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Old 27-11-13, 09:50 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 30th, '13

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November 30th, 2013




ISPs May Have to Block File-Sharing Websites, Warns EU

Courts could get new powers to force ISPs to block access to illegal file-sharing websites, according to an EU legal expert
Matthew Sparkes

ISPs could be forced to block any websites which host copyright-infringing material, it was suggested today, and similar injunctions could lawfully be levelled at the owners of the websites. But any block would have to target only illegal material and ensure that access to anything else remained possible.

The EU Court of Justice will rule on a legal case concerning the powers imminently, but advice from Advocate General Pedro Cruz Villalón today said that it would be lawful. In most cases the judges act on advice given by the Advocate General.

The case centres around a legal dispute between major Austrian ISP UPC Telekabel Wien and movie production companies Constantin Film Verleih and Wega Filmproduktionsgesellschaft, which asked for a block to be placed on the website kino.to where users could download or stream copyrighted films. Europe's highest court was prompted to review the matter when the Austrian Supreme Court sought clarification on the extent of existing legal powers.

According to German prosecutors the site saw four million unique visits between 2008 and 2011. It is thought that around 96 per cent of those visits came from within Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The site has since been taken down, but the Advocate General ruled today that there were “numerous similar cases”.

It was suggested by the Advocate General that copyright holders should still go directly to those running websites that host infringing material to seek removal, but that it may still be necessary for national courts to step in if the problem persists. He said that it would certainly be legal for courts to make banning orders.

“In practice, the operators of illegal websites and the internet providers which make them available online are frequently based outside Europe or conceal their identity, making it difficult to pursue them before the courts,” he said.

The advice given was that ISPs could not create blanket bans, but that each case would have to be considered by the courts to “weigh the fundamental rights of the parties”.

“A specific blocking measure concerning a specific website is not disproportionate, in principle," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-warns-EU.html





Court Orders Google, Microsoft & Yahoo to Make Pirate Sites Disappear
Andy

While its common for search engines to receive DMCA takedown requests for specific URLs, events in France have taken things to a whole new level. In order to protect the copyrights of film producers, the High Court of Paris has concluded a 2011 case by ordering Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to completely de-list 16 video streaming sites from their search results.

Last week turned out to be yet another hectic seven days for the copyright enforcement obligations of Google. The search engine received requests to de-list 6.51 million allegedly infringing URLs, yet another new record in a piracy battle that seemingly has no end.

If the entertainment companies had their way, however, things would be handled differently. The general line coming out of the MPAA, RIAA and their UK-based counterparts BPI, is that by now Google knows which domains are infringing copyright. On this basis action should be taken to render their indexes harder to find. Or better still, have them de-listed from search engines altogether, the rightsholders say.

While Google has shown zero interest in the latter proposal, over in Europe a case underway since 2011 has now concluded, with a thought-provoking outcome for the entertainment industries.

The case dates back to December 2011 when L’Association des Producteurs de Cinéma (APC), a group which in itself represents more than 120 companies including Paramount and Sony, teamed up with La Fédération Nationale des Distributeurs de Films (FNDF) and Syndicat de l’Edition Vidéo Numérique (SEVN). Adding to the already formidable lineup, the groups were later joined by the Union of Film Producers (UPF) and the Union of Independent Producers (SPI).

The film and TV companies’ complaint, rooted in Article 336-2 of the Intellectual Property code, targeted 16 domains connected to the popular Allostreaming, Fifostream and DPstream video portals. The aim was to force the world’s largest search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo – to completely delist the sites from their search results and to have local ISPs block them.

After previously obtaining emergency interim measures, yesterday the studios received good news from the High Court of Paris.

The court ruled that the film industry had clearly demonstrated that the sites in question are “dedicated or virtually dedicated to the distribution of audiovisual works without the consent of their creators,” thus violating their copyrights.

As a result the search services of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and local company Orange are now under orders to “take all necessary measures to prevent the occurrence on their services of any results referring to any of the pages” on these sites.

Several ISPs – Orange, Free, Bouygues Télécom, SFR, Numéricable and Darty Télécom were also ordered to “implement all appropriate means including blocking” to prevent access to the infringing sites.

Rightsholders have been celebrating the decision in the case which was concluded after almost two years of legal wrangling.

“The ruling today by the High Court in this case recognized the merits of the approach forcing ISPs and search engines to cooperate with right holders in the protection of the law of literary and artistic property on the Internet,” they said in a statement.

But despite the big win, the cards didn’t all fall in favor of the movie companies. PCInpact reports that they had demanded that the search engines and ISPs foot the bill of the blocking and censorship, but the court decided otherwise.

“The cost of the measures ordered can not be charged to the defendants who are required to implement them,” the decision reads.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the ISPs now have two weeks to implement the measures, which come on the heels of the EU Advocate General’s advice earlier this week on the blocking of infringing sites.
http://torrentfreak.com/court-orders...appear-131129/





As Customers Seek Privacy, AeroFS Emerges With Stealthy File Sharing Software
Deborah Gage

Air Computing Inc., which is doing business as AeroFS, emerged publicly Friday with software that lets customers privately share files in a way that no outsider–not even their software provider—can gain access to their data.

The company has been working in stealth for about three-and-a-half years, since graduating from the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator in the summer of 2010, and has since raised a total of $5.5 million in funding, primarily from Avalon Ventures, Venture Capital Dispatch has learned.

It has also won some large corporate customers, including a financial services firm in New York that signed up for 1,000 seats, with virtually no marketing, according to co-founder and Chief Executive Yuri Sagalov.

Mr. Sagalov says he assumes customers are proactively searching for what AeroFS does. He also believes the media stories generated by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden on how the NSA secretly monitors and captures our data have only reinforced customers’ desire to find something like AeroFS.

“We have a lot of customers come from Germany. They say they can’t store stuff on American servers, but you’re just software so it’s OK,” he said.

AeroFS’s distinguishing feature is its ability to avoid putting files on servers or any other central location where they could potentially be seen. Files are instead synchronized directly between users’ machines, and because they don’t have to take extra trips between the machines and a server, the data can travel faster and the software can accommodate more users.

AeroFS was inspired by a simple idea—co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Weihan Wang’s desire to share photos and other material with his family in China while he was going to school in Canada—but it has grown into something much more.

About six months ago, AeroFS put its software into private beta with a few corporate customers. They were impressed, Mr. Sagalov said, but they wanted something that operated completely behind their corporate firewalls so that even their registration data wasn’t on AeroFS’s servers.

So AeroFS refined its software into a private cloud, which is also available Friday and which lets customers control their encryption keys and run and manage the software inside their companies.

“We don’t see anything,” he said.

Even though customers may use software from competitors like Dropbox Inc. or Box Inc. to store and manage some of their files, AeroFS is betting there will always be data that they want to keep private.

One next step is an Application Programming Interface so customers can build applications that run on top of AeroFS so they can collaborate on files in new ways.

“Some of the things (that will be built) we can’t yet imagine,” Mr. Sagalov said.

AeroFS may also raise another funding round next year, although much of the money it raised two years ago—a $4.5 million Series A led by Avalon in December 2011—is still in the bank.

But the company now has revenue, and it has room in its Palo Alto office to triple or quadruple its 12-person staff. Given the tough competition for engineers in the Bay Area, Mr. Sagalov said his biggest challenge is hiring.

Other investors in AeroFS include Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and the Webb Investment Network started by former Bay Area tech executive Maynard Webb. Valuation is not disclosed.
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/...ring-software/





MediaFire Offers File Sharing with No Sign-Up Required
Melissa J. Perenson

In today's crowded file-sharing landscape, it's difficult for players old and new to stand out. But MediaFire does just that with today's new beta. Most notably, while other services make it simple for you to share a folder packed with files, you typically have to sign up for that service to access the folder. By contrast, MediaFire lets you simply designate a folder for sharing, invite people to it, and gives all nvitees access to the folder to download or add more files.

MediaFire hasn't been grabbing headlines lately, but the company has been around since 2006, targeting media-centric consumers and creative businesses by offering high capacity storage. “We launched as a way to send really big files, which was necessary at that time,” says MediaFire vice president Brent Bucci.

Now, he says the company has refocused its efforts from file sharing to file storage and sharing, so you access documents and media anywhere, on Web, desktop, and mobile. Bucci says the company has 30 million registered users in 238 countries. “It's all about providing people with the tools to share files really easily,” says Bucci.

Today, MediaFire launches a redesigned Web site and a pair of new desktop apps that simplify sharing files, and monitoring shared files. The app, for Windows desktop and Mac OS X, enables automatic syncing and sharing of data between mobile, cloud, and PC, similar to how Dropbox works. However, you can also easily adjust file and folder permissions, and you can see notifications on who's accessed a given file.

The mobile apps for Android and iOS will be refreshed in January 2014, says Bucci.

File Drop is exactly what the name implies

While I listened to Bucci describe what MediaFire was up to, the feature that caught my attention the most was File Drop.

While we early adopters might not mind signing up for every new service to cross our path, most users are much more gun-shy. File Drop is an elegant answer to that problem.

Take this real-world example. You want to invite a group of internal team members and external contractors to share files. MediaFire doesn't rely on email domain names for allowing sharing rights (as some of the combination team messaging/file sharing apps I've tried recently do), so those outside of your office can collaborate via the folder share without having to sign up for anything. That increases the chance everybody will actually participate.

Plus, with the desktop app, you can view a notifications panel that tells you who accessed a file, when, and what they did with it (such as download, edit, or view). If two users save a file at the same time, two versions are saved to reflect their respective changes. Bucci says the company will introduce a feature called “global lock” to automatically lock a file that is being accessed by someone else.

Other points that distinguish MediaFire are its capacity for the buck and its built-in media streaming.

The basic free account starts at 10GB, with plans that scale from there up to 200GB for $9.99 per month -- twice the capacity Dropbox offers at that price. (MediaFire owns its own servers, which is one reason for its competitively low pricing, says Bucci.) MediaFire also has built-in support for over 200 file formats, so you can view files anywhere. You can even stream audio and and video files stored in MediaFire to any device, mobile or desktop; MediaFire detects the type of device and transcodes the video on the fly on its servers to provide a device-optimized version.

I've only had access to the beta for a short time, but I'm already attracted to the service for its clean, easy-to understand, and efficient interface. I'm looking forward to trying this for a while instead of some of my other go-to services, and seeing how it enables me to do things more effectively.
http://www.citeworld.com/cloud/22706...re-beta-review





Beyond 3-D Printers’ Magic, Possible Legal Wrangling
Phyllis Korkki

When reports first appeared that computers could produce three-dimensional objects — from toys to auto parts to household items — it sounded like a page from a science fiction novel.

But the era of 3-D printers is upon us. For a mere $1,299, plus shipping, you can even buy one from Staples to use at home.

There’s still a gee-whiz aspect to the technology, but once that fades away, it’s likely to set off something else: lawsuits. That warning comes from two law professors in a paper to appear early next year in The Georgetown Law Journal.

The 3-D printing “will do for physical objects what MP3 files did for music,” wrote Deven R. Desai, associate professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and Gerard N. Magliocca, professor at the Robert H. McKinney School of Law at Indiana University.

Using computer modeling software, 3-D printers can reproduce objects using layers of materials like rubber, plastics, ceramics and metals. Some websites share software to build these objects; the attitude of many of the software makers is: “I designed this cool thing, and I want you to be able to print it,” Professor Desai said in an interview.

But just as people copy music files, it seems probable that they will do the same with objects — a tool, say, or a piece of furniture that may be covered by a patent. All patents are available to the public, and it would be possible for a knowledgeable person to pore over a patent file and create software that can reproduce the invention described, Professor Desai said. Also, 3-D scanners can scan some objects and translate them into computer models, to be modified or printed.

So what is a patent owner seeking to stop an infringement to do, given that tracking down people in their homes would be extremely difficult?

One option would be to go after the makers of the printing hardware, but that would be a misguided approach centered on a general-purpose technology with many legal uses, Professor Desai said. Patent holders could also sue the websites that host the software that enables the printers to manufacture the objects, but this, too, could stymie perfectly legal inventions and end up putting a stranglehold on innovation, he said.

Just as record companies were unable to stop music file-sharing, manufacturers will not be able to prevent the proliferation of 3-D printing, he said. While violation of patents is a concern, and there may be ways to sue some individual lawbreakers, the best way to handle this threat, he said, may well be to embrace the new technology and the new markets it opens.

People who use unauthorized music-sharing sites know that the files they download may be poor in quality or corrupt, or even contain viruses; that’s why they are willing to pay for their music on sites like iTunes. Similarly, manufacturers can set themselves up as authorized dealers for 3-D software and material, Professor Desai said, so that “consumers would know they were getting a trusted product.”

A main advantage of 3-D printing is that users can customize items to their personal needs — for example, by adjusting the sizes and shapes of parts. Manufacturers could customize their mass-market products for people using 3-D printers and promote them as having superior quality, Professor Desai said.

Is the government likely to take an aggressive approach toward 3-D printing violations? That’s hard to know, but past efforts by the government to stop illegal taping of movies and television shows, along with illegal downloading of music, have not been very effective, and the same seems likely to be true of 3-D printing, Professor Desai said. The march of technology is just too insistent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/bu...wrangling.html





Unseen JD Salinger Stories Leaked on to Filesharing Site

In defiance of the late author's wishes, three stories have been released following an eBay auction
Liz Bury

An anonymous filesharer has gone against the wishes of JD Salinger about the posthumous publication of his works, by leaking a scanned version of three of his short stories online. They include"The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls", thought to be one of the author's best, and which he directed should not be published before 2060.

A pdf which appeared to be a scan of a paperback book entitled Three Stories first showed up in an eBay auction. A post on Reddit suggested that a scan of the book was then uploaded to a filesharing site. Notes on Reddit reported that the uploader claimed that the paperback was number six of 25 copies published in London in 1999.

Ocean Full of Bowling Balls has previously been available to read under supervision at Princeton library. The story concerns the death of Kenneth Caulfield, who developed into the character of Holden's little brother Allie in The Catcher in the Rye. The terms of its donation to the library stipulated that it should not be published until on January 27, 2060, 50 years after Salinger's death.

The two others stories in the scanned paperback are "Paula" and "Birthday Boy", which have only previously been readable at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center. "Birthday Boy", completed in 1946, is referenced by Salinger in letters as late as 1951.

Salinger scholar Kenneth Slawenski, author of JD Salinger: A Life, told Buzzfeed that "they look to be true transcripts of the originals and match my own copies".

After publication of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 Salinger fled New York and the limelight to lead a reclusive life in New Hampshire. Makers of the documentary film Salinger, released in September, have claimed that he was writing during this time and that he left instructions to his estate to publish five new books between 2015 and 2020, including A Counterintelligence Agent's Diary, based on the writer's experience interrogating prisoners during the final months of the second world war, and an unseen collection of short stories, The Complete Chronicle of the Glass Family.

The record of the eBay auction, now closed, showed that the winning bid was for £67.50.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...ed-filesharing





Beastie Boys Fight Online Video Parody of ‘Girls’
Dave Itzkoff

Over a music career of more than 25 years, the Beastie Boys evolved from a goofy rap trio to a conscientious band with more nuanced positions on politics and art.

But now that group, which says on principle that it does not allow its music to be used in advertisements, has come into conflict with a company that feels just as strongly about its own socially aware messaging, and that has gained wide attention with an online video that parodies the Beastie Boys song “Girls.”

On Monday, the band released an open letter to the company, GoldieBlox, a San Francisco-area start-up that makes toys and games designed to encourage girls to learn about science and technology.

GoldieBlox had filed a lawsuit on Thursday that asserted its right to use the music in the video, which has gone viral with more than eight million views. It said in the suit that it “created its parody video specifically to comment on the Beastie Boys song, and to further the company’s goal to break down gender stereotypes.”

But the Beastie Boys, in the letter to GoldieBlox, said the video was essentially part of a commercial enterprise and “an advertisement that is designed to sell a product,” for which the band says it does not allow its music to be used.

In the original song, which appeared on the Beastie Boys’ 1986 hip-hop album “Licensed to Ill,” the band sings:

Girls to do the dishes
Girls to clean up my room
Girls to do the laundry
Girls and in the bathroom.

The online video shows children building an elaborate Rube Goldberg device while singing:

Girls build a spaceship
Girls code the new app
Girls that grow up knowing
That they can engineer that.

GoldieBlox, which has used versions of songs by Queen and other pop artists in its online videos, says that the Beastie Boys had “threatened GoldieBlox with copyright infringement” and that lawyers for the band say the video “is not a fair use.”

The lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in the Northern District of California and gained widespread media attention before the Beastie Boys had formally responded to it. GoldieBlox says in its strongly worded complaint that the video was created “specifically to comment on the Beastie Boys song, and to further the company’s goal to break down gender stereotypes,” and that the video “has been recognized by the press and the public as a parody and criticism of the original song.”

The open letter from the Beastie Boys was attributed to surviving band members Mike D and Ad-Rock, the stage names of Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz. A third member, Adam Yauch, known by the stage name MCA, died last year

The Beastie Boys said in the open letter that they were “impressed by the creativity and the message” of the GoldieBlox video. And, the band said, “We strongly support empowering young girls, breaking down gender stereotypes and igniting a passion for technology and engineering.”

But, the band continued, “make no mistake, your video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.”

“When we tried to simply ask how and why our song ‘Girls’ had been used in your ad without our permission, YOU sued US,” the Beastie Boys said.

The open letter from the Beastie Boys reads:

Like many of the millions of people who have seen your toy commercial “GoldieBlox, Rube Goldberg & the Beastie Boys,” we were very impressed by the creativity and the message behind your ad.

We strongly support empowering young girls, breaking down gender stereotypes and igniting a passion for technology and engineering.

As creative as it is, make no mistake, your video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.

When we tried to simply ask how and why our song “Girls” had been used in your ad without our permission, YOU sued US.


Representatives for GoldieBlox did not immediately comment on Monday morning.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...rody-of-girls/





Neb. Bar Accused of Violating Music Copyrights
AP

A suburban Omaha bar is being accused of violating copyright law by playing songs like "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Born to Be Wild" for customers at its Waterloo location.

Broadcast Music International leads a list of music industry plaintiffs on the lawsuit filed Friday against the Fire Barn Sports Bar & Grill.

Neither the lawyer representing the music licensing agencies nor the bar's manager responded immediately to messages about the case.

Federal law says writers and publishers of music are entitled to be paid for public performances of their music. Bars and other businesses usually pay an annual fee to groups such as BMI for a blanket license to their songs.

The lawsuit says the Fire Barn played the songs without a proper license to do so.
http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...ts-5017026.php





U.S. Government Caught Pirating Military Software, Settles For $50 Million
Ernesto

For years the U.S. military operated pirated copies of logistics software that was used to protect soldiers and shipments in critical missions. Apptricity, the makers of the software, accused the military of willful copyright infringement and sued the Government for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in unpaid licenses. In a settlement just announced, the Obama administration has agreed to pay $50 million to settle the dispute.

In recent years the U.S. Government has taken an aggressive stance towards copyright infringement, both at home and abroad.

“Piracy is theft, clean and simple,” Vice President Joe Biden said when he announced the Joint Strategic Plan to combat intellectual property theft.

However, at the same time the Vice President was launching the new anti-piracy strategy, software company Apptricity was involved in a multi-million dollar piracy dispute with the Government.

In 2004 Apptricity signed a contract with the U.S. Army to license enterprise software that manages troop and supply movements. The deal allowed the Government to use the software on five servers and 150 standalone devices, and since then it has been used in critical missions all over the world.

“The Army has used Apptricity’s integrated transportation logistics and asset management software across the Middle East and other theaters of operation. The Army has also used the software to coordinate emergency management initiatives, including efforts following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti,” the company explains.

While Apptricity was happy to have the Government as a client, the company was shocked to find out that the army had secretly installed thousands of unlicensed copies of the software. This unauthorized use was discovered by accident during Strategic Capabilities Planning 2009, when the U.S. Army Program Director stated that thousands of devices used Apptricity software.

As it turned out, the army had installed pirated copies of the software on 93 servers and more than 9,000 standalone devices. With license fees of $1.35 million per server and $5,000 per device, Apptricity calculated that the Government owed the company $224 million in unpaid fees.

To recoup the missing revenue the software company filed a lawsuit at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. It accused the Government of willful copyright infringement, while actively concealing these infringements from Apptricity.

“The Government knew or should have known that it was required to obtain a license for copying Apptricity software onto each of the servers and devices,” the company told the court, demanding a minimum of $224,543,420.80 in damages, an amount equal to the shortfall in license revenue.

The Government eventually admitted that it used many copies of the software without permission, and after lengthy negotiations both parties have now decided to settle the case.

“After Alternative Dispute Resolution proceedings, the parties agreed to settle for $50 million. The figure represents a fraction of the software’s negotiated contract value that provides a material quantity of server and device licenses for ongoing and future Department of Defense usage,” Apptricity just announced.

Despite the copyright dispute, Apptricity expects that it will continue its business relationship with the U.S. military.

“Now that this process is behind us, it is envisioned the Apptricity and Army relationship will continue to grow exponentially,” says Tim McHale, an Apptricity senior adviser and retired major-general.

The Obama administration has yet to comment on the settlement but if a statement is forthcoming it will be almost certainly be less vocal on the piracy front, especially since the Government now finds itself on the other side of the fence.
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-caught-p...settle-131127/





E-mails Show Cozy Relationship Between Obama Trade Negotiators and Industry Groups
Timothy B. Lee

On Tuesday, I wrote about the close relationship between the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which negotiates U.S. trade agreements, and industry groups that favor stronger copyright and patent protections. New e-mails released by the advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International shine further light on the close working relationship between Obama trade negotiators and K Street lobbyists.

The e-mails were released in response to a freedom of information request by IP-Watch this year. They don't provide much information about the substance of USTR's conversations with industry groups. But there are dozens of e-mails in which lobbyists from the pharmaceutical, medical device, video game, biotechnology and recording industries arranged meetings with senior USTR officials. The close relationship suggested by the e-mails contrasts with the more arms-length relationship public interest groups say they've experienced when they try to influence USTR officials.

One name that comes up frequently in the e-mails is Ralph Ives, a lobbyist for AdvaMed, a trade group representing medical device makers. In Tuesday's story, I quoted an AdvaMed spokeswoman, who said that "neither AdvaMed nor Ives has ever provided USTR comments on a provision of the TPP IP chapter."

The e-mails, which cover a period from 2009 to 2013, demonstrate regular contact between Ives and Jared Ragland, whose title in 2011 was director, Office of Intellectual Property and Innovation at USTR. On two occasions, on March 16, 2011, and Feb. 14, 2012, Ragland e-mailed Ives seeking advice. On two other occasions, on Sept. 20, 2011, and March 16, 2012, Ives e-mailed Ragland asking for a meeting.

The e-mails also show that Ives participated in a Feb. 1 conference call between USTR officials and industry lobbyists arranged by Medtronic lobbyist Trevor Gunn. On Jan. 22, in an e-mail with the subject line "TPP IP Issues," Gunn wrote that USTR official Probir Mehta "has confirmed a meeting for the following individuals, representing ITAC3 on TPP IP issues." ITAC3 is a USTR advisory committee representing pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Ives was one of six individuals listed as participating in the meeting, and subsequent e-mails suggested he joined the meeting by phone.

On Wednesday, an AdvaMed spokeswoman told me that the intellectual property chapter of the TPP was not discussed at any of these meetings. She noted that "Ragland was the lead negotiator for the transparency issues and procedural fairness provision of the TPP." She says that those issues, not IP issues, were the focus of Ives's conversations with Ragland.

As for the "TPP IP issues" e-mail, AdvaMed says that Gunn is simply in the habit of using "TPP IP issues" as a shorthand for all of the issues that he works on, which also includes non-IP issues of interest to medical device companies. The AdvaMed spokeswoman, after consulting with Ives, said that despite the meeting's title, intellectual property issues did not come up during that Feb. 1 conference call.

The documents suggest that USTR interacts differently with industry insiders seeking to influence its policymaking than it does with public interest groups seeking to do the same. The e-mails contain numerous references to "cleared advisors," individuals to whom USTR has granted access to confidential documents. Numerous companies and industry groups have had their personnel named as cleared advisers, and many of the meetings described in the e-mails were limited to cleared advisers so that confidential matters could be discussed.

In contrast, few public interest groups have been named as cleared advisers. Indeed, a USTR spokeswoman couldn't name any examples of non-industry public interest advocates who have been cleared to advise USTR on IP issues. That severely limits the ability of public interest groups to have productive conversations with USTR officials, some of those groups say. "I can walk up to the front of the Department of Commerce building and tell them everything I think," says Sherwin Siy, an attorney at the advocacy group Public Knowledge. "It doesn't mean a thing unless we know what's in the text."

Another difference: the e-mails show that USTR doesn't just take meetings with industry advocates, the agency also regularly solicits their advice. As we've seen, Ragland asked Ives for advice on two occasions. On another occasion, July 24, 2012, USTR's Stanford McCoy e-mailed Jay Taylor of the pharmaceutical industry group PhRMA: "Can we possibly have a cleared adviser meeting Thursday or Friday of this week? I’d like to get up to speed on your concerns about medpharm and get a fresh start on the way forward."

Peter Maybarduk, who works on pharmaceutical issues at the advocacy group Public Citizen, says that he never gets e-mails like that from USTR. "We don't get any request for our take on this or that. If we ask to meet with Probir [Mehta of the USTR's Office of Intellectual Property and Innovation] for example, he'll meet with us. We'll have a conversation. Those conversations have gotten better over time. But it's a complex diplomatic exercise, it's not like a frank exchange of information about what is actually happening."

To be sure, there's nothing wrong with government trade negotiators soliciting the advice of industry groups. Those groups have valuable information that should be taken into account as the government formulates its negotiating priorities. But the e-mails released this week underscore the gap between the government's close working relationship with industry groups and the difficulty public interest groups have had in influencing USTR's work on copyright and patent issues. Industry lobbyists appear to enjoy much easier access to both confidential TPP documents and the government officials who are involved in drafting them. Public interest groups have become frustrated that they do not have the same opportunity to make their case to senior policymakers at USTR.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...dustry-groups/





Exclusive: Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere
Colum Lynch

The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable.

The diplomatic battle is playing out in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is considering a proposal by Brazil and Germany to place constraints on unchecked internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services. American representatives have made it clear that they won't tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network. The stakes are high, particularly in Washington -- which is seeking to contain an international backlash against NSA spying -- and in Brasilia, where Brazilian President Dilma Roussef is personally involved in monitoring the U.N. negotiations.

The Brazilian and German initiative seeks to apply the right to privacy, which is enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to online communications. Their proposal, first revealed by The Cable, affirms a "right to privacy that is not to be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence." It notes that while public safety may "justify the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information," nations "must ensure full compliance" with international human rights laws. A final version the text is scheduled to be presented to U.N. members on Wednesday evening and the resolution is expected to be adopted next week.

A draft of the resolution, which was obtained by The Cable, calls on states to "to respect and protect the right to privacy," asserting that the "same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy." It also requests the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, present the U.N. General Assembly next year with a report on the protection and promotion of the right to privacy, a provision that will ensure the issue remains on the front burner.

Publicly, U.S. representatives say they're open to an affirmation of privacy rights. "The United States takes very seriously our international legal obligations, including those under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," Kurtis Cooper, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said in an email. "We have been actively and constructively negotiating to ensure that the resolution promotes human rights and is consistent with those obligations."

But privately, American diplomats are pushing hard to kill a provision of the Brazilian and German draft which states that "extraterritorial surveillance" and mass interception of communications, personal information, and metadata may constitute a violation of human rights. The United States and its allies, according to diplomats, outside observers, and documents, contend that the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does not apply to foreign espionage.

In recent days, the United States circulated to its allies a confidential paper highlighting American objectives in the negotiations, "Right to Privacy in the Digital Age -- U.S. Redlines." It calls for changing the Brazilian and German text so "that references to privacy rights are referring explicitly to States' obligations under ICCPR and remove suggestion that such obligations apply extraterritorially." In other words: America wants to make sure it preserves the right to spy overseas.

The U.S. paper also calls on governments to promote amendments that would weaken Brazil's and Germany's contention that some "highly intrusive" acts of online espionage may constitute a violation of freedom of expression. Instead, the United States wants to limit the focus to illegal surveillance -- which the American government claims it never, ever does. Collecting information on tens of millions of people around the world is perfectly acceptable, the Obama administration has repeatedly said. It's authorized by U.S. statute, overseen by Congress, and approved by American courts.

"Recall that the USG's [U.S. government's] collection activities that have been disclosed are lawful collections done in a manner protective of privacy rights," the paper states. "So a paragraph expressing concern about illegal surveillance is one with which we would agree."

The privacy resolution, like most General Assembly decisions, is neither legally binding nor enforceable by any international court. But international lawyers say it is important because it creates the basis for an international consensus -- referred to as "soft law" -- that over time will make it harder and harder for the United States to argue that its mass collection of foreigners' data is lawful and in conformity with human rights norms.

"They want to be able to say ‘we haven't broken the law, we're not breaking the law, and we won't break the law,'" said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel for Human Rights Watch, who has been tracking the negotiations. The United States, she added, wants to be able to maintain that "we have the freedom to scoop up anything we want through the massive surveillance of foreigners because we have no legal obligations."

The United States negotiators have been pressing their case behind the scenes, raising concerns that the assertion of extraterritorial human rights could constrain America's effort to go after international terrorists. But Washington has remained relatively muted about their concerns in the U.N. negotiating sessions. According to one diplomat, "the United States has been very much in the backseat," leaving it to its allies, Australia, Britain, and Canada, to take the lead.

There is no extraterritorial obligation on states "to comply with human rights," explained one diplomat who supports the U.S. position. "The obligation is on states to uphold the human rights of citizens within their territory and areas of their jurisdictions."

The position, according to Jamil Dakwar, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Program, has little international backing. The International Court of Justice, the U.N. Human Rights Committee, and the European Court have all asserted that states do have an obligation to comply with human rights laws beyond their own borders, he noted. "Governments do have obligation beyond their territories," said Dakwar, particularly in situations, like the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where the United States exercises "effective control" over the lives of the detainees.

Both PoKempner and Dakwar suggested that courts may also judge that the U.S. dominance of the Internet places special legal obligations on it to ensure the protection of users' human rights.

"It's clear that when the United States is conducting surveillance, these decisions and operations start in the United States, the servers are at NSA headquarters, and the capabilities are mainly in the United States," he said. "To argue that they have no human rights obligations overseas is dangerous because it sends a message that there is void in terms of human rights protection outside countries territory. It's going back to the idea that you can create a legal black hole where there is no applicable law." There were signs emerging on Wednesday that America may have been making ground in pressing the Brazilians and Germans to back on one of its toughest provisions. In an effort to address the concerns of the U.S. and its allies, Brazil and Germany agreed to soften the language suggesting that mass surveillance may constitute a violation of human rights. Instead, it simply deep "concern at the negative impact" that extraterritorial surveillance "may have on the exercise of and enjoyment of human rights." The U.S., however, has not yet indicated it would support the revised proposal.

The concession "is regrettable. But it’s not the end of the battle by any means," said Human Rights Watch’s PoKempner. She added that there will soon be another opportunity to corral America's spies: a U.N. discussion on possible human rights violations as a result of extraterritorial surveillance will soon be taken up by the U.N. High commissioner.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/po...s _everywhere





Despite US Opposition, UN Approves Rights to Privacy in the Digital Age

Summary: Despite last week's US-led opposition to the United Nations' "Rights To Privacy In The Digital Age," the resolution put forward as a reaction to US surveillance activities was passed.
Violet Blue

The United Nations on Wednesday approved 18 draft resolutions, notably "The right to privacy in the digital age," despite opposition from the U.S. government.

It is the first such document to establish privacy rights and human rights in the digital sphere.

Sponsored by Germany and Brazil, it is specifically concerned with the negative impact of surveillance, "in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights."

Brazil's representative said: "Through this resolution, the General Assembly establishes, for the first time, that human rights should prevail irrespective of the medium and therefore need to be protected both offline and online."

The draft was approved without a vote. Read more

According to The Guardian, the major concession made to the US, UK, and Australia was to include a reference linking "human rights violations" to extraterritorial snooping.

No countries moved against the measure, though last week the United States lobbied its fellow so-called "Five Eyes" nations of the UK, Australia and New Zealand to weaken the language of the resolution.

A leaked copy of the US negotiating position prior to today's announcement revealed that the US does not feel that its surveillance activities and practices are illegal.

According to the AFP news agency, as a result of the US-led efforts, language stating that foreign spying would be a rights violation was weakened.

"The right to privacy in the digital age" will have the UN General Assembly "call upon Member States to review their procedures, practices and legislation on the surveillance of communications, their interception and collection of personal data, including mass surveillance, with a view to upholding the right to privacy by ensuring the full and effective implementation of all relevant obligations under international human rights law."

According to the UN's General Assembly press release today: "Following the approval, some delegates stressed the need for agreed international human rights mechanisms in relation to ensuring privacy and freedom of expression.

The statement added: "Some expressed regret over the lack of a specific reference to such mechanisms in the draft, while others applauded the consensus as a clear international reaction to the national and extraterritorial electronic surveillance activities conducted by the United States."

Sweden expressed disappointment regarding the outcome of the resolution's language regarding human rights.

The representative of Sweden said he "would have preferred a reference" to the enjoyment of all human rights — online and offline — including the freedom of expression and the right to privacy.

The representative of the US suggested that information collection was linked to privacy saying, "seeking, receiving and imparting information were linked to the right to privacy."

According to the UN, "The representative of the United States said her country had long championed the right to privacy and to freedom of expression as pillars of democracy and reaffirmed the relevant human rights instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."

It added: "Privacy and freedom of expression should be promoted online and offline, she said, adding that seeking, receiving and imparting information were linked to the right to privacy."

Korea: US talk of democracy "hypocritical"

The representative of North Korea (DPRK) said the draft was timely and had been tabled in the appropriate forum.

The reclusive country's representative told the Committee that it was a reaction to "the massive electronic surveillance activities conducted by one country that had shocked public opinion."

He stressed that, "infringements of State sovereignty should no longer be tolerated," and, "massive espionage activities were targeting Heads of State, who were symbols of State sovereignty, resulting in rampant violations and interference in internal affairs."

Talk of democracy by the U.S. was "hypocritical," he said, saying that it should therefore abstain from talking about human rights violations in other countries, especially in light of its use of drones against civilians.

Resolution to strengthen human rights against drone use

The Committee next went onto vote and approve a resolution specifically aimed at the use of drones and human rights violations, with an urgent stress on the legalities of drone use.

Pakistan's representative told the Committee the use of drones against innocent civilians is a clear violation of international law, stressing that drone strikes were counterproductive in the fight against terrorism.

He called for an end to illegal drone strikes against his country’s territories, emphasizing that the use of armed drones against innocent civilians was a clear violation of international law.

The resolution regarding drones titled, "Protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism," was also passed without a vote.

The international bloc of nations said in a statement: "By that text, the General Assembly would take note of the report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, which referred to the use of remotely piloted aircraft."

"The Assembly would also note the urgent and imperative need to seek agreement among Member States on legal questions pertaining to the use of remotely piloted aircraft," it added.

Passed: Resolution to protect journalists against intimidation and arbitrary detention

Next, the Committee passed a resolution to protect journalists worldwide, specifying that the arbitrary detention, harassment and intimidation of journalists would now be universally condemned — bringing to mind the UK's recent detention of David Miranda, partner to journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The Committee approved "Safety of journalists and the issue of impunity" without a vote.

The UN said: "By its terms, the General Assembly would condemn unequivocally all attacks and violence against journalists and media workers, such as torture, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention, as well as intimidation and harassment in both conflict and non-conflict situations."

"It would also decide to proclaim 2 November as the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists," it added.

The UN's document noted, "the representative of Qatar, noting that her delegation had co-sponsored the draft, stressed the critically important role of journalists and the need to safeguard their work."

By far, the most impressive piece of today's announcement is the passing of the UN's "Rights to privacy in the digital age."

It was created in a committee comprised of 193 member states and is the biggest demonstration against mass digital surveillance by the United States as revealed by former government contractor Edward Snowden.
http://www.zdnet.com/despite-us-oppo...ge-7000023708/





Dutch Privacy Watchdog Says Google Breaks Data Law
Thomas Escritt

Google's practice of combining personal data from its many different online services violates Dutch data protection law, the country's privacy watchdog said on Thursday after a seven-month investigation.

The Dutch Data Protection Authority, or DPA, asked Google to attend a meeting to discuss its concerns, after which it would decide whether to take any action against the cloud services, Internet search and advertising giant, which could include fines.

Google, responding to the Dutch authority's findings, said it provided users of its services with sufficiently specific information about the way it processed their personal data.

"Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services. We have engaged fully with the Dutch DPA throughout this process and will continue to do so going forward," Google said in a statement.

The Dutch decision reflects concerns across Europe about the volume of personal data that is held in foreign jurisdictions in so-called "cloud" storage services, where data is stored remotely via the Internet instead of on-site, giving individuals little control over their personal information.

Privacy campaigners have also pointed to documents leaked by the former CIA technician and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that suggest U.S. intelligence services have access to material stored in U.S.-based cloud services.

"Google spins an invisible web of our personal data, without consent," said Jacob Kohnstamm, the chairman of the DPA. "That is forbidden by law."

In March 2012, Google unilaterally imposed new terms of service on users of all its cloud services, which include the YouTube video streaming site, the GMail email service, and the ubiquitous Google search engine.

That decision triggered privacy investigations in six European countries, though the fines regulators can typically impose are modest.

In France, the maximum fine is 300,000 euros ($408,000). In a previous Dutch case involving the gathering of data from Wifi networks, a spokeswoman for the agency said Google - which has a market capitalization of over $350 billion - could have been fined up to 1 million euros if it had not subsequently complied.

"Google does not properly inform users which personal data the company collects and combines, and for what purposes," the DPA said in a statement.

The report said it was "almost impossible" for a Dutch Internet user not to interact with Google "be it via Search, YouTube or Maps, or passively through third-party websites". ($1 = 0.7353 euros)

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Sara Webb and Mark Trevelyan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AR0KL20131128





Dutch Intelligence Agency AIVD Hacks Internet Fora
Steven Derix, Glenn Greenwald and Huib Modderkolk

The Dutch intelligence service - AIVD - hacks internet web fora to collect the data of all users. The majority of these people are unknown to the intelligence services and are not specified as targets when the hacking and data-collection process starts. A secret document of former NSA-contractor Edward Snowden shows that the AIVD use a technology called Computer Network Exploitation – CNE – to hack the web fora and collect the data.

Last week NRC reported that the NSA has infected 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software. According to Dutch law, the intelligence service is permitted to hack computers of people or organisations under suspicion. But the law is not prescriptive regarding sophisticated forms of computer espionage. These techniques allow the intelligence services to harvest, analyse and utilise computer data of a large group of people using web fora.

‘AIVD crossed boundaries of Dutch legislation’

Nico van Eijk, a Dutch professor in Information Law, is of the opinion that the Dutch intelligence service has crossed the boundaries of Dutch legislation. “They use sweeps to collect data from all users of web fora. The use of these techniques could easily lead to mass surveillance by the government.”

IT specialist Matthijs Koot says that the exploitation of this technology can lead to a blurring of the lines between normal citizens and legitimate targets of the intelligence services.

The document summarizes a meeting held on February 14, 2013 between officials of the NSA and the Dutch intelligence services - AIVD and MIVD. During this meeting Dutch officials briefed their American counterparts on the way they target web fora with the CNE technique. “They acquire MySQL databases via CNE access”, the document reads.

MySQL is free open source software used to build databases for web fora. These databases contain all the posts of all the users of the forum and their personal data.

During the meeting Dutch intelligence officers explained how they use the information in the database. In order to identify targets. According to the document the Dutch “are looking at marrying the forum data with other social network info, and trying to figure out good ways to mine the data that they have.”

Dutch MP’s call for parliamentary inquiry

A group of Dutch members of parliament have called for a parliamentary inquiry into the way the secret services are collecting and using data. The Dutch intelligence services have been previously criticised by an oversight committee for the way in which they have used legally intercepted data. According to this committee the search queries the intelligence services used to filter the data, were not specific enough. The use of generic queries, the committee concluded, was “not in accordance with Dutch law”.

A spokesperson for the Dutch government refused to comment on the use of data from web fora by the AIVD, but stated that the intelligence services are allowed to hack computers. A spokesperson for the American government stated that the publication of classified information is a threat to US national security.
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/30/...internet-fora/





Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied on Porn Habits as Part of Plan to Discredit 'Radicalizers'
Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, Ryan Grim

The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues.

Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.”

The Director of the National Security Agency -- described as "DIRNSA" -- is listed as the "originator" of the document. Beyond the NSA itself, the listed recipients include officials with the Departments of Justice and Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"Without discussing specific individuals, it should not be surprising that the US Government uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence," Shawn Turner, director of public affairs for National Intelligence, told The Huffington Post in an email Tuesday.

Yet Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said these revelations give rise to serious concerns about abuse. "It's important to remember that the NSA’s surveillance activities are anything but narrowly focused -- the agency is collecting massive amounts of sensitive information about virtually everyone," he said.

"Wherever you are, the NSA's databases store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online," he added. "The NSA says this personal information won't be abused, but these documents show that the NSA probably defines 'abuse' very narrowly."

None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots. The agency believes they all currently reside outside the United States. It identifies one of them, however, as a "U.S. person," which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. A U.S. person is entitled to greater legal protections against NSA surveillance than foreigners are.

Stewart Baker, a one-time general counsel for the NSA and a top Homeland Security official in the Bush administration, said that the idea of using potentially embarrassing information to undermine targets is a sound one. "If people are engaged in trying to recruit folks to kill Americans and we can discredit them, we ought to," said Baker. "On the whole, it's fairer and maybe more humane" than bombing a target, he said, describing the tactic as "dropping the truth on them."

Any system can be abused, Baker allowed, but he said fears of the policy drifting to domestic political opponents don't justify rejecting it. "On that ground you could question almost any tactic we use in a war, and at some point you have to say we're counting on our officials to know the difference," he said.

In addition to analyzing the content of their internet activities, the NSA also examined the targets' contact lists. The NSA accuses two of the targets of promoting al Qaeda propaganda, but states that surveillance of the three English-speakers’ communications revealed that they have "minimal terrorist contacts."

In particular, “only seven (1 percent) of the contacts in the study of the three English-speaking radicalizers were characterized in SIGINT as affiliated with an extremist group or a Pakistani militant group. An earlier communications profile of [one of the targets] reveals that 3 of the 213 distinct individuals he was in contact with between 4 August and 2 November 2010 were known or suspected of being associated with terrorism," the document reads.

The document contends that the three Arabic-speaking targets have more contacts with affiliates of extremist groups, but does not suggest they themselves are involved in any terror plots.

Instead, the NSA believes the targeted individuals radicalize people through the expression of controversial ideas via YouTube, Facebook and other social media websites. Their audience, both English and Arabic speakers, "includes individuals who do not yet hold extremist views but who are susceptible to the extremist message,” the document states. The NSA says the speeches and writings of the six individuals resonate most in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia.

The NSA possesses embarrassing sexually explicit information about at least two of the targets by virtue of electronic surveillance of their online activity. The report states that some of the data was gleaned through FBI surveillance programs carried out under the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act. The document adds, "Information herein is based largely on Sunni extremist communications." It further states that "the SIGINT information is from primary sources with direct access and is generally considered reliable."

According to the document, the NSA believes that exploiting electronic surveillance to publicly reveal online sexual activities can make it harder for these “radicalizers” to maintain their credibility. "Focusing on access reveals potential vulnerabilities that could be even more effectively exploited when used in combination with vulnerabilities of character or credibility, or both, of the message in order to shape the perception of the messenger as well as that of his followers," the document argues.

An attached appendix lists the "argument" each surveillance target has made that the NSA says constitutes radicalism, as well the personal "vulnerabilities" the agency believes would leave the targets "open to credibility challenges" if exposed.

One target's offending argument is that "Non-Muslims are a threat to Islam," and a vulnerability listed against him is "online promiscuity." Another target, a foreign citizen the NSA describes as a "respected academic," holds the offending view that "offensive jihad is justified," and his vulnerabilities are listed as "online promiscuity" and "publishes articles without checking facts." A third targeted radical is described as a "well-known media celebrity" based in the Middle East who argues that "the U.S perpetrated the 9/11 attack." Under vulnerabilities, he is said to lead "a glamorous lifestyle." A fourth target, who argues that "the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks on itself" is said to be vulnerable to accusations of “deceitful use of funds." The document expresses the hope that revealing damaging information about the individuals could undermine their perceived "devotion to the jihadist cause."

The Huffington Post is withholding the names and locations of the six targeted individuals; the allegations made by the NSA about their online activities in this document cannot be verified.

The document does not indicate whether the NSA carried out its plan to discredit these six individuals, either by communicating with them privately about the acquired information or leaking it publicly. There is also no discussion in the document of any legal or ethical constraints on exploiting electronic surveillance in this manner.

While Baker and others support using surveillance to tarnish the reputation of people the NSA considers "radicalizers," U.S. officials have in the past used similar tactics against civil rights leaders, labor movement activists and others.

Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI harassed activists and compiled secret files on political leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. The extent of the FBI's surveillance of political figures is still being revealed to this day, as the bureau releases the long dossiers it compiled on certain people in response to Freedom of Information Act requests following their deaths. The information collected by the FBI often centered on sex -- homosexuality was an ongoing obsession on Hoover's watch -- and information about extramarital affairs was reportedly used to blackmail politicians into fulfilling the bureau's needs.

Current FBI Director James Comey recently ordered new FBI agents to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington to understand "the dangers in becoming untethered to oversight and accountability."

James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. "The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to 'neutralize' their targets," he said. "Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history."

That controversy, Bamford said, also involved the NSA. "And back then, the NSA was also used to do the eavesdropping on King and others through its Operation Minaret. A later review declared the NSA’s program 'disreputable if not outright illegal,'" he said.

Baker said that until there is evidence the tactic is being abused, the NSA should be trusted to use its discretion. "The abuses that involved Martin Luther King occurred before Edward Snowden was born," he said. "I think we can describe them as historical rather than current scandals. Before I say, 'Yeah, we've gotta worry about that,' I'd like to see evidence of that happening, or is even contemplated today, and I don't see it."

Jaffer, however, warned that the lessons of history ought to compel serious concern that a "president will ask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist or human rights activist."

"The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be naïve to think it couldn't use its power that way in the future," he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...n_4346128.html





Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Says US 'Really Blew It' On Surveillance
Michelle Jamrisko and Todd Shields

Washington: The US government "really blew it" on conducting surveillance programs that riled foreign leaders and domestic sceptics, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a television interview.

"They're continuing to blow it in some ways and I hope they become more transparent," Mr Zuckerberg, 29, said in an interview broadcast on ABC's This Week. "These things are always in balance, in terms of doing the right things and also being clear and telling people about what you're doing."

The National Security Agency is facing scrutiny in Congress and abroad over revelations that it spied on foreign leaders, broke into fibre-optic cables overseas and gathered e-mails and phone records of innocent Americans. Most of the revelations were exposed by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who remains in Russia under temporary asylum.

Mr Zuckerberg, whose Menlo Park, California-based social media company started its initial public offering in May 2012, has spent much of the last year getting involved in political issues, from education in New Jersey to infrastructure development in Africa. In April he announced the formation an advocacy group called FWD.us to lobby for changes to US immigration policy, higher academic standards and investments in scientific research.
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"The future of our economy is a knowledge economy, and that means getting the most talented people into this country is the most important thing we can do to make sure the companies of tomorrow are founded here," Ms Zuckerberg, whose estimated worth of $US22.6 billion ranks him 32nd on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world's wealthiest individuals, said in the ABC interview.

Undocumented misconceptions

There are "a lot of misconceptions" about the legality of 11 million undocumented persons in the US, Mr Zuckerberg said, citing the case of a student he taught in an after-school program who said he wouldn't be able to attend college because he was undocumented.

"When you meet these children and they're really talented and they grew up in America and don't really know any other country besides that but they don't have the opportunities that we all enjoy, it's really heartbreaking," he said. "It seems like it's one of the biggest civil rights issues of our time."

Fwd.us supports helping undocumented workers become citizens and is calling for an increase in H-1B visas, a program favoured by the technology industry that lets skilled guest workers come to the US. Mr Zuckerberg visited Capitol Hill in September and discussed immigration with lawmakers.

Citizenship path

The Senate in June passed a bill that, as part of revising immigration policy, includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The measure has stalled in the House, where many Republicans oppose the citizenship provision.

House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, has said he wants to approach changes to immigration policy "in a common sense, step-by-step way." He has rejected the Senate approach of using one bill to address multiple issues.

Asked for his advice on what President Barack Obama's administration should do to resolve snags in the new government- run health-insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act, Zuckerberg cited his company's own technological challenges.

"Sometimes stuff doesn't work when you want it to," he said. "We've certainly had plenty of mistakes and things that haven't worked the way that we want to. The right thing here is to keep on focusing on building the service that you think is right in the long term."
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...#ixzz2lfFb3hKL





N.S.A. May Have Hit Internet Companies at a Weak Spot
Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff

The recent revelation that the National Security Agency was able to eavesdrop on the communications of Google and Yahoo users without breaking into either companies’ data centers sounded like something pulled from a Robert Ludlum spy thriller.

How on earth, the companies asked, did the N.S.A. get their data without them knowing about it?

The most likely answer is a modern spin on a century-old eavesdropping tradition.

People knowledgeable about Google and Yahoo’s infrastructure say they believe that government spies bypassed the big Internet companies and hit them at a weak spot — the fiber-optic cables that connect data centers around the world that are owned by companies like Verizon Communications, the BT Group, the Vodafone Group and Level 3 Communications. In particular, fingers have been pointed at Level 3, the world’s largest so-called Internet backbone provider, whose cables are used by Google and Yahoo.

The Internet companies’ data centers are locked down with full-time security and state-of-the-art surveillance, including heat sensors and iris scanners. But between the data centers — on Level 3’s fiber-optic cables that connected those massive computer farms — information was unencrypted and an easier target for government intercept efforts, according to three people with knowledge of Google’s and Yahoo’s systems who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It is impossible to say for certain how the N.S.A. managed to get Google and Yahoo’s data without the companies’ knowledge. But both companies, in response to concerns over those vulnerabilities, recently said they were now encrypting data that runs on the cables between their data centers. Microsoft is considering a similar move.

“Everyone was so focused on the N.S.A. secretly getting access to the front door that there was an assumption they weren’t going behind the companies’ backs and tapping data through the back door, too,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School.

Data transmission lines have a long history of being tapped.

As far back as the days of the telegraph, spy agencies have located their operations in proximity to communications companies. Indeed, before the advent of the Internet, the N.S.A. and its predecessors for decades operated listening posts next to the long-distance lines of phone companies to monitor all international voice traffic.

Beginning in the 1960s, a spy operation code-named Echelon targeted the Soviet Union and its allies’ voice, fax and data traffic via satellite, microwave and fiber-optic cables.

In the 1990s, the emergence of the Internet both complicated the task of the intelligence agencies and presented powerful new spying opportunities based on the ability to process vast amounts of computer data.

In 2002, John M. Poindexter, former national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, proposed the Total Information Awareness plan, an effort to scan the world’s electronic information — including phone calls, emails and financial and travel records. That effort was scrapped in 2003 after a public outcry over potential privacy violations.

The technologies Mr. Poindexter proposed are similar to what became reality years later in N.S.A. surveillance programs like Prism and Bullrun.

The Internet effectively mingled domestic and international communications, erasing the bright line that had been erected to protect against domestic surveillance. Although the Internet is designed to be a highly decentralized system, in practice a small group of backbone providers carry almost all of the network’s data.

The consequences of the centralization and its value for surveillance was revealed in 2006 by Mark Klein, an AT&T technician who described an N.S.A. listening post inside a room at an AT&T switching facility.

The agency was capturing a copy of all the data passing over the telecommunications links and then filtering it in AT&T facilities that housed systems that were able to filter data packets at high speed.

Documents taken by Edward J. Snowden and reported by The Washington Post indicate that, seven years after Mr. Klein first described the N.S.A.’s surveillance technologies, they have been refined and modernized.

“From Echelon to Total Information Awareness to Prism, all these programs have gone under different names, but in essence do the same thing,” said Chip Pitts, a law lecturer at Stanford University School of Law.

Based in the Denver suburbs, Level 3 is not a household name like Verizon or AT&T, but in terms of its ability to carry traffic, it is bigger than the other two carriers combined. Its networking equipment is found in 200 data centers in the United States, more than 100 centers in Europe and 14 in Latin America.

Level 3 did not directly respond to an inquiry about whether it had given the N.S.A., or the agency’s foreign intelligence partners, access to Google and Yahoo’s data. In a statement, Level 3 said: “It is our policy and our practice to comply with laws in every country where we operate, and to provide government agencies access to customer data only when we are compelled to do so by the laws in the country where the data is located.”

Also, in a financial filing, Level 3 noted that, “We are party to an agreement with the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense addressing the U.S. government’s national security and law enforcement concerns. This agreement imposes significant requirements on us related to information storage and management; traffic management; physical, logical and network security arrangements; personnel screening and training; and other matters.”

Security experts say that regardless of whether Level 3’s participation is voluntary or not, recent N.S.A. disclosures make clear that even when Internet giants like Google and Yahoo do not hand over data, the N.S.A. and its intelligence partners can simply gather their data downstream.

That much was true last summer when United States authorities first began tracking Mr. Snowden’s movements after he left Hawaii for Hong Kong with thousands of classified documents. In May, authorities contacted Ladar Levison, who ran Lavabit, Mr. Snowden’s email provider, to install a tap on Mr. Snowden’s email account. When Mr. Levison did not move quickly enough to facilitate the tap on Lavabit’s network, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did so without him.

Mr. Levison said it was unclear how that tap was installed, whether through Level 3, which sold bandwidth to Lavabit, or at the Dallas facility where his servers and networking equipment are stored. When Mr. Levison asked the facility’s manager about the tap, he was told the manager could not speak with him. A spokesman for TierPoint, which owns the Dallas facility, did not return a call seeking a comment.

Mr. Pitts said that while working as the chief legal officer at Nokia in the 1990s, he successfully fended off an effort by intelligence agencies to get backdoor access into Nokia’s computer networking equipment.

Nearly 20 years later, Verizon has said that it and other carriers are forced to comply with government requests in every country in which they operate, and are limited in what they can say about their arrangements.

“At the end of the day, if the Justice Department shows up at your door, you have to comply,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, said in an interview in September. “We have gag orders on what we can say and can’t defend ourselves, but we were told they do this with every carrier.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/te...r-the-nsa.html





Twitter Enables Perfect Forward Secrecy Across Sites to Protect User Data Against Future Decryption
Matthew Panzarino

Twitter has enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy across its mobile site, website and API feeds in order to protect against future cracking of the service’s encryption. The PFS method ensures that, if the encryption key Twitter uses is cracked in the future, all of the past data transported through the network does not become an open book right away.

“If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic,” says Twitter’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews. “As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, this type of protection is increasingly important on today’s Internet.”

This will augment the TLS and SSL protocols already used by Twitter to protect logins and transmission of data across its network. Twitter made its site fully HTTPS compliant in early 2011, though a login flaw uncovered late last year allowed passwords to be sent in plain text for some time from a sub-section of Twitter’s site. This is a simplification, but PFS basically ensures that if an agency is recording all of Twitter’s encrypted data it can’t crack one key and read it all. Instead, Twitter has implemented a solution that lets each client and server session generate its own encryption key, never sending that key over the networks. If an organization were to collect a bunch of Twitter data, it can’t break one lock and read it all, it must now break thousands or hundreds of thousands of additional keys to read any significant chunk of data.

The organization most likely to be collecting enormous amounts of Twitter data for later decryption? The National Security Agency, who was recently revealed to have several major data gathering programs already in play. The revelations, which came via the Washington Post and whistleblower Edward Snowden, detailed a complex and robust system of collection tools that allow the NSA and other government agencies to access unencrypted data and to collect encrypted traffic in the hopes that they can decrypt that data in the future and add it to their searchable data stockpile.

The site, according to an interview with The New York Times, will encounter a bit of a speed hit to make this work, to the tune of around 150ms on initial connection. But the differential should be worth it to enable extra security. Google implemented PFS two years ago and reports earlier this year say that Facebook will follow suit. You can read more about Twitter’s implementation of PFS on its blog here.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/twi...re-decryption/





Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself

Following NSA surveillance revelations, talks advance on making the privacy-protecting tool Tor an Internet standard.
David Talbot

Why It Matters

Published reports suggest that Internet traffic is widely spied upon by the NSA and other government agencies.

The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard.

If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps. This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic.

If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass surveillance by the National Security Administration. Already the IETF is working to encrypt more of the data that flows between your computer and the websites you visit (see “Engineers Plan a Fully Encrypted Internet”).

Collaborating with Tor would add an additional layer of security and privacy. When Tor is successfully used, the websites you visit don’t know the true address and location of your computer, and anyone watching traffic from your computer wouldn’t know where you’re browsing—a distinct layer of protection that goes beyond encrypting your communications.

Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College, Dublin, believes that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires people to take special action to implement. “I think there are benefits that might flow in both directions,” he says. “I think other IETF participants could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who’ve faced interesting challenges that aren’t often seen in practice. And the Tor people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who’ve got a lot of experience with large-scale systems.”

Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it. “We’re basically at the stage of ‘Do we even want to go on a date together?’ It’s not clear we are going to do it, but it’s worth exploring to see what is involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we’ve done,” he says. On the other hand, he adds: “The risks and concerns are that it would tie down developers in rehashing everything we’ve done, explaining why we made decisions we made. It also opens it up to being weakened,” he says, because third-party companies implementing Tor could add their own changes.

The IETF is an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus. Internet service providers, companies, and websites aren’t required to implement any standards the IETF issues. And even if security standards are implemented, they may not be widely deployed. For example, years ago the IETF created a standard for encrypting Web traffic between your computer and the websites you visit. Although this standard, HTTPS, is built into most software for serving Web pages and browsing the Web, only banks, e-commerce sites, and a number of big websites like Google and Facebook have elected to actually use it. The IETF hopes to make such encryption the default for a future Web communications standard known as HTTP 2.0.

The Tor Project is a nonprofit group that receives government and private funding to produce its software, which is used by law enforcement agencies, journalists, and criminals alike. The technology originally grew out of work by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory aimed at protecting military users (see “Dissent Made Safer”).

When someone installs Tor on his computer and takes other precautions, it supplies that computer with a directory of relays, or network points, whose owners have volunteered to handle Tor traffic. Tor then ensures that the user’s traffic takes extra steps through the Internet. At each stop, the previous computer address and routing information get freshly encrypted, meaning the final destination sees only the address of the most recent relay, and none of the previous ones.

Leaks by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, suggest that circumventing Tor was one of the NSA’s goals, and that the agency had had some success (see “Anonymity Network Tor Needs a Tune-up to Protect Users from Surveillance”). “We are about 10 people, and have multibillion dollar agencies trying to break our technology,” Lewman says.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news...ternet-itself/





New Snowden Leaks Reveal US, Australia's Asian Allies
Philip Dorling

Singapore and South Korea are playing key roles helping the United States and Australia tap undersea telecommunications links across Asia, according to top secret documents leaked by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. New details have also been revealed about the involvement of Australia and New Zealand in the interception of global satellite communications.

A top secret United States National Security Agency map shows that the US and its “Five Eyes” intelligence partners tap high speed fibre optic cables at 20 locations worldwide. The interception operation involves cooperation with local governments and telecommunications companies or else through “covert, clandestine” operations.

The undersea cable interception operations are part of a global web that in the words of another leaked NSA planning document enables the “Five Eyes” partners – the US, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - to trace “anyone, anywhere, anytime” in what is described as “the golden age” signals intelligence.

The NSA map, published by Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad overnight, shows that the United States maintains a stranglehold on trans-Pacific communications channels with interception facilities on the West coast of the United States and at Hawaii and Guam, tapping all cable traffic across the Pacific Ocean as well as links between Australia and Japan.

The map confirms that Singapore, one of the world's most significant telecommunications hubs, is a key “third party” working with the “Five Eyes” intelligence partners.

In August Fairfax Media reported that Australia's electronic espionage agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, is in a partnership with Singaporean intelligence to tap the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable that runs from Japan, via Singapore, Djibouti, Suez and the Straits of Gibraltar to Northern Germany.

Australian intelligence sources told Fairfax that the highly secretive Security and Intelligence Division of Singapore's Ministry of Defence co-operates with DSD in accessing and sharing communications carried by the SEA-ME-WE-3 cable as well as the SEA-ME-WE-4 cable that runs from Singapore to the south of France.

Access to this major international telecommunications channel, facilitated by Singapore's government-owned operator SingTel, has been a key element in an expansion of Australian-Singaporean intelligence and defence ties over the past 15 years.

Majority owned by Temask Holdings, the investment arm of the Singapore Government, SingTel has close relations with Singapore's intelligence agencies. The Singapore Government is represented on the company's board by the head of Singapore's civil service, Peter Ong, who was previously responsible for national security and intelligence co-ordination in the Singapore Prime Minister's office.

Australian intelligence expert, Australian National University Professor Des Ball has described Singapore's signal's intelligence capability as “probably the most advanced” in South East Asia, having first been developed in cooperation with Australia in the mid-1970s and subsequently leveraging Singapore's position as a regional telecommunications hub.

Indonesia and Malaysia have been key targets for Australian and Singaporean intelligence collaboration since the 1970s. Much of Indonesia's telecommunications and Internet traffic is routed through Singapore.

The leaked NSA map also shows South Korea is another key interception point with cable landings at Pusan providing access to the external communications of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service has long been a close collaborator with the US Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA, as well as the Australian intelligence agencies. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation recently engaged in legal action in an unsuccessful effort to prevent publication of details of South Korean espionage in Australia. ASIO Director-General David Irvine told the Federal Court that Australian and South Korean intelligence agencies had been cooperating for “over 30 years” and that any public disclose of NIS activities would be “detrimental” to Australia's national security.

The NSA map and other documents leaked by Mr Snowden and published by the Brazilian O Globo newspaper also reveal new detail on the integration of Australian and New Zealand signals intelligence facilities in the interception of satellite communications traffic by the “Five Eyes” partners.

For the first time it is revealed that the DSD satellite interception facility at Kojarena near Geraldton in Western Australia is codenamed “STELLAR”. The New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau facility at Waihopai on New Zealand's South Island is codenamed “IRONSAND”. The codename for DSD's facility at Shoal Bay near Darwin is not identified. However all three facilities are listed by the NSA as “primary FORNSAT (foreign satellite communications) collection operations”.

Coverage of satellite communications across Asia and the Middle East is also supported by NSA facilities at the United States Air Force base at Misawa in Japan, US diplomatic premises in Thailand and India, and British Government Communications Headquarters facilities in Oman, Nairobi in Kenya and at the British military base in Cyprus.

The leaked NSA map also shows that undersea cables are accessed by the NSA and the British GCHQ through military facilities in Djibouti and Oman, thereby ensuring maximum coverage of Middle East and South Asian communications.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...#ixzz2lfEiwG7T





Spies Worry Over "Doomsday" Cache Stashed by Ex-NSA Contractor Snowden
Mark Hosenball

British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a "doomsday" cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud.

The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.

The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The passwords are in the possession of at least three different people and are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said. The identities of persons who might have the passwords are unknown.

Spokespeople for both NSA and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

One source described the cache of still unpublished material as Snowden's "insurance policy" against arrest or physical harm.

U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories.

"The worst is yet to come," said one former U.S. official who follows the investigation closely.

Snowden, who is believed to have downloaded between 50,000 and 200,000 classified NSA and British government documents, is living in Russia under temporary asylum, where he fled after traveling to Hong Kong. He has been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act.

Cryptome, a website which started publishing leaked secret documents years before the group WikiLeaks or Snowden surfaced, estimated that the total number of Snowden documents made public so far is over 500.

Given Snowden's presence in Moscow, and the low likelihood that he will return to the United States anytime soon, U.S. and British authorities say they are focused more on dealing with the consequences of the material he has released than trying to apprehend him.

It is unclear whether U.S. or allied intelligence agencies - or those of adversary services such as Russia's and China's - know where the material is stored and, if so, have tried to unlock it.

One former senior U.S. official said that the Chinese and Russians have cryptographers skilled enough to open the cache if they find it.

Snowden's revelations of government secrets have brought to light extensive and previously unknown surveillance of phone, email and social media communications by the NSA and allied agencies. That has sparked several diplomatic rows between Washington and its allies, along with civil liberties debates in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.

Among the material which Snowden acquired from classified government computer servers, but which has not been published by media outlets known to have had access to it, are documents containing names and resumes of employees working for NSA's British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), sources familiar with the matter said.

The sources said Snowden started downloading some of it from a classified GCHQ website, known as GC-Wiki, when he was employed by Dell and assigned to NSA in 2012.

Snowden made a calculated decision to move from Dell Inc to another NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, because he would have wide-ranging access to NSA data at the latter firm, one source with knowledge of the matter said.

"EXTREME PRECAUTIONS"

Glenn Greenwald, who met with Snowden in Hong Kong and was among the first to report on the leaked documents for the Guardian newspaper, said the former NSA contractor had "taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published."

"If anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives," Greenwald said in a June interview with the Daily Beast website. He added: "I don't know for sure whether has more documents than the ones he has given me... I believe he does."

In an email exchange with Reuters, Greenwald, who has said he remains in contact with Snowden, affirmed his statements about Snowden's "precautions" but said he had nothing to add.

Officials believe that the "doomsday" cache is stored and encrypted separately from any material that Snowden has provided to media outlets.

Conservative British politicians, including Louise Mensch, a former member of parliament, have accused the Guardian, one of two media outlets to first publish stories based on Snowden's leaks, of "trafficking of GCHQ agents' names abroad."

No names of British intelligence personnel have been published by any media outlet. After U.K. officials informed the Guardian it could face legal action, the newspaper disclosed it had destroyed computers containing Snowden material on GCHQ, but had provided copies of the data to the New York Times and the U.S. nonprofit group ProPublica.

Sources familiar with unpublished material Snowden downloaded said it also contains information about the CIA - possibly including personnel names - as well as other U.S. spy agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which operate U.S. image-producing satellites and analyze their data.

U.S. security officials have indicated in briefings they do not know what, if any, of the material is still in Snowden's personal possession. Snowden himself has been quoted as saying he took no such materials with him to Russia.

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AO0Y120131125





Julian Assange Unlikely to Face U.S. Charges Over Publishing Classified Documents
Sari Horwitz

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.

The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.

The Obama administration has charged government employees and contractors who leak classified information — such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning — with violations of the Espionage Act. But officials said that although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them, something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.

“The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists,” said former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “And if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.”

Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said last week that the anti-secrecy organization is skeptical “short of an open, official, formal confirmation that the U.S. government is not going to prosecute WikiLeaks.” Justice Department officials said it is unclear whether there will be a formal announcement should the grand jury investigation be formally closed.

“We have repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to tell us what the status of the investigation was with respect to Mr. Assange,” said Barry J. Pollack, a Washington attorney for Assange. “They have declined to do so. They have not informed us in any way that they are closing the investigation or have made a decision not to bring charges against Mr. Assange. While we would certainly welcome that development, it should not have taken the Department of Justice several years to come to the conclusion that it should not be investigating journalists for publishing truthful information.”

There have been persistent rumors that the grand jury investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks had secretly led to charges. Officials told The Post last week that there was no sealed indictment, and other officials have since come forward to say, as one senior U.S. official put it, that the department has “all but concluded” that it will not bring a case against Assange.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did former U.S. attorney Neil H. MacBride, whose office in the Eastern District of Virginia led the probe into the WikiLeaks organization.

In an interview with The Post earlier this month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that Justice Department officials are still trying to repatriate Snowden, who has obtained temporary asylum in Russia, to stand trial. But Holder also said that the Justice Department is not planning to prosecute former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who received documents from Snowden. Greenwald has written a series of articles based on the leaked material. An American citizen, Greenwald has said he fears prosecution if he returns to the United States from his home in Brazil.

Justice officials said that the same distinction between leaker and journalist or publisher is being made between Manning and Assange. One former law enforcement official said the U.S. government could bring charges against Assange if it discovered a crime, such as evidence that he directly hacked into a U.S. government computer. But the Justice officials said he would almost certainly not be prosecuted for receiving classified material from Manning.

Assange has been living in a room in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London since Ecuador granted him political asylum. Assange is facing sexual-assault allegations in Sweden. Assange and some of his supporters have said the Australian national fears that if he goes to Sweden to face those allegations, he will be extradited to the United States.

But current and former U.S. officials dismissed that defense.

“He is hiding out in the embassy to avoid a sexual-assault charge in Sweden,” Miller said. “It has nothing to do with the U.S. government.”

Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...0a9_story.html





China's Rumor Crackdown has 'Cleaned' Internet, Official Says
Megha Rajagopalan

China's campaign against online rumors, which critics say is crushing free speech, has been highly successful in "cleaning" the Internet, a top official of the country's internet regulator said on Thursday.

China has the world's most sophisticated online censorship system, known outside the country as the Great Firewall. It blocks many social media websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others, along with many sites hosted in Taiwan and those of rights groups and some foreign media agencies.

The crackdown on online rumors is really intended to quash anti-government discourse, activists say. High profile users of Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblog, have been targeted, apparently for political speech.

In a rare public appearance, Ren Xianliang, vice minister of the State Internet Information Office, emphasized China's commitment to scrubbing the web of content it deemed critical or offensive.

"The fight against rumors has received a positive response and has been quite effective," he said.

"The Internet has become clean. The frequency of slander has declined, but it has not impacted the orderly flow of information."

Although social media has become a platform for users to voice complaints and criticism about the government, authorities force domestic internet firms to delete user-posted content they consider too politically sensitive.

China will work to strengthen regulation of the internet by training local internet regulators and net companies, Ren added, and further "manage" search and microblogs as well as Tencent's popular WeChat app.

"We will meet the demands of the people to create a cyberspace with Chinese characteristics," Ren said.

He reiterated China's right to block websites with information on Tibetan independence or support for separatists in China's far western region of Xinjiang.

"Some websites propagating material on Tibet and Xinjiang aim to split our nation, or try to subvert the power of the state," Ren added. "This runs counter to China's laws and regulations."

(Reporting by Megha Rajagopalan; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AR0BQ20131128





Soon, Your Wireless Devices Could Be Using the Military’s Old Spectrum
Brian Fung

The military is nearing a deal with broadcasters that would clear up valuable spectrum for consumers' airwave-hungry wireless devices.

A key federal agency, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, on Monday endorsed a proposal by the Defense Department that would have the Pentagon movE some of its operations into airwaves currently licensed to television stations. What's left behind will be made available for an upcoming auction that will benefit cellular providers, such as AT&T and Verizon. Those companies intend to use the new spectrum to enhance 3G and 4G data networks.

In exchange for giving up control over its federally-owned spectrum, the Pentagon should get access to new spectrum in the higher-frequency 2.1 GHz band, the NTIA said in a letter Monday to the Federal Communications Commission. That part of the spectrum is currently used by broadcasters for internal communications. It's also partly used by NASA for space satellites. The NTIA — an arm of the Commerce Department — effectively oversees the federal government's share of the wireless spectrum, which is substantial.

"These changes would provide DoD additional spectrum access to a band with comparable technical characteristics to restore essential military capabilities that will be lost as a result of relocating systems out of 1755-1780 MHz," the letter read.

Scott Bergmann, vice president of regulatory affairs for the wireless group CTIA, hailed the endorsement, calling it "an important step forward."

The FCC is hoping to clear up 300 MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband by 2015, and 500 MHz by the end of the decade. Part of that effort involves repurposing 120 MHz from the broadcasters themselves, even as the plan to cram DoD into their spectrum moves forward.

Under the tentative deal, which is expected to cost the Pentagon $3.5 billion, broadcasters would be expected to share channels with the military. To avoid interference as much as possible, the military will need radio equipment that lets its transmissions intelligently jump frequencies. The change won't just alter the way voice communications are handled; drones, precision-guided bombs and electronic warfare operations that rely on radio spectrum may also be affected.

The agreement aids a longer-term effort by the Obama administration to convince federal agencies to use their airwaves more efficiently. President Obama issued a presidential memorandum to that end in June.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers greeted the NTIA endorsement with praise.

"This effort will help free up licensed spectrum to meet growing commercial demand while protecting the missions of our men and women in uniform," said Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Greg Walden (R-Ore.), leaders in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement.

At a news conference, the National Association of Broadcasters' Rick Kaplan said he was "very confident" that the remaining details of the deal will be hammered out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-old-spectrum/





The Internet Mystery that has the World Baffled

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301
Chris Bell

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs.

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”. After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four” might be important – and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image’s code.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,” says Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. I was hooked.”

Eriksson didn’t realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the internet’s most enduring puzzles; a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the "darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.

It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called "Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either a mysterious secret society, a statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by some quasi-military body. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it’s the CIA.

For some, it’s just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku; for others, it has become an obsession. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to work out what it means for him. "It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,” he says. "And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge.”

On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy” message from the duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables.

Taking the duck’s mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption program called OutGuess. Success: another hidden message, this time linking to another messageboard on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Here, encrypted lines from a book were being posted every few hours. But there were also strange symbols comprising of several lines and dots – Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. And duly translated, they led to another cipher.

Up until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required any advanced skills, or suggested anything other than a single anonymous riddle-poser having some fun. "But then it all changed,” says Eriksson. "And things started getting interesting.”

Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. And the puzzles themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Pictures of the cicada insect – reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs – became a common motif.

"I knew cicadas only emerge every prime number of years – 13, or 17 – to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators,” says Eriksson. "It was all starting to fit together.” The references became more arcane too. The book, for example, turned out to be "The Lady of the Fountain”, a poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts.

Later, the puzzle would lead him to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson – specifically his 1992 poem "Agrippa” (a book of the dead), infamous for the fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. Armies of users of 4chan, the anarchic internet forum where the first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pooled their collective intelligence – and endless free time – to crack the puzzles.

Within hours they’d decoded "The Lady of the Fountain”. The new message, however, was another surprise: "Call us,” it read, "at telephone number 214-390-9608”. By this point, only a few days after the original image was posted, Eriksson had taken time off work to join the pursuit full time.

"This was definitely an unexpected turn,” he recalls. "And the first hint that this might not just be the work of a random internet troll.” Although now disconnected, the phone line was based in Texas, and led to an answering machine. There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime and a new website: 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a cicada confirmed they were on the right path.

"It was thrilling, breathtaking by now,” says Eriksson. "This shared feeling of discovery was immense. But the plot was about to thicken even more.” Once the countdown reached zero, at 5pm GMT on January 9, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world: locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. Sat in Sweden, Eriksson waited as, around the globe, amateur solvers left their apartments to investigate. And, one by one reported what they’d found: a poster, attached to a lamp post, bearing the cicada image and a QR code (the black-and-white bar code often seen on adverts these days and designed to take you to a website via your smartphone).

"It was exhilarating,” said Eriksson. "I was suddenly aware of how much effort they must have been putting into creating this kind of challenge.” For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive – proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organisation of talented people. But who?

Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately – and disappointingly – promote a new movie or car.

Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed "I Love Bees” ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.

But there were complicating factors to Cicada. For one, the organisers were actively working against the participants. One "solver”, a female known only as Wind from Michigan, contributed to the quest on several messageboards before the community spotted she was deliberately disseminating false clues. Other interference was more pointed. One long, cautionary diatribe, left anonymously on the website Pastebin, claimed to be from an ex-Cicada member – a non-English military officer recruited to the organisation "by a superior”. Cicada, he said, "was a Left-Hand Path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organisation” – comprising of "military officers, diplomats, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world”. Their plan, the writer claimed, was to transform humanity into the Nietzschen Übermensch.

"This is a dangerous organisation,” he concluded, "their ways are nefarious.” With no other clues, it was also asssumed by many to be a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6 or America’s National Security Agency (NSA), as part of a search for highly talented cryptologists. It wouldn’t have been the first time such tactics had been used.

Back in 2010, for example, Air Force Cyber Command – the United States’ hacking defence force, based at Fort Meade in Maryland – secretly embedded a complex hexadecimal code in their new logo. Cybercom head Lt Gen Keith Alexander then challenged the world’s amateur analysts to crack it (it took them three hours). And in September this year, GCHQ launched the "Can You Find It?” initiative – a series of cryptic codes designed to root out the best British cryptographers. As GCHQ’s head of resourcing Jane Jones said at the time, "It’s a puzzle but it’s also a serious test – the jobs on offer here are vital to protecting national security.”

Dr Jim Gillogly, former president of the American Cryptogram Association, has been cracking similar codes for years and says it’s a tried and tested recruitment tactic.

"During the Second World War, the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School used crossword puzzles printed in The Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park,” he says. "But I’m not sure the CIA or NSA is behind Cicada. Both are careful with security, the recent Snowden case notwithstanding. And starting the puzzle on [the anarchic internet forum] 4chan might attract people with less respect for authority than they would want working inside.”

But that doesn’t rule out other organisations. "Computer and data security is more important than ever today,” says Dr Gillogly. The proliferation of wireless devices, mobile telephones, e-commerce websites like Amazon and chip-and-pin machines, means the demand for cryptologists has never been higher. (Something the UK government acknowledged last year when it announced it was setting up 11 academic "centres of excellence” in cyber security research.)

"One of the more important components of security systems is the efficacy of the cryptography being used,” says Dr Gillogly. "Which means cryptanalysts are in higher demand than ever before - no longer just with the intelligence services. It could just as easily be a bank or software company [behind Cicada].”

Eriksson himself agrees. As a regular speaker at Black Hat Briefings – the secretive computer security conferences where government agencies and corporations get advice from hackers – he knows certain organisations occasionally go "fishing” for new recruits like this. But to him the signs point to a recruitment drive by a hacker group like Anonymous.

"I can’t help but notice,” he says, "that the locations in question are all places with some of the most talented hackers and IT security researchers in the world.” Either way, their identity would prove irrelevant. When the QR codes left on the lamp posts were decoded, a hidden message pointed the solvers towards a TOR address. TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the "darknet” – the vast, murky portion of the internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the "surface" web, it’s in these recesses where you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks. And it’s here where the Cicada path ended.

After a designated number of solvers visited the address, the website shut down with a terse message: "We want the best, not the followers." The chosen few received personal emails – detailing what, none have said, although one solver heard they were now being asked to solve puzzles in private. Eriksson, however, was not among them. "It was my biggest anticlimax – when I was too late to register my email at the TOR hidden service," he says. "If my sleep-wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first." Regardless, a few weeks later, a new message from Cicada was posted on Reddit. It read: "Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month-long journey ends. For now." All too abruptly for thousands of intrigued solvers, it had gone quiet.

Except no. On January 4 this year, something new. A fresh image, with a new message in the same white text: "Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues." Analysis of the image would reveal another poem – this time from the book Liber Al Vel Legis, a religious doctrine by the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. From there, the solvers downloaded a 130Mb file containing thousands of prime numbers. And also an MP3 file: a song called The Instar Emergence by the artist 3301, which begins with the sound of – guess what – cicadas.

Analysis of that has since led to a Twitter account pumping out random numbers, which in turn produced a "gematria": an ancient Hebrew code table, but this time based on Anglo-Saxon runes. This pointed the solvers back into the darknet, where they found seven new physical locations, from Dallas to Moscow to Okinawa, and more clues. But that’s where, once again, the trail has gone cold. Another select group of "first solvers" have been accepted into a new "private" puzzle – this time, say reports, a kind of Myers-Briggs multiple-choice personality test.

But still, we are no closer to knowing the source, or fundamental purpose, of Cicada 3301. "That’s the beauty of it though," says Eriksson. "It is impossible to know for sure until you have solved it all." That is why for him, and thousands of other hooked enthusiasts, January 4 2014 is so important: that’s when the next set of riddles is due to begin again. "Maybe all will be revealed then," he grins. "But somehow, I doubt it."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...d-baffled.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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