a senior administration official said, “We are not talking about an across-the-board ‘no spy’ agreement.” Instead, he said, “we need to work towards updated understandings between our two countries.”

Ms. Hayden and Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both said that a major element of the current review is to reassess the “National Intelligence Priorities Framework,” which is how the White House instructs the intelligence agencies about what subjects it most needs to understand. Terrorism and nuclear proliferation are the highest priorities, and are examined in detail.

The tapping of Ms. Merkel was a low-priority item for the United States, and subject to far less oversight, until it became public, and Mr. Obama declared the United States was not now monitoring her, and would not in the future. He has made no such commitment for other national leaders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/wo...-continue.html





The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation

Imagine what Edward Snowden could have accomplished if he had a different agenda.
Conor Friedersdorf

Did the Obama Administration ever spy on Mitt Romney during the recent presidential contest? Alex Tabarrok, who raised the question at the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, acknowledges that it is provocative. Until recently, he would've regarded it as a "loony" question, he writes, and he doesn't think that President Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain.

Let's be clear: I don't think so either. In every way, I regard Obama as our legitimate head of state, full stop. But I agree with Tabarrok that today, "the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable." * Most Americans have a strong intuition that spying and electoral manipulation of that kind could never happen here. I share that intuition, but I know it's nonsense: the Nixon Administration did spy on its opponents for political gain. Why do I worry that an unreformed surveillance state could put us in even greater jeopardy of such shenanigans?

Actually, I have a particular scenario in mind, and it seems frighteningly plausible. I'll sketch it out at the end of this article. But first, let's get back to Tabarrok:

Do I think Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain? No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, Facebook metadata and other data are being collected.

The answer is yes, however, if we mean did the NSA spy on political candidates like Mitt Romney. Did Mitt Romney ever speak with Angela Merkel, whose phone the NSA bugged, or any one of the dozens of her advisers that the NSA was also bugging? Did Romney exchange emails with Mexican President Felipe Calderon? Were any of Romney’s emails, photos, texts or other metadata hovered up by the NSA’s break-in to the Google and Yahoo communications links?

Almost certainly the answer is yes.

Of course, that doesn't mean that Romney's information was improperly exploited during the election. "Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not," Tabarrok writes. "Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels."

I'll tell you why I agree on both counts.

Why do I doubt Romney was treated unfairly? Because I doubt Obama would have dared order it, and because the prospect of a Romney victory didn't threaten either the NSA nor a contractor like Booz Allen Hamilton nor the national-security state generally. There was reason to believe he'd have been friendlier to them than Obama!

The scenario I worry about most isn't actually another Richard Nixon type in the Oval Office, though that could certainly happen. What I worry about actually more closely resembles Mark Felt, the retired FBI agent exposed 32 years after Watergate as Deep Throat **—that is, I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too?

Imagine a very plausible 2016 presidential contest in which an anti-NSA candidate is threatening to win the nomination of one party or the other—say that Ron Wyden is challenging Hillary Clinton, or that Rand Paul might beat Chris Christie. Does anyone doubt where Keith Alexander or his successor as NSA director would stand in that race? Or in a general election where an anti-NSA candidate might win?

What would an Alexander type do if he thought the victory of one candidate would significantly rein in the NSA with catastrophic effects on national security? Would he really do nothing to prevent their victory?

I don't know. But surely there is some plausible head of the NSA who'd be tempted to use his position to sink the political prospects of candidates antagonistic to the agency's interests. And we needn't imagine something so risky and unthinkable as direct blackmail.

Surveillance-state defenders will want to jump in here and insist that there are already internal safeguards and congressional oversight to prevent the abuses I am imagining. But I don't buy it. It isn't just that I can't help but think Alexander could find a way to dig up dirt on politicians if he wanted to without it ever getting out to overseers or the public.

Forget about Alexander. Let's think about someone much lower in the surveillance state hierarchy: Edward Snowden. As we know, Snowden broke protocol and violated his promise to keep classified information secret because his conscience demanded it: He believed that he was acting for the greater good; his critics have called him a narcissist for taking it upon himself to violate rules and laws he'd agreed to obey.

It isn't hard to imagine an alternative world in which the man in Snowden's position was bent not on reforming the NSA, but on thwarting its reformers—that he was willing to break the law in service of the surveillance state, fully believing that he was acting in the best interests of the American people.

A conscience could lead a man that way too.

This Bizarro Edward Snowden wouldn't have to abscond to a foreign country with thousands of highly sensitive documents. He wouldn't have to risk his freedom. Affecting a U.S. presidential election would be as easy as quietly querying Rand Paul, or Ron Wyden, or one of their close associates, finding some piece of damaging information, figuring out how someone outside the surveillance state could plausibly happen upon that information, and then passing it off anonymously or with a pseudonym to Politico, or The New York Times, or Molly Ball. Raise your hand if you think that Snowden could've pulled that off.

And if you were running for president, or senator, even today, might you think twice about mentioning even an opinion as establishment friendly as, "Hey, I'm all for NSA surveillance, but I don't trust a private contractor like Booz Allen Hamilton to do it"? Maybe safeguards put in place since the first Snowden leak would prevent a Bizarro Edward Snowden with strong Booz loyalties from targeting you.

Maybe. Why risk it?

In yet another scenario, the NSA wouldn't go so far as to use information obtained through surveillance to affect an election. But they'd use it to their advantage to thwart the reform agenda of the candidate they didn't like if he or she won.

And maybe the NSA would be as horrified by this sort of thing as I am. But maybe one of their contractors is on the payroll of a foreign government, and that person wants to affect a presidential election by exploiting the unprecedented amounts of data that the surveillance state has collected and stored on almost everyone.

American democracy could be subverted in all sorts of hypothetical ways. Why worry about this one in particular? Here's the general standard I'd submit as the one that should govern our thinking: If a powerful institutional actor within government has a strong incentive to do something bad, the means to do it, and a high likelihood of being able to do it without getting caught, it will be done eventually.

The NSA has the incentive. At least as recently as the Snowden leaks, an unknown number of its employees or contractors had the means. And many informed observers believe abuse undetected by overseers could be easily accomplished.

If this particular abuse happened, it would be ruinous to self-government.

Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished.

__

*And yes, it's just as legitimate to ask, did the Bush Administration spy on John Kerry?

**How sure are we that we know why he leaked?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...lation/281232/





Here’s How People are Changing their Internet Habits to Avoid NSA Snooping
Timothy B. Lee

This year's revelations of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency have caused Washington Post readers to take new steps to protect their privacy online, the results of an online survey show.

"I've begun educating myself on internet security and privacy," one reader wrote. In an atmosphere of increased concern about surveillance, users have adopted privacy-enhancing technologies, ditched services they deemed to have inadequate privacy protections, and even cut back on using the Internet for sensitive communications altogether.

The survey was not based on a random sample, so it may not be representative of all visitors to washingtonpost.com, to say nothing of all Americans. But the 81 readers who provided in-depth responses provided a fascinating glimpse of how privacy-conscious users have reacted to Ed Snowden's revelations.

The privacy-enhancing tactic mentioned by the most readers was to avoid the use of mainstream cloud computing services, especially Gmail. "I deleted everything from my gmail account and switched to an account that comes with a domain I own," wrote one reader. The individual uses a desktop e-mail client and avoids "leaving my e-mail on [the] server any longer than necessary."

About 17 other users took similar precautions, halting or reducing their use of Dropbox, Yahoo Mail, and other cloud computing services. These precautions were presumably a reaction to the revelations of the NSA's PRISM program, which gives the NSA access to the contents of Gmail and other cloud Internet services.

Almost a dozen users also reported that they had switched from mainstream search engines like Google or Yahoo to DuckDuckGo. Unlike its larger competitors, this independent search engine doesn't track its users. That means the company wouldn't have much information to share if the NSA came knocking.

Several users reported installing privacy-enhancing software on their computers. Leading the list was Tor, a network of servers that helps users anonymize their online activity. Also popular is HTTPS Everywhere, an extension for the Firefox and Chrome browsers that causes these browsers to always use the encrypted "https" version of the web's fundamental protocol when accessing Web sites that support encryption.

Several users mentioned using Ghostery, a sophisticated tool for managing and blocking the third-party cookies that Web sites use to track users from site to site. A few readers also reported that they had started experimenting with using PGP software to encrypt their e-mail communications.

The irony of asking for full names and e-mail addresses in a survey about online privacy was not lost on Switch readers. "The questionnaire can't be for real. I thought I inadvertently connected to 'the Onion,'" one reader wrote in the comment section. Other commenters described the survey as "bizarre" and "creepy."

Some survey respondants indicated that they had cut back on using the Internet to send sensitive personal information. But a much larger group told us that they hadn't changed their Internet habits at all.

"If the NSA wants to know I spend too much time researching fantasy football, hotels in Las Vegas, and the best way to roast pumpkin seeds, so be it," one wrote. "You only have something to fear if you are looking up things that the NSA would consider dangerous to US citizens."

Other respondents haven't changed their habits because they believe doing so is hopeless. "There is simply no defense against the NSA if they are targeting you," one reader claimed. "I accept that I am a minnow swimming in a pool full of sharks," wrote another.

Added a third respondent: "I always add the following to my emails 'Hey NSA, go f--k yourselves.'"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-nsa-snooping/





You Are a Rogue Device

A New Apparatus Capable of Spying on You Has Been Installed Throughout Downtown Seattle. Very Few Citizens Know What It Is, and Officials Don’t Want to Talk About It.
Matt Fikse-Verkerk and Brendan Kiley

If you're walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You'll see off-white boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to utility poles. If you're walking around downtown while looking at a smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: "4th&Seneca," "4th&Union," "4th&University," and so on. That is how you can see the Seattle Police Department's new wireless mesh network, bought from a California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.

The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?

How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone, laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its "media access control address"—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous to a device's thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?

The SPD declined to answer more than a dozen questions from The Stranger, including whether the network is operational, who has access to its data, what it might be used for, and whether the SPD has used it (or intends to use it) to geo-locate people's devices via their MAC addresses or other identifiers.

Seattle Police detective Monty Moss, one of the leaders of the mesh-network project—one part of a $2.7 million effort, paid for by the Department of Homeland Security—wrote in an e-mail that the department "is not comfortable answering policy questions when we do not yet have a policy." But, Detective Moss added, the SPD "is actively collaborating with the mayor's office, city council, law department, and the ACLU on a use policy." The ACLU, at least, begs to differ: "Actively collaborating" is not how they would put it. Jamela Debelak, technology and liberty director of the Seattle office, says the ACLU submitted policy-use suggestions months ago and has been waiting for a response.

Detective Moss also added that the mesh network would not be used for "surveillance purposes... without City Council's approval and the appropriate court authorization." Note that he didn't say the mesh network couldn't be used for the surveillance functions we asked about, only that it wouldn't—at least until certain people in power say it can. That's the equivalent of a "trust us" and a handshake.

His answer is inadequate for other reasons as well. First, the city council passed an ordinance earlier this year stating that any potential surveillance equipment must submit protocols to the city council for public review and approval within 30 days of its acquisition and implementation. This mesh network has been around longer than that, as confirmed by Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install it. Still, the SPD says it doesn't have a policy for its use yet. Mayor McGinn's office says it expects to see draft protocols sometime in December—nearly nine months late, according to the new ordinance.

Second, and more importantly, this mesh network is part of a whole new arsenal of surveillance technologies that are moving faster than the laws that govern them are being written. As Stephanie K. Pell (former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee) and Christopher Soghoian (senior policy analyst at the ACLU) wrote in a 2012 essay for the Berkeley Technology Law Journal:

The use of location information by law enforcement agencies is common and becoming more so as technological improvements enable collection of more accurate and precise location data. The legal mystery surrounding the proper law enforcement access standard for prospective location data remains unsolved. This mystery, along with conflicting rulings over the appropriate law enforcement access standards for both prospective and historical location data, has created a messy, inconsistent legal landscape where even judges in the same district may require law enforcement to meet different standards to compel location data.

In other words, law enforcement has new tools—powerful tools. We didn't ask for them, but they're here. And nobody knows the rules for how they should be used.

This isn't the first time the SPD has purchased surveillance equipment (or, as they might put it, public-safety equipment that happens to have powerful surveillance capabilities) without telling the rest of the city. There was the drones controversy this past winter, when the public and elected officials discovered that the SPD had bought two unmanned aerial vehicles with the capacity to spy on citizens. There was an uproar, and a few SPD officers embarked on a mea culpa tour of community meetings where they answered questions and endured (sometimes raucous) criticism. In February, Mayor Mike McGinn announced he was grounding the drones, but a new mayor could change his mind. Those SPD drones are sitting somewhere right now on SPD property.

Meanwhile, the SPD was also dealing with the port-camera surveillance scandal. That kicked off in late January, when people in West Seattle began wondering aloud about the 30 cameras that had appeared unannounced on utility poles along the waterfront. The West Seattle neighborhood blog (westseattleblog.com) sent questions to city utility companies, and the utilities in turn pointed at SPD, which eventually admitted that it had purchased and installed 30 surveillance cameras with federal money for "port security." That resulted in an additional uproar and another mea culpa tour, much like they did with the drones, during which officers repeated that they should have done a better job of educating the public about what they were up to with the cameras on Alki. (Strangely, the Port of Seattle and the US Coast Guard didn't seem very involved in this "port security" project—their names only appear in a few cursory places in the budgets and contracts. The SPD is clearly the driving agency behind the project. For example, their early tests of sample Aruba products—beginning with a temporary Aruba mesh network set up in Pioneer Square for Mardi Gras in 2009—didn't have anything to do with the port whatsoever.)

The cameras attracted the controversy, but they were only part of the project. In fact, the 30 pole-mounted cameras on Alki that caused the uproar cost $82,682—just 3 percent of the project's $2.7 million Homeland Security–funded budget. The project's full title was "port security video surveillance system with wireless mesh network." People raised a fuss about the cameras. But what about the mesh network?

Detective Moss and Assistant Chief Paul McDonagh mentioned the downtown mesh network during those surveillance-camera community meetings, saying it would help cops and firefighters talk to each other by providing a wireless network for their exclusive use, with the potential for others to use overlaid networks handled by the same equipment. (Two-way radios already allow police officers to talk to each other, but officers still use wireless networks to access data, such as the information an officer looks for by running your license plate number when you've been pulled over.)

As Brian Magnuson of Cascade Networks, Inc., which helped install the Aruba system, explained the possible use of such a system: "A normal cell-phone network is a beautiful thing right up until the time you really need it—say you've just had an earthquake or a large storm, and then what happens? Everybody picks up their phone and overloads the system." The network is most vulnerable precisely when it's most needed. A mesh network could be a powerful tool for streaming video from surveillance cameras or squad car dash-cams across the network, allowing officers "real-time situational awareness" even when other communication systems have been overloaded, as Detective Moss explained in those community meetings.

But the Aruba mesh network is not just for talking, it's also for tracking.

After reviewing Aruba's technical literature, as well as talking to IT directors and systems administrators around the country who work with Aruba products, it's clear that their networks are adept at seeing all the devices that move through their coverage area and visually mapping the locations of those devices in real time for the system administrators' convenience. In fact, one of Aruba's major selling points is its ability to locate "rogue" or "unassociated" devices—that is, any device that hasn't been authorized by (and maybe hasn't even asked to be part of) the network.

Which is to say, your device. The cell phone in your pocket, for instance.

The user's guide for one of Aruba's recent software products states: "The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and associated devices." That software includes "a location engine that calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds by default... The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each MAC address."

For now, Seattle's mesh network is concentrated in the downtown area. But the SPD has indicated in PowerPoint presentations—also acquired by The Stranger—that it hopes to eventually have "citywide deployment" of the system that, again, has potential surveillance capabilities that the SPD declined to answer questions about. That could give a whole new meaning to the phrase "real-time situational awareness."

So how does Aruba's mesh network actually function?

Each of those off-white boxes you see downtown is a wireless access point (AP) with four radios inside it that work to shove giant amounts of data to, through, and around the network, easily handling bandwidth-hog uses such as sending live, high-resolution video to or from moving vehicles. Because this grid of APs forms a latticelike mesh, it works like the internet itself, routing traffic around bottlenecks and "self-healing" by sending traffic around components that fail.

As Brian Magnuson at Cascade Networks explains: "When you have 10 people talking to an AP, no problem. If you have 50, that's a problem." Aruba's mesh solution is innovative—instead of building a few high-powered, herculean APs designed to withstand an immense amount of traffic, Aruba sprinkles a broad area with lots of lower-powered APs and lets them figure out the best way to route all the data by talking to each other.

Aruba's technology is considered cutting-edge because its systems are easy to roll out, administer, and integrate with other systems, and its operating system visualizes what's happening on the network in a simple, user-friendly digital map. The company is one of many firms in the networking business, but, according to the tech-ranking firm Gartner, Aruba ranks second (just behind Cisco) in "completeness of vision" and third in "ability to execute" for its clever ways of getting around technical hurdles.

Take the new San Francisco 49ers football stadium, which, Magnuson says, is just finishing up an Aruba mesh network installation. The stadium has high-intensity cellular service needs—70,000 people can converge there for a single event in one of the most high-tech cities in America, full of high-powered, newfangled devices. "Aruba's solution was ingenious," Magnuson says. It put 640 low-power APs under the stadium's seats to diffuse the data load. "If you're at the stadium and trying to talk to an AP," Magnuson says, "you're probably sitting on it!"

Another one of Aruba's selling points is its ability to detect rogue devices—strangers to the system. Its promotional "case studies" trumpet this capability, including one report about Cabela's hunting and sporting goods chain, which is an Aruba client: "Because Cabela's stores are in central shopping areas, the company captures huge quantities of rogue data—as many as 20,000 events per day, mostly from neighboring businesses." Aruba's network is identifying and distinguishing which devices are allowed on the Cabela's network and which are within the coverage area but are just passing through. The case study also describes how Cabela's Aruba network was able to locate a lost price-scanner gun in a large warehouse by mapping its location, as well as track employees by the devices they were carrying.

It's one thing for a privately owned company to register devices it already owns with a network. It's another for a local police department to scale up that technology to blanket an entire downtown—or an entire city.

Aruba also sells a software product called "Analytics and Location Engine 1.0." According to a document Aruba has created about the product, ALE "calculates the location of associated and unassociated wifi devices... even though a device has not associated to the network, information about it is available. This includes the MAC address, location, and RSSI information." ALE's default setting is anonymous, which "allows for unique user tracking without knowing who the individual user is." But, Aruba adds in the next sentence, "optionally the anonymization can be disabled for richer analytics and user behavior tracking." The network has the ability to see who you are—how deeply it looks is up to whoever's using it. (The Aruba technology, as far as we know, does not automatically associate a given MAC address with the name on the device's account. But figuring out who owns the account—by asking a cell-phone company, for example—would not be difficult for a law-enforcement agency.)

Geo-location seems to be an area of intense interest for Aruba. Last week, the Oregonian announced that Aruba had purchased a Portland mapping startup called Meridian, which, according to the article, has developed software that "pinpoints a smartphone's location inside a venue, relying either on GPS technology or with localized wireless networks." The technology, the article says, "helps people find their way within large buildings, such as malls, stadiums, or airports and enables marketing directed at a phone's precise location."

How does that geo-location work? Devices in the network's coverage area are "heard" by more than one radio in those APs (the off-white boxes). Once the network hears a device from multiple APs, it can compare the strength and timing of the signal to locate where the device is. This is classic triangulation, and users of Aruba's AirWave software—as in the Cabela's example—report that their systems are able to locate devices to within a few feet.

In the case of large, outdoor installations where APs are more spread out, the ability to know what devices are passing through is useful—especially, perhaps, to policing agencies, which could log that data for long-term storage. As networking products and their uses continue to evolve, they will only compound the "legal mystery" around how this technology could and should be used that Pell and Soghoian described in their Berkeley Technology Law Journal piece. Aruba's mesh network is state-of-the-art, but something significantly smarter and more sensitive will surely be on the market this time next year. And who knows how much better the software will get.

An official spokesperson for Aruba wrote in an e-mail that the company could not answer The Stranger's questions because they pertained "to a new product announcement" that would not happen until Thanksgiving. "Aruba's technology," the spokesperson added, "is designed for indoor (not outdoor) usage and is for consumer apps where they opt in." This is in direct contradiction to Aruba's own user's manuals, as well as the fact that the Seattle Police Department installed an outdoor Aruba mesh network earlier this year.

One engineer familiar with Aruba products and similar systems—who requested anonymity—confirmed that the mesh network and its software are powerful tools. "But like anything," the engineer said, it "can be used inappropriately... You can easily see how a user might abuse this ability (network admin has a crush on user X, monitors user X's location specifically)." As was widely reported earlier this year, such alleged abuses within the NSA have included a man who spied on nine women over a five-year period, a woman who spied on prospective boyfriends, a man who spied on his girlfriend, a husband who spied on his wife, and even a man who spied on his ex-girlfriend "on his first day of access to the NSA's surveillance system," according to the Washington Post. The practice was so common within the NSA, it got its own classification: "LOVEINT."

Other Aruba clients—such as a university IT director, a university vice president, and systems administrators—around the country confirmed it wouldn't be difficult to use the mesh network to track the movement of devices by their MAC addresses, and that building a historical database of their movements would be relatively trivial from a data-storage perspective.

As Bruce Burton, an information technology manager at the University of Cincinnati (which uses an Aruba network), put it in an e-mail: "This mesh network will have the capability to track devices (MAC addresses) throughout the city."

Not that the SPD would do that—but we don't know. "We definitely feel like the public doesn't have a handle on what the capabilities are," says Debelak of the ACLU. "We're not even sure the police department does." It all depends on what the SPD says when it releases its mesh-network protocols.

"They're long overdue," says Lee Colleton, a systems administrator at Google who is also a member of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, a grassroots group that formed in response to SPD's drone and surveillance-camera controversies. "If we don't deal with this kind of thing now, and establish norms and policies, we'll find ourselves in an unpleasant situation down the road that will be harder to change."

The city is already full of surveillance equipment. The Seattle Department of Transportation, for example, uses license-plate scanners, sensors embedded in the pavement, and other mechanisms to monitor individual vehicles and help estimate traffic volume and wait time. "But as soon as that data is extrapolated," says Adiam Emery of SDOT, "it's gone." They couldn't turn it over to a judge if they tried.

Not that license-plate scanners have always been so reliable. Doug Honig of the ACLU remembers a story he heard from a former staffer a couple of years ago about automatic license-plate readers on police cars in Spokane. Automatic license-plate readers "will read a chain-link fence as XXXXX," Honig says, "which at the time also matched the license plate of a stolen car in Mississippi, resulting in a number of false alerts to pull over the fence."

Seattle's mesh network is only one instance in a trend of Homeland Security funding domestic surveillance equipment. Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a story about a $7 million Homeland Security grant earmarked for "port security"—just like the SPD's mesh-network funding—in Oakland.

"But instead," the Times reports, "the money is going to a police initiative that will collect and analyze reams of surveillance data from around town—from gunshot- detection sensors in the barrios of East Oakland to license plate readers mounted on police cars patrolling the city's upscale hills."

The Oakland "port security" project, which the Times reports was formerly known as the "Domain Awareness Center," will "electronically gather data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases, analyze that data, and display some of the information on a bank of giant monitors." The Times doesn't detail what kind of "sensors and databases" the federally funded "port security" project will pay for, but perhaps it's something like Seattle's mesh network with its ability to ping, log, and visually map the movement of devices in and out of its coverage area.

Which brings up some corollary issues, ones with implications much larger than the SPD's ability to call up a given time on a given day and see whether you were at work, at home, at someone's else home, at a bar, or at a political demonstration: What does it mean when money from a federal agency like the Department of Homeland Security is being funneled to local police departments like SPD to purchase and use high-powered surveillance gear?

For federal surveillance projects, the NSA and other federal spying organizations have at least some oversight—as flawed as it may be—from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA court) and the US Congress. But local law enforcement doesn't have that kind of oversight and, in Seattle at least, has been buying and installing DHS-funded surveillance equipment without explaining what it's up to. The city council's surveillance ordinance earlier this year was an attempt to provide local oversight on that kind of policing, but it has proven toothless.

It's reasonable to assume that locally gleaned information will be shared with other organizations, including federal ones. An SPD diagram of the mesh network, for example, shows its information heading to institutions large and small, including the King County Sheriff's Office, the US Coast Guard, and our local fusion center.

Fusion centers, if you're unfamiliar with the term, are information-sharing hubs, defined by the Department of Homeland Security as "focal points" for the "receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing" of surveillance information.

If federally funded, locally built surveillance systems with little to no oversight can dump their information in a fusion center—think of it as a gun show for surveillance, where agencies freely swap information with little restriction or oversight—that could allow federal agencies such as the FBI and the NSA to do an end-run around any limitations set by Congress or the FISA court.

If that's their strategy in Seattle, Oakland, and elsewhere, it's an ingenious one—instead of maintaining a few high-powered, herculean surveillance agencies designed to digest an immense amount of traffic and political scrutiny, the federal government could sprinkle an entire nation with lots of low-powered surveillance nodes and let them figure out the best way to route the data by talking to each other. By diffusing the way the information flows, they can make it flow more efficiently.

It's an innovative solution—much like the Aruba mesh network itself.

The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to requests for comment.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/y...t?oid=18143845





Big Cable May Have Felled Seattle’s Mayor, But it Couldn’t Stop this Colo. Project
Brian Fung

In 2009, Vince Jordan was one of a handful of Coloradans hoping to flip the switch on a next-generation fiber optic network in his area. Longmont's 17-mile loop of fiber would have been capable of connecting Jordan to the Web at speeds 100 times faster than the national average. The city owned the cables already. All it needed was approval from the city's voters.

But Jordan, the broadband manager for Longmont's public electric utility, failed to anticipate one thing: The cable companies.

"We got creamed," he says. "We lost by 12 [percentage points] in that vote."

On that election night four years ago, they were caught flat-footed. The cable industry had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into thwarting its prospective government-owned challenger at the polls. It dwarfed the advocates' expenditures, which that year amounted to all of $95.

That history made last night's election results particularly sweet for the city's municipal fiber advocates. Longmont residents approved a $45.3 million bond issuance that will go toward funding a city-wide fiber network. But recent political fights haven't always had a happy ending for advocates of municipal broadband projects.

A nationwide campaign

Cable incumbents have been fighting to defeat municipal fiber proposals all over the country. We recently reported that cable groups invested money to defeat Seattle mayor Mike McGinn, a municipal fiber supporter. (For the record, Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokesperson, denied Tuesday that the company's political contributions had any connection with McGinn's broadband policies. She says Comcast has contributed consistently to the Seattle Broadband Communications Coalition of Washington over the past five years.) In early returns Tuesday, McGinn was trailing challenger Ed Murray, 56-44.

But the battle of Seattle is far from the only time advocates of new broadband initiatives have crossed swords with incumbent cable companies. Across the United States, cable lobbyists have helped erect legal barriers to stifle competition from public utilities. Industry groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits to block city attempts to roll out fiber service. And they have also opposed public referendums to allow cities to build their own networks.

Longmont, Colo., was merely one such battleground. In North St. Paul, Minn., a 2009 ballot measure to let muni fiber move forward was defeated by a resounding 34-point margin. Opposition to the fledgling network, PolarNet, was led by the Minnesota Cable Communications Association. In the weeks leading up to the vote, it and other opposition groups spent some $40,000 campaigning against the measure. MCCA alone contributed more than $15,000 to the effort over the same period.

Part of the organization's message was that despite consumer confusion about the options for commercial Internet, the local market for broadband was actually very competitive — people just didn't know it.

"So many things have happened since then," says Michael Martin, MCCA's treasurer. "The state has developed a mapping system that shows all the providers in an area so people can go to an objective source and identify the competitors that are available to them. That wasn't available at the time. A lot of what people knew about what was available came mainly through word of mouth. It was anecdotal."

Whatever workarounds may have been built since the push for PolarNet, the fiber optic cables it was supposed to light up with traffic remain dark today. Paul Ammerman, North St. Paul's economic development director, seemed resigned to the cable industry's will.

"We're trying to figure out if it's worth the effort," he says. "Certainly we've got a lot of capacity that's not being used. On the horizon there's always the next breakthrough that might do it. Some say maybe the last mile is not fiber; maybe it's wireless. But that gets beyond the current technology."

In Chattanooga, one of the few places where municipal fiber has managed to gain traction, the state cable association filed a lawsuit in 2007 alleging that the local public utility, EPB, would be breaking the law if it allowed its electricity division to cross-subsidize its fiber optic service. When a judge threw out the case the following year, Comcast filed its own suit. That too was dismissed — and once more on appeal in 2009.

Big Cable's big stand

Still, Longmont may offer the most vivid example of cable industry groups trying to hobble a public broadband provider. Colorado is one of more than a dozen states that have passed laws prohibiting or hindering municipal broadband deployments. (Tennessee and Minnesota made it onto the Federal Communications Commission's initial list in 2004; Colorado proposed its law one year later.) Under the restriction, known as SB 152, cities that want to use their fiber optic cables to provide Internet service must get the approval of its residents before doing so. The rule effectively forbids local governments from managing their own property.

Lobbyists played an obscure but important role in pushing the bill through. According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the Colorado Telecommunications Association, a group representing 25 rural phone companies, hired two different teams of lobbyists in 2005 to promote the idea. One, Axiom Strategies, Inc., received $6,000 in contributions from CTA in 2005, a review of state records shows. Lobbyist Patrick Boyle, received $20,616.60 from the industry over the same period.

This chain of events is what ultimately led to Longmont's failed 2009 referendum on muni fiber; under the newly-passed law, the city couldn't move forward unless a majority of residents gave their consent. The state's cable group — the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association — intervened, donating nearly $225,000 to an opposition committee named No Blank Check. Armed with these funds, the group took out full-page newspaper ads assigning nefarious motives to foreign investors who might have played a role in the project.

But not long after the cable industry's victory, Google started floating the idea of installing gigabit fiber in various sites around the country. Some in Longmont suggested petitioning the tech giant to make the city one of its testbeds.

"That really helped us educate the community to the value of what we already have here," says Longmont's Vince Jordan. "So we went again [with another referendum] in 2011."

This time, CCTA went all-in on fighting the initiative. It upped its contribution to anti-fiber groups, giving $385,000 to a committee called Look Before We Leap. This, in a battle that saw total opposition expenditures top $419,000. In other words, 92 percent of the messaging war against Question 2A was funded by the cable industry.

Yet the increased industry spending hardly seemed to make a difference. By a 61-39 percent vote, city residents agreed that Longmont should be able to do with its fiber optic cables what it wished.

How much did pro-fiber groups spend in that encounter? Around $3,700, says Jordan.

There are 27,000 households in Longmont. Even if the city were to connect all of the eligible homes to its existing fiber network overnight, it would still reach only 1,100 residences. Cable companies therefore spent over half a million dollars trying to prevent four percent of city households from gaining access to municipal fiber on any reasonable timescale. That's around $600 a home, or six months' worth of Xfinity Triple Play.

Did Longmont set a precedent?

Perhaps that's why the cable industry has mostly given up fighting Longmont — it's not worth it anymore. On Tuesday night, voters overwhelmingly approved of the city's third fiber ballot measure since SB 152, Question 2B. Question 2B asks whether the local government should be allowed to issue $45.3 million in bonds to pay for a city-wide deployment of fiber, one that would finally connect all 27,000 homes, and every private business, to public fiber within the next three years. Proponents estimated that without the funding, it would take a half-century to complete the roll-out. Voters gave it the green light, by a 68-32 percent split. No group came forward to contest the measure. The cable companies had picked up their ball and gone home.

This doesn't mean they're going to start backing down everywhere. Critics of municipal networks continue to point to the financial risks taxpayers assume when cities decide to embark on such ambitious projects.

"We've been supportive of public-private partnerships where tax dollars aren't competing against private investment capital," says Comcast's Sena Fitzmaurice. "In general, cities have extensive infrastructure needs like roads, bridges and schools, and we think especially in times of fiscal tradeoffs that taxpayer money should be focused on those needs rather than competing with the private sector."

There are certainly more than a handful of municipalities whose fiber projects have failed. Provo, Utah famously sold its public network to Google for a single dollar this year (though the tech company will also assume the burden for Provo's construction loans, which is not insignificant, either). Still, the fact that some local governments have struggled to monetize their fiber, even as others have succeeded, is not an argument for preventing cities from experimenting.

Longmont's plan explicitly bars the use of tax money to pay off the bonds. Instead, it will rely solely on revenues from broadband customers. Whether that'll actually work out is hardly clear. But what Longmont's experience does show is how large the gulf is between an incumbent industry that can spend money on a massive scale to promote its interests and advocates of municipal fiber that often lack deep-pocketed allies. Those odds made the triumph of Longmont's municipal fiber backers all the more remarkable.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...orado-project/





6TB Helium-Filled Hard Drives Take Flight, Bump Capacity 50%

Helium in drives enables a 23% decrease in power use
Lucas Mearian

It took Western Digital's HGST subsidiary more than a decade to develop a way to reliably seal helium gas inside of a hard drive. It was worth the wait.

HGST Monday announced that it's now shipping a helium-filled, 3.5-in hard disk drive with 50% more capacity than the current industry leading 4TB drives. The new drive uses 23% less power and is 38% lighter than the 4TB drives.

Without changing the height, the new 6TB Ultrastar He6 enterprise-class hard drive crams seven disk platters into what was a five disk-platter, 4TB Ultrastar drive.

While HGST would not release specific pricing for the drives, as they will be sold to server and storage array manufactures, the company did say the drives will "command a premium" not just based on capacity, the lower total cost of ownership that the helium technology offers.

"I'd say helium is one of the major breakthroughs in the hard drive industry because you can only increase the platter areal density so much with today's technology," said Fang Zhang, an analyst at market researcher IHS.

While the Ultrastar He6's 50% boost in capacity is impressive, what's most notable is the power reduction, Zhang said, because the high-capacity drives will be used in large data centers and cloud infrastructures.

At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.

The helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.

Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

Netflix, which uses HGST high-capacity hard drives in its data centers, said the increase in capacity and lower power-usage in the Ultrastar He6 hard drives will go a long ways toward optimizing their streaming video server infrastructure.

Netflix serves up billions of hours of streaming video per quarter to over 40 million subscribers requires a constant effort to optimize server infrastructure, according to David Fullagar, director of Content Delivery Architecture at Netflix.

"As part of our efforts to optimize the delivery ecosystem for Netflix and our Internet Service Provider partners, we strive to build better and better streaming appliances. The high storage density and lower power usage of the Ultrastar He6 hard drives allow us to continue with that goal, and create a great customer experience," Fullagar said.

HGST said it's been working with key computer manufacturers, cloud and research groups, including HP, Huawei Unified Storage, Green Revolution Cooling, Code42, CERN as well as some of the world's largest social media and search companies, to qualify the drive.

"Data is going to the moon. As we deploy solutions that are tens and hundreds of petabytes, anything you can do to increase density is a boon," said Jimmy Daley, director of Smart Storage at Hewlett-Packard. "We are seeing about 2-watt lower power on random workloads compared to today's 4TB. That's about 20% [power reduction]."

Daley is currently testing more than a dozen of HGST's He6 6TB drives in HP's SL4500 servers, and expects hundreds of the drives to be in the servers by the end of the month.

The SL4500 servers hold up to 60 drives each. Previously, the SL4500 server, using 4TB drives, could hold a quarter of a petabyte, or 250TB of data; the box could potentially hold one-third of a petabyte, or about 333TB of data with the 6TB drives.

"To me, it is a clear indication of how important density is," Daley said. "Density translates into reduction of footprint."

The helium drive was first announced last year under the HGST's HelioSeal moniker as a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come.

The new Ultrastar He6 drive offers the best total cost of ownership for high-capacity environments, such as cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments, HGST said.

But helium-filled drives can only boost density so much, Zhang said.

After the initial boost in capacity for today's perpendicular magnetic recording drive technology, it will then take newer technologies, such as HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording), BPM (bit patterned recoding), and SMR or Shingled Magnetic Recording, to further increase the areal density of the drive platters themselves.

Today's hard drive platters max out at 625Gbit per square inch, or the equivalent to more than 1TB of capacity per platter. Seagate sees SMR, which overlaps bits on a platter like a shingled roof, as having the potential to knock hard drive capacity out of the park with 1Tbit per square inch areal density.

Seagate has plans to release 5TB hard drives based on SMR early next year and a 10TB hard drive by 2016 and 20TB by 2020.

Using HAMR technology, HGST expects to take drive platter areal density to 5 terabits (Tbits) per square inch.

Even with the areal density developments, helium will continue to be a key component in boosting capacity and reducing power requirements. The industry is expected to continue using the lighter gas in emerging drive technology, Zhang said.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...p_capacity_50_





Allan Block, Whose Sandal Shop Was Folk Music Hub, Dies at 90
Bruce Weber

Allan Block, a leather craftsman and fiddler who made sandals and music in his Greenwich Village shop — which became a bubbling hub of folk music during the 1950s and ’60s; a showcase for talented pickers and singers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Doc Watson and Maria Muldaur; and a destination for aspiring musicians like John Sebastian and Bob Dylan — died on Oct. 23 at his home in Francestown, N.H. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his family.

Mr. Block, who studied classical violin growing up in Oshkosh, Wis., was a self-taught sandal maker who helped popularize open-toed footwear. But he was prone to setting aside his leather samples and his awl to pick up a fiddle and jam with the folkies, mountain music makers and acoustic blues players who were wont to drop in with their banjos, guitars, mandolins and other instruments.

The store, the Allan Block Sandal Shop at 171 West Fourth Street, was just a few minutes’ walk from Washington Square Park and from the Folklore Center on Macdougal Street, where perpetual musical performances, both impromptu and planned, made Greenwich Village the red-hot center of the so-called folk revival.

Many evenings and weekend afternoons, the jams migrated to Mr. Block’s store, where the crowds often spilled out the door and onto the sidewalk. According to Mr. Block’s daughter Rory, a blues singer who worked with her father and ran the store after he decamped for New Hampshire in the late 1960s, Bob Dylan dropped by more than once just to chat with her father.

“He’d be sitting in a chair and my dad would be working and they’d be talking,” Ms. Block said about Mr. Dylan in an interview. “And my dad said to me: ‘You see that young man? He’s a poet first and foremost. He values his art above all else. He’s been signed by a label, but he really doesn’t care about the business side of things.’ ”

Mr. Sebastian recalled in an interview on Wednesday that in 1960, when he was 16 and living with his parents on the perimeter of Washington Square Park, soaking up what he called “the folk scene, the doo-wop scene, the beatnik scene, the blues scene,” that he often found himself at the sandal shop.

“This was a place that was an energy power point for the folk music movement,” he said, adding that many of those who played there were his heroes, old-time musicians who were featured on the influential 1952 set of recordings known as the “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

“That particular album was very important for folk singers and people learning guitar in that era,” Mr. Sebastian recalled. “And here were living examples, the people who had been on that anthology, and you could sit in a small wooden kind of room and be with them. It was unbelievable. I saw Son House, Bukka White, John Hurt, and those were just the guys in my part of the bag. I saw Doc Watson. Every guitar player should be discouraged after seeing Doc Watson.”

Allan Forrest Block was born in Oshkosh on Oct. 6, 1923. His father, Isadore, ran a scrap metal business that later expanded into building supplies. After high school, he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin but never graduated, leaving during World War II to join the American Field Service, which he served as an ambulance driver in India. Afterward, he moved to New York City — where, his brother Daniel said, he first became interested in folk music — and then, for a while, to the woods of New Jersey, near Princeton, where, his brother said, he began making sandals.

Back in New York, his first shop was a tiny hole in the wall on Macdougal Street. According to “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña,” by David Hajdu, the West Fourth Street store opened in 1950.

There, Mr. Block’s daughter Mona Young said, he perfected his method of making custom-tailored sandals, complete with arch supports. Customers would choose a style from one of 20 drawings posted on the wall, stand on a piece of cardboard to have their feet traced and then return two or three weeks later for a fitting.

“Whatever weird shape the person’s foot was, that’s the shape the sandal would be,” she said.

Mr. Block’s sandals, famous in their day — the actress Faye Dunaway and musicians including Ms. Baez, Ms. Fariña and members of the band Sha Na Na bought them, Mr. Block’s daughters said, and Suze Rotolo, Mr. Dylan’s onetime girlfriend, lionized them in her memoir of the era, “A Freewheelin’ Time” — were groundbreaking footwear, fashionwise.

“In the beginning, most people saw sandals as something very European or feminine,” Mr. Block told Mr. Hajdu. “White men wouldn’t buy them at all — only black men. Then, I think, people started relating the idea of exposed feet and natural leather and something handmade with folk music and crafts.”

In New Hampshire, Mr. Block continued his leather work; in addition to sandals, he made belts, handbags, guitar straps and other items. He also performed on the fiddle at folk festivals and dances.

In addition to his daughters, Mr. Block, who was married several times, is survived by a son, Paul; a brother, Daniel; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

By some measures, from the mid-1950s through the early ’60s, the frenzy of the folk music revival, an important factor in the emergence of a fervid counterculture, was symbolized by the Allan Block Sandal Shop, where music often trumped capitalism. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, the store was so crowded with musicians and listeners that business was impossible.

“God help you,” the singer Dave Van Ronk told Mr. Hajdu, “if you wanted to buy a pair of sandals.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/ny...ies-at-90.html
















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