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Old 30-10-13, 08:17 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 2nd, '13

Since 2002


































"IsoHunt can definitely be called a file-sharing icon. The main goal is to restore the website with torrents and provide users with the same familiar interface." – New Development Team


"As it turns out, you're doing it wrong if you want to make money in music by being a musician." – Peter Filimore

















































November 2nd, 2013










UK ISPs Asked to Block 21 File Sharing Sites Including Torrentz.eu, BitSnoop and ExtraTorrent
Thomas Newton

The UK’s leading ISPs have been asked to block a further 21 file-sharing sites after receiving fresh court orders from rights holders.

The sites, including the likes of Torrentz.eu, BitSnoop and ExtraTorrent are to be blocked on October 30.

BT and Virgin Media have confirmed that the block will be implemented in the next two days.

A BT spokesperson said: “BT will only block access to websites engaged in online copyright infringement when ordered by a court to do so. BT has been ordered to block access to these websites, and will do so within the timeframe set out in the court order.”

Read our guides to Which ISPs block file sharing sites? the Digital Economy Act and Internet Piracy Prosecutions
Gareth Mead, a Virgin Media spokesperson added: “We’ve received court orders requiring us to block a further 21 file-sharing sites found to be infringing on copyright. As a responsible ISP we obey court orders addressed to the company.”

Sky typically does not comment on which sites it blocks but states that it always complies with court orders as and when they’re received. Sky refreshes a list of sites that it’s been asked to block on its ‘Our approach to protecting copyright’ page. So far, Torrentz.eu and the others have not yet appeared.

TalkTalk has yet to respond to a request for comment.

A report from TorrentFreak first revealed that Torrentz.eu, BitSnoop and ExtraTorrent would be blocked in the UK at the end of the month.

Recombu Digital has obtained the full list of sites that are to be blocked:

• 1337x
• Abmp3
• BeeMP3
• BitSnoop
• Bomb-Mp3
• eMp3World
• ExtraTorrent
• FileCrop
• FilesTube
• Monova
• Mp3Juices
• Mp3lemon
• Mp3Raid
• Mp3skull
• NewAlbumReleases
• Rapidlibrary
• TorrentCrazy
• TorrentDownloads
• TorrentHound
• Torrentreactor
• Torrentz

This latest wave of site blocking measures is the biggest yet. Previously, rights holders had sought court orders for sites like The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, Movie2k and EZTV.

The length of time it took for court orders to materialise meant that there was time for those involved in file sharing to set up mirrors and proxies. Obtaining orders to block several sites all at once makes it easier for rights holders to bring the fight to the pirates.
http://recombu.com/digital/news/uk-i...nt_M12345.html





IsoHunt Resurrected Less Than Two Weeks After $110 Million MPAA Deal
Andy

BitTorrent indexing site isoHunt, that was forced to shut down earlier this month after a claimed $110m settlement deal with the MPAA, has this morning been resurrected. The people behind the recreation of one of the world’s largest torrent sites, who are not in any way related to the old isoHunt site, say the aim was to give isoHunt refugees access to their much-loved database of torrents wrapped up in a familiar interface.

Earlier this month some pretty surprising news hit the file-sharing scene. After many years battling aggressively with the MPAA, Canadian BitTorrent site isoHunt suddenly agreed to a settlement with the MPAA.

The amount that owner Gary Fung would have to pay to the MPAA was publicized at $110 million, a somewhat scary quantity of money by anyone’s standards. Of course, Fung doesn’t have that kind of money and wouldn’t pay it freely to the MPAA even if he did. The amount was put out there to act as a deterrent to those who might think of opening a similar site in future, the metaphorical head-on-a-pike if you will.

But despite the scary messages and veiled threats, just days after the settlement was announced a group calling themselves the ArchiveTeam told TorrentFreak that they intended to save isoHunt’s torrent files, to save them for future generations. They had a big job ahead and a deadline of October 23 looming, the date that Fung had agreed to close down isoHunt.

Things wouldn’t pan out as planned. After hearing of the backup plan Fung pulled the plug days early, thwarting the ArchiveTeam’s attempts at preserving history.

However, in the background another project was already underway to breathe new life into isoHunt even after it had been shot and buried by the MPAA. Today isoHunt.to was launched, a site that looks identical to its now-dead namesake.

Speaking with TorrentFreak the team behind the project, who have no connections to the ArchiveTeam, say that preserving a cultural icon is their main aim.

“IsoHunt has been a great part of the torrent world for more than a decade. It’s a big loss to everyone who used it over the years. Media corporations don’t like innovative or competition and isoHunt’s fate is one of the examples of how they deal with it,” our sources explain.

“IsoHunt can definitely be called a file-sharing icon. People got used to it and they don’t want to simply let it go. We want those people to feel like being at home while visiting isohunt.to. The main goal is to restore the website with torrents and provide users with the same familiar interface.”

While there is still work to be done and bugs to be ironed out, things are well underway. The interface is completely familiar, with categories to browse on the left hand side as usual. Torrent pages appear as they previously did although the ‘time added’ box appears to show when the torrent was added to the new isoHunt site, not when it was added to the original isoHunt.

At the moment some of the community-driven modules of the site such as the forum and user profiles are unavailable and due to their nature it seems unlikely that they will return. User torrent comments are also absent but it at least seems possible that these might be recovered in a future update. Additionally, brand new torrents are also being added to the site so its usefulness will not only be limited to preserving the past.

With the original isoHunt gone there is no simple way of comparing the new isoHunt’s database with the old one but the team behind the resurrection inform TorrentFreak that so far around 75% of isoHunt’s torrent database has been restored.

“Only time will tell whether users like the site or not. If they like the idea and keep coming back we’ll be happy to develop the project even further,” the team conclude.

Update: A former employee of isoHunt.com has asked us to make it extra clear that isoHunt.to has nothing to do with the original isoHunt.com.
http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-resu...a-deal-131029/





15 Years Ago, Congress Kept Mickey Mouse Out of the Public Domain. Will They do it Again?
Timothy B. Lee

For most of history, a great character or story or song has passed from its original creator into the public domain. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens and Beethoven are long dead, but Macbeth and Oliver Twist and the Fifth Symphony are part of our shared cultural heritage, free to be used or re-invented by anyone on the planet who is so inclined. But 15 years ago this Sunday, President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended copyright protection. As a result, the great creative output of the 20th century, from Superman to "Gone With the Wind" to Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue," were locked down for an extra 20 years.

It was a windfall to the families and corporations that owned these lucrative copyrights. But it meant these iconic works would be off-limits to those who wanted to reuse or reinvent them without permission. And hundreds of thousands of lesser-known works aren’t available at all, because there's no cost-effective way to obtain permission to republish them.

The copyright extension Clinton signed will expire in five years. Copyright holders like the Disney Corp. and the Gershwin estate have a strong incentive to try to extend copyright extension yet further into the future. But with the emergence of the Internet as a political organizing tool, opponents of copyright extension will be much better prepared. The question for the coming legislative battle on copyright is who will prevail: those who would profit from continuing to lock up the great works of the 20th century, or those who believe Bugs Bunny should be as freely available for reuse as Little Red Riding Hood.

Longer and longer

Today, copyrights can easily last for more than a century. Things were very different when America was founded. In America's original copyright system, protection only lasted for 28 years. By the mid-20th century, Congress had doubled the maximum term to 56 years. Then, in 1976, Congress overhauled the copyright system. Instead of fixed terms with a maximum of 56 years of protection, individual authors were granted protection for their life plus an additional 50 years, an approach that had become the norm in Europe. For works authored by corporations—Hollywood blockbusters, for example—copyright terms were extended to 75 years.

If not for the CTEA, Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, would have fallen into the public domain at the end of 2003. That would have allowed anyone to use the character in their own works. (Disney)

The 1976 legislation granted a retroactive extension for works published before the new system took effect. The maximum term for already-published works was lengthened from 56 years to 75 years. That meant that any work that was still under copyright in 1978, when the new system took effect, was eligible for an additional 19 years of protection. Without the term extension, works published between 1922 and 1941 would have fallen into the public domain between 1978 and 1997.

Instead, those works remained under copyright, providing a windfall to the owners of iconic copyrighted works such as the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, "Steamboat Willie," and George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." When the 1990s arrived, the holders of those older copyrights began agitating for another extension. Copyrighted works from the 1920s were scheduled to begin falling into the public domain again in 1998, and copyright interests wanted Congress to stop that from happening.

Following Europe's lead

"There was not a single argument that actually can stand up to any kind of reasonable analysis," says Dennis Karjala, a law professor at Arizona State who emerged as a de facto leader of the opposition to the law. The supporters of the law, Karjala says, were "basically the Gershwin family trust, grandchildren of Oscar Hammerstein, Disney, others of that ilk"—that is, holders of copyrights in old works that were on the verge of expiring.

Supporters of the extension pointed to Europe. In 1993, the European Union added 20 years to the term of European copyrights. Under European law, American authors would only enjoy longer copyright terms in Europe if the United States followed Europe's lead and adopted "life plus 70" copyright terms.

"It didn't seem like there was any reason why American creators should be at a disadvantage vis a vis their European counterparts," says Preston Padden, who represented Disney in the late 1990s and is now affiliated with the University of Colorado Law School. "The old disparity invited mischief, like American creators artificially creating legal domiciles for Europe in order to gain the benefit of the longer license term." And, advocates said, if Congress was extending terms for new works, it would only be fair to extend terms for existing works as well.

Critics pointed out that extending copyright terms retroactively wouldn't benefit the public. After all, William Faulkner, George Gershwin and Walt Disney had died decades earlier. Granting longer copyright terms for their existing works couldn't cause them to produce any more masterpieces.

"To suggest that the monopoly use of copyrights for the creator's life plus 50 years after his death is not an adequate incentive to create is absurd," wrote Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.) in a 1996 report for the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The real incentive here is for corporate owners that bought copyrights to lobby Congress for another 20 years of revenue—not for creators who will be long dead once this term extension takes hold."

But Brown was in the minority. Indeed, Brown says, he was the committee's only opponent. "I thought it was a moral outrage," says Brown, who left the Senate in 1996 and now practices law in Colorado. "There wasn't anyone speaking out for the public interest."

A lonely fight

Few members of Congress were opposed to the legislation, but Karjala was working to rally opposition to the legislation from outside of Congress. The Copyright Office asked for comments on extending copyright terms in 1993. Karjala says he drafted a letter opposing the idea and got "30 or 40" of his fellow legal scholars to sign it. When Congress took up the idea in 1995, people encouraged Karjala to once again take a leading role. "I kind of groaned to myself," Karjala says. "I'm not an activist type of personality, but I thought, 'I guess I've started on this thing. I'm the only one who seems to be sufficiently energized about it.'"

If President Clinton hadn't signed the CTEA, Superman would be scheduled to fall into the public domain at the end of this year.

To actually stop the legislation, Karjala needed powerful allies. And there were established groups that he thought should be helping out. This was long before reddit and Wikipedia helped create a grassroots copyright movement. But Karjala says that non-profit groups representing professions such as librarians and historians had traditionally served as public-interest watchdogs on copyright issues. And those groups had lobbyists that could have helped stop copyright terms from being extended.

But his efforts to recruit them to fight term extension fell flat. With the bill looking unstoppable, most of these groups chose to make peace with the forces pushing the bill. Karjala says they were "bought off" by minor changes to the legislation that addressed specific issues that concerned them. "In exchange they agreed not to oppose the rest of the bill," he says.

Brown did his best to slow progress on the bill. "I noted the absence of a quorum several times," he says, a tactic that delayed consideration of the legislation. "I did my best to extend the debate."

"A hostage situation"

Without the CTEA, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves would have fallen into the public domain at the beginning of this year. (Disney)

But the biggest reason the fight lasted as long as it did—legislation was introduced in 1995 but it didn't pass until 1998—was because the restaurant industry saw the campaign for term extension as an opportunity to advance their own pet issue: getting a broader exemption for small bars and restaurants that played copyrighted music over the radio.

"This was a hostage situation," says Peter Jaszi, a law professor at American University who also testified against extending terms. Bars and restaurants didn't care about term extensions, but they threatened to bottle up the proposal unless they got their way.

Negotiations over the hospitality industry's demands slowed the passage of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). But eventually, policymakers agreed to pass the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, which addressed the hospitality industry's concerns, as a companion bill. When bars and restaurants dropped their opposition to term extension, the legislation's remaining opponents weren't powerful enough to stop it. It passed both houses of Congress on Oct. 7, 1998, and was signed by President Clinton on Oct. 27.

Opponents get their day in court

The retroactive extension of copyright terms soon drew a legal challenge. Eric Eldred was an Internet publisher who specialized in publishing works that were in the public domain. Represented by legal scholar Larry Lessig, Eldred became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of retroactively extending copyright terms.

The Constitution requires that copyrights be granted for a limited time; Lessig argued that if Congress has the power to retroactively extend copyright terms, it effectively has the power to grant unlimited copyright terms on the installment plans. Ironically, the legal battle against the CTEA drew much broader public support than the legislative battle had. "Once Larry Lessig brought the constitutional challenge, all these same people came out of the woodwork," Karjala says of people who hadn't engaged on the issue when the legislation was before Congress. "They started writing amicus briefs to argue the Supreme Court should rule it unconstitutional."

One brief was signed by some of the nation's most prominent economists, including Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, and Kenneth Arrow. The Constitution requires that copyright protection promote the progress of science, but the economists pointed out that the CTEA was hard to justify in these terms. Copyright terms were already so long, they argued, that an additional 20 years would provide only minimal incentive to produce new works. More to the point, retroactively extending protection for existing works couldn't possibly encourage the creation of new works.

But these arguments fell on deaf ears. Writing for a seven-member majority in 2003, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg ruled that Congress had broad discretion to choose copyright terms and to retroactively extend them as it saw fit. So long as the terms remained finite, the court held, they satisfied the court's "limited times" requirement.

"They're going to have to start doing it now"

The big question now is whether incumbent copyright holders will try to get yet another extension of copyright terms before works begin falling into the public domain again on January 1, 2019.

For now, Hollywood is staying mum; a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America declined to comment on its plans. We weren't able to find any sign the topic has come up on Capitol Hill. But most of the experts we spoke to said the stakes are so high that a renewed lobbying push is almost inevitable.

"If Hollywood and their allies want to do this, they're going to have to start doing it now," says Chris Sprigman, a legal scholar at New York University. "I would imagine there are discussions going on." Sprigman predicts a debate over term extension over the next five years will look very different than it did in the 1990s. "People are paying attention," he says. "There's a coalition now" that's likely to oppose longer terms.

Indeed, Sprigman sees public outrage over the 1998 extension as a catalyst for the copyright reform movement that came of age with the protest that stopped the Stop Online Piracy Act last year. "None of that would have been possible without the loss in the CTEA and Eldred," he argues.

One advantage opponents will have this time around is better arguments and evidence. Public debate over the last extension has stimulated increased academic research into the economics of the public domain, and as a result, we know a lot more about the costs of longer copyright terms than we did 20 years ago.

One striking example: a study looked at the availability of books published in the last 200 years on Amazon.com. Surprisingly, the study found that there are more printed books available from the 1880s than the 1980s. When books fall into the public domain, as works from the 1880s have, anyone is free to re-publish them. In contrast, books from the 1980s are still in copyright, so only their original copyright holder can give permission to distribute them. As a result, older books are actually easier to get online than newer books are. That means that the 1976 and 1998 extensions have deprived a generation of readers of easy access to books from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

Not only have many copyright holders failed to keep their older works in print, but there are now many books whose copyright holders can't be identified at all. In many cases, the original copyright holder is dead and records about who now holds the copyright aren't available. These "orphan works" have become a serious problem for projects such as Google Books, which aims to digitize books and make them available to the public. Google can't obtain the rights to reproduce these books at any price because it can't figure out who it needs to negotiate with. The older a work is, the more likely it is to be orphaned, so copyright extensions have made the problem much worse.

"There's no evidence suggesting that a longer term is going to produce any more art, literature," Sprigman says. "The only reason to extend the term is to give private benefits to companies like Disney or Time Warner that have valuable properties like Mickey Mouse or famous films."

But copyright, he says, is "not supposed to be about corporate welfare for Disney." Over the next five years, we'll find out if Congress agrees.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...y-do-it-again/





Hacker Uses Bots to Top Music Charts, Bumps P!nk, Niki Minaj
Darren Pauli

A Melbourne security professional has sent ear-piercing 'garbage' tunes to the top of online music charts by spoofing track plays.

Despite that Peter Filimore (@typhoonfilsy) has never played an instrument, in a month he accrued hundreds of thousands of plays for his tunes hosted in online music charts, trumping artists like P!nk, Nicki Minaj, Flume and chart topper album The Heist and making $1000 in royalties in the process.

A now dormant artist account he operated has received nearly a million hits.

Rather than spend years practising an instrument and writing songs, he compiled music from clunky electronic MIDI files and later by applying algorithms that squashed together public domain audio.

He then purchased three Amazon compute instances and wrote a simple bash script to simulate three listeners playing his songs 24 hours a day for a month.

Filimore wasn't bothered when online listeners dubbed the tunes "rubbish", "horrible" and of a quality perhaps only appealing while "on cocaine".

Rather, the payments security expert was curious whether fraud detection mechanisms were used across music services like Spotify, Pandora and CDBaby.

"I'm not a musician," Filimore told SC at the Ruxcon security event in Melbourne this week. "But I kept hearing that artists were going broke and wanted to look into it."

"As it turns out, you're doing it wrong if you want to make money in music by being a musician."

He began to test the services earlier this year by uploading the awful audio to a variety of streaming music services.

While Telstra's MOG and Spotify would both ban his account early in his research, Filimore suspected the crackdowns were not automated. For the former service, his 1200 plays would have been easily detected as relative high traffic, while Spotify users likely would have reported the apparently popular yet shrill MIDI tunes to site administrators.

Filimore then compiled the tunes from public domain works using Wolfram Alpha and created an album dubbed Kim Jong Christmas.

The new music appeared less obviously-fraudulent than the MIDI tunes but still failed to attract fans despite its fusion of festival carols and blasting 90's techno.

"Loops, poorly mixed sound resulting in distortion, cheesy horrible samples; it might sound good on cocaine like when it was made, but this isn't music," one reviewer wrote.

"There's ain't no party like a Korean Worker's Party. But seriously, what the hell is this doing on high rotation?" another said.

For a total cost of about $30, Filimore was able to gain a slow trickle of royalty payments from the fixed resource pool that online streaming services used to pay the many thousands of artists for the clicks their tunes generate.

His work was possible he suspected because the services lacked automated analysis and instead relied on user reports to detect fraudulent music.

Suspension notices said only that his accounts breach terms of service and Filimore did not receive responses to requests for more details.

This he said created an opportunity for artists to "DDoS" rival musicians off the streaming networks by directing fraudulent clicks from attacker-controlled cloud computing instances to the targets' tracks.

An attacker then posing as a listener could then report what appeared as fraudulent plays to the streaming service administrators who would ostensibly suspend the account without providing further information to the victim artist.

While the research was a small-scale demonstration designed for Ruxcon, Filimore said it could be easily scaled-up by adding more cloud compute resources that would generate thousands of dollars in fraudulent royalties.

Filimore had seen only one other would-be muso who appeared to be scamming royalties under the name 'Scam Artist'.
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/36...ic-charts.aspx





Phone-Hacking Trial: Andy Coulson Told Editor 'Do His Phone'

Ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson denies phone hacking and corrupt payment charges
BBC

Then News of the World editor Andy Coulson told a senior journalist investigating an exclusive story on television celebrity Calum Best to "do his phone", a court has heard.

Mr Coulson emailed the instruction to his then head of news, Ian Edmondson, prosecutor Andrew Edis QC said.

They feared a rival paper may get the story about the son of George Best and a woman, Mr Edis told the Old Bailey.

Mr Coulson and Mr Edmondson deny conspiracy to intercept communications.

Mr Edis said that in 2006, the now-closed News of the World (NoW) was investigating Calum Best, who was thought to be the father of a child with a woman who was willing to sell the story.

The NoW wanted the story as an exclusive and were paying the woman a lot of money, but were worried that Mr Best - son of the late Manchester United footballer George Best - might "leak" the story to their competition, the court heard.

Following an email discussion on the matter, Mr Coulson sent Mr Edmondson a message which read: "Do his phone."

"What does that mean?" Mr Edis asked the jury.

He added the evidence against Mr Edmondson was "overwhelming".

Celebrity targets

The court was also told that journalists at the paper used hacking as a "perfectly rational but entirely illegal" way of standing up stories.

Reporters would receive a tip-off about a story, and then use surveillance and phone hacking to check whether it was true before confronting those involved.

Alleged targets of the phone hacking included former Home Secretary Charles Clarke, actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller, and former aide to Prince William and Prince Harry, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the jury heard. The list also included former politician Lord Archer, cook Delia Smith, and model Abi Titmuss.

The court heard the newspaper had been tipped off about a rumoured affair - which was untrue - between Mr Clarke and his assistant, Hannah Pawlby, and journalists watched her home and accessed her voicemails.

Mr Edis said this demonstrated how the NoW had used three ways to investigate stories - phone hacking, surveillance, and confrontation - and in this case Mr Coulson had approached their target.

"The editor is personally involved in the third. Obviously he knows about the second, surveillance - he must do. What about the first? Does he know about phone hacking? He says he doesn't, we say 'Oh yes, he did'," he argued.

Mr Edis also told the jury that a hairdresser called Laura Rooney had had her phone hacked, even though she had no connection with England striker Wayne Rooney. They had thought she was related to him, Mr Edis said.

Royal directories

Allegations of inappropriate payments involving Mr Coulson and Clive Goodman, a former NoW royal editor who was convicted of phone hacking in 2007, were also outlined by Mr Edis.

Police found 15 royal-related directories at Goodman's home, two of which the prosecution maintained were illegally bought from royal protection officers.

In 2003, Goodman emailed Mr Coulson to ask if he could pay a royal policeman £1,000 for another directory, saying: "These people will not be paid in anything other than cash because if they're discovered selling stuff to us they end up on criminal charges, as could we."

Mr Edis said that, as a result of that conversation, a cash payment of £1,000 was made to a David Farish, which turned out to be a false name.

"The investigation has never identified the policeman responsible for this," Mr Edis told the court.

But he added the conversation and payment were the "clearest possible evidence" of conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office - a charge that Mr Coulson denies - and were linked to phone hacking.

The court heard the telephone directories were needed to assist targeting Sir Michael Peat, former principal private secretary to the Prince of Wales. The NoW's private investigator targeted him on the day the book was purchased.

The court heard that in June 2005, Goodman sent Mr Coulson an email saying: "One of our palace cops has got hold of a rare and just printed Palace staff phone book.

"Every job, every name, every number. We usually pay £1,000 for these. It's a very risky document for him to nick. Ok to put the credit through?"

Mr Edis said Mr Coulson did not reply to this email, but after Goodman followed up asking again for authorisation, the editor replied: "Fine."

The prosecutor told the jury that the use of the word "nick" would have "told Mr Coulson precisely that he was paying a policeman to commit a crime".

Mr Coulson and Mr Edmondson are among eight defendants - including former Sun and NoW editor Rebekah Brooks - who deny a range of charges at the Old Bailey.

The court heard on Wednesday that three former News of the World journalists, who are not on trial, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire had pleaded guilty to phone-hacking charges.

The trial continues.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24769953





Data Suggests Push to Spy on Merkel Dates to ’02
Alison Smale, Melissa Eddy and David E. Sanger

New details about the monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone by the National Security Agency further stoked the German government’s anger on Sunday and raised two questions: Why did the United States target her as early as 2002, and why did it take five years for the Obama administration to put a halt to the surveillance?

The latest round of recriminations came after Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, published details from what it described as an entry from an N.S.A. database, apparently from the trove of documents downloaded by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who is now in temporary asylum in Moscow.

The database entry, according to Der Spiegel and outside experts, seemed to indicate that the request to monitor her cellphone began in 2002. But the document refers to her as “chancellor,” a position she has held only since late 2005. That seems to suggest the database entry had been updated.

The authenticity of the document could not be independently confirmed. But the German intelligence services believe it to be real, and in conversations between Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and her German counterpart, Ms. Rice made no effort to question the evidence, even while declining to confirm that Ms. Merkel’s cellphone was ever monitored, according to both American and German officials.

Der Spiegel also reported that the monitoring operation was run from the United States Embassy in the heart of Berlin, right by the Brandenburg Gate where President Obama spoke during a visit here last June. He also spoke about a mile from the gate during a now-famous campaign appearance in 2008. On his latest trip, with the Snowden documents already leaking out, he promised a full review of American spying on its allies.

The administration has seemed uncertain about how to handle the reports concerning Ms. Merkel, who has enjoyed a close rapport with Mr. Obama and has provided critical intelligence on Al Qaeda and on Iran’s nuclear program. Last week the White House stuck to carefully scripted talking points, saying Ms. Merkel was not currently being monitored and would not be in the future, but refused to say anything about the past.

That changed on Sunday, when the N.S.A. issued a statement to deny another German news media report, published in Bild am Sonntag, that said Mr. Obama had been briefed on the surveillance of Ms. Merkel in 2010 by Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the N.S.A. and of the United States Cyber Command. The report contradicted assurances given privately to the German authorities by Ms. Rice that Mr. Obama was unaware of any such operation.

The N.S.A. statement said that “General Alexander did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel. News reports claiming otherwise are not true.”

The N.S.A. statement did not question the validity of the database entry indicating when surveillance began, back when Ms. Merkel was the leader of the Christian Democratic Party. Nor did it shed light on why Ms. Merkel, a rare stalwart supporter in Europe of the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iraq, was chosen for surveillance.

On Sunday evening a senior administration official said of the spying on allies that the White House believed that “it’s not that the N.S.A. or the intelligence community were going rogue or operating out of bounds.” But the official added that two reviews of N.S.A. practices ordered by Mr. Obama are “to ensure that the intelligence community is getting the appropriate guidance from policy makers.”

The Obama administration has said as little as possible about the reports of the operation against Ms. Merkel, seemingly in hopes it will blow over. But the recent disclosures appear to have raised many new questions, including several that White House officials, saying they could not discuss classified intelligence matters, have been trying to deflect.

First among them is why Mr. Obama, by White House and N.S.A. accounts, was not made aware of the surveillance of a close ally. American officials have said that while the president approves major operations for the intelligence agencies, he does not get involved in the selection of targets. “I think this just wasn’t on the White House radar,” said one administration official familiar with internal discussions of the subject.

But given the delicacy of the subject — and previous German protests about other forms of surveillance — it is unclear why General Alexander or James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, would not have informed Mr. Obama as soon as the phone taps were disclosed. The White House has never said when any operations against Ms. Merkel ended, but the database entry published by Der Spiegel appeared to be current earlier this year. The Wall Street Journal reported late on Sunday that the N.S.A. program that was used to spy on a number of world leaders ended over the summer.

Even if Mr. Obama was unaware, it is possible some of his senior staff were. While the President’s Daily Brief, the intelligence assessment of global threats Mr. Obama is given each day, is heavy on analysis, some of his aides receive far more detailed accounts of intercepts in their daily binders of intelligence assessments.

In the United States, Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, vigorously defended American surveillance activities in Europe, saying that much of the anger over them flowed from a misunderstanding of their scope and intent.

Mr. Rogers insisted on the CNN program “State of the Union” that the N.S.A. surveillance program, particularly regarding France, but also Germany, had been badly misrepresented and that it was designed to protect them and other countries from the threat of terrorist attacks.

Reporters who had seen an N.S.A. slide concluded incorrectly that the agency had monitored 70 million French phone calls, he said, adding that reports of the monitoring of Ms. Merkel’s cellphone were also incomplete. He did not elaborate.

The extent of the German news coverage reflected how deeply anger and a feeling of deception had penetrated the political establishment here, underscored by Ms. Merkel’s decision last week to place an indignant call to Mr. Obama. She has said that trust must be restored, and that words will not be enough.

Ms. Merkel has come under fire at home for failing to act vigorously when Der Spiegel first reported massive surveillance of German data in June. At the time of Mr. Obama’s visit, she concurred with him that the intelligence operations had prevented terrorist acts in Germany. Senior officials of her government later declared the affair over after visiting Washington in August and gaining what they said were repeated assurances that no German laws had been broken.

The Germans and the French have said they will send senior intelligence officials to Washington this week to work on a “no-spy” accord — or another accord that regulates spying between close allies.

Ms. Merkel’s interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, and other officials have said they will review all the statements made to them by Washington and demand further confirmation that they are true. “The U.S.A. must explain where and to what extent they intercepted the communications of citizens and the government,” Mr. Friedrich told the daily newspaper The Bild.

A leading member of Mr. Friedrich’s party, the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, called for trans-Atlantic trade talks between the United States and the European Union to be suspended.

Alison Smale and Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Brian Knowlton contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/wo...tes-to-02.html





The NSA's Secret Spy Hub in Berlin
By SPIEGEL Staff

According to SPIEGEL research, United States intelligence agencies have not only targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone, but they have also used the American Embassy in Berlin as a listening station. The revelations now pose a serious threat to German-American relations.

It's a prime site, a diplomat's dream. Is there any better location for an embassy than Berlin's Pariser Platz? It's just a few paces from here to the Reichstag. When the American ambassador steps out the door, he looks directly onto the Brandenburg Gate.

When the United States moved into the massive embassy building in 2008, it threw a huge party. Over 4,500 guests were invited. Former President George H. W. Bush cut the red-white-and-blue ribbon. Chancellor Angela Merkel offered warm words for the occasion. Since then, when the US ambassador receives high-ranking visitors, they often take a stroll out to the roof terrace, which offers a breathtaking view of the Reichstag and Tiergarten park. Even the Chancellery can be glimpsed. This is the political heart of the republic, where billion-euro budgets are negotiated, laws are formulated and soldiers are sent to war. It's an ideal location for diplomats -- and for spies.

Research by SPIEGEL reporters in Berlin and Washington, talks with intelligence officials and the evaluation of internal documents of the US' National Security Agency and other information, most of which comes from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, lead to the conclusion that the US diplomatic mission in the German capital has not merely been promoting German-American friendship. On the contrary, it is a nest of espionage. From the roof of the embassy, a special unit of the CIA and NSA can apparently monitor a large part of cellphone communication in the government quarter. And there is evidence that agents based at Pariser Platz recently targeted the cellphone that Merkel uses the most.

The NSA spying scandal has thus reached a new level, becoming a serious threat to the trans-Atlantic partnership. The mere suspicion that one of Merkel's cellphones was being monitored by the NSA has led in the past week to serious tensions between Berlin and Washington.

Hardly anything is as sensitive a subject to Merkel as the surveillance of her cellphone. It is her instrument of power. She uses it not only to lead her party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but also to conduct a large portion of government business. Merkel uses the device so frequently that there was even debate earlier this year over whether her text-messaging activity should be archived as part of executive action.

'That's Just Not Done'

Merkel has often said -- half in earnest, half in jest -- that she operates under the assumption that her phone calls are being monitored. But she apparently had in mind countries like China and Russia, where data protection is not taken very seriously, and not Germany's friends in Washington.

Last Wednesday Merkel placed a strongly worded phone call to US President Barack Obama. Sixty-two percent of Germans approve of her harsh reaction, according to a survey by polling institute YouGov. A quarter think it was too mild. In a gesture of displeasure usually reserved for rogue states, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle summoned the new US ambassador, John Emerson, for a meeting at the Foreign Ministry.

The NSA affair has shaken the certainties of German politics. Even Merkel's CDU, long a loyal friend of Washington, is now openly questioning the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement. At the Chancellery it's now being said that if the US government doesn't take greater pains to clarify the situation, certain conclusions will be drawn and talks over the agreement could potentially be put on hold.

"Spying between friends, that's just not done," said Merkel on Thursday at a European Union summit in Brussels. "Now trust has to be rebuilt." But until recently it sounded as if the government had faith in its ally's intelligence agencies.

In mid-August Merkel's chief of staff, Ronald Pofalla, offhandedly described the NSA scandal as over. German authorities offered none of their own findings -- just a dry statement from the NSA leadership saying the agency adhered to all agreements between the countries.

Now it is not just Pofalla who stands disgraced, but Merkel as well. She looks like a head of government who only stands up to Obama when she herself is a target of the US intelligence services. The German website Der Postillon published a satirical version last Thursday of the statement given by Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert: "The chancellor considers it a slap in the face that she has most likely been monitored over the years just like some mangy resident of Germany."

Merkel has nothing to fear domestically from the recent turn of affairs. The election is over, the conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats are already in official negotiations toward forming a new government. No one wants to poison the atmosphere with mutual accusation.

Nevertheless, Merkel must now answer the question of how much she is willing to tolerate from her American allies.

Posing as Diplomats

A "top secret" classified NSA document from the year 2010 shows that a unit known as the "Special Collection Service" (SCS) is operational in Berlin, among other locations. It is an elite corps run in concert by the US intelligence agencies NSA and CIA.

The secret list reveals that its agents are active worldwide in around 80 locations, 19 of which are in Europe -- cities such as Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague and Geneva. The SCS maintains two bases in Germany, one in Berlin and another in Frankfurt. That alone is unusual. But in addition, both German bases are equipped at the highest level and staffed with active personnel.

The SCS teams predominantly work undercover in shielded areas of the American Embassy and Consulate, where they are officially accredited as diplomats and as such enjoy special privileges. Under diplomatic protection, they are able to look and listen unhindered. They just can't get caught.

Wiretapping from an embassy is illegal in nearly every country. But that is precisely the task of the SCS, as is evidenced by another secret document. According to the document, the SCS operates its own sophisticated listening devices with which they can intercept virtually every popular method of communication: cellular signals, wireless networks and satellite communication.

The necessary equipment is usually installed on the upper floors of the embassy buildings or on rooftops where the technology is covered with screens or Potemkin-like structures that protect it from prying eyes.

That is apparently the case in Berlin, as well. SPIEGEL asked British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell to appraise the setup at the embassy. In 1976, Campbell uncovered the existence of the British intelligence service GCHQ. In his so-called "Echelon Report" in 1999, he described for the European Parliament the existence of the global surveillance network of the same name.

Campbell refers to window-like indentations on the roof of the US Embassy. They are not glazed but rather veneered with "dielectric" material and are painted to blend into the surrounding masonry. This material is permeable even by weak radio signals. The interception technology is located behind these radio-transparent screens, says Campbell. The offices of SCS agents would most likely be located in the same windowless attic.

No Comment from the NSA

This would correspond to internal NSA documents seen by SPIEGEL. They show, for example, an SCS office in another US embassy -- a small windowless room full of cables with a work station of "signal processing racks" containing dozens of plug-in units for "signal analysis."

On Friday, author and NSA expert James Bamford also visited SPIEGEL's Berlin bureau, which is located on Pariser Platz diagonally opposite the US Embassy. "To me, it looks like NSA eavesdropping equipment is hidden behind there," he said. "The covering seems to be made of the same material that the agency uses to shield larger systems."

The Berlin-based security expert Andy Müller Maguhn was also consulted. "The location is ideal for intercepting mobile communications in Berlin's government district," he says, "be it technical surveillance of communication between cellphones and wireless cell towers or radio links that connect radio towers to the network."

Apparently, SCS agents use the same technology all over the world. They can intercept cellphone signals while simultaneously locating people of interest. One antenna system used by the SCS is known by the affable code name "Einstein."

When contacted by SPIEGEL, the NSA declined to comment on the matter.

The SCS are careful to hide their technology, especially the large antennas on the roofs of embassies and consulates. If the equipment is discovered, explains a "top secret" set of classified internal guidelines, it "would cause serious harm to relations between the United States and a foreign government."

According to the documents, SCS units can also intercept microwave and millimeter-wave signals. Some programs, such as one entitled "Birdwatcher," deal primarily with encrypted communications in foreign countries and the search for potential access points. Birdwatcher is controlled directly from SCS headquarters in Maryland.

With the growing importance of the Internet, the work of the SCS has changed. Some 80 branches offer "thousands of opportunities on the net" for web-based operations, according to an internal presentation. The organization is now able not only to intercept cellphone calls and satellite communication, but also to proceed against criminals or hackers. From some embassies, the Americans have planted sensors in communications equipment of the respective host countries that are triggered by selected terms.

How the Scandal Began

There are strong indications that it was the SCS that targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone. This is suggested by a document that apparently comes from an NSA database in which the agency records its targets. This document, which SPIEGEL has seen, is what set the cellphone scandal in motion.

The document contains Merkel's cellphone number. An inquiry to her team revealed that it is the number the chancellor uses mainly to communicate with party members, ministers and confidants, often by text message. The number is, in the language of the NSA, a "Selector Value." The next two fields determine the format ("raw phone number") and the "Subscriber," identified as "GE Chancellor Merkel."

In the next field, labeled "Ropi," the NSA defines who is interested in the German chancellor: It is the department S2C32. "S" stands for "Signals Intelligence Directorate," the NSA umbrella term for signal reconnaissance. "2" is the agency's department for procurement and evaluation. C32 is the unit responsible for Europe, the "European States Branch." So the order apparently came down from Europe specialists in charge of signal reconnaissance.

The time stamp is noteworthy. The order was transferred to the "National Sigint Requirements List," the list of national intelligence targets, in 2002. That was the year Germany held closely watched parliamentary elections and Merkel battled Edmund Stoiber of Bavaria's Christian Social Union to become the conservatives' chancellor candidate. It was also the year the Iraq crisis began heating up. The document also lists status: "A" for active. This status was apparently valid a few weeks before President Obama's Berlin visit in June 2013.

Finally, the document defines the units tasked with implementing the order: the "Target Office of Primary Interest": "F666E." "F6" is the NSA's internal name for the global surveillance unit, the "Special Collection Service."

Thus, the NSA would have targeted Merkel's cellphone for more than a decade, first when she was just party chair, as well as later when she'd become chancellor. The record does not indicate what form of surveillance has taken place. Were all of her conversations recorded or just connection data? Were her movements also being recorded?

'Intelligence Target Number One'

Among the politically decisive questions is whether the spying was authorized from the top: from the US president. If the data is accurate, the operation was authorized under former President George W. Bush and his NSA chief, Michael Hayden. But it would have had to be repeatedly approved, including after Obama took office and up to the present time. Is it conceivable that the NSA made the German chancellor a surveillance target without the president's knowledge?

The White House and the US intelligence agencies periodically put together a list of priorities. Listed by country and theme, the result is a matrix of global surveillance: What are the intelligence targets in various countries? How important is this reconnaissance? The list is called the "National Intelligence Priorities Framework" and is "presidentially approved."

One category in this list is "Leadership Intentions," the goals and objectives of a country's political leadership. The intentions of China's leadership are of high interest to the US government. They are marked with a "1" on a scale of 1 to 5. Mexico and Brazil each receive a "3" in this category.

Germany appears on this list as well. The US intelligence agencies are mainly interested in the country's economic stability and foreign policy objectives (both "3"), as well as in its advanced weapons systems and a few other sub-items, all of which are marked "4." The "Leadership Intention" field is empty. So based on the list, it wouldn't appear that Merkel should be monitored.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake does not see this as a contradiction. "After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Germany became intelligence target number one in Europe," he says. The US government did not trust Germany, because some of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots had lived in Hamburg. Evidence suggests that the NSA recorded Merkel once and then became intoxicated with success, says Drake. "It has always been the NSA's motto to conduct as much surveillance as possible," he adds.

A Political Bomb

When SPIEGEL confronted the government on Oct. 10 with evidence that the chancellor's cellphone had been targeted, the German security apparatus became deeply unsettled.

The Chancellery ordered the country's foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), to scrutinize the information. In parallel, Christoph Heusgen, Merkel's foreign policy adviser, also contacted his US counterpart, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, to tell her about SPIEGEL's research, which had been summarized on a single sheet of paper. Rice said she would look into it.

Shortly afterwards, German security authorities got back to the Chancellery with a preliminary result: The numbers, dates and secret codes on the paper indicated the information was accurate. It was probably some kind of form from an intelligence agency department requesting surveillance on the chancellor's cellphone, they said. At this point, a sense of nervousness began to grow at government headquarters. It was clear to everyone that if the Americans were monitoring Merkel's phone, it would be a political bomb.

But then Rice called the Chancellery on Friday evening to explain that if reports began to circulate that Merkel's phone had been targeted, Washington would deny it -- or at least that is how the Germans understood the message. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney assured his counterpart, Merkel's spokesperson Steffen Seibert, of the same thing. The message was passed on to SPIEGEL late that evening without comment, at which point editors decided to continue investigating.

With this, both the US agencies and Berlin won themselves more time to come up with a battle plan for approaching the deep crisis of confidence between the two countries. And it was clearly already a crisis of confidence, because Berlin obviously doubted the statements coming from the US and hadn't called off its probe. And, as later became clear, there were also inquiries taking place in the US, despite the denial from Rice.

Over the weekend, the tide turned.

Rice contacted Heusgen once again, but this time her voice sounded less certain. She said that the possibility the chancellor's phone was under surveillance could only be ruled out currently and in the future. Heusgen asked for more details, but was put off. The chief adviser to the president on Europe, Karen Donfried, and the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia at the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, would provide further information midweek, he was told. By this time it was clear to the Chancellery that if Obama's top security adviser no longer felt comfortable ruling out possible surveillance, this amounted to confirmation of their suspicions.

Going on the Offensive

This detail only served to intensify the catastrophe. Not only had supposed friends monitored the chancellor's cellphone, which was bad enough on its own, but leaders in Berlin were also left looking like a group of amateurs. They had believed the assurances made this summer by Obama, who downplayed the notion of spying in Germany on a visit to Berlin. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich had even gone so far as to say at the time that Germany's concerns had "dissipated."

On Tuesday morning Merkel decided to go on the offensive. She had seen how strongly French President François Hollande had reacted to allegations that US intelligence agencies had conducted widespread surveillance on French citizens. Hollande called Obama immediately to air his anger. Merkel now wanted to speak with Obama personally too -- before her planned meeting with Hollande at the upcoming EU summit in Brussels.

Heusgen made a preliminary call to Obama to let him know that Merkel planned to make some serious complaints, with which she would then go public. At stake was control over the political interpretation of one of the year's most explosive news stories.

Merkel spoke with Obama on Wednesday afternoon, calling him from her secure landline in her Chancellery office. Both spoke English. According to the Chancellery, the president said that he had known nothing of possible monitoring, otherwise he would have stopped it. Obama also expressed his deepest regrets and apologized.

Around 5:30 p.m. the same day, Merkel's chief of staff, Pofalla, informed two members of the Parliamentary Control Panel, the body in Germany's parliament charged with keeping tabs on the country's intelligence agencies, of what was going on. At the same time, the administration went public with the matter. It contacted SPIEGEL first with a statement containing Merkel's criticism of possible spying on her cellphone. Her spokesman Seibert called it a "grave breach of trust" -- a choice of phrase seen as the highest level of verbal escalation among allied diplomats.

Surprising Unscrupulousness

The scandal revives an old question: Are the German security agencies too trusting of the Americans? Until now, German agencies have typically concerned themselves with China and Russia in their counterintelligence work, for which the domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV), is responsible.

A year ago, there was already debate between the agencies, the Interior Ministry and the Chancellery over whether Germany should be taking a harder look at what American agents were up to in the country. But the idea was jettisoned because it seemed too politically sensitive. The main question at the time came down to whether monitoring allies should be allowed.

Even to seasoned German intelligence officials, the revelations that have come to light present a picture of surprising unscrupulousness. It's quite possible that the BFV could soon be tasked with investigating the activities of the CIA and NSA.

The ongoing spying scandal is also fueling allegations that the Germans have been allowing the NSA to lead them around by the nose. From the beginning of the NSA scandal, Berlin has conducted its attempts to clarify the allegations with a mixture of naivety and ignorance.

Letters with anxious questions were sent, and a group of government department leaders traveled to Washington to meet with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The BND was also commissioned with negotiating a "no-spying pact" with the US agencies. In this way, Merkel's government feigned activity while remaining largely in the dark. In fact, it relied primarily on the assurance from the US that its intentions were good.

It also seems to be difficult for German intelligence agencies to actually track the activities of the NSA. High-level government officials admit the Americans' technical capabilities are in many ways superior to what exists in Germany. At the BFV domestic intelligence agency, for example, not even every employee has a computer with an Internet connection.

But now, as a consequence of the spying scandal, the German agencies want to beef up their capabilities. "We're talking about a fundamental realignment of counterintelligence," said one senior security official. There are already more than 100 employees at the BFV responsible for counterintelligence, but officials are hoping to see this double.

One focus of strategic considerations is the embassy buildings in central Berlin. "We don't know which roofs currently have spying equipment installed," says the security official. "That is a problem."

Trade Agreement at Risk?

When the news of Merkel's mobile phone being tapped began making the rounds, the BND and the BSI, the federal agency responsible for information security, took over investigation of the matter. There too, officials have been able to do nothing more than ask questions of the Americans when such sensitive issues have come up in recent months.

But now German-American relations are threatened with an ice age. Merkel's connection to Obama wasn't particularly good before the spying scandal. The chancellor is said to consider the president overrated -- a politician who talks a lot but does little, and is unreliable to boot.

One example, from Berlin's perspective, was the military operation in Libya almost three years ago, which Obama initially rejected. When then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton convinced him to change his mind, he did so without consulting his allies. Berlin saw this as evidence of his fickleness and disregard for their concerns.

The chancellor also finds Washington's regular advice on how to solve the euro crisis irritating. She would prefer not to receive instruction from the country that caused the collapse of the global financial system in the first place. Meanwhile, the Americans have been annoyed for years that Germany isn't willing to do more to boost the world economy.

Merkel also feels as though she was duped. The Chancellery now plans once again to review the assurances of US intelligence agencies to make sure they are abiding by the law.

The chancellor's office is also now considering the possibility that the much-desired trans-Atlantic free trade agreement could fail if the NSA affair isn't properly cleared up. Since the latest revelations came out, some 58 percent of Germans say they support breaking off ongoing talks, while just 28 percent are against it. "We should put the negotiations for a free-trade agreement with the US on ice until the accusations against the NSA have been clarified," says Bavarian Economy Minister Ilse Aigner, a member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats.

Outgoing Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has used the scandal as an excuse to appeal to the conscience of her counterpart in Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder. "The citizens rightly expect that American institutions also adhere to German laws. Unfortunately, there are a number of indications to the contrary," she wrote in a letter to Holder last week.

EU Leaders Consider Consequences

The American spying tactics weren't far from the minds of leaders at the EU summit in Brussels last Thursday, either. French President Hollande was the first to bring it up at dinner, saying that while he didn't want to demonize the intelligence agencies, the Americans had so blatantly broken the law on millions of counts that he couldn't imagine how things could go on this way.

Hollande called for a code of conduct among the intelligence agencies, an idea for which Merkel also showed support. But soon doubts emerged: Wouldn't Europe also have to take a look at its own surveillance practices? What if a German or French Snowden came forward to reveal dirty spy tactics? British Prime Minister David Cameron pointed out how many terror attacks had been prevented because of spying capabilities. Then it was asked whether it has been proven that Obama even knows what his agencies are doing. Suddenly, mutual understanding seemed to waft through the group.

That was a bit too rich for Hollande: No, he interjected, spying to such an immense degree, allegedly on more than 70 million phone calls per month in France alone -- that has been undertaken by only one country: the United States. The interruption was effective. After nearly three hours, the EU member states agreed on a statement that can be read as clear disapproval of the Americans.

Merkel no longer wants to rely solely on promises. This week Günter Heiss, Chancellor Merkel's intelligence coordinator, will travel to Washington. Heiss wants the Americans finally to promise a contract excluding mutual surveillance. The German side already announced its intention to sign on to this no-spying pact during the summer, but the US government has so far shown little inclination to seriously engage with the topic.

This is, of course, also about the chancellor's cellphone. Because despite all the anger, Merkel still didn't want to give up using her old number as of the end of last week. She was using it to make calls and to send text messages. Only for very delicate conversations did she switch to a secure line.

BY JACOB APPELBAUM, NIKOLAUS BLOME, HUBERT GUDE, RALF NEUKIRCH, RENÉ PFISTER, LAURA POITRAS, MARCEL ROSENBACH, JÖRG SCHINDLER, GREGOR PETER SCHMITZ AND HOLGER STARK

Translated from the German by Kristen Allen and Charly Wilder
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-930205.html





France in the NSA's Crosshair : Phone Networks Under Surveillance
Jacques Follorou et Glenn Greenwald

The future will perhaps tell us one day why France has remained so discreet in comparison with Germany or Brazil, for example, after the first revelations about the extent of the American electronic espionage programmes in the world as revealed by Edward Snowden, the ex-employee of an NSA (National Security Agency) sub-contractor. France was also concerned and today has at its disposition tangible proof that its interests are targeted on a daily basis.

According to the documents retrieved from the NSA database by its ex-analyst, telephone communications of French citizens are intercepted on a massive scale. Le Monde has been able to obtain access to documents which describe the techniques used to violate the secrets or simply the private life of French people. Some elements of information about this espionage have been referred to by Der Speigel and The Guardian, but others are, to date, unpublished.

Amongst the thousands of documents extracted from the NSA by its ex-employee there is a graph which describes the extent of telephone monitoring and tapping (DNR – Dial Number Recognition) carried out in France. It can be seen that over a period of thirty days – from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70,3 million recordings of French citizens' telephone data were made by the NSA. This agency has several methods of data collection. According to the elements obtained by Le Monde, when a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which can also automatically trigger the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target – or the meta-data.

This espionage is listed under the programme US-985D. The precise explanation of this acronym has not been provided, to date, by the Snowden documents nor by the former members of the NSA. By way of comparison, the acronyms used by the NSA for the same type of interception targeting Germany are US-987LA and US-987LB. According to some sources, this series of numbers corresponds to the circle referred to by the United States as the ‘third party', to which belong France, Germany but also Austria, Poland or again Belgium. ‘The second party' concerns the English-speaking countries historically close to Washington: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – this group is known by the name the ‘five eyes'. ‘The first party' concerns the sixteen American secret services of which today the NSA has become the most important, according to a senior official from the French Intelligence community.

The techniques used for these interceptions appear under the codenames ‘DRTBOX' and ‘WHITEBOX'. Their characteristics are not known either. But we do know that, thanks to DRTBOX, 62.5 million data were collected in France and that WHITEBOX enables the recording of 7.8 million elements. The documents which Le Monde has been able to see have not enabled the provision of further details on these methods. But they give sufficient explanation to lead us to think that the NSA targets concerned both people suspected of association with terrorist activities as well as people targeted simply because they belong to the worlds of business, politics or French state administration.

The NSA graph shows an average of 3 million data intercepts per day with peaks at almost 7 million on 24 December 2012 and 7 January 2013. But between 28 and 31 December no interception seems to have taken place. This apparent stoppage of activity could be explained, in particular, by the time required at the end of December 2012, for the American Congress to renew section 702 of the law dealing with electronic espionage abroad. Similarly nothing appears on the 3, 5 and 6 January 2013; this time we cannot suggest any plausible reason. Many questions are still posed by this diagram – to start with the precise identity of the targets and the justifications for such a large-scale collection of data in a foreign country which is both sovereign and an ally.

When questioned, the American authorities did not wish to comment on these documents which they considered to be ‘classified'. Nevertheless, they do refer to the statement made on 8 June 2013 by the Director of National Intelligence according to which, ‘the government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for Section 702 collection unless there is an appropriate, and document foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States. We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose.

France is not the country in which the NSA intercepts the most digital or telephone connections. The ‘Boundless Informant' system, revealed in June by Edward Snowden to the British daily The Guardian, enabled an overall vision and in real time of the information gathered throughout the world, by means of the various NSA wire-tapping systems. This system gathers not only telephone data (DNR) but also digital data (DNI Digital Network Intelligence). One of the documents which Le Monde was able to consult notes that between 8 February and 8 March 2013, the NSA collected, throughout the world, 124,8 billion telephone data items and 97,1 billion computer data items. In Europe, only Germany and the United Kingdom exceed France in terms of numbers of interceptions.
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/a...41_651865.html





U.S. NSA Spied on 60 Million Spanish Phone Calls in a Month: Report

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) recently tracked over 60 million calls in Spain in the space of a month, a Spanish newspaper said on Monday, citing a document which it said formed part of papers obtained from ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Spain's government has so far said it was not aware its citizens had been spied on by the NSA, which has been accused of accessing tens of thousands of French phone records and monitoring the phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Spain on Friday resisted calls from Germany for the European Union's 28 member states to reach a "no-spy deal", similar to an agreement Berlin and Paris are seeking, though Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said the country was looking for more information.

El Mundo newspaper on Monday reproduced a graphic, which it said was an NSA document showing the agency had spied on 60.5 million phone calls in Spain between December 10, 2012 and January 8 this year.

The newspaper said it had reached a deal with Glenn Greenwald, the Brazil-based journalist who has worked with other media on information provided to him by Snowden, to get access to documents affecting Spain.

El Mundo said the telephone monitoring did not appear to track the content of calls but their duration and where they took place.

Spain's European secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador in Spain were scheduled to meet on Monday, after Rajoy said on Friday he too would seek more details from the ambassador.

"We'll see once we have more information if we decide to join with what France and Germany have done," Rajoy told a news conference in Brussels on Friday.

"But these aren't decisions which correspond to the European Union but questions related to national security and exclusive responsibility of member states. France and Germany have decided to do one thing and the rest of us may decide to do the same, or something else."

Snowden is currently living in Russia, out of reach of U.S. attempts to arrest him.

(Reporting by Sarah White and Emma Pinedo, Editing by Tracy Rucinski and Alistair Lyon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...99R0AJ20131028





Spy Expert Says Australia Operating as 'Listening Post' for US Agencies Including the NSA
Jason Om and staff

A veteran spy watcher claims Australia is playing a role in America's intelligence networks by monitoring vast swathes of the Asia Pacific region and feeding information to the US.

Intelligence expert Professor Des Ball says the Australian Signals Directorate - formerly known as the Defence Signals Directorate - is sharing information with the National Security Agency (NSA).

The NSA is the agency at the heart of whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks, and has recently been accused of tapping into millions of phone calls of ordinary citizens in France, Germany and Spain.

Mr Ball says Australia has been monitoring the Asia Pacific region for the US using local listening posts.

"You can't get into the information circuits and play information warfare successfully unless you're into the communications of the higher commands in [the] various countries in our neighbourhood," he told Lateline.

Mr Ball says Australia has four key facilities that are part of the XKeyscore program, the NSA's controversial computer system that searches and analyses vast amounts of internet data.

They include the jointly-run Pine Gap base near Alice Springs, a satellite station outside Geraldton in Western Australia, a facility at Shoal Bay, near Darwin, and a new centre in Canberra.

Spies grilled over NSA operations

The United States' top intelligence chiefs have fronted a congressional hearing over the NSA's spying operations.

Director of the NSA general Keith Alexander told the hearing that reports the US collected tens of millions of phone calls across Europe were "completely false".

Meanwhile, the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said US agencies do not spy on Americans, nor do they "indiscriminately" spy on the citizens of any country.

Mr Clapper said spying on foreign leaders are nothing new.

"It's one of the first things I learned in intel school in 1963: that this is a fundamental given in the intelligence business," he said. Read more.

Mr Ball says security is the focus for Australia's intelligence agencies.

"At the top of [the list of priorities] you're going to find communications relating to terrorist activities, particularly if there's alerts about particular incidents," Mr Ball said.

A secret map released by Snowden revealed the US had also set up surveillance facilities in embassies and consulates, including in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Yangon, Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing.

"Australia itself has used foreign embassies for listening purposes [in] an operation codenamed Reprieve ... in which we've used embassies in our region to monitor local, essentially microwave-relayed telephone conversations," Mr Ball said.

"The fact that the United States has special collection elements that are doing this today is no different from what many other countries are doing today. It's not unusual."

Some critics have raised concerns about the extent of the NSA's spying program, suggesting that communications of ordinary Australians may have been pried on.

Xenophon calls on Government to protect Australians from US surveillance

Mr Ball says Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada have a long-standing "five eyes" agreement to not spy on each other, and he believes it has not been breached.

"The fact that it hasn't [been breached] for over five decades I think signifies to the integrity of at least that part of the arrangement," he said.

But independent Senator Nick Xenophon says the Government should do more to ensure Australians are not subject to the surveillence from US agencies.

"At the very least, the Australian Government should be calling in the US ambassador and asking whether the level of scrutiny, the level of access to citizens' phone records in Germany, France and Spain, has been happening here," he said.

"I think we deserve an answer on that."

Former NSA executive lifts lid on spy practices

In 2010, former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake was charged with leaking government secrets to a journalist.

He was tried under the US espionage act but his case was ultimately reduced to a minor misdemeanour charge. He escaped a jail sentence after a finding that the information he disclosed was not classified.

He agrees with Mr Ball that the US has not breached its spying agreement with Australia.

But he told Lateline those five nations do "utilise each other's services" to gather information on other "fair game" nations.

"Much of it is legit, but increasingly since 9/11 because of the sheer power of technology and access to the world's communication systems ... [agencies have] extraordinary access to even more data on just about anything and anybody," he told Lateline.

"And what they want is to do so and have access to it any time, anywhere, any place."
US moves to ease concerns about NSA

US president Barack Obama has come under fierce criticism over allegations that the NSA tapped the mobile phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel and conducted widespread electronic snooping in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.

Amid a growing uproar, White House officials have said they will review intelligence collection programs with an eye to narrowing their scope.

"We need to make sure that we're collecting intelligence in a way that advances our security needs and that we don't just do it because we can," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Mr Drake says it is alarming that a nation would spy on those it considers allies.

"Spying on others is considered the world's second oldest profession and so the idea that nation states would engage in spying on others is no surprise, not at all," he said.

"I think what's particularly pernicious here is the fact we're actually listening on the personal communications of the highest levels of governments in countries that are supposed to be our allies and are actually partnered with us in ensuring that we deal and defend against threats to international order and stability."

Spying 'done behind the veil of secrecy'

He says most countries go along with US requests for data.

"It's heavy stuff and when it's done behind the veil of secrecy, outside the public view then hey, it's whatever you can get away with because you can," he said.

"Just because you can doesn't mean you should and I actually think it's encouraging the countries are standing up against the US in this regard because it is overreach.

"It really is going far beyond the mandate to ensure international order and stability, even in partnership with other countries.

"The real fundamental threat here though is ultimately the sovereignty of individuals, who we are as people. We're supposed to have rights.

"What's happened after 9/11 is now security has kind of taken primacy over rights and liberties because of the real or perceived threat."
Snowden 'aware his revelations have been explosive'

Snowden is currently holed up in Russia after leaking information about America's vast surveillance operations.

Mr Drake recently met Snowden in Moscow, and says the former NSA contractor is aware his disclosures have been "quite explosive".

"His focus is on reform. His focus is on rolling back the surveillance data. His focus is repealing many of the enabling act legislation that put all this into place, or at least enabled the government in secrecy to expand the surveillance date far beyond its original mandate," Mr Drake said.

"He's obviously grateful that he's got temporary asylum in Russia. I don't think it was certainly not a place he was planning on going to or remaining in for any length of time.

"He's looking forward, at some point in the future, to returning to the US but that's certainly not possible right now.

"The US has already levied serious charges against him including the same charges that they levied against me under the espionage act."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-3...encies/5056534





NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden Documents Say
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies.

In a statement, the NSA said it is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.”

“NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons — minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination,” it said.

In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company has “long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping” and has not provided the government with access to its systems.

“We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform,” he said.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said, “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”

Under PRISM, the NSA gathers huge volumes of online communications records by legally compelling U.S. technology companies, including Yahoo and Google, to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. That program, which was first disclosed by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in Britain, is authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to “full take,” “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.

Outside U.S. territory, statutory restrictions on surveillance seldom apply and the FISC has no jurisdiction. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333 , which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies.

John Schindler, a former NSA chief analyst and frequent defender who teaches at the Naval War College, said it is obvious why the agency would prefer to avoid restrictions where it can.

“Look, NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole,” he said. “It’s fair to say the rules are less restrictive under Executive Order 12333 than they are under FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In a statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence denied that it was using executive authority to “get around the limitations” imposed by FISA.

The operation to infiltrate data links exploits a fundamental weakness in systems architecture. To guard against data loss and system slowdowns, Google and Yahoo maintain fortresslike data centers across four continents and connect them with thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable. Data move seamlessly around these globe-spanning “cloud” networks, which represent billions of dollars of investment.

For the data centers to operate effectively, they synchronize large volumes of information about account holders. Yahoo’s internal network, for example, sometimes transmits entire e-mail archives — years of messages and attachments — from one data center to another.

Tapping the Google and Yahoo clouds allows the NSA to intercept communications in real time and to take “a retrospective look at target activity,” according to one internal NSA document.

To obtain free access to data- center traffic, the NSA had to circumvent gold-standard security measures. Google “goes to great lengths to protect the data and intellectual property in these centers,” according to one of the company’s blog posts, with tightly audited access controls, heat-sensitive cameras, round-the-clock guards and biometric verification of identities.

Google and Yahoo also pay for premium data links, designed to be faster, more reliable and more secure. In recent years, both of them are said to have bought or leased thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables for their own exclusive use. They had reason to think, insiders said, that their private, internal networks were safe from prying eyes.

In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” however, a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is “added and removed here!” The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security.

Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said.

For the MUSCULAR project, the GCHQ directs all intake into a “buffer” that can hold three to five days of traffic before recycling storage space. From the buffer, custom-built NSA tools unpack and decode the special data formats that the two companies use inside their clouds. Then the data are sent through a series of filters to “select” information the NSA wants and “defeat” what it does not.

PowerPoint slides about the Google cloud, for example, show that the NSA tries to filter out all data from the company’s “Web crawler,” which indexes Internet pages.

According to the briefing documents, prepared by participants in the MUSCULAR project, collection from inside Yahoo and Google has produced important intelligence leads against hostile foreign governments that are specified in the documents.

Last month, long before The Post approached Google to discuss the penetration of its cloud, Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering, said the company is rushing to encrypt the links between its data centers. “It’s an arms race,” he said then. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

Yahoo has not announced plans to encrypt its data-center links.

Because digital communications and cloud storage do not usually adhere to national boundaries, MUSCULAR and a previously disclosed NSA operation to collect Internet address books have amassed content and metadata on a previously unknown scale from U.S. citizens and residents. Those operations have gone undebated in public or in Congress because their existence was classified.

The Google and Yahoo operations call attention to an asymmetry in U.S. surveillance law. Although Congress has lifted some restrictions on NSA domestic surveillance on grounds that purely foreign communications sometimes pass over U.S. switches and cables, it has not added restrictions overseas, where American communications or data stores now cross over foreign switches.

“Thirty-five years ago, different countries had their own telecommunications infrastructure, so the division between foreign and domestic collection was clear,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the intelligence panel, said in an interview. “Today there’s a global communications infrastructure, so there’s a greater risk of collecting on Americans when the NSA collects overseas.”

It is not clear how much data from Americans is collected and how much of that is retained. One weekly report on MUSCULAR says the British operators of the site allow the NSA to contribute 100,000 “selectors,” or search terms. That is more than twice the number in use in the PRISM program, but even 100,000 cannot easily account for the millions of records that are said to be sent to Fort Meade each day.

In 2011, when the FISC learned that the NSA was using similar methods to collect and analyze data streams — on a much smaller scale — from cables on U.S. territory, Judge John D. Bates ruled that the program was illegal under FISA and inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...4dd_story.html





Obama May Ban Spying on Heads of Allied States
Mark Landler and David E. Sanger

President Obama is poised to order the National Security Agency to stop eavesdropping on the leaders of American allies, administration and Congressional officials said Monday, responding to a deepening diplomatic crisis over reports that the agency had for years targeted the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The White House informed a leading Democratic lawmaker, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, of its plans, which grew out of a broader internal review of intelligence-gathering methods, prompted by the leak of N.S.A. documents by a former contractor, Edward J. Snowden.

In a statement on Monday, Senator Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers.” Ms. Feinstein, who has been a stalwart defender of the administration’s surveillance policies, said her committee would begin a “major review of all intelligence collection programs.”

The White House said Monday evening that no final decision had been made on the monitoring of friendly foreign leaders. But the disclosure that it is moving to prohibit it marks a landmark shift for the N.S.A., which has had nearly unfettered powers to collect data on tens of millions of people around the world, from ordinary citizens to heads of state, including the leaders of Brazil and Mexico.

It is also likely to prompt a fierce debate on what constitutes an American ally. Prohibiting eavesdropping on Ms. Merkel’s phone is an easier judgment than, for example, collecting intelligence on the military-backed leaders in Egypt.

“We have already made some decisions through this process and expect to make more,” said a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Caitlin M. Hayden, adding that the review would be completed in December.

Disclosure of the White House’s proposed action came after the release of Senator Feinstein’s statement Monday afternoon, in which she asserted that the White House had told her it would cease all intelligence collection in friendly countries. That statement, White House officials said, was “not accurate,” but the officials acknowledged that they had already made unspecified changes in surveillance policy and planned further changes, particularly in the monitoring of government leaders.

The administration will reserve the right to continue collecting intelligence in friendly countries that pertains to criminal activity, potential terrorist threats, and the proliferation of unconventional weapons, according to several officials. It also appeared to be leaving itself room in the case of a foreign leader of an ally who turned hostile or whose actions posed a threat to the United States.

The crossed wires between the White House and Senator Feinstein were an indication of how the furor over the N.S.A.’s methods is testing even the administration staunchest defenders.

Aides said the senator’s six-paragraph statement reflected exasperation at the N.S.A. for failing to keep the Intelligence Committee fully apprised of such politically delicate operations as eavesdropping on the conversations of friendly foreign leaders.

“She believes the committee was not adequately briefed on the details of these programs, and she’s frustrated,” said a committee staff member. “In her mind, there were salient omissions.”

The review that Senator Feinstein announced would be “a major undertaking,” the staff member said.

The White House has faced growing outrage in Germany and among other European allies over its surveillance policies. Senior officials from Mrs. Merkel’s office, as well as the heads of Germany’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, plan to travel to Washington in the coming days to register their anger.

They are expected to ask for a no-spying agreement similar to what the United States has with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which are known as the Five Eyes.

The United States has historically resisted such agreements, even with friendly governments, though it explored a similar arrangement with France early in the Obama administration. But officials said they would give the Germans, in particular, a careful hearing.

“We have intel relationships that are already very close,” said a senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. “There are other types of agreements you could have: cooperation, limits on intelligence, greater transparency. The countries on the top of the list for those are close European allies.”

The National Security Agency has said it did not inform Mr. Obama of its monitoring of Ms. Merkel, which began in early 2002 and was not suspended until sometime last summer after the theft of the N.S.A. data by Mr. Snowden was discovered. But the N.S.A.’s documentation on Mrs. Merkel’s case authorized the agency’s operatives in Germany not only to collect data about the numbers she was calling, but also to listen in on her conversations, according to current and former administration officials.

It was unclear whether excerpts from Ms. Merkel’s conversations appeared in intelligence reports circulated in Washington or shared with the White House. Officials said they had never seen information attributed to an intercept of Ms. Merkel’s conversations. But they said it was likely that some conversations had been recorded simply because the N.S.A. had focused on her for so long.

“At that point it was clear that lists of targeted foreign officials may well become public,” said one official, “so many of the interceptions were suspended.”

In both public comments and private interchanges with German officials, the Obama administration has refused to confirm that Ms. Merkel’s phone was targeted, though it has said that it is not the subject of N.S.A. action now, and will not be in the future.

The refusal to talk about the past has further angered German officials, who have said that the surveillance has broken trust between two close allies. The Germans were particularly angry that the operation appears to have been run from inside the American Embassy or somewhere near it, in the heart of Berlin, steps from the Brandenburg Gate.

None of the officials and former officials who were interviewed would speak directly about the decision to target Ms. Merkel, saying that information was classified. But they said the legal distinction between tapping a conversation and simply collecting telephone “metadata” — essentially the kind of information about a telephone call that would be found on a telephone bill — existed only for domestic telephone calls, or calls involving United States citizens.

To record the conversation of a “U.S. Person,” the intelligence agencies would need a warrant. But no such distinction applies to intercepting the calls of foreigners, on foreign soil — though those intercepts may be a violation of local law.

That means that the intercepts of other world leaders could have also involved both information about the calls and the conversations themselves.

Dennis C. Blair, Mr. Obama’s first director of national intelligence, declined to speak specifically about the Merkel case. But he noted that “in our intelligence relationship with countries like France and Germany, 90 to 95 percent of our activity is cooperative and sharing, and a small proportion is about gaining intelligence we can’t obtain in other ways.”

He said he had little patience for the complaints of foreign leaders. “If any foreign leader is talking on a cellphone or communicating on unclassified email, what the U.S. might learn is the least of their problems.”

In addition to the Germans, European Union officials and members of the European Parliament are descending on Washington to deliver a tough message: The N.S.A.’s surveillance is unacceptable and has eroded trust between the United States and Europe.

“The key message is there is a problem,” said Silvia Kofler, a spokeswoman for the European Union. “We need to re-establish the trust between partners. You don’t spy on partners.”

One potential threat, Ms. Kofler said, was to the negotiation of the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment agreement, one of Mr. Obama’s major trade initiatives. European Union officials, she said, were anxious to keep those talks on track but would require unspecified “confidence-building measures” to restore trust between the two sides.

An administration official said the White House would take these visits seriously, having senior officials, including the national security adviser, Susan R. Rice, and Mr. Obama’s adviser for counterterrorism, Lisa Monaco, meet with the Germans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/wo...ed-states.html





Feinstein Releases Fake NSA Reform Bill, Actually Tries To Legalize Illegal NSA Bulk Data Collection
Mike Masnick

Despite Dianne Feinstein's supposed "conversion" earlier this week about the NSA being out of control with its spying, and the associated performance of NSA folks claiming that they were screwed, it's quickly become apparent that this was all pure theater to make people think that real reform might be coming. Feinstein claimed she was shocked about this and called for a full investigation... and yet, just two days later, she held a markup of her planned "reform" bill for the collection of intelligence by the NSA (and held the markup in secret -- because nothing says "let's increase transparency of the NSA" like keeping the debates and votes secret). That bill was moved out of committee today by a vote of 11 to 4, leading Feinstein to release the bill with a bunch of misleading claptrap designed to make people think it's real reform. It even confused some folks who know this stuff into thinking, after a quick first pass, that it "banned" the bulk data collection. And you might think that's the case because her description says:

Prohibits the collection of bulk communication records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill;

• Establishes criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for intentional unauthorized access to data acquired under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by the United States;

• Prohibits the bulk collection of the content of communications under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act;


Reading that, you might think it actually banned the bulk data collection that's been reported on, but it does not. That "except under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the bill" just takes the highly questionable reasoning of the FISA Court in approving the bulk data collection and makes that the "exception." In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what Feinstein claims. Rather than banning bulk data collection, it legalizes it. That third point on the "content" is just a red herring -- the same red herring that Feinstein and others have been waving about wildly for months, pretending people are upset about the collection of actual recordings, rather than the collection of metadata. She's wrong. People are upset about the collection of metadata, which this legalizes.

Even more ridiculous, the focus (both in the marketing and the bill itself) on collection of content "under Section 215" is another red herring, since it appears that much of that collection actually happens under other programs anyway. So this doesn't change a damn thing.

Other supposed "changes" in the bill -- including limiting who can perform queries on the data, how many "hops" they can analyze and how long they can retain the data, all match with current practice and don't change a thing. Even though James Clapper and Keith Alexander more or less seemed to concede at yesterday's House hearing that they'd be okay with cutting back on the data retention from five to three years, this bill keeps it at five. There are a few other minor changes, but this bill is almost entirely as expected, simply codifying the status quo, even though Feinstein has insisted that it was legal all along. The one minor "concession" which many had expected -- having a third party at the FISA Court who could fight for civil liberties -- is watered down. Rather than an actual adversarial setup, with this person representing civil liberties, it's set up as an appointed "amicus cureia" or "friend of the court," where they basically just advise the court on the issue.

This bill is a farce, and made even more farcical by the misleading way in which Feinstein has presented it, pretending it bans bulk data collection when it actually legalizes it.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...llection.shtml





Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet
Somini Sengupta

For years, a school principal’s job was to make sure students were not creating a ruckus in the hallways or smoking in the bathroom. Vigilance ended at the schoolhouse gates.

Now, as students complain, taunt and sometimes cry out for help on social media, educators have more opportunities to monitor students around the clock. And some schools are turning to technology to help them. Several companies offer services to filter and glean what students do on school networks; a few now offer automated tools to comb through off-campus postings for signs of danger. For school officials, this raises new questions about whether they should — or legally can — discipline children for their online outbursts.

The problem has taken on new urgency with the case of a 12-year-old Florida girl who committed suicide after classmates relentlessly bullied her online and offline.

Two girls — ages 12 and 14 — who the authorities contend were her chief tormentors were arrested this month after one posted a Facebook comment about her death.

Educators find themselves needing to balance students’ free speech rights against the dangers children can get into at school and sometimes with the law because of what they say in posts on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Courts have started to weigh in.

In September, a federal appeals court in Nevada, for instance, sided with school officials who suspended a high school sophomore for threatening, through messages on Myspace, to shoot classmates. In 2011, an Indiana court ruled that school officials had violated the Constitution when they disciplined students for posting pictures on Facebook of themselves at a slumber party, posing with rainbow-colored lollipops shaped like phalluses.

“It is a concern and in some cases, a major problem for school districts,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, which represents public school superintendents.

Surveillance of students’ online speech, he said, can be cumbersome and confusing. “Is this something that a student has the right to do, or is this something that flies against the rules and regulations of a district?”

Interviews with educators suggest that surveillance of students off campus is still mostly done the old-fashioned way, by relying on students to report trouble or following students on social networks. Tracking students on social media comes with its own risks: One principal in Missouri resigned last year after accusations that she had snooped on students using a fake Facebook account. “It was our children she was monitoring,” said one Twitter user who identified herself as Judy Rayford, after the news broke last year, without, she added, “authorization” from children or parents.

But technology is catching on.

In August, officials in Glendale, a suburb in Southern California, paid Geo Listening, a technology company, to comb through the social network posts of children in the district. The company said its service was not to pry, but to help the district, Glendale Unified, protect its students after suicides by teenagers in the area.

Students mocked the effort on Twitter, saying officials at G.U.S.D., the Glendale Unified School District, would not “even understand what I tweet most of the time, they should hire a high school slang analyst #shoutout2GUSD.”

“We should be monitoring gusd instead,” one Twitter user wrote after an instructor was arrested on charges of sexual abuse; the instructor pleaded not guilty.

Chris Frydrych, the chief executive of Geo Listening, based in Hermosa Beach, also in Southern California, declined to explain how his company’s technology worked, except to say that it was “a sprinkling of technology and a whole lot of human capital.” He said Geo Listening looked for keywords and sentiments on posts that could be viewed publicly. It cannot, for instance, read anyone’s Facebook posts that are designated for “friends” or “friends of friends.”

But with Facebook’s announcement this month that teenagers will be permitted to post public status updates and images, Geo Listening and similar services will potentially have access to more information on that social network.

Glendale has paid Geo Listening $40,500 to monitor the social media posts. Mr. Frydrych declined to say which other schools his company works with, except to predict that by the end of the year, his company would have signed up 3,000 schools.

David Jones of CompuGuardian, based in Salt Lake City, said his product let school officials monitor whether students were researching topics like how to build bombs or discussing anorexia. His customers include five schools, but he, too, is optimistic about market growth.

“It helps you boil down to what students are having what problems,” he said. “And then you can drill down.”

But when does protecting children from each other or from themselves turn into chilling free speech?

John G. Palfrey Jr., head of Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, said he favored a middle ground. He follows his students on Twitter if they follow him, for instance, but he is wary of automated tools that try to conduct what he called National Security Agency-style surveillance.

He briefly contended with this question last year when students created a blog where they could anonymously share “secrets.” Many posts were on the fringe, Mr. Palfrey recalled, and some teachers and students were concerned that children’s identities could be determined from their writing patterns. The blog’s student founders were persuaded to add a note of caution, warning participants that their identities could be discovered.

Mr. Palfrey offered an offline analogy. “We wouldn’t want to record every conversation they are having in the hallway,” he said. “The safety and well-being of our students is our top priority, but we also need for them to have the time and space to grow without feeling like we are watching their every move.”

That fine line seems to be equally confounding the courts.

In the Nevada case, a 16-year-old boy bragged on Myspace about having guns at home, and threatened to kill fellow students on a particular date. He also cited the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, in which a troubled student killed 32 people.

The boy ended up spending 31 days in a local jail and was suspended from school for 90 days. He then sued the district, saying his free speech rights had been violated.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the claim. It called his threats “alarming” and so specific that they presented “a real risk of significant disruption” to the school. Administrators were justified, the court ruled, for penalizing what was ostensibly off-campus speech.

“It’s going to be more and more of legal issues,” said Gretchen Shipley, a lawyer who represents school districts. “The ability to monitor is growing so quickly.”

The Indiana case offers a contrast. In the summer of 2009, two incoming 10th graders at Churubusco High School posted what the court called “raunchy” pictures of themselves. Once school officials found out, the girls were suspended from extracurricular activities for the school year. The girls sued, saying their free speech rights had been violated. The school contended that its student handbook bars conduct that could “discredit” or “dishonor” it.

The court found that prohibition too broad. The students’ pictures, “juvenile” though they were, did not cause “substantial disruption” at school, the court ruled, and even though it was just “crude humor,” it was protected speech. “No message of lofty social or political importance was conveyed, but none is required,” the court said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/te...nd-campus.html





Silent Circle, Lavabit Unite for 'Dark Mail' Encrypted Email Project

Dark Mail will provide end-to-end encryption, including email metadata
Jeremy Kirk

Two privacy-focused email providers have launched the Dark Mail Alliance, a project to engineer an email system with robust defenses against spying.

Silent Circle and Lavabit abruptly halted their encrypted email services in August, saying they could no longer guarantee email would remain private after court actions against Lavabit, reportedly an email provider for NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Their idea, presented at the Inbox Love email conference in Mountain View on Wednesday, is for an open system that could be widely implemented and which offers much stronger security and privacy. As envisioned, Dark Mail would shield both the content of an email and its "metadata," including "to" and "from" data, IP addresses and headers. The email providers hope a version will be ready by next year.

"The issue we are trying to deal with is that email was created 40 years ago," Jon Callas, CTO and founder of Silent Circle, in a phone interview. "It wasn't created to handle any of the security problems we have today."

Silent Circle, Lavabit and at least one VPN provider, CryptoSeal, shut down their services fearing a court order forcing the turnover of a private SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) key, which could be used to decrypt communications.

Lavabit was held in contempt of court for resisting an order to turn over its SSL key, which in theory allowed the government to decrypt not only Snowden's communications but also those of its 400,000 users. Ladar Levison, Lavabit's founder, is appealing.

Callas said Dark Mail is a collaboration with Levison. Rather than create a closed email service, they decided to design Dark Mail with open-source software components that could be used by any email provider.

"We need 1,000 Lavabits all around the world," he said.

Microsoft's David Dennis, lead principal program manager for the company's Outlook.com webmail portal, said Dark Mail is an "interesting proposal."

"We pay attention to any new innovations, protocols, standards and proposals impacting online communications," Dennis wrote in an email. "And we're always open to discussions with potential partners."

Representatives of Google and Yahoo who attended Inbox Love did not have an immediate comment.

Dark Mail will be crafted around XMPP, a web messaging protocol known by its nickname Jabber, along with another encryption protocol created by Silent Circle called SCIMP (Silent Circle Instant Message Protocol), Callas said.

An adapter will be built that will enable Dark Mail within different email clients. "There's no reason why you couldn't modify Outlook and Exchange to do this," he said.

The private key used to encrypt email will be held on users' systems and not retained by a service provider. Even if the government forced a SSL key to be turned over, users would not be compromised "because all of the messages are encrypted to keys that are sitting in the hands of the recipient," Callas said.

In that case, the party interested in the communication would have to request the encryption key from a person or find another way to decrypt the message.

Snowden's documents showed the NSA was also collecting email metadata, which reveals a sender's and recipient's email addresses, subject line of the email, IP addresses and more. Dark Mail will encrypt the metadata, using the XMPP protocol to signal when a new message has arrived, Callas said.

The alliance is also considering longstanding problems around encryption keys, such as public and private key pairs that are in use for years. "The longer that a key stays around, the bigger of a vulnerability it is," Callas said.

One idea is to create a protocol that would only keep a static public key for just a few hours or a day and then refresh it. Older messages would need to be re-encrypted with a new key to maintain access, but it would provide much better long-term protection for sensitive messages, Callas said.

Also under consideration is "forward secrecy," an encryption feature that limits the amount of data that can be decrypted if a private key is compromised in the future.

Wide use of encrypted email has implications for companies such as Google, which displays advertisements based on email content. In industries such as financial services, companies are required to retain email for compliance regulations.

There's also a convenience factor, as email encryption isn't necessarily easy to implement, especially as people use multiple tablets and mobile phones and desktop computers. Callas said Dark Mail will be flexible, allowing users to send unencrypted email if they don't need an extra level of security.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...ail_projec t/





Angry Over U.S. Surveillance, Tech Giants Bolster Defenses
Claire Cain Miller

Google has spent months and millions of dollars encrypting email, search queries and other information flowing among its data centers worldwide. Facebook’s chief executive said at a conference this fall that the government “blew it.” And though it has not been announced publicly, Twitter plans to set up new types of encryption to protect messages from snoops.

It is all reaction to reports of how far the government has gone in spying on Internet users, sneaking around tech companies to tap into their systems without their knowledge or cooperation.

What began as a public relations predicament for America’s technology companies has evolved into a moral and business crisis that threatens the foundation of their businesses, which rests on consumers and companies trusting them with their digital lives.

So they are pushing back in various ways — from cosmetic tactics like publishing the numbers of government requests they receive to political ones including tense conversations with officials behind closed doors. And companies are building technical fortresses intended to make the private information in which they trade inaccessible to the government and other suspected spies.

Yet even as they take measures against government collection of personal information, their business models rely on collecting that same data, largely to sell personalized ads. So no matter the steps they take, as long as they remain ad companies, they will be gathering a trove of information that will prove tempting to law enforcement and spies.

When reports of surveillance by the National Security Agency surfaced in June, the companies were frustrated at the exposure of their cooperation with the government in complying with lawful requests for the data of foreign users, and they scrambled to explain to customers that they had no choice but to obey the requests.

But as details of the scope of spying emerge, frustration has turned to outrage, and cooperation has turned to war.

The industry has learned that it knew of only a fraction of the spying, and it is grappling with the risks of being viewed as an enabler of surveillance of foreigners and American citizens.

Lawmakers in Brazil, for instance, are considering legislation requiring online services to store the data of local users in the country. European lawmakers last week proposed a measure to require American Internet companies to receive permission from European officials before complying with lawful government requests for data.

“The companies, some more than others, are taking steps to make sure that surveillance without their consent is difficult,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But what they can’t do is design services that truly keep the government out because of their ad-supported business model, and they’re not willing to give up that business model.”

Even before June, Google executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirming that their suspicions were not just paranoia.

In response, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, issued a statement that went further than any tech company had publicly gone in condemning government spying. “We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping,” he said. “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone.”

A tech industry executive who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities around the surveillance, said, “Just based on the revelations yesterday, it’s outright theft,” adding, “These are discussions the tech companies are not even aware of, and we find out from a newspaper.”

Though tech companies encrypt much of the data that travels between their servers and users’ computers, they do not generally encrypt their internal data because they believe it is safe and because encryption is expensive and time-consuming and slows down a network.

But Google decided those risks were worth it. And this summer, as it grew more suspicious, it sped up a project to encrypt internal systems. Google is also building many of its own fiber-optic lines through which the data flows; if it controls them, they are harder for outsiders to tap.

Tech companies’ security teams often feel as if they are playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with intruders like the government, trying to stay one step ahead.

Google, for instance, changes its security keys, which unlock encrypted digital data so it is readable, every few weeks. Google, Facebook and Yahoo have said they are increasing the length of these keys to make them more difficult to crack.

Facebook also said it was adding the encryption method of so-called perfect forward secrecy, which Google did in 2011. This means that even if someone gets access to a secret key, that person cannot decrypt past messages and traffic.

“A lot of the things everybody knew they should do but just weren’t getting around to are now a much higher priority,” said Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, which makes security technologies.

Facebook said in July that it had turned on secure browsing by default, and Yahoo said last month that it would do the same for Yahoo Mail early next year. And Twitter is developing a variety of new security measures, including encrypting private direct messages, according to a person briefed on the measures.

Many tech companies have made public information about the number of government requests for user data they receive, and sued to ask for permission to publish more of this data. On Thursday, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and AOL reiterated these points in a letter to members of Congress.

But publishing the numbers of requests the companies receive has less meaning now that reports show the government sees company data without submitting a legal request.

A sense of betrayal runs through the increasingly frequent conversations between tech company lawyers and lawmakers and law enforcement in Washington, and in private conversations among engineers at the companies and increasingly outspoken public statements by executives.

Mr. Drummond and Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, have said privately that they thought the government betrayed them when the N.S.A. leaks began, by failing to explain the tech companies’ role to the public or the extent of its spying to the tech companies, according to three people briefed on these conversations. When President Obama invited tech chief executives to discuss surveillance in August, Mr. Page did not go and sent a lower-level employee instead.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, sarcastically discussed surveillance at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September.

“The government blew it,” he said. “The government’s comment was, ‘Oh, don’t worry, basically we’re not spying on any Americans.’ Right, and it’s like, ‘Oh, wonderful, yeah, it’s like that’s really helpful to companies that are really trying to serve people around the world and really going to inspire confidence in American Internet companies.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/te...-defenses.html





Cheapest 150Mbps Broadband in Big US Cities Costs 100% More than Overseas

US cellular customers are also paying more and getting less.
Jon Brodkin

A new study confirms what you might have expected: US customers are getting hosed when it comes to broadband speeds and prices.

The annoying trend holds true in both wired and wireless service. In the Cost of Connectivity 2013 report being released today by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, researchers note that "in larger US cities, we continue to observe higher prices for slower speeds. … In the US for example, the best deal for a 150Mbps home broadband connection from cable and phone companies is $130/month, offered by Verizon FiOS in limited parts of New York City. By contrast, the international cities we surveyed offer comparable speeds for $77 or less per month, with most coming in at about $50/month. When it comes to mobile broadband, the cheapest price for around 2GB of data in the US ($30/month from T-Mobile) is twice as much as what users in London pay ($15/month from T-Mobile). It costs more to purchase 2GB of data in a US city than it does in any of the cities surveyed in Europe."

The survey does not cover the entire US or the world, or even all major cities, but it does provide a nice sampling of cities in which you'd expect good connectivity. The list includes all cities surveyed in the 2012 version of the report plus Kansas City, the first Google Fiber site. These cities are:

• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Berlin, Germany
• Bristol, VA, United States
• Bucharest, Romania
• Chattanooga, TN, United States
• Copenhagen, Denmark
• Dublin, Ireland
• Hong Kong, China
• Kansas City, KS, United States
• Kansas City, MO, United States
• Lafayette, LA, United States
• London, United Kingdom
• Los Angeles, CA, United States
• Mexico City, Mexico
• New York, NY, United States
• Paris, France
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Riga, Latvia
• San Francisco, CA, United States
• Seoul, South Korea
• Tokyo, Japan
• Toronto, Canada
• Washington, DC, United States
• Zurich, Switzerland

"We selected a number of cities that ranked highly in surveys of Internet speeds, including many at the top of the list in the Akamai report, as well as major cities with relatively similar population sizes and densities," the New America Foundation wrote. "We also chose to include three smaller US cities which have municipal broadband networks: Bristol, VA; Chattanooga, TN; and Lafayette, LA. These cities currently offer some of the fastest Internet connections in the US because the local communities have invested in and built their own communications infrastructure."

There are much better deals in the US than what made it into the report. But these deals are often found in small cities. Residents of Springfield, VT and surrounding towns can purchase gigabit speed for $35 a month, and numerous other cities and towns have gigabit connections in the $70 range. Google Fiber customers can get a gigabit up and down for just $70 a month as well.

The best prices worldwide (such as in Seoul and Tokyo) make even Google Fiber look expensive, though.

"T-Mobile offered the best deal among the US providers, but it still placed 12th in our rankings behind all of the European cities surveyed," the report said. "China, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea fell lower than the US cities, although it must be noted that the Japanese provider offers an unlimited plan, while the lowest available data cap in Seoul is 5GB. Moreover, the providers in Asian cities offered base packages with much faster speeds—100 Mbps download in Hong Kong and Seoul—than any of the other providers included in this ranking."

In the US, wireless providers are increasingly monetizing data caps by charging users for any data they use beyond their limit. Internationally, "most providers throttle users instead of charging for data overages," the report said. "Last year, for example, Verizon switched from throttling to charging for data overages, leaving T-Mobile as the only US provider which throttles rather than charging steep overage fees."

What's the takeaway from all this data? It's not a surprising one: lack of competition makes for bad choices. "[T]the most affordable and fast connections are available in markets where consumers can choose between at least three competitive service providers," the report said. The New America Foundation plans to follow up next month with a more extensive report that will "analyze the roots and impact of high costs and low speeds in the United States" and offer policy recommendations.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013...than-overseas/





Just How Bad Is Your Internet Connection?

What you think of as broadband is actually not that fast, as far as Internet speeds go.
David Sobotta

If you are wondering just how well your own Internet connection stacks up against others, the question is actually pretty easy to answer if you live in the United States: your connection is likely small broadband.

It is also probably slower and more expensive than you will need very soon. This Google chart shows where the U.S. ranks in upload speeds among a few countries, and it's not very pretty.

High-quality broadband services are a key infrastructure piece for this information-focused century. If creating and sharing information defines our jobs, we need to be able to upload it faster than most of us can today.

Where We Should Be

When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the conference report discussed the goal of opening the door to competition. The hope was that the private sector would improve all sorts of communications and get us on the road to the future.

There have been some benefits; certainly getting my telephone service from either the cable or phone company has driven down the cost of my phone service. However, my triple-play bundle, which includes phone service, is up to $165 monthly.

For that cost, my wife and I enjoy lots HD television channels we hardly watch, some Netflix shows, inexpensive long distance calls, even to Canada and enough bandwidth to do basic video conferencing and computer work that accommodates my home office work.

But the promised competition has not applied to broadband speeds: while many Americans got access to this kind of small broadband, there is no magic technology will make Internet speeds significantly better in the foreseeable future.

On top of that, the U.S. government estimates that demands on broadband will increase by an astronomical number in the next three years, as more and more people figure out how to use it.

Already I notice the difference in my Internet access on weekdays when the older kids are home. While we do not have snow days like this chart, the bad-storm effect is similar and it makes working from home harder. As more and more tablets and smartphones are used at home, the demands will increase on our networks built with yesterday’s technologies.

More importantly, no one is really competing for my Internet business. I either take what the cable company offers me or suffer the indignity of using DSL or satellite. Phone company technologies have dropped far behind cable company technology. VDSL, the phone companies' next-generation technology, offers faint hope only for the subdivisions built within the last ten years or so, because VDSL requires fairly new copper wires.

Where Is The Fiber Solution?

If you do believe that big, affordable broadband will be a significant engine of growth in this century, the only real solution is fiber to the home (FTTH). The million-dollar question: how are we going to get it and pay for it?

Most of us who have modest, small-broadband service today have it because some company makes a lot of money from wires buried a long time ago. There is little business incentive for the people who own the current buried wires to replace them with fiber. It will take time to recoup the cost of burying fiber and running it to our homes. Verizon’s FIOS, which cherry-picked some of the best neighborhoods, has stopped its expansion.

Incumbent service providers claim that most Americans already have access to “broadband.” The problem is that the access is to small broadband with almost no chance of an improvement in the near term.

So if cable and phone companies think things are hunky dory, what is going to save us?

One alternative could be public-private partnerships that delivers an open fiber network upon which vendors compete for customers. Governments can finance the construction costs of fiber with low cost bonds. In return for a negotiated long-term use of the network by public entities, the ownership and management of network is transferred to a private company set up just for this purpose.

Modern governments have large communications bills from leasing high speed lines for integrated communications services including fire, police, security, government and schools. Having access to a low cost, high quality infrastructure with fixed costs instead of annually rising costs can make lots of financial sense to municipalities especially if they already own their own utility company.

A well-run municipal network, with business and home customers can cover construction costs in ten years. The key here, of course, is “well-run.”

Can Government Handle The Fiber?

Along with the successes in pushing fiber to communities, there have been some locations where cities and towns assumed that running a sophisticated network was simple, like running an electric utility selling something that everyone has to have. This has often turned out not to be the case.

A phased approach to extend the fiber neighborhood by neighborhood often makes most sense. The service you deliver has to be affordable with competitive offerings. Running a FTTH enterprise with a lean staff has to use all the automation that it can, because taking care of broadband customers is not a nine-to-five job. On top of that, if you want FTTH to be successful, you have to market it.

Some of these success factors are not government strengths. Private entities can step in and help navigate the path to success or even provide software to help.

The best-run big broadband systems have open networks, where the service providers can jockey for the consumer’s business. Think of it like a road. While the government owns the roads, they do not determine which businesses can use it or what products and services those business can supply.

With 135 miles of fiber, Danville, Virginia has made strides at transforming their manufacturing dependent economy. They now have over 500 homes in their initial FTTH deployment. It is doubtful that Danville would be able to lay claim to the first site with a next-generation supercomputer outside of federal laboratory or university without their fiber network.

One recent project, Chattanooga’s FTTH, has gotten a lot of publicity recently. Chattanooga’s electric company runs the service andhas also modernized their electric grid to use the Internet to reroute electricity around outages. Google’s fiber projects in Kansas City, Provo, and eventually Austin, Texas have also made the headlines.

You do not have to be a city to need better connectivity. The Wired Road Project is a project in rural Southwest Virginia with a mix of fiber and wireless. It is bringing big, affordable broadband to many who have never had it.

Providers Hold Fiber Back

Fiber to the home is a little like the push of electricity to our rural areas in the 1930s. However incumbents are a lot smarter today. Through aggressive lobbying, they have convinced a number of states to pass bills making it harder for municipalities to become involved in fiber.

In North Carolina, Time-Warner and other small-broadband providers successfully lobbied for stringent restrictions on new municipal fiber projects. A couple of municipalities, including Wilson in eastern North Carolina, were grandfathered in but there have been no new municipal FTTH projects in the state since the bill passed.

Wilson’s Greenlight Community Broadband has been a huge success for the town and compared favorably to the winner of our speed tests for best broadband, Google Fiber. People and small companies needing true big broadband are moving to Wilson from the Raleigh-Durham area because of Wilson’s fiber network. As someone who lives in North Carolina, I can attest to people moving from the Research Triangle area to Wilson is a huge shift from the status quo. Wilson, with a population of less than 50,000 people runs their own services and a basic triple-play package of phone, cable and a symmetric 20 Mb/s Internet connection is only $99.95 per month. A basic Internet package with a 20 Mb/s connection is $39.95 and their top-level service is $149.95.

You can check this community network map out to see if you live in a state with restrictive laws and what big broadband is near you. Or you can peruse this chart to see cities within the U.S. currently rank with broadband.

Larger municipalities have not been as eager to embrace FTTH. One reason is they often have more large companies who can afford the cost of high-speed Internet access to city offices. There are no big cities on the list of fiber projects at this point and it will not be easy matter to change this. Commentary on the issue spans the whole spectrum of opinions from Andrew Crane who really doesn’t think there is much of a problem to Susan Crawford who thinks quite the opposite.

One way to think about the whole issue is to look at your bill for TV/cable/Internet. Using my new rate and projecting a 15% annual savings with a more competitive fiber network shows I could save $3,000 over ten years. I would also have Internet speeds and quality of service that I can only dream of today. There are 45 homes in our subdivision with similar cable bills so the potential for savings is substantial.

Could savings such as this finance FTTH? It is possible, but only if service providers stop fighting progress.
http://readwrite.com/2013/10/28/just...eadWriteWeb%29





New Cable Broadband Specs Say 10 Gbps Speeds Possible

Now if we could just come up with a better name than DOCSIS 3.1
John Solit

CableLabs, the nonprofit research and development consortium for the cable industry, today announced the availability of its DOCSIS 3.1 specifications. Most notable is that, according to CableLabs specs, DOCSIS 3.1 will be able to support home broadband speeds up to ten Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream. Compared to current standard DOCSIS 3.0, this is an impressive leap.

In addition to blazing new speed potential, DOCSIS 3.1 will be able to:

• Utilize Active Queue Management to relieve network traffic congestion and improve web application responsiveness

• Improve modem energy efficiency

• Transmit up to 50 percent more data over the same spectrum using existing hybrid fiber coaxial networks

Another important feature in DOCSIS 3.1 is that it is able to achieve all of these improvements without disruption to current DOCSIS 3.0 systems. In other words, DOCSIS 3.1 is designed to work with older 3.0 systems as product migration takes place.

Interestingly, the update from 3.0 to 3.1 took place much percent faster than the last major tech standard improvement, according to CableLabs CEO Phil McKinney. “To meet the demand for higher speed access and increased network efficiency, CableLabs completed the development of DOCSIS 3.1 specifications 40 percent faster than previous DOCSIS projects,” says McKinney. By streamlining development, key cable stakeholders were able to accelerate DOCSIS 3.1 design and testing. The result will be delivering next generation technology to consumers faster than ever before.

One final fascinating fact about DOCSIS 3.1 is that NASA played a part in its development. You can read more about that here.

CableLabs says that as soon as prototypes are available it will begin testing products to prepare manufacturers for certification.

You can download the full DOCSIS 3.1 specifications here.
http://www.cabletechtalk.com/industr...eeds-possible/





Comcast is Donating Heavily to Defeat the Mayor Who is Bringing Gigabit Fiber to Seattle
Andrea Peterson

One of Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn's big policy initiatives has been expanding the quality and quantity of high-speed Internet access throughout the city. A public-private partnership plans to offer higher speeds at lower prices than most broadband providers currently offer. And incumbent providers, particularly Comcast, have invested heavily in defeating McGinn in Tuesday's mayoral election. While Comcast denies there is any connection between McGinn's broadband policies and their donations, the company has given thousands of dollars to PACs that have, in turn, given heavily to anti-McGinn groups.

McGinn's major opponent, state Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle), has committed to honoring the city's existing contracts for a 14-neighborhood pilot project, but has shown limited enthusiasm about McGinn's plans to expand the network in the future. So the election could determine whether Seattle residents have new options for high-speed broadband service, or will have to make do with the slower services already offered by incumbents like Comcast.

McGinn's broadband initiative

According to Robert Cruickshank, a senior communications adviser for McGinn, one of McGinn's core promises in the 2009 campaign was to "develop a city-wide broadband system." The mayor considered creating a citywide broadband system as a public utility, like water or electricity. But aides say that would have been too expensive, so the mayor settled on public-private partnerships using city-owned dark fiber. This dark fiber was laid down starting in 1995, and the mayor's office now says there are some 535 miles of it, only a fraction of which is being used.

In a partnership with the University of Washington, the city put out a request for proposals in late 2012. "The RFP process is not intended to pick one provider," says Cruickshank, but one company -- Washington, D.C.-based Gigabit Squared -- is currently farthest along. The company is still wrapping up its funding and finalizing plans with the city. They expect to begin offering gigabit-speed service to households with a combined population of 50,000 in early 2014, according to Mark Ansboury, co-founder of Gigabit Squared.

In June, Gigabit Squared announced pricing for its Seattle service: $45 dollars a month for 100 Mbps service or $80 a month for 1 Gbps service plus a one-time installation cost of $350 that will be waived for customers signing a one-year contract. For comparison, Comcast, one of the primary Internet providers in the area, offers 105 Mbps service in the area for $114.99 a month according to their website. (It's unclear if there is an installation charge.)

McGinn has suggested that Comcast hasn't taken this threat of competition lightly. In a recent question and answer session on reddit, he was asked what would happen to Gigabit Squared if he were to lose the race. "I don't know, but I do know Comcast gave Murray a big pile of money," McGinn responded.

Ansboury believes Gigabit Squared's plans will continue regardless of who wins the mayoral election Tuesday, saying that although he supports McGinn -- who he calls an "avid supporter of broadband and fiber services" -- his company's pursuit of fiber service is a community initiative focused on the citizens. "It's pretty clear that outside of the politics, the citizens of Seattle are really looking forward to getting gigabit connections," he said.

Murray does not mention broadband policy or his stance on the mayor's fiber initiative on his Web site. A spokesman for his campaign said that the lack of comment was because "this issue has not come up before in the campaign," so it had not "drilled down yet to make systematic assessment of how the City's approach to promoting ultrafast broadband is going."

The spokesman also committed that, if elected, Murray would honor the current agreements between Gigabit Squared and the city, "but he will also makes sure that the City monitors the company's performance to ensure that they are delivering the promised results as the project moves forward." In other words, the limited pilot project would likely go forward in a Murray administration, but there's more of a question about whether the rest of Seattle would be offered gigabit service via a private-public partnership.

Comcast's contributions

An analysis of Murray's campaign contributions show that he received $700 from Centurylink WA PAC less than a month after the Gigabit Squared project was announced. Comcast has previously donated to Murray's state senate campaigns, and records also show that a Comcast executive named Janet Turpen contributed $500 to Murray's mayoral campaign in October 2013. Her LinkedIn profile describes her as the VP of Government Affairs for Comcast Cable in Seattle.

Comcast's donations to political action committees (PACs) suggest Comcast has poured dramatically more resources into defeating McGinn. The Broadband Communications Association of Washington PAC, which received 94 percent of its 2013 contributions from Comcast, donated $5,000 to the group People for Ed Murray less than a month after Gigabit Squared's pricing announcement. That was the PAC's largest single donation. Unsurprisingly, People for Ed Murray has made significant expenditures supporting Murray's candidacy. The Web site of the Broadband Communications Association of Washington also lists Janet Turpen as president-elect.

Comcast also donated $5,000 to the PAC called the "Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy," or CASE, whose largest expenditures were donations to People for Ed Murray, to the tune of $52,500 -- over half of the money spent by the group according to the most recent disclosures online. Their second largest expenditures was $10,000 to People for a New Seattle Mayor, a group opposing McGinn's reelection.

Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission recently levied a fine against CASE for failing to disclose that a major donation (from a party other than Comcast) was earmarked for People for Ed Murray.

In a statement to The Post, Comcast denied their donations to the Murray campaign were related "in any way to any actions of the current Mayor," instead saying they reflected their prior support for Murray's state senate campaign. On the issue of the CASE donations, they said the PAC "gives to a wide variety of candidates, and which candidates they support is in no way determined by us." A follow-up inquiry about their donations to the Broadband Communications Association of Washington was not returned by the time this blog item was published.

For his part, Ansboury, was not surprised to hear about Comcast's contributions, saying "it's not uncommon in the industry that the larger incumbents, cable operators, and PACs support certain policy initiatives that favor" their interests. Established Internet providers are often afraid of the disruptive nature of fiber competitors, he says, whose potential for much higher speeds can be disruptive to their business.

Often, he believes, these incumbent providers seem to think they know what consumers need more than consumers themselves, but says Gigabit Squared has received over 10,000 requests for gigabit service before even launching in Seattle. That demand is at odds with the argument a Comcast executive vice president made in an op-ed this summer, suggesting that the reason there weren't higher broadband speeds was that consumers didn't want them.

If Comcast is indeed attempting to sway the election, it would fall in line with a larger pattern of telecom interests lobbying against municipal efforts to create their own municipal broadband systems or leveraging city-owner fiber resources to create more competition for incumbent providers. A number of states have even enacted legislation banning municipal broadband.

A loss for McGinn on Tuesday probably won't mean the end of Gigabit Squared's work in the Seattle metro area, though it could curtail Gigabit Squared's plans to expand to other parts of Seattle. More importantly, though, if Comcast's donations help Murray defeat McGinn, it will send a powerful message to mayors in other American cities considering initiatives to increase broadband competition.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...er-to-seattle/





Vodafone Rises on Report of AT&T Takeover Interest

Shares in Vodafone Group rose on Friday after a media report that U.S. mobile operator AT&T was exploring strategies for a potential takeover of the British telecoms firm.

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson has said there is a "huge opportunity" to invest in mobile broadband in Europe and he would buy wireless assets if they were available at the right price.

AT&T is the second-largest mobile provider in the United States after Verizon Wireless. But it is not adding new customers in its home market as fast as Verizon, and it is also ceding market share to much smaller rival T-Mobile US.

Vodafone sold its stake in Verizon Wireless to its joint venture partner Verizon Communications Inc for $130 billion in September, leaving it with a pan-European business spanning Britain to Romania and operations in the Middle East and Africa.

AT&T has been eyeing Europe since the beginning of the year and has considered options including Vodafone and Britain's largest mobile carrier EE, a joint venture of Orange and Deutsche Telekom, sector bankers have previously told Reuters.

A Bloomberg report on Thursday, citing people familiar with the situation, said AT&T was examining how it could divide Vodafone up after a deal, keeping some assets and disposing of others. The companies have not entered formal negotiations, the report said.

Shares in Vodafone were up 2.9 percent to 231 pence at 1104 GMT, the biggest gainers on the FTSE 100 index of blue-chip stocks.

Espirito Santo analyst Robert Grindle said it was logical for AT&T to consider its options regarding Vodafone, following its U.S. exit.

"What we don't have full clarity on is how ambitious AT&T is," he said. "(The report) is short on substance but long on plausibility."

Vodafone and AT&T declined to comment.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle and Sarah Young; Editing by Erica Billingham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9A008K20131101





Patent War Goes Nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-Owned “Rockstar” Sues Google

Rockstar paid $4.5 billion for Nortel patents, and has launched a major attack.
Joe Mullin

Canada-based telecom Nortel went bankrupt in 2009 and sold its biggest asset—a portfolio of more than 6,000 patents covering 4G wireless innovations and a range of technologies—at an auction in 2011.

Google bid for the patents, but didn't get them. Instead, they went to a group of competitors—Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony—operating under the name "Rockstar Bidco." The companies together bid the shocking sum of $4.5 billion.

Patent insiders knew that the Nortel portfolio was the patent equivalent of a nuclear stockpile: dangerous in the wrong hands, and a bit scary even if held by a "responsible" party.

This afternoon, that stockpile was finally used for what pretty much everyone suspected it would be used for—launching an all-out patent attack on Google and Android. The smartphone patent wars have been underway for a few years now, and the eight lawsuits filed in federal court today by Rockstar Consortium mean that the conflict just hit DEFCON 1.

Google probably knew this was coming. When it lost out in the Nortel auction, the company's top lawyer, David Drummond, complained that the Microsoft-Apple patent alliance was part of a "hostile, organized campaign against Android." Google's failure to get patents in the Nortel auction was seen as one of the driving factors in its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola in 2011.

Rockstar, meanwhile, was pretty unapologetic about embracing the "patent troll" business model. Most trolls, of course, aren't holding thousands of patents from a seminal technology company. When the company was profiled by Wired last year, about 25 of its 32 employees were former Nortel employees.

The suits filed today are against Google and seven companies that make Android smartphones: Asustek, HTC, Huawei, LG Electronics, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE. The case was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, long considered a district friendly to patent plaintiffs.

The lawsuits

The complaint against Google involves six patents, all from the same patent "family." They're all titled "associative search engine," and list Richard Skillen and Prescott Livermore as inventors. The patents describe "an advertisment machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network.

The smartphone patent wars have been underway for a few years now, and the conflict just hit DEFCON 1.

The oldest patent in the case is US Patent No. 6,098,065, with a filing date of 1997, one year before Google was founded. The newest patent in the suit was filed in 2007 and granted in 2011.

The complaint tries to use the fact that Google bid for the patents as an extra point against the search giant. "Google subsequently increased its bid multiple times, ultimately bidding as high as $4.4 billion," write Rockstar's lawyers. "That price was insufficient to win the auction, as a group led by the current shareholders of Rockstar purchased the portfolio for $4.5 billion. Despite losing in its attempt to acquire the patents-in-suit at auction, Google has infringed and continues to infringe the patents-in-suit."

The suits against the six manufacturing companies each assert the same seven patents, which cover a variety of innovations and have different inventors. One patent filed in 1997, for a "navigation tool for graphical user interface," describes a way of navigating through electronic documents. Another describes an "Internet protocol filter," and a third patent describes an "integrated message center."

The manufacturer lawsuits name the targets' whole array of smartphones and tablets. The lawsuit against Huawei, for instance, claims the infringing products include "the Huawei M865 MUVE, Huawei Ascend II, and Huawei Premia 4G M931, and Huawei’s family of tablets, including but not limited to the Huawei MediaPad and Huawei IDEOS S7 Slim."

Rockstar has employed two different law firms to file the suits; both firms have patent experience and experience litigating in the Eastern District. The Google search suit is being handled by Susman Godfrey, which has taken on other sue-the-world patent cases, like Paul Allen's lawsuits against Facebook, Google, and others.

The manufacturer suits, meanwhile, are being handled by McKool Smith, a formidable Texas law firm that has probably wrung more massive verdicts out of tech companies than any other. The firm scored $368 million from Apple for VirnetX, $290 million from Microsoft over i4i's XML patent, and most recently notched a $173 million verdict against Qualcomm.

The ultimate "patent privateer"

When Wired visited Rockstar's Ontario headquarters, it found 10 reverse-engineering experts, working daily to take apart products and find patent infringement.

With just a few dozen employees, Rockstar is hoping to convince more than 100 technology companies to pay it patent licensing fees for a huge array of products. "Pretty much anyone out there is infringing," said Rockstar's CEO, John Veschi.

The Rockstar Consortium may be the ultimate example of patent "privateering"—when big companies hand off their patents to small shell companies to do the dirty work of suing their competitors. Essentially, it's patent trolling gone corporate.

The "privateering" phenomenon has long irked Google. In February, when Google filed a patent lawsuit against British Telecom, it said one of the reasons for the suit was that BT had not only sued Google directly, but it had also gone around "arming patent trolls."

Part of the company's strategy is avoiding a patent-countersuit by not having any operating businesses. Essentially, Rockstar wants to enjoy the same advantage patent trolls have, even though it's owned by direct Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft.

"The principals have plausible deniability," said Thomas Ewing, an IP attorney who spoke to Wired about Rockstar. "They can say with a straight face: ‘They’re an independent company. We don’t control them.’ And there’s some truth to that."

And Rockstar's CEO was quite straightforward about his belief that whatever promises Microsoft and Apple might have made about how they'll use their patents, those promises don't apply to Rockstar. “We are separate,” he says. “That does not apply to us.”

Rockstar may want to keep the patent conflict as a kind of "proxy war" between Google and its competitors. But Google has plenty of patents, and this new attack seems assured to bring a counter-attack.

The smartphone market is more valuable than ever, and the $4.5 billion Rockstar purchase shows that Google's competitors will spare no expense to put a damper on Android, and they hope to make money while they do it. Patents have become the arena in which tech companies have chosen to do battle. Six years after the iPhone and five years after the launch of Android, the stakes keep getting raised.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...r-sues-google/





Apple Censors Lawrence Lessig Over Warranty Information; iOS 7 Mess Grows
Violet Blue

Summary: The man behind Creative Commons was twice censored by Apple in its Community forums when he tried to share warranty information with users who lost Wi-Fi after the iOS 7 update.

A significant number of Apple users have lost Wi-Fi functions after its glitch-ridden iOS 7 update. Ignored since September, Apple Support Communities members are now watching their solutions be deleted by Apple.

And according to Lawrence Lessig, Apple is also preventing its users from posting innocent questions about the deletions.

Mr Lessig personally experienced Apple's censors today, when two of his comments were disallowed — with one removed for forum violation — when he joined the growing throngs of iOS 7 upgrade failure victims.

The man behind Creative Commons, and friend and lawyer to Aaron Swartz, Lessig is now part of an angry mob in Apple's forums who upgraded to iOS 7 and lost Wi-Fi connectivity.

When a warranty return solution was posted in the forum, Lessig witnessed firsthand that Apple is deleting this information — and more — from its support boards.

Mr Lessig first experienced Apple's censorship when he was prevented from posting a comment asking whether Apple removed comments.

Frustrated at this, along with Apple's lack of response in its forums, and the non-trivial difficulty in restoring any device to a pre-iOS 7 state, he had also taken particular notice of a UK commenter who found a last-ditch solution in returning their device under UK warranty laws.

But when Lessig blinked, the comment was gone.

Lessig reposted the comment, which explained to the growing mass of iOS 7 vanished-Wi-Fi victims that in the EU, if an iOS update breaks your phone, you can return it due to warranty protections and get a new one.

Lessig's own comment was deleted — and Apple admonished him for posting inappropriate content to its forums.

Apple told Mr Lessig,

We understand the desire to share experiences in your topic, "Re: Wi-Fi greyed out after update to iOS 7," but because these posts are not allowed on our forums, we have removed it.

Lessig responded in a blog post detailing the experience, Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department,

OK, so what precisely is the valid objection here? Sure, the community site is intended for technical issues. That was what the thread began with — a technical issue.

When there was no corporate response to that technical issue, some started to offer advice to other customers about what they could do to deal with that issue.

When did it become inappropriate to inform people about legally protected rights related to technical issues? Is talking about legal rights the new porn?


Having saved a copy of the comment, Mr Lessig reposted it, noting that the comment was a repost but contained essential information for UK Apple users.

He remarked that UK users were lucky to have this solution available (US users have no such legal protections with Apple products).

Lessig's "Borg" post detailing his "Support" experience circled the larger problems at hand, which prompted the comment in the first place — namely, the serious technical problems in the iOS 7 rollout, and Apple's refusal to answer legitimate user questions in its forums.

I upgraded my iPhone ("what, you have an iPhone" — OK, you win, sin #1) to iOS 7.0.3. It killed Wi-Fi. I went to the Apple discussion site to see what the community had to say about it.

Seems there are lots of people who had the same problem.

... This link is a great example: link.

As you read through it, you'll see that it's fairly clear there's a bug which is causing significant trouble; clear that there's been no response from Apple; and clear that the troops are getting angry.



Lessig is now watching — and recording — Apple's active removal of legitimate Support Communities queries, such as his new post, the slaughter continues — Apple's latest deleted comment.

Currently, the Apple Support Communities post, Wi-Fi greyed out after update to iOS 7, has 4,806 views and only 25 comments — but as Mr Lessig discovered, the comment number is higher and unknown, due to Apple's active removal of legitimate comments about the problem.

The Wi-Fi issue is only one of nearly two dozen of the many known, serious bugs in Apple's seventh major release of the iOS mobile operating system.

Today, iOS 7 users are reporting a new glitch in the calendar's daylight savings time function.

Apple's policy to remove comments that lend legitimate help is little more than a display of censorship for the internet thought leader, who clearly understands that it is Apple's right to censor its forum users.

But it shows that Apple is well aware of the problem and the critical mass being reached over iOS 7's serious technical problems — and is both refusing to help and actively removing solutions it simply doesn't like.

ZDNet has reached out to Apple for comment and will update this post if it responds.
http://www.zdnet.com/apple-censors-l...ws-7000022533/





Motorola Announces “Project Ara” Which Will Allow Users to Customize Their Smartphones
Rajamanickam

Motorola has announced “Project Ara“, a free and open hardware platform for smartphones.

The purpose of Project Ara is to create a modular smartphone that would allow users to swap hardware components according their own wish.

Motorola says it wants to “do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”

And, it says,

Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it.

The design for Project Ara consists of an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter–or something not yet thought of!

Motorola is wokring with Phonebloks, for developing Project Ara. Motorola allows people to sign up to be “Ara Scout” for giving feedback and share ideas about the design.

Watch the below video explaining Phonebloks concept which is the base for Motorola’s Project Ara which will be launched in one year.

Motorola was acquired by Google around two years back.

Motorola’s this new initiative of “Project Ara” gets lot of positive responses from people. But few people raise many questions/negative responses too.

For example,

1. Will phone manufactures support this? Because it may not help them as allowing people to change the faulty components instead of replacing the whole device may reduce their sales.

2.Project Ara can not be implemented without making the smart phones Larger.

3.Dropping the phone may make the parts to separate.

4. The phone makers may hesitate to spend time/effort to innovate further from their side to make it successful as this is Open system. Already lot of mobile companies are actively fighting over patents related to mobile devices.
http://www.rtoz.org/2013/10/29/motor...r-smartphones/
















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