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Old 22-12-10, 08:38 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 25th, '10

Since 2002































"If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that's a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see." – Trefor Davies


"Using Google and searching for my name and the word 'rape,' there are some 30 million Web pages. So this has been a very successful smear." – Julian Assange



































December 25th, 2010





F.C.C. Approves Net Rules and Braces for Fight
Brian Stelter

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. head, center, with Michael Copps, left, and Robert McDowell.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. head, center, with Michael Copps, left, and Robert McDowell.

8:52 p.m. | Updated Want to watch hours of YouTube videos or sort through Facebook photos on the computer? Your Internet providers would be forbidden from blocking you under rules approved by the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday. But if you want to do the same on your cellphone, you may not have the same protections.

The debate over the rules, intended to preserve open access to the Internet, seems to have resulted in a classic Washington solution — the kind that pleases no one on either side of the issue. Verizon and other service providers would prefer no government involvement. Public interest advocates think the rules stop far short of ensuring free speech. Some Republicans believe the rules are another instance of government overreach.

At the commission meeting in Washington, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said the steps were historic. “For the first time,” he said, “we’ll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness.”

The rules, which address some of the principles of so-called network neutrality, will be tested in the courts in the months ahead, and Republicans said Tuesday that they would challenge the rules in Congress as well.

The new rules are, at best, net semi-neutrality. They ban any outright blocking and any “unreasonable discrimination” of Web sites or applications by fixed-line broadband providers, but they afford more wiggle room to wireless providers like AT&T and Verizon.

They require all providers to disclose what steps they take to manage their networks. In a philosophical break with open Internet advocates, the rules do not explicitly forbid “paid prioritization,” which would allow a company to pay for faster transmission of data.

Nonetheless, supporters said the 3-2 vote by the commission represented significant progress toward fulfilling a campaign promise by President Obama to preserve a level playing field for Web developers. In a statement, Mr. Obama congratulated the F.C.C. and said that the government would “remain vigilant and see to it that innovation is allowed to flourish, that consumers are protected from abuse, and that the democratic spirit of the Internet remains intact.”

The rules are set to take effect early in 2011.

The media mogul Barry Diller, chairman of the IAC/InterActive Corporation, said in an interview Tuesday that he thought the F.C.C. had achieved “as much as could be done.” The rules of the road, he said, are “going to deter the bad behavior that I think was coming closer and closer.”

That “bad behavior” is largely theoretical to date, but as the Internet becomes the pipeline for all the world’s text, audio and video, clashes are likely to occur between the owners of the pipe and the people who want to supply innovative services through it.

Mr. Genachowski reiterated on Tuesday that the F.C.C. would “fulfill its historic role as a cop on the beat.” But there was considerable disagreement on Tuesday about whether the F.C.C. had the legal authority to go forward with the rules under Title II of the Communications Act.

Hinting that it has doubts about that, Verizon said the F.C.C. order “appears to assert broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband wireline and wireless networks and the Internet itself” without “solid statutory underpinnings.” In the long term, Verizon said, “that is harmful to consumers and the nation.”

Many others sounded more satisfied by Tuesday’s decision. Comcast and Time Warner Cable each separately said the F.C.C. had struck a “workable balance,” and AT&T said the compromise appeared “to balance major differences.”

The fact that the rules received support — even the lukewarm kind — from big businesses should worry consumers, some public interest groups said Tuesday.

“There is a reason that so many giant phone and cable companies are happy, and we are not. These rules are riddled with loopholes,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman, the policy director for the nonprofit Media Access Project, said in one representative statement. “They foreshadow years of uncertainty and regulatory confusion, which those carriers will use to their advantage.”

Other groups warned that the rules would smooth the way for fast and slow lanes on the Internet. They objected especially loudly to the looser rules for wireless devices, which are becoming important on-ramps to the Internet.

But wireless was treated differently, Mr. Genachowski said, because it has “unique technical issues” and is at a more nascent stage of growth. He added, “Any reduction in Internet openness would be a cause for concern, as would any reduction in innovation and investment in mobile broadband applications, devices or networks that depend on Internet openness.”

While wireless carriers will be able to block various apps and services, they won’t be able to block basic Web sites or any apps that compete with their own voice and video products. That represents a win for Skype, the Internet phone service, which praised the F.C.C. rules on Tuesday.

The vote on the rules split along party lines, with two Democratic commissioners joining Mr. Genachowski to gain passage. Those commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Mignon Clyburn, both indicated that they wished the rules were tougher, but that, as Mr. Copps put it, “without some action today, the wheels of network neutrality would grind to a screeching halt for at least the next two years.”

The two Republican commissioners, Robert M. McDowell and Meredith Baker, vocally opposed the rules as unnecessary and unjustified.

“The F.C.C. has provocatively chartered a collision course with the legislative branch,” Mr. McDowell said, alluding to the complaints of Republicans in Congress. Before the F.C.C. meeting even began on Tuesday, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said in a statement that the Internet “should be left alone,” and that his colleagues would “push back against new rules and regulations” next year.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ces-for-fight/





FCC Net Neutrality Rules Reach Mobile Apps
Declan McCullagh

Net neutrality advocates in Washington have long insisted that eventual government regulations would be simple and easy to understand. Public Knowledge has called the Net neutrality concept "ridiculously simple," and Free Press said the rules would be "clear" and easy to understand.

The Federal Communications Commission finally released its long-expected regulations this afternoon, which it had previously approved on a 3-2 party line vote earlier this week, and they're not exactly "ridiculously" simple. The rules and the related explanations total a whopping 194 pages (PDF).

One new item that was not previously disclosed: mobile wireless providers can't block "applications that compete with the provider's" own voice or video telephony services. By including that rule, the FCC effectively sided with Skype over wireless carriers.

A series of disputes erupted last year over whether Skype would be allowed on smartphones and over whether it was AT&T or Apple that was responsible for Google Voice not appearing in the iPhone's App Store. (In October 2009, AT&T agreed to support voice over Internet Protocol applications such as Skype on its 3G network, and Google Voice appeared as an iPhone application last month.)

The legality of "paid prioritization," which previously was ambiguous, also has been cleared up. The concept means a broadband provider favoring some traffic over other traffic. That would mean Amazon.com can't, theoretically, pay Comcast for its Web site to load faster than Barnes & Noble's.

The FCC acknowledged there's no evidence that "U.S. broadband providers currently engage in such arrangements." But because any pay-for-priority deals would "represent a significant departure from historical" practice and potentially raise barriers to entry on the Internet, they should be outlawed.

That section of today's order, which has been championed by Chairman Julius Genachowski, rejects arguments about paid prioritization that AT&T made earlier this year. As CNET reported at the time, AT&T noted it already had "hundreds" of customers who have paid extra for higher-priority services, and it argued that the Internet Engineering Task Force's specifications explicitly permit the practice.

Genachowski had said during Tuesday's vote that the rules would require all broadband providers including mobile services to disclose their network management practices, and that non-mobile providers would be prohibited from blocking and "unreasonably" discriminating against network traffic.

Other points that became public in today's order:

• Internet providers are allowed to block users from committing copyright infringement, "which has adverse consequences for the economy," though the FCC intentionally left ambiguous the extent of this authority.

• Mobile providers, which are generally not the target of these rules, nevertheless can't block access to "lawful" Web sites or "competing" services. That includes "a voice or video telephony service" provided by that carrier or a parent company.

• The definition of "reasonable" network management: "Appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service."

• All broadband providers, including mobile wireless providers, must disclose their network practices. That includes "descriptions of congestion management practices; types of traffic subject to practices; purposes served by practices; practices' effects on end users' experience; criteria used in practices, such as indicators of congestion that trigger a practice, and the typical frequency of congestion; usage limits and the consequences of exceeding them; and references to engineering standards, where appropriate."

• It also includes "whether and why the provider blocks or rate-controls specific protocols or protocol ports, modifies protocol fields in ways not prescribed by the protocol standard, or otherwise inhibits or favors certain applications or classes of applications."

The FCC has been attacked on nearly all sides since its vote Tuesday, with pro-regulation groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge saying the order doesn't go far enough, especially in terms of regulating wireless providers. That was echoed by FCC commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, saying he almost voted against the proposal because it "could--and should--have gone further."

Robert McDowell, a Republican, dissented from the vote, saying the FCC did not have the legal authority to enact Internet regulations. The real effect, he predicted, would be: "Less investment. Less innovation. Increased business costs. Increased prices for consumers. Disadvantages to smaller ISPs. Jobs lost."

The ultimate fate of the FCC's order released today is, of course, anything but certain.

In April, a federal appeals court unceremoniously slapped down the agency's earlier attempt to impose Net neutrality penalties on Comcast after the company temporarily throttled some BitTorrent transfers.

And more than a few Republican members of Congress -- including incoming House Speaker John Boehner--have slammed the FCC's action as an illegal attempt to regulate the Internet. In the 2011 funding bill, they could prohibit the FCC from enforcing any such rules.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20026581-38.html





FCC Chair to Approve Comcast-NBC Merger with Conditions for Program Sharing
Cecilia Kang

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission issued a draft order approving Comcast's proposed merger with NBC Universal on Thursday, putting the deal up for vote before the agency's other members.

Senior FCC officials said in a news conference that the merger presented five areas of concern but was ultimately deemed by staff and Chairman Julius Genachowski to tilt in the favor of public interest. Approval would come with several conditions related to Internet video distribution of NBC and Comcast content and the sharing of shows to competing cable and satellite firms. The merger would also have to ensure that competing networks get on Comcast's platform.

The Justice Department is conducting a separate review to see if the deal passes antitrust laws. The antitrust arm of Justice hasn't commented on the status of its review. A source familiar with the agency's thinking said Thursday that Justice officials have been working closely with FCC staff, but that the companies haven't fully committed yet to promises that would assuage concerns the deal could squash developing competition in the video space.

Given the size of the mergered company, Justice would want to ensure the company doesn't use its power to retaliate against programmers and partners who don't ascribe to their business demands. That was a condition Justice attached to Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation.

The merger of the nation's biggest broadband Internet and cable service provider and a media giant with television, movie and broadcast station assets has elicited cricitism from public interest groups and competitors.

Senior officials wouldn't go into details but indicated that conditions for Internet video distribution were narrowly defined as the online TV market is new and evolving.

Competitors and public interest groups have expressed concern that Comcast, the nation's biggest broadband and cable company, could unfairly withhold NBC shows and movies from Internet video platforms such as Netflix and Apple TV. Critics have urged the FCC to ensure that Comcast not withhold that content from new platforms for consumers who may want to get all their video news and entertainment through the Internet. They point to Comcast's competing Internet video strategy, called Xfinity, as a threat to newcomers. Xfinity provides Internet versions of television shows and movies but only to consumers who subscribe to both Comcast cable and broadband Internet services.

The FCC has been working closely with the Justice Department on their parallel antitrust review.

The draft order now goes before the other four commissioners, who may suggest changes. Analysts expect the merger to be approved and that the federal review will be finalized in January.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/pos...=moreheadlines





Homeland Security Presents 'Evidence' For Domain Seizures; Proves It Knows Little About The Internet - Or The Law
Mike Masnick

Earlier this week, we noted how the owners of the various hiphop blogs and Torrent-Finder, the torrent search engine, that were seized by Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group still hadn't been provided the details on why their domains were seized. However, that's no longer the case. A partial affidavit and the seizure warrant for those sites has been released, and it highlights how ridiculously clueless Homeland Security is on this issue (you can read the whole thing at the bottom of this post). What's troubling isn't just that the folks who made the decision to seize these domain names don't seem to know what they're talking about, but that they seem to have relied almost exclusively on the MPAA for their (lack of) knowledge on the subject at hand.

It looks like the four blog/forum sites (RapGodFathers, OnSmash, Dajaz1 and RMX4U) and Torrent-Finder were all lumped together into a single warrant and affidavit. The affidavit was written by a Special Agent with ICE, named Andrew Reynolds, who indicates in the affidavit that he only recently graduated from college (he notes that he's only been on the job for one year, but before that he was a "student trainee with the group"). Much of the affidavit relies heavily on the MPAA. This fits with what ICE assistant deputy director Erik Barnett said soon after the seizures, admitting that they basically just took what sites Hollywood said were a problem and seized them.

In this case, Mr. Reynolds repeats the debunked stats the MPAA has given out concerning "losses" to Hollywood, including the claim of "domino effects" of piracy -- a claim that has been debunked so many times it's getting stale. The "domino" effects are really all about double, triple and quadruple counting the same dollars -- and, perhaps more importantly, they only look at the domino effect (they usually call it a "ripple effect") in one direction, ignoring the fact that money not spent on movies still gets spent elsewhere (potentially boosting those other industries). That doesn't mean that it's okay to not pay for movies -- but it means that claiming some massive economic "harm" here is misleading at best. Even the GAO -- from the same government Agent Reynolds works for -- has debunked the MPAA's stats, in part because the MPAA refused to explain how it came up with those numbers.

Most of the reasoning behind seizing the blogs is left out of the released document, but the entire section on Torrent-Finder is there, and the level of confusion by Mr. Reynolds is worrisome. First of all, he calls it a "linking" and a "bit torrent website." Earlier in the affidavit, these terms are defined loosely -- without any indication of the unsettled nature of the legal question concerning whether or not simply linking to potentially infringing content is, itself, infringing. Instead, it's simply assumed that linking is not just infringement, but potentially criminal infringement. That's scary. And wrong.

Meanwhile, a "bit torrent website" is defined is a "website through which illegal copies of movies and television shows are shared and transferred." The problem here, of course, is that Torrent-Finder is not, in fact, a "bit torrent website." It hosts no tracker. It hosts no infringing content. It's a search engine. That distinction is entirely ignored. In fact, Agent Reynolds appears to blame Torrent-Finder for anything it finds as a search engine. Anyone at any search engine (or who understands how the internet works) should be horrified by this. It's like saying that Google is liable for everything and anything that people can find by doing a search on Google. Think about that for a second.

From there, it gets even more ridiculous. As part of Agent Reynold's argument as to why Torrent-Finder is liable he points to a series of posts by the Torrent-Finder Admin in the site's forums. Specifically, he names the following:

Quote:
I was able to view several posts by the user "Torrent Finder," including "Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent," "Piracy in the Music Industry," "Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously," "The First Episode of 'The Walking Dead' Leaks to BitTorrent," and "Piracy domain siezure bill gains support."
Agent Reynolds helpfully provides some of these "posts" in the exhibit. And therein we discover a serious problem. The exhibit shows a page from TorrentFreak.com, the popular blog (who we link to quite often) doing its weekly research report -- and not Torrent-Finder. In fact, if you do searches on those "posts" that Agent Reynolds claims are by Torrent-Finder, you quickly discover that a few are blog posts on TorrentFreak, one is a post from ZeroPaid and the last one is a story at CNET's News.com by Declan McCullough.

In other words, the "support" that Agent Reynolds provides for why Torrent-Finder's domain should be seized is that he claims that Torrent-Finder's admin linked directly to infringing material. But that's not true. Instead, the admin was simply pointing to a bunch of different news stories. Even worse, some of those news stories highlight why the claims of the MPAA, which Agent Reynolds relies upon, are simply made up -- such as TorrentFreak's story about comic artist Steve Lieber (which was actually based on a Techdirt story about how Steve Lieber embraced the so-called "pirates" and ended up making a lot more money -- we later interviewed Steve about his experiences). The CNET article is all about the COICA law -- which is about the legality of seizures like this one. How is that evidence of probable cause?

Even going beyond the fact that Agent Reynolds can't seem to figure out that a search engine is different than a torrent tracker or a torrent hosting site, he also seems to think that linking to blog posts like the ones we write here is probable cause for criminal behavior. Holy crap! That's just downright scary.

The entirety of the evidence against Torrent Finder appears to be that because you could do a search that takes you to another site and because the site's admin linked to some blog posts that discuss -- but do not encourage -- the state of file sharing, that there is probable cause of criminal behavior and your domain can and should be seized without any adversarial trial.

Agent Reynolds' cluelessness in the matter is compounded by the fact that it appears the only folks outside of ICE that he spoke to about what he was doing were at the MPAA itself -- which is hardly an unbiased party. It would be like investigating whether or not an upstart bank was committing fraud, by only talking to a large banking competitor. Who would think that's appropriate? Apparently Agent Reynolds and his bosses at ICE.

Equally troubling is that magistrate judge Margaret Nagle signed off on the warrants (literally, with a rubber stamp) without questioning any of this, from the look of things. Nowhere is there any discussion on how the seizure of domain names has nothing to do with the actual servers. Nowhere is there any discussion about first amendment issues in seizing domain names. Nowhere is there any discussion about prior restraint. Nowhere is there any discussion about the difference between a search engine and a torrent tracker. Nowhere is there any discussion about the difference between an infringing file and a torrent. Nowhere is there any discussion about the difference between a link to a news blog post about current events and encouraging people to download infringing content.

I thought the whole thing was ridiculous before. But now that I've read the affidavit -- at least the part about Torrent Finder -- it's become clear that this is a colossal screwup on the part of Homeland Security, ICE and the US government, based on a freshly minted ICE agent who doesn't seem to understand the technology, being lead around by the nose by MPAA staff with an agenda.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...et---law.shtml





More & Bigger Mistakes Discovered In Homeland Security's Domain Seizures
Mike Masnick

We've been covering the ridiculous domain name seizures by Homeland Security's Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) group over the last few weeks, and it seems that nearly every day we come across more info that makes the seizures look like a bigger and bigger mistake. We already noted how strange it was that a group of the seized domains were hiphop blogs and forums that were regularly supported by some of the leading stars in hiphop. Furthermore, we discussed how the specific affidavit that was used to show "probable cause" to get the warrant to seize these domains was full of technical and legal errors, was written by a guy who just graduated college, Agent Andrew Reynolds, and seemed to rely heavily on MPAA and RIAA claims.

With one specific site, dajaz1.com, we noted that the songs used by Agent Reynolds to support his claims, had actually been sent by the artists or record label representatives themselves. Dajaz1 is a blog, not a forum. Agent Reynolds called it a "linking site" which downplays and/or ignores the fact that there is a lot more on the site than just links.

I've now seen the specific email and other evidence as well, and it certainly looks like dajaz1 was asked to promote all four songs that Agent Reynolds listed by the artists or representatives of the artists. There were four songs listed in Agent Reynolds' affidavit, and in each case it appears that the songs were sent by official representatives for the specific purpose of promoting them.

1. Deuces, by Chris Brown

This song was released for free by Chris Brown, as a part of a mixtape entitled Fan of a Fan -- apparently released as part of the effort to rehabilitate Brown's reputation, following the incident with Rihanna. It was only after the song was released free, and a bunch of (you guessed it) hiphop blogs and forums started promoting it, that his label, a subsidiary of Sony Music decided to release it commercially. That song was sent directly to dajaz1 from someone at Brown's record label, using an email from the record label, and it's clear from the email that the sender is urging the recipient to spread the songs.

2. Long Gone, by Nelly

This song was sent directly by a VP at the record label, who was thanked in the blog post on the website, which linked to where the song could be downloaded. A simple search by Agent Reynolds of the person thanked on the blog posting (which I did) would quickly uncover the fact that the person was a VP at the record label.

3. Fall For Your Type, by Jamie Foxx

This song was sent directly by a known promoter of music, who has worked with the major record labels. The email clearly suggests that it is promoting the song for the rightsholder, and directly encourages the recipients of the email to download and share the song.

4. Mechanics, by Reek Da Villian

This one's interesting, since Reek Da Villian is not signed to a major record label, but is an artist whom Busta Rhymes has taken under his wing, and has been supporting and promoting for a while now. That song was apparently sent directly by Busta Rhymes -- though I did not see that email. However, considering that his work is not represented through an RIAA affiliated label, it seems odd that Reynolds would rely on an RIAA representative to later claim that this file was infringing. There's even a sort of odd admission of this in Agent Reynold's affidavit, where he notes:

"Based on my review of public record listings, as well as conversations with RIAA representatives, I know that as of October 26th, 2010, all of the above referenced songs were determined to be "Pre-release" or not yet released for purchase to the general public, three were copyrighted, and the copyright holders did not authorize their third party distribution over the Internet by DAJAZ1.COM or any other website."

Note that he says all were pre-release, but only three were copyrighted. Of course, this is another example of where Agent Reynolds shows his confusion about the law. All new and original creative works in the US when set in fixed format are automatically covered by copyright (technically "copyrighted" is not a verb, also). What Agent Reynolds probably meant, but got wrong, was that the Reek Da Villian song was not registered (which is not required to be covered by copyright). Still, if we assume that he believes what he wrote, how is it copyright infringement when Agent Reynolds himself admits that one of the songs is supposedly not covered by copyright? And why would the magistrate judge allow that?

So that's that. The four songs used by Agent Reynolds to support the domain name seizure of dajaz1.com, all appear to have been sent for the purpose of promoting in this manner. The Dajaz1 site was quite popular with DJs, and was regularly used by labels, artists and promoters as a way to get their music out to those DJs. It does not appear that Reynolds checked into any of this. Instead, he simply asked Carlos Linares, the VP of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs for the RIAA, who claimed that all four songs represented "pirated songs" that were "unauthorized copies of rights holder's works," even though there are questions about whether or not he actually knew that for a fact, or even had the right to speak for some of the artists/songs in question.

On top of that, if you dig into the dajaz1 website, you quickly see that it is not at all focused on just offering up as much as possible to download. In multiple cases, the blogger notes that he will not post links to too many tracks from an album, suggesting that the site is not at all focused on getting as much infringing material up as possible, as implied in the affidavit. If that was the goal, why would it specifically refuse to post links to more than just a few songs?

Separately, the person I spoke with from dajaz1 claims that, contrary to Agent Reynolds' assertion that the site had signed up for a Valueclick advertising account, no such account was actually set up. He claims he's willing to state that under oath. Agent Reynolds' claims that the account was set up using an email address that was associated with the site. I'm not sure who's right in this instance, but the whole thing does seem questionable.

The further you dig into this, the deeper you get into just how ridiculous the music industry works these days -- with various subsidiaries and independent promoters and DJs and mixtapes, and all sorts of stuff that the labels very specifically support with one hand, while pretending to be above all that with the other. There are more details that I'm still researching, but some of it suggests that the last thing the major record labels want is for this to go to court, because it'll expose all sorts of things that the labels are doing that they probably don't want exposed.

Either way, even if we go with Occam's Razor and assume that these four cases are examples of the left hand (lawyers) not knowing what the right hand (promotions/marketing) was doing, it highlights why it's a total mistake (and probably a violation of the law) for Homeland Security to have simply seized these domains without an adversarial hearing -- or any contact with the sites in question themselves. Some of our commenters have insisted that all of these sites were "obviously criminally infringing," but the evidence suggests an extremely different story. And it's that sort of thing which is why we're supposed to have due process in the US before we shut stuff down or seize things.

Contrary to what some believe, copyright infringement is rarely a "black and white" case -- which is why we have trials to determine whether or not something is actually infringing. This is even more true in cases of criminal copyright infringement, which has a much higher bar to prove. So it's beyond baffling that Homeland Security and the magistrate judge who approved these seizures felt that it was simply okay to seize them prior to any adversarial hearing, where much of these details might have come out.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...seizures.shtml





Not-So-Gentle Persuasion: US Bullies Spain into Proposed Website Blocking Law
Gwen Hinze

It’s no secret that the US government has used its annual Special 301 Report to intimidate other countries into adopting more stringent copyright and patent laws by singling out particular countries for their "bad" intellectual property policies, and naming them on a tiered set of "watch lists". Listing results in heightened political pressure and in some cases, the potential for trade sanctions, which encourages foreign trading partners to change their laws to mirror those in the US. But now some of the cables provided by WikiLeaks to Spanish newspaper El Pais confirm that the US government has pushed other countries to adopt measures that go beyond US law, unleashing the fury of Spanish Internet users.

A set of cables reported on by El Pais make clear that the US government played a key role in Spain’s controversial website blocking law – the 2009 Sustainable Economy Bill, which the Spanish government is now trying to sneak it through a Committee in a pre-holiday session on 21st December. (Spanish readers, please see Action you can take below).

El Pais reports that in February 2008 the US government threatened to put Spain on the annual Special 301 Watch List issued by the Office of the US Trade Representative unless the new Spanish government announced new measures to address Internet piracy, including a law that requires ISPs to terminate the Internet access of subscribers accused three times of file sharing - like the French “HADOPI” Three Strikes law.

In a February 2008 cable, the US Embassy in Madrid stated that:

“We propose to tell the new government that Spain will appear on the Watch List if it does not do three things by October 2008. First, issue a [Government of Spain] announcement stating that internet piracy is illegal, and that the copyright levy system does not compensate creators for copyrighted material acquired through peer-to-peer file sharing. Second, amend the 2006 “circular” that is widely interpreted in Spain as saying that peer-to-peer file sharing is legal. Third, announce that the GoS will adopt measures along the lines of the French and/or UK proposals aimed at curbing Internet piracy by the summer of 2009.”

Let’s be clear what this means; a US official apparently pressured the government of Spain to adopt novel and untested legislative measures that have never been proposed in the US Congress, and as the other cables published by El Pais show, did so at the request of US IP rightsholders.

The “French proposal” mentioned in the cable is the controversial 2009 HADOPI law, which provides for the French authority, the Haute Autorite pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet, to send notices to ISPs recommending that they suspend the Internet accounts of users at identified IP addresses for up to a year, on the third allegation of copyright infringement.

The “UK Proposal” appears to be a reference to UK IP rightsholders’ demands that ISPs disconnect their subscribers after three allegations of copyright infringement in consultations that were convened by the UK government’s Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in 2007-2008, following a recommendation in the landmark Gowers report on UK IP law reform. Those consultations and a subsequent agreement were the precursor to the Digital Economy Act enacted in early 2010. The UK ultimately decided not to adopt Three Strikes. (To date, only the governments of France and South Korea have passed these novel laws, but a draft law is pending in New Zealand). The Digital Economy Act requires ISPs to forward notices of alleged infringement to their subscribers, but does not currently require ISPs to disconnect their subscribers upon a third allegation of copyright infringement – although it leaves open the possibility that the UK government could require such “technical measures” in the future.

The cables show that the US Embassy in Madrid had devised a detailed “roadmap” in 2007 with short, medium and long-term strategies to increase pressure upon Spain to take action to strengthen IP laws by the March 2008 elections. This would “require continued constant high-level attention from Embassy and occasional help from Washington agencies over the coming 3 to 4 years”, including meetings with visiting US government officials from the USPTO and State Department.

The Spanish government apparently did not act fast enough on US demands. The US made good on their threat to add Spain to the Watch List in the US Trade Representative’s Special 301 Report in 2008 and 2009. In November 2009, the Spanish government proposed a new anti-piracy law, the Sustainable Economy Bill, which raises serious concerns for Spanish citizens’ rights of due process, privacy and freedom of expression. The good news is that the proposed legislation does not require ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection of individuals. However, the bad news is that it follows the recent trend towards imposing obligations on Internet intermediaries to block content. Similar laws have been proposed in the U.S. (COICA) and the UK (through the reserved powers in the Digital Economy Act).

The proposed Sustainable Economy law would allow a new government Commission to direct ISPs to block service or remove content on websites after receiving complaints on certain grounds. These include national defense, public order, public safety, public health, protection of minors, and “safeguarding IP rights”. It would also require ISPs to respond to requests from authorized entities for the identification and disclosure of persons responsible for IP infringements – an issue that IP rightsholders had pursued and lost in the 2008 European Court of Justice’s ruling in Promusica v. Telefonica.

A US Embassy cable from December 2009 describes the massive Internet community protests that soon followed the introduction of the legislation. It notes that the Government of Spain had “disavowed any intention to implement a graduated response regime such as contemplated in recently enacted legislation in France. Their specific intent is rather to impede access to infringing content.” The cable reports back to Washington officials on the respective reactions of senior representatives of the recording industry and motion picture industry, the local affiliates of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries and the Motion Picture Association of Europe. Many content providers, including the President of the Federation for Intellectual Property in Audiovisual works (FAP) , reportedly thought that the legislation was the most that could currently be achieved and would pave the way for more stringent laws in the future, but the Spanish music industry representative was not satisfied, claiming that “this limitation [i.e., the legislation’s failure to oblige ISPs to adopt a Three Strikes Internet disconnection regime] will leave users free to continue in unauthorized P2P downloading”.

After the Spanish Parliament failed to adopt the legislation in 2009, Spain was again put on the Watch List in the USTR’s Special 301 Report in April 2010. The reasons given reiterate each of the points of contention described in the cables:

“Spain will remain on the Watch List in 2010. The United States remains concerned about particularly significant Internet piracy in Spain, and strongly urges prompt and effective action to address the issue. The Spanish government has not amended portions of a 2006 Prosecutor General Circular that appears to decriminalize illegal peer-to-peer file sharing of infringing materials, contributing to a public misperception in Spain that such activity is lawful. Spain’s existing legal and regulatory framework has not led to cooperation between Internet service providers (ISPs) and rights holders to reduce online piracy. On the contrary, rights holders in Spain report an inability to obtain information necessary to prosecute online IPR infringers, further reducing their ability to seek appropriate remedies. Spain’s legal system also generally does not result in criminal penalties for intellectual property infringement. The United States is encouraged by some recent positive developments in Spain, including the establishment of an Inter-Ministerial Commission with a mandate to propose changes in Spanish law and policy that will strengthen efforts to reduce Internet piracy. In January 2010, the Commission proposed legislation that would allow a committee based in the Ministry of Culture to request that an ISP block access to infringing materials hosted online. The United States urges Spain to continue taking positive steps to address Internet piracy, and will closely monitor progress in the next year.”

This is how the entertainment industry works with the US government to bully governments to create harmonized laws that continuously ratchet up copyright protection, one country at a time.

The Sustainable Economy Bill will be debated in the Committee of Economy and Finance of Spain’s Congress next Tuesday, 21st December, just before the holiday recess. It could then be adopted by the Senate by the end of February 2011.

The past is behind us, but the future is in your hands. If you are a Spanish citizen, call your Congressional representative and demand that this legislation be debated in open Parliament with the full attention that it deserves, not adopted by sleight of hand because of background political pressure. Our Spanish friends ask that you focus on representatives of the independent parties (some of whom have called for the Bill to be debated in a plenary session) - the Catalonian party (CIU), the Vasc Party (PNV), and the Canarian Island Pary (CC). More information is available at Asociacion de Internautas' campaign page; Red-SoS and here, and follow @La_EX_ on Twitter.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/1...spain-proposed





Major File-Sharing Sites Go Dark To Protest Anti-Download Law
enigmax

A coalition of file-sharing sites are voluntarily taking themselves offline to protest against the likely passing of new legislation tomorrow. The sites, which together are believed to generate up to 70% of Spain’s Internet traffic, will display a black page warning that if the so-called Sinde Act is approved, their sites could disappear forever. Earlier this month, cables leaked by Wikileaks showed that Spain had bowed to US pressure to introduce the law.

In recent times, Spanish courts have ruled repeatedly that subject to some fairly minor conditions, operating a file-sharing site falls within the boundaries of the law.

However, as shown by diplomatic cables recently leaked by Wikileaks, under pressure from the United States, the Spanish Government proposed new legislation to close loopholes and provide sweeping new anti-filesharing powers.

The Sustainable Economy Law (LES) is likely to be approved in Spain tomorrow and is expected to pose a real problem to file-sharing sites. The legislation, popularly known as the Sinde Act in reference to its main driving force Minister of Culture Ángeles González-Sinde, has been widely protested but could be fully adopted as early as February next year.

The law will provides for the creation of a Commission on Intellectual Property under the Ministry of Culture. It would have the power to deal with complaints against websites that link to copyright movies, music and software, including blocking and taking them offline.

The opposition to the passing of the legislation is growing, not least due to the decision by Congress to approve the Sustainable Economy Law in a single meeting. Although the bill will pass to the Senate, Congress will be able to ignore any amendments introduced there.

In response, many of Spain’s largest file-sharing sites will be protesting today by voluntarily taking themselves offline. Each will display the message shown below (translated from Spanish) and link to anti-censorship website No al Cierre de Webs.

The list of sites includes Cinetube, DivxTotal, Mydescarga, Peliculasyonkis, Series Danko, Seriespepito, Seriesyonkis and SuBTorrents.

It is believed that in total the sites, which have millions of pageviews, help to generate up to 70% of Spain’s Internet traffic. However, the new law could take them offline very quickly indeed.

Following complaints by rightsholders to the Commission on Intellectual Property, site status would be reviewed by a court which would then be required to take action within 4 days.
http://torrentfreak.com/major-file-s...ad-law-101220/





A Bug in the Bill to Stop File-Sharing
Público Madrid

“Parliament rejects Sinde law,” announces Público. On 21 December a parliamentary committee threw out culture minister Ángeles González-Sinde’s bill, under which websites providing access to copyright-protected content could be closed down. Apart from producers, authors and publishers, the only support for the proposed legislation came from prime minister Zapatero’s socialist group. Over the past few days, the Spanish daily reports, “netizens have been mobilising and even attacking official sites”.
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/...p-file-sharing





Movie Group Will DDoS The Courts To Have File-Sharing Laws Weakened
enigmax

A movie interests association has just announced an interesting new strategy. Having previously focused on having The Pirate Bay blocked in their home country, ACAPOR – which recently had its emails leaked by Operation Payback – says it will now make legal history by reporting unprecedented numbers of file-sharers to the authorities. Their aim? To have the law for infringements made less severe.

In September this year, movie rental association ACAPOR filed a complaint against The Pirate Bay with the General Inspection of Cultural Activities, a department of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture.

Blaming the site for 15 million illegal downloads in Portugal every year, ACAPOR demanded that the country’s ISPs should take similiar action to that taken in Italy, and block The Pirate Bay.

In a parallel action, a complaint was also made against Piratatuga.net, a file-sharing site which has proven extremely popular among their countrymen, also blamed for millions of downloads. In this case a criminal investigation was requested.

But having taken action against the sites that facilitate the transfers undertaken by file-sharers, ACAPOR – which recently had its email database hacked as part of Operation Payback – is now widening its approach somewhat. Starting in January 2011, the movie interests group will begin reporting thousands of file-sharers to the authorities.

Their aim? To have punishments for file-sharing made less severe.

According to ACAPOR president Nuno Pereira, only one case has been brought against a Portuguese file-sharer. He believes that this restrained approach is down to the justice system being afraid of the 3 year jail sentences currently on the books for the offense.

Calling the current system “outdated”, Pereira is calling for Portuguese law to be changed to follow the French lead of a graduated response.

“It would be better to replace the prison sentence, which is never enforced and that is excessive, for a breach or a cut in Internet access, like they do in France,” he explained.

Pereira also says that if the current law was applied as required, the criminal courts would become inundated with case of illegal file-sharing.

So, in order to ‘help’ the situation, Pereira has announced a new ACAPOR strategy of – wait for it – inundating the criminal courts with cases of illegal file-sharing.

Starting January 5th 2011, ACAPOR will begin filing “the largest collection of criminal complaints submitted simultaneously in the history of Portuguese Justice” against individuals alleged to have shared movies online.

“From that day on, every month we will file 1,000 new complaints,” said Pereira, adding that although file-sharing is a crime in Portugal, ACAPOR is being forced to act privately because their complaints to the government have come to nothing.

Will the justice system be able to keep up with what is in effect a Denial of Service attack on the courts? Almost certainly not. But this stunt appears to be less about justice and more about pressuring the government and generating publicity to scare potential file-sharers.
http://torrentfreak.com/movie-group-...akened-101223/





What Will the Govt Do After iiNet’s BitTorrent Case?
Renai LeMay

The Federal Attorney-General’s Department has distanced itself from a report that it was waiting for the outcome of the high-profile court case between iiNet and a number of movie and TV studios before promoting options to Attorney-General Robert McLelland to overhaul online copyright laws dealing with illegal file-sharing by Australians.

The internet service provider won the case in February, with Justice Cowdroy at the time finding that iiNet did not authorise copyright infringement carried out by its customers online. However, the coalition of movie and TV studios, together with the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, is appealing the decision.

Last week, telco industry newsletter Communications Day reported that the Federal Attorney-General’s Department had issued a brief to the incoming Government stating that examining the growth of online file sharing was a “priority”, including legislative and non-legislative changes, but that the issue would “desirably” await the outcome of the iiNet trial.

The comments raise the possibility that AFACT may be successful in its push to lobby the Government to overhaul the copyright regime in the wake of its loss in the iiNet trial.

However, late last week the Attorney-General’s Department issued a separate statement, noting that while it was working on the issue, the timing of any potential reforms was a matter for Attorney-General Robert McLelland to decide, rather than the department itself.

“The department is currently considering a number of copyright policy matters, including the issue of online copyright infringement, which includes illegal file sharing, on which it will provide advice to the Attorney-General,” a departmental spokesperson said, noting it was examining various approaches that had been adopted in other countries as part of its work developing options for the Attorney-General’s consideration.

“The department’s policy work is continuing while the iiNet litigation is on foot. The department is closely following the progress of that litigation.”

Comment on the matter is also being sought from the office of Attorney-General Robert McLelland.

Despite its advice to the Government published by Communications Day noting that developing options to address the growth of online file sharing or copyright infringement was a “priority”, in its statement last week the Attorney-General’s Department appeared to play down any need for legislative change.

“The Government is conscious of the adverse impact illegal peer to peer file sharing has on the creative industries,” the department said. “Australia’s copyright law was extensively amended in 2006 to address many new technology issues and is up to date by international comparison.”

The Attorney-General’s Department has recently been stridently criticised by a number of parties for what has been perceived as a lack of public consultation surrounding its controversial proposal to force Australia’s ISPs to store a wealth of information pertaining to emails and telephone calls, popularly dubbed ‘OzLog’.

Some ISPs had signed non-disclosure agreements on the matter that prohibited them from discussing it publicly, and Greens Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam recently took departmental officials to task in a Senate Enquiry for not consulting the public and the parliament on the matter.

Asked whether a public consultation would be held on online copyright reform, the department said that would be up for the Attorney-General for to decide, but that it was “usual practice” in copyright policy to consult with “relevant stakeholders” when proposals for reform were developed.
http://delimiter.com.au/2010/12/20/w...ttorrent-case/





Pirate Bay Financier Takes Case to Supreme Court

A key financier of the Swedish filesharing site, The Pirate Bay, appealed to the country's highest court on Monday to overturn his four-month prison sentence and fines to the music and movie industry, court documents showed.

"Carl Lundstroem demands the Supreme Court cancel the Appeal Court's ruling," the petition read.

In April 2009, Lundstroem and Pirate Bay founders Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay 32 million kronor (3.4 million euros, 4.5 million US dollars) for copyright infringement.

Last month, the Svea Court of Appeal reduced Lundstroem's sentence to four months in prison but hiked the amount of damages to 46 million kronor.

"We do not accept the Appeal Court's ruling," Lundstroem's lawyer Per E. Samuelsson told Swedish public radio.

"My client Carl Lundstroem delivered Internet capacity to the Pirate Bay. Different people around the world use the Pirate Bay services ... We think it is completely wrong that someone who delivered power to a website should pay damages and sit in prison for what users of the website do with it," he said.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay, which claims to have more than 23 million users, makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

During last year's trial, the defendants maintained that file-sharing services can be used both legally and illegally, insisting their activities were within the law.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news...221-193bf.html





Film Industry Gets Tough on BT in Bid to Stop File-Sharing Websites

With the Digital Economy Act on hiatus those in the creative industries are themselves having to get creative to take on the file-sharers through the UK legal system, with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) the latest to have a go.

The MPA, which represents Hollywood studios outside of the US, has launched a suit to try and take down the Newzbin website that it claims infringes copyright by making films and televisions programmes available to download.

As part of its attempt to take the site down the MPA is trying to secure an order that will force BT to block access to the site using Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act that offers the possibility of an injunction against internet firms to block certain websites.

The law, which is part of a wider EU law on copyright, has been successfully used before against such sites in Denmark, while cases in Germany, Holland and Belgium are pending.

The president and managing director of the MPA, Chris Marcic, said the organisation was confident that the decision would succeed, noting these previous success in the EU.

"The continued operation of Newzbin flies in the face of the previous judgment by the High Court and we feel it necessary to invoke 97A to seek the co-operation of BT through a court order to stop the infringing activity via their services," he said.

"This action follows the High Court decision and EU law, which ruled that in many such cases, intermediaries are best placed to bring such infringing activities to an end."

A spokesperson for BT said: "We can confirm that we have received the papers from the MPA and are reviewing them. We will respond in due course".

Whatever the outcome, it's a telling reminder towards the end of a year dominated by the controversial Digital Economy Act that those in the creative industries aren't about to give up their position without a fight just yet.
http://thefrontline.v3.co.uk/2010/12...right-mpa.html





Judge Orders Hearing To Deal With All ACS:Law File-Sharing Cases
enigmax

Following last month’s failed attempt by ACS:Law to have default judgments handed down to 8 individuals accused of illegal file-sharing, the company have been back in court again. In a case where they couldn’t even get the defendant’s name right, ACS hoped for a ruling in their favor but were again denied by the judge. Instead, all of ACS:Law’s outstanding cases have been rounded up for a hearing next month. Things are about to get interesting.

Last month, the Patents County Court in the UK witnessed a messy attempt by law firm ACS:Law to get default judgments against 8 internet connection owners who the company claimed infringed or allowed others to infringe copyrights.

Representing Media C.A.T, a kind of ‘front company’ for movie companies involved in so-called “pay up or else” or “speculative invoicing” schemes, ACS:Law managed to squeeze an impressive number of errors into the proceedings and the result was that in all 8 cases, default judgments were denied.

Now it appears that ACS:Law have been back to court again, this time with a case brought against an alleged file-sharer called Mr Billington.

“Following our phone call today regarding the claim form I have received from yourselves [on behalf of] ACS:Law, I apologise for the belated reply as on the claim form there is no mention of timescale, or a acknowledge service form for me to respond to, which I believe should have been included,” Mr Billington wrote in a letter to the clerk of the court.

Judge Birss QC, who also handled last month’s cases, noted that in Mr Billington’s case the claim appeared to have been issued without including a response pack, i.e the necessary paperwork which enables the defendant to put his side of the story.

“My last correspondence on 1st November to ACS Law was advising them that I have not infringed any copyright, I refuted the claim in that, they have an IP address, which they claim relates to my computer,” continued Mr Billington.

“Firstly I have 5 computers so I do not know which one they refer to. Also I am not the sole user of the computers. I asked them for further evidence of this alleged infringement. I then receive the said claim form.”

The defendant then went on to explain that since he had been receiving “threatening letters from ACS Law demanding monies” he believed he had been the victim of “some sort of scam”.

However, rather than deal with the case, the Judge did something interesting.

In October the Patents County Court implemented new procedures designed to streamline intellectual property disputes. To this end, the court conducted a review of ACS:Law/Media C.A.T cases in the system. They found 27, which included the 8 from the previous hearing and this new one involving Mr Billington.

“Some of the cases are defended but the court file in most of the 27 cases consists of little more than a claim form,” wrote the Judge, noting that all cases are broadly similar. He added:

“In the circumstances I have decided to take an unusual course and to exercise the court’s power to make orders of its own initiative under CPR Part 3 rule 3.3(1). The order I will make is an order to convene a hearing for directions in this case and in all the parallel Media C.A.T. Limited cases in the Patents County Court files at the moment.”

So, the hearing of all outstanding ACS:Law cases will take place on Monday 17th January 2011 before Judge Birss QC who has the power to decide how these cases will be dealt with. Considering his comments from the previous cases, that Media C.A.T is not even the rights holder of the movies in question, potentially all of the cases could be dismissed.

Should this come to pass, this could be a pivotal point in the overall ‘speculative invoicing’ scene in the UK.

There are loud but unconfirmed reports that ACS:Law are no longer instructed to act for rightsholder DigiProtect in similar cases. If both they and Media C.A.T are put out of the picture, ACS:Law have no more significant anti-filesharing clients left and if it’s true that damaged reputations are directly linked to the prospect of gaining more customers, that gap won’t be filled any time soon.

Furthermore, it has been confirmed that lawyers Gallant MacMillan no longer represent Ministry of Sound in chasing alleged file-sharers. Couple that with comments from CEO Lohan Presencer that their latest court application “makes no economic sense” and it’s clear that it’s hardly full-steam ahead for them either.

Another interesting issue that appeared again in Mr Billington’s case is ACS:Law’s ability to keep making mistakes. In addition to the catalog of errors from last month, in the case detailed above ACS:Law managed to get the defendant’s name wrong. Allan Billington does not exist. There is, however, an Aaron Billington at the address in question.

While a transposed forename might seem fairly trivial here, consider the implications of a transposed IP address – the only evidence on which ACS:Law rely. For example, TorrentFreak’s IP address is 208.100.11.174 – transposing the last three digits of that IP connects readers not to file-sharing news, but to a gender reassignment clinic.

The important thing now is that the court will notify all 27 individuals of the January hearing and give them a chance to respond. They must respond, it is absolutely crucial. Anyone in receipt of one of these court claims (claim numbers here) can contact us here at tips@torrentfreak.com for completely free and confidential advice.
http://torrentfreak.com/judge-orders...-cases-101222/





United States: Appeals Court: World of Warcraft "Bots" Do Not Infringe Video Game Developer's Copyright But DMCA Claim Survives
Nicole Hyland

Blizzard, creator of the popular online game World of Warcraft (WoW), recently suffered a setback in its litigation against MDY Industries, which sells Glider – a software "bot" that automatically plays some of the early levels of the game. The Ninth Circuit reversed a $6.5 million judgment for Blizzard, finding no liability for secondary copyright infringement. A party may be liable for secondary infringement if it either (1) intentionally induced another person's direct infringement (known as "contributory infringement") or (2) had the right and ability to control another's infringing activities and derived a financial benefit from those activities (known as "vicarious infringement"). In either case, direct infringement must be established before secondary liability can attach.

To establish secondary infringement against MDY, Blizzard had to show that Glider users infringed Blizzard's copyright by violating a Terms of Use (ToU) provision that prohibits the use of "cheats, bots, 'mods,' and/or hacks." The appeals court held that WoW players who used Glider in violation of the ToU did not infringe Blizzard's copyright. Thus, MDY could not be secondarily liable for infringement.

The decision was a mixed bag of good news and bad news for the parties – as well as their customers. Although the court exonerated MDY for copyright infringement, it found the "bot" maker liable for violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In addition, the court ordered a trial on Blizzard's claim that MDY tortiously interfered with Blizzard's user agreements. While WoW players may be happy with the ruling that license and ToU violations do not necessarily constitute copyright infringement, they might be surprised to learn they do not actually own their copies of the WoW software program, according to the court's decision.

WoW Users Do Not "Own" Their Software:

Before determining whether Glider users committed copyright infringement, the court had to ascertain whether they were "owners" or "licensees" of the WoW software. To answer this question, the court turned to its decision in Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., an important software licensing case that we covered in a previous post. As discussed in Vernor, in order to run any software program, a user's computer must create a copy of the program in the computer's random access memory ("RAM"), which may infringe the seller's copyright.

Under Vernor, users who "own" a copy of the software program may invoke the "essential step" defense to copyright infringement, because copying the program into the computer's RAM is essential to running the program. However, users who license a software program are not protected by the "essential step" defense and, therefore, their use of the program must comply with the seller's license agreement and terms of use. Applying Vernor's analytical framework, the court concluded that purchasers of WoW are licensees, rather than owners of the software. Thus, when their computers copy WoW software into RAM, users may infringe Blizzard's copyright, unless their use complies with Blizzard's license and ToU.

Glider Users Are Not Infringers:

Having determined that WoW players are licensees and not owners, the central issue facing the court was whether Glider users who violated Blizzard's prohibition against "bots" committed copyright infringement or merely breached their license agreements. The answer turned on a somewhat arcane distinction between a license "condition" (which limits the scope of a license) and a "covenant" (which is merely a contractual promise). According to the court, if the prohibition against bots was a "condition," Glider users committed copyright infringement, making MDY liable for secondary infringement. If, on the other hand, the prohibition was a "covenant," Glider users merely breached their license agreements.

Examples of license "conditions" might include restrictions against distributing copies of the software program or creating derivative works. By contrast, a prohibition against harassing other gamers online constitutes a "covenant" because it does not implicate Blizzard's "exclusive rights of copyright." The court held that Blizzard's prohibition against using "bots" was a covenant, not a condition, because it did not implicate Blizzard's "exclusive rights of copyright." Thus, Glider users who violated this prohibition did not commit copyright infringement and, by extension, MDY could not be held liable for secondary copyright infringement.

MDY Violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

To combat Glider and similar unauthorized programs, Blizzard developed a technology called Warden, which is able to detect and ban players who use such programs. In response, MDY modified Glider to include anti-detection features and sold a subscription service, Glider Elite, which offered additional protections against Warden.

The appeals court held that MDY's anti-detection technology violated Section 1201(a)(2) of the DMCA, which prohibits trafficking in products that circumvent technologies designed to control access to copyright protected works. In reaching this conclusion, the court rejected the Federal Circuit's seminal ruling in Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Techs., Inc. holding that circumvention technologies which do not facilitate copyright infringement do not trigger liability under Section 1201(a)(2) of the DMCA. Thus, even though – as discussed above – the court ruled that Glider did not facilitate copyright infringement, MDY could still be liable under the DMCA for circumventing Warden's detection features.

What the Decision Means:

This decision could have significant implications for another lawsuit filed by Blizzard against three alleged hackers who created "cheats" for StarCraft II, another popular Blizzard game. Blizzard has alleged similar claims of secondary copyright infringement against the defendants in that case. This decision may lead to dismissal of those copyright claims, although the defendants may still be liable for tortious interference with Blizzard's contracts.

The decision also creates a conflict between the Federal Circuit and the Ninth Circuit on an important question of federal statutory interpretation – whether a plaintiff seeking to hold a defendant liable under the DMCA for selling a technology-circumventing device must prove that the device facilitates copyright infringement. This conflict may call, ultimately, for Supreme Court resolution.
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/a...ticleid=118912





BitTorrent Domain Exodus Continues As Torrentz Dumps .COM
enigmax

The Internet’s second biggest BitTorrent site is dumping its .COM domain. In an apparent response to the US Government’s Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement recent seizures of domain names, the site moved to a new home. Despite being only a meta-search engine, Torrentz.com appears to be taking no chances with an immediate .EU domain migration.

The fallout from last month’s domain name seizures carried out by US authorities continues to spread in the file-sharing community.

Torrent-Finder, which shifted to a .INFO domain to continue its operations, is fighting back with legal representation. Others, unsettled by the developing atmosphere of uncertainty, are taking steps to mitigate any potential future action against their sites.

Already several private trackers have invested in alternative domain names which are at least currently believed to be outside US control or influence. Early December the popular Demonoid tracker showed its hand with a shift from a .COM to a .ME domain.

While seizing the domain names of a fully fledged torrent site with index, categorization, heavy moderation, tracker and seedboxes might not be a huge surprise in the current climate, the targeting of the Torrent-Finder meta-search engine came as a real shock to the file-sharing community.

So there can be little doubt that Torrentz, the Internet’s second biggest torrent site, eyed the recent developments with an element of disbelief. As a meta-search engine it should be absolutely fine but the unofficially established rules of the game appear to have changed, despite being based on a case filled with serious mistakes.

To that end, today we can confirm that Torrentz has officially dumped its .COM domain in favor of Torrentz.eu. There’s no official announcement from the site but anyone visiting the old URL is immediately redirected. This change is a permanent one, we have learned.

Two years ago Torrentz already faced a hostile domain takeover from a hacker, but this issue was resolved quickly and without any serious consequences. We assume that moving away from the .COM domain is deemed to be the path of least resistance by the Torrentz team.

But its not just BitTorrent sites that are affected by this environment of uncertainty. With the seizing of the domains of several hip-hop sites – RapGodFathers.com, RMX4U.com, Dajaz1.com, and OnSmash.com – that community is also worried for its future.

A handful of bewildered site owners have contacted TorrentFreak during the last month with questions ranging from “Why were these sites taken down?” through to “What can we do to avoid the same fate?” Our answer to these sites has been consistent – they have been targeted for being involved in RIAA-label music.

For those in hip-hop, the chance to really take their music back to the streets should be a breath of fresh air and a poke in the eye for the corporates who have tried, once they realized it was a money spinner, to absorb their scene during the last 20 years.

For everyone else, other tactics will have to be employed. The technology war to stay online – and findable with a search engine – has only just begun.
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-d...ps-com-101218/





ATC Releases Updated P2P Marshal, Now with eMule Support

ATC-NY has just released Version 3.1.0 of P2P Marshal(TM). P2P Marshal is a computer forensics tool which automatically detects, extracts and analyzes P2P evidence on hard drives. A typical data acquisition and analysis taking hours by hand runs in a few minutes with P2P Marshal.

The tool comes in two editions:

-- P2P Marshal Forensic Edition(TM) - The "software only" edition installs and runs on an investigator's workstation to analyze a mounted disk image.
-- P2P Marshal Field Edition(TM) - This edition comes on and runs from a USB drive. It can conduct live investigations as well as analyze mounted disk images. Field Edition allows an investigator to go mobile as the USB drive may be moved from computer to computer; no installation is required. This allows an investigator to conduct forensic searches out in the field, offering freedom of movement and capabilities on a target computer where P2P Marshal can investigate that computer's hard drive.

P2P Marshal automatically detects and analyzes peer-to-peer file sharing usage including the most commonly used P2P client programs such as Ares, BitTorrent, Frostwire, LimeWire, uTorrent and Azureus Vuze. The updated version adds support for eMule.

P2P Marshal presents per-user information on those clients, including shared files, downloaded files, peer servers and configuration and log information. P2P Marshal performs these tasks in a forensically valid way and presents the results in an easily readable form on screen and can produce reports in CSV, RTF, PDF and HTML formats.

Images can be quickly reviewed with P2P Marshal's thumbnail browser. It's fast!

ATC-NY developed P2P Marshal in conjunction with the National Institute of Justice. For information about the products, visit http://www.p2pmarshal.com

ATC-NY offers a one-day course in peer-to-peer forensics and P2P Marshal. Contact training@p2pmarshal.com for information about course locations and dates.

P2P Marshal is currently being used by local, state, federal and international law enforcement to investigate cyber crimes. Without automated tools, a forensic investigator's job to find evidence of illegal file sharing and distribution is manually intensive and time-consuming. P2P Marshal greatly helps investigators reduce the time required for the analysis process. The tool is also useful to private corporations for compliance checking. A company that prohibits peer-to-peer software on its corporate systems could use P2P Marshal to confirm such compliance.
http://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/...ctivity-588962





New York City to Citizens: Web Piracy Kills Jobs
Greg Sandoval

New York City, the nation's largest city and its true media capital, is telling citizens that "piracy doesn't work" as part of a new publicly funded antipiracy ad campaign.

The message to New Yorkers is that downloading music and movies without paying for them "kills jobs" in the city. The ads will appear at bus shelters, movie theaters, on the Web and on the video screens found in taxicabs, according to Katherine Oliver, commissioner of media and entertainment for the city of New York.

The costs of running the campaign are minimal because the city is using many of its own resources, such as the bus shelters and the city-owned public TV stations to circulate the ads, said Oliver. She says the city has too much invested in the creation of films, books, radio, and TV to do nothing about illegal file sharing.

While Burbank Calif., home of some of the major film studios, calls itself the "media capital of the world," New York is home to the major book publishers, TV networks and music labels. Media conglomerates such as Viacom, Time Warner and NBC Universal call New York home. The heart of the city, Times Square, is named after The New York Times. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the 10th richest man in America, amassed much of his fortune from the financial news service he cofounded in 1981.

More than 700,000 jobs in the city are connected directly or indirectly to media and are potentially harmed by illegal file sharing, according to Oliver's staff.

In one of the video ads for the campaign, comedian Tom Papa performs with actors in a sketch. Papa is behind a table in Union Square offering free DVDs to passerby. He tells people who stop that they are welcome to take his free films but there's a hitch: The woman behind him, who is holding a boom microphone and is supposed to be a sound technician, will lose her job.

Oliver said that New York got the idea for the campaign when it occurred to her that the sale of bootleg discs had begun to drop following a crackdown by Bloomberg's office, with the help of the Motion Picture Association of America, in 2007. She learned that street sales of pirated movies were down but illegal file sharing was up. She said she wanted to take a fresh approach.

"I wasn't aware that book publishing was being affected by illegal downloading before," Oliver said. "But I now know as reading digital books becomes more popular to read on different devices, piracy is moving into publishing. I think this is an international problem and we want to raise awareness."

As far as quantifying the impacts of illegal file sharing, there isn't much credible data. Representatives from the U.S. Government Accountability Office said earlier this year that they found flaws with studies done on on piracy's effects. The GAO, however, noted that their was plenty of evidence that piracy does cost jobs in many U.S. industries.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20026518-261.html





New Study Examines the Impact of Illegal Filesharing

Three US researchers from Harvard and Stanford have published research on the impact on sales of digital distribution and illegal filesharing. While they choose their words carefully, one of the main findings is that filesharing is – wait for it – a double-edged sword – hurting sales for big bands, but boosting awareness of lesser-known acts. “File-sharing may increase awareness of smaller, more obscure artists and their music by making the music available from more sources and at a much lower cost (or for free in the case of illegal file-sharing),” they write. “While file-sharing may offset some album sales for small artists[,] this may be mitigated in part by increased sales from the larger potential fan base that may result from increased awareness of those artists.” The research was based on analysis of data from Pollstar, SoundScan and MusicBrainz.
http://musically.com/blog/2010/12/21...l-filesharing/





Harwich: Musician Backs Filesharing
James Cox

A MUSICIAN says illegally downloading songs could do more good than harm to the industry.

More than seven million people have obtained music illegally through the internet this year, according to figures from the British record industry's trade association.

James Martin, Harwich Road, Little Oakley, said the only people affected by online piracy are rich artists and fat cat record companies.

“It broadens tastes and gives people a leg up to start with,” he said.

“The top musicians are overpayed and have had it easy for too long."

Mr Martin has co-written an album of songs for Harwich group Kennedy Green.

He helped produce their charity single, Rocket Girl, to raise money for CLIC Sargent children’s cancer charity, after Declan Heath, a school friend of the girls, died of cancer in 2004.

He added: “I don’t think we lost anything from people downloading the single. “Those people wouldn’t have bought it anyway.” Kennedy Green’s charity single is available from www.kennedygreen.co.uk
http://www.harwichandmanningtreestan...s_filesharing/





CRB Sets Webcaster Royalty Rates For 2011-2015
FMQB

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has issued its webcaster royalty rates for 2011-2015, though the rates are only applicable to online stations that do not have special agreements already in place with SoundExchange. According to RAIN (Radio And Internet Newsletter), the new rates still must be finalized by the Library of Congress.

The CRB-suggest rates of $0.0019 per performance in 2011, $0.0021 per performance in 2012 and 2013, and an increase to $0.0023 in 2014 and 2015. "Per performance" means each time a song is heard by one listener, so each song played as multiplied by the webcaster's audience.

RAIN notes that most webcasters are already covered by deals that exist outside of these new CRB rates, including Pandora, Public Radio stations, commercial broadcasters and small webcasters.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2057228





A Merry Christmas to all Bankers
Ross Anderson

The bankers’ trade association has written to Cambridge University asking for the MPhil thesis of one of our research students, Omar Choudary, to be taken offline. They complain it contains too much detail of our No-PIN attack on Chip-and-PIN and thus “breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure”; they also complain about Omar’s post on the subject to this blog.

Needless to say, we’re not very impressed by this, and I made this clear in my response to the bankers. (I am embarrassed to see I accidentally left Mike Bond off the list of authors of the No-PIN vulnerability. Sorry, Mike!) There is one piece of Christmas cheer, though: the No-PIN attack no longer works against Barclays’ cards at a Barclays merchant. So at least they’ve started to fix the bug – even if it’s taken them a year. We’ll check and report on other banks later.

The bankers also fret that “future research, which may potentially be more damaging, may also be published in this level of detail”. Indeed. Omar is one of my coauthors on a new Chip-and-PIN paper that’s been accepted for Financial Cryptography 2011. So here is our Christmas present to the bankers: it means you all have to come to this conference to hear what we have to say!
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2...o-all-bankers/





Porn Site Says Revealing Takedown Notices Infringe Copyright
David Kravets

Perfect 10, the porn website that bills itself as displaying “the world’s most beautiful natural women,” claims that disclosing its copyright takedown notices is a little too revealing.

The copyright-infringement allegations are part of Perfect 10’s ongoing lawsuit against Google, a suit with a tortured procedural history. In 2007, a federal appeals court rendered a far-reaching decision, saying search engines like Google were not infringing copyrights by displaying thumbnails and hyperlinking to Perfect 10’s perfect babes.

Fast forward to today.

Part of the case, originally filed in 2005, is back before the San Francisco-based appeals court. Among other things, Perfect 10 (NSFW) alleges Google’s forwarding of Perfect 10’s takedown notices to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website constitutes copyright infringement.

Chilling Effects is a repository of takedown notices and has published thousands of them for scholarly research. Perfect 10 claims Google’s actions amount to copyright infringement because Perfect 10’s takedown notices include the nude pics.

The takedown notice was born in 1998 under the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA allows websites to host user-generated content free of being liable for copyright infringement if the website promptly responds to takedown notices from the right holders by removing the content. Viacom, in an unrelated case against Google, is challenging that process — one that it says will “destroy copyright.”

Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, started the Chilling Effects site about eight years ago “to educate the public and to provide transparency around the notice-and-takedown process,” she said in a telephone interview Thursday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also become involved, telling the appeals court in a filing this week that “Chilling Effects serves the purposes of the DMCA by facilitating research and education about online copyright policy, and by making possible an evaluation of the extent to which Congress’ goals for the DMCA are being met in practice.”

No court date has been set.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...edown-notices/





All Internet Porn Will be Blocked to Protect Children, Under UK Government Plan

THE UK Government is to combat the early sexualization of children by blocking internet pornography unless parents request it, it was revealed today.

The move is intended to ensure that children are not exposed to sex as a routine by-product of the internet. It follows warnings about the hidden damage being done to children by sex sites.

The biggest broadband providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, are being called to a meeting next month by Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, and will be asked to change how pornography gets into homes.

Instead of using parental controls to stop access to pornography - so-called "opting out" - the tap will be turned off at source. Adults will then have to "opt in."

The new initiative is in advance of the imminent convergence of the internet and television on one large screen in the living room.

It follows the success of an operation by most British internet service providers (ISPs) to prevent people inadvertently viewing child porn websites. Ministers want companies to use similar technology to shut out adult pornography from children. Pornography sites will be blocked at source unless people specifically ask to view them.

TalkTalk, which includes Tiscali and the British version of Aol.com, is already introducing a new free service early next year called "bright feed," which allows people to control the internet so that all devices are automatically covered without the need to set up individual controls.

Homeowners can either specify which adult sites they want to receive or put a cinema-style classification on their feed to restrict what is received according to age ranges, such as U, 12 or 18. A survey by Psychologies magazine this summer found that one in three children aged 10 in Britain had viewed pornography on the net.

Mr Vaizey said: "This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children.

"I'm hoping they will get their acts together so we don't have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years."

Claire Perry, the Tory MP for Devizes and a keen lobbyist for more restrictions, said: "Unless we show leadership, the internet industry is not going to self-regulate. The minister has said he will get the ISPs together and say, 'Either you clean out your stables or we are going to do it for you'."

"There is this very uneasy sense for parents of children that we do not have to tolerate this Wild West approach. We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure our children aren't stumbling across things we don't want them to see."

Previously the Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) has told MPs that such a blanket ban would be expensive and technically difficult to operate.

But Miranda Suit, co-founder of the charity Safermedia, which held a conference on internet porn at the Commons last month, said: "Technically we know it can be done because the ISPs are already removing child porn after the government put pressure on them.

"In the past, internet porn was regarded as a moral issue or a matter of taste. Now it has become a mental health issue because we now know the damage it is causing. We are seeing perverse sexual behavior among children. Legislation is both justifiable and feasible."

She quoted the example of two underage brothers sentenced to at least five years' detention this year for a sadistic sex attack on two other boys in South Yorkshire. The brothers were said to have had a "toxic" home life where they were exposed to pornography.

This weekend some ISPs appeared ready to introduce an "opt in" clause voluntarily. Andrew Heaney, executive director of strategy and regulation for TalkTalk, said: "Our objective was not to do what the politicians want us to do but to do what was right by our customers.

"If other companies aren't going to do it of their own volition, then maybe they should be leant on. Legislation is a sledgehammer but it could work."

A spokeswoman for Virgin Media said: "We already have an opt-in approach on mobiles. We've taken this approach as mobiles are taken out of the home - and kept in a pocket - whereas parents can control what happens within the home and online "We're able to block sites, so it would be possible to do the same on the internet. It is just about finding the right approach."

A spokesman for BT, which has a "clean feed" system to block access to illegal sites, said: "We do what we can to protect children."

The ISPA did not return calls to London's Sunday Times.
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news...-1225973481287





Internet Porn Block 'Not Possible' Say ISPs

Government plans to block pornography "at source" are unlikely to prove effective, say ISPs.
BBC

The proposal to cut off access to pornographic material was floated by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey in an interview with the Sunday Times.

The government is talking to ISPs to set up a meeting at which the proposal will be discussed.

But, say experts, technical challenges mean any large scale filtering system is doomed to failure.
Legal issues

A spokesman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, confirmed Mr Vaizey's plan to talk to ISPs about setting up an age verification scheme to govern access to pornographic sites.

"This is a very serious matter," said Mr Vaizey. "I think it's very important that it's the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children."

"I'm hoping they will get their acts together so we don't have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years."

In response to the government proposal, Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of the Ispa industry body, said: "Ispa firmly believes that controls on children's access to the internet should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down."

Mr Lansman said its members provided parents with many different means of controlling what is accessible via the computers in their homes.

"Online safety is a priority issue for the internet industry and ISPA will be discussing the options available to protect children with Government," he said.

"ISPs currently block child abuse content which is illegal and widely regarded as abhorrent," said Mr Lansman. "Blocking lawful pornography content is less clear cut, will lead to the blocking of access to legitimate content and is only effective in preventing inadvertent access."

BT, the UK's largest ISP, said it would be "happy" to take part in any discussion of the issues, but added: "There are many legal, consumer rights and technical issues that would need to be considered before any new web blocking policy was developed."
Filter failure

"Unfortunately, It's technically not possible to completely block this stuff," said Trefor Davies, chief technology officer at ISP Timico.

He said the sheer volume of pornographic material online and the number of ways that people access it, via the web, file-sharing networks, news groups, discussion boards and the like, made the job impossible.

While some proponents of a national pornographic filtering scheme cite the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) as an example of how such a scheme might work, Mr Davies said it was not a good guide.

The IWF circulates a list to ISPs of sites found to be hosting illegal images of child sexual abuse.

However, said Mr Davies, the IWF draws up its list largely using information passed to it by the public. In addition it only tackles illegal content found on websites.

Such a system would not work if it was used to deal with millions of porn sites, chat rooms and bulletin boards, he said.

Experience with filtering systems, he said, shows that they are a very blunt tool that often blocks access to sites that could be useful.

"You end up with a system that's either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it's just not effective," he said.

"The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind," he said.

Mr Davies also feared that any wide-scale attempt to police pornographic content would soon be expanded to include pirated pop songs, films and TV shows.

"If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that's a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see," he said.
'Child protection'

His comment was echoed by Jim Killock, chair of the Open Rights Group which campaigns on digital liberties issues.

"This is not about pornography, it is about generalised censorship through the back door," said Mr Killock.

"This is the wrong way to go," he said. "If the government controlled a web blacklist, you can bet that Wikileaks would be on it."

Miranda Suit, co-chair of Safer Media, which campaigns to make media safe for children, told the BBC that the pornography available on the internet was "qualitatively and quantitatively" different from any that has gone before.

Ms Suit cited a report compiled by the US conservative think tank The Witherspoon Institute which suggested that easy access to pornography was damaging some young people.

"Children are becoming addicted in their teens to internet pornography," she said. "They are being mentally damaged so they cannot engage in intimate relationships."

Safer Media backed the government call to block pornography "at source", said Ms Suit.

"What we are talking about is censorship to protect our children," she said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12041063





"Pedophiles Guide" Author Arrested in Colorado
Keith Coffman

A self-published author who sparked a debate over the limits of free speech with a book that police say advocates pedophilia was arrested by Florida authorities on obscenity charges at his Colorado home on Monday.

Philip Greaves, 47, who wrote "The Pedophiles Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct," was arrested without incident in Pueblo, Colorado, about 110 miles south of Denver, according to Captain Andrew McLachlan of the Pueblo police department.

Greaves made news last month when the book was posted for sale on Amazon.com, igniting outrage from child advocacy groups and law enforcement. Amazon pulled the book after a two-week controversy. There is no allegation so far that Greaves had any illegal sexual contact with children.

A Florida judge issued the arrest warrant after detectives in Winter Haven, Florida, contacted Greaves and allegedly purchased an autographed copy of the book from Greaves for $50. The book had been listed for sale at $4.79 a copy on Amazon.

"The book contains two graphic stories depicting an adult engaged in sex acts with children," according to a statement from the Polk County Sheriff's Office in Florida. "The book also defends, advocates, and trains adults regarding illegal sex acts between adults and children."

Greaves was booked into the Pueblo County jail and is being held on a $15,000 bond while awaiting extradition to Florida, said Laurie Kilpatrick, spokeswoman for the Pueblo County Sheriff's Office.

Pueblo police interviewed Greaves when the flap erupted, but found no reason to detain him at that time, McLachlan told Reuters. Greaves is not a registered sex offender in Colorado and was cooperative with police, McLachlan said.

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Greg McCune)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BJ59120101220





FBI Defends Disruptive Raids on Texas Data Centers
Kim Zetter

The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses.

The raids were part of an investigation prompted by complaints from AT&T and Verizon about unpaid bills allegedly owed by some data center customers, according to court records. One data center owner charges that the telecoms are using the FBI to collect debts that should be resolved in civil court. But on Tuesday, an FBI spokesman disputed that charge.

"We wouldn’t be looking at it if it was a civil matter," says Mark White, spokesman for the FBI’s Dallas office. "And a judge wouldn’t sign a federal search warrant if there wasn’t probable cause to believe that a fraud took place and that the equipment we asked to seize had evidence pertaining to the criminal violation."

In interviews with Threat Level, companies affected by the raids say they’ve lost millions of dollars in equipment and business after the FBI hauled off gear belonging to phone and VoIP providers, a credit card processing company and other businesses that housed equipment at the centers. Nobody has been charged in the FBI’s investigation.

According to the owner of one co-location facility, Crydon Technology, which was raided on March 12, FBI agents seized about 220 servers belonging to him and his customers, as well as routers, switches, cabinets for storing servers and even power strips. Authorities also raided his home, where they seized eight iPods, some belonging to his three children, five XBoxes, a PlayStation3 system and a Wii gaming console, among other equipment. Agents also seized about $200,000 from the owner’s business accounts, $1,000 from his teenage daughter’s account and more than $10,000 in a personal bank account belonging to the elderly mother of his former comptroller.

Mike Faulkner, owner of Crydon, says the seizure has resulted in him losing millions of dollars in revenue. It’s also put many of his customers out of business or at risk of closure.

The raids are the result of complaints filed by AT&T and Verizon about small VoIP service providers whom the telecoms say owe them money for connectivity services. But instead of focusing the raid on those companies, Faulkner and others say the FBI vacuumed up equipment and data belonging to hundreds of unrelated businesses.

In addition to Crydon, the data center of Core IP Networks was raided last week. Customers who went to Core IP to try to retrieve their equipment were threatened with arrest, according to an announcement posted online by the company’s CEO, Matthew Simpson. According to Simpson, the FBI is investigating a company that purchased services from Core IP in the past but had never co-located equipment at Core IP’s address. Simpson reported that 50 businesses lost access to their e-mail and data as a result of the raid. Some of those clients are phone companies, and the loss of their equipment has meant that some of their customers lost emergency 911 access.

"If you run a data center, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason," Simpson wrote.

Faulkner says the FBI seized about $2.5 million from Simpson’s personal bank account. Simpson did not respond to a request for comment.

Faulkner and others say that the FBI agent who led the raid, Special Agent Allyn Lynd from the Dallas field office, warned them not to discuss the raid with each other or with the press.

But a 39-page affidavit (.pdf) related to the Crydon raid provides a convoluted account of the investigation. It alleges that a number of conspirators, some of who may have connections to Faulkner, conspired to obtain agreements from AT&T and Verizon to purchase connectivity services with the telecoms. Several documents used to provide proof of business ownership and financial stability were forged, according to the affidavit. For example, the affidavit claims that one of the conspirators named Ronald Northern sent AT&T a bill from Verizon to show that he had a history of paying for services on time. The bill was allegedly forged with Verizon’s logo — which the company is claiming is a trademark infringement — and that the corporation number the conspirator used actually belonged to a different Verizon customer.

Northern could not be reached for comment.

The affidavit claims that Faulkner, Northern and others committed mail and wire fraud, criminal e-mail abuse (stemming from separate allegations of spamming), criminal copyright infringement and criminal use of fraudulent documents. The affidavit mentions several companies that Faulkner has been connected to including, Crydon, Premier Voice and Union Datacom.

But mixed in with these allegations is a separate tale that hints at the larger story behind the raid. AT&T and Verizon say they’re owed about $6 million in fees from VoIP service providers who used servers that were co-located at Crydon and the other data centers. The telecoms claim that these VoIP providers used up more than 120 million "physical connectivity minutes" without paying for them, and that attempts by AT&T and Verizon to collect on the debts proved fruitless.

"Based on my investigation and that of AT&T and Verizon," writes Special Agent Lynd in the affidavit, "I believe individuals associated with Lonestar Power and Premier Voice defrauded AT&T and Verizon out of hundreds of millions of minutes of physical connectivity service and significant revenue by means of the submission of false/fraudulent credit information and other false representations."

Faulkner, who was a part owner of Premier Voice before selling it about a year ago, acknowledges that Premier owed money to AT&T at one time — though he says he’s not certain it was for interconnection. He says that debt was assumed by the new owner when he sold the company. Either way, he says, this would be categorized as corporate debt, not fraud.

"There’s a big difference between stealing money and owing money," he says.

He says he often invests in troubled companies that are carrying debt when he buys them.

"Usually you settle the debt," he says. "But AT&T never contacted me about owing money. Verizon never contacted me."

Faulkner says the two telecoms have used the FBI to seize equipment to obtain evidence through a criminal investigation instead of pursuing the companies through civil litigation and the discovery process. And instead of targeting the investigation specifically at the VoIP companies, he says the FBI swept in everyone who had servers in the same place where the VoIP servers were located. As a result, all of Crydon Technology’s equipment was seized, as was the equipment of numerous businesses that had the bad luck to own servers running out of Crydon’s facility.

"They’re destroying more and more customers and it just doesn’t seem to make sense," Faulkner says. "They’ve done a horrible amount of damage and have been so barbaric in the way they’ve shut things down. If they just picked some random guy off the street to do this investigation, he could have done a better job than the FBI did."

Among more than 300 businesses affected by the raid on Crydon were Intelmate, which provides inmate calling services for prisons and jails and had about $100,000 in equipment seized in the raid; a credit card processing company that had just become PCI compliant and was in the process of signing on its first customers; Primary Target, a video game company that makes first-person shooters; a mortgage brokerage; and a number of VoIP companies and international telecoms that provided customers with service to the U.S. through servers belonging to a separate company Faulkner ran called Intelivox. These customers essentially lost connectivity to the U.S. after the raid, Faulkner says.

Faulkner says the FBI appears to have assumed that all the servers located at Crydon’s address belonged to him, and didn’t seem to understand the concept of co-location.

The seized data included transactional records for companies, which means the companies won’t be able to bill customers for services already rendered before the raid.

"All of our clients will have to refund their customers, and we’re in the hole now to refund our customers," says Faulkner. "I could tell the FBI agent had never even considered that. He just said, ‘Well, that’s your problem.’"

The owner of a credit card processing company who had servers at Crydon says he lost about $35,000 in equipment in the seizure, and that the survival of his company is at risk until he secures a new location. He asked that he and his company not be named because the company is in the process of securing business partners to launch its processing service. He fears that news about the disruption to his business operation could lead potential partners to avoid contracting with him. To keep his launch on track, he’s had to purchase about $32,000 in new equipment.

He said when he tried to explain to an FBI agent that some of the servers that were seized belonged to him and not to Faulkner, the FBI agent implied he was lying.

"We were treated like we were criminals," he said. "They assumed there was no legitimate business in there."

In addition to the transaction servers taken from Crydon’s facility, he also lost telephone service for his company after the FBI raided Core IP, which housed a business that was providing his company with VoIP.

FBI spokesman White says the equipment seizures were necessary.

"My understanding is that the way these things are hooked up is that they’re interconnected to each other," he says. "Company A may be involved in some criminal activity and because of the interconnectivity of all these things, the information of what company A is doing may be sitting on company B or C or D’s equipment."

White says the FBI is working with affected companies to provide them with copies of seized data they need to run their businesses.

"It’s not that we’re doing nothing to assist them," White says. "We’ve repeatedly asked the companies to call and provide us with the information we need so we can get the info they need back to them. It is a time-consuming process."

The owner of the card-processing company, however, says the FBI has been "completely unresponsive" to the needs of Crydon customers caught up in the raid. An agent gave him a fax number to send the FBI details about the equipment that belongs to him, but the fax number didn’t work. Then, he says, the agent in charge took a vacation.

"They were all unavailable after they effectively seized all of our equipment," he says.

An agent told the customer that no equipment would be released until agents could determine if it was used in criminal activity. And if it was used for criminal activity, it wouldn’t be released until after a trial.

"Our equipment could be there indefinitely," the customer said. "There’s been no due process…. I consider this to be an issue for anyone owning a data center right now. That they have this much power and can take anyone just because your equipment is inside a facility…. They’re supposed to limit their search and seizure to the owner of the equipment."

Faulkner says he’s managed to replicate mail servers and some functionality for some customers and is building up new business resources elsewhere — this time offshore in Panama, Mexico and Canada, where the FBI would have trouble seizing servers in the future. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has contacted him to investigate the FBI’s possible violation of due process.

Faulkner says when he visited the FBI’s office after the raid, he found numerous cubicles stacked full of servers seized in other raids that were waiting for someone to examine them. The irony, he says, is that in the case of his servers the data was all hardware encrypted.

"It would take a lot of NSA time to crack just one of them," Faulkner says.

Many of the allegations against Faulkner are based on claims from an unidentified informant who told the FBI that he used to work for Faulkner, and witnessed many criminal acts Faulkner committed. The witness told authorities he was "unaware of any legitimate business being run by Faulkner and that as far as he/she knew all of his income was derived from his illegal activities." The informant also claimed Faulkner used crack cocaine and methamphetamine and engaged in commercial spamming.

Faulkner says the unnamed informant is a former employee who was fired after failing to show up to work over an extended period.

"We paid him $70,000 to help us launch a VoIP business, and he never actually did anything," Faulkner says.

Faulkner says he doesn’t do drugs and he’s never conducted spamming nor been associated with spammers. He says when he has discovered spammers using ISP services he provided through companies he owned in the past, he would block their activities.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/200...ta-centers-ra/





Monitoring America
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker who allegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

The Obama administration heralds this local approach as a much-needed evolution in the way the country confronts terrorism.

Top Secret America is a project two years in the making that describes the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Today’s story is about those efforts at the local level, including law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every state and thousands of communities. View previous stories, explore relationships between government organizations and the types of work being done, and view top-secret geography on an interactive map.

However, just as at the federal level, the effectiveness of these programs, as well as their cost, is difficult to determine. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, does not know how much money it spends each year on what are known as state fusion centers, which bring together and analyze information from various agencies within a state.

The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total.

The Post findings paint a picture of a country at a crossroads, where long-standing privacy principles are under challenge by these new efforts to keep the nation safe.

The public face of this pivotal effort is Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, which years ago built one of the strongest state intelligence organizations outside of New York to try to stop illegal immigration and drug importation.

Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say Something" campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity."

She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists.

"This represents a shift for our country," she told New York City police officers and firefighters on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary this fall. "In a sense, this harkens back to when we drew on the tradition of civil defense and preparedness that predated today's concerns."

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From Afghanistan to Tennessee

On a recent night in Memphis, a patrol car rolled slowly through a parking lot in a run-down section of town. The military-grade infrared camera on its hood moved robotically from left to right, snapping digital images of one license plate after another and analyzing each almost instantly.

Suddenly, a red light flashed on the car's screen along with the word "warrant."

"Got a live one! Let's do it," an officer called out.

The streets of Memphis are a world away from the streets of Kabul, yet these days, the same types of technologies and techniques are being used in both places to identify and collect information about suspected criminals and terrorists.

The examples go far beyond Memphis.

* Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

* In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.

* U.S. Customs and Border Protection flies General Atomics' Predator drones along the Mexican and Canadian borders - the same kind of aircraft, equipped with real-time, full-motion video cameras, that has been used in wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan to track the enemy.

The special operations units deployed overseas to kill the al-Qaeda leadership drove technological advances that are now expanding in use across the United States. On the front lines, those advances allowed the rapid fusing of biometric identification, captured computer records and cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid.

Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with collecting photos, video images and other personal information about U.S. residents in the hopes of teasing out terrorists.

The DHS helped Memphis buy surveillance cameras that monitor residents near high-crime housing projects, problematic street corners, and bridges and other critical infrastructure. It helped pay for license plate readers and defrayed some of the cost of setting up Memphis's crime-analysis center. All together it has given Memphis $11 million since 2003 in homeland security grants, most of which the city has used to fight crime.

"We have got things now we didn't have before," said Memphis Police Department Director Larry Godwin, who has produced record numbers of arrests using all this new analysis and technology. "Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can't."

One of the biggest advocates of Memphis's data revolution is John Harvey, the police department's technology specialist, whose computer systems are the civilian equivalent of the fancier special ops equipment used by the military.

Harvey collects any information he can pry out of government and industry. When officers were wasting time knocking on the wrong doors to serve warrants, he persuaded the local utility company to give him a daily update of the names and addresses of customers.

When he wanted more information about phones captured at crime scenes, he programmed a way to store all emergency 911 calls, which often include names and addresses to associate with phone numbers. He created another program to upload new crime reports every five minutes and mine them for the phone numbers of victims, suspects, witnesses and anyone else listed on them.

Now, instead of having to decide which license plate numbers to type into a computer console in the patrol car, an officer can simply drive around, and the automatic license plate reader on his hood captures the numbers on every vehicle nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver, instead of having to wait 20 minutes for someone back at the office to manually check records, he can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a mug shot, a Social Security number, the status of the driver's license and any outstanding warrants.

The computer in the cruiser can tell an officer even more about who owns the vehicle, the owner's name and address and criminal history, and who else with a criminal history might live at the same address.

Take a recent case of two officers with the hood-mounted camera equipment who stopped a man driving on a suspended license. One handcuffed him, and the other checked his own PDA. Based on the information that came up, the man was ordered downtown to pay a fine and released as the officers drove off to stop another car.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

A record of that stop - and the details of every other arrest made that night, and every summons written - was automatically transferred to the Memphis Real Time Crime Center, a command center with three walls of streaming surveillance video and analysis capabilities that rival those of an Army command center.

There, the information would be geocoded on a map to produce a visual rendering of crime patterns. This information would help the crime intelligence analysts predict trends so the department could figure out what neighborhoods to swarm with officers and surveillance cameras.

But that was still not the end of it, because the fingerprints from the crime records would also go to the FBI's data campus in Clarksburg, W.Va. There, fingerprints from across the United States are stored, along with others collected by American authorities from prisoners in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.

This year for the first time, the FBI, the DHS and the Defense Department are able to search each other's fingerprint databases, said Myra Gray, head of the Defense Department's Biometrics Identity Management Agency, speaking to an industry group recently. "Hopefully in the not-too-distant future," she said, "our relationship with these federal agencies - along with state and local agencies - will be completely symbiotic."

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The FBI's 'suspicious' files

At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.

If the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, works as intended, the Guardian database may someday hold files forwarded by all police departments across the country in America's continuing search for terrorists within its borders.

The effectiveness of this database depends, in fact, on collecting the identities of people who are not known criminals or terrorists - and on being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.

"If we want to get to the point where we connect the dots, the dots have to be there," said Richard A. McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI's Baltimore office.

In response to concerns that information in the database could be improperly used or released, FBI officials say anyone with access has been trained in privacy rules and the penalties for breaking them.

But not everyone is convinced. "It opens a door for all kinds of abuses," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who now leads the American Civil Liberties Union's campaign on national security and privacy matters. "How do we know there are enough controls?"

The government defines a suspicious activity as "observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity" related to terrorism.

State intelligence analysts and FBI investigators use the reports to determine whether a person is buying fertilizer to make a bomb or to plant tomatoes; whether she is plotting to poison a city's drinking water or studying for a metallurgy test; whether, as happened on a Sunday morning in late September, the man snapping a picture of a ferry in the Newport Beach harbor in Southern California simply liked the way it looked or was plotting to blow it up.

Suspicious Activity Report N03821 says a local law enforcement officer observed "a suspicious subject . . . taking photographs of the Orange County Sheriff Department Fire Boat and the Balboa Ferry with a cellular phone camera." The confidential report, marked "For Official Use Only," noted that the subject next made a phone call, walked to his car and returned five minutes later to take more pictures. He was then met by another person, both of whom stood and "observed the boat traffic in the harbor." Next another adult with two small children joined them, and then they all boarded the ferry and crossed the channel.

All of this information was forwarded to the Los Angeles fusion center for further investigation after the local officer ran information about the vehicle and its owner through several crime databases and found nothing.

Authorities would not say what happened to it from there, but there are several paths a suspicious activity report can take:

At the fusion center, an officer would decide to either dismiss the suspicious activity as harmless or forward the report to the nearest FBI terrorism unit for further investigation.

At that unit, it would immediately be entered into the Guardian database, at which point one of three things could happen:

The FBI could collect more information, find no connection to terrorism and mark the file closed, though leaving it in the database.

It could find a possible connection and turn it into a full-fledged case.

Or, as most often happens, it could make no specific determination, which would mean that Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in limbo for as long as five years, during which time many other pieces of information about the man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning could be added to his file: employment, financial and residential histories; multiple phone numbers; audio files; video from the dashboard-mounted camera in the police cruiser at the harbor where he took pictures; and anything else in government or commercial databases "that adds value," as the FBI agent in charge of the database described it.

That could soon include biometric data, if it existed; the FBI is working on a way to attach such information to files. Meanwhile, the bureau will also soon have software that allows local agencies to map all suspicious incidents in their jurisdiction.

The Defense Department is also interested in the database. It recently transferred 100 reports of suspicious behavior into the Guardian system, and over time it expects to add thousands more as it connects 8,000 military law enforcement personnel to an FBI portal that will allow them to send and review reports about people suspected of casing U.S. bases or targeting American personnel.

And the DHS has created a separate way for state and local authorities, private citizens, and businesses to submit suspicious activity reports to the FBI and to the department for analysis.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

Of those, 103 have become full investigations that have resulted in at least five arrests, the FBI said. There have been no convictions yet. An additional 365 reports have added information to ongoing cases.

But most remain in the uncertain middle, which is why within the FBI and other intelligence agencies there is much debate about the effectiveness of the bottom-up SAR approach, as well as concern over the privacy implications of retaining so much information on U.S. citizens and residents who have not been charged with anything.

The vast majority of terrorism leads in the United States originate from confidential FBI sources and from the bureau's collaboration with federal intelligence agencies, which mainly work overseas. Occasionally a stop by a local police officer has sparked an investigation. Evidence comes from targeted FBI surveillance and undercover operations, not from information and analysis generated by state fusion centers about people acting suspiciously.

"It's really resource-inefficient," said Philip Mudd, a 20-year CIA counterterrorism expert and a top FBI national security official until he retired nine months ago. "If I were to have a dialogue with the country about this . . . it would be about not only how we chase the unknowns, but do you want to do suspicious activity reports across the country? . . . Anyone who is not at least suspected of doing something criminal should not be in a database."

Charles Allen, a longtime senior CIA official who then led the DHS's intelligence office until 2009, said some senior people in the intelligence community are skeptical that SARs are an effective way to find terrorists. "It's more likely that other kinds of more focused efforts by local police will gain you the information that you need about extremist activities," he said.

The DHS can point to some successes: Last year the Colorado fusion center turned up information on Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident planning to bomb the New York subway system. In 2007, a Florida fusion center provided the vehicle ownership history used to identify and arrest an Egyptian student who later pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism, in this case transporting explosives.

"Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything" said Richard Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office. "But we're happy to wade through these things."

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Expert training?

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.

"Alabama, Colorado, Vermont," said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. "California, Texas and Missouri," he continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.

"They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House - not on my watch!" he said. "My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders."

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to understand the world of terrorism. They aren't FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training.

Instead, they are often people like Lacy Craig, who was a police dispatcher before she became an intelligence analyst at Idaho's fusion center, or the detectives in Minnesota, Michigan and Arkansas who can talk at length about the lineage of gangs or the signs of a crystal meth addict.

Now each of them is a go-to person on terrorism as well.

"The CIA used to train analysts forever before they graduated to be a real analyst," said Allen, the former top CIA and DHS official. "Today we take former law enforcement officers and we call them intelligence officers, and that's not right, because they have not received any training on intelligence analysis."

State fusion center officials say their analysts are getting better with time. "There was a time when law enforcement didn't know much about drugs. This is no different," said Steven W. Hewitt, who runs the Tennessee fusion center, considered one of the best in the country. "Are we experts at the level of [the National Counterterrorism Center]? No. Are we developing an expertise? Absolutely."

But how they do that is usually left up to the local police departments themselves. In their desire to learn more about terrorism, many departments are hiring their own trainers. Some are self-described experts whose extremist views are considered inaccurate and harmful by the FBI and others in the intelligence community

Like Montijo, Walid Shoebat, a onetime Muslim who converted to Christianity, also lectures to local police. He too believes that most Muslims seek to impose sharia law in the United States. To prevent this, he said in an interview, he warns officers that "you need to look at the entire pool of Muslims in a community."

When Shoebat spoke to the first annual South Dakota Fusion Center Conference in Sioux Falls this June, he told them to monitor Muslim student groups and local mosques and, if possible, tap their phones. "You can find out a lot of information that way," he said.

A book expanding on what Shoebat and Montijo believe has just been published by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank. "Shariah: The Threat to America" describes what its authors call a "stealth jihad" that must be thwarted before it's too late.

The book's co-authors include such notables as former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, along with the center's director, a longtime activist. They write that most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country.

Frank Gaffney Jr., director of the center, said his team has spoken widely, including to many law enforcement forums.

"Members of our team have been involved in training programs for several years now, many of which have been focused on local law enforcement intelligence, homeland security, state police, National Guard units and the like," Gaffney said. "We're seeing a considerable ramping-up of interest in getting this kind of training."

Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center's book inaccurate and counterproductive. They say the DHS should increase its training of local police, using teachers who have evidence-based viewpoints.

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the department does not maintain a list of terrorism experts but is working on guidelines for local authorities wrestling with the topic.

So far, the department has trained 1,391 local law enforcement officers in analyzing public information and 400 in analytic thinking and writing skills. Kudwa said the department also offers counterterrorism training through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which this year enrolled 94 people in a course called "Advanced Criminal Intelligence Analysis to Prevent Terrorism."

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A lack of useful information

The DHS also provides local agencies a daily flow of information bulletins.

These reports are meant to inform agencies about possible terror threats. But some officials say they deliver a never-ending stream of information that is vague, alarmist and often useless. "It's like a garage in your house you keep throwing junk into until you can't park your car in it," says Michael Downing, deputy chief of counterterrorism and special operations for the Los Angeles Police Department.

A review of nearly 1,000 DHS reports dating back to 2003 and labeled "For Official Use Only" underscores Downing's description. Typical is one from May 24, 2010, titled "Infrastructure Protection Note: Evolving Threats to the Homeland."

It tells officials to operate "under the premise that other operatives are in the country and could advance plotting with little or no warning." Its list of vulnerable facilities seems to include just about everything: "Commercial Facilities, Government Facilities, Banking and Financial and Transportation . . ."

Bart R. Johnson, who heads the DHS's intelligence and analysis office, defended such reports, saying that threat reporting has "grown and matured and become more focused." The bulletins can't be more specific, he said, because they must be written at the unclassified level.

Recently, the International Association of Chiefs of Police agreed that the information they were receiving had become "more timely and relevant" over the past year.

Downing, however, said the reports would be more helpful if they at least assessed threats within a specific state's boundaries.

States have tried to do that on their own, but with mixed, and at times problematic, results.

In 2009, for instance, after the DHS and the FBI sent out several ambiguous reports about threats to mass-transit systems and sports and entertainment venues, the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center's Threat Analysis Program added its own information. "New Jersey has a large mass-transit infrastructure," its report warned, and "an NFL stadium and NHL/NBA arenas, a soccer stadium, and several concert venues that attract large crowds."

In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.

From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.

And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings.

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'We have our own terrorists'

Even if the information were better, it might not make a difference for the simplest of reasons: In many cities and towns across the country, there is just not enough terrorism-related work to do.

In Utah on one recent day, one of five intelligence analysts in the state's fusion center was writing a report about the rise in teenage overdoses of an over-the-counter drug. Another was making sure the visiting president of Senegal had a safe trip. Another had just helped a small town track down two people who were selling magazine subscriptions and pocketing the money themselves.

In the Colorado Information Analysis Center, some investigators were following terrorism leads. Others were looking into illegal Craigslist postings and online "World of Warcraft" gamers.

The vast majority of fusion centers across the country have transformed themselves into analytical hubs for all crimes and are using federal grants, handed out in the name of homeland security, to combat everyday offenses.

This is happening because, after 9/11, local law enforcement groups did what every agency and private company did in Top Secret America: They followed the money.

The DHS helped the Memphis Police Department, for example, purchase 90 surveillance cameras, including 13 that monitor bridges and a causeway. It helped buy the fancy screens on the walls of the Real Time Crime Center, as well as radios, robotic surveillance equipment, a mobile command center and three bomb-sniffing dogs. All came in the name of port security and protection to critical infrastructure.

Since there hasn't been a solid terrorism case in Memphis yet, the equipment's greatest value has been to help drive down city crime. Where the mobile surveillance cameras are set up, criminals scatter, said Lt. Mark Rewalt, who, on a recent Saturday night, scanned the city from an altitude of 1,000 feet.

Flying in a police helicopter, Rewalt pointed out some of the cameras the DHS has funded. They are all over the city, in mall parking lots, in housing projects, at popular street hang-outs. "Cameras are what's happening now," he marveled.

Meanwhile, another post-9/11 unit in Tennessee has had even less terrorism-related work to do.

The Tennessee National Guard 45th Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team, one of at least 50 such units around the country, was created to respond to what officials still believe is the inevitable release of chemical, biological or radiological material by terrorists.

The unit's 22 hazardous-materials personnel have the best emergency equipment in the state. A fleet of navy-blue vehicles - command, response, detection and tactical operations trucks - is kept polished and ready to roll in a garage at the armory in Smyrna.

The unit practices WMD scenarios constantly. But in real life, the crew uses the equipment very little: twice a year at NASCAR races in nearby Bristol to patrol for suspicious packages. Other than that, said Capt. Matt Hayes, several times a year they respond to hoaxes.

The fact that there has not been much terrorism to worry about is not evident on the Tennessee fusion center's Web site. Click on the incident map, and the state appears to be under attack.

Red icons of explosions dot Tennessee, along with blinking exclamation marks and flashing skulls. The map is labeled: "Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity.

But if you roll over the icons, the explanations that pop up have nothing to do with major terrorist plots: "Johnson City police are investigating three 'bottle bombs' found at homes over the past three days," one description read recently. ". . . The explosives were made from plastic bottles with something inside that reacted chemically and caused the bottles to burst."

Another told a similar story: "The Scott County Courthouse is currently under evacuation after a bomb threat was called in Friday morning. Update: Authorities completed their sweep . . . and have called off the evacuation."

Nine years after 9/11, this map is part of the alternative geography that is Top Secret America, where millions of people are assigned to help stop terrorism. Memphis Police Director Godwin is one of them, and he has his own version of what that means in a city where there have been 86 murders so far this year.

"We have our own terrorists, and they are taking lives every day," Godwin said. "No, we don't have suicide bombers - not yet. But you need to remain vigilant and realize how vulnerable you can be if you let up."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/t...oring-america/





The Smartphone that Spies, and Other Surprises
Galen M. Gruman

The invasion of consumer-oriented smartphones and now tablets into business is old news. But we're beginning to see unintended consequences of the adoption of such devices that users, businesses, and mobile platform providers should pay attention to. For example, the U.S. Army has begun educating soldiers on how to turn off the often automatic location-detection capabilities [1] in their smartphones and digital cameras so that they don't inadvertently reveal their locations to enemy fighters or spies.

Built-in microphone and cameras also can have unintended consequences, from inadvertant revelation of company secrets (say, a Christmas party photo that happens to include a view of a whiteboard with a product launch schedule in the background) to personal embarrassment (forgetting to end a call, then be heard talking like a sailor by a client).

The easy reaction [5] would be to ban such devices to eliminate the risks, but of course, that also eliminates the benefits. Plus, banning personal equipment in the workplace is extremely difficult to do -- for example, even with its body scanners and pat-downs, the feds can't provide 100 percent assurance of what enters an airplane. Companies that believe they can cordon off their environs from smartphones, USB drives, Eye-Fi cards, cameras, audio recorders, and the like are simply fooling themselves.

The U.S. Army's measured reaction [1] is a better example of how to address the issue; the Army realizes that letting soldiers stay in touch with loved ones when away from home is good for morale. Plus, the use of smartphones lets them manage their finances better thanks to the wide availability of mobile banking apps; soldiers are less prone to have financial difficulties that compromise their attention when in service.

The dilemma posed by consumer-focused devices in a blended world

Most of the problematic devices are designed primarily for consumer usage, and today that usage is biased toward unfettered sharing. Digital cameras (not just the ones built in to smartphones) often include geolocation stamps to help you remember where the picture was taken. More and more social networking apps, such as Foursquare and Facebook, track and publish your current location [6] -- courtesy of your smartphone -- so that your online friends can know where you are, allowing impromptu get-togethers or a reminder from your spouse to pick up a carton of orange juice while you're at the grocery store. There's even an industry that uses the technology to track kids in case they get lost.

In the business world, such tracking has long been used [7] to make sure delivery truck drivers aren't goofing off en route, such as swinging by a favorite bar or taking the gas- and time-consuming scenic route.

There are similar examples for the use of cameras and microphones: You can deposit a check at several banks by snapping a picture on your iPhone or Android, then sending in the image. You can buy products or compare prices by scanning bar codes via the built-in camera. You can sample music and get its name and a chance to buy the song or album via apps that tap into the bult-in microphone. You can record lectures for richer note-taking. And on and on.

But the same technology that brings benefts to some can bring dangers to others. Troop location is one such example. Stalking is another -- public geolocation makes that easier, too. Cameras and audio recording are great for spying uses, whether personal, business, or government.

First steps to managing multiple-user devices

So what to do? Educating users is the first step. As I hear over and over again from security and IT pros, most people want to do the right thing -- they just don't know if they are and, if not, or how to do it.

The use of mobile management tools can help [3], as they can disable cameras and so forth on several popular devices. The catch is that the devices have to be actually managed -- a person who brings in a personal device and never accesses the corporate network won't ever get managed by IT's mobile management tool. Plus, even for managed devices, the tools today aren't sophisticated enough to, say, disallow use of the camera within the employer facilities but allow it elsewhere, to prevent only problematic photo-taking.

The mobile industry needs to embrace the new business usage

Mobile device makers should play a stronger role. Although the devices may have been intended for consumer use, the lines between personal and business have all but disappeared [8], and device makers should design their wares with that merger in mind. Most don't even think about the business implications, as they consider the devices to be consumer electronics.

That thinking holds everyone back -- look at how the iPhone and iPad leaped into the enterprise [9] once Apple enabled business-class management capabilities, and then consider that they could have made that jump three years earlier had Apple built in such management from the get-go. Google's Android OS still suffers [10] from its avoidance of the business side of its use.

Apple, Google, and the rest should help users, businesses, and governments do the right thing more easily. It's great that iOS [11] and Android [12] let users manage location-information permissions, but they could do a better job in ensuring that individual apps can't act surreptitiously to access location information, personal information on the device, and so on -- in other words, to not be botnets. Device makers need to understand that in many environments -- such as health care and defense -- having 3G connectivity is problematic, so they should offer non-3G models, as Apple does with the iPad [13]. Ditto on cameras, microphones, and GPS.

I realize having a bunch of hardware variations is not realistic, but what if the mobile OS makers had a software switch that could turn these devices on or off as desired? That way, company-purchased devices could come preconfigured with the desired capabilities disabled (and not able to be turned on by users), and employee-purchased devices could be managed via mobile management tools' policies as to whether and when these particular capabilities were enabled. Think of this as the No Spy and No Stalk equivalents of the Airplane Mode software switches that smartphones have to disable radio communications when in flight -- except they could be managed "fleetwide."

The new capabilities of mobile devices can do a lot of good -- and some harm. The modern devices are used in a wide variety of personal and business situations. It's time that they're designed with that heterogeneity in mind, with the nuances of situational control built in from the beginning.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/...-workplace-578





Your Apps Are Watching You

A WSJ Investigation finds that iPhone and Android apps are breaching the privacy of smartphone users
Scott Thurm and Yukari Iwatani Kane

Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.

WSJ's Julia Angwin explains to Simon Constable how smartphone apps collect and broadcast data about your habits. Many don't have privacy policies and there isn't much you can do about it.

Among the apps tested, the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Because of the test's size, it's not known if the pattern holds among the hundreds of thousands of apps available.

Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone's unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and gender, to two of them.

Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone's ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.

"In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity," says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, an industry trade group. A cellphone is "always with us. It's always on."

iPhone maker Apple Inc. says it reviews each app before offering it to users. Both Apple and Google say they protect users by requiring apps to obtain permission before revealing certain kinds of information, such as location.

"We have created strong privacy protections for our customers, especially regarding location-based data," says Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr. "Privacy and trust are vitally important."

The Journal found that these rules can be skirted. One iPhone app, Pumpkin Maker (a pumpkin-carving game), transmits location to an ad network without asking permission. Apple declines to comment on whether the app violated its rules.

Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking. With few exceptions, app users can't "opt out" of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular computers. On computers it is also possible to block or delete "cookies," which are tiny tracking files. These techniques generally don't work on cellphone apps.

The makers of TextPlus 4, Pandora and Grindr say the data they pass on to outside firms isn't linked to an individual's name. Personal details such as age and gender are volunteered by users, they say. The maker of Pumpkin Maker says he didn't know Apple required apps to seek user approval before transmitting location. The maker of Paper Toss didn't respond to requests for comment.

Many apps don't offer even a basic form of consumer protection: written privacy policies. Forty-five of the 101 apps didn't provide privacy policies on their websites or inside the apps at the time of testing. Neither Apple nor Google requires app privacy policies.

To expose the information being shared by smartphone apps, the Journal designed a system to intercept and record the data they transmit, then decoded the data stream. The research covered 50 iPhone apps and 50 on phones using Google's Android operating system. (Methodology at WSJ.com/WTK.)

The Journal also tested its own iPhone app; it didn't send information to outsiders. The Journal doesn't have an Android phone app.

Among all apps tested, the most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a "supercookie," says Vishal Gurbuxani, co-founder of Mobclix Inc., an exchange for mobile advertisers.

On iPhones, this number is the "UDID," or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and typically can't be blocked or deleted.

"The great thing about mobile is you can't clear a UDID like you can a cookie," says Meghan O'Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. "That's how we track everything."

Ms. O'Holleran says Traffic Marketplace, a unit of Epic Media Group, monitors smartphone users whenever it can. "We watch what apps you download, how frequently you use them, how much time you spend on them, how deep into the app you go," she says. She says the data is aggregated and not linked to an individual.

The main companies setting ground rules for app data-gathering have big stakes in the ad business. The two most popular platforms for new U.S. smartphones are Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Google and Apple also run the two biggest services, by revenue, for putting ads on mobile phones.

Apple and Google ad networks let advertisers target groups of users. Both companies say they don't track individuals based on the way they use apps.

Apple limits what can be installed on an iPhone by requiring iPhone apps to be offered exclusively through its App Store. Apple reviews those apps for function, offensiveness and other criteria.

Apple says iPhone apps "cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used." Many apps tested by the Journal appeared to violate that rule, by sending a user's location to ad networks, without informing users. Apple declines to discuss how it interprets or enforces the policy.

Phones running Google's Android operating system are made by companies including Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Google doesn't review the apps, which can be downloaded from many vendors. Google says app makers "bear the responsibility for how they handle user information."

Google requires Android apps to notify users, before they download the app, of the data sources the app intends to access. Possible sources include the phone's camera, memory, contact list, and more than 100 others. If users don't like what a particular app wants to access, they can choose not to install the app, Google says.

"Our focus is making sure that users have control over what apps they install, and notice of what information the app accesses," a Google spokesman says.

Neither Apple nor Google requires apps to ask permission to access some forms of the device ID, or to send it to outsiders. When smartphone users let an app see their location, apps generally don't disclose if they will pass the location to ad companies.

Lack of standard practices means different companies treat the same information differently. For example, Apple says that, internally, it treats the iPhone's UDID as "personally identifiable information." That's because, Apple says, it can be combined with other personal details about people—such as names or email addresses—that Apple has via the App Store or its iTunes music services. By contrast, Google and most app makers don't consider device IDs to be identifying information.

A growing industry is assembling this data into profiles of cellphone users. Mobclix, the ad exchange, matches more than 25 ad networks with some 15,000 apps seeking advertisers. The Palo Alto, Calif., company collects phone IDs, encodes them (to obscure the number), and assigns them to interest categories based on what apps people download and how much time they spend using an app, among other factors.

By tracking a phone's location, Mobclix also makes a "best guess" of where a person lives, says Mr. Gurbuxani, the Mobclix executive. Mobclix then matches that location with spending and demographic data from Nielsen Co.

In roughly a quarter-second, Mobclix can place a user in one of 150 "segments" it offers to advertisers, from "green enthusiasts" to "soccer moms." For example, "die hard gamers" are 15-to-25-year-old males with more than 20 apps on their phones who use an app for more than 20 minutes at a time.

Mobclix says its system is powerful, but that its categories are broad enough to not identify individuals. "It's about how you track people better," Mr. Gurbuxani says.

Some app makers have made changes in response to the findings. At least four app makers posted privacy policies after being contacted by the Journal, including Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company behind the popular game Angry Birds (in which birds battle egg-snatching pigs). A spokesman says Rovio had been working on the policy, and the Journal inquiry made it a good time to unveil it.

Free and paid versions of Angry Birds were tested on an iPhone. The apps sent the phone's UDID and location to the Chillingo unit of Electronic Arts Inc., which markets the games. Chillingo says it doesn't use the information for advertising and doesn't share it with outsiders.

Apps have been around for years, but burst into prominence when Apple opened its App Store in July 2008. Today, the App Store boasts more than 300,000 programs.

Other phone makers, including BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. and Nokia Corp., quickly built their own app stores. Google's Android Market, which opened later in 2008, has more than 100,000 apps. Market researcher Gartner Inc. estimates that world-wide app sales this year will total $6.7 billion.

Many developers offer apps for free, hoping to profit by selling ads inside the app. Noah Elkin of market researcher eMarketer says some people "are willing to tolerate advertising in apps to get something for free." Of the 101 apps tested, the paid apps generally sent less data to outsiders.

Ad sales on phones account for less than 5% of the $23 billion in annual Internet advertising. But spending on mobile ads is growing faster than the market overall.

Central to this growth: the ad networks whose business is connecting advertisers with apps. Many ad networks offer software "kits" that automatically insert ads into an app. The kits also track where users spend time inside the app.

Some developers feel pressure to release more data about people. Max Binshtok, creator of the DailyHoroscope Android app, says ad-network executives encouraged him to transmit users' locations.

Mr. Binshtok says he declined because of privacy concerns. But ads targeted by location bring in two to five times as much money as untargeted ads, Mr. Binshtok says. "We are losing a lot of revenue."

Other apps transmitted more data. The Android app for social-network site MySpace sent age and gender, along with a device ID, to Millennial Media, a big ad network.

In its software-kit instructions, Millennial Media lists 11 types of information about people that developers may transmit to "help Millennial provide more relevant ads." They include age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views. In a re-test with a more complete profile, MySpace also sent a user's income, ethnicity and parental status.

A spokesman says MySpace discloses in its privacy policy that it will share details from user profiles to help advertisers provide "more relevant ads." My Space is a unit of News Corp., which publishes the Journal. Millennial did not respond to requests for comment on its software kit.

App makers transmitting data say it is anonymous to the outside firms that receive it. "There is no real-life I.D. here," says Joel Simkhai, CEO of Nearby Buddy Finder LLC, the maker of the Grindr app for gay men. "Because we are not tying [the information] to a name, I don't see an area of concern."

Scott Lahman, CEO of TextPlus 4 developer Gogii Inc., says his company "is dedicated to the privacy of our users. We do not share personally identifiable information or message content." A Pandora spokeswoman says, "We use listener data in accordance with our privacy policy," which discusses the app's data use, to deliver relevant advertising. When a user registers for the first time, the app asks for email address, gender, birth year and ZIP code.

Google was the biggest data recipient in the tests. Its AdMob, AdSense, Analytics and DoubleClick units collectively heard from 38 of the 101 apps. Google, whose ad units operate on both iPhones and Android phones, says it doesn't mix data received by these units.

Google's main mobile-ad network is AdMob, which it bought this year for $750 million. AdMob lets advertisers target phone users by location, type of device and "demographic data," including gender or age group.

A Google spokesman says AdMob targets ads based on what it knows about the types of people who use an app, phone location, and profile information a user has submitted to the app. "No profile of the user, their device, where they've been or what apps they've downloaded, is created or stored," he says.

Apple operates its iAd network only on the iPhone. Eighteen of the 51 iPhone apps sent information to Apple.

Apple targets ads to phone users based largely on what it knows about them through its App Store and iTunes music service. The targeting criteria can include the types of songs, videos and apps a person downloads, according to an Apple ad presentation reviewed by the Journal. The presentation named 103 targeting categories, including: karaoke, Christian/gospel music, anime, business news, health apps, games and horror movies.

People familiar with iAd say Apple doesn't track what users do inside apps and offers advertisers broad categories of people, not specific individuals.

Apple has signaled that it has ideas for targeting people more closely. In a patent application filed this past May, Apple outlined a system for placing and pricing ads based on a person's "web history or search history" and "the contents of a media library." For example, home-improvement advertisers might pay more to reach a person who downloaded do-it-yourself TV shows, the document says.

The patent application also lists another possible way to target people with ads: the contents of a friend's media library.

How would Apple learn who a cellphone user's friends are, and what kinds of media they prefer? The patent says Apple could tap "known connections on one or more social-networking websites" or "publicly available information or private databases describing purchasing decisions, brand preferences," and other data. In September, Apple introduced a social-networking service within iTunes, called Ping, that lets users share music preferences with friends. Apple declined to comment.

Tech companies file patents on blue-sky concepts all the time, and it isn't clear whether Apple will follow through on these ideas. If it did, it would be an evolution for Chief Executive Steve Jobs, who has spoken out against intrusive tracking. At a tech conference in June, he complained about apps "that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...703574602.html





2010 Trend Watch Update: Attacks on Cryptography
Marcia Hofmann

At the beginning of this year EFF identified a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we thought would play a significant role in shaping digital rights in 2010, with a promise to revisit our predictions at the end of the year. Now, as 2010 comes to a close, we're going through each of our predictions one by one to see how accurate we were in our trend-spotting. Today, we're looking back on Trend #1, Attacks on Cryptography, where we predicted:

Quote:
In 2010, several problems with cryptography implementations should come to the fore, showing that even encrypted communications aren't as safe as users expect. Two of the most significant problems we expect concern cellphone security and web browser security.

GSM, the technology that underpins most cellphone communications around the world, uses a deeply flawed security technology. In 2010, devices which intercept phone calls will get cheaper and cheaper. Expect to see public demonstrations of the ability to break GSM's encryption and intercept mobile phone calls. We hope that this will prompt the mobile phone industry to replace its obsolete systems with modern and easy-to-use cryptography.

SSL (in its newer versions known as TLS), the basic security technology of the world wide web, is exhibiting similarly severe flaws. Several powerful practical attacks against real-world SSL implementations were published in 2009; more problems and concerns will emerge throughout 2010. SSL security must be improved.

Despite flaws in how SSL is used, it's still the best system for web security around, and so it also needs to become more widely deployed. Google set a fantastic example this week when it set GMail to use SSL by default — in 2010 we hope to see other online service providers follow its example.
Our predictions on this front were solid. In July, security researcher Chris Paget demonstrated at DEFCON how easy it is to trick cell phones into turning off encryption and connecting to a fake base station, thereby allowing a third party to eavesdrop on conversations. The security vulnerabilities that make this attack possible aren't new, but historically would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to exploit. Paget's system cost roughly $1,500 to assemble — bringing the attack well within the means of the less financially flush.

Three months later, Eric Butler and Ian Gallagher highlighted the insecurity of Internet web sites that don't use SSL by default when they debuted the Firesheep Firefox extension at ToorCon. Firesheep allows an eavesdropper to hijack another user's session on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, and many other popular websites merely by sniffing packets on an open wireless network and capturing the victim's cookie. This means that if a web site isn't using SSL to encrypt users' communications, Firesheep makes it ridiculously simple for someone to access a user's account on that site. In response, a handful of sites started using encryption by default, including GitHub and DropBox, while others, such as Windows Live, have made it an option for the first time.

EFF has made progress on monitoring and aiding HTTPS adoption with our popular HTTPS Everywhere software, and on advancing research on how HTTPS is actually used with our SSL Observatory. Though the Observatory has yet to find evidence of the man-in-the-middle attacks we're most curious about, it's unearthed plenty of evidence that HTTPS is not always used as its designers intended.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/1...s-cryptography





Venezuela: The Bill to Regulate Internet has been Approved

On Monday, December 20th, the Venezuelan Parliament passed the bill that gives the Executive the power to regulate all content accessible in Internet within Venezuela. Through an administrative organ, CONATEL, all venezuelan-based ISPs will have the responsibility to block all content that collides with article 28 and 29:

1. Inciten y promuevan el odio y la intolerancia por razones religiosas, políticas, por diferencia de género, por racismo o xenofobia.
2. Inciten o promuevan y/o hagan apología al delito.
3. Constituyan propaganda de Guerra.
4. Fomenten zozobra en la ciudadanía o alteren el orden público.
5. Desconozcan a las autoridades legítimamente constituidas.
6. Induzcan al homicidio.
7. Inciten o promuevan el incumplimiento del ordenamiento jurídico vigente.
8. Promuevan, hagan apología o inciten a alteraciones del orden público
9. Utilicen el anonimato.
10. Desconozcan las autoridades legítimamente constituidas.


1. Encourages and promotes hatred and intolerance for religious, political, and gender difference, by racism or xenophobia.
2. Incites or promote and/or justify the crime.
3. Constitutes war propaganda.
4. Fosters unrest among the citizenship or disturb public order.
5. Refuses to recognize the government's authority.
6. Induces to murder.
7. Incites or promotes the violation of existing law.
8. Promote, justify or incite public disturbances
9. Use anonimity.
10. Disregards the legitimate authority

According to congress members, the law will regulate all content, including text, images, sound and video, that might collide with the above mentioned provisions. Through an administrative procedure, those ISPs that are considered to break the law will be sanctioned with high fines.

This very morning, the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, stated through his twitter account that he just had enacted the law. The law will take effect the day following its publication in the Official Gazette.
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.o...been-approved/





Ingram Micro Sees More Android, iPhones at Work
Alex Dobuzinskis

Smartphones such as Google Inc's Android-based devices and Apple Inc's iPhone are poised to become popular business tools, said an executive at the world's biggest technology distributor.

Increased use of Androids and iPhones for business, as consumers look to simplify their lives with one device for work and play, could hurt Research in Motion's BlackBerry, which has been the dominant smartphone for corporations.

Hot-selling Android and iPhones have already conquered the consumer market, and with users becoming accustomed to those devices, more people want to use them for work, said Mario Leone, chief information officer at Ingram Micro Inc, which provides corporations with billions of dollars' worth of technology each year.

The BlackBerry is a key device that companies made "part of their architecture," Leone told Reuters in an interview.

"I think you're seeing the same thing with the iPhone, which has historically been more in the consumer space and less in the pure business environment. And that's changing -- I think the iPhone and soon the Android and all of that -- CIOs like myself have to make room for those kinds of devices."

Research in Motion Ltd on Thursday reported better-than-expected third-quarter results, driven by sales of the BlackBerry Torch.

But analysts have pointed to some headwinds for RIM's BlackBerry sales, even in the business segment, where it has ruled supreme.

The BlackBerry operating system is expected to see its global market share among business users decline to 33 percent in 2014, compared with 41.5 percent this year, according to research firm IDC.

Much of that will come from a surge by Android, which IDC expects to grab 12.7 percent in 2014, compared with 5.2 percent this year. In the face of strong Android growth, IDC expects the iPhone OS to decrease to 15 percent share in the same period, from 17.5 percent now.

Until now, one factor bolstering BlackBerry sales has been the company's robust encryption technology to secure e-mail communications, making that device an easier choice for companies worried about losing proprietary information.

But Leone said businesses will increasingly find solutions to overcome security concerns. For instance, he said, sensitive information could be protected on Microsoft Corp's SharePoint software, which could help businesses use more smartphones.

"I don't think that over time they can be blocked from the corporate architecture," he said.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: editing by Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BG4BD20101217





Supernode crash

Skype Outage Hits Users Worldwide

Millions can't make calls, or are dropped in mid-conversation, because of a network connection failure — the second major disruption in service this year.
W.J. Hennigan

Millions of Skype Internet phone users worldwide couldn't make calls — or were dropped in mid-conversation — because of a network connection failure that began about 9 a.m. Wednesday PST.

It marked the second time this year that the popular, low-cost calling service was hit with a major outage, and this one was more widespread than the two-day disruption in 2007.

"For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of," said Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. "Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide."

Indeed. In the past, there have been network outages to auction site EBay and social networks Facebook and Twitter, but the impact wasn't as great, Golvin said.

"With those sort of disruptions, people have alternatives or they can wait it out," he said. "But with something like this — and you need to communicate with someone — it's far more significant."

Skype tried to reach its customers through its official blog and messages on the micro-blogging service Twitter.

"Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype — we're investigating, and we're sorry for the disruption to your conversations," Skype said on its Twitter account. "Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal — thanks for your continued patience."

In a blog post, Skype said it first noticed a problem when the number of people on the website dropped off. It "wasn't typical or expected, so we began to investigate," it said.

"Skype isn't a network like a conventional phone or IM network — instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running," the post said. "Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline."

The Luxembourg company said that engineers were working to get the system running and that it "may take a few hours."

But the outage in many areas lasted into the night.

Skype apologized, and said some features, such as group video calling, "may take longer to return to normal."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,2778742.story





Intel's Sandy Bridge Processors have a Remote Kill Switch
Emil Protalinski

Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors have a new feature that the chip giant is calling Anti-Theft 3.0. The processor can be disabled even if the computer has no Internet connection or isn't even turned on, over a 3G network. With Intel anti-theft technology built into Sandy Bridge, David Allen, director of distribution sales at Intel North America, told ITBusiness that users have the option to set up their processor so that if their computer is lost or stolen, it can be shut down remotely.

For those who want to protect their computers from thieves, the ability to remotely disable them sounds great. We're not sure the CPU is the component that should be targeted though. While a given stolen netbook, laptop, or desktop can no longer be turned on if Intel's new kill switch is flipped, there's nothing stopping the thief from taking out the HDD and putting it in another computer. As a result, you've only slightly slowed the criminal down and haven't really managed to ensure your sensitive data is protected.

Furthermore, those wearing tin foil hats will want to know if users have complete control over the feature. Is it enabled by default? If not, could someone else turn it on? Can anyone but the owner of the processor disable it remotely? Those might seem like paranoid questions, but nonetheless Intel needs to guarantee that the answer to all three is a resounding no.
http://www.techspot.com/news/41643-i...ll-switch.html





In 3-D Broadcast, Big Is Bigger, But Eyes Grow Weary
Joshua Brustein

When Zydrunas Ilgauskas of the Miami Heat took the court at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, the benefit of watching basketball in 3-D became immediately apparent. On ESPN’s 3-D broadcast, the 7-foot-3 Ilgauskas towered over the players for the Heat and the Knicks in a manner that has no true equivalent in a standard broadcast. The effect would be familiar to anyone accustomed to watching basketball on television who is sitting in good seats in an arena: a sudden appreciation for the physical size of the players on the court.

The biggest story on Friday, of course, was LeBron James’s first visit to Madison Square Garden since he signed with the Heat. But Friday also marked the first N.B.A. game that could be watched at home in 3-D, and the N.B.A. and ESPN, which have been experimenting with 3-D production for four years, were hoping that it would help drive wider adoption of a technology that has yet to truly catch on.

Adding a 3-D production to a busy Friday at the Garden was no small task. Three other broadcast teams were vying for space in the already-tight confines of the arena, leaving scant room for the nine cameras required for the 3-D production. In order take up the least amount of space, six of those cameras were robotic, operated via joysticks by a team tucked away in the bowels of the arena. A fly-cam, a moving camera attached to a cable suspended from the upper reaches of the arena, provided the high shots.

Each 3-D camera takes two people to operate, one to point the camera in the right direction, and another, what ESPN called a convergence engineer, to focus. ESPN also brought a separate set of announcers and a separate 3-D production truck, staffed with technicians wearing 3-D glasses.

ESPN plans to air 10 more games during this regular season, including one on Christmas, a day on which it expects the number of people who own 3-D televisions to jump significantly. The network will also show six playoff games.

It is still not clear whether the investment will pay off in terms of profits or production value.

The best results came when the cameras were close to the action and very low. A viewer could see more easily the lanes through which a player drove to the basket and could appreciate the spacing of the players on the court. When Knicks forward Danilo Gallinari caught a pass with his back to the camera and then shot a three-point shot, the ball did seem to move further into the screen before hitting the bottom of the net.

But much of the game had to be shot from a higher vantage point to allow viewers to follow everything happening on the court. From these angles, the depth of the court remained, but the players themselves appeared flat, leaving them looking like cardboard cutouts. It was not necessarily unpleasant, just odd.

Because of the constraints on space in the arena, the higher cameras were placed low enough that when people in the crowd stood up they would suddenly appear in full focus in front of the camera, drawing a viewer’s eyes away from the game. The flattened figure of the cross-armed Mike D’Antoni in the foreground was also a constant distraction.

3-D cameras have to pan slower than standard cameras, because of the more complex focus issues. In a game where the ball was moving up and down the court quickly, there were times when they could not keep up.

ESPN’s production teams are still working to tweak the mixture of shots, and networks officials said they planned to use more low camera angles than they use in a standard broadcast.

This would improve the experience, but other problems seem harder to address. Many times, when the camera angle changed, there was a momentary lack of focus. By halftime my eyes were exhausted from the effort, leaving me questioning whether I could keep up with another 24 minutes. But then, by that point in the evening, the game was starting to get away from the Knicks, too.
http://offthedribble.blogs.nytimes.c...es-grow-weary/





Buyers Shrug Off 3D, Internet TVs
Liana B. Baker

Fancy new features like 3D screens and Internet connectivity have failed to inspire U.S. television shoppers, dashing a hoped-for recovery in the global consumer electronics industry.

Manufacturers such as Sony Corp, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Sharp Corp are learning that features such as razor-thin LED TVs are just not enough for television sales to stage a comeback in the United States.

On Tuesday, Best Buy Co Inc Chief Executive Brian Dunn told analysts that sales of 3D TVs had fallen behind industry expectations.

"There was confusion about 3D early (on)," Dunn said. "It was a little short on content."

The largest U.S. electronics chain cut its full-year profit forecast, and its disappointing results put pressure on shares of Best Buy and other electronics companies.

"The stock got killed today," said Frank Ingarra, a co-portfolio manager of Hennessy Funds, which holds 32,000 shares of Best Buy. The retailer's shares dropped nearly 15 percent on Tuesday to close at $35.52.

Despite a better-than-expected performance by U.S. retailers in November, consumers are holding off on big-ticket purchases like TVs with the latest bells and whistles.

Consumer electronics executives say TV sales will improve once more 3D content becomes available next year and when consumers start recording their own content on 3D-enabled camcorders.

"Just like how high-definition TV started in sports and movies, as 3D evolves, it will go with sports and movies and then become more of an everyday thing," Jay Vandenbree, head of home entertainment at LG Electronics USA, said in an interview.

Road Blocks

For now, investors are demanding to know why retailers aggressively pushed a new generation of TVs after many consumers had just upgraded to their first flat-screen sets this year.

"People don't understand the added benefit of 3D," Ingarra said. "When you get into $2,000 TVs, you start thinking: 'At what point do I really need this, and is it going to make my viewing experience that much better?'"

Consumers are also put off by the need to purchase expensive 3D glasses to go along with the new TVs, said NPD analyst Ross Rubin. The picture quality of some shows produced in 3D has also made some viewers queasy.

"If the 3D content hasn't been produced well -- if it has been aggressive on certain kinds of effects -- that can result in discomfort for viewers," Rubin said.

This holiday, consumers are more interested in buying TVs with bigger screens, rather than pricier ones with more features, Rubin said.

Sales of TVs with Google Inc's Google TV software, which lets viewers surf the Web directly from TV sets, were also hurt as consumers realized they could find the same services, like movie service Netflix Inc, elsewhere.

"People can also buy lower-priced alternatives to connected TVs, be it video game players, Blu-ray players or Apple TV."

(Reporting by Liana Baker; Editing by Kenneth Li, Gerald E. McCormick and Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BD51T20101214





Sony Optimistic About Google TV Despite Setbacks
Hiroko Tabuchi

Sony acknowledged on Monday that reviews of its new Internet-enabled Google TV have been mixed but remained upbeat about its prospects, even as Google asked other TV makers to delay new models until the software can be refined.

Several of Sony’s rivals, including Toshiba, LG Electronics and Sharp, had been prepared to show off their own versions of the Google TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. But Google has asked those makers to delay their introductions, a sign of the difficulties the company faces in making inroads into the unfamiliar realm of consumer electronics.

Sony, which developed the Google TV with the Internet search giant, and Intel started selling models in October. Logitech, the Swiss technology company, also sells Google TVs.

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo on Monday, Hiroshi Yoshioka, Sony’s executive deputy president and head of Sony’s TV business, said sales of the Google TVs were “in line with expectations.“ He declined to give specific numbers.

He said sales were likely to pick up further when more services were available from Google for televisions, including Android Market, from which users will be able to download applications onto their TVs in early 2011.

Mr. Yoshioka agreed that initial reviews of the TV were mixed. “Some reviews have been good, some have been bad,” he said. “It might take a little longer for users to really start having fun” with Google TVs, he said.

As for Sony’s TV business overall, Mr. Yoshioka said the Tokyo-based electronics and entertainment company would struggle to make the TV division profitable this year, and that Sony would fall short of a target to sell 25 million TVs in the fiscal year ending in March.

Sony’s 3D-TVs, which went on sale in June, had a slow start, though sales have picked up in November and December, Mr. Yoshioka said. The lack of content to view in 3-D — as well as misconceptions among users that 3-D TVs can’t show conventional 2-D images — seems to be hurting sales, he said.

Skeptics have also said consumers do not want to wear the clunky glasses that must be worn to see images in 3-D.

For now, Sony aims for sales of 3-D TV to make up 10 percent of its overall TV sales this fiscal year.

Still, Mr. Yoshioka said he expected 3-D capability to become a standard feature for all TVs in the future.

But that could also mean that 3-D TVs will lose their price premium in an industry where price competition is fierce. Rivals, including Samsung of South Korea, the world’s biggest TV maker by sales, are pushing their own versions of 3-D TVs. Toshiba, meanwhile, intends to sell a 3-D TV that does not require glasses, though only in small sizes.

Sony had been banking on its 3-D and Google TV models to finally get its TV business back in the black after six years of losses. Sony dominated the global TV market in the 1990s but has since fallen behind in market share for flat-panel liquid-crystal display TVs.

Sony dispatched 15 to 16 engineers to work with programmers at Google, which is based in based in Mountain View, Calif., full time on the Google TV project, Mr. Yoshioka said.

He said there was much more collaboration on Google TV than on Sony’s use of Google’s Android operating system for cellphones from Sony Ericsson, a joint venture between Sony and Swedish telecommunications giant.

The Google TVs, which run on Intel’s Atom chips, are close to full-fledged computers. They let users search for keywords to find shows and see when and where it is being broadcast, as well as viewing links to Web sites about the show.

But major U.S. networks have been reluctant to provide shows on Google TV. INBC, CBS, ABC and Hulu have blocked people from watching full-length shows on their Web sites using Google TV, though users can pay to watch shows or movies on demand from Netflix or Amazon.

Samsung still plans to show off a forthcoming Google TV model at the Consumer Electronics Show, while Vizio will demonstrate its take on Google TV in private demonstrations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/te...gy/21sony.html





Netflix: We're Working On HTML5 Standard to Bring Streaming Video to All Devices
Mike Melanson

Remember a couple months back, when we were all waiting breathlessly for Netflix to release an app for the iOS, so we could finally watch streaming movies on the go? Well, iPhone and iPad users finally got their wish, as did Windows Phone 7 users, but Android users are left awaiting their own, device-specific app.

According to Netflix VP of Engineering Christian Kaiser, this is a key area of focus for Netflix in the coming year, and the company hopes to help define a standard that will bring streaming video to a variety of consumer electronics using HTML5.

When the company posted about its use of HTML5 technology earlier this month, it spoke of "the freedom to create rich, dynamic and interactive experiences for any platform with a web browser." HTML5, it said, was the core to its iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Immediately, the comments were filled with Linux, WebOS, Android and other platform users asking when streaming video would be brought to them. The post was later updated to say that the company would address these issues in the near future.

Today's blog post addresses this issue, explaining that HTML5 "seems like a natural next step for us to use it for streaming video playback within our HTML5-based user interfaces. However, as of today, there is no accepted standard for advanced streaming through the <video> tag."

For Netflix to use HTML5 to stream video, writes Kaiser, a number of requirements need to be met, from agreeing on protocols to formats to protecting content. He explains that, with proprietary technology such as these iPhone and iPad apps, Netflix has solved most all of these issues. The only thing remaining is "a way of exposing all this functionality into HTML5." The result would be a standard that could be used by many services to bring streaming video to nearly any device, writes Kaiser:

Quote:
But what if we could replace all these proprietary solutions with an industry-wide standard? Then Netflix, or any other video streaming service, could deliver to a standard browser as a pure HTML5 web application, both on computers and in CE devices with embedded browsers. Browser builders and CE manufacturers could support every OS and device they choose, leveraging the same implementations across multiple streaming services instead of building and integrating an one-off implementation for each service. Consumers would benefit by having a growing number of continually evolving choices available on their devices, just like how the web works today for other types of services.

We believe that this is an attractive goal.
To this end, Netflix has said that it is getting involved with the community to devise a standard. It is working to define an "industry standard for adaptive streaming" and to "define the requirements for premium on-demand streaming services like ours"."

Even this description is glossing over the more technical points presented in the post, but the short of it is that this sort of advancement could bring a more device-agnostic standard to streaming video and help put an end to much of the debate over how to get streaming video on different devices.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...o_bring_st.php





A Hollywood Brawl: How Soon Is Too Soon for Video on Demand?
Brooks Barnes

Perhaps the biggest fight on Hollywood’s horizon involves where and when consumers can watch movies.

Studios want to offer new movies on video-on-demand systems in living rooms about 45 days after the movies arrive in theaters. The response from multiplex theater chains, which currently have an exclusive window of about 120 days to show new films and are concerned about protecting ticket sales: Over our dead bodies.

Meanwhile at the opposite end of the motion picture business — specialty film — experiments with the timing of video-on-demand have been occurring for some time. A smattering of new films, most recently the drama “All Good Things,” are even daring to go to V.O.D. before they open in theaters. Can the lessons learned by the art house sector teach the big boys anything for the coming showdown?

Specialty film, by definition, is a sharply different business from mainstream cinema — the best evidence being the amount of money gambled on individual releases. For that reason and others, the National Association of Theater Owners, for one, does not believe that the art house market’s on-demand experiments offer any parallels to the discussion under way in the industry’s top tier.

“The little V.O.D. distributions of little movies by companies such as Magnolia and IFC Entertainment have been happening for years,” said John Fithian, the association’s president. “Only very few cinema companies will exhibit those movies. Those movies are not significant. The premium V.O.D. being discussed by some major studios now concerns exhibitors much, much more.”

That may be true, but Magnolia Pictures and IFC Entertainment, two of the few survivors in the troubled independent business, encountered just as much resistance from theater owners when they first experimented with new video-on-demand “windows” that make 120 days seem like an artifact from another era. A few years ago, when IFC, part of Rainbow Media, worked with Comcast to offer movies on V.O.D. on the same day they were released in theaters, IFC got severe pushback from exhibitors.

“When we first started, only four or five theaters were on board — the others were just too scared about what V.O.D. might do to their ticket sales,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC.

As Mr. Sehring and other independent film companies plowed ahead, however, more theater owners came on board, realizing that video-on-demand was not as threatening to their business as they initially thought. By Mr. Sehring’s estimation, about 500 theaters are now willing to play films that are simultaneously made available on video-on-demand systems.

Magnolia has gone even further with its release of “All Good Things,” a love story and murder mystery starring Kirsten Dunst and Ryan Gosling. That film, directed by Andrew Jarecki and loosely based on the true story of a New York real estate dynasty, arrived first in V.O.D. After about a month of playing in homes, it rolled into theaters on Dec. 3.

This kind of distribution strategy has traditionally been viewed as even more heretical, with theaters wondering why anyone would bother driving to a movie and buying a ticket to a film that has already been available to watch from the comfort of the living room. But if “All Good Things” is any measure, perhaps those worries are overblown.

“All Good Things,” which cost about $20 million to make, performed in spectacular fashion on V.O.D., selling over $4 million in rentals priced at about $10.99, according to Magnolia, which is a division of 2929 Entertainment, a media company co-owned by Mark Cuban. Eamonn Bowles, Magnolia’s president, said that total makes “All Good Things” one of the top nonstudio V.O.D. releases of the year. (Unlike box-office statistics, video-on-demand sales are not closely tracked by independent sources.)

When “All Good Things” finally arrived in theaters, including prominent independent places like New York’s Angelika Film Center, ticket sales averaged about $19,000 a theater — a strong performance by specialty film standards. To date, “All Good Things,” playing in 35 theaters nationwide, has sold about $200,000 in tickets, according to Magnolia. The film, an awards contender, will expand to a much wider release in the weeks ahead.

“The idea is to turn V.O.D. almost into a paid word-of-mouth campaign — early adopters and people interested in the subject matter will find the film and hopefully tell their friends it is worth seeing in a theater,” Mr. Bowles said.

Could that sort of word-of-mouth campaign also power a Hollywood blockbuster?

Theater owners have had an unexpected ally in their resistance to making films available early on video-on-demand systems, including options like Amazon Video on Demand: the filmmakers themselves. Most directors feel strongly that their work should be seen on the big screen.

Mr. Jarecki said his desire for people to see “All Good Things” helped him get over his own resistance. “It would be nice if there was an art house accessible to everyone in the country, but there isn’t,” he said. “So I got a bit past the stigma of V.O.D. because the power of having your movie seen so widely on it is extraordinary.”

Nobody is arguing for such extreme experiments when it comes to wide-release commercial films. With theater owners up in arms over a 45-day window, imagine how they would react to even a simultaneous V.O.D. release. So what’s the lesson? Perhaps it is simply that fear of the untried might be overstated — that business calamity is not a certainty. “Times are changing,” Mr. Sehring said. “Like it or not, the pack is going to have to learn to explore and exploit these new models.”

Sooner rather than later. Studios like Warner Brothers have made clear they will test so-called premium V.O.D. in coming months. And then consumers will have to decide whether they want to pay $20 or even $30 for the privilege of making their own popcorn as they settle in to watch a hot film, or head to the neighborhood multiplex.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/bu...dia/20vod.html





Cracking the New York Times Popularity Code
Thomas E. Weber

Just how many people does it take to propel a story onto the Times' influential most-emailed list? And can it be gamed? Thomas E. Weber finds the answers.

The most-emailed articles list on The New York Times website is one of the Internet's key barometers of news and trends, an essential way for the world to stumble onto stories and ideas that might otherwise get lost in the ether of the perpetual news cycle. Thus, careful watchers might have been puzzled by a seemingly out-of-place story last week. Among the latest news, feature and opinion pieces was a three-week-old science section story about a soon-to-close exhibition on cuneiform clay tablets. What could have propelled a stale, bone-dry story to the top of the Internet's importance arbiter?

I can tell you: It was me.

More precisely, it was a group of people under my direction who all, at my request, emailed that particular story within a relatively short timeframe to learn exactly what it takes to make the most-emailed list.

How we did it—and how many people it took—reinforces a lesson of our viral media age: Even at the biggest newspaper website in the world, the content that is spotlighted as most engaging reflects the judgment of a group far smaller than the overall audience, and can even be gamed by those motivated enough to do so.

Popularity, of course, is considered a key metric of the information age. From entertainers courting the spotlight to entrepreneurs who want publicity for their ventures—and don't forget journalists slaving away at their keyboards—"going viral" is a cherished goal. Exposure begets more exposure. With the electronic fire hose pouring out torrents of content each day, many turn to what's already been deemed interesting by others—whether it's their Facebook friends or the collective readership of a major publication—to help them filter.

Which is what makes the most-popular lists at the Times so intriguing. The Times attracts some 50 million unique visitors each month online, far outdistancing rivals like The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal, according to comScore. In fact, the Times publishes several different types of most-popular lists, including rankings of which articles have been viewed the most and which have drawn the most interest from bloggers.

But it is the most-emailed list that enjoys primacy of place on the site's home page and many other key pages. Thus, the most-emailed list implicitly represents which stories are getting the most buzz. Readers can even subscribe to an RSS feed of the most-emailed list.

So how many emails does it take to make the list? We started several weeks ago by recruiting a cadre of friends and colleagues who agreed to stand by and, when instructed, visit the Times website, view the designated article and use the site's email function to have the article sent to a friend. Next we selected an article that was unlikely to have many, if anyone, emailing it on their own.

By 7 a.m. the next morning, about 300 emails had been sent, and our story was climbing.

Article - Weber Most Emailed The author instructed a group of people to e-mail the highlighted article within a relatively short timeframe.

To start, we went with pieces from the Science page, which offered us an achievable gateway—the chance to crack an individual section's ranking, rather than the overall list, which is dominated by news, service and opinion. (Not that the Science list is a pushover. As the Times itself reported earlier this year, one analysis by University of Pennsylvania researchers showed that science stories do particularly well in email-ibility.)

Round one of testing got under way on November 23 around 5 p.m. Our volunteers were asked to email a story on research funding, "Rare Hits and Heaps of Misses to Pay For," which had been published online more than two weeks prior, to one or more friends—and to do so within a few hours of the call to action. As our volunteers reported back, the tally showed that over several hours, 48 people emailed it to a total of 135 friends.

By 7:35 p.m., the story popped up on the Science page most-emailed list, starting at No. 10 and rising to No. 6 by 9:30 a.m. the following morning. (The default most-emailed list reflects activity over the previous 24 hours, according to language on the Times' expanded most-popular page.)

But it left us with a question: did the results reflect the 48 people sending the article—or the 135 recipients? So on December 9, we launched a second test, asking the volunteers to email an old, rote story, "Justices to Rule on States' Emission Case," to one person only. Ultimately, 35 senders shot the story out within a few hours. And by 11 p.m., it too emerged on the Science most-emailed list—eventually peaking at No. 5, overnight, slightly better than our previous test.

That suggested that the number of senders, not recipients, was the key factor in scoring a slot on the most emailed list, understanding, of course, that traffic naturally fluctuates on the Times' site, so the lists could be more difficult to climb on busy news days. (We launched all our tests on weekday evenings.) Once our test story surfaced on the list, of course, it raised the likelihood that other visitors to the Times site would notice the piece, decide to read and then email it. So it's possible that our test story peaked higher on the list than could be accounted for purely from our test emails.

So if a few dozen people can make a Science article "popular" on that channel, what does it take to get onto the big board, the one noticed by millions of readers, and even ardently followed, I'm told, by Times editors and writers themselves?

Clearly needing more than a few dozen friends, I enlisted a small army using the greatest motivator I had: cash. I found people, mostly abroad, via an online labor marketplace called the Mechanical Turk, who were willing for a small fee to register at the Times, or even complete multiple registrations, and send a story out.

On December 14, my troops were given a new story: the aforementioned "An Exhibition That Gets to the (Square) Root of Sumerian Math," now three weeks past its publication date.

Based on our previous tests, we knew we wouldn't see movement in the most-popular list immediately, since the Times appears to use a 24-hour moving average. We started to see some impact at 11:43 p.m., 70-odd emails in, when the story popped up on the Science most-emailed list at No. 8. By 7 a.m. the next morning, about 300 emails had been sent, and our story was climbing—now up to No. 4 on the Science-page list, our new high-water-mark.

But as we checked the overall list and found no sign of our test article, we figured we needed to turn up the heat—saturating the site with more emails over a 24-hour period. Things started to pick up. Shortly before 1 p.m., the Sumerian story jumped up to No. 2 on the Science page—and, more importantly, made its debut on the overall most-emailed list. Though the Times only displays the top 10 most-emailed stories in its home-page box, it also offers a link to an expanded list showing the top 25. After 400 emails, our story edged onto the overall list at No. 22.

So we sent word to our global staff: more emails! As evening came, the story inched up further, hitting No. 1 on the Science list and ticking up on the overall list: 19, 18, 17. Around 12:35 a.m. on December 16, 36 hours into the blitz, it happened. Our story made it onto the Times' home page, scoring the No. 10 slot on the most-emailed list. And it wasn't slowing down. As the hours passed, it rose higher and higher. At 12:18 p.m., it peaked at No. 3, outdoing a Gail Collins column, a story about the Obama administration's plans for handling a nuclear attack and a handful of perennially popular writers. (Take that, Tom Friedman!)

So how many emails did we need to pull it off? The answer: 1,270.

Clearly, roughly 1,300 email senders is more than a handful. On the other hand, 1,300 people wouldn't be enough to sell out one performance of Wicked on Broadway. More to the point, it represents a tiny fraction of the Times' overall readership. If our results are accurate—and a Times spokeswoman confirmed that the list is based on individual senders and did not have any disagreement with this story's methodology—out of the 30-plus million Times website visitors each month, it takes only one out of every 25,000 emailing a particular story to secure it a spot, at least for a day, in the hallowed most-emailed list. (The Times spokeswoman did indicate that hitting the No. 1 spot would have required significantly more email senders.)

The fact that the No. 3 slot was attained with fewer than 1,300 emails also raises the question of whether others might seek to manipulate the list for their own gain, or may have already done so. Notably, the most-emailed list of virtually every other news site in the world surely requires a small fraction of that number, and thus would be far easier to game. That certainly includes The Daily Beast, which is one reason this site's homepage features the most-viewed stories more prominently than the most-emailed.

The Times told us that the paper considers it important to maintain the authenticity of the most-emailed list and that was a consideration in basing the list on the number of senders rather than recipients. "This minimizes the ability for one person to game the system, though we know it's not a perfect solution," the spokeswoman wrote in an email.

As for why the Times features most-emailed over most-viewed, the spokeswoman responded: "We think of emailing as a more engaged action than viewing or searching, since the user is taking a personal action by proactively sending the article to a specific person or group of people."

This wisdom of crowds so popular on the Internet was born partly out of necessity. A better, impossible-to-game solution may be emerging from social networks, which let individuals know which content is popular within their own network. From The Daily Beast to the Huffington Post, many news sites now offer readers a look at what their friends are liking. At least one major newspaper site does too: The New York Times.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...mailed-list/p/





E-Mail Gets an Instant Makeover
Matt Richtel

Signs you’re an old fogey: You still watch movies on a VCR, listen to vinyl records and shoot photos on film.

And you enjoy using e-mail.

Young people, of course, much prefer online chats and text messages. These have been on the rise for years but are now threatening to eclipse e-mail, much as they have already superseded phone calls.

Major Internet companies like Facebook are responding with message services that are focused on immediate gratification.

The problem with e-mail, young people say, is that it involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours. And sign-offs like “sincerely” — seriously?

Lena Jenny, 17, a high school senior in Cupertino, Calif., said texting was so quick that “I sometimes have an answer before I even shut my phone.” E-mail, she added, is “so lame.”

Facebook is trying to appeal to the Lenas of the world. It is rolling out a revamped messaging service that is intended to feel less like e-mail and more like texting.

The company decided to eliminate the subject line on messages after its research showed that it was most commonly left blank or used for an uninformative “hi” or “yo.”

Facebook also killed the “cc” and “bcc” lines. And hitting the enter key can immediately fire off the message, ŕ la instant messaging, instead of creating a new paragraph. The changes, company executives say, leave behind time-consuming formalities that separate users from what they crave: instant conversation.

“The future of messaging is more real time, more conversational and more casual,” said Andrew Bosworth, director of engineering at Facebook, where he oversees communications tools. “The medium isn’t the message. The message is the message.”

The numbers testify to the trend. The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6 percent; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18 percent. (The only big gainer in the category has been Gmail, up 10 percent from a year ago.)

The slide in e-mail does not reflect a drop in digital communication; people have just gravitated to instant messaging, texting and Facebook (four billion messages daily).

James E. Katz, the director for the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University, said this was not the death of e-mail but more of a downgrade, thanks to greater choice and nuance among communications tools.

“It’s painful for them,” he said of the younger generation and e-mail. “It doesn’t suit their social intensity.”

Some, predictably, turn up their noses at the informality and the abbreviated spellings that are rampant in bite-size, phone-based transmissions. Judith Kallos, who writes a blog and books about e-mail etiquette, complains that the looser, briefer and less grammatical the writing, the less deep the thoughts and emotions behind it.

“We’re going down a road where we’re losing our skills to communicate with the written word,” Ms. Kallos said.

Mary Bird, 65, of San Leandro, Calif., is another traditionalist, if a reluctant one. “I don’t want to be one of those elders who castigate young peoples’ form of communication,” she said. “But the art of language, the beauty of language, is being lost.”

Ms. Bird’s daughter, Katie Bird Hunter, 26, is on the other side of the digital communications divide and finds her parents to be out of touch.

“They still use AOL,” she says, implying with her tone that she finds this totally gross.

Ms. Hunter says she seeks to reach friends first by text, then by instant message, then with a phone call, and then by e-mail. “And then, while I’d probably never do this last one, showing up at their house.”

Like a lot of younger people, Ms. Hunter, who works in construction management in San Francisco, says e-mail has its place — namely work and other serious business, like online shopping. She and others say they still regularly check e-mail, in part because parents, teachers and bosses use it.

David McDowell, senior director of product management for Yahoo Mail, conceded that the company was seeing a shift to other tools, but said this was less a generational phenomenon than a situational one. Fifteen-year-olds, for example, have little reason to send private attachments to a boss or financial institution.

Yahoo has added features like chat and text messaging to its e-mail service to reflect changing habits, as has Gmail, which also offers phone calls.

“Mail is now only a part of Gmail,” said Mike Nelson, a Google spokesman. “It’s video conferencing, texting, it’s I.M., it’s phone calling.”

Mr. Katz, the Rutgers professor, said texting and social networks better approximated how people communicated in person — in short snippets where niceties did not matter. Over time, he said, e-mail will continue to give way to faster-twitch formats, even among older people.

The changing trends have even some people in their 20s feeling old and slightly out of touch, or at least caught in the middle.

Adam Horowitz, 23, who works as a technology consultant for a major accounting firm in New York, spends all day on e-mail at his office. When he leaves it behind, he picks up his phone and communicates with friends almost entirely via texts.

Yet he sometimes feels caught between the two, as when he texts with his younger brothers, ages 12 and 19, who tend to send even shorter, faster messages.

“When they text me, it comes across in broken English. I have no idea what they’re saying,” said Mr. Horowitz. “I may not text in full sentences, but at least there’s punctuation to get my point across.”

“I guess I’m old school.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/te...y/21email.html





Google, Richard Blumenthal Square Off
Tony Romm

More legal wrangling could be in store for Google now that it has refused to turn over to state investigators the e-mails and other data it accidentally collected while mapping neighborhoods.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company declined to deliver that trove of information to Connecticut Attorney General and soon-to-be senator Richard Blumenthal by his Friday deadline. That could set up a legal showdown between the two less than a month before Blumenthal is set to become his state’s newest Democratic senator.

“I certainly will be pressing for continued involvement at the federal level in coordination with the states,” Blumenthal told POLITICO on Monday, just days after promising to explore “additional enforcement actions” if Google does not share the data soon.

Asked to describe what those federal efforts might include, the outgoing attorney general said, “There’s a range of potential opportunities for oversight and scrutiny by a member of the U.S. Congress – including letters, meetings hearings, and potentially even legislation.”

For its part, Google has tried to defuse the issue by offering to delete the data. The company reaffirmed that position in a Friday statement, promising to work with Blumenthal in the coming weeks, but declined to comment further on Monday.

“We want to delete the data as soon as possible and will continue to work with the authorities to determine the best way forward, as well as to answer their further questions and concerns,” a spokeswoman said last week.

The so-called Google “Spy-Fi” flap has made international headlines for months, triggering investigations in a number of European countries. In May, Google first alerted authorities and users that its Street View vehicles had inadvertently intercepted fragments of data transmitted over unprotected Wi-Fi networks.

The company has since settled with many concerned regulators, sharing the data with Germany, France and Spain, and announcing this weekend it had the permission of the United Kingdom to delete the snippets of e-mails, Web addresses and other documents it obtained there.

But U.S. regulators have not yet finished addressing the matter: While the Federal Trade Commission closed its review earlier this year – the reasons for which Blumenthal said he did not “entirely understand” – the Federal Communications Commission is still exploring the breach.

An FCC spokeswoman declined to comment on the status of that investigation Monday.

As those reviews unfold, Blumenthal has remained the public face on a 30-state inquiry into the controversy.

It is unclear what type of legal action Google may face for failing to comply with Blumenthal’s request. But the outgoing attorney general told POLITICO that, in general, state watchdogs can always seek “enforcement options in the court,” including official orders and subpoenas, to obtain information that is critical to investigations.

“The main point I’d like to stress here is that it’s our strong hope the company will work constructively with us to make these documents accessible, because all we’re really requesting is the opportunity to inspect and examine them through our experts,” he said. “We’re not seeking to take possession of hard drives or physical evidence; we just really are seeking an opportunity to verify what they are saying.”

The outgoing AG could also find some allies in Congress if he seeks to press Google on the Street View incident at the federal level: His soon-to-be House colleagues, Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), have long pressed the search giant on the matter.

“We’re not asking for names or addresses. We want to see the nature of the data they have,” he added. “Their claim is that none of it was obtained illegally anyway, so it kind of contradicts their underlying contention they’ve done nothing legally wrong.” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46641.html





Vengeful Neighbor in Blaine Pleads to Biden Threat, Hacking

The Blaine man admitted commandeering his neighbors' PC to threaten the vice president and carry out a harassment campaign.
James Walsh

Barry Ardolf sat in a Ramsey County jail cell Thursday night and made a decision: He would no longer fight charges that he used a neighbor's computer to threaten the vice president of the United States and harass others. He pleaded guilty Friday to charges of identify theft, threats, and possession and transmission of child pornography.

He'd refused a more favorable plea deal last summer, insisting on fighting the government's case against him. But after two days of trial -- including Thursday's testimony from expert witnesses who showed the elaborate means Ardolf used to harass and smear neighbors who'd once called the police on him -- he stopped denying what he had done.

"The reality of it became apparent to him that this was going to happen and he didn't want to perpetuate his own distress or the pain for the victims," Ardolf's lawyer, Seamus Mahoney, said Friday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Rank was asked what he thought had changed for Ardolf, a man he described in his opening argument as a technically savvy computer hacker who carried anger against his neighbors to the extreme.

Rank said there was a difference between looking at exhibits and documents outside the courtroom "and seeing 12 people sitting ready to convict you."

Despite his denial, Rank said, everything -- the bogus e-mails in his neighbor's name, the fake MySpace page and the threats to the vice president -- all pointed to Ardolf.

"We know what happened," Rank said. "We figured it out."

Anger over report

It began in August 2008, when Ardolf's new neighbors called Blaine police to report a creepy encounter. Ardolf, they told police, had picked up their 4-year-old son and kissed him. After that, Matt and Bethany Kostolnik said, they intended to just keep their distance from him.

Unknown to them, he began moving to exact revenge.

He created e-mail accounts in Matt Kostolnik's name and used a password-cracking program to hack into the Kostolniks' wireless router. He then sent e-mails -- one containing sexually suggestive language, others containing images of child pornography -- to Matt Kostolnik's co-workers and boss. It was all meant to appear that the e-mails came from Kostolnik. Ardolf also used the bogus e-mail accounts to create a fake MySpace page, which contained a child porn image.

Later, he sent another fake e-mail to Kostolnik's law firm, purporting to be from a woman who claimed Kostolnik sexually assaulted her. The woman was real, the incident was not.

After Ardolf sent threatening e-mails to Vice President Joe Biden, Gov. Tim Pawlenty and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, claiming to be the Kostolniks, an investigator hired by Matt Kostolnik's firm discovered Ardolf was hijacking the family's wireless service.

That led to a search of Ardolf's home, which produced evidence taken from more than a dozen computers and dozens of computer storage devices, evidence that included detailed notes of e-mail addresses, passwords, photographs and text of e-mails that had been sent.

Rank and investigators with the Minnesota Cyber Crimes Task Force confronted Ardolf with that evidence last summer and a plea deal was arranged. Then Ardolf changed his mind. Officials then charged him with the child porn offenses, which could add years to his sentence.

Now, Ardolf faces a maximum of 44 years in prison.

Tears of relief

Just as a choked-up Ardolf began saying "guilty" to all charges against him, the Kostolniks entered the courtroom. When deputy U.S. marshals handcuffed Ardolf and led him away, the young couple tearfully embraced.

Outside the courtroom, they said they were happy that Ardolf finally accepted responsibility for what he did to them.

"It was terrible what we went through," Matt Kostolnik said. "I wouldn't want anyone to have to go through what we did.

"I think what he did today was right."

Kostolnik praised the people at his law firm, who believed him when he said he didn't send the e-mails. He also thanked Rank and the federal and local investigators who uncovered how Ardolf had sabotaged his life. He said he and his wife suspected Ardolf was behind the smear campaign "from the start."

Now, he said, they're thankful it's over.
http://www.startribune.com/local/north/112080854.html





Under ‘High-Tech House Arrest,’ WikiLeaks Founder Takes the Offensive
John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya

When Julian Assange wakes these days, he looks out from a three-story Georgian mansion house overlooking a man-made lake. Under a blanket of snow, the 650-acre Ellingham Hall estate, a mile back from the closest public road, is as tranquil a spot as can be found in eastern England.

But Mr. Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who is fighting accusations of sexual misconduct in Sweden, strolls through this bucolic idyll with an electronic tag on his ankle and a required daily 20-minute drive to the part-time police station in the neighboring town of Beccles. There he signs a register and chats “pleasantly” with the officers, according to their account, and returns to his curfew at the hall.

It is what Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has laconically referred to as “my high-tech house arrest” in interviews since arriving last week from the High Court in London, where he was granted bail of $370,000, much of it provided by wealthy celebrities and friends, including Vaughan Smith, Ellingham Hall’s owner.

From his rural redoubt, Mr. Assange has gone on a media offensive, continuing to charge that he is the victim of a smear campaign led by the United States, which is weighing criminal prosecution for the leaks of nearly 750,000 classified documents.

In an interview with The Times of London on Tuesday, he compared himself to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., saying that when he was jailed at Wandsworth Prison in London, a black guard handed him a card saying, “I only have two heroes in the world, Dr. King and you.” Mr. Assange added, “That is representative of 50 percent of people.”

In the interview, he also compared the obloquy directed at WikiLeaks by the Obama administration and other critics with the “persecution” endured by American Jews in the 1950s. He added, “I’m not the Jewish people,” but suggested that the common thread was that supporters of WikiLeaks and American Jews were “people who believe in freedom of speech and accountability.”

Mr. Assange also denied prior contact with Bradley Manning, the Army private jailed on charges that he leaked thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks. “I never heard of the name Bradley Manning before it appeared in the media,” he said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday.

While there have been a number of prosecutions of government employees under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information, there has never been a successful prosecution of a journalist for receiving and publishing such information. But prosecutors have been studying online chats in which Private Manning reportedly talked about contacts with Mr. Assange to see if they suggest that the WikiLeaks leader solicited or encouraged the leaks.

Mr. Assange noted that it was standard journalistic practice to call government officials and ask for information. Criminalizing such conduct would threaten the freedom of the press, he said.

“If they want to push the line that when a newspaperman talks to someone in the government about looking for things relating to potential abuses, that that is a conspiracy to commit espionage, that is going to take out all the good government journalism that takes place in the United States,” Mr. Assange said.

In the interview with The Times of London, Mr. Assange also spoke of his “feeling of betrayal” toward the two women in Sweden, who have said he forced sex on them without using a condom, and in one case while the woman, according to her account, was asleep. Over the weekend, The Guardian and The New York Times obtained copies of a 68-page police document detailing the accusations against Mr. Assange, leaks he said were “clearly designed to undermine” his bail arrangements.

“Somebody in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison,” he said of himself.

Mr. Assange said the accusations had put at risk what WikiLeaks had achieved. “We have changed governance, we have certainly changed many political figures within governments, we have caused new law reform efforts, we have caused police investigations into the abuses we expose, U.N. investigations, investigations here in the U.K., especially in relation to our revelation of the circumstances of the deaths of 109,000 people in Iraq,” he said. He added, “We are also changing the perception of the West.”

Attempts by The New York Times to interview Mr. Assange in recent days were unsuccessful. For months, he has regularly changed cellphones, and had members of his close-knit entourage answer them for him.

Recently, even those have been switched off, and Ellingham Hall has padlocked its gates against intruders. Telephones there go unanswered, and the hall’s Web site for weddings and shooting parties, during which the public is charged $40 to shoot a pheasant, has been taken off-line.

Where the private road leading to Ellingham Hall begins, WikiLeaks supporters who have gathered to support Mr. Assange have taped a hand-lettered placard to an electricity junction box, next to one posted by Mr. Smith advertising “fresh eggs,” saying “Free Bradley Manning.”

Mr. Assange has given conflicting accounts of the handling of his case in Sweden. Immediately after an initial warrant was issued for his arrest in August, he said he had “no idea” who his accusers were; he has since acknowledged that he slept with both of the women over a four-day period before the warrant was issued. He has said he waited weeks to be interviewed by the police in Sweden; they have said that it was Mr. Assange who delayed meeting with them.

He said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday that he saw no reason to return to Sweden to answer the allegations. Asked why he would not comply with the legal processes of a country with a respected system of jurisprudence, he described Sweden as “a bit more of a banana republic” than its reputation suggested, and said his WikiLeaks work was too important to answer to “random prosecutors around the world who simply want to have a chat.”

“They can come here, or we can have a video linkup, or they can accept a statement of mine,” he said. In the BBC interview, Mr. Assange acknowledged obliquely that he had high ambitions for himself, saying, “Everybody would like to be a messianic figure without dying.”

At times in the interviews, he seemed conflicted about the impact of the Swedish allegations. Speaking to the BBC, he said he thought they could be “quite helpful to our organization” because “it will expose a tremendous abuse of power.” But he also rued the impact on his own reputation, saying that his name was now linked widely on the Internet with the rape allegation.

Using Google, he said, and “searching for my name and the word ‘rape,’ there are some 30 million Web pages. So this has been a very successful smear.”

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/wo...s-assange.html





WTF? OMG, LOL! CIA Gives WikiLeaks Taskforce Naughty Name

US spy agency forms taskforce to assess fallout from 250,000 leaked US cables
Adam Gabbatt

The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.

The group will be charged with scouring the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.

"Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF," the Washington Post reported.

WTF is more commonly associated with the Facebook and Twitter profiles of teenagers than secret agency committees. Given that its expanded version is usually an expression of extreme disbelief, perhaps the term is apt for the CIA's investigation.

Earlier this month the Guardian revealed that the CIA was responsible for drafting the data "wishlist" that the US state department wanted on UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and other senior members of the organisation.

The Washington Post said the panel was being led by the CIA's counter-intelligence centre, although it has drawn in two dozen members from departments across the agency.

Although the CIA has featured in some WikiLeaks disclosures, relatively little of its own information has entered the ether, the paper reported. A recently retired former high-ranking CIA official told the Post this was because the agency "has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders".

"They don't even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked."

While most of the agency's correspondence is understood to be classified at the same "secret" level as the leaked cables that ended up online, it is understood the CIA uses different systems to those of other government agencies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...-taskforce-wtf





Wikileaks' Leaks Leaked: Norwegian Paper Has All the Cables and None of the Restrictions
Curt Hopkins

Norway's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, claims to have access to all 250,000 of Wikileaks' diplomatic cables. Until this point, no news organization had more than a sample sent by the whistle-blower organization.

Norwegian business publication Dagens it reported the claim today. Aftenposten editor Ole Erik Almlid refused to explain who had leaked the leaks, but BoingBoing theorizes, "one guess could involve the database being stored on a server within Norway."

Unlike The New York Times, El Pais, The Guardian, Le Monde and Wikileaks' other media partners in past leaks, Aftenposten has no agreement requiring the organization's sign-off prior to publishing the leaks, said Almid.

"We have worked long to get the documents, but it would be wrong of me to tell who is the source. We have not paid for the material, which we have gained access to no conditions. It is we who decide what to publish and how we should handle it."

All bets are off, in other words, and control is out of the hands of Wikileaks. Given Wikileaks' abiding dedication to information control, you have to wonder three things.

1. How many more leaks (of these leaks and others) will happen?

2. How will they effect what Wikileaks does in the future?

3. How will it complicate the relationships, both partnerships and antagonisms, that have flowered around these leaks?

How many stories are likely to issue from the leaked leaks is uncertain, as is the timeline for their release. But we anticipate a great interest at news organizations around the world in "that one intern from Tromsř." Hold on to your hat, Vebjřrn!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...tic_cables.php





Apple Drops WikiLeaks App, Google Keeps it
Jim Finkle

Apple Inc has joined a growing number of U.S. companies that have severed ties with WikiLeaks, removing an application from its online store that gave users access to the controversial website's content.

But Google Inc, which operates the second-largest online mobile applications store, has kept more than half a dozen apps available on its Android Marketplace that make it easier to access the confidential U.S. government documents WikiLeaks had released on its site.

The two distinct approaches highlight how it is far tougher for developers to get on the iPhone's platform than Android's. Some of the Android programs provide direct access to the WikiLeaks cables, and one of them even alerts users whenever a new leaked document from the WikiLeaks repository is made public.

In past weeks, a host of companies from Amazon.com Inc to Bank of America has withdrawn services for WikiLeaks, which has outraged U.S. authorities by releasing thousands of confidential State Department cables.

But in a backlash against organizations that have cut off the site, cyberactivists have taken to targeting companies -- such as Visa Inc -- seen as foes of WikiLeaks. The website's founder, Julian Assange, was released on bail last week from a jail in Britain, where he is fighting extradition to Sweden over alleged sexual offenses.

"Is it likely that Apple could become a target? Of course," said John Bumgarner, chief technology officer for the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, and an expert in such attacks. "Anyone that distances themselves from WikiLeaks could potentially become a cyber target."

The WikiLeaks App, created by developer Igor Barinov and offered for $1.99, was only available in Apple's App Store for a few days before it was removed.

"We removed the WikiLeaks App from the App Store because it violated our developer guidelines," Apple said in a statement on Wednesday. "Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or targeted group in harm's way."

It was not clear whether WikiLeaks' vocal supporters might target Apple, though the move clearly angered some of them.

"More Apple censorship," one supporter of Assange's tweeted.

"This is exactly why I would never purchase an iOS device," tweeted another, referring to the iOS operating system that runs the iPhone and popular iPad tablet.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said he is considering using the U.S. Espionage Act, under which it is illegal to obtain national defense information for the purpose of harming the United States, as well as other laws to prosecute the release of sensitive government information by WikiLeaks.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan, Gabriel Madway and Jim Finkle; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BL2VH20101222





The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks
Jaron Lanier

The degree of sympathy in tech circles for both Wikileaks and Anonymous has surprised me. The most common take seems to be that the world needs cyber-pranksters to keep old-school centers of power, like governments and big companies, in check. Cyber-activists are perceived to be the underdogs, flawed and annoying, perhaps, but standing up to overbearing power.

It doesn't seem so to me. I actually take seriously the idea that the Internet can make non-traditional techie actors powerful.1 Therefore, I am less sympathetic to hackers when they use their newfound power arrogantly and non-constructively.

This is an interesting difference in perception. How can you tell when you are the underdog versus when you are powerful? When you get that perception wrong, you can behave quite badly quite easily.2

Every revolutionary these days must post a video online. So the group Anonymous, which avenged the perceived enemies of Wikileaks by ganging up on sites like MasterCard and PayPal, released theirs, a scratchy cyberpunk scrawl. In it, a digitized announcer condemns the attacked companies for the "crime of cutting people off from the global brain." This might seem like an odd bit of propaganda for those who aren't familiar with the world of nerd supremacy.

The ideology that drives a lot of the online world -- not just Wikileaks but also mainstream sites like Facebook -- is the idea that information in sufficiently large quantity automatically becomes Truth. For extremists, this means that the Internet is coming alive as a new, singular, global, post-human, superior life form. For more moderate sympathizers, if information is truth, and the truth will set you free, then adding more information to the Internet automatically makes the world better and people freer.

The one exception to be carved out is that technically skilled programmers are celebrated for erecting digital privacy curtains around themselves. Thus we didn't necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment, before his detention on rape-related charges, or what Facebook or Google know about you.

But leaving hypocrisy aside, is there something to the idea? If the number of secrets falls with each passing minute and gradually approaches zero, what does that do to the world? Would a world without secrets be fairer, or more compassionate? More efficient? Does it matter if some secrets are revealed before others?

It is often the case that microstructure influences macrostructure. In the case of digital systems, where the microstructure is bits that are either completely on or completely off, it is easiest to build big things that tend to peg completely one way or another. You can easily be completely anonymous online, or utterly revealed, but it is hard to find an in-between spot.

The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns: low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other.

While many individuals in Wikileaks would probably protest that they don't personally advocate radical ideas about transparency for everybody but hackers, architecture can force all our hands. This is exactly what happens in current online culture. Either everything is utterly out in the open, like a music file copied a thousand times or a light weight hagiography on Facebook, or it is perfectly protected, like the commercially valuable dossiers on each of us held by Facebook or the files saved for blackmail by Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.

The Internet as it is, which supports the abilities of Anonymous and Wikileaks, is an outgrowth of a particular design history which was influenced in equal degrees by 1960s romanticism and cold war paranoia. It aligned the two poles of the bit to these two archetypal dramas. But the poles of the bit can be aligned with other things. The Internet can and must be redesigned to reflect a more moderate and realistically human-centered philosophy.

Assange sees information as an abstract free-standing thing. Differences in perspective and circumstance mean nothing. This is how nerd supremacists think.

It is possible for tiny actions to occasionally have huge consequences on the Internet -- like the creation of a Facebook or a Wikileaks by tiny teams -- because many thousands of people over decades set up the underlying structure of that seeming magic trick.

It seems to cost nothing to send an email, so we spend billions of dollars on spam. The existing Internet design is centered on creating the illusion of no-cost effort. But there is no such thing. It's an illusion born of the idylls of youth, and leads to a distorted perception of the nature of responsibility. When there seems to be no cost, the idea of moderation doesn't seem sensible.

Openness in itself, as the prime driver of events, doesn't lead to achievement or creativity.

One problem is that information in oceanic magnitudes can confuse and confound as easily as it can clarify and empower, even when the information is correct. There is vastly more financial data set down in the world's computers than there ever has been before, including publically accessible data, and yet the economy is a mess. How can this be, if information is the solution?

A sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid. Another way to put this is that a lot of information made available over the internet encourages players to think as if they had a God's eye view, looking down on the whole system.

A financier, for instance, might not be able to resist the temptations of access to seemingly endless data. If you can really look down on the whole market from on high, then you ought to be able to just pluck money out of it without risk, which leads to the notion of a highly computerized, data intensive, brobdingnagian hedge fund. This is fine, for a while, until other people start similar funds and the whole market becomes distorted.

The interesting similarity between Mr. Assange and a typical financier who overdid it is that both attempted to align themselves with a perceived God-like perspective and method made possible by the flow of vast information on the Internet, while both actually got crazy and absurd. Wikileaks and similar efforts could do for politics approximately what access to a lot of data did for finance in the run up to the recession.

Whom does Cablegate harm? This issue has been debated extensively elsewhere, but I do want to point something out about how to interpret the question. The details that are prematurely revealed in Cablegate are not essential knowledge for me, since I am not immediately involved in the events, and the contents of the leaks thus far haven't disrupted my worldview or my politics.

They are, however, potentially consequential to American diplomacy, which is often, if we are to believe the cables, both trickier and better intentioned then we might have feared. The contents might be extremely consequential, even deadly, to a hapless individual on the ground -- and we'll once again invoke the canonical unfortunate fellow in Afghanistan who translated for a US diplomat and counted on the USA to keep it secret. I don't know if he exists, but it seems to me that there must be analogs to him, at least.

Julian Assange, in defending his actions sees a vindicating contradiction in this difference: How can information be both dangerous and inconsequential, he asks? He sees information as an abstract free-standing thing, so to him, differences in perspective and circumstance mean nothing. This is how nerd supremacists think.

Wikileaks isn't really a "wiki," but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia. It aspires to emulate the practical philosophy of the wiki movement. The Wikipedia professes to get humanity as a whole to arrive at the one truest truth.

The Wikileaks design, by invoking Wikipedia, creates the impression that some universally negotiated, balanced unveiling of human affairs is being approximated; that what was formerly hidden is being fairly unhidden. But that is not true.

If you are a fan of Wikileaks, you might have trouble seeing this, so you would do well to consider Wikileaks-like activities performed by people of opposing ideological persuasions. The comparison will probably enrage some Wikileaks supporters, but if you are one of them, I ask you to try it on as an exercise to test your own internal degrees of bias.

Two cases from the United States come to mind: In one, personal information about abortion providers was posted online, and an "X" was drawn over the information about a specific provider once that provider was murdered. In another, which occurred in Utah in 2010, vigilantes published personal details about undocumented Hispanic immigrants, in an apparent bid to encourage harassment.

In the first case, there were deaths, while the second was all noise and fear mongering with no action, so far as I know. The activists who listed abortion doctors never pulled a trigger, didn't know the people who pulled triggers, and so perhaps had "nothing" to do with the murders.

These actions were related to what goes on in Wikileaks, though people with different politics performed them. Defenders of Wikileaks will probably feel that the comparison is unwarranted, so I would like to address some of the rationalizations I have heard.

It is often pointed out that Wikileaks didn't leak all the diplomatic cables it had, but only a small percentage that was filtered through traditional news organizations, as if this were a sign of deliberation and moderation.

But it did use all of the cables for blackmail. Encrypted copies were sent around the world, creating what is known as a "dead man switch." It was claimed that the encrypted cables contained genuinely dangerous information. Under certain circumstances the key would be released. Is this not similar to the case of the abortion doctors? "Either do what I want or I will expertly use my Internet skills to enable creepy third parties I don't even know to harm you."

It seems that our perceptions of the two cases are strongly colored by how we feel about the targets and where we find the underdog. At the very least, the comparison demonstrates that there is no such thing as a neutral Internet leak organization. Anyone who plays the game brings biases into the work.

The same critique can and should be applied to militaries and other traditional players who have become cyber-fascinated. It is true that the U.S. military faces a moral hazard in the use of drones. An anonymous operator a world away can direct an attack, and there is an inevitable danger of forgetting the seriousness of the decision. But consider: Anonymous Wikileakers attacked anonymous drone operators, sniping from snug perches in front of computer screens. Wikileaks published the names of Afghans who were put at risk, potentially becoming collateral damage.

Isn't it clear that we tend to become like what we mock and fear?

Another common rationalization favoring Wikileaks is that we don't have documentation of individuals, such as the canonical example of liasons in Afghanistan, who were killed as a result of a leak.

I wish I could find comfort in this line of thinking, but bad behavior doesn't become ok just because we don't know if anyone's been hurt yet. Did anyone ask the individuals who were named for permission to leak their names? I don't think any of the undocumented immigrants in Utah were killed, but does that excuse what happened? Assange has stated that if there were deaths from leaks, it would be acceptable because of the bigger picture. The ideological framework and rationale for collateral damage has been made explicit.

To me, both right wing extremist leaks and Wikileaks are for the most part resurrections of old-fashioned vigilantism. Some of the targets of vigilantism in the Utah of the 19th century, say, might have unquestionably been "bastards," and yet there are, to say the least, some tremendously attractive things about the rule of law. Vigilantism has always eroded trust and civility, but what's new online is the sterile imprimatur of a digital ideology that claims to offer automatic betterment.

Vigilante information violation is a form of assault that degrades society for everyone. If we are to experiment with giving up some degree of privacy, we have to do it all at once, including even the hackers.

Can we say Wikileaks is doing anything beyond sterile information worship? Is it engaged in nonviolent activism?

We celebrate the masters of nonviolent activism, such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. All these figures displayed astounding courage, faced arrest, and suffered without hating their oppressors in order to demonstrate a common humanity. These remarkable people did not make "Crush the bastards" into their mantra.

So the question has to be, if you add the Internet, can you now be a nonviolent activist without having to show courage and respect the opposing side? Is it now suddenly helpful to be a troll, attacking from the darkness, as the members of Anonymous do? Does the Internet really make life that much easier?

Of course it doesn't.

Although I have certainly not done as much as any of us should, I can say that I have gone to jail as a result of political protest, and doing so was not a way of rejecting society, but engaging it. In my case, I was arrested while protesting the nuclear weapons policies of the United States in the 1970s. I helped block the entrance to a power plant that was also feeding the weapons program. I smiled and had a friendly conversation with the police who carried me off, and with the jailers.

Civil disobedience is fundamentally respectful of the shared project of having a civilization, but only when the protestor gets arrested voluntarily and without sneering at opponents. Instead, one hopes to raise consciousness with a flood of respect and compassion, even for those who disagree.

In the intervening years, my point of view on nuclear weapons policy has shifted, though not totally. If my phase as a protester had been ruder, I would have complicated my own avenue for personal evolution, because I would have become too invested in the trauma that would have ensued. Respectful civil disobedience is not only more productive for others, but for oneself. It is the path away from extremism.

Totally aside from whether Wikileaks has hurt the USA or anyone else, we should ask the question, "What has it done to us?" The hacker idea has gotten meaner, less sensitive, more combative, and more reactive. This is what I mean by the problem of nerd supremacy.

Wikileaks grew out of a forum hosted by John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I almost became one of the founders of EFF as well. I was at the founding meeting, a meal in San Francisco's Mission District with John, John Perry Barlow, and Mitch Kapor. What kept me out of EFF was a sudden feeling -- at that very meal -- that something was going wrong.

There was a fascination with using encryption to make hackers potentially as powerful as governments, and that disturbed me. I could feel the surge of ego: We hackers could change history. But if there's one lesson of history, it is that seeking power doesn't change the world. You need to change yourself along with the world. Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline as much as anything else.

EFF has matured, and is now moderate enough to be subject to occasional attacks from outfits like Anonymous (though Anonymous rejects characterizations of itself as a group of people and prefers to be known as collective cyber-brain.) In its early days, however, EFF helped glamourize the image of the encrypted nerd resisting the government. EFF was hardly alone: One of the first covers of Wired magazine featured a dashing gaggle of outlaw hackers, faces hidden by scarves. The hacker as glamorous revolutionary was a guiding image as the Internet was first coming together and being polished for widespread use a couple of decades ago, and we are paying now for our silly romanticism back then.

When you feel that urge to power within yourself- that is when you should be most careful. When I hear Julian Assange talk about "crushing bastards" I feel grateful that I avoided getting swept up back then.

Should information flows be controlled in the network age? Who should get to decide who gets access to what information? It's not as if these questions have only been asked for the first time because of the Internet. The many generations of people that learned how to build democracies wrestled with them over the centuries.

Privacy is not about anachronistic prohibitions on information flow, but about personhood.
We know what the answers are. If the secret is about something that isn't a vital interest for other people, then everyone has a right to keep a private sphere private. If the secret is about something of vital interest to other people, then secrets can be kept by those who are sanctioned and accountable to keep them within the bounds of a reasonably functional democratic process.

Both of these answers are under assault by the ideology of nerd supremacy which I understand well, since I was part of it in its early days.

You need to have a private sphere to be a person, or for that matter for anything creative to happen in any domain. This is the principle I described as "encapsulation" in You Are Not a Gadget. I have written about this idea in various ways, but I'd like to try another way here, addressed to the truest believers. Let's consider encapsulation in computer code.

There was a time when computer code was messier, in that any piece of code could read or write to any other part. That didn't work out well. Programs were too tangled and impossible to maintain.

So a movement to add structure to programming took root. For instance, the idea of "object oriented" code breaks a program up into encapsulated modules centered on chunks of data and code related specifically to that data. If you program in an object oriented way, you are not allowed to make the code in one object directly manipulate the interior of another. Instead, everything has to go through the proper channels.

A great many programmers hated the object oriented idea in the early days. It seemed like nothing but prissy restrictions. To others, it was simply incomprehensible how restrictions would do you any good. Wasn't the point to be able to program anything? How could a negative be a positive? How could restrictions improve results?

And yet, ideas like object oriented programming were essential to making big programs reliable. The world we know today couldn't exist if code had stayed as messy as it used to be. Structure is what makes information usable. Making everything totally connected and open to everything destroys structure. This principle works for code, but it is also cosmic.

Even we people need structure in our affairs. Imagine openness extrapolated to an extreme. What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me. You need an interior space that is different from mine in order to have a different, exotic model of the world, so that our two models can meet, and have a conversation.

Privacy is not about anachronistic prohibitions on information flow, but about personhood. I was one of those young hackers who didn't get this point for a long time. I used to think that an open world would favor the honest and the true, and disfavor the schemers and the scammers. In moderation this idea has some value, but if privacy were to be vanquished, people would initially become dull, then incompetent, and then cease to exist. Hidden in the idea of radical openness is an allegiance to machines instead of people.

Improving access to information can be a very good thing in the right circumstances. For instance, another huge factor in making code better (in addition to structure) was a flow of information feedback from the real world.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere.
Coding used to be based on hope. You'd code something and someone else would experience whether it crashed or not, and while they would let you know, it was hard to learn much from their tales of woe. With the arrival of the Internet, crash logs could be reported back to the programmers automatically, so software engineering became a closed loop feedback system. I well remember Steven Sinofsky showing me the early results of this flow of data about crashes in the early Windows operating system. It was as if a new sense organ had suddenly sprouted on one's face.

I bring this up to say that asking whether secrets in the abstract are good or bad is ridiculous. A huge flow of data that one doesn't know how to interpret in context is either useless or worse than useless, if you let it impress you too much. A contextualized flow of data that answers a question you know how to ask can be invaluable.

As has been frequently observed, the Cablegate episode hasn't revealed military or "top" secrets; at least as I write this. Furthermore, while some Wikileaks supporters see the documents as a portrait of an evil USA, actually the USA comes off pretty well in them.

In fact, most of the figures who have been embarrassed by the leaked cables seem to not have been America's closest friends. Instead, a typical hot leak dishes dirt about someone who was disturbing to American diplomats.

This is to be expected, since the Cablegate leak was of American documents, expressing American perceptions. So Wikileaks ended up accentuating the American point of view, which was already easy to know, instead of bringing new perspectives to the world!

If your primary motivation for supporting Wikileaks is that you think the USA is the problem, and must be opposed, then please meditate on this. (I happen to think the USA is going through a troubling period in some ways, but is overall an essential positive force in the world. But what I think about that isn't what's at issue here.)

If we want to understand all the sides of an argument, we have to do more than copy files. It's not as though we are supporting reporters out there on the ground to do independent investigative journalism. Random leaking is no substitute for focused digging. The "everything must be free and open" ideal has nearly bankrupted the overseas news bureaus.

The point of Cablegate is to make it hard for diplomats to function. We know this is the point, since Julian Assange has described the strategy in his writing. He hopes to screw up the USA, which he considers a conspiracy of bastards, by screwing up the trust which glues the USA together. When you reveal what one person said in confidence to another, you screw up their relationships with other people. That's what Wikileaks has come to be about with the Cablegate episode, not the revelation of deeply scandalous secrets.

Yet the controversies around radical openness are usually framed around questioning the legitimacy of keeping regulated institutional secrets. Military, commercial, and diplomatic spheres sanction more secret keeping than we are used to in civilian life.

If the distinctions between these spheres fail, then what we will lose is civilian life, since the others are ultimately indispensible. Then we'd turn into a closed society. In closed societies, like North Korea, everyday life is militarized.

You might not agree that this is what would happen, because it might seem as though fewer secrets ought to always, always mean a more open society. If you think that, you are making the same mistake those programmers who resisted structure made long ago.

Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.

There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work.

The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...kileaks/68217/





Wikileaks Exposes Internet's Dissent Tax, Not Nerd Supremacy
Zeynep Tufekci

Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined "nerd supremacist" ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine.

Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a "dissent tax" on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one's ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a "quasi-public sphere," where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent.

When Lanier says that privacy "is not about anachronistic prohibitions on information flow, but about personhood" and "that everyone has a right to keep a private sphere private," as a scholar of privacy and the Internet, I wholeheartedly agree; I have written about this many times. However, Lanier then argues this right on behalf of institutions and governments, claiming that endeavors like Wikileaks are akin to social networking sites in destroying privacy, thus impeding the development of "personhood." He presents Wikileaks as a harmful example of the "nerd ideology" that is exposing us all, to the detriment of us all.

Lanier thus conflates the right to privacy of persons with the privilege of non-disclosure that states may sometimes exercise. Raising personhood in this context is irrelevant and dangerous. Misguided legal fictions aside, states and corporations are not persons and should not enjoy the considerations, such as an inherent right to privacy. On the contrary, they are subject to the people's right to transparent and accountable governance. Institutions, may, under certain conditions, exercise a privilege not to disclose particular kinds of information to the general public, but then only with justification. Any implied equation of these powerful institutional agents with humans made up of flesh, vulnerability is both morally and analytically suspect.. A "fair" fight between non-equals is not fair, and being blind to power is an implicit endorsement of the powerful.

Further, while one may disagree with the particular methods chosen by Wikileaks--and I certainly have my criticisms--the suggestion that we live in a world in which states and individuals have both become too transparent makes me wonder if Lanier is writing about not this reality, but one of the virtual ones he helped pioneer. It seems to me that states (and corporations) have become increasingly secretive and opaque, while people are increasingly exposed. This divergence was lampooned quite effectively by Saturday Night Live. "I give you private information about corporations for free," SNL's Assange quipped, "And I'm a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's the Man of the Year."

Nerd Power vs. Corporate Power

Much of Lanier's piece revolves around "nerd ideology," a topic of much concern to him; indeed, it is the subject of his last book, "You Are Not a Gadget." I'm sympathetic to much of what he has to say about this. I agree that there is sometimes almost a fetishization of information for its own sake. In my talk about Wikileaks at the Personal Democracy Forum recently, I emphasized that we should not see information by itself as a change agent and that a glut of information, especially without context and political leverage, may not result in meaningful change. That, however, is not an argument for less information.

I also share Lanier's distaste for the "Internet is coming alive as a new, singular, global, post-human, superior life form ... a global brain" discourse, again much discussed in his book. Lanier apparently sees "Anonymous," the loosely-affiliated groups of individuals that are associated with the distributed denial-of-service attacks against corporations that targeted Wikileaks, as subscribers to the "global brain" idea. Fine, down with the global brain.

But how is this in any way but the most tangential connected to Wikileaks? First, neither Julian Assange nor Wikileaks is associated with Anonymous. His few public statements on this issue have been to distance his organization from them. Second, is Anonymous' campaign--a few, relatively unsuccessful, virtual protests by a group most estimate to be mostly composed of teenagers--really the main thing Lanier sees when he looks at what this whole affair has shown us about the Internet? It is one thing to be personally concerned about nerd ideology, it is quite another to see nerd ideology everywhere to the exclusion of all else .

During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech--it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.

The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere "quasi-public sphere," the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private. If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power.

So, no, I fail to be moved by Lanier's horror of "Anonymous," apparently the epitome of nerd ideology, whose most fearsome member charged to-date with Wikileaks-related attacks is a 16-year-old Dutch kid. Anonymous' support for Wikileaks hardly makes Wikileaks a leading proponent of nerd ideology by association any more than Wikileaks is Kevin Bacon, but Lanier wants to write about Nerd Ideology. The actions by Anonymous were barely the equivalent of virtual sit-ins, and had very little effect. Jaron Lanier should know better how to judge the true impact of these small-scale DDoS attacks, regardless of the brief media hysteria.

The real cause for concern is the emergence of an Internet in which arbitrary Terms-of-Service can be selectively employed by large corporations to boot content they dislike. What is worrisome is an Internet in which it is very easy to marginalize and choke information. The fact that information is "there" in a torrent, or openly on a website that is not easily accessible or has been vilified, is about as relevant as your right to shout at your TV.

It has become obvious that, increasingly, contentious content is going to require infrastructure far above and beyond what is necessary to support content that is mainstream, power-friendly, or irrelevant. And further, contentious content will likely be cut off from being funded through people-power, as was shown by the speed with which Paypal, Mastercard and Visa, representing almost all the conventional and easy ways to send money over the Internet, moved to cut off Wikileaks. Platforms such as Apple, which maintain total control over content in their increasingly-appliancized devices, are another worrisome trend in this direction. (Apple swiftly moved to censor the lone Wikileaks App that made it through its app store).

What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet. As a dissident content provider, you might have to fight your DNS provider. You might need to fund large-scale hosting resources while others can use similar capacity on commercial servers for a few hundred dollars a year. Fund-raising infrastructure that is open to pretty much everyone else, including the KKK, may not be available. This does not mean that Wikileaks cannot get hosted, as it is already well-known and big, but what about smaller, less-famous, less established, less well-off efforts? Will they even get off the ground?

These developments should alarm every concerned citizen, even those who are thoroughly disgusted by Wikileaks. This is the issue that the Wikileaks furor has exposed, not nerd ideology. This is the story and likely will be more important than the release of diplomatic cables (which were already available to millions of people) through major newspapers after scrutiny by journalists. This question will stay with us even if Wikileaks dissolves, and Julian Assange is never heard from again.

The Bits of the Internet

As a former professional programmer (in a previous life), I cannot resist briefly commenting on two somewhat technical claims made by Lanier.

First, Lanier argues that the digital architecture of computers causes things to end up in binary states at the macro level, i.e. we are either completely opaque or completely transparent. This analogy rests on a false premise. The binary system can represent numbers to any degree of precision one wishes, and can even be said to have an advantage over analog systems which cannot be as precise in representing in-between numbers. In fact, if degrees of gray are your goal, a digital system is your friend whereas analog systems are limited by the precision of measuring and sensing devices. It is no problem to distinguish 1.573234512345 from 1.573234512342 in a digital system.

The true reasons for the uncomfortable exposure of our information are not in silicon but in human affairs and macro-structures: legal, political and corporate. We don't have sufficiently-developed laws protecting us as our commons have moved to privately-owned spaces on the Internet. Lanier misses the fact that this is an issue of design, motive and choice. It would be just as easy, and just as technically feasible to design a different kind of Facebook. I agree that the ease with which information can be copied makes exposure easier and in that point, there is a link between Facebook and Wikileaks. However, to understand the structure of our Internet commons, one needs to look at relations of power. The purely techno-deterministic story told by Lanier misses that point.

Second, Lanier argues that, just as object-oriented programming made program flow easier to control, we should have orderly flow of information between different components of the social structure, i.e. between powerful institutions, governments, their diplomats and the people. His implication is that unstructured flow of information will be like "spaghetti code," in that it will result in unpredictable and undesirable consequences. In object-oriented programming, each module is opaque to each other; one only has inputs and outputs and no view of the internal workings. Lanier's lesson from object-oriented programming seems to be that citizens should always sit down and wait till the government module spits out whatever output it deems appropriate for us. (In fact, Lanier's argument, exporting technical design considerations to human affairs, seems like a perfect example of nerd culture and the kind of reasoning he's inveighing against.)

I don't believe that a "don't ask, don't tell" relationship between a state and its citizens is a moral position, especially for citizens of the most powerful nation on Earth, which is still engaged in multiple wars around the world. Again, surprisingly for a whole piece on Wikileaks, that fact only enters the discussion when Lanier invokes, in his words, "the canonical unfortunate fellow in Afghanistan who translated for a US diplomat and counted on the USA to keep it secret." Besides the fact that such cases are not known, these cables were available to about three million people (which has led me to argue elsewhere that their true impact may be in collapsing the insider/outsider boundary, rather than revealing deep secrets). I trust and hope that U.S. diplomats had the good sense not to put sensitive names in such a widely available resource. What I wonder is can one really write a whole piece about Wikileaks and not mention that administration after administration continues to be awfully secretive about these wars we are engaged in that are killing real people, surely a pressing a concern that must be raised when discussing the exposure of these cables.

I reiterate that one does not need to be a fan of Wikileaks to reject the notion that rather than demand increased transparency and disclosure from institutions with power, we should trust them because trust is a human value. Going back to my starting point, it appears that Lanier is once again conflating human-to-human relations and human-institution relations and suggesting that the same principles should apply to them. A world in which humans don't trust each other is indeed cold and inhumane. A world in which we trust powerful institutions merely on principle is one where we abdicate our responsibilities as citizens and human beings.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...premacy/68397/





Congressman Calls Public Radio "Non-Essential"
FMQB

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) has penned a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), asking for an audit of funds for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB). Lamborn wrote, "In the era of trillion dollar annual deficits, we obviously must cut our federal spending. We no longer have the luxury of funding non-essential services, if we ever did. As we move forward with tough spending cuts, it is critical that we have the most accurate picture of government spending to ensure the cuts are made responsibly."

Lamborn adds that he finds it "imperative that an accurate and complete snapshot of CPB’s use of taxpayer funding be available to lawmakers and the public." He also asks for a specific breakdown on funds going to NPR, including those that go to NPR vs. local affiliates, how these funds flow through NPR and CPB to their affiliates and how federal funding is used beyond the development of content.

Lamborn has proposed a bill, H.R. 6417, prohibiting federal dollars from going to NPR through congressional appropriations and any of the various federal grants NPR now accesses. Lamborn claims that with the funding NPR stations receive from corporation, members and sponsorships, " eliminating taxpayer support should not materially affect NPR’s ability to operate. It will, however, save taxpayers many millions of dollars each year."

The Colorado Springs Gazette notes that Lamborn had proposed a pair of bills to deny NPR and CPB funding in November, but they were both defeated by House Democrats. The paper reports that Lamborn may try to re-introduce the legislation again in January.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2051847





Was It Google And Verizon Or The FCC That Just Screwed Us On Mobile Net Neutrality?
MG Siegler

We’ve already covered the FCC Net Neutrality vote earlier today, but something new has come to light. Something that’s very odd. Something that’s quite frankly a little terrifying.

Engadget dug up the FCC’s release and found the following nugget buried in the all-important section “Measured Steps for Mobile Broadband”:

“Further, we recognize that there have been meaningful recent moves toward openness, including the introduction of open operating systems like Android. In addition, we anticipate soon seeing the effects on the market of the openness conditions we imposed on mobile providers that operate on upper 700 MHz C-Block spectrum, which includes Verizon Wireless, one of the largest mobile wireless carriers in the U.S.

In light of these considerations, we conclude it is appropriate to take measured steps at this time to protect the openness of the Internet when accessed through mobile broadband”

While that may read like it’s a statement from Google or Verizon — actually, the entire section reads a lot like their joint proposal — it’s actually the FCC’s statement. Yes, that’s the FCC citing Android’s openness as a reason why they don’t need to impose net neutrality rules for mobile broadband.

Except wait. What the hell does an open operating system have anything to do with network access? Nilay Patel wonders this. John Gruber wonders this. Everyone should wonder this. It really does almost read as if they just copied what Google and Verizon laid out and forgot to remove the self-promotion.

As Patel writes:

“… if we were slightly more paranoid, we’d be pretty sure there’s a link between the FCC’s Android mention and the combined furious lobbying of Google and Verizon.”

I am slightly more paranoid. What the hell is Android doing in that statement?

I’ve made my thoughts on Android’s “openness” very clear. So have others. I believe the carriers are taking advantage of it and will continue to do so to the detriment of consumers. Now the FCC is using the “openness” label to screw us on net neutrality? Great.

Why doesn’t the FCC just say something like: “We just attended this great Google conference and heard that Android was open. Therefore, we see no need to regulate mobile broadband. It’s open, you see. That’s good for everyone. That means that everyone is going to do the right thing. An open operating system ensures there won’t be any throttling or filtering. Why? Because. Well. Open! Verizon agrees.”

It was only a month ago that FCC head Julius Genachowski said that the Verizon/Google proposal “slowed down” the process of coming up with a net neutrality proposal. Apparently, that’s because they had to rewrite the thing to include exactly what Verizon and Google agreed upon.

And now you see the danger of Google backtracking and screwing us in this regard. It seems greed, for lack of a better word, was just too good.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/ver...net-neutrality
















Until next week,

- js.



















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