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Old 19-11-14, 10:22 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 22nd, '14

Since 2002



Volume XIII, Issue Number I






























"I can't. I'm sorry. I can't." – Det. John L. Haley


"Nobody would know it was us." – Senior Uber vice president Emil Michael


"The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn 77 percent of all revenue from recorded music." – Derek Thompson






































November 22nd, 2014




BitTorrent Opens Its Paygate Premium Content Bundles To All Artists, Giving Creators A 90% Cut
Ingrid Lunden

BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file distribution network that has been repositioning itself as a legit friend and home to the creative industries, is today embarking on the latest phase of its strategy to build a bigger business model for itself, and the musicians, filmmakers and others whose content gets distributed on its network. It is opening its paygate-based business model to all artists and others who would like to use BitTorrent to distribute their content.

At a time when there is a lot of debate over whether services like Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube or Amazon are really giving creators the returns they deserve when their content is downloaded or streamed on those platforms, BitTorrent believes that it has the answer: giving artists a 90% cut of all sales around a model that features a flexible model: you can take some content for free, get some behind a paywall; or see the content move to paywall after a certain number of visits for example.

“Taylor Swift sparked debate over the state of music in recent weeks; the value of a stream, the value of a record. The value of art shouldn’t be up for debate. It should be up to artists,” said Matt Mason, chief content officer for BitTorrent. “Our goal with BitTorrent Bundle is to restore control to creators. We’re opening up applications for paygates to all publishers: allowing artists to sell content direct to fans, on their terms, while keeping 90% of sales revenue.”

The move was made public at the same time that BitTorrent announced the second of its big-name Paygate partners, a collaboration with the musician Diplo, who is celebrating the tenth anniversary of his first album, Florida, with a $5 paygated Bundle that features the full album plus new, unreleased content.

Although BitTorrent has been talking about its plans for paygates for well over a year now, it only released the first of these at the end of September. Radiohead frontman (and Spotify naysayer) Thom York’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes Bundle has now been downloaded 4.4 million times.

The company is not disclosing how many of those downloads have seen people pay for the extra content. “As with Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Thom Yorke’s decision was, from the outset, not to disclose sales data. The choice to share that information is at the artist’s discretion. As it should be. We have to respect the artist’s decision,” says Straith Schreder, director of content strategy for BitTorrent.

She adds that new artists or others wanting to use the paygate can apply here; those already distributing on BitTorrent can now click on “Add Paygate” when they create new Bundles on existing accounts.

“Applying”, she says, is pretty straightforward: New artists will be asked to provide contact details, as well as some basic information about the project they’d like to publish, and that’s all.

But they are not going to be rolled out all at once.

“We are not being selective per se,” she says. “Our goal is to make paygates available to all artists. We believe art has value; we want everyone to have the ability to sell their work direct-to-fan using Bundle. As with the rollout of the self-publish email gate feature in September 2013, we’re greenlighting paygates in batches. This allows us to QA the platform, and make sure that each publisher is properly set up. We want the paygate experience to be the best possible one for creators and their fans.”

In addition to the 10% cut to BitTorrent, she says that the publisher is also responsible for payment processing fees, which is typically less than 5%. “This is a much better deal for artists.”

“For one, it’s transparent. Other sales and streaming platforms have come under attack for failing to disclose the deals they’ve made with labels. While Spotify has claimed to pay 70% of their revenue to rightsholders, public statements by artists, including Taylor Swift, indicate that little of that money is actually making it back to the people making the songs,” she says. “For another, it’s sustainable. Platforms like iTunes take up to 40% of sales revenue — without disclosing fan contact information or data. Which means that, as an artist, you have no idea who’s buying your work, and how to reach them. To deprive artists of this data is to deprive them of the ability to build a viable business.”
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/17/bit...ndles-paygate/





YouTube's Refusal to Remove 20,000 Songs Leads to New Irving Azoff Warning

The standoff involves works by Pharrell Williams and other popular songwriters
Eriq Gardner

YouTube has apparently made the decision not to immediately remove songs composed by popular musicians including The Eagles, Pharrell Williams and John Lennon, and as a result, the popular video website is being warned of the risks of "defiance."

Last week, just as YouTube announced the launch of a subscription service called Music Key, music industry heavyweight Irving Azoff was sounding the alarm that YouTube hadn't completed all of the licensing necessary. YouTube may have made deals with record labels, but to publicly perform songs, the company also has to take care of songwriters, which Azoff says are "massively underpaid" when it comes to digital services. Many songwriters are handled by publishers working through performance rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI, but Azoff is spearheading a new venture, Global Music Rights (GMR), which has managed to sign up about 42 songwriters, including Smokey Robinson and Chris Cornell, who collectively have published about 20,000 songs.

According to a letter sent by GMR's outside lawyer Howard King to YouTube general counsel Kent Walker on Monday (see below), YouTube has failed to comply with demands to stop performing those 20,000 songs. Now the two sides begin a dance to the beat of copyright law.

The first question that arises from the escalating situation is whether YouTube has a right to perform these songs until proven otherwise. GMR thinks the burden of proving a valid license is on YouTube.

According to the Azoff camp, YouTube has come forward with word that it has a multiyear license for the public performance of works represented by GMR. The licensors aren't identified, but it's possible that YouTube thinks itself covered by prior deals made with ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or some foreign PRO. (YouTube hasn't publicly commented about the situation, although it did give us a statement. It's below.)

King writes: "Obviously, if YouTube contends that it has properly licensed any of the songs for public broadcast, a contention we believe to be untrue, demand is hereby made that we be furnished with documentation of such licenses."

The next issue to be debated will be whose responsibility it is for alerting YouTube about infringing works on the network. Azoff tells The Hollywood Reporter that GMR has sent takedown notices, but from what we understand, these appear to fall under the category of a general notice of 20,000 unlicensed works. Azoff says that YouTube is making GMR track down each instance of an infringing work in the YouTube ecosystem. "They hide behind safe harbor," he says. "But that doesn't protect a knowing and willful infringer."

Interestingly, the responsibilities of ISPs under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act began to be shaped by Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube. That litigation was settled earlier this year, leaving it to other cases like the record companies' dispute with Vimeo to further inform the discussion about precisely what kind of knowledge and awareness is necessary before an ISP like YouTube is disqualified from having safe harbor from copyright liability. (The Vimeo case will be argued before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals very soon.)

Although Azoff says he's not contemplating a lawsuit quite yet, the letter from King (a notable litigator) does raise the prospect of "willful copyright infringement." Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement run up to $150,000 per work, meaning that if a lawsuit does come, it could theoretically be a $3 billion case. Statutory damages more typically run between $10,000 to $50,000 per work, though. That still amounts to a lawsuit potentially worth somewhere between $200 million and $1 billion.

Of course, it's possible YouTube does have a prior license or can mitigate its liability another way. (For example, the company now uses content fingerprinting technology that could be a middle ground in the takedown process.) If not, this is Azoff's way of ratcheting up the pressure and making his formal invitation to YouTube to get to the negotiating table right away.

A spokesperson from YouTube gave us this statement: "We've done deals with labels, publishers, collection societies and more to bring artists' music into YouTube Music Key. To achieve our goal of enabling this service's features on all the music on YouTube, we'll keep working with both the music community and with the music fans invited to our beta phase."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...0-songs-749947





Court Agrees that Google’s Search Results Qualify as Free Speech

Website CoastNews had its complaint tossed; must pay attorney's fees to Google.
Megan Geuss

The regulation of Google's search results has come up from time to time over the past decade, and although the idea has gained some traction in Europe (most recently with “right to be forgotten” laws), courts and regulatory bodies in the US have generally agreed that Google's search results are considered free speech. That consensus was upheld last Thursday, when a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Google's right to order its search results as it sees fit.

The owner of a website called CoastNews, S. Louis Martin, argued that Google was unfairly putting CoastNews too far down in search results, while Bing and Yahoo were turning up CoastNews in the number one spot. CoastNews claimed that violated antitrust laws. It also took issue with Google's refusal to deliver ads to its website after CoastNews posted photographs of a nudist colony in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Google then filed an anti-SLAPP motion against the plaintiff. Anti-SLAPP regulations in California allow courts to throw out lawsuits at an early stage if they're intended to stifle free speech rights. In this case, the judge agreed [PDF] that Google was permitted by the First Amendment to organize its search results as it saw fit.

“Defendant has met its burden of showing that the claims asserted against it arise from constitutionally protected activity,” the judge's order read.

More powerful companies have also taken issue with Google's ordering of search results to no avail. Back in 2011, a Senate antitrust subcommittee began an investigation of Google's search results under the premise that Google's size could lead to anticompetitive behavior. The FTC also launched an investigation into Google's practices, but the company came away unscathed after the 19-month-long ordeal.

In 2012, Google commissioned a white paper by prominent UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk in which the two concluded that Google's search engine is protected by the First Amendment because it "uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers' judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries."

Ars contacted Volokh regarding this recent ruling, and he said that if anything, the search engine's status as protected by the First Amendment is stronger today than it was before. This is especially true given a recent ruling in a case involving Chinese search engine Baidu, which was sued in America by pro-democracy activists for censoring political speech from US users. Nevertheless, the Manhattan US District judge in that case ruled that the search engine could organize its search results as it liked because it was protected by the First Amendment.

”Newspapers, guidebooks—and, for that matter, Ars Technica—have a First Amendment right to choose which stories are worth publishing, and which businesses are worth covering,” Volokh wrote to Ars in an e-mail. “Likewise, Google (a modern heir of the guidebook) can choose which pages to prominently display (and thus implicitly recommend as relevant and interesting) to readers and which pages aren’t worth displaying so prominently—or aren’t worth displaying at all.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...s-free-speech/





Large Number of Tor Hidden Sites Seized by the FBI in Operation Onymous Were Clone or Scam Sites
Nik Cubrilovic

This post is the first in a series dealing with the takedown of Silk Road 2.0 and Operation Onymous. The data in this post was put together with @secruedmh and @imposter. A big thanks to Juha Nurmia and his Tor Hidden Service Index, and researchers who share their work or report on stories such as lamoustache, gwern, deepdotweb along with others who don’t wish to be named for helping us fill in our index and cache. For updates follow on twitter.

In the two weeks since Silk Road 2.0 and a large number of other Tor hosted hidden services were taken down as part of Operation Onymous, we have crawled and indexed onion sites to find out just how many sites were seized and what sites were seized. Initial reports said 410 sites were seized, then 400 and this number has continued to be revised down until Europol said only some two-dozen sites were seized. Our crawl of just over 9,000 onion sites has found 276 seized onion sites.

The full table of seized onion sites discovered is below, an overview of the data and some findings:

1. Out of a total of 276 seized onion addresses found, we identified 153 of the addresses as belonging to either clone, scam or phishing sites.
2. Of the 153 clone or scam sites, 133 were clones and 20 were scam or phishing sites.
3. In a number of cases the FBI has seized the clone or scam version of a site while leaving up the real site.
4. In May of 2014 a bot known as the “Onion Cloner” was discovered and became known to Tor hidden service operators. This bot would find Tor hidden sites and clone them on its own address in an effort to steal passwords or intercept Bitcoin transactions. Of the 133 clone sites that the FBI seized, a large number of them were clone sites produced by the Onion Cloner that were mistaken for the real copy.
5. Of the 8 websites mentioned in the FBI press release, 2 are clones and 1 is a scam site.
6. Of the 32 onion addresses mentioned in the DOJ seizure notice filed in US court, 3 are scam sites and 9 are clone websites.
7. As far as our survey has revealed and based on prior data about the Onion Cloner, every single Onion Cloner clone site has been seized.
8. For the following sites, the clone or fake version was seized while the real site remains live: Cannabis UK, CStore, Dedope, Executive Outcomes, FakeID, Fake Real Plastic, Hackintosh, Pablo Escobar Drug Store, Real Cards Team, Smokeables, Zero Squad. Some of these sites were mentioned in the FBI press release or court seizure notice as having been taken down when in fact the clones were seized.
9. There are almost 200 sites that have been seized that are not mentioned in any seizure notice or press release. These include the (real) sites for Fish Squad, Exposed, Hack the Planet, Cash Machine, DOXBIN, Pink Meth, OnionSphere, Mr Ouid’s Forum. That list includes personal websites, forums or other sites that had no outward appearance of illegal activity, and they are also not mentioned in any court or press documents. These sites were seized with what appears to be no, or little legal justification.
10. Scam or phishing versions of Silk Road 2.0, Agora, Real Cards Team, Evolution and many other sites were seized.
11. For some of the onion addresses, being mentioned in the FBI press release or the seizure notice is the first and only ever public web mention of the address.
12. The website “Executive Outcomes”, which the FBI claims in seizure notices and press releases was a retailer of firearms was a well known scam site – it never shipped any weapons but took users funds.
13. A clone of a Jihad funding website called “Fund the Islamic Struggle without leaving a trace” was seized, while the real website remains live (and has accepted over 5 BTC in donations)

Indications of Method

That the FBI seized so many clone and fake websites suggests a broad, untargeted sweep of hidden services rather than a targeted campaign. The slapshot nature of how sites were seized suggests that rather than starting with an onion address and then discovering the host server to seize, this campaign simply vacuumed up a large number of onion websites by targeting specific hosting companies. We have tracked down the hosting companies affected and the details will be published in a follow-up.

On that note, if you were the administrator of a hidden site that was seized, be it a clone or a real site, please get in touch (PGP and email here). I’ve spoken to a number of admins and hosting companies and have put together what the seized sites had in common in order to deduce the method used to locate them. Information from admins and hosts is invaluable in working out what the weaknesses of the seized sites was, and what can be learned from the seizures. There is a high likelihood that none of the seizures will be tested or revealed in court, at least not in the short term, so getting this information is important.

Tor Onion Data

The database of hidden sites, which I believe is the largest that has been collated, will be posted to this GitHub repository sometime in the next couple of days. An earlier version of the crawler used is also available on GitHub. We are currently putting together an index of data from the seized sites, including the forums, and other Tor hidden services along with a search engine. If you’re interested in contributing or adding data to it get in touch.
https://www.nikcub.com/posts/onymous-part1/





U.S. Government Seeks to Keep Megaupload Money Because Kim Dotcom Is a 'Fugitive'
Eriq Gardner

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice told a Virginia federal judge that Kim Dotcom and cohorts have no business challenging the seizure of an estimated $67 million in assets because the Megaupload founder is evading prosecution.

The government brought criminal charges against Dotcom in early 2012, but he's been holed up in New Zealand awaiting word on whether he'll be extradited. The government got antsy and this past July, brought a civil complaint for forfeiture in rem, a maneuver to firmly establish a hold over money from bank accounts around the world, luxury cars, big televisions, watches, artwork and other property allegedly gained by Megaupload in the course of crimes.

Dotcom is fighting the seizures by questioning the government's basis for asserting a crime, saying "there is no such crime as secondary criminal copyright infringement," as well as challenging how the seized assets are tied to the charges against Dotcom.
But according to the U.S. government, Dotcom doesn't get the pleasure of even making the arguments. In a motion to strike, the government cites the doctrine of fugitive disentitlement, which bars a person from using the resources of the court if that person is aware of prosecution and is evading it. The U.S. government has previously leaned on the doctrine to rebut an attempt by Dotcom's lawyers to dismiss the criminal complaint.

"Though disentitlement of fugitive claimants is discretionary, rather than mandatory, courts have found that the exercise of its discretion under § 2466 is necessary to protect the integrity of the judicial system," states the U.S. government in a motion to strike.

Dotcom could "consent to surrender," adds the government, "but has instead opposed extradition."

The U.S. government also raises the issue of timing. Dotcom's extradition hearing is currently set for June 2, 2015, but "for assets located in New Zealand, at least, the restraint sought based upon the order of this Court cannot, by statute, be extended beyond April 18, 2015."

The latest papers also offer some updates about the other defendants.

Bram van der Kolk, former lead programmer at Megaupoad, Finn Batato, former chief marketing officer, and Mathias Ortmann, former chief technology officer, are also in New Zealand awaiting extradition.

More notable are Julius Bencko, a co-founder who designed Megaupload's site, and Sven Echternach, who was the head of business development at the company. Slovakia is refusing to extradite Bencko while Germany won't hand over Echternach. According to the U.S., "they do not have to fear arrest there on the charges in this court."

Ira Rothken, lawyer for Dotcom, attacks the move as gamesmanship. He responds, "The issue is the government basically is looking to use the fugitive disentitlement doctrine as procedural mechanism to avoid arguing merits of criminal action. The issue here is that since Congress never created a statute that makes secondary criminal copyright infringement, this court doesn't have subject matter jurisdiction over this case or the defendants."

Rothken also disputes that Dotcom is a fugitive, saying he's never been to the United States, so the definition doesn't fit and the doctrine shouldn't apply on those grounds either.
http://www.billboard.com/biz/article...-money-because





University Fines Students for Pirating Movies, TV Shows
Ben Grubb

An Australian university is issuing fines to pirating students and using the money raised for campus facilities instead of returning it to the copyright owners.

Students at the University of NSW can be fined up to $1000 for downloading television shows and movies that infringe copyright using the institution's free Wi-Fi network.

The university also disconnects guilty students from its network for as long as a semester.

News that funds raised go towards improving "student amenities" and not to the rights holders who have had their copyright breached prompted Michael Speck, an independent anti-piracy investigator and former NSW policeman, to question the scheme's legality.

Mr Speck labelled it "misguided and inappropriate".

"I just find it disturbing that a university has decided how it will enforce the laws of the Commonwealth," he said. "It's quite disturbing and without too much natural justice.

"It ultimately doesn't do anything to solve the problem universities have with piracy."

Kelvin Tan posted on the Sydney Morning Herald's Facebook page that he was one of the students caught. He said he forgot to close a program used to pirate when he left home, only to have it automatically reconnect when on campus.

Have you ever been fined for downloading movies or TV shows illicitly? Tell us

Jon Lawrence, executive officer of digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Australia, had concerns about due process being followed and the level of surveillance being deployed to detect alleged infringement.

"Whatever money they are raising from this it would be good if they could devote that to the ultimate purpose of copyright, which is the creation of new content," Mr Lawrence said.

"If they are not giving the money to the rights holders then they should be using it to incentivise the creation of new content at the university."

Steve Dalby, chief regulatory officer of internet provider iiNet, called the fines "very strange".

Conversely, Graham Burke, co-chief executive of Village Roadshow, said he thought it was "terrific" that UNSW was being "proactive and taking responsibility for the users of its network".

"We think it is more important for students to be educated about copyright by the university imposing these fines than it is for the rights holders to collect damages for the breaches that are occurring.

"In fact the more I think about it this action by the university is helping the future of good citizenship of its many students."

According to UNSW, three students and one staff member received "penalty notices" in 2014. All four had their Wi-Fi access suspended; two of the students were also fined $480 each.

The university's academic board sets the fines, which can go up to $1000, a UNSW spokeswoman said. Students and staff can still use the computer network from library desktops and computer labs if disconnected.

Michael Kirby-Lewis, UNSW's chief information officer, defended the practice.

"The proceeds of the fines collected go to student amenities for the benefit of all students. This ensures that there is no potential for the university to view the fines as a revenue source," Mr Kirby-Lewis said.

Students are given two weeks to provide an explanation as to why copyright infringement has occurred or to produce evidence that they had the rights to the material in question, he added.

"Following this period an investigation is conducted and if found to have infringed copyright, the penalty letter is issued by the chief information office under the delegations of the [acceptable computer use] policy," he said.

After the penalty notice is issued, students have 14 days to lodge an appeal.

"This is handled independently of IT through the student conduct and appeals officer," he said.

The little-known practice at UNSW became public in 2008 after the university threatened to end its free Wi-Fi service because students were clogging it with illicit download.

One student was said to have downloaded 7 gigabytes of copyright infringing material in a single day.

"Students' awareness of online copyright issues and UNSW policies has grown significantly since 2008," a UNSW spokeswoman said. "Incidents and penalties are well down on 2008 levels."

In addition to issuing fines, UNSW uses technology to prevent copyright infringement from occurring, although it's not foolproof.

A spokesman for the University of Technology, Sydney said there were no cases relating to students downloading copyrighted material using its facilities.

An RMIT University spokesman said it may disconnect or block students or staff who infringe copyright but said it did not have a policy of imposing a financial penalty. There had been no disconnections this year.

The University of Sydney doesn't have a history of fining students but has been known to disconnect students. In its June student newsletter it warned students not to pirate.

The Abbott government plans to crack down on online piracy, with sources saying it will make it easier to block infringing websites.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/d...18-11oxg3.html





Pay Phones in New York City Will Become Free Wi-Fi Hot Spots
Matt Flegenheimer

The modern New York pay phone will provide no shelter from the rain, no alcove for the quarreling couple seeking a private moment to reconcile. It will afford little refuge to the prospective superhero requiring a wardrobe change.

In fact, the pay phone of tomorrow will include no traditional phone at all — nor any payment, for that matter, at least for communication within the United States.

But beginning next year, city officials said on Monday, the relics will evolve into something deemed far more practical: thousands of Wi-Fi hot spots across the city, providing free Internet access, free domestic calls using cellphones or a built-in keypad, a charging station for mobile devices and access to city services and directions.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, which issued a request for proposals earlier this year, awarded the project to CityBridge, a consortium of companies including Qualcomm and Titan. The initiative, known as LinkNYC, will be paid for by advertising revenues from the kiosks’ digital displays.

Administration officials framed the move as an extension of Mr. de Blasio’s focus on inequality. Maya Wiley, counsel to the mayor, said low-income people, particularly blacks and Latinos, relied disproportionately on cellphone browsing to get online. And data charges can add up.

“It’s going to help us close the digital divide,” Ms. Wiley said during a briefing about the plan at City Hall.

In a statement, Mr. de Blasio called expanded broadband access “essential for everything we need to do to be a fair and just city,” adding that the system would be “the fastest and largest municipal Wi-Fi network in the world.”

The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications said the network would be 100 times as fast as average municipal Wi-Fi systems, and more than 20 times as fast as average home Internet service in the city. A two-hour movie, officials said, could be downloaded in about 30 seconds.

The kiosks’ Wi-Fi range will extend 150 feet in any direction, officials said. Up to 250 devices would be able to use the network at each kiosk without diminishing service and in heavily trafficked areas access points can be added.

The department first tested pay phone Wi-Fi as part of a pilot program under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2012. Now the city hopes to install about 10,000 kiosks, each tall and slender — about 9.5 feet high and less than a foot wide. There are now about 8,400 pay phones.

It is expected to cost more than $200 million to build the network.

While few have taken issue with the goal of expanded Wi-Fi, some elected officials have expressed reservations about the city’s decision to entrust the final product to a single enterprise like CityBridge.

In a statement on Monday, Letitia James, the city’s public advocate, said that she had “serious concerns” about the city’s plan, calling it “a monopolistic arrangement.”

“Instead of trying to rush the process, the administration should seek a new authorizing resolution from the City Council that contemplates multiple companies,” Ms. James said.

The administration has defended the process, arguing that it allowed for competitive bidding and noting that CityBridge comprised several companies.

Earlier on Monday, Ms. Wiley said that she was prepared for lawsuits against the city. “In my legal opinion,” she said, “this is the coolest thing ever.”

Officials also sought to pre-empt the privacy concerns. The city said it would “never share or sell any protected personal information” collected on the network. But companies may use aggregate data, information extracted anonymously from a pool of users, to guide advertising.

Though pay phones have waned in popularity, they served a critical function during Hurricane Sandy, when power failures felled other communication sources. The city said backup batteries would allow for 911 calls to be made for at least 24 hours after power went out.

The city also plans to remain hospitable to the cape-wearing set. CityBridge said it would maintain three existing “Superman pay phones” scattered along West End Avenue, where a small number of traditional phone booths have survived.

For the rest of the city, privacy may be more elusive. Without headphones — or careful attention to volume — calls from the kiosk keypad could be broadcast semi-publicly, as if on speakerphone.

Colin O’Donnell, a founding partner at Control Group, a member of CityBridge, wondered in an interview if the project might fuel cottage industries for headphone vendors or umbrella salesmen. Monday would have been good for business. The National Weather Service said it was the city’s rainiest Nov. 17 on record.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/ny...hot-spots.html





Somebody’s Already Using Verizon’s ID to Track Users

Twitter is using a newly discovered hidden code that the telecom carriers are adding to every page you visit – and it’s very hard to opt out.
Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson

Twitter's mobile advertising arm enables its clients to use a hidden, undeletable tracking number created by Verizon to track user behavior on smartphones and tablets.

Wired and Forbes reported earlier this week that the two largest cellphone carriers in the United States, Verizon and AT&T, are adding the tracking number to their subscribers' Internet activity, even when users opt out.

The data can be used by any site – even those with no relationship to the telecoms -- to build a dossier about a person's behavior on mobile devices – including which apps they use, what sites they visit and for how long.

MoPub, acquired by Twitter in 2013, bills itself as the "world's largest mobile ad exchange." It uses Verizon's tag to track and target cellphone users for ads, according to instructions for software developers posted on its website.

Twitter declined to comment.

AT&T said that its actions are part of a test. Verizon says it doesn't sell information about the demographics of people who have opted out.

This controversial type of tracking, known in industry jargon as header enrichment, is the latest step in the mobile industry's quest to track users on their devices. Google has proposed a new standard for Internet services that, among other things, would prevent header enrichment.

People using apps on tablets and smartphones present a challenge for companies that want to track behavior so they can target ads. Unlike on desktop computers, where users tend to connect to sites using a single Web browser that can be easily tracked by "cookies," users on smartphones and tablets use many different apps that do not share information with each other.

For a while, ad trackers solved this problem by using a number that was build into each smartphone by Apple and Google. But under pressure from privacy critics, both companies took steps to secure these Device IDs, and began allowing their users to delete them, in the same way they could delete cookies in their desktop Web browser.

So the search for a better way to track mobile users continued. In 2010, two European telecom engineers proposed an Internet standard for telecom companies to track their users with a new kind of unique identifier. The proposal was eventually adopted as a standard by an industry group called the Open Mobile Alliance.

Telecoms began racing to find ways to use the new identifier. Telecom equipment makers such as Cisco and Juniper began offering systems that allow the identifiers to be injected into mobile traffic.

In the spring of 2012, AT&T applied for a patent for a method of inserting a "shortlived subscriber identifier" into Web traffic of its mobile subscribers and Verizon applied for a patent for inserting a "unique identification header" into its subscriber's traffic. The Verizon patent claims this header is specifically meant to "provide content that is targeted to a subscriber."

Inserting the identifiers requires the telecom carrier to modify the information that flows out of a user's phone. AT&T's patent acknowledges that it would be impossible to insert the identifier into web traffic if it were encrypted using HTTPS, but offers an easy solution – to instruct web servers to force phones to use an unencrypted connection.

In the fall of 2012, Verizon notified users that it would begin selling "aggregating customer data that has already been de-identified" -- such as Web-browsing history and location -- and offered users an opt-out. In 2013, AT&T launched its version -- a plan to offer "anonymous AT&T data" to allow advertiser to "deliver the most relevant messages to consumers." The company also updated its privacy policy to offer an opt-out.

AT&T's program eventually shut down. Company spokesman Mark Siegel said that AT&T is currently inserting the identifiers as part of a "test" for a possible future "relevant advertising" service. "We are considering such a program, and any program we would offer would maintain our fundamental commitment to customer privacy," he said. He added that the identifier changes every 24 hours.

It's not clear how much of a hurdle changing the identifier would present to a targeting company that was assembling a dossier of a user's behavior.

Meanwhile, Verizon's service – Precision Market Insights – has become popular among ad tracking companies that specialize in building profiles' of user behavior and creating customized ads for those users. Companies that buy the Verizon service can ask Verizon for additional information about the people whose unique identifiers they observe.

"What we're excited about is the carrier level ID, a higher-level recognition point that lets us track with certainty when a user, who is connected to a given carrier, moves from an app to a mobile Web landing page," an executive from an ad tracking company Run told an industry trade publication.

And in a promotional video for Verizon's service, ad executive Chris Smith at Turn, touted "the accuracy of the data," that the company receives from Verizon.

But advertisers who don't pay Verizon for additional information still receive the identifier. A Verizon spokeswoman said, "We do not provide any data related to the [unique identifier] without customer consent and we change the [unique identifier] on a regular basis to prevent third parties from building profiles against it." She declined to say how often Verizon changes the identifier.

The use of carrier-level identifiers appears to be becoming standard. Vodafone, a British telecom, says it inserts a similar identifier into some mobile traffic. A Vodafone spokesman said "Header enrichment is not our default operation and we do not routinely share information with the websites our customers visit."

However, ProPublica found a handful of Vodafone identifiers in its logs of website visitors. That review also showed more than two thirds of AT&T and Verizon visitors to ProPublica's website contained mobile identifiers.

And there appears to be no way to opt out. Last week, security engineer Kenn White noticed an Ad Age news article about Verizon's mobile marketing program and set up a test server to see if he was being tracked. He had opted out years ago, but he noticed a strange identifier in the web traffic from his phone.

His tweets sparked a flurry of discussion of Verizon's actions on the Hacker News discussion board, and articles in the technology press.

Software engineer Dan Schmads, an AT&T user, also tried to opt out. He found that he needed to visit four different webpages to opt out, including one web page not even on AT&T's domain: http://205.234.28.93/mobileoptout/. But he continues to see the AT&T identifier in his mobile traffic.

AT&T's Siegel told ProPublica that he appreciated the feedback on the difficulty of opting out and that the company plans to streamline the process before launching its service.

"Before we do any new program, we'll give customers the opportunity to reset their mobile ID at any time," he said. "It would be like clearing cookies."

Google has proposed a new Internet protocol called SPDY that would prevent these types of header injections – much to the dismay of many telecom companies who are lobbying against it. In May, a Verizon executive made a presentation describing how Google's proposal could "limit value-add services that are based on access to header" information.
http://www.propublica.org/article/so...to-track-users





PeeeM, an Anonymous Messaging and File-Sharing App, Sets its Sights on the U.S.
Kevin Fitchard

An anonymous messaging app called PeeeM has made a name for itself in the Middle East, where it’s found a following among youngsters and communities that can’t flaunt their lifestyles in public. But now PeeeM is turning to the much tougher U.S. market, hoping to make its mark.

PeeeM just launched a new version of its app in the iTunes App Store and Google Play, and its raised $300,000 from angle investors to fund its expansion into the U.S. Considering the plethora of anonymous, off-grid and ephemeral communications apps that come in and out of vogue of the U.S., why does PeeeM think it has shot here? Co-founder Christophe de Courson sat down with me at Gigaom’s offices and explained that PeeeM’s appeal is in its absolute anonymity.

Like BlackBerry Messenger every PeeeM user has an ID number, which is the only identifier for anyone on its network. Customers need not register with a phone number or email address. They’re not prompted to share their address book, and apart from the PeeeM number, no other information about the user is stored on the company’s servers, de Courson said.

That anonymity is why it’s become popular in countries like Saudi Arabia where direct contact between the sexes is frowned upon and homosexuality is outlawed, de Courson said. Users can communicate, share pictures and video and even transfer files between accounts by only sharing their PeeeM numbers, he said. Though its made headway in some European and Asian countries, that success in the Middle East has led to a following of 2 million users sending 1 million monthly messages, de Courson said.
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The U.S. is a much more open society – one would argue at least – so the need for such strict anonymity would seem unnecessary. But as the rise of apps from SnapChat and to Secret have shown, there’s definitely plenty of demand for this kind of communication.
https://gigaom.com/2014/11/12/peeem-...ts-on-the-u-s/





WhatsApp Rolls Out End-to-End Encryption Using Textsecure Code
Russell Brandom

The most recent update to WhatsApp's Android app includes a surprising feature: strong end-to-end encryption, enabled by default. It's the strongest security any major texting app has offered, even compared with similar tools from giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. WhatsApp partnered with Open Whisper Systems for the launch, using open source code to build in the new features. It's unclear when the features will come to iOS, but just reaching WhatsApp's Android users represents a huge step forward for everyday encryption use.

"WhatsApp is by far the largest platform to adopt the system"

"End-to-end" means that, unlike messages encrypted by Gmail or Facebook Chat, WhatsApp won't be able to decrypt the messages itself, even if the company is compelled by law enforcement. The company will set up the key exchange between users, but only the two users will have access to the conversation itself. There are other end-to-end encryption apps on the market — most notably Cryptocat, Silent Text and Telegram — but with over 600 million users across the world, WhatsApp is by far the largest platform to adopt the system.

Open Whisper Systems is best known as the developer of the Signal, Redphone, and TextSecure apps. WhatsApp looked to TextSecure in particular, which keeps messages encrypted even if an attacker cracks the key at some point in the future, a feature known as forward secrecy. TextSecure has also published its source code and withstood numerous public code audits, earning the app a lot of credibility in security circles. Open Whisper has said the team will continue improving its in-house apps, but the company also expects to take on more integrations like this one in the future.

Still, it took a lot of work to get TextSecure's protocols ready for WhatsApps hundreds of millions of users. Open Whisper CTO Moxie Marlinspike says it took six months to get the code ready for such a large deployment, beginning shortly after WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook. "Most of our efforts have been focused on making our code easier to consume," Marlinspike told The Verge. "I've been really impressed with the dedication and commitment WhatsApp has to the project."
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/18/7...ith-textsecure





AT&T Demands Clarity: Are Warrants Needed for Customer Cell-Site Data?

Legal uncertainty surrounds a law compelling disclosure of location information.
David Kravets

AT&T has entered the legal fracas over whether court warrants are required for the government to obtain their customers' cell-site location history.

The telecom, while not siding one way or the other, said Monday the courts should adopt a uniform policy nationwide. As it now stands, there's conflicting appellate rulings on the matter. The Supreme Court has yet to decide the issue.

The Dallas, Texas-based company told the following to the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering the issue:

The government orders at issue—and tens of thousands like them annually—seek detailed records that can reveal the location and movements of the user of a particular mobile device, often over a relatively lengthy period. In many cases, the government can use that information to track the ongoing movements of particular targeted individuals, building a detailed understanding of the target’s patterns of behavior and social and professional contacts and activities. Network, application, and other technological developments are making that location information ever more detailed and precise. Considerable legal uncertainty surrounds the standards the government must satisfy to compel the production of location information, and achieving legal clarity is essential to protecting consumer privacy, defining the scope of legitimate law enforcement interests, and ensuring the efficient operation of companies operating in various sectors of the digital economy.

The case before the appeals court involves a Florida man, Quartavious Davis. He was sentenced to life for a string of robberies. His 2012 conviction rested largely on mobile phone records pegging his location near six of seven heists. The Atlanta-based appeals court, ruling in Davis' case in June, concluded that warrants were required.

But President Barack Obama's administration urged the court to rehear the case:

On the merits, it is not persuasive to hold that cell site data is always within the subscriber's reasonable expectation of privacy—no matter whether the information in question pertains to a single phone call spanning a few seconds or thousands of phone calls spanning a few years, no matter whether the subscriber makes a call in plain view in a public place or from the privacy of his own home, and no matter how explicit the warning incorporated into the customer’s service contract.

The government also noted that the court's decision conflicted with other appellate decisions. The appeals court decided to rehear the case at a yet-to-be-determined time.

Davis successfully argued that the public maintains a reasonable expectation of privacy that their public movements won't be catalogued for the government unless a probable cause warrant is issued by a judge. The authorities did not get a warrant in Davis' prosecution.

"Thus, the exposure of the cell site location information can convert what would otherwise be a private event into a public one. When one’s whereabouts are not public, then one may have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those whereabouts," the court ruled. (Because the court decided to rehear the case, the decision is no longer case law.)

At least three other federal circuits, there are 13 altogether, have ruled differently from the 11th Circuit. In all of the cases, the authorities argued that so-called cell-site records are not constitutionally protected and are business records that telcos may hand over if the government asserts there are reasonable grounds to believe the data is relevant to an investigation.

The stakes are high. The government is embracing warrantless cell-site tracking as a surveillance tool in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that said the authorities needed a warrant to affix GPS trackers to vehicles. In that case, the justices ruled that the actual installation of a GPS device on a vehicle was the equivalent of a search usually requiring a warrant. Mobile phones, usually in a suspect's pocket or purse, don't require any government installation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy & Technology also weighed in to the case with a filing Friday. They said a massive amount of information was at stake:

As of December 2013, there were 335.65 million wireless subscriber accounts in the United States, responsible for 2.61 trillion annual minutes of calls and 1.91 trillion annual text messages. Cell phone use has become ubiquitous: more than 90 percent of American adults own cell phones and more than a third of US households have only wireless telephones.

The National Association of Criminal Defense lawyers also took the ACLU's and CDT's side, filing its own brief Friday.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ell-site-data/





Judge Threatens Detective with Contempt for Declining to Reveal Cellphone Tracking Methods
Justin Fenton

Baltimore prosecutors withdrew key evidence in a robbery case Monday rather than reveal details of the cellphone tracking technology police used to gather it.

The surprise turn in Baltimore Circuit Court came after a defense attorney pressed a city police detective to reveal how officers had tracked his client.

City police Det. John L. Haley, a member of a specialized phone tracking unit, said officers did not use the controversial device known as a stingray. But when pressed on how phones are tracked, he cited what he called a "nondisclosure agreement" with the FBI.

"You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court," Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams replied. Williams threatened to hold Haley in contempt if he did not respond. Prosecutors decided to withdraw the evidence instead.

The tense exchange during a motion to suppress evidence in the robbery trial of 16-year-old Shemar Taylor was the latest confrontation in a growing campaign by defense attorneys and advocates for civil liberties nationwide to get law enforcement to provide details of their phone tracking technology, and how and when they use it.

Law enforcement officials in Maryland and across the country say they are prohibited from discussing the technology at the direction of the federal government, which has argued that knowledge of the devices would jeopardize investigations.

"Courts are slowly starting to grapple with these issues," said Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is tracking stingray cases. "What we're talking about is basic information about a very commonly used police tool, but because of the extreme secrecy that police have tried to invoke, there are not many court decisions about stingrays."

Defense attorney Joshua Insley still believes that police used a stingray to find Taylor. He cited a letter in which prosecutors said they were prohibited by the Department of Justice from disclosing information about methods used in their investigation.

The portable device was developed for the military to help zero in on cellphones. It mimics a cellphone tower to force nearby phones to connect to it.

Records shows that the Baltimore Police Department purchased a stingray for $133,000 in 2009.

Some critics say the use of such technology might be appropriate, with court approval, to help law enforcement locate a suspect. But in the secrecy surrounding its use, they say, it's not always clear that law enforcement officials have secured the necessary approval, or stayed within their bounds.

They also express concern for the privacy of other cellphones users whose data are caught up in a search.

In the case before the court Monday, two teens are accused of robbing a Papa John's pizza delivery driver at gunpoint in April.

Police say phone records show that the phone that was used to call in the delivery was also used to make and receive hundreds of calls to and from Taylor's phone. Police believe the first phone belonged to Taylor's co-defendant. They say Taylor confessed after he was arrested.

Taylor is being tried as an adult. The other suspect is being tried as a juvenile.

In court Monday, the robbery detective who prepared the warrant to search Taylor's home testified that members of the department's Advanced Technical Team did a "ride-by" — described in court papers as "sophisticated technical equipment" — to determine one of the phones was inside the home. Detective Alan Savage said he did not know what technology or techniques the unit employs.

The defense then called Haley to the stand. He said police can use data from the cellphone companies to locate phones in real time.

Insley asked Haley whether police can ascertain a phone's location "independently," without the help of a phone company. Haley said yes.

When asked how, he balked.

"I wouldn't be able to get into that," Haley said.

Insley tried again later. Haley responded that police can get GPS location data from phone companies.

"Then there's equipment we would use that I'm not going to discuss that would aid us in that investigation," Haley said.

Williams, the judge, instructed Haley to answer the question. Haley invoked the nondisclosure agreement.

"I can't. I'm sorry. I can't," Haley said.

Williams called Insley's question "appropriate," and threatened to hold Haley in contempt if he did not answer.

Haley demurred again, and Assistant State's Attorney Patrick R. Seidel conferred with other prosecutors in court to observe the hearing.

Finally, Seidel said prosecutors would drop all evidence found during the search of the home — including, authorities have said, a .45-caliber handgun and the cellphone. The prosecutor said the state would continue to pursue the charges.

Wessler, of the ACLU, said Williams was right to ignore the nondisclosure agreement with the FBI.

"You can't contract out of constitutional disclosure obligations," Wessler said. "A secret written agreement does not invalidate the Maryland public records law [and] does not invalidate due process requirements of giving information to a criminal defendant."

Attorneys say they have suspected for years that police were employing secret methods to track cellphones. But only recently have they begun to find what they believe are clear examples.

Police and prosecutors in another case ran into a similar problem in September, when they were asked to reveal how a cellphone was tracked.

Sgt. Scott Danielczyk, another member of the Advanced Technical Team, testified in that home invasion case — also before Judge Williams — that police used data from a court order to track a cellphone to the general area of the 1400 block of E. Fayette St.

Danielczyk and three other members of the unit were tasked to "facilitate finding it," he testified, and determined the phone was in the possession of someone on a bus.

Williams asked how Danielczyk concluded the phone was being carried by the suspect.

"Um, we had information that he had the property on him," the officer said.

Williams pressed.

"This kind of goes into Homeland Security issues, your honor," Danielczyk said.

"If it goes into Homeland Security issues, then the phone doesn't come in," Williams said. "I mean, this is simple. You can't just stop someone and not give me a reason."

In that case, too, the phone evidence is no longer in play. Prosecutors are proceeding without it.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/mar...117-story.html





Local Judge Unseals Hundreds of Highly Secret Cell Tracking Court Records

Stingray docs unsealed by North Carolina judge could prompt wave of new appeals.
Cyrus Farivar

A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device.

According to the Charlotte Observer, the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used.

The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time.

Relatively little is known about precisely how stingrays are used by law enforcement agencies nationwide, although more and more documents have surfaced showing how they've been purchased and used in limited instances. Last year, Ars reported on leaked documents showing the existence of a body-worn stingray. In 2010, security researcher Kristin Paget famously demonstrated a homemade device built for just $1,500.

Worse still, local cops have lied to courts (at the direction of the United States Marshals Service) about the use of such technology. Not only can stingrays be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. While they do target specific phones, they also sweep up cell data of innocents nearby who have no idea that such data collection is taking place.

Neither Senior Resident Judge Richard Boner, nor the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, nor the Mecklenburg County Public Defender’s office immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment. Ars has filed a public records request with the court to obtain the full set of documents.

UPDATE 1:34pm CT: Meghan Cooke, a spokeswoman for the District Attorney's (DA's) Office, told Ars in a statement that the office did not know how long the review process would take.

"As soon as the DA’s Office has a list of cases associated with the orders, the office will review those cases individually to determine whether the information was shared with defendants," the statement read. "If prosecutors find that the information was not shared, the office will then work to determine whether the information should have been included in the discovery process. The DA’s Office continues to stand by its law enforcement partners as we all work to protect the rights of individuals while also keeping our community as safe as possible.”

“Sealed at the request of police”

According to the Observer, which did not publish the records in full, but summarized some of them, the “CMPD sought permission to use cellphone surveillance more than 500 times since 2010, or about twice a week…Documents and interviews suggest judges rarely, if ever, denied authorization requested by CMPD to use equipment that can intercept cellphone information from criminal suspects and innocent people alike.

“In Mecklenburg County, the documents had remained sequestered in a filing cabinet at the clerk of court’s office. They were sealed at the request of police, who have said they were worried about criminal suspects avoiding detection.”

The documents apparently include “boilerplate language connected to phone data,” but do not specifically mention a stingray, nor indicate how it would be used, nor what its capabilities are.

It has been very difficult for attorneys and the public alike to fully understand when, where, and how law enforcement has been asking judges to sign off on stingrays. Previously, Brian Owsley, one federal magistrate judge who served in Texas for eight years and is now a law professor at Indiana Tech, had his efforts thwarted to unseal similar orders.

Owsley is involved in a related situation involving an attempt to reveal the government's actions. Not long before he stepped down from the bench, Owsley tried to unseal more than 100 of his own long-completed judicial orders involving digital surveillance that he himself sealed at the government’s request.

But then, a US district judge—who outranks a magistrate—vacated Owsley’s order and resealed them all. That order itself was then sealed. The media company Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, filed a motion in federal court in June 2014 to compel the release of those documents. The court has yet to rule on the issue.

"I don't think it's that normal," Owsley told Ars in June 2014.

"I sent in various ways to the government, a number of applications and I said I'm going to unseal these unless you tell me why I shouldn't," he said. These were done in waves. The first wave were completed five years previous, past the statute of limitations, and quite likely are no longer really significant. That was the first wave. The government did not oppose unsealing of any of them. So I spoke to the court's office and said to upload them to make them available online, and as they were doing that, somehow this district judge found out about it an interjected himself into the process. If the government has said: 'We don't think these things should be unsealed,' that's one thing. But just out of the blue the district judge interjecting himself, that's a little unusual."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...court-records/





Spy Cable Revealed: How Telecoms Firm Worked with GCHQ
Geoff White

One of the UK's largest communications firms had a leading role in creating the surveillance system exposed by Edward Snowden, it can be revealed.

Please wait while this video loads. If it doesn't load after a few seconds you may need to have Adobe Flash installed.

Cable and Wireless even went as far as providing traffic from a rival foreign communications company, handing information sent by millions of internet users worldwide over to spies.

The firm, which was bought by Vodafone in July 2012, was part of a programme called Mastering the Internet, under which British spies used private companies to help them gather and store swathes of internet traffic; a quarter of which passes through the UK. Top secret documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by Channel 4 News show that GCHQ developed what it called "partnerships" with private companies under codenames. Cable and Wireless was called Gerontic.

Under the moniker, the company carried out tests on equipment used to carry out the surveillance, it came up with suggestions on how the spies could go about tapping its network, and even had a GCHQ employee working full-time within the company.

And a 2011 document reveals that Cable and Wireless went further. The company rented space on a cable owned by Indian telecoms company Reliance Communications that stretched from Asia across the Middle East and landed in Porthcurno in Cornwall. Reliance's transatlantic cable lands in Sennen Cove six miles to the north. And the two cables come together at nearby Skewjack Farm. Documents show that in 2011, this allowed Britain's spies to access all traffic from Reliance's main cable and send it to the GCHQ base up the coast in Bude.

The Channel 4 News report was a joint investigation with the German broadcaster WDR and the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper

Surveillance

Top secret documents from GCHQ show it was this access point, codenamed Nigella and run by Cable and Wireless, that allowed Britain's spies to gather the private communications of millions of internet users worldwide.

Channel 4 News has been unable to establish whether Reliance Communications was served with a warrant to authorise this and the company has not responded to our calls. Either way, from having no access to the cable at all, GCHQ planned to take in a trillion gigabytes of data per second.

Please wait while this video loads. If it doesn't load after a few seconds you may need to have Adobe Flash installed.

The documents show an increasingly close relationship between the spy agency and Cable and Wireless, which has been operating submarine cables from the UK for more than a century. From 2008 until at least 2010, Cable and Wireless held regular meetings with GCHQ and was paid tens of millions of pounds to establish surveillance on web traffic as it flowed through its networks. At one point, the Mastering the Internet programme was costing £1m per month.

Cable and Wireless was bought by Vodafone in a billion-pound takeover. Documents seen by this programme appear to show that the Nigella access point was still feeding GCHQ's interception programmes as late as April 2013 - long after Vodafone's takeover had been completed. And GCHQ's partner company was still codenamed Gerontic.

'Consequences'

Vodafone insists GCHQ was never given direct access to its network and that any interception could only take place with a warrant. It also said GCHQ can only access the customer data of other telecoms companies if it serves them with a warrant too.

The damage has not only affected private citizens. In Germany, a key market where Vodafone has 30 million customers, has already been rocked after the Snowden documents showed that Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone was intercepted. And now, leaked documents from government cyber security experts have singled out Vodafone uniquely for criticism, questioning its ability to protect officials' data. Some politicians are now calling for Vodafone's contract with the German government to be pulled.

German Green Party MP Florian Konstantin von Notz said: "the consequences would be to immediately suspend the contract, or cancel it. I believe cancellation is possible and legal. A company such as Vodafone, which has responsibility for so many customers, has to take a clear stand against these data grabs."

A Vodafone spokesman said: "the law in Germany governing all these areas of privacy and data protection are essentially the same as the laws in the UK. What we have in the UK is a system based on warrants, where we receive a lawful instruction from an agency or authority to allow them to have access to communications data on our network. We have to comply with that warrant and we do and there are processes for us to do that which we're not allowed to talk about because the law constrains us from revealing these things. We don't go beyond what the law requires.

A GCHQ spokesman said: "it is longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters; Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight."
http://www.channel4.com/news/spy-cab...rked-with-gchq





Facebook, Microsoft, Apple Make Year-End Lobbying Push to Curb NSA Spying
Chris Strohm

Trade groups representing Facebook Inc. (FB), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) are pushing the Senate to pass legislation limiting National Security Agency spying before the Republican majority takes control of the chamber.

A coalition of Internet and technology companies, which also include Google Inc. (GOOG) and Twitter Inc. (TWTR), support a bill the Senate plans to vote on Nov. 18 to prohibit the NSA from bulk collection of their subscribers’ e-mails and other electronic communications. Many of the companies opposed a Republican-backed bill the House passed in May, saying a “loophole” would allow bulk collection of Internet user data.

Members of the Consumer Electronics Association “have already lost contracts with foreign governments worth millions of dollars,” in response to revelations about U.S. spying, Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive officer of the group that represents Apple, Google and Microsoft, wrote in a letter sent to all senators on Nov. 13.

The clock is ticking. If a final bill isn’t reached this year, the process for passing legislation would begin over in January under a new Congress controlled by Republicans, many of whom support government surveillance programs.

U.S. Internet and technology companies are confronting a domestic and international backlash against government spying that may cost them as much as $180 billion in lost business, according to Forrester Research Inc. (FORR)

Tech Retaliation

The issue emerged in June 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed a program under which the U.S. uses court orders to compel companies to turn over data about their users. Documents divulged by Snowden also uncovered NSA hacking of fiber-optic cables abroad and installation of surveillance tools into routers, servers and other network equipment.

The NSA's Gigantic Haystack

Apple and Google have retaliated by offering stronger security, including on new smartphones, that will automatically shield photos, contact lists and other documents from the government. That, in turn, has heightened tensions with law enforcement agencies that want access to the data for criminal investigations.

The Senate bill, S. 2685, would end one of the NSA’s most controversial domestic spy programs, through which it collects and stores the phone records of millions of people not suspected of any wrongdoing. In addition to curbing data collection, the legislation would allow companies to publicly reveal the number and types of orders they receive from the government to hand over user data.
Photographer: Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images

US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks to European... Read More

Privacy Protections

Instead, the NSA would be required to get court orders to obtain the records, such as numbers dialed and call durations from Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and other carriers. The phone records don’t include the content of communications, and the carriers would be given liability protection and compensation under the bill.

The bill also would require the government to narrow its surveillance, forbidding authorities from collecting all information about a particular service provider, or from collecting geographic data like a city, ZIP code or area code.

“The American people are asking us to protect their privacy,” Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chief sponsor of the bill, said in an e-mailed statement.

“It is time to show the American people that Congress is about more than talking points, sound bites, and the next campaign,” said Leahy, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republicans won control of the Senate in the Nov. 4 elections and will take over in January.

Economic costs

U.S. companies are in danger of losing more business to foreign competitors if the NSA’s power to spy on customers isn’t curbed, according to a July report by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten has estimated that the spying revelations could cost the American cloud computing industry as much as $180 billion through 2016 as foreign governments and competitors contract with other companies.

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) became one of the first companies to go public with concerns about NSA spying. The revelations affected sales in China and caused customers in other countries to hesitate when making decisions about buying products, John Chambers, chairman and chief executive officer for the San Jose, California-based company, said during an earnings conference call in November 2013.

Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean that might be built without any U.S. companies, said Francisco Ziober Filho president of the state-owned telecommunications company Telecomunicacoes Brasileiras SA (TELB4), known as Telebras.

Lost Business

Along with CEA, other industry trade groups that support the Senate bill include the Information Technology Industry Council and The Internet Association.

“Many companies have lost business, or face laws designed to restrict data flows, due to foreign governments’ fear that the U.S. government can reach company-managed data at will,” Shapiro said.

Although Microsoft and Verizon have lost some contracts in Brazil and Germany, and Cisco has reported declining orders from emerging markets, the finances of most U.S. technology companies have held up so far. Gross margins for the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Information Technology Sector Index are at their highest levels since 1990, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Senate vote on Nov. 18 will be a procedural motion to allow debate on the measure and amendments to begin. Although the bill is supported by President Barack Obama’s administration, it’s unclear if enough senators will vote to allow debate to begin.

Legislative Outlook

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Senate’s intelligence committee, has said there’s no urgent need to pass the bill. The law authorizing the NSA to collect bulk phone records expires on June 1, meaning the new Congress can wait until then to pass legislation, Chambliss told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in October.

The U.S House passed a bill, H.R. 3361, curbing NSA powers in May. However, there are differences between the House bill and the Senate measure that could complicate efforts to come to a final agreement by the end of the year.

A group of technology companies, including Facebook, Google and Apple, opposed the House bill because of what it called an “unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of Internet users’ data.” Some lawmakers who voted against the bill agreed that the legislation should have been stronger.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-1...sa-powers.html





AP Exclusive: Some in NSA Warned of a Backlash Over Phone Data Collection
Ken Dilanian

Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn’t providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.

The NSA took the concerns seriously, and many senior officials shared them. But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agency’s recent history.

The warnings proved prophetic last year after the calling records program was made public in the first and most significant leak by Edward Snowden, a former NSA systems administrator who cited the government’s deception about the program as one of his chief motivations for turning over classified documents to journalists. Many Americans were shocked and dismayed to learn that an intelligence agency collects and stores all their landline calling records.

In response, President Barack Obama is now trying to stop the NSA collection but preserve the agency’s ability to search the records in the hands of the telephone companies — an arrangement similar to the one the administration quietly rejected in 2009. But his plan, drawing opposition from most Republicans, fell two votes short of advancing in the Senate on Tuesday.

A now-retired NSA senior executive, who was a longtime code-breaker who rose to top management, had just learned in 2009 about the top secret program that was created shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He says he argued to then-NSA Director Keith Alexander that storing the calling records of nearly every American fundamentally changed the character of the agency, which is supposed to eavesdrop on foreigners, not Americans.

Alexander politely disagreed, the former official told The Associated Press.

The former official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he didn’t have permission to discuss a classified matter, said he knows of no evidence the program was used for anything other than hunting for terrorism plots in the U.S. But he said he and others made the case that the collection of American records in bulk crossed a line that had been sacrosanct.

He said he also warned of a scandal if it should be disclosed that the NSA was storing records of private calls by Americans — to psychiatrists, lovers and suicide hotlines, among other contacts.

Alexander, who led the NSA from 2005 until he retired last year, did not dispute the former official’s account, though he said he disagreed that the program was improper.

"An individual did bring us these questions, and he had some great points," Alexander told the AP. "I asked the technical folks, including him, to look at it."

By 2009, several former officials said, concern about the "215 program," so-called for the authorizing provision of the USA Patriot Act, had grown inside NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters to the point that the program’s intelligence value was being questioned. That was partly true because, for technical and other reasons, the NSA was not capturing most mobile calling records, which were an increasing share of the domestic calling universe, the former officials said.

The dissent prompted NSA leaders to examine whether the agency could stop gathering and storing domestic landline calling records and instead access the records as needed from the telephone companies, Alexander said. The NSA consulted with the Justice Department, Congress and the White House, newly occupied by President Barack Obama.

But the government ultimately decided against changing what most officials still view as a necessary bulwark against domestic terror plots, Alexander and other former officials said. The program collects and stores so-called metadata on every landline phone call made in America — the phone number called from, the phone number called and the duration of the call. Some estimates have estimated the program collects records on up to 3 billion calls a day.

In 2006, the program came under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The agency, which continues to obtain the records from telephone companies under a court order, says it searches them only for connections to phone numbers suspected of association with overseas terror groups.

Under a process known as "contact chaining," analysts examine the numbers that had been in contact with the "dirty number" and then the numbers in contact with those. Sometimes the circle is expanded to a "third hop" — a process that could include analysis of millions of American phone calls. Only 30 intelligence employees are permitted to access the database, officials have said, and it is done about 300 times a year.

Current and former intelligence officials disagree about whether the phone record searching has been important in stopping terror attacks. The U.S. has been able to point to a single terrorism case that came to light exclusively through a domestic phone records match — that of a San Diego cab driver who was sentenced earlier this year to six years in prison for sending money to Somalia’s al-Qaida affiliate.

To address their concerns, the former senior official and other NSA dissenters in 2009 came up with a plan that tracks closely with the Obama proposal that the Senate failed to pass Tuesday. The officials wanted the NSA to stop collecting the records, and instead fashion a system for the agency to quickly send queries to the telephone companies as needed, letting the companies store the records as they are required to do under telecommunications rules.

In a departure from the bill that failed Tuesday, however, they wanted to require the companies to provide the metadata in a standardized manner, to allow speedy processing and analysis in cases of an imminent terror plot. The lack of such a provision was among the reasons many Republicans and former intelligence officials said they opposed the 2014 legislation.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/...ficials-agency





Bill to Restrict N.S.A. Data Collection Blocked in Vote by Senate Republicans
Charlie Savage and Jeremy W. Peters

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans’ phone calls in bulk.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58 to 42 for consideration.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who drafted the bill, blamed what he said was fear-mongering by the bill’s opponents for its defeat. “Fomenting fear stifles serious debate and constructive solutions,” he said. “This nation deserves more than that.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

“This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,” Mr. McConnell said before the vote, expressing the concerns of those who argued that the program was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism.

But Tuesday’s vote only put off until next year a debate over security and personal liberties. While a Republican-controlled Senate is less likely to go along with the kinds of reforms that were in the bill, which sponsors had named the U.S.A. Freedom Act, the debate could further expose rifts between the party’s interventionist and more libertarian-leaning wings.

The new Congress will also be working against a hard deadline because the legal authority for the data collection will expire next year.

Under the bill, which grew out of the disclosures in June 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, the N.S.A. would have gotten out of the business of collecting Americans’ phone records. Instead, most of the records would have stayed in the hands of the phone companies, which would not have been required to hold them any longer than they already do for normal business purposes, which in some cases is 18 months.

The N.S.A., Mr. Snowden revealed, was systematically collecting telephone metadata — information about who called whom, but not the content of what was said — from major American phone companies. The program began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based on an assertion of unilateral executive power by President George W. Bush. In 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secretly brought the program under its authority and started issuing orders to the companies under the Patriot Act.

The proposed legislation would still have allowed analysts to perform so-called contact chaining in which they trace a suspect’s network of acquaintances, but they would been required to use a new kind of court order to swiftly obtain only those records that were linked, up to two layers away, to a suspect — even when held by different phone companies.

In January, President Obama announced some changes to the program, including requiring court approval before a new number could be used to query the database, and limiting analysts to scrutinizing the records of callers two — down from three — layers removed.

The Republican-controlled House passed a version of the bill in May, but it was watered down before passage, losing the support of civil liberties groups. The deadline for new legislation is next June, when the legal basis for the phone records program, a provision of the Patriot Act, expires.

After that, when the 90-day orders to phone companies requiring them to turn over their customers’ records expire, the surveillance court would be unable to issue a new round of orders.

The Obama administration, warning of the potential for “brinkmanship and uncertainty” next spring if the bill did not pass, had strongly urged the Senate to support it even though it initially resisted efforts on Capitol Hill to rein in the N.S.A. programs.

And it may not be any easier for a compromise to be reached over the bill next year. Some of its opponents, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, believe it went too far in curbing the N.S.A. Others, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, thought it did not go far enough.

One possibility would be a bill that is scaled back enough to win over more hawkish Republicans, while relying on the votes of some Democrats, like Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who were more skeptical of broad-based reform.

It is unknown how the 11 new Republicans who will join the Senate next year might alter the debate. For instance, Cory Gardner of Colorado, who will replace Senator Mark Udall, one of the Senate’s staunchest advocates of N.S.A. changes, has been supportive of ending bulk record collection. Steve Daines, the incoming Republican senator from Montana, also voted yes with Mr. Gardner on a contentious proposal to strip funding for bulk collection when the House took up the issue last year.

Other Republican members of the House who will join the Senate next year — Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and James Lankford of Oklahoma — voted no.

But resistance from inside the Republican Party has been unrelenting. Before Tuesday’s vote, two top former officials from the Bush administration — Michael B. Mukasey, the former attorney general, and Michael V. Hayden, the former N.S.A. and C.I.A. director, essentially called the bill a gift to terrorists in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal that carried the headline “N.S.A. Reform That Only ISIS Could Love.”

The debate over curtailing the N.S.A.'s ability to collect telephone call data is just one example of how Republicans will continue to grapple with questions of privacy and security as the 2016 presidential elections near. At the center of the debate on Tuesday were three senators considering a run for president: Mr. Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.

Mr. Rubio voted against the measure, calling it “a reaction to misinformation and alarmism.” Mr. Paul also voted no, but because he believed it did not do enough to restrict the N.S.A. Supporters of the overhaul had worked all day to persuade him to switch his vote, to no avail. He said Tuesday he would prefer the entire Patriot Act be allowed to expire.

Mr. Cruz voted yes, saying, “It is imperative that we stand together protecting the Bill of Rights.”

Four Republicans voted to advance the bill: Mr. Cruz, Mike Lee of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dean Heller of Nevada. One Democrat voted no, Bill Nelson of Florida.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/us...e-records.html





Congress Is Irrelevant on Mass Surveillance. Here’s What Matters Instead.
Glenn Greenwald

The “USA Freedom Act”—which its proponents were heralding as “NSA reform” despite its suffocatingly narrow scope—died in the august U.S. Senate last night when it attracted only 58 of the 60 votes needed to close debate and move on to an up-or-down vote. All Democratic and independent senators except one (Bill Nelson of Florida) voted in favor of the bill, as did three tea-party GOP Senators (Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Dean Heller). One GOP Senator, Rand Paul, voted against it on the ground that it did not go nearly far enough in reining in the NSA. On Monday, the White House had issued a statement “strongly supporting” the bill.

The “debate” among the Senators that preceded the vote was darkly funny and deeply boring, in equal measure. The black humor was due to the way one GOP senator after the next—led by ranking intelligence committee member Saxby Chambliss of Georgia (pictured above)—stood up and literally screeched about 9/11 and ISIS over and over and over, and then sat down as though they had made a point. Their scary script had been unveiled earlier that morning by a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Bush Attorney General Mike Mukasey and former CIA and NSA Director Mike Hayden warning that NSA reform would make the terrorists kill you; it appeared under this Onion-like headline:

So the pro-NSA Republican senators were actually arguing that if the NSA were no longer allowed to bulk-collect the communication records of Americans inside the U.S., then ISIS would kill you and your kids. But because they were speaking in an empty chamber and only to their warped and insulated D.C. circles and sycophantic aides, there was nobody there to cackle contemptuously or tell them how self-evidently moronic it all was. So they kept their Serious Faces on like they were doing The Nation’s Serious Business, even though what was coming out of their mouths sounded like the demented ramblings of a paranoid End is Nigh cult.

The boredom of this spectacle was simply due to the fact that this has been seen so many times before—in fact, every time in the post-9/11 era that the U.S. Congress pretends publicly to debate some kind of foreign policy or civil liberties bill. Just enough members stand up to scream “9/11″ and “terrorism” over and over until the bill vesting new powers is passed or the bill protecting civil liberties is defeated.

Eight years ago, when this tawdry ritual was still a bit surprising to me, I live-blogged the 2006 debate over passage of the Military Commissions Act, which, with bipartisan support, literally abolished habeas corpus rights established by the Magna Carta by sanctioning detention without charges or trial. (My favorite episode there was when GOP Sen. Arlen Specter warned that “what the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some nine hundred years,” and then voted in favor of its enactment.) In my state of naive disbelief, as one senator after the next thundered about the “message we are sending” to “the terrorists,” I wrote: “The quality of the ‘debate’ on the Senate floor is so shockingly (though appropriately) low and devoid of substance that it is hard to watch.”

So watching last night’s Senate debate was like watching a repeat of some hideously shallow TV show. The only new aspect was that the aging Al Qaeda villain has been rather ruthlessly replaced by the show’s producers with the younger, sleeker ISIS model. Showing no gratitude at all for the years of value it provided these senators, they ignored the veteran terror group almost completely in favor of its new replacement. And they proceeded to save a domestic surveillance program clearly unpopular among those they pretend to represent.

There is a real question about whether the defeat of this bill is good, bad, or irrelevant. To begin with, it sought to change only one small sliver of NSA mass surveillance (domestic bulk collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act) while leaving completely unchanged the primary means of NSA mass surveillance, which takes place under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, based on the lovely and quintessentially American theory that all that matters are the privacy rights of Americans (and not the 95 percent of the planet called “non-Americans”).

There were some mildly positive provisions in the USA Freedom Act: the placement of “public advocates” at the FISA court to contest the claims of the government; the prohibition on the NSA holding Americans’ phone records, requiring instead that they obtain FISA court approval before seeking specific records from the telecoms (which already hold those records for at least 18 months); and reducing the agency’s “contact chaining” analysis from three hops to two. One could reasonably argue (as the ACLU and EFF did) that, though woefully inadequate, the bill was a net-positive as a first step toward real reform, but one could also reasonably argue, as Marcy Wheeler has with characteristic insight, that the bill is so larded with ambiguities and fundamental inadequacies that it would forestall better options and advocates for real reform should thus root for its defeat.

When pro-privacy members of Congress first unveiled the bill many months ago, it was actually a good bill: real reform. But the White House worked very hard— in partnership with the House GOP—to water that bill down so severely that what the House ended up passing over the summer did more to strengthen the NSA than rein it in, which caused even the ACLU and EFF to withdraw their support. The Senate bill rejected last night was basically a middle ground between that original, good bill and the anti-reform bill passed by the House.

* * * * *

All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.

The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform. This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co-opt the entire reform process. That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence committees and a special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy.

Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: Enact something that is called “reform”—so that he can give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes almost nothing, thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able to point to something called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest.

In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the premise of the question, which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally. Those limitations are going to come from—are now coming from —very different places:

1) Individuals refusing to use internet services that compromise their privacy. The FBI and other U.S. government agencies, as well as the U.K. Government, are apoplectic over new products from Google and Apple that are embedded with strong encryption, precisely because they know that such protections, while far from perfect, are serious impediments to their power of mass surveillance. To make this observation does not mean, as some deeply confused people try to suggest, that one believes that Silicon Valley companies care in the slightest about people’s privacy rights and civil liberties.

As much of the Snowden reporting has proven, these companies don’t care about any of that. Just as the telecoms have been for years, U.S. tech companies were more than happy to eagerly cooperate with the NSA in violating their users’ privacy en masse when they could do so in the dark. But it’s precisely because they can’t do it in the dark any more that things are changing, and significantly. That’s not because these tech companies suddenly discovered their belief in the value of privacy. They haven’t, and it doesn’t take any special insight or brave radicalism to recognize that. That’s obvious.

Instead, these changes are taking place because these companies are petrified that the perception of their collaboration with the NSA will harm their future profits, by making them vulnerable to appeals from competing German, Korean, and Brazilian social media companies that people shouldn’t use Facebook or Google because they will hand over that data to the NSA. That—fear of damage to future business prospects—is what is motivating these companies to at least try to convince users of their commitment to privacy. And the more users refuse to use the services of Silicon Valley companies that compromise their privacy—and, conversely, resolve to use only truly pro-privacy companies instead—the stronger that pressure will become.

Those who like to claim that nothing has changed from the NSA revelations simply ignore the key facts, including the serious harm to the U.S. tech sector from these disclosures, driven by the newfound knowledge that U.S. companies are complicit in mass surveillance. Obviously, tech companies don’t care at all about privacy, but they care a lot about that.

Just yesterday, the messaging service WhatsApp announced that it “will start bringing end-to-end encryption to its 600 million users,” which “would be the largest implementation of end-to-end encryption ever.” None of this is a silver bullet: the NSA will work hard to circumvent this technology and tech companies are hardly trustworthy, being notoriously close to the U.S. government and often co-opted themselves. But as more individuals demand more privacy protection, the incentives are strong. As The Verge notes about WhatsApp’s new encryption scheme, “‘end-to-end’ means that, unlike messages encrypted by Gmail or Facebook Chat, WhatsApp won’t be able to decrypt the messages itself, even if the company is compelled by law enforcement.”

2) Other countries taking action against U.S. hegemony over the internet. Most people who claim nothing has changed from the Snowden disclosures are viewing the world jingoistically, with the U.S. the only venue that matters. But the real action has long been in other countries, acting individually and jointly to prevent U.S. domination of the internet.

Brazil is building a new undersea internet infrastructure specifically to avoid U.S. soil and thus NSA access. That same country punished Boeing by denying the U.S. contractor a long-expected $4.5 billion contract for fighter jets in protest over NSA spying. Another powerful country, Germany, has taken the lead with Brazil in pushing for international institutions and regulatory schemes to place real limits on NSA mass surveillance. U.S. diplomatic relations with numerous key countries have been severely hampered by revelations of mass surveillance.

In July, Pew reported that “a new…survey finds widespread global opposition to U.S. eavesdropping and a decline in the view that the U.S. respects the personal freedoms of its people” and that, while the U.S. remains popular in many countries, particularly relative to others such as China, “in nearly all countries polled, majorities oppose monitoring by the U.S. government of emails and phone calls of foreign leaders or their citizens.” After just one year of Snowden reporting, there have been massive drops in the percentage of people who believe “the U.S. government respects personal freedom,” with the biggest drops coming in key countries that saw the most NSA reporting:

All of that has significantly increased the costs for the U.S. to continue to subject the world, and the internet, to dragnets of mass surveillance. It has resulted in serious political, diplomatic, and structural impediments to ongoing spying programs. And it has meaningfully altered world opinion on all of these critical questions.

3) U.S. court proceedings. A U.S. federal judge already ruled that the NSA’s domestic bulk collection program likely violates the 4th Amendment, and in doing so, obliterated many of the government’s underlying justifications. Multiple cases are now on appeal, almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. None of this was possible in the absence of Snowden disclosures.

For a variety of reasons, when it comes to placing real limits on the NSA, I place almost as little faith in the judiciary as I do in the Congress and executive branch. To begin with, the Supreme Court is dominated by five right-wing justices on whom the Obama Justice Department has repeatedly relied to endorse their most extreme civil-liberties-destroying theories. For another, of all the U.S. institutions that have completely abdicated their role in the post-9/11 era, the federal judiciary has probably been the worst, the most consistently subservient to the National Security State.

Still, there is some chance that one of these cases will result in a favorable outcome that restores some 4th Amendment protections inside the U.S. The effect is likely to be marginal, but not entirely insignificant.

4) Greater individual demand for, and use of, encryption. In the immediate aftermath of the first Snowden reports, I was contacted by countless leading national security reporters in the U.S., who work with the largest media outlets, seeking an interview with Snowden. But there was a critical problem: despite working every day on highly sensitive matters, none of them knew anything about basic encryption methods, nor did their IT departments. Just a few short months later, well over 50 percent of the journalists who emailed me did so under the protection of PGP encryption. Today, if any journalist emails me without encryption, they do so apologetically and with embarrassment.

That is reflective of a much broader change from the Snowden reporting, perhaps the most important one: a significantly increased awareness of the need for encryption and its usage around the world. As Wired reported in May:

Early last year—before the Snowden revelations—encrypted traffic accounted for 2.29 percent of all peak hour traffic in North America, according to Sandvine’s report. Now, it spans 3.8 percent. But that’s a small jump compared to other parts of the world. In Europe, encrypted traffic went from 1.47 percent to 6.10 percent, and in Latin America, it increased from 1.8 percent to 10.37 percent.

As a result, there are people genuinely devoted to privacy (as opposed to Silicon Valley profit-driven companies) developing all-new, free encryption capabilities. The New York Times recently urged all media outlets to provide default “HTTPS” protection for their sites to protect user privacy (The Intercept is currently only one of three news sites to do so).

Increased individual encryption use is a serious impediment to NSA mass surveillance: far stronger than any laws the U.S. Congress might pass. Aside from the genuine difficulty the agency has in cracking well-used encryption products, increased usage presents its own serious problem. Right now, the NSA—based on the warped mindset that anyone who wants to hide what they’re saying from the NSA is probably a Bad Person¬—views “encryption usage” as one of its key factors in determining who is likely a terrorist. But that only works if 10,000 people around the world use encryption. Once that number increases to 1 million, and then to 10 million, and then to default usage, the NSA will no longer be able to use encryption usage as a sign of Bad People. Rather than being a red flag, encryption will simply be a brick wall: one that individuals have placed between the snooping governments and their online activities. That is a huge change, and it is coming.

So let Saxby Chambliss and Susan Collins and Marco Rubio scream into their insular void about ISIS and 9/11 and terrorism. Let Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi deceitfully march under a “reform” banner as they do everything possible to protect the NSA from any real limits. Let the NSA and other national security officials sit smugly in the knowledge that none of the political branches in D.C. can meaningfully limit them even if they wanted to (which they don’t).

The changes from the Snowden disclosures are found far from the Kabuki theater of the D.C. political class, and they are unquestionably significant. That does not mean the battle is inevitably won: The U.S. remains the most powerful government on earth, has all sorts of ways to continue to induce the complicity of big Silicon Valley firms, and is not going to cede dominion over the internet easily. But the battle is underway and the forces of reform are formidable—not because of anything the U.S. congress is doing, but despite it.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...-surveillance/





Amnesty, EFF, Privacy International Put Out Free Anti-Surveillance Tool
Natasha Lomas

Resistance is digital. Human rights charity Amnesty International is one of several organizations behind the release of a free, open source anti-surveillance tool called Detekt.

Other partners include Privacy International and digital privacy rights organizations the EFF and Germany’s Digitale Gesellschaft. The tool itself was developed by Berlin-based security researcher Claudio Guarnieri.

Detekt has been designed for Windows PC users to scan their machines for “known surveillance spyware” that its makers warn is used to “target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world”.

Given that security is always an arms race, you can be sure the surveillance tools that are detectable with Detekt will evolve to not be — and/or be replaced by alternative spyware that’s not on this tool’s radar.

As indeed Detekt’s own makers caution on the website (resistsurveillance.org) set up to promote the tool.

“Please beware that Detekt is a best effort tool,” they write. “While it may have been effective in previous investigations, it does not provide a conclusive guarantee that your computer is not compromised by the spyware it aims to detect. The tool is provided as is, without warranties or guarantees of any kind.”

So Detekt is not a panacea for surveillance. But that’s exactly the point being made here: technology alone can’t cure surveillance — rather it needs political pressure applied on governments to change their data capture practices.

You could argue it’s irresponsible to release a free tool which, after scanning a PC and giving the user the all clear might also give them a false sense of security about whether or not they are being watched. But Detekt’s makers also caution about that too, and point users to additional EFF resources for combating malware and viruses:

It is important to underline that if Detekt does not find trace of spyware on a computer, it does not necessarily mean that none is present. Some spyware will likely be updated in response to the release of Detekt in order to avoid detection. In addition, there may be existing versions of spyware, from these or other providers, which are not detected by this tool.

To learn more we recommend you visit EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense.


By linking the practice of surveillance to repressive governments, and thereby connecting it with other practices associated with such regimes — such as torture — this initiative seeks to apply political pressure on Western governments whose hands are dirty when it comes to dragnet surveillance of their citizens, as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has illuminated.

And that’s certainly a point worth making.

Below emphasis mine.

In recent years we have witnessed a huge growth in the adoption and trade in communication surveillance technologies. Such spyware provides the ability to read personal emails, listen-in skype conversations or even remotely turn on a computers camera and microphone without its owner knowing about it.

Some of this software is widely available on the Internet, while some more sophisticated alternatives are made and sold by private companies based in industrialized countries to state law enforcement and intelligence agencies in countries across the world.

There is little to no regulation currently in place to safeguard against these technologies being sold or used by repressive governments or others who are likely to use them for serious human rights violations and abuses.

You can find many reports on the use of spyware against civil society here. You can learn more about the trade in unlawful surveillance equipment by visiting the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports website.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/20/detekt/





Let's Play NSA! The Hackers Open-Sourcing Top Secret Spy Tools
Lucy Teitler

Last August, at Defcon, the hacker conference in Las Vegas, a boyish 40-year-old engineer and security researcher named Michael Ossmann stood on the stage of a lecture hall, about to detail a stunning new set of tools designed for spying on a wealth of electronic devices.

As quiet descended over an eager audience of hundreds of hackers, Ossmann stopped and issued a warning. “If you don't want to hear about leaked classified information, you can leave now,” he told the crowd.

Ossmann was acknowledging a legal barrier: if you're a government employee, you're prevented by law from reading or hearing about leaked classified information. And leaked classified information, it turned out, was precisely the basis of his research.

Ossmann paused to see if anyone was getting out of their seats. As he peered out into the audience, he said that it was an opportune moment for a friendly game of "Spot the Fed." (From where I was on the mezzanine of the giant lecture hall, I didn’t see anyone get up).

Then, with the patience and attention to detail of a likeable college science professor, he explained to the audience just how he had engineered the kind of surveillance devices that, six months earlier, only a select group of spies had even known were possible.

The ANT farm

It all began just after Christmas 2013, when a peculiar 48-page gadget catalog appeared on the website of Der Spiegel. The top of each page contained a string of letters, beginning with "TOP SECRET."

Six months earlier, the German newspaper had been one of a number of media outlets to publish thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden. But this document wasn't like the others.

The leaked file, authored around 2008 by a group at the National Security Agency known as the Advanced Network Technology (ANT) division, was a list of spy devices designed for getting what it called "the ungettable."

These tools weren't made for the controversial blanket surveillance that had captured the world's imagination and stirred its outrage. They were for use in more targeted and, in some cases, more dazzling attacks: gadgets meant to be secreted deep inside specific computers or telephones or walls, spying on the world's most secure systems—in some cases, even when they weren't connected to the internet. These devices were for the kind of old-fashioned spying that we almost forgot about in 2013: surveilling foreign governments and agents, terrorists, criminals, and perhaps some unintended victims.

“For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox,” wrote Jacob Appelbaum, the American privacy activist and security researcher, in Der Spiegel. “And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them.”

It wasn't clear how the catalog was leaked, but after the debacle over the NSA's tapping of Angela Merkel’s "handy," the decision to publish the document in Germany must have left more than a few American officials—and technology executives—grimacing.

Five thousand miles away in Colorado, however, Michael Ossmann was delighted. Ossmann had spent much of his career taking apart, designing, and hacking together radio electronics himself, mainly in the hope of trying to find their vulnerabilities and figure out how to protect them from people who might want to interfere with or spy on them.

To him, the document was like a late Christmas present—a kind of cyberspy’s Sharper Image catalog, chock full of capabilities and code names that would not disappoint fans of espionage literature.

There's a bugged set of mobile phones called PICASSO that can secretly record audio at any time (cost: $2,000), and software called MONKEYCALENDAR that transmits a mobile phone's location by hidden text message ($0). A USB plug codenamed COTTONMOUTH is designed to capture data as soon as it’s plugged in to a device (as much as $1.25 million for 50 of them), and CANDYGRAM, a set of fake base stations for hijacking cell phone calls, can be yours for a mere $40,000 apiece (if you're the right "you").

Most of the document was fun for Ossmann, rather than actually revelatory. “We"—as in the global community of radio hackers—"already knew how to build most of this stuff,” he told me recently.

But the ANT toolkit also included another more unusual class of devices known as "radio frequency retroreflectors.” With names like NIGHTWATCH, RAGEMASTER, and SURLYSPAWN, these devices were designed to give NSA agents "the means to collect signals that otherwise would not be collectable, or would be extremely difficult to collect and process."

And they were surprising. “Wow,” Ossmann thought. "Why the hell haven't I ever seen anything like these?"

Conceptually, radio frequency (RF) retroreflectors aren't novel. We encounter them on an everyday basis, since it is the technology used in RFID chips: anti-theft tags at stores, badges that grant entry to secure entrances, some credit cards, E-Z-Passes, fancy dog collars.

(Now I'm going to explain how retro-reflection works and things are going to get a little bit complicated, but bear with me, because the details are important. And if I can understand it, so can you.)

Retroreflection technology utilizes what's known as "backscatter communication." A retroreflector is "illuminated" remotely by the radio signal of another device, causing the retroreflector to, well, reflect a signal back.

A simple, non-technical illustration of this phenomenon would be two children trying to send messages in Morse code across a dark valley using only a flashlight and a mirror. A girl shines a flashlight at a boy, who wiggles his mirror to reflect the light back to the girl with meaningful modifications.

Because of this special functionality, a retroreflector, unlike a classic surveillance bug, requires no connection to a power source. As a result, it can be much smaller than a traditional bug and much harder to detect. And it can pretty much last forever.

By combining these devices with tiny sensors like a microphone or a keystroke reader, the NSA's engineers had turned retroreflectors into a superb spy bug: a sleeper agent that could gather data from your computer, silently and only when activated by a radar signal—when you weren't looking, when you weren't connected to the Internet, after you were dead.

Once Ossmann had read the catalog and knew that someone could build these magical-seeming devices, he did what hackers do.

“I thought that someone should demonstrate to people how easy it is to make such things," he said, "and I couldn't think of anyone more qualified to do it than myself.”

It All Started With "The Thing"...

Prior to the release of the ANT catalog, the last time the public had ever heard anything about retro-reflection technology being used in a surveillance device was in 1960. And the technology became such a sensation that it earned one of the most iconic nicknames of the Cold War.

On August 4, 1945, as World War II was winding down and new tensions with the Soviets were starting to wind up, Russian schoolchildren paid a visit to the American Ambassador in Moscow and bestowed upon him a token of good will: a Great Seal of the United States. The Ambassador hung it in his residential study.

There it hung until one day in 1952, when a British radio technician in Moscow, listening in on Russian air traffic, discovered something unexpected on one frequency: the sound of the British ambassador, loud and clear, along with other American-accented conversations. Thus began one of many exhaustive tear-downs of the embassy. They were looking to find a listening device—and they did, along with a new frontier of spying. The culprit was the Great Seal.

Inside the Americans and British found a tiny device the likes of which they’d never seen. So alien was the Great Seal Bug that the only appropriate name for it seemed to be “The Thing,” after the character in the Addams Family (which was then still just a New Yorker cartoon). It was a retroreflector.

“The Thing,” turned out to have been invented by the legendary Russian engineer Lev Sergeyevich Termen, or Leon Theremin, who may be most famous as the father of the spooky radio-based instrument named after him, but is also considered a pioneer of RFID technology.

But perhaps surprisingly, despite all the public interest in the revelation, “The Thing” did not seem to herald more “things.” In the history of espionage technology, it was a great story, but ultimately a footnote. As far as the public knew, after its fantastical discovery there were fifty-three years of radio silence, so to speak.

“In hindsight,” Ossmann said, “it’s obvious that these types of attacks are practical and employed. For someone who knows a little bit about electronics and a little bit about security, RF retroreflectors should be completely unsurprising. However, I couldn't find anyone who had published any research on the subject at all. That was astonishing."

(This is where things get a bit complicated again; it's worth it, but if you simply can't deal with the details, take my word for it, and skip down to the next section.)

The ANT catalog arrived at a serendipitous moment for Ossmann. For years, he'd been working in software-defined radio (SDR), an emerging field in which wireless devices are built in code rather than with hardware. Instead of modulators and oscillators, an SDR uses digital signal processing chips that give programmers the ability to automatically create radio signals and specify their frequency and power.

Ossmann has designed his own SDR that he sells on his website called the HackRF One, which plugs into any computer's USB. He compares it to a computer's sound card, except instead of making sounds or processing audio, it makes and receives radio signals. Think of it as a kind of radio hacker's Swiss Army Knife, capable of engaging with any radio band on the fly: AM, FM, GSM, Bluetooth—you name it. (As of publication, the HackRF One is sold out; Ossmann is currently readying a new batch.)

Devices like these can be used to test the security of radio systems, but Ossmann figured that its versatility could also be used to send signals to a retroreflector and receive them back with minimal interference. He poured over the ANT catalog, began communicating with other hardware and software engineers on online message boards, and enlisted the help of a number of other hardware tinkerers he knew from the internet. The project's name—the NSA Playset—originated with a friend of Ossmann's, an engineer named Dean Pierce, who had originally suggested it for another hacking project that began when news of the government's secret domestic surveillance program was first reported in 2006.

Ossmann's first successful retroreflector experiment involved spying on a simple electrical signal using a toy. First, he hacked a Hot Wheels Radar Gun (about $30 on eBay) to connect to an oscilloscope, which displays electrical signals on a screen. Then he soldered a small piece of wire—an antenna—onto a basic transistor called a MOSFET, and attached this to a function generator configured to produce a simple square wave, and he powered it up.

"I aimed the radar gun at the retroreflector and was able to see the square wave on the oscilloscope." With some fiddling, the bug could be used to surveil a TV monitor, or the keystrokes on a keyboard, or a telephone line, or an automobile's internal network, all quietly and from a safe distance. Ossmann got to work on turning his transistor/antenna combination into a retroreflector he called CONGAFLOCK.

“I made a few,” he said. “And they’re really small, so I made a thousand.”

Pulling back the curtain

Every tool in the NSA Playset has been designed on top of open-source hardware and software so that anyone can build their own, often in no more than a few hours. Over a dozen engineers are involved in the project, Ossmann said, but anyone is invited to join and contribute their own device. The first requirement: a silly name riffing on the original NSA codename. "For example, if your project is similar to FOXACID, maybe you could call it COYOTEMETH," says the NSA Playset website. (A separate website, NSA Name Generator, is designed to help.)

Just like the ANT catalog, the NSA Playset includes more than just retroreflectors. In a separate talk at Defcon, another NSA Playset engineer from Colorado named Joshua Datko showed off the CHUCKWAGON, a device he built that allows malware to be reinstalled on a computer even after being erased by antivirus software. By attaching the bug to an exposed portion of a computer's wiring system, something called the I2C bus, "you can attack somebody's PC without even opening it up," Ossmann said.

At a table outside the conference hall at Defcon, where a number of members of the NSA Playset team gave presentations, attendees could buy some of the devices, at prices that might have shocked the authors of the ANT catalog.

One device, dubbed TWILIGHTVEGETABLE, is a knock off of an NSA-built GSM cell phone that's designed to sniff and monitor internet traffic. The ANT catalog lists it for $15,000; the NSA Playset researchers built one using a USB flash drive, a cheap SDR, and an antenna, for about $50. The most expensive device, a drone that spies on WiFi traffic called PORCUPINEMASQUERADE, costs about $600 to assemble. At Defcon, a complete NSA Playset toolkit was auctioned by the EFF for $2,250.

There are, of course, a few concerns about loosing this kind of spy gear into the public realm. In the cab on my way to the conference to see Ossmann speak, I mentioned Defcon to my taxi driver. “I’ve never seen so many criminals under one roof,” he joked. He was echoing the popular conception of hackers: They’re going to rob you, they’re going to stalk you; they’re the peroxide-haired master villain played by Javier Bardem in that latest Bond movie.

It’s self-evident that spies need all kinds of sophisticated spy gear; it’s not self-evident exactly how much they need, and how far they should go in the use of that technology. But does Ossmann and his merry bunch of geeks need to know how to create tiny, undetectable bugs that, once installed, can last forever? Frankly, it seems like pretty bad news for ex-girlfriends everywhere.

Those concerned about this might also point out that anyone can come to Defcon. If you have $220 in cash, and you’re willing to wait in long lines, you’re in. Plenty of people at the conference don’t use their real names or take off their sunglasses. Sure, there’s a friendly, open-source atmosphere at the conference, but that doesn’t mean that foreign spies or criminals aren’t hidden among the crowd. And there’s even less of a barrier to entry for those who want to see Ossmann’s plans for building these devices. They’re on Github. All you need is an internet connection.

Well before the Snowden revelations, the security community has been debating the merits of "full" disclosure of known vulnerabilities versus "responsible" disclosure. On the NSA Playset's Google Group, I found little discussion about this. But in one post from June, a hardware hacker named Tony DiCola, who was building his own NSA-inspired device designed to spy on keystrokes over WiFi, expressed some hesitation.

"I did have a concern about ethics," he wrote. "Are there any thoughts or processes to help keep stuff in the NSA Playset from being too easily used for 'bad'? I worry that releasing and documenting an easy to use WiFi keylogger could make it too easy for someone without much skill to get themselves in trouble. Obviously the whole point of the NSA Playset seems like it's to show people just how easy and possible it is for these spy devices to be built and used. However is there a point where it might cause more trouble than it's worth?"

In a follow-up comment, DiCola proposed one solution—building a countermeasure to his device—but his initial question received scant response.

The aftermath

Looking for answers after the talk, I found Ossmann in the pool area at the Rio Hotel, surrounded by faux waterfalls and swimming vacationers, holding an informal Q&A. Wearing well-fitting jeans, a checked Oxford shirt, and Prada glasses, nodding attentively as he listened to the ideas of his excited young fans, he could hardly have looked less like a digital radical.

Speaking to a smaller, less formal audience, Ossmann ruminated about the future. He mentioned the possibility that some of this spying technology doesn’t require a piece of embedded hardware at all, and may be able to work with the unmodified elements of everyday electronic devices. Potentially, that means that your totally average, everyday stereo could, if beamed at by the right kind of equipment, turn into a surveillance device.

“I have not yet seen this work,” Ossmann said, “so I can't be certain, but I suspect that this is a legitimate threat, and it is one of the areas of future research that I think is most important.”

I took the opportunity to break into the conversation to ask Ossmann about the concerns I imagined people would have with this kind of work: what are the consequences of making information and tools like this public? What does it mean to put these kinds of capabilities into the hands of people who don’t have the motives of a national security organization?

I tried to choose my words carefully, but I could tell immediately from the frustrated brows of the other people in the crowd that I had revealed myself as an outsider. They were the smartest kids in the class, happily bounding ahead of the curriculum, and I was the person asking the teacher to go back to the beginning because I hadn’t understood the original equation.

But Ossmann was as generous and patient with me as he was with all the others.

“The point is to raise awareness within the security field," he said. "If we [in the information security field] are going to take ourselves seriously, we've got to understand these threats. If we don’t know much about attacks, we don’t know counter-measures. There is no security in obscurity.”

"Once you know that it’s being done, it’s rudimentary and obvious to anyone with minimal electronics and security background," he said. "So it’s safe to assume that lots of people are doing it. Maybe foreign governments. Maybe criminals.”

“When things are difficult and obscure,” he said, “they’re not widely available and then only the bad guys can use them.”

In the circumstances—Defcon, surrounded by young hackers—I wasn’t sure what he meant by “the bad guys.” The US government? The Kremlin?

But he wasn’t being political: "Bad guys" was just an expression. “If you’re trying to defend a system," he said, "everyone attacking it is a bad guy.”

At this point, a hacker standing nearby said that there was another, totally different way to look at the NSA Playset. To him, the work Ossmann is doing is helping many of the government's engineers resolve a catch-22 that’s emerged in the wake of the Snowden revelations: government security researchers who didn't have access to the ANT catalog when it was classified aren't legally permitted to read it or transmit it now, even though everyone else can. Arguably, that leaves the public sector at a disadvantage next to the private sector—or to spies in, say, Beijing or Moscow.

Ossmann confirmed this. “I've been thanked by several US government employees for my work on the NSA Playset and particularly for my RF retroreflector research,” he told me. “They don't have the opportunity to understand state-of-the-art threats against their systems unless someone like me produces unclassified information about such threats.”

A security specialist who goes by the name Clive Robinson, and who appears to be familiar with the NSA's implants, echoed this concern in one of many comments on Bruce Schneier's blog in June. “The annoying thing" for experts who have been trained in the government's secret surveillance tools, "is not being able to talk about things until some independent researcher has put a paper into the public domain. If it’s from a classified source that's been leaked like the Ed Snowden revelations it still can not be talked about or even looked at.”

This is far more frustrating, he wrote, because, “if you can read Russian as a friend of mine can then you will find there is quite a bit of info available up on the web” about this material, a reminder not just about what information is out there but who is looking at it.

“Government people don’t have all the tools to protect their own networks,” Ossmann told me, and he knows this first-hand. Before he quit his day job to focus on his own security and electronics company, Great Scott Gadgets, he was working as a wireless security researcher in a government-funded lab. His research wasn't classified, but it "wasn't widely disseminated," he said. "Since then I have made a deliberate effort to work only on open source and public research."

In one top secret slide from 2010, NSA technicians are shown intercepting a Cisco router in order to implant a digital bug.

At this point, the most visible elements in the transparency debate seem to be those on the far reaches of both sides of the spectrum. On one side, there's Anonymous and WikiLeaks and the rest of the “hacktivist” community, for whom total transparency is a self-evident good that rarely needs further justification. On the other, there are the officials in the intelligence community and others who think it’s always unsafe to expose classified information and behavior, even if those classified things might make us unsafe to begin with. What’s yet to emerge is a reasonable middle ground that takes into account all the grays of a topic as complex and nuanced as information security.

One concern often voiced by critics of the intelligence community relates to its culture of excessive surveillance and over-classification—a land of too many secrets, where knowledge can be a casualty and paranoia and corruption can thrive. Thomas Drake, a former NSA official-turned-whistleblower, doesn't think a document like the ANT catalog should have been classified to begin with. In his opinion, that kind of protection should be reserved for troop movements and nuclear secrets.

“People in secret knowing about others becomes very seductive, and you get addicted to it, and you’re not accountable," Drake said. "There’s a natural tendency to expand what is secret.”

But while policy people debate what should or shouldn't be public, the scientists are doing what they always do: learning more. Ossmann doesn't take a firm stance on whether the ANT Catalog should have been released in the first place.

"I do not know who leaked it or why," he wrote in an email. "I find nothing shocking about the fact that the NSA possesses any of the tools in the catalog, and this makes me wonder about the motivation of the leaker.” He said he was skeptical that Edward Snowden was behind it. "Snowden's motives have been fairly clear," he said.

To Ossmann and people like him—people in whose hands the consequences of this kind of information arguably actually rest—the political aspects and the motives are incidental. “I do not support the idea that knowledge can or should be withheld from anyone,” he said. “As a security researcher, my interest in the ANT catalog is that it informs me about potentially interesting areas of research."

It almost sounds simple when he says it.

With additional reporting by Alex Pasternack ( @pasternack)
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mic...he-nsa-playset





Self-Repairing Software Tackles Malware

Computer scientists have developed software that not only detects and eradicates never-before-seen viruses and other malware, but also automatically repairs damage caused by them. The software then prevents the invader from ever infecting the computer again.

University of Utah computer scientists have developed software that not only detects and eradicates never-before-seen viruses and other malware, but also automatically repairs damage caused by them. The software then prevents the invader from ever infecting the computer again.

A3 is a software suite that works with a virtual machine -- a virtual computer that emulates the operations of a computer without dedicated hardware. The A3 software is designed to watch over the virtual machine's operating system and applications, says Eric Eide, University of Utah research assistant professor of computer science leading the university's A3 team with U computer science associate professor John Regehr. A3 is designed to protect servers or similar business-grade computers that run on the Linux operating system. It also has been demonstrated to protect military applications.

The new software called A3, or Advanced Adaptive Applications, was co-developed by Massachusetts-based defense contractor, Raytheon BBN, and was funded by Clean-Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts, a program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The four-year project was completed in late September.

There are no plans to adapt A3 for home computers or laptops, but Eide says this could be possible in the future.

"A3 technologies could find their way into consumer products someday, which would help consumer devices protect themselves against fast-spreading malware or internal corruption of software components. But we haven't tried those experiments yet," he says.

U computer scientists have created "stackable debuggers," multiple de-bugging applications that run on top of each other and look inside the virtual machine while it is running, constantly monitoring for any out-of-the-ordinary behavior in the computer.

Unlike a normal virus scanner on consumer PCs that compares a catalog of known viruses to something that has infected the computer, A3 can detect new, unknown viruses or malware automatically by sensing that something is occurring in the computer's operation that is not correct. It then can stop the virus, approximate a repair for the damaged software code, and then learn to never let that bug enter the machine again.

While the military has an interest in A3 to enhance cybersecurity for its mission-critical systems, A3 also potentially could be used in the consumer space, such as in web services like Amazon. If a virus or attack stops the service, A3 could repair it in minutes without having to take the servers down.

To test A3's effectiveness, the team from the U and Raytheon BBN used the infamous software bug called Shellshock for a demonstration to DARPA officials in Jacksonville, Florida, in September. A3 discovered the Shellshock attack on a Web server and repaired the damage in four minutes, Eide says. The team also tested A3 successfully on another half-dozen pieces of malware.

Shellshock was a software vulnerability in UNIX-based computers (which include many web servers and most Apple laptops and desktop computers) that would allow a hacker to take control of the computer. It was first discovered in late September. Within the first 24 hours of the disclosure of Shellshock, security researchers reported that more than 17,000 attacks by hackers had been made with the bug.

"It is a pretty big deal that a computer system could automatically, and in a short amount of time, find an acceptable fix to a widespread and important security vulnerability," Eide says. "It's pretty cool when you can pick the Bug of the Week and it works."

Now that the team's project into A3 is completed and proves their concept, Eide says the U team would like to build on the research and figure out a way to use A3 in cloud computing, a way of harnessing far-flung computer networks to deliver storage, software applications and servers to a local user via the Internet.

The A3 software is open source, meaning it is free for anyone to use, but Eide believes many of the A3 technologies could be incorporated into commercial products.

Other U members of the A3 team include research associate David M. Johnson, systems programmer Mike Hibler and former graduate student Prashanth Nayak.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1113140011.htm





Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists

Senior vice president Emil Michael floated making critics’ personal lives fair game. Michael apologized Monday for the remarks.
Ben Smith

Emil Michael, senior vice president of business for Uber, in July. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

His remarks came as Uber seeks to improve its relationship with the media and the image of its management team, who have been cast as insensitive and hyper-aggressive even as the company’s business and cultural reach have boomed.

Michael, who has been at Uber for more than a year as its senior vice president of business, floated the idea at a dinner Friday at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn attended by an influential New York crowd including actor Ed Norton and publisher Arianna Huffington. The dinner was hosted by Ian Osborne, a former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and consultant to the company.

At the dinner, Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick, boyish with tousled graying hair and a sweater, made the case that he has been miscast as an ideologue and as insensitive to driver and rider complaints, while in fact he has largely had his head down building a transformative company that has beat his own and others’ wildest expectations.

A BuzzFeed editor was invited to the dinner by the journalist Michael Wolff, who later said that he had failed to communicate that the gathering would be off the record; neither Kalanick, his communications director, nor any other Uber official suggested to BuzzFeed News that the event was off the record.

Michael, who Kalanick described as “one of the top deal guys in the Valley” when he joined the company, is a charismatic and well-regarded figure who came to Uber from Klout. He also sits on a board that advises the Department of Defense.

Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.

Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

Michael at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing.

In a statement through an Uber spokeswoman, Michael said: “The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them.”

The spokeswoman, Nairi Hourdajian, said the company does not do “oppo research” of any sort on journalists, and has never considered doing it. She also said Uber does not consider Lacy’s personal life fair game, or believe that she is responsible for women being sexually assaulted.

Hourdajian also said that Uber has clear policies against executives looking at journalists’ travel logs, a rich source of personal information in Uber’s posession.

“Any such activity would be clear violations of our privacy and data access policies,” Hourdajian said in an email. “Access to and use of data is permitted only for legitimate business purposes. These policies apply to all employees. We regularly monitor and audit that access.”

In fact, the general manager of Uber NYC accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed News reporter, Johana Bhuiyan, to make points in the course of a discussion of Uber policies. At no point in the email exchanges did she give him permission to do so.

At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.

Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/ube...on-journalists





Police Face Legal Action for Snooping on Journalists

‘Domestic extremists’ unit kept a secret database of details on journalists including medical history of family members
Rob Evans

A group of journalists has launched a legal action against Scotland Yard after discovering that the Metropolitan police has been recording their professional activities on a secret database designed to monitor so-called domestic extremists.

The six journalists have obtained official files that reveal how police logged details of their work as they reported on protests. One photographer discovered that the Met police had more than 130 entries detailing his movements, including what he was wearing, at demonstrations he attended as a member of the press.

They have started the legal action to expose what they say is a persistent pattern of journalists being assaulted, monitored and stopped and searched by police during their work, which often includes documenting police misconduct.

In legal paperwork, the journalists who have worked for national newspapers describe how they have regularly exposed malpractice by the state and big corporations and have campaigned for press freedom.

The group includes a journalist on the Times. Jules Mattsson, who, police noted, was “always looking for a story”. Mattsson said that when he had been a victim of crime, police had transferred on to the domestic extremism database details of his appearance, childhood and a family member’s medical history.

Adrian Arbib, a press photographer for three decades, found that police had recorded him taking photographs of Heathrow airport for a Guardian story about the decline of English orchards.

Freelance photographer Jess Hurd discovered that her file dated back to 2000.

Five of the journalists have successfully sued the police in the past, winning damages or apologies over wrongdoing such as being assaulted or unjustifiably searched by officers while they worked.

The legal action, backed by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), has been initiated at a time when the media are protesting that police are misusing surveillance powers to access reporters’ telephone records to unmask confidential sources.

The journalists are seeking to force the Met to destroy the files held on them as they say the surveillance violates the liberty of the press and their privacy.

They have used the Data Protection Act to obtain copies of the files. Many of the 130-plus entries in the file of freelance photographer Jason Parkinson since 2005 note that he is a photographer working for the media and log how he is using a camera or video to record events.

Several entries note that he is a member of the NUJ and had a visible card around his neck declaring this fact. Another entry records that on a 2009 demonstration, he was “present throughout the protest, undertaking his photographic duties”. Often his dress, body piercings, and facial hair are described.

The file on David Hoffman, a freelance photographer who has been chronicling demonstrations for the media since 1976, appears to label him twice as “an Anti-Nazi League photographer”. He said he had never been a member or worked for the Anti-Nazi League, a campaign that was wound up more than a decade ago.

He questioned why there was a file on him on the database compiled by the Met’s domestic extremism unit. “I have never contemplated any sort of extreme action of a political or criminal nature”, he said.

The covert unit has been tracking thousands of campaigners and storing files on them. It says it is seeking to pinpoint the minority who have, or are about to, commit crime to promote their political aims.

The Met says the domestic extremism unit deleted many files recently after a watchdog found there was no justification for retaining them.

There has been criticism that many on the database, including Jenny Jones, the Green party’s sole peer, have no criminal record. One campaigner discovered that police had recorded how he had sold anti-capitalist publications from a stall at the Glastonbury festival.

Police are going to the supreme court in December to overturn a landmark ruling that they unlawfully kept the political activities of 89-year-old peace campaigner, John Catt, on the database.

A freedom of information request last month found that the unit has more than 2,000 references in its files to journalists and press photographers.

Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told MPs last week that this did not mean that there were that number of files on individuals, as terms such as “journalists” were used to describe events, indicating for instance that there were a group of them at a demonstration.

The commissioner said police did not “routinely collect” information on journalists and their sources, adding that the police only took an interest in people if they were either victims or suspects.

The file on journalist and comedian Mark Thomas, who is part of the legal action, contained more than 60 pieces of intelligence in what he has described as “being wonderfully odd in an Ealing Comedy-meets-the-Stasi sort of way”.

Michelle Stanistreet, the NUJ general secretary, said: “There is no justification for treating journalists as criminals or enemies of the state”.

The Met confirmed it had received a legal letter from Bhatt Murphy, the law firm working for the journalists, and would respond in due course.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...ng-journalists





Why the Internet is Slowly Strangling Religion

Increased access to information is making it more difficult for faiths to exert total control over their followers
Amanda Marcotte

While the burgeoning atheist movement loves throwing conferences and selling books, a huge chunk–possibly most–of its resources go toward the Internet. This isn’t borne out of laziness or a hostility to wearing pants so much as a belief that the Internet is uniquely positioned as the perfect tool for sharing arguments against religion with believers who are experiencing doubts. It’s searchable, it allows back-and-forth debate, and it makes proving your arguments through links much easier. Above all else, it’s private. An online search on atheism is much easier to hide than, say, a copy of The God Delusion on your nightstand.

In recent months, this sense that the Internet is the key for atheist outreach has started to move from “hunch” to actual, evidence-based theory. Earlier this year, Allen Downey of the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts examined the spike in people declaring they had no religion that started in the ’90s and found that while there are many factors contributing to it–dropping familial pressure, increased levels of college education–increased Internet usage was likely a huge part of it, accounting for up to 25 percent of the decline in religious belief. While cautioning that correlation does not mean causation, Downey did go on to point out that since so many other factors were controlled for, it’s a safe bet to conclude that the access to varied thought and debate the Internet provides is persuading people to drop their religions.

But in the past few months, that hypothesis grew even stronger when a major American religion basically had to admit that Internet arguments against their faith is putting them on their heels. The Church of Latter Day Saints has quietly released a series of essays, put together by church historians, addressing some of the less savory aspects of their history, such as the practice of polygamy or the ban on black members. The church sent out a memo in September telling church leaders to direct believers who have questions about their religion’s history to these essays, which they presented as a counter to “detractors” who “spread misinformation and doubt.”

While there are plenty of detractors who will share their opinions offline, there’s little doubt that the bulk of the detractors plaguing the church are explaining their views online, which is why this has become a problem now for a church that used to act like it could exert total control over believers’ access to information. One of the church historians, Steven Snow, openly cited the internet as the source of the criticisms. “There is so much out there on the Internet ,” he told the New York Times, “that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history.”

While the memo sent to church leaders strongly implied that the websites bothering believers are full of disinformation, the likelier story is that they’re worried about all the historically accurate information out there. The Mormons tend to be plagued more than other major churches by historically accurate information, because they are a relatively new church and the historical records on their founders like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are intact and hard to deny. This concern is reflected in the nature of the essays, which openly admit a lot of information that the church used to spend a lot of effort in minimizing, facts like exactly how many wives Joseph Smith had or the fact that polygamy was practiced by many members long after the church officially banned it. Not that they had much of a choice. If members of the church learn this stuff from Wikipedia instead of from their own religious authorities, it will likely sow more anger and distrust of the church for misleading them.

The Internet generally gathered around President Obama for his recent comments endorsing an extremely strong version of net neutrality that would make it very difficult for corporate internet providers to give certain people preferential internet access over others. His comments were seen as a victory for political activists, everyday bloggers, and non-profits that would lose out on the ability to compete with moneyed corporations and other institutions in the free-for-all that is internet discourse. But atheists and critics of religion also win out with net neutrality. Giant, well-funded churches would probably love to pay for better access to your computer screen than any atheist blogger could afford, but if net neutrality becomes the law, they won’t have that ability.

The Mormons might be the most obvious example of a church that has had to deal directly with non-believers using the Internet to get unprecedented abilities to publicize their critiques of religion, but there’s good reason to believe that the feedback religions are getting online is hurting other churches. Is it any coincidence that Pope Francis is undertaking the monumental task of trying to make the Catholic Church seem a little less forbidding in the age of the Internet?

At a recent conference on technology held by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Monsignor Paul Tighe expressed concerns that the Catholic Church is losing out by not being more aggressive online. “If the church in some way is not present in the digital, we’re going to be absent from the experience and from the lives of many people,” he said. “If we withdraw, then we’re leaving those areas to the trolls. We’re leaving it to the bullies.”

Again, it’s hard to believe that trolls and bullies, as irritating as they may be, are the real issue here–trolling is aggravating, but it’s not very persuasive. No, the real threat to the faith is people making strong cases against the Catholic Church and religion in general. Some of those cases are boldly stated and some are more polite and accommodating, but either way, they are real arguments and far more threatening to religion than some trolls saying stupid stuff that is best ignored.

It will be interesting to see how religions adapt to the fact that the Internet makes it that much harder for them to control their believers’ access to information. Some will probably be adaptable, like the Mormons, realizing that a little more information-sharing and transparency is the only way to keep trust alive. Others, like Pastor Mark Driscoll of the fundamentalist Mars Hill Church in Seattle, will react by doubling down, trying to convince their followers to stay off the Internet rather than read persuasive cases against their beliefs. But the Internet’s beauty is it makes satisfying basic curiosity as easy as typing some words into a search bar. Odds are that’s a temptation fewer and fewer believers will be able to resist.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/14/why_...igion_partner/





Net Neutrality Emails Reveal a Cozy 'Social Network' Between the FCC and Telecoms
Jason Leopold

The Federal Communications Commission has long been accused of having a close relationship with the industry it regulates.

The accusations are usually leveled because of the revolving door that has seen FCC officials leave the agency to work as lobbyists for telecom companies, and lobbyists for telecom companies leave to work for the FCC.

Internal FCC documents obtained by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed last April sheds a little more light on the revolving door and the cozy relationship between the regulators and the industry it oversees.

The 600-pages of documents, which include emails and letters, are especially noteworthy because they pertain to discussions revolving around rules for net neutrality, which FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler — he's a former lobbyist for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and Nextel — is expected to unveil and enact in the coming weeks.

At the same time, the documents the FCC released do not tell the whole story about the agency's net neutrality discussions with the telecom industry. The FCC said that in response to our FOIA request, it reviewed about 4,600 records, including 3,000 emails and "internal drafts, memoranda, charts, outlines," and "notes."

But the FCC withheld the vast majority of those documents from VICE News citing exemptions that protect personal privacy, "trade secrets and commercial or financial information," and "deliberative" records — in other words, records that are part of the behind-the-scenes decision-making process. Moreover, the records the FCC released, particularly certain emails that contain information FCC officials sent to FCC spokespeople about how to respond to a wide range of queries from reporters about net neutrality, are completely redacted.

The FCC was supposed to release another batch of documents to VICE News on November 14. The agency said it now intends to turn over those records on November 26 — the day before Thanksgiving.

* * *

Net neutrality is a contentious issue. Last May, the FCC voted to approve a preliminary, open Internet proposal by Wheeler that could authorize broadband providers to create "fast lanes" for content companies like Netflix who are willing to pay for the service.

Net neutrality advocates reacted negatively to the proposal and flooded the FCC with 4 million emails during the two-month open comment period on the matter that followed the commission's 3-2 vote.

Last week, President Barack Obama weighed in on the issue. In videotaped remarks, Obama urged the FCC, which operates independently, to adopt open internet rules that would ensure that "neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online." Obama suggested that the FCC classify broadband as a public utility.

Wheeler, a major Obama fundraiser who raised $700,000 for his two presidential campaigns, has reportedly not yet decided how he will act. But some of the internal FCC documents show that telecom lobbyists and executives at internet service providers have a direct line to the chairman and have already attempted to influence his decision.

Two days before the FCC's May 15 vote on the open internet proposal, John Chambers, the chairman and chief executive of Cisco Systems, spoke with Wheeler on the phone to express his concerns by some "advocates to impose the old fashioned telephone regulations of Title II of the Communications Act to broadband internet access service." That is the proposal Obama is urging the FCC to adopt.

Chambers said Cisco "strongly supports" Wheeler's proposal that the commission voted on, as it would spur innovation "by allowing new technology and business models to be deployed without onerous regulation." Classifying broadband service as a public utility would chill "investment in new infrastructure," Chambers said.

Neither Wheeler nor Chambers responded to VICE News' requests for comment.

Republicans reacted angrily to Obama's proposal, and to net neutrality in general. Senator Ted Cruz likened the issue to "Obamacare for the Internet." But Republicans weren't happy with Wheeler's proposals either. Head Comcast lobbyist Kathy Zachem sent an email to Philip Verveer, the FCC's senior lawyer, on April 24 — the day the FCC circulated new open internet proposals — and gave him advanced notice of the Republican response.

"This to go out from upton and walden shortly," Zachem wrote.

Upton and Walden are Representative Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Representative Greg Walden. In a joint news release on April 24, they said the FCC's proposal on net neutrality is "a solution in search of a problem."

'Unlike arguments made in public, no one gets the opportunity to debunk the telecoms' arguments when they're made in secret.'

Later on April 24, Zachem forwarded an email to Verveer about an investor meeting sponsored by a venture capital firm being held for Republicans on why net neutrality is a good thing. "Fyi - please do not forward with my e-mail reference thanks," Zachem wrote.

Verveer's responses, if there were any, were not included in the documents the FCC provided to VICE News.

Zachem's emails underscore the revolving door and the close relationship lobbyists have with the regulatory agency. Verveer is the FCC chairman's senior counselor; he's also a former Comcast consultant and industry lobbyist. Verveer was also hired by two industry groups — the powerful National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the Wireless Association (CTIA) — that have worked to block net neutrality. Neither Verveer nor Zachem responded to requests for comment.

Comcast is the only internet service provider in the US that is legally bound by full net neutrality rules; the company agreed to the arrangement as part of its deal to acquire NBCUniversal. But according to a report in the Washington Post published last July, Comcast has "two big goals" in Washington: "The first is to get its merger with Time Warner Cable approved by federal regulators. The second is to forestall what it views as potentially onerous new regulations on its broadband business."

* * *

Kit Walsh, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who works on net neutrality issues, reviewed the FCC documents. Walsh said the records show the telecoms were happy with Wheeler's "weak" April proposal on open internet rules and "reacted intensely" when "Title II was on the table."

But Walsh is troubled that the FCC withheld so much material.

"Unlike arguments made in public, no one gets the opportunity to debunk the telecoms' arguments when they're made in secret," Walsh told VICE News. "But the documents we do see demonstrate telecoms have access and relationships with regulators. It's a social network between regulator and the regulated."

One of those documents is an email Wheeler sent former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, now the president of NCTA, after Powell delivered a keynote speech to the trade and lobbyist group last April 29.

"Michael, Great speech! Very statesmanlike challenge to your industry while putting things in perspective," Wheeler wrote on April 29. Wheeler also used to be the chairman of the NCTA. "FYI, I'm going to get pretty direct about the Open Internet tomorrow. The press is full of misinformation and I'm going to use the visit to the largest broadband providers to deliver a message that shows that the perception that we're gutting Open Internet is wrong."

It's unclear how Powell responded because the FCC withheld his reply. Wheeler, however, responded a day later to Powell and said that his chief of staff Ruth Milkman — another former industry lobbyist — would send an advance copy of Wheeler's speech.

"I intend to be direct," Wheeler wrote. "If you want to talk about these points in our discussion that's fine with me."

In his keynote address, Powell said, "We must continually prove that the private sector can achieve public good. We need to continue to build a faster and open Internet. We need to keep prices reasonable and the value of our services high…. We need to be good corporate citizens."

The only insight into Wheeler's thinking about the new rules for the open Internet was found in an email exchange he had with Richard Greenfield, a media and technology analyst at investment firm BTIG. Greenfield had sent Wheeler an email on May 11, four days before the FCC voted on its open internet proposal, under the subject line, "Maybe changing wording could help." Greenfield wrote:

There will not be two internets -- there is and can only be one

But there can be dedicated ip services called managed services that never touch the public internet

That was in the prior rulemaking and never caused this insanity from the tech world - even though they were effectively fast lanes

I honestly think everyone spins to their advantage and doesnt know what they are talking about

Hope u enjoyed our piece from Friday - we submitted to the official record too


Wheeler responded the following day, saying he had "repeatedly" read Greenfield's research report, "Fast Lanes Do Not Have to Affect Internet Speeds & Why Reverse Blocking Should End the Net Neutrality Debate."

"Can you tell me more about the Roku [streaming service] example? I didn't realize that this relationship was in place. Are there other MSOs [multi system operators] or other edge services that have something similar? Specifically, how does it work in terms of cost, etc.?"

Greenfield replied and noted that: "Time Warner Cable's Roku (and ios/Android apps) inside the home function as managed or specialized network services. The content originates from Time Warner Cable's digital center in Denver and is transported only over TWC infrastructure -- it never touches the public internet. It is not removing bandwidth from the Internet service that TWC delivers to me, it is a separate pathway -- essentially a fast lane that never gets congested… which I think is exactly what was envisioned in the last rulemaking. There is no cost to the consumer."

Some of the correspondence Wheeler received was from old colleagues who wanted to reconnect with the FCC chairman.

"Hey Mr. Chairman, I sincerely hope this note (from the public domain) makes its way to your desk," wrote Laurence Master on March 31. "Just want to tip my hat and say kudos for all that's going on in your life, seems like it has been a long time coming. Ironically, I find myself on the other side of the fence these days, as Director, Digital Distribution, NBC Sports, go figure, fill in the blanks (especially with the TW [Time Warner]/Comcast merger and net neutrality filling you inbox [sic])…. I hope Carol and family are well. If you still stay in touch with Stamberger, please pass along my best wishes to him as well."

It is likely Master was referring to Richard Stamberger, a lobbyist for CTIA, the powerful lobbying group Wheeler used to head.

Master emailed Wheeler again on April 24. "TW - Good to see you all over the news taking lead on net-neutrality, hope things progressing well. -LM"

In Wheeler's response, he spells Master's first name wrong. "Thanks Lawrence. These are interesting times."

It didn't seem to bother Master, however. He replied, "From everything I'm reading, sounds like you have your hands full…. if anyone can handle this ride you're certainly one of them…. as someone in charge of NBCS streaming partnership distribution, you bet I'm paying attention…. good luck, Tom hang in there."
https://news.vice.com/article/net-ne...c-and-telecoms





Leaked Documents Show Net Neutrality May be in Danger!
Maryant Fernández Pérez

On 14 November 2014, the Italian Presidency presented amendments to the Telecommunications package for comment by the Member State delegations. We are hereby making the document and its annexes publicly available (Note and addendum). These documents show that the Italian Presidency is now back-pedalling on meaningful net neutrality protections – having previously made some much more meaningful and positive suggestions. It presented a “principles-based approach” to the Member States “in order not to inhibit innovation and to avoid” having an outdated regulation in the future. In reality, all the text would do is add confusion for freedom of communication and online innovation.

The text proposes the removal of the definitions of “net neutrality”. “Instead of a definition of net neutrality there could be a reference to the objective of net neutrality, e.g. in an explanatory recital, which would resolve the concerns that the definition might be at variance with the specific provisions.” Yet, without meaningful and enforceable net neutrality provisions, the fundamental right to receive and impart information would be hindered – with significant costs for growth, investment and innovation.

Additionally, the text removes the definition of “specialised services” from Article 23. The deletion would in principle not be such a bad idea, as long as non-discrimination was clearly supported by the text. Sadly, the proposal would achieve the opposite:

“Traffic management measures that block, slow down, alter, degrade or discriminate against specific content, applications or services, or specific classes thereof” could be maintained by providers of Internet access services under certain circumstances, such as to “prevent the transmission of unsolicited communications” (which seems strange because an e-mail service is not an internet access service); to prevent “temporary congestion control” (whose exceptional nature should be clarified not to be the default); or to meet their “obligations under a contract with an end-user to deliver a service requiring a specific level of quality to that end-user” (which makes little sense in the “best effort” Internet).

The biggest gap in the Council text however is that Article 23 fails to prohibit discrimination on the basis of billing. Allowing “free” access to certain services and metered access to everything else is as much – and as damaging – an infringement of net neutrality and the fundamental right of freedom to impart information, as any blocking or filtering. If people have to pay extra to access your website (or if you have to pay internet companies to allow them to do so), then the essence of the open internet has been dismantled.

The proposal also makes a bizarre reference to the legislation being without prejudice to the lawfulness of “information, content, application [sic] or services” – even though nothing in the text could possibly be understood as legalising illegal content. The purpose of this text appears to permit the widespread arbitrary “voluntary” blocking practised in some EU Member States, most notably the United Kingdom. If this is the meaning, then it is in clear and obvious breach of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

In sum, this last proposal of the Italian Presidency would weaken citizens’ rights and annul the strong provisions adopted by the European Parliament in April 2014. If adopted, the text would lack the much needed protections to prevent internet access providers from creating a new monopoly – access to their customers. With all of the talk of the need for a single digital market in Europe, we would have new barriers and new monopolies.

National regulators would not have clear enforceable obligations to preserve citizens’ digital rights and freedoms by default. After Obama’s recent declarations emphasising the importance and need of real net neutrality, is the Council going to suggest leaving Europe in the slow lane?

The Member States are and will be discussing this document in the Council today and tomorrow. Any text that is adopted would need to be approved by the European Parliament before becoming law.

Leaked documents (14.11.2014)
Note: https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/...14.11.2014.pdf
Addendum: https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/...14.11.2014.pdf

The Members States will discuss it in the Council today and tomorrow
http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/...14-INIT/en/pdf (17.11.2014)
http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/...4-COR-1/en/pdf (19.11.2014)

https://edri.org/leaked-documents-sh...ty-may-danger/





The Shazam Effect

Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music?
Derek Thompson

In 2000, a Stanford Ph.D. named Avery Wang co-founded, with a couple of business-school graduates, a tech start-up called Shazam. Their idea was to develop a service that could identify any song within a few seconds, using only a cellphone, even in a crowded bar or coffee shop.

At first, Wang, who had studied audio analysis and was responsible for building the software, feared it might be an impossible task. No technology existed that could distinguish music from background noise, and cataloging songs note for note would require authorization from the labels. But then he made a breakthrough: rather than trying to capture whole songs, he built an algorithm that would create a unique acoustic fingerprint for each track. The trick, he discovered, was to turn a song into a piece of data.

Shazam became available in 2002. (In the days before smartphones, users would dial a number, play the song through their phones, and then wait for Shazam to send a text with the title and artist.) Since then, it has been downloaded more than 500 million times and used to identify some 30 million songs, making it one of the most popular apps in the world. It has also helped set off a revolution in the recording industry. While most users think of Shazam as a handy tool for identifying unfamiliar songs, it offers music executives something far more valuable: an early-detection system for hits.

By studying 20 million searches every day, Shazam can identify which songs are catching on, and where, before just about anybody else. “Sometimes we can see when a song is going to break out months before most people have even heard of it,” Jason Titus, Shazam’s former chief technologist, told me. (Titus is now a senior director at Google.) Last year, Shazam released an interactive map overlaid with its search data, allowing users to zoom in on cities around the world and look up the most Shazam’d songs in São Paulo, Mumbai, or New York. The map amounts to a real-time seismograph of the world’s most popular new music, helping scouts discover unsigned artists just as they’re starting to set off tremors. (The company has a team of people who update its vast music library with the newest recorded music—including self-produced songs—from all over the world, and artists can submit their work to Shazam.)

“We know where a song’s popularity starts, and we can watch it spread,” Titus told me. Take, for example, Lorde, the out-of-nowhere sensation of 2013. Shazam’s engineers can rewind time to trace the international contagion of her first single, “Royals,” watching the pings of Shazam searches spread from New Zealand, her home country, to Nashville (a major music hub, even for noncountry songs), to the American coasts, pinpointing the exact day it peaked in each of nearly 3,000 U.S. cities.

Shazam has become a favorite app of music agents around the country, and in February, the company announced that it would get into the music-making business itself, launching a new imprint under Warner Music Group for artists discovered through the app.

Shazam searches are just one of several new types of data guiding the pop-music business. Concert promoters study Spotify listens to route tours through towns with the most fans, and some artists look for patterns in Pandora streaming to figure out which songs to play at each stop on a tour. In fact, all of our searching, streaming, downloading, and sharing is being used to answer the question the music industry has been asking for a century: What do people want to hear next?

It’s a question that label executives once answered largely by trusting their gut. But data about our preferences have shifted the balance of power, replacing experts’ instincts with the wisdom of the crowd. As a result, labels have gotten much better at understanding what we want to listen to. This is the one silver lining the music industry has found in the digital revolution, which has steadily cut into profits. So it’s clearly good for business—but whether it’s good for music is a lot less certain.

Earlier this year, Patch Culbertson, a scout for Republic Records, sat in his New York office and opened the Shazam map on his iPhone. Republic Records is the most data-driven major label in the music business (even an executive at a rival label described Republic as the gold standard for using analytics in scouting and marketing), and Culbertson in particular has proved to be a star at the company.

Culbertson wanted to check up on SoMo, an R&B singer from Denison, Texas, whom Culbertson had helped sign last year. Culbertson zoomed in on Victoria, Texas, a small city between Corpus Christi and Houston, where one of the radio stations had started playing a SoMo single called “Ride.” Although a town of just 63,000 won’t launch a national hit by itself, Culbertson was using Victoria as a sort of testing ground to determine whether the song would resonate with listeners. “ ‘Ride,’ ” he told me, “is the No. 1 tagged song in Victoria.”

Pop music is a sentimental business, and predicting the next big thing has often meant being inside that crowded bar, watching a young band connect with the besotted, swaying throng. But now that new artists are more likely to make a name for themselves on Twitter than in a Nashville club, Culbertson is finding that the chair in front of his computer might be the best seat in the house.

New tools may soon further diminish the importance of actually hearing artists perform. Next Big Sound, a five-year-old music-analytics company based in New York, scours the Web for Spotify listens, Instagram mentions, and other traces of digital fandom to forecast breakouts. It funnels half a million new acts through an algorithm to create a list of 100 stars likely to break out within the next year. “If you signed our top 100 artists, 20 of them would make the Billboard 200,” Victor Hu, a data scientist with Next Big Sound, told me. A 20 percent success rate might sound low, until you gaze out at the vast universe of new music and try to pick the next Beyoncé.

Last year, the company unveiled a customizable search tool called Find, which, for a six-figure annual subscription, helps scouts mine social media to spot artists who show signs of nascent stardom. If, for example, you wanted to search for obscure bands with the fastest-growing followings on Twitter, Find could produce a list within seconds.

The company has discovered that some metrics, such as Facebook likes, are unreliable indicators of a band’s trajectory, while others have uncanny forecasting power. “Radio exposure, unsurprisingly, is the most important thing,” Hu says. It remains the best way to introduce listeners to a new song; once they’ve heard it a few times on the radio, they tend to like it more. “But we discovered that hits to a band’s Wikipedia page are the second-best predictor.” Wikipedia searches are revealing for the same reason Shazam searches are. While getting a song on the radio ensures that people have heard it, Culbertson says, “Shazam tells you that people wanted to know more.”

To get a song on the radio in the first place, music labels confront a paradox: How do you prove that it will be a hit before anyone has heard it? DJs consider unfamiliar songs “tune-outs,” because audiences tend to spurn new music. In the past, labels sometimes pressured or outright bribed stations to promote their music. Songs became hits because executives decided they should be hits.

But radio, too, has come to rely more on data, and now when label executives pitch a station, they’re likely to come armed with spreadsheets. The search for evidence of a song’s potential has become exhaustive: you can’t just track radio data, or sales, or YouTube hits, or Facebook interactions, or even proprietary surveys and focus groups. To persuade a major radio station to play a new song, labels have to connect all these dots.

“The idea that DJs are just picking songs because they like them is so antiquated,” says Radha Subramanyam, the executive vice president of insights, research, and analytics at iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the nation’s largest owner of FM stations. iHeartMedia consults companies like Shazam to figure out which songs are going viral. Nielsen Audio, another data firm that has partnered with the company, offers thousands of listeners cash or gift cards to wear devices called Portable People Meters that track which radio stations people are tuning in to. To know when listeners are growing tired of a song, iHeartMedia conducts weekly surveys using a database of 1.5 million people.

Perhaps iHeartMedia’s most interesting partner in the search for pop music’s next big thing is a 12-year-old subsidiary called HitPredictor, which, true to its name, predicted 48 of the top 50 radio hits last year. Before a song debuts on a major chart—Top 40, urban, country, or alternative—HitPredictor plays key sections for its online database of listeners and rates their responses. Any song that scores above a 65 is considered a possible breakout, though above that threshold, the highest-scoring songs don’t always do best. (Meghan Trainor’s debut single, “All About That Bass,” scraped by with a 68.97 rating but went on to become the top song in the country this fall.)

All of this number crunching is aimed at keeping listeners’ fingers off the dial. “It’s not about eliminating the human element from radio, but rather presenting the most human element—the reaction of audiences—more clearly than ever,” Jay Frank, the owner and CEO of DigSin, a digital record label (it sells music strictly through downloads—no CDs), told me. “This might be the most populist moment in radio history.”

A similar revolution has occurred in the music charts. Take the Billboard Hot 100, which has counted down the top songs in America since 1958. For decades, Billboard had to rely on record-store owners and radio stations to report the most-bought and most-played songs. Both parties lied, often because labels nudged or bribed them to plug certain records, or because store owners didn’t want to promote albums they no longer had in stock. The entire industry was biased toward churn: labels and stores wanted songs to enter and exit the charts quickly so they could keep selling new hits.

The Hot 100 matters because it doesn’t just reflect listener preferences, it also shapes them. In a groundbreaking 2006 study on the influence of song rankings, three researchers at Columbia University showed that popularity can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The researchers sent participants to different music Web sites where they could listen to dozens of tracks and download their favorites. Some sites displayed a ranking of the most-downloaded songs; others did not. Participants who saw rankings were more likely to listen to the most-popular tracks.

The researchers then wondered what would happen if they manipulated the rankings. In a follow-up experiment, some sites displayed the true download counts and others showed inverted rankings, where the least-popular song was listed in the No. 1 spot. The inverted rankings changed everything: previously ignored songs soared in popularity, and previously popular songs were ignored. Simply believing, even wrongly, that a song was popular made participants more likely to download it.

Billboard replaced its honor system with hard numbers in 1991, basing its charts on point-of-sale data from cash registers. “This was revolutionary,” says Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s current director of charts. “We were finally able to see which records were actually selling.” Around the same time, Billboard switched to monitoring radio airplay through Nielsen.

When that happened, hip-hop and country surged in the rankings and old-fashioned rock slowly began to fade—suggesting that perhaps an industry dominated by white guys on the coasts hadn’t paid enough attention to the music interests of urban minorities and southern whites.

Another sea change came in the mid-2000s, when Billboard started tracking music streaming and downloads. Songs that weren’t label-picked singles, like the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” in 2005, began outperforming the tracks that executives expected to do well. “Deep cuts”—songs that labels didn’t hype but that fans nonetheless loved—used to fly under the radar. (There is no evidence that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” one of the most famous rock songs of all time, was ever played on the radio in the years immediately after its release, and it never cracked the Hot 100.) But because the industry can now track what people are listening to, any song that catches on can become a hit.

Everyone I spoke with about the Hot 100—label and radio executives, industry analysts, and other journalists—agreed with Jay Frank’s assessment that consumers have more say than they did decades ago, when their tastes were shaped by the hit makers at labels. But here’s the catch: if you give people too much say, they will ask for the same familiar sounds on an endless loop, entrenching music that is repetitive, derivative, and relentlessly played out.

Now that the Billboard rankings are a more accurate reflection of what people buy and play, songs stay on the charts much longer. The 10 songs that have spent the most time on the Hot 100 were all released after 1991, when Billboard started using point-of-sale data—and seven were released after the Hot 100 began including digital sales, in 2005. “It turns out that we just want to listen to the same songs over and over again,” Pietroluongo told me.

Because the most-popular songs now stay on the charts for months, the relative value of a hit has exploded. The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn 77 percent of all revenue from recorded music, media researchers report. And even though the amount of digital music sold has surged, the 10 best-selling tracks command 82 percent more of the market than they did a decade ago. The advent of do-it-yourself artists in the digital age may have grown music’s long tail, but its fat head keeps getting fatter.

Radio stations, meanwhile, are pushing the boundaries of repetitiveness to new levels. According to a subsidiary of iHeartMedia, Top 40 stations last year played the 10 biggest songs almost twice as much as they did a decade ago. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” the most played song of 2013, aired 70 percent more than the most played song from 2003, “When I’m Gone,” by 3 Doors Down. Even the fifth-most-played song of 2013, “Ho Hey,” by the Lumineers, was on the radio 30 percent more than any song from 10 years prior.

And not only are we hearing the same hits with greater frequency, but the hits themselves sound increasingly alike. As labels have gotten more adept at recognizing what’s selling, they’ve been quicker than ever to invest in copycats. People I spoke with in the music industry told me they worried that the reliance on data was leading to a “clustering” of styles and genres, promoting a dispiriting sameness in pop music.

In 2012, the Spanish National Research Council released a report that delighted music cranks around the world. Pop, it seemed, was growing increasingly bland, loud, and predictable, recycling the same few chord progressions over and over. The study, which looked at 464,411 popular recordings around the world between 1955 and 2010, found that the most-played music of the new millennium demonstrates “less variety in pitch transitions” than that of any preceding decade. The researchers concluded that old songs could be made to sound “novel and fashionable” just by freshening up the instrumentation and increasing “the average loudness.”

The problem is not our pop stars. Our brains are wired to prefer melodies we already know. (David Huron, a musicologist at Ohio State University, estimates that at least 90 percent of the time we spend listening to music, we seek out songs we’ve heard before.) That’s because familiar songs are easier to process, and the less effort needed to think through something—whether a song, a painting, or an idea—the more we tend to like it. In psychology, this idea is known as fluency: when a piece of information is consumed fluently, it neatly slides into our patterns of expectation, filling us with satisfaction and confidence.

“Things that are familiar are comforting, particularly when you are feeling anxious,” Norbert Schwarz, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, who studies fluency, told me. “When you’re in a bad mood, you want to see your old friends. You want to eat comfort food. I think this maps onto a lot of media consumption. When you’re stressed out, you don’t want to put on a new movie or a challenging piece of music. You want the old and familiar.”

It would be too simplistic to say that music is racing in a single direction—toward dumber, louder, and more-repetitive pop. Now that labels recognize how popular hip-hop and country really are, they have created innovative new sounds by blending those genres with traditional pop. One of the popular songs of this past summer, “Problem,” combined a dizzy sax hook, ’90s-pop vocals, a whispered chorus, and a female rap verse. It was utterly strange and, for a while, ubiquitous. Greta Hsu, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis, who has done research on genre-blending in Hollywood, told me that although mixing categories is risky, hybrids can become standout successes, because they appeal to multiple audiences as being somehow both fresh and familiar.

Music fans can also find comfort in the fact that data have not taken over the songwriting process. Producers and artists pay close attention to trends, but they’re not swimming in spreadsheets quite like the suits at the labels are. Perhaps one reason machines haven’t yet invaded the recording room is that listeners prefer rhythms that are subtly flawed. A 2011 Harvard study found that music performed by robotic drummers and other machines often strikes our ears as being too precise. “There is something perfectly imperfect about how humans play rhythms,” says Holger Hennig, the Harvard physics researcher who led the study. Hennig discovered that when experienced musicians play together, they not only make mistakes, they also build off these small variations to keep a live song from sounding pat.

The Internet can connect us to an astonishing amount of music—some of it derivative, but much of it wildly experimental, even brilliant. Streaming services like Spotify and Pandora let us sample from music libraries that, decades ago, wouldn’t have fit inside the largest record store in the world. These services aren’t just vast; they’re also searchable and exquisitely personal. “One thing about Pandora that isn’t obvious to people who use our service is that it isn’t just one algorithm,” Eric Bieschke, the company’s chief scientist, told me. “We have dozens and dozens of algorithms that connect people to music in different ways, like genre, and popularity, and repetitiveness. Then we have a meta-algorithm that directs all of the algorithms, like a conductor standing in front of a symphony that’s only playing for one person.”

But while fans can burrow deep into rabbit holes of esoterica, “Today’s Top Hits” is still the No. 1 playlist on Spotify, and Pandora’s most popular station is “Today’s Hits.” Even when offered a universe of music, most of us prefer to listen to what we think everyone else is hearing.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...ngle_page=true





Steve Albini on the Surprisingly Sturdy State of the Music Industry – in Full

The music producer, Shellac frontman and author of seminal 1993 essay, The Problem with Music, spoke in Melbourne about the advantages of the internet, the death of the major label system, copyright law and that ‘purple dwarf in assless chaps’

Steve Albini is the producer (he prefers the term “recording engineer”) behind several thousand records. He is also a member of the band Shellac. In 1993, he published The Problem with Music, an essay expounding his belief that the major label-dominated industry of the time was inefficient, exploited musicians and led to below par music. On Saturday he gave the keynote address at Melbourne’s Face the Music conference in which he celebrated the fact the internet had both dismantled this system and addressed its inequalities:


I’m going to first explain a few things about myself. I’m 52 years old, I have been in bands continuously, and active in the music scene in one way or another since about 1978. At the moment I’m in a band, I also work as a recording engineer and I own a recording studio in Chicago. In the past I have also been a fanzine writer, radio club DJ, concert promoter and I ran a small record label. I was not terribly successful at any of those things, but I have done them, so they qualify as part of my CV.

I work every day with music and with bands and I have for more than 30 years. I’ve made a couple thousand records for independent bands and rock stars, for big labels and small ones. I made a record two days ago and I’ll be making one on Monday when I get off the plane. So I believe this puts me in a pretty good position to evaluate the state of the music scene today, as it relates to how it used to be and how it has been.

We’re all here to talk about the state of the music scene and the health of the music community. I’ll start by saying that I’m both satisfied and optimistic about the state of the music scene. And I welcome the social and technological changes that have influenced it. I hope my remarks today will start a conversation and through that conversation we can invoke an appreciation of how resilient the music community is, how supportive it can be and how welcoming it should be.

I hear from some of my colleagues that these are rough times: that the internet has cut the legs off the music scene and that pretty soon nobody will be making music anymore because there’s no money in it. Virtually every place where music is written about, there is some version of this troubling perspective. People who used to make a nice income from royalties, they’ve seen the royalties dry up. And people who used to make a living selling records are having trouble selling downloads as substitute for records, and they no longer make records.

So there is a tacit assumption that this money, lost money, needs to be replaced and a lot of energy has been spent arguing from where that money will come. Bitchiness about this abounds, with everybody insisting that somebody else should be paying him, but that he shouldn’t have to pay for anybody else. I would like to see an end to this dissatisfaction.

It’s worthwhile to remember from where we’ve come. From where this bitchiness originates. In the 1970s through the 1990s, the period in which I was most active in bands in the music scene – let’s call this the pre-internet era. The music industry was essentially the record industry, in that records and radio were the venues through which people learned of music and principally experienced it. They were joined by MTV and videos in the 80s and 90s, but the principle relationship people had with music was as sound recordings. There was a booming band scene and all bands aspired to getting recorded, as a mark of legitimacy.

But recording was a rare and expensive enterprise, so it wasn’t common. Even your demo tape required considerable investment. So when I started playing in bands in the 70s and 80s most bands went through their entire lifecycle without so much as a note of their music ever being recorded.

Now I’m going to describe the scene as I observed it in America, but I understand that most of the structures and conditions I observed have parallels in other markets. Maybe somebody from my generation can add the local Aussie colour to my comments – I prefer them shouted in as thick an accent as you can muster.

As a yardstick for the economics of the day or for the era, in 1979 you could buy a 45rpm single for a buck, a new album for $5, go see a club gig for $1 or a stadium gig for $7. I know these things because I still have some old ticket stubs and price stickers on my records. Note the relative parity between the live show costs and the recorded music costs. A gradual inflation of prices remained under way through the 90s, making recorded music more expensive, though it remained the principal means of experience.

The whole industry depended on these sales, and sales depended on exposure. Bands on big labels toured, essentially to promote their recordings. And the labels provided promotional and logistical support to keep the bands on the road. This supported a network of agents and managers and roadies and promotional staff, so the expense was considerable.

Retail outlets also offered special placements and promotion: displays, posters, mentions in print ads, giveaways, trinkets and what were called end cap displays. Record labels paid handsomely for these promotions and the stores used the sale of these promotions as additional income. Chain stores especially relied on corporate chain-wide promotions, regardless what the stores might think their local clientele might like. It wasn’t uncommon to see big displays of hair metal bands in urban outlets where they couldn’t sell a single stick but the labels had paid for their utility, so up they went.

Radio stations were enormously influential. Radio was the only place to hear music from any people and record companies paid dearly to influence them. Direct payola had been made illegal but this was a trivial workaround. Record pluggers acting as programming consultants were the middlemen. They paid radio stations for access to their programmers and conducted meetings where new records were promoted.

These promotional offers were quite lucrative. But their metrics depended on radio stations recording that they had added the records to their playlist. To satisfy this requirement and keep the promotional money flowing, radio stations often played tiny fragments of songs jumbled one after the other in any incomprehensible flow during late-night programming hours, to satisfy the programming requirement that they add songs to their playlist. Popular radio stations also staged mammoth concerts, often for free or for nominal cover featuring bands that the labels were promoting. These unpaid radio gigs were a drag on their touring income but the promotional value was presumed to be worth it.

Journalists and editors who could place reviews, program directors and independent DJs who could add records to playlists or played in nightclubs, were subject to much buttering up. Promotional trinkets and advance copies of records were sent their way. Sometimes by the box. Presumably these were listening and file copies. But they were actually a bribe. These promotional copies were immediately sold secondhand to record stores and it was not uncommon for such stores to be overstocked with a new release prior to its official release as a result. My wife worked in a record store that bought records secondhand in the 90s. And their biggest repeat customers, by a long shot, were the people on these label promo lists. The staff at her store kept a tally for awhile and the editor of the local weeklies music section made a comfortable second income amounting to a $1,000 or more a month from selling these promo copies.

So it was a leaky system, riddled with inefficiencies, but a lot of people made a living through it. Record store owners, buyers, employees, ad agencies, designers, club owners, label reps, A&R, producers, recording studios, publicists, lawyers, journalists, program directors, distributors, tour managers, booking agents, band managers, and all the ancillary services they required: banking, shipping, printing, photography, travel agencies, limos, spandex wardrobe, cocaine dealers, prostitutes. Because of this great bulk of the industry needed to sustain itself. Every facet of the industry was tailored to this need.

The most significant bit of tailoring was an accounting trick called recouping costs. The costs of making a record wasn’t borne by the record label, except initially. Those costs were recouped or taken out of the income the band might otherwise run as royalties. The same was true of all those promo copies, posters, radio pluggers and payola men, producers, publicists, tour support, 8x10 glossies, shipping, freight – basically anything that could be associated with a specific band or record was ultimately paid for by the band, not by the record label.

As the label shifted from vinyl to CD as the dominant format, the labels could easily sell the CD as a convenient, compact, trouble-free way to listen to music. The profit margin exploded and the money got stupid. Retails costs of a CD was half again or double more than an LP but the manufacturing, shipping and storage costs were a tiny fraction. The labels even used vinyl’s legacy as a tool to increase this profit margin by charging bands for unique packaging, despite the fact that CD packaging was designed to be standardised. Or pre-emptively charging back for broken CDs at a rate implying that someone was attacking the inventory with an axe.

In the end the bands operating under this system earned very little from their record sales, unless they were monumental stars. Often enough bands would conduct their entire careers with a label and never reach the point where they had sufficiently recouped to get paid anything at all. Now the label made its per-piece profit on every record sold. And could recoup the cost of any records unsold. And all those other people got paid using the money that would have otherwise gone to the bands as royalties. Unsurprisingly, those other people also got paid pretty well. It stands to reason that if the label is paying you with someone else’s money, the label doesn’t need to care how much you charge.

During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.

Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.

International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.

The one exception to this was the brilliant BBC DJ John Peel. He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task. I sent him a copy of the first album I ever made and not only did he play the record on air, he sent me back a postcard with a personal remembrance of Chicago, of visiting a matron aunt as a child in Evanston, the suburb where my post office box was kept. I treasured that note as the first indication that John Peel was a great man.

So these independent bands had to be resourceful. They’d built their own infrastructure of independent clubs, promoters, fanzines and DJs. They had their own channels of promotion, including the beginnings of the internet culture that is so prevalent today – that being bulletin boards, and newsgroups. These independent bands even made their own record label. Some were collectives and those that weren’t were likely to operate on a profit-sharing basis that encouraged efficiency, rather than a recoupable patronage system that encouraged indulgence.

That’s where I cut my teeth, in that independent scene full of punks and noise freaks and drag queens and experimental composers and jabbering street poets. You can thank punk rock for all of that. That’s where most of us learned that it was possible to make your own records, to conduct your own business and keep control of your own career. If a bunch of pimply glue sniffers could do it, we reasoned, then anybody could.

The number of records released this way was incredible. Thousands of small releases made their way into the “mom and pop” independent speciality stores, which then provided a market for independent distribution. It was the beginnings of an alternative to the label paradigm. It was cumbersome and slow but it was more efficient than a shotgun approach with the big labels, whose answer to every problem was to spend more of the band’s money on it.

It was the beginning of what we would call the peer network. By mid-90s there were independent labels and distributors moving millions of dollars of records and CDs. And there was a healthy underground economy of bands making a reasonable income owing to the superior efficiencies of the independent methods. My band, as an example, was returned 50% of the net profit on every title that we released through our record label. I worked it out and that earned us a better per-piece royalty than Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna or any other superstar operating concurrently. And we were only one of thousands of such bands.

So, that was the system as it was. That’s what we lost when the internet made everything available everywhere for free. And make no mistake about it, we have lost it. There is still an independent label network but it’s a slim fraction of what it was. The labels continuing to survive do so by supplying niche music to a discerning audience. And because they have been steeled in the art of efficiency their constitution allows them to scale everything to suit the remaining demand.

You may have noticed that in my description of the mass market music scene and the industry as it was pre-internet I made little mention of the audience or the bands. Those two ends of the spectrum were hardly considered by the rest of the business. Fans were expected to listen to the radio and buy records and bands were expected to make records and tour to promote them. And that was about all the thought either were given. But the audience was where all the money came from and the bands were where all the music came from.

Through the internet, which more than anything else creates access to things, limitless music eventually became available for free. The big record companies didn’t see how to make money from online distribution so they effectively ignored it, leaving it to the hackers and the audience to populate a new landscape of downloading. People who prefer the convenience of CDs over LPs naturally prefer downloaded music even more. You could download it or stream it or listen from YouTube or have your friends on message boards or acquaintances send you zip files. In the blink of an eye music went from being rare, expensive and only available through physical media in controlled outlets to being ubiquitous and free worldwide. What a fantastic development.

There’s a lot of shade thrown by people in the music industry about how terrible the free sharing of music is, how it’s the equivalent of theft, etc. That’s all bullshit and we’ll deal with that in a minute. But for a minute I want you to look at the experience of music from a fan’s perspective, post-internet. Music that is hard to find was now easy to find. Music to suit my specific tastes, as fucked up as they might be, was now accessible by a few clicks or maybe posting a query on a message board. In response I had more access to music than I had ever imagined. Curated by other enthusiasts, keen to turn me on to the good stuff; people, like me, who want other people to hear the best music ever.

This audience-driven music distribution has other benefits. Long-forgotten music has been given a second life. And bands whose music that was ahead of its time has been allowed to reach a niche audience that the old mass distribution failed to find for them, as one enthusiast turns on the next and this forgotten music finally gets it due. There’s a terrific documentary about one such case, the Detroit band Death whose sole album was released in a perfunctory edition in, I believe, 1975 and disappeared until a copy of it was digitised and made public on the internet. Gradually the band found an audience, their music got lovingly reissued, and the band has resurrected, complete with tours playing to packed houses. And the band are now being allowed the career that the old star system had denied them. There are hundreds of such stories and there are speciality labels that do nothing but reissue lost classics like that once they surface.

Now look at the conditions from a band’s perspective, the conditions faced by a band. In contrast to back in the day, recording equipment and technology has simplified and become readily available. Computers now come pre-loaded with enough software to make a decent demo recording and guitar stores sell microphones and other equipment inexpensively that previously was only available at a premium from arcane speciality sources. Essentially every band now has the opportunity to make recordings.

And they can do things with those recordings. They can post them online in any number of places: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud, their own websites. They can link to them on message boards, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and even in the comment streams of other music. “LOL,” “this sucks,” “much better,” “death to false metal,” “LOL”. Instead of spending a fortune on international phone calls trying to find someone in each territory to listen to your music, every band on the planet now has free, instant access to the world at its fingertips.

I cannot overstate how important a development that is. Previously, in the top-down paradigm allowed local industry to dictate what music was available in isolated or remote markets, markets isolated by location or language. It was inconceivable that a smaller or independent band could have market penetration into, say, Greece or Turkey, Japan or China, South America, Africa or the Balkans. Who would you ask to handle your music? How would you find him? And how would you justify the business and currency complications required to send four or five copies of a record there?

Now those places are as well-served as New York and London. Fans can find the music they like and develop direct relationships with the bands. It is absolutely possible – I’m sure it happens every day – that a kid in one of these far-flung places can find a new favourite band, send that band a message, and that singer of that band will read it and personally reply to it from his cell phone half a world away. How much better is that? I’ll tell you, it’s infinitely better than having a relationship to a band limited to reading it on the back of the record jacket. If such a thing were possible when I was a teenager I’m certain I would have become a right nuisance to the Ramones.

A couple of years ago my band mounted a tour of eastern Europe. We played all the hot spots: the Czech Republic, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, we made it as far as Istanbul, Turkey. It was a magical experience, playing in front of audiences who were relatively unjaded by the routine of touring bands and we were welcomed like friends. We played to full houses at the same size venues as the rest of Europe. The same sizes as we would play here in Australia. And the audiences seem equivocally familiar with our music. The key difference being that most of the places have literally never sold a single record. Essentially 100% of our exposure had been through informal means over the internet or hand-to-hand.

On that trip we established contacts with local promoters and arts organisations and audiences developed an appetite for our music and we have since sold quite a few records into the region. Our next tour through the region was easier as a result and we’re going back to Istanbul this spring, using contacts made on that first exploratory trip. I expect to have a marvellous time.

In short, the internet has made it much easier to conduct the day-to-day business of being in a band and has increased the efficiency. Everything from scheduling rehearsals using online calendars, to booking tours by email, to selling merchandise and records from online stores, down to raising the funds to make a record is a new simplicity that bands of the pre-internet era would salivate over. The old system was built by the industry to serve the players inside the industry. The new system where music is shared informally and the bands have a direct relationship to the fans was built by the bands and the fans in the manner of the old underground. It skips all the intermediary steps.

Bands now have default control of their exposure. It’s no longer necessary to pay people to pay other people to play your records on the radio, only to have those people lie about doing so. It’s no longer necessary to spend money to let people hear your band. It happens automatically.

There’s another, much subtler change that all this instigated. Since people no longer have to make do listening to whatever is on the radio playlist and are no longer limited to owning what the store decides to stock, they have become much more indulgent in their tastes. My friends now normally listen to exotic playlists that they have dreamed up themselves, full of counterintuitive and contrasting choices that are uniquely theirs.

Our office bearer has a hi-fi in that studio office and is as likely to be playing the new 45 from the hardcore band Leather or electro drone by Tim Hecker as he is to be playing a deep cut of Cincinnati soul or handbag disco or improv guitar noodlings, whether newly released from Oren Ambarchi or 30 years old from the Takoma label. People can now listen only to music they are ecstatic about, all the time.

There are active online communities for every kind of music and its subcultures. Whether you’re into Dusty’s Deep Cut reggae, minimal electronics, symphonic pop, Texas blues, Japanese noise, power electronics, children’s music, christmas music, Raymond Scott, or Burl Ives, I guarantee there is an online community where you can connect with other enthusiasts to indulge the minute specificity of your tastes.

These online communities are now a vital part of the scene and this debate and others are hashed out there daily. I’ve probably unconsciously lifted some of my positions in these remarks from discussions I’ve had online so I’d like to confess that plagiarism now, as a way to encourage all of you to get involved in these forums where all the interesting conversations about music is happening.

Imagine a great hall of fetishes where whatever you felt like fucking or being fucked by, however often your tastes might change, no matter what hardware or harnesses were required, you could open the gates and have at it on a comfy mattress at any time of day. That’s what the internet has become for music fans. Plus bleacher seats for a cheering section.

As a result fans are more ardent for this music. They are willing to spend more on seeing it played live. They are willing to buy more ephemera and eager to establish a personal relationship to the people who make the music. Gig prices have escalated as a result. And the merchandise tables at gigs are universally teeming with activity. Back home, gigs that used to cost five or six bucks are now 20 or 30. Over here the ticket inflation has been more pronounced, with club gigs going for $80 or more. As a result gig income for bands has increased exponentially. My band has been playing a lot of the same places for the entirety of our existence, over 20 years now. I guess you could say we’ve saturated our audience, no matter how long we stay at it. Some of these perennial gigs are now paying an over of magnitude better than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That’s right, some places where we used to earn four or five hundred dollars we now earn four or five grand.

This ease of access, redoubled interest and increase in income has created a new partnership and possibilities between individuals, bands and visual artists, online film-makers, choreographers and other kinds of public people. Collaborations take place in real time or displaced over the internet where the parties often never meet face-to-face. I have a dear friend who found himself with a bunch of time on his hands last year so he formed a couple of new bands. One of these bands was entirely populated by people he only knew online and all of their music was made by online collaboration. This music was a pure result of the interconnectivity of the internet.

All of that, all of those characteristics, all of those possibilities were instigated and made possible by the online sharing of music. If not directly, as in the case of building an audience for the band Death and my own band in the Balkans and beyond, then indirectly by changing the expectations of the listeners and musicians.

This explains my enthusiasm for the way the music scene has changed, but what about my optimism? I would like to address a platitude about the online exposure of music. From all quarters we hear that, this is the platitude: “We need to figure out how to make internet distribution work for everyone.” I use finger quotes to indicate intellectual distance between myself and the quotation. I have a friend, Tim Midgett, who uses three fingers for finger quotes to indicate extra irony. This is a two jobber.

I disagree with this rather inoffensive platitude. It’s innocuous and vapid and fills the air after someone asks the question, “How is the music scene these days?” And it maintains hope that the current state of affairs as mentioned, presumed to be tragic, can be changed for the better. For “everyone”. That word everyone is important to the people using the sentence. In their mind the physical distribution model worked for everyone. But the new one does not. Not yet, not yet. Not until we “figure it out”. I’m sure we’re all going to get tired of me doing that [air quotes].

I disagree that the old way is better. And I do not believe this sentence to be true: “We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone.” I disagree with it because within its mundane language are tacit assumptions: the framework of an exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole creative life. Inside that trite sentence, “We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,” hides the skeleton of a monster.

Let’s start at the beginning. “We need to figure out”: the subject of that sentence, the first-person plural, sounds inclusive but the context defeats that presumption. Who would have the power to implement a new distribution paradigm? Who would be in the room when we discuss our plans for it? Who would do the out figuring we need to do? Industry and consumers? Consumers is a likely response, but did the consumers get a vote about how their music would be compressed or tagged or copy protected or made volatile? Did anybody? Did the consumers get a choice about whether or not Apple stuck a U2 album on their iTunes library? Of course not. These things were just done and we had to deal with them as a state of being. Consumers rebelling or complaining about things – “market pushback” – isn’t the same thing as being involved in the decision to do something. Clearly the “we” of this sentence doesn’t include the listener. I believe any attempt to organise the music scene that ignores the listener is doomed.

How about the bands? Do the bands get a seat at the “we” table, while our figuring-out needs are met? Of course not. If you ask bands what they want – and I know this because I’m in a band and I deal with bands every day – what they want is a chance to expose their music and to have a shot at getting paid by their audience. I believe the current operating status satisfies the first of these conditions exquisitely and the latter at least as well as the old record label paradigm.

So who is this “we”? The administrative parts of the old record business, that’s who. The vertical labels who hold copyright on a lot of music. They want to do the figuring. They want to set the agenda. And they want to do all the structural tinkering. The bands, the audience, the people who make music and who pay for it – they are conspicuously not in the discussion.

How about the word “need”, we “need” to figure out? The need is actually a “want”, a preference. These remnants of the music industry are unsatisfied with how the internet, the bands and the audience can get along fine without them. So they prefer to change things to re-establish relevance. You see this in the spate of 360 deals that are being offered now, where everything a band does, from their music to their T-shirts to their Twitter accounts belong to the record label. In exchange the record label offers startup money. I believe this approach is doomed by things like Kickstarter, which have proven more effective and efficient at raising money directly from the audience that wants to support the music.

How about the infinitive “to figure out”? We need “to figure out”. That presumes that we can know how to attack a global distribution enterprise long after the internet has crowdsourced an efficient and painless way to do precisely that. There’s a reason the water faucet hasn’t changed radically over the years. Time and trial have demonstrated that the best and simplest way to control hot water is by turning a tap. Problem solved, no further solving of the hot water faucet problem is required. I cannot be the only one who is annoyed by the constantly misaligned proximity faucets in public washrooms. Imagine if listening to music was as frustrating as that.

The next part of the sentence: “make” distribution work. This implies that we have control over the distribution, that we can make it do some things but not others. The internet proves this to be a fallacy. Once we release music it’s out of our control. I use the verb “release” because it’s common vernacular. But I think it’s a perfect description. Even more apt if you consider what happens when you release other things, say a bird or a fart. When you release them they’re in the world and the world will react and use them as it sees fit. The fart may wrinkle noses until it dissipates. The bird may fly outside and crap on windshields; it may get shot down by a farmer. It’s been released, so you have no control over it. You can’t recall the fart, however much you would like to. You can’t protect the bird.

Distribution is a problematic word. Its prior meaning implies scarcity and allocation of physical products. You can inventory them, you could tax them, duty them, you could search somebody’s book bag for them. None of that is true with digital files. If it were possible to return digital files to the strict control of the record labels (it is impossible, don’t worry), what would be their incentive to be honest in their accounting? In the physical distribution model you could inventory the titles in the warehouse during an audit and compare them with the delivery manifests from the press manufacturing plant, and know with reasonable accuracy how many copies had been sold. How on earth would you inventory a digital file? Count how many were left on the shelf?

That word is problematic, but the most problematic word in the sentence is the word “work”: we need to figure out how to make it “work”. Work is an impossible word in this context. Depending on who uses it, it will have contradictory meanings. For a label the system would work if it generated a profit per play, controlled access to music while providing access to the audience for advertisers as an additional income, and allowed the availability of push marketing for promotion. For the listener it would mean open access, ability to find specific and niche music, continuous playback, lack of nuisance, ease of use, freedom from spying, low or no cost, utility on different devices, lack of push marketing and lack of advertising. For a band it would mean finding an audience and having no barrier to participation, and no limits on amount of material made available. You can see how this is problematic. It is literally impossible for a system to satisfy all of these needs simultaneously when they are contradictory.

And the hybrid approaches being tried are clumsy and insulting. I recently tried streaming a podcast from an official licensed site. When the cats started fighting I missed a little bit, having to separate the cats and then feed the cats and then calmed them down. I came back to my computer and tried to replay the last few minutes that I had missed but was greeted with a notice that due to copyright agreements this player was not allowed to rewind the podcast. I find it unimaginable that the people who posted the podcast wanted that provision enabled. And the site just ensured that I would never bother with their product again.

The conclusion of that sentence, the “for everyone” is also problematic. I don’t think it is necessary or even preferable to have everyone involved in defining the experience with music or more generally the relationship with the band and its audience. We seem to accept that record stores, who were once the welcoming face of the industry and the recipient of much promotional patronage described earlier, are not coming along in the digital era. Record stores now get their appeal from carrying secondhand records, something the industry used to have a regular shit fit about. And by carrying speciality and niche material that is too marginal for corporate attention, they are clearly not part of the “everyone” in the sentence.

So there’s no reason to insist that other obsolete bureaux and offices of the lapsed era be brought along into the new one. The music industry has shrunk. In shrinking it has rung out the middle, leaving the bands and the audiences to work out their relationship from the ends. I see this as both healthy and exciting. If we’ve learned anything over the past 30 years it’s that left to its own devices bands and their audiences can get along fine: the bands can figure out how to get their music out in front of an audience and the audience will figure out how to reward them.

The internet has facilitated the most direct and efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience. And I do not mourn the loss of the offices of inefficiencies that died in the process. I suppose some people are out of work. But the same things happened when the automobile replaced the horse, and all the blacksmiths had to adapt, spending their time making garden gates rather than horseshoes.

When I read over these notes on the plane today I felt like I spent too much time enumerating complaints, and I don’t want to conclude without reiterating how terrific the current music environment is. I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies. I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small – most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.

I’ve been talking an awful long time, but I have not yet mentioned the intellectual property debate. I’ll try to get that out of the way briefly now. I would like to leave room for questions after I speak, and though I’m leaving out a lot – publishing, stolen credits, sampling, fair use, inspiration – I suspect there will be a healthy discussion afterward and think that such discussions are necessary and overdue.

From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to.

There is great public good by letting creative material lapse into the public ownership. The copyright law has been modified so extensively in the past decades that now this essentially never happens, creating absurdities whenever copyright is invoked. There’s a huge body of work that is not legally in the public domain, though its rights holder, authors and creators have died or disappeared as businesses. And this material, from a legal standpoint now removed from our culture – nobody may copy it or re-release it because it’s still subject to copyright.

Other absurdities abound: innocuous usage of music in the background of home videos or student projects is technically an infringement and official obstacles are set up to prevent it. If you want a video of your wedding reception – your father’s first dance with a new bride – it’s off limits unless it is silent. If your little daughter does a kooky dance to a Prince song don’t bother putting it on YouTube for her grandparents to see or a purple dwarf in assless chaps will put an injunction on you. Did I offend the little guy? Fuck it. His music is poison.

Music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation. Well, not unless the rights holders are willing to let me turn the tables on it. If you think my listening is worth something, OK then, so do I. Play a Phil Collins song while I’m grocery shopping? Pay me $20. Def Leppard? Make it $100. Miley Cyrus? They don’t print money big enough.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/201...-music-in-full

















Until next week,

- js.



















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