Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 14th, '12

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April 14th, 2012




Greek Police Make Arrest, Hunt Admins Of 500,000 Member File-Sharing Site
enigmax

Following a key arrest on Monday, authorities say they have charged three individuals said to be the administrators of a very large file-sharing site. The Greek forum, which carried links to material hosted on cyberlocker sites including Megaupload, had more than half a million members. According to the police the suspects generated substantial revenue from donations and gambling ads and cost copyright holders more than $85 million.

In the not-so distant past, every other week there would be news about either BitTorrent sites or their users falling foul of the law. While they still have their share of problems, the rise of so-called cyberlockers and sites that index them means that at least for now the focus has been shifted.

In recent months its been all about the file-hosters themselves, the Megaupload raid in January and the fall out ever since. Today we bring news of action against a site that supplied links to films, music and games hosted on file-hosters all around the world.

On Monday, Greek police swooped on addresses in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki and arrested a woman said to be 40 years-old and one of the operators of GreekDDL.

The site, which is hosted in the United States and remains partially online but with “major upgrades” underway, was a significant player. Authorities claim that it had in excess of 500,000 members.

To get an idea of the gravity local police are putting on the case, we can compare some recent stats. According to US authorities Megaupload, one of the world’s largest websites at the time, cost rightsholders $500m. GreekDDL (according to Alexa Greece’s 63rd largest site) allegedly cost rightsholders $85.4m (65m euros).

The amounts quoted are, as always, up for debate. It is being claimed that GreekDDL had to shut down for a while in January (traffic stats do indeed show a nosedive) since much of its indexed content had been stored on Megaupload. If that was the case, presumably the ‘losses’ to rightsholders would have been counted twice in two separate cases.

Authorities add that GreekDDL charged its members a subscription for access, although it’s not currently clear if these are simply donations by another name. GreekDDL did have a so-called ‘premium’ VIP section but what went on there is unclear. Nevertheless, police say that in January alone the site received 220,000 euros.

It’s also claimed that the admins of the site generated “substantial amounts” of revenue both from advertising and directing site members to online gambling sites located abroad, earning “commissions of up to 40%” on the latter.

Police say they want to detain two other site admins, one of whom is reportedly being tracked with the help of Swedish authorities and Interpol.
https://torrentfreak.com/police-make...g-site-120411/





Russia’s Nationwide Check on Web Providers as Police Target File-Sharing

A nationwide check on Internet providers is being conducted by the country’s Interior Ministry.

The aim is to root out illegal file-sharing through local networks. The police say local networks are being used to distribute child pornography.

The first criminal cases will be opened in late April or early May, investigators say.

Such servers, hosting millions of films and music files, were quite popular in the early 2000s when the first local networks started popping up across the country.

The networks united a limited range of computers in the same area, from dozens to several thousand, giving their users access to the Internet and services provided by the network itself, like chat, mIRC channels, and various servers with music, movies, computer games etc.

Gradually, large Internet providers bought up all the local networks. Most of the illegal servers were destroyed but the police say some of them are still available, and the series of investigations will hopefully put an end to this practice.

The move comes after several attempts by the Russian government to shut down the country’s most popular torrent website. Despite multiple attacks, the resource is now functioning under a different name and has completely regained its popularity.
https://rt.com/news/prime-time/local...l-sharing-615/





German Courts at Epicenter of Global Patent Battles Among Tech Rivals
Kevin O’Brien

Is Germany’s system of litigating disputes over patents bad for business?

Microsoft’s decision to move its European logistics and distribution headquarters to the Netherlands from Germany has generated a debate over patent law here, where it is easy to block the sale of a rival’s product even before an infringement claim is verified.

Microsoft cited the potential consequences of a lawsuit brought against it in Germany by Motorola Mobility as a factor in its decision to move its logistics center to the Netherlands from Düren, a small German town near the Dutch border.

Motorola Mobility has asked a court in Mannheim, Germany, to stop Microsoft from distributing its Xbox game consoles and Windows 7 operating system software because they employ a video streaming technology that Motorola claims to own. The court in Mannheim is scheduled to rule on Motorola’s request on April 17.

Microsoft is taking no chances. Thomas Baumgärtner, a Microsoft spokesman in Unterschleissheim, Germany, said the possibility that the court in Mannheim might grant Motorola’s request and ban the European distribution of the Xbox and Windows 7 had prompted Microsoft to seek a friendlier base.

The company began transferring its operations this year to a location in the Netherlands, which it will not disclose.

“The move is taking place as we speak,” Mr. Baumgärtner said last week.

In the last two years, Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft and Motorola Mobility have either introduced or defended themselves against patent claims in Germany. In one case, Apple won a ruling at a court in Düsseldorf that banned the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer in Germany. Samsung quickly modified the device, releasing the Galaxy Tab 10.1N a month later. Apple sued to block sales of the new device, but a court in Munich denied its request.

In March, Apple won a Munich court ruling against Motorola Mobility because Motorola had used one of Apple’s patented photo management technologies on its mobile phones. Motorola said it had modified the devices to remove the infringing technology.

Nokia is suing Apple in Düsseldorf and Mannheim, as well as in Britain and the Netherlands, accusing Apple of using 13 Nokia patents without authorization in its iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

The lawsuits, often claiming violations of patents that are considered essential parts of globally recognized mobile technology standards, prompted the European Commission to open investigations this year against Samsung and Motorola Mobility.

Joachim Henkel, a professor of management at the Technical University of Munich, said big international companies were often seeking to exploit the German system for strategic advantage.

Mr. Henkel said the prominent patent and intellectual property disputes in the mobile phone sector, which have also involved courts in Asia, Britain and the United States, were bogging down cutting-edge companies in court.

“All of these infringement cases in Germany, Europe, the United States and Asia are having a hampering effect on innovation globally,” Mr. Henkel said. “Usually, what masquerades as a patent dispute is in actuality a dispute motivated by business strategy.”

The process has turned the German patent courts in Mannheim, Düsseldorf and Munich into some of the most overworked in Europe.

Two-thirds of all patent claims in Europe are now filed in Germany, according to the Munich law firm Meissner Bolte, which does patent litigation. In a sense, Germany has become a destination for fast, effective one-stop patent challenges, much as Britain is for libel and the state of Delaware is for registration of American companies.

While these may benefit German law firms financially, technology experts and smaller German technology firms say the system is being abused to generate nuisance claims.

Determining the substance of a patent claim in Germany can take years. During that time, a rival can effectively be stopped from using a basic piece of technology, often without a legal reason that holds up in the end.

That was the case with Unitedprint, a company in Radebeul, Germany, that does online printing for small and midsize businesses. In 2006, Unitedprint was sued by a competitor, Vistaprint, of Bermuda, which said Unitedprint was using a piece of its patented design technology that enabled users to print business cards and fliers in high resolution.

The German Patent Court rejected Vistaprint’s claim in 2007, but Vistaprint appealed. Five years later, on March 22, the German Federal Court of Justice set the matter to rest, siding with Unitedprint. In its ruling, the German court said the European Patent Office, based in Munich, had erred in 1994 when it issued the patent at the center of the dispute.

Although Vistaprint lost on the legal issues, the company did succeed in getting Unitedprint to change its business operations. Beginning in July 2007, Unitedprint stopped using the patented technology at the heart of the dispute. It has since devised new methods of printing that do not make use of it, but the lawsuits were costly to defend.

Anja Sebald, the head of the legal department at Unitedprint, said it was simple for companies to obtain ownership rights to technology that was already in the public domain.

“It is often too easy to obtain a software patent from the European patent authorities,” she said. “Many times, the people awarding the patents don’t have the direct relevant expertise to make an informed judgment.”

Unitedprint is requesting a six-figure sum in euros from Vistaprint to recover legal costs.

Unlike the German patent system, the American system gives judges the option of awarding proportionate damages instead of granting outright injunctions that ban sales of disputed products in cases where “irreparable harm” cannot be demonstrated.

In Germany, if a court determines that a company legally holds a patent, it can issue an injunction to ban competing uses if asked.

There is no option of granting proportional monetary damages.

Some German businesses are clamoring for changes to better shield themselves from nuisance suits. In 2009, 200 small and midsize businesses created a lobbying group, the Bundesverband Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie, based in Hamburg, with the goal of altering the legal system.

But the group’s members, which are primarily software and hardware companies, have so far been unable to persuade German lawmakers. In 2005, the German Parliament unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution urging changes to the system to limit abuse. But the call was never followed by action.

The last activity came in 2009, when the German Justice Ministry produced a favorable report on the issue, said Johannes Sommer, the managing director of the association. But since then, there has been little progress, he said.

“The topic is too complicated and the pressure from the German Mittelstand of small and medium-sized businesses has not been strong enough,” Mr. Sommer said.

Microsoft’s decision to move a business unit from Germany could prompt change. Microsoft had been running its European logistics business from Düren for more than a decade under a contract with Arvato, a unit of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.

But German businesses are reluctant to wade into a political debate publicly. Klaus Markus, an Arvato spokesman, said Arvato preferred not to comment on Microsoft’s criticism of the German patent litigation system. Likewise, a representative of Bitkom, the leading German technology industry group, declined to comment.

Both Microsoft and Google, which is acquiring Motorola Mobility, are members of Bitkom.

Mr. Sommer said that fear of nuisance patent claims was the top concern for many businesses.

“We are a very patent-holder-friendly country in Germany, to a fault,” Mr. Sommer said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/t...-patent09.html





Portugal Considers 'Terabyte Tax'

Money grabbing legislation in an ailing economy
Paul Taylor

In what legislators are calling an attempt to “bring old legislation into the 21st century”, the Portuguese parliament is considering taxation on storage devices, in an attempt to protect copyright holders.

According to one local media outlet, Exame Informatica, the 'minor' legislative update proposed by the Portuguese Socialist Party (currently in the opposition) in Portugal, would have consumers forking out for a new tax on storage devices, all in the name of copyright protection - yet all but killing off HDD sales in the country.

The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB). This would be enough to singlehandedly stall PC and component sales. Let’s not even consider the ongoing effects of the flooding in Thailand. We won’t even attempt a parody at formatted capacity vs. raw capacity.

Ironically, under the original format of the bill, hard-drives under the capacity of 150GB are exempt of this tax. Of course, the odds of finding anything on sale below 160GB is unlikely these days, unless it’s an SSD, a sort of grey area for this bill.

USB pens and memory cards will be taxed at 6 cents to the gigabyte, while internal storage on mobile phones and other similar storage devices will be charged 50 cents to the gigabyte. Yes, your 64GB iPhone would become €32 more expensive.

Copy devices would also be affected by this legislation: photocopiers and multi function printers would also be taxed according to the number of pages copied per minute, with a 70 ppm MFP being charged up to €227 more per device.

In Portugal, storage devices like DVDs and CDs pay a 3 percent fixed surtax, besides VAT, as a sort of penalty for being copyright violation enablers.

A Socialist Party parliamentarian was quoted as having said that home users would not feel the pinch as the tax was aimed at professionals who use larger capacity drives.

This is not an isolated case of legislative numbnuttery. It now seems to run rampant in the current Portuguese legislature, what with new taxation being created left right and centre, in an attempt to stave off another 'Greece'.

One recent and particularly obvious money grab was the creation of electronic tolls on motorways leading into neighbouring Spain, which not only peeved the locals when going about their daily business, but also annoyed Spaniards who were not made fully aware of the implications, and were unable to pay in any fashion other than standing in very long queues for hours on end.
http://news.techeye.net/hardware/por...s-terabyte-tax





U.S. Tries to Silence MegaUpload Lawyers on Issue of User Data

There's a chance that MegaUpload's lawyers may not get to address the court about what should happen to the company's servers.
Greg Sandoval

The struggle for control of MegaUpload's servers begins in earnest later today.

The courtroom of U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady is expected to be packed with lawyers representing the many parties with some kind of stake in what happens to the billions of files stored on MegaUpload's 1,100 servers. Expected to appear are attorneys representing consumers, MegaUpload, the six major Hollywood studios, the U.S. government and MegaUpload's hosting service.

The U.S. government in January accused MegaUpload, founder Kim DotCom, and six other company managers of criminal copyright violations, racketeering, and money laundering. U.S. officials shut down the cyberlocker service, requested that the New Zealand government arrest DotCom, and are now trying to extradite him to the United States. U.S. officials have called the MegaUpload indictment the largest online criminal copyright case ever brought.

Hanging in the balance of today's hearing are digital files belonging to as many as 60 million people across the globe. Their files could be in jeopardy if O'Grady decides to allow Carpathia Hosting, the company that has housed the servers at its own expense since the service was taken down, to delete the information on them or possibly sell off the servers. Carpathia says the cost of caring for the data is too financially burdensome to shoulder alone and it has asked the court for relief.

According to Ira Rothken, the lawyer in charge of MegaUpload's worldwide defense, the first order of business this morning will be to determine whether MegaUpload's lawyers should be allowed even to address the court. Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the man who indicted DotCom, has argued in a brief filed Wednesday that Rothken and the newly hired firm of Quinn Emanuel should not be allowed to represent them in court.

That's right. There's a chance that MegaUpload's lawyers may not even be heard from on the server issue. MacBride's office argues that it would be improper for MegaUpload's lawyers to be heard when the defendants have yet to appear.

U.S. officials also claim Quinn Emanuel should be excluded from the case because of several conflicts. This is a juicy part because it certainly seems that the firm has a conflict. When the indictment was filed against MegaUpload in January, U.S. officials alleged that company managers attempted to unlawfully copy YouTube's videos in 2006.

Just so happens that Andrew Schapiro, one of the Quinn Emanuel lawyers expected to help defend MegaUpload, represented YouTube and Google after Viacom filed a copyright suit against them in 2007. The government has indicated it plans to call YouTube managers to testify as witnesses.

Lastly, the government implies there's no need for MegaUpload's attorneys to appear because in order for the company to reclaim their servers, MegaUpload needs some of the money that was seized from them to purchase them. That isn't going to happen, says U.S. officials. They say New Zealand has already released some money and giving the defendants any more would be unfair to copyright owners who believe that the assets seized rightfully belongs to them.

Eventually, the judge is expected to address the issue of what should become of MegaUpload's user data.

Rothken says that all the parties are in agreement that MegaUpload's data should be preserved save for the U.S. government. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology and Internet user advocacy group, is expected to ask the court that the data be returned to users.

Even the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the trade group representing the film studios, has asked the court to save the data. The MPAA has said it may need it should the studios want to file a civil complaint at a later date against MegaUpload.

And should MegaUpload's attorneys be allowed to speak, they will tell the judge that they can't defend their clients properly without the server data, Rothken said.

The hearing is schedule for 10 a.m. ET. CNET will be reporting from the courthouse so check back.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...-of-user-data/





Judge Wants MegaUpload User Data Preserved for Now

Federal judge tells MPAA, U.S. government, and numerous other parties to continue looking for a solution that all can agree on about what should be done with MegaUpload's servers.
Greg Sandoval

MegaUpload's lawyers got much of what they asked for today from a federal district court regarding what should be done with the company's servers and user data.

Lawyers representing consumers, MegaUpload, the six major Hollywood studios, the U.S. government, and MegaUpload's hosting service were all in court to voice their opinion about what should be done with billions of digital files belonging to maybe as many as 60 million former users of the cyberlocker service. The government shut down the site in January and filed criminal copyright charges against MegaUpload's managers, including founder Kim DotCom, in a case that has generated massive international interest.

Since then, MegaUpload has been unable to keep up the payments to Carpathia Hosting. Instead of destroying the user data, Carpathia has preserved MegaUpload's servers at its own expense. Carpathia has asked the court for financial relief in the form of a protective order. The parties were in court to determine what should be done with the MegaUpload's data.

Ira Rothken, MegaUpload's lead attorney, asked U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady to send all the parties interested in the data back to the negotiating table to continue looking for a solution they can agree on.

And that's exactly what O'Grady told them to do. What's most important about the judge's decision was that the user data will continue to be preserved.

O'Grady told the parties that unless they wanted to hire their own "special master" to help mediate the talks, then he would send them to a magistrate judge known for his abilities to "bring people together" and hash out agreements.

If you're rooting for MegaUpload or if you're one of the people who stored content on the service, then there's some more good news. O'Grady said he was "sympathetic" with Carpathia's financial plight and he also seemed dismissive of the government's argument that Carpathia shouldn't be allowed to return the information to MegaUpload.

Rothken had tried to buy the servers from Carpathia but the government nixed the deal. MegaUpload says it needs the servers to help prove its innocence.

It wasn't a big victory but my read of the tea leaves was that the judge is reluctant to make any ruling now that would result in the destruction of the data.

After hearing arguments from so many parties, O'Grady seemed a little desperate to find somewhere to park the servers. When an attorney representing one copyright owner argued that his client wanted the data preserved, the judge sighed and asked him, tongue in cheek: "Your parties aren't interested in taking possession of the data are they?"

Here are a few more highlights:

• While O'Grady was sympathetic to Carpathia's financial burden, the government's lawyers told the judge that the company was no babe in the woods. They said that the company generated $35 million from working with MegaUpload and suggested that Carpathia may bear some of the responsibility for the copyright infringement that allegedly occurred at MegaUpload. They told the judge there's a chance that Carpathia will face a civil suit. The government's lawyers said Carpathia just wants to "get out" of the servers but that doesn't mean U.S. taxpayers have to ride to the rescue.

• The Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group representing the six top Hollywood film studios, softened its stance on what should be done with the data. The group had originally asked that the court preserve the information so it could access it if it chooses to file any civil suits. But today in court, the lawyers representing the MPAA said their only concern was preventing any pirated movies and TV shows from being redistributed. The MPAA asserts that the majority of the information stored on MegaUpload's servers rightfully belongs to the studios.

• Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for Internet users and tech companies, said it believes an independent entity should oversee a system whereby MegaUpload's users can retrieve legal content before it's too late. When the judge sounded skeptical that so much information could easily be handled in such a way, Julie Samuels, an EFF staff attorney, told the judge that she wasn't suggesting a solution would be easy as "flipping on a switch," but she implored him not to forget innocent third parties.

• As for MegaUpload itself, the day started off well when the judge agreed to allow them to be heard during the hearing. The United States had argued in a brief that it was improper that they should appear before MegaUpload's defendants had appeared in court. Rothken told the judge that his clients needed access to the servers to prove their case and that he was confident a deal could be worked out between the interested parties that would protect copyright owners as well as the rights of his clients.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-574...erved-for-now/





DOJ May Sue Apple Over eBooks Early as Wednesday: Sources

The Justice Department could sue Apple Inc as early as Wednesday over alleged electronic book price-fixing, while settling with several publishers as early as this week, two people familiar with the matter said.

The Justice Department is investigating alleged price-fixing by Apple and five major publishers: CBS Corp's Simon & Schuster Inc, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, Pearson and Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH.

A lawsuit against Apple, one of the parties not in negotiations with the Justice Department for a potential settlement, could come as early as Wednesday but no final decision has been made, the people said.

Apple declined to comment. The Justice Department and the five publishers could not be reached for comment.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz and Poornima Gupta; editing by Carol Bishopric)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8391JW20120410





Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals
David Streitfeld

The government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon in a powerful position: the nation’s largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.

As soon as the Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it was suing five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, and simultaneously settling with three of them, Amazon announced plans to push down prices on e-books. The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle.

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

“Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,” said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. “Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.”

The government said the five publishers colluded with Apple in secret to develop a new policy that let them set their own retail prices, and then sought to hide their discussions.

As soon as the deal was in place in 2010, the government said, prices jumped everywhere because under the agreement, no bookseller could undercut Apple.

HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster settled the charges Wednesday, leaving the other two, Penguin and Macmillan, and Apple to fight.

Amazon, which already controls about 60 percent of the e-book market, can take a loss on every book it sells to gain market share for its Kindle devices. When it has enough competitive advantage, it can dictate its own terms, something publishers say is beginning to happen.

The online retailer declined to comment Wednesday beyond its statement about lowering prices. Asked last month if Amazon had been talking to the Justice Department about the investigation — a matter of intense speculation in the publishing industry — a spokesman, Craig Berman, said, “I can’t comment.”

Traditional bookstores, which have been under pressure from the Internet for years, fear that the price gap between the physical books they sell and e-books from Amazon will now grow so wide they will lose what is left of their market. Barnes & Noble stores, whose Nook is one of the few popular e-readers that is not built by Amazon, could suffer the same fate, analysts say.

“To stay healthy, this industry needs a lot of retailers that have a stake in the future of the product,” Mr. Norris said. “The bookstore up the street from my office is not trying to gain market share. They’re trying to make money by selling one book at a time to one person at a time.”

Electronic books have been around for more than a decade, but took off only when Amazon introduced the first Kindle e-reader in 2007. It immediately built a commanding lead. The antitrust case had its origins in the leading publishers’ struggle to control the power of Amazon, which had one point had 90 percent of the market.

Apple’s introduction of the iPad in early 2010 seemed to offer a way to combat Amazon.

John Sargent, the chief executive of Macmillan, said he would not settle because he had done nothing wrong and colluded with no one. He wrote to his authors and employees that he made the decision to change pricing structure “on January 22nd, 2010, a little after 4 a.m., on an exercise bike in my basement. It remains the loneliest decision I have ever made, and I see no reason to go back on it now.”

The government suit, filed in United States District Court for the Southern District in New York, made clear that the publishers were resentful and angry about the way that their relationship with Amazon had evolved. The retailer started out a customer of the publishers, but became a competitor. Even as the publishers and Apple negotiated in early 2010, the suit said, Amazon announced its own publishing program.

This only fed publishers’ anxiety. “I am now more convinced that we need a viable alternative to Amazon or this nonsense will continue and get much worse,” the suit quoted David Shanks, the Penguin USA chief executive, as saying.

In the short term, readers will save money. When 16 states simultaneously sued Apple and three of the publishers Wednesday, they said consumers had lost $100 million as a result of higher e-book prices.

“It will look like blue skies,” said Lorraine Shanley, a publishing consultant. “But in the longer term, competition erodes as the spread between e-books and physical books grows greater. There will be fewer retail stores.”

Booksellers reacted to the news with dismay. The American Booksellers Association said the Justice Department’s decision “to challenge a business model that played an essential role in fostering a more competitive, diverse retail environment seems to turn logic on its head.”

Individual stores struggled to absorb the news.

“If there’s an upside, I don’t see it yet,” said J. B. Dickey, the owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. “My fear is that the major publishers won’t be able to stay in business just selling e-books. You can’t bring in enough money to support the infrastructure. If that happens, there goes the marketing, the editorial, the author tours, the expertise of the book industry.”

And his store, he added.

Celebrating on Wednesday was Steve Berman, a lawyer who last summer filed a class-action lawsuit against the five publishers and Apple for price-fixing. “The actions by the Justice Department substantiate our view of the case,” Mr. Berman said.

The plaintiffs in the case are readers troubled by e-book prices. “One consumer came to us and said, ‘How come I’m paying $14.99 when I used to pay $9.99?’ ” Mr. Berman recalled.

Mr. Berman’s firm, Hagens Berman, is in a Seattle office building that also houses Amazon offices. That has set off some speculation among Amazon opponents. Mr. Berman said the proximity was simply a coincidence. “We have no relationship with Amazon,” he said.

Amazon executives have said that the future is open to the bold, but that certain elements will be left behind. “Our mission is to reinvent reading,” one executive, Russ Grandinetti, said in an interview. “I guess Kindle’s not great for book binderies.”

The retailer has been taking a more aggressive stance toward publishers in recent months. When it failed to get better terms from a large Chicago distributor, the Independent Publishers Group, it removed IPG’s nearly 5,000 e-books from sale.

Curt Matthews, IPG’s chief executive, said publishers who dealt with Amazon “will have to insist on keeping their fair share. It is obviously true that producing good content is the hard part of making a good book, no matter how that content is captured. Why should publishers cede all of their power to this new player in the book business?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/b...ng-rivals.html





Online Piracy Statistics Increase on Universities

Editor’s Note: the name Renae Hutcherson (marked with an asterisk) has been used to protect the identity of the source.

An increasing number of students, including some at Mississippi State, are turning to illegal file sharing software to download music and movies for free, rather than purchasing them from legitimate providers.

Renae Hutcherson*, a junior at MSU, said most students are able to pirate music and movies regularly without regret.

“Somehow all these artists get rich anyway,” Hutcherson said. “When we look at their luxurious lives, we don’t feel like we’ve stolen anything from them. We actually feel like we’re supporting them because no matter how we get their music, that’s what makes us fans.”

A report commissioned by Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy estimated between $30 billion and $75 billion of digitally pirated products in 2008 and predicts an estimated increase of $80 billion to $240 billion of digitally pirated products by the year 2015.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act passed in 2008 requires universities and colleges to have a plan in place to combat piracy on campus.

Tom Ritter, security and compliance officer for MSU’s Information Technology Services, said students do not seem to understand how easily they can be found out.

“One of the first questions I ask people when we talk about this is ‘You get on our wireless network and you enter your net ID and your password; do you think you’re anonymous?’” Ritter said.

He said a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives people who own copyrights for music and movies the right to complain if someone shares it illegally.

“For example, MSU is registered with the Library of Congress,” Ritter said. “We have an email address people can complain to, and we frequently receive complaints about people sharing music and movies inappropriately on our network. Under the DMCA, as long as MSU responds effectively and quickly, we can’t get sued.”

MSU and other colleges receive copyright notices from the Recording Industry Association of America to notify downloaders in advance that they are breaking the law and steeper consequences will follow if the actions continue.

If the student fails to adhere to the warning, Ritter said the RIAA will usually try to offer the opportunity to settle outside of court for about $2,000.

“Ninety-nine cents per song on iTunes is looking better and better,” he said.

Fines and legal consequences are even steeper for students caught file sharing, rather than just illegally downloading.

“What most people don’t understand about software like Bit Torrent or Limewire is that while you download, you’re sharing,” Ritter said. “So you find a torrent file on the web with a movie in it, and while you’re downloading it, perhaps thousands of other people across the Internet are downloading it from you at MSU. Then, when it comes time for them to actually sue you, they don’t look at you as a person who was just downloading; they look at you as a person who was sharing with others.”

Illegal downloading and file sharing also has negative effects on the music and entertainment industry.

Terminal Recording Studios in Ridgeland, Miss. has seen the results firsthand. The studio has produced original music for “O’ Brother Where Art Thou”, as well as for The Williams Brothers, Stevie Wonder, David Banner and other country and blues stars.

Kamel King, the entertainment attorney for Terminal Recording Studios, said the rise in pirating has strongly impacted every genre, as well as other aspects of the industry.

“Illegal downloading and file sharing have tremendously affected the entire entertainment industry as a whole,” King said. “It’s cost the industry a lot of jobs and positions. Let’s face it; you can be as creative of a person as you want, but you have to be able to provide for your family financially through your creativity.”

The effects of piracy are not just financial. King said although the impact has been negative toward the artists who do not get what they deserve, the upside is that it has pushed some people out who need to be pushed out.

“It has also forced the entire music industry to go into a superfluous overhaul and redesigned the entire music business model as we know it,” he said. “It’s kind of an evolutionary phenomenon. The people who cannot evolve and transition with the new model are dying out and being forced out of the industry. The people who can adapt, understand the music industry and develop marketing and business strategies to take advantage of it are becoming the new front-runners of the industry.”
http://www.reflector-online.com/news...ties-1.2727400





Students File-Sharing Work on Facebook: Is it Legal?
Charlie Osborne

On Wednesday, Facebook announced a service reminiscent of its roots — Facebook Group for Schools. According to the service announcement by engineer Michael Novati, students are once again able to connect through groups reserved purely for different schools and campuses.

Apart from being able to connect with fellow students and exchange information concerning events, classes or to participate in discussions, users will also be able to share files of up to 25MB in size.

The service will eventually be rolled out globally, and Facebook users can sign up to be notified once the facility is launched in local areas. “We are also introducing file sharing for these groups, to make it even easier to share lecture notes, sports schedules or class assignments,” Facebook says.

What Facebook doesn’t say, however, is how introducing a file-sharing feature aimed at academic institutions may affect students’ rights on the social networking site.

Facebook’s Terms of Use have not been amended to reflect the new facility — which is a step beyond uploading photos and video, as it directly targets files that may not be the intellectual property of the uploader in a variety of formats. These policies have been in place since April 26, 2011, and these rules now apply to the new file-sharing facility:

“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings,” Facebook says.

There’s a catch. It continues: “In addition…”

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).

This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

According to these terms of use, users grant Facebook a transferable, royalty-free license to use any uploaded content in whatever manner it wishes. Therefore, as the uploader, you are awarding the social networking site rights to redistribute and use the material.

If the file is your own intellectual property, then it is your prerogative to do so. However, even if you have created material — such as class notes — it may not be the case that it is actually in your ownership, and so theoretically, you may be infringing copyright by sharing such files across the site.
What do students legally own?

Students, especially those studying at bachelor’s level in college or university, generally assume that the work they produce is theirs. However, once you have signed up with a university, it is common for academic institutions to claim the rights on work you produce — although this prerogative is not necessarily enforced.

Under UK law, as stated by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), as a student is not an employee of the university, lecturers generally cannot claim joint ownership of work unless they have contributed equally to the material. However:

“Some universities and colleges may ask that the students assign their copyright over to the establishment when enrolling.

Alternatively, the establishment might extract a royalty free licence of any works created as a condition of enrolment. In the absence of any such contract, the copyright would remain with the creator.”

This appears straightforward at first glance. However, if academic institutions in the UK use third-party companies that stipulate the transfer of intellectual property rights, students are not eligible to refuse based on copyright grounds.

If we relate this to sharing files on Facebook, then there are four possibilities to consider:

• If the university has claimed ownership of your work, then you are in breach of copyright by sharing your work on the site and therefore granting Facebook a license to reproduce the material.
• If the university has claimed a royalty-free license, then the work remains your intellectual property, and you can use the files as you wish.
• If the university has transferred your IP rights to a third-party, then again, you are in possible breach of copyright by sharing the content, as the file is not your intellectual property and so you do not necessarily retain the rights to share it without the explicit permission of the third party.
• If no such contracts are in place, then the IP rights remain with you; therefore you can use the material as you wish.

Under U.S. law, policies grant the creator exclusive reproduction rights as standard. However, whereas many UK universities take a common approach to claiming student’s intellectual property — although not necessarily enforcing it — some American universities have staked their claim in a more forward manner:

California State University and the University of California are limiting what students can do with notes taken in class. At least one student is known to have been reported to judicial affairs for selling notes to a website.

UC Berkeley updated its policy on note-taking and materials, stating that as individual note sets are based on the ‘intellectual effort’ of lecturers, students are barred from: “broadly sharing their notes or other class materials. Furthermore [...] students may not reproduce, share, or distribute notes or other class materials made available by an instructor for commercial purposes or for compensation.”

Under UC Berkeley’s policies, if a student shared their notes through Facebook’s new platform, they would be committing an offence. Even though the student has produced the notes, as they are based on the contribution of the university, it claims the right to control reproduction and sharing of the material.

Not only this, but any material that a university employee has provided is for individual use only, and its sharing is prohibited.

University lecturers often protest copies of their notes, PowerPoint presentations or lecture recordings being uploaded online — and some universities enforce policies to ban this from taking place, at least within the public domain. Facebook’s new service may result in academic institutions heavily policing such groups to make sure no files of this nature are exchanged — which limits one of the reasons the facility has become available.
What happens when third parties become involved?

Depending on individual university and college policy, it is not only a student’s notes that come under scrutiny. In some cases, third-party companies become the owners of a student’s intellectual property. But what would happen if two or more of these businesses laid claim to academic material posted online?

An example of a third-party that claims file copyright is Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection web service developed by iParadigms LLC. As part of their business model, Turnitin makes a profit by processing student work, archiving it and selling services based on its plagiarism-detection database.

Once a piece of work is submitted for checking, the material’s copyright passes from student to university, and then becomes the property of the company.

In 2008, several student complaints resulted in the charge of copyright violation, based on Title 17 in U.S. copyright law which awards creators exclusive reproduction rights.

However, the students did not win their case. The judge said that:

“While iParadigms makes a profit in providing this service to education institutions its use of student works… iParadigms provides a substantial public benefit through the network of educational institutions using Turnitin.

It is clear that iParadigms’ use of the Plaintiff’s works has caused no harm to the market value of these works.”

In short, even though Title 17 awards intellectual copyright to the original creator “in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device”, the Turnitin database was considered ‘fair use’ due to its function as a private checker rather than a public service, in comparison to a search engine such as Google.

In terms of Facebook, the scenario differs. Although the market value of such material may not be damaged by Turnitin’s use, the exchange of these files across social networking sites may result in clashes between original creators and those that claim intellectual ownership due to either university attendance or its submission into such software.

If a third-party, or university for that matter, already lay claim to material uploaded by a student, then is Facebook opening itself for liability, or will the student uploaders have to deal with the consequences?

What do students and universities need to be aware of?

If students plan to utilize this service, then schools and universities have an obligation to inform them of any material that is claimed by copyright other than their own. If the university has set up a copyright-transferring contract with the student, then this must be reiterated before such networks are created, in order to avoid future disputes.

If the student retains the intellectual property rights to their work — more commonly the case when a student is undertaking a masters or PhD — then it is their right to share that material as they wish.

However, as in the case of UC Berkeley, just because you have individually written a set of notes from a lecture does not mean that you own the right to that work. If Facebook Groups for Schools is successful, then it may be the case that academic institutions will consider changing their policies to reflect the potential public sharing of such material.
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/igenerati...it-legal/15067





MPAA: You Can Infringe Copyright Just by Embedding a Video
Timothy B. Lee

The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it's possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party.

A federal judge took that position last July, prompting a chorus of criticism. Two briefs—one by Google and Facebook, the other by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge—attacked the decision as contrary to past precedents and potentially disruptive to the Internet economy. They asked the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn it.

Last week, the MPAA joined the fray with a brief in support of Illinois federal judge John F. Grady's ruling. It urged the Seventh Circuit not to draw a legal distinction between hosting content and embedding it. In the MPAA's view, both actions should carry the risk of liability for direct copyright infringement.

The case arose from a dispute over Internet pornography. MyVidster is a video bookmarking site that allows users to save links to their favorite videos and share them with others. The site supports embedding, so bookmarked videos can be viewed on a myVidster page surrounded by myVidster ads.

A porn company called Flava Works discovered numerous myVidster pages with embedded Flava videos. MyVidster did not host the videos—they were streamed by third-party hosting sites such as RedTube—but Flava sent myVidster DMCA takedown notices anyway. MyVidster claims it complied with these takedown notices, but evidently its response didn't satisfy Flava, which eventually sued for copyright infringement.

Hosting vs. embedding

The case has been plagued by confusion over the difference between hosting a video and embedding a video hosted by someone else. MyVidster's owner, Marques Gunter, failed to clearly explain the distinction in his testimony, and Flava's lawyers exploited Gunter's poor communications skills to make him look evasive and indifferent to following the law.

For example, a key issue in the case is whether myVidster qualifies for a safe harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To qualify for the safe harbor, a service provider is required to have a policy of terminating the accounts of repeat copyright infringers. Gunter apparently interpreted the DMCA as only requiring him to terminate users who directly infringe copyright, and he believes that bookmarking (and, consequently, embedding) a video does not qualify as direct infringement. Hence, he didn't terminate users who bookmarked publicly available videos, even if those videos infringed copyright.

Reasonable people can dispute Gunter's interpretations of copyright law (indeed, the MPAA does just that) but it's not clear that Judge Grady even understood Gunter's position. Gunter testified that he would warn, and eventually terminate, the accounts of users who "use myVidster to publish links/embeds of videos that would otherwise not be accessible by the public. For example, if a user is uploading videos to a file server and using myVidster as a way and means to distribute the content."

However, Gunter said that "most of the content are embeds which are hosted on external websites, [and] I would suggest contacting the websites that are hosting your content to help stop the future bookmarking of it on myVidster."

Judge Grady characterizes this as "the epitome of willful blindness," writing that Gunter "pointed a finger at other websites while failing to acknowledge that his own website is perpetuating copyright infringement." But Gunter's point wasn't that infringement on other sites excused the infringement of his own users. It was that embedding an infringing video wasn't copyright infringement for purposes of the DMCA's "repeat infringer" rule.

Grady wasn't impressed with this distinction—indeed, he seemed to regard it as so obviously wrong that he doesn't even bother to analyze it in any depth. Instead, he ruled that because the infringing videos appeared "on myVidster," myVidster was responsible for them regardless of the technical details of how they were delivered to the user's computer.

But as Google and Facebook pointed out in a November brief, previous precedents have found the distinction between hosting and embedding legally relevant. The 2007 decision of Perfect 10 v. Amazon is a key precedent. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in that case that only the server that hosts infringing content, not other servers that may provide links to infringing content, are guilty of direct copyright infringement. The Perfect 10 decision is a strong precedent because it dealt with the closely analogous case of Google's image search engine embedding copies of infringing images hosted on third-party servers.

Grady also ruled that Gunter's failure to take proactive steps to discourage infringement by myVidster's users undermined his claim to the safe harbor. Grady complained about Gunter's "mechanical response" to takedown notices, faulting him for failing to "warn his users about copyright infringement," to prevent previously blocked videos from being uploaded again, or to terminate users who have posted infringing videos "on two or more occasions."

The MPAA weighs in

Judge Grady's decision was music to the ears of the MPAA, which has long downplayed the distinction between websites that host content and websites that merely link or embed content hosted elsewhere. Last Wednesday, the MPAA filed an amicus brief urging the Seventh Circuit to uphold key parts of Judge Grady's decision.

"Although there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links, this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites," the organization writes. "Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content." The MPAA also notes that embedding can enable sites to monetize infringing content by surrounding it with ads.

The MPAA argues that "myVidster users who posted links to infringing videos and images participated in the process by which those videos were streamed and shown to the public," making them direct infringers. It calls the "server test" articulated by the Ninth Circuit in the Perfect 10 case "novel," arguing that it "conflicts with the language and legislative history of the Copyright Act, which affords copyright owners a broad and technologically neutral display right."

In the MPAA's view, then, anyone who serves a website with an embedded link to infringing content "displays" that content to users, directly infringing copyright in the process. The MPAA also backs Grady's narrow conception of the DMCA's safe harbor. It argues that "the safe harbors only apply to 'innocent' service providers." And myVidster, in the MPAA's view, doesn't make the cut.

Far-reaching implications

If the Seventh Circuit adopts Judge Grady's—and the MPAA's—expansive interpretation of copyright liability, implications for the Internet economy could be far-reaching.

Numerous websites embed content from third parties they have not personally inspected. Under the theory articulated by Grady, and supported by the MPAA, these websites would be responsible for this content, exactly as if they had stored it on their own servers. This could create a serious disincentive for sites to allow users to post embedded content, hampering the convenience and user-friendliness of the Web.

Of course, as Google and Facebook stress in their brief, sites like myVidster could still be liable under the secondary infringement rules that felled Napster and Grokster. So the argument that myVidster's users are not a direct infringer isn't an argument that "link sites" that profit from infringement should get a free pass.

Secondary infringement is more difficult to prove than direct infringement, however, and the penalties are lower. That's as it should be. Sites that host content should bear greater responsibility for that content than sites that merely link to content hosted by third parties.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ng-a-video.ars





Expert Witness Says Most Popular Hotfile Downloads are Open Source Apps
Ryan Paul

Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood’s ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile’s case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications.

Charges against Hotfile that alleged direct copyright infringement were thrown out last year by a federal court judge. The remaining charges allege that the company is liable for inducing its users to infringe copyright. The answer to that question will hinge on whether the courts find that Hotfile has substantial non-infringing uses.

A study commissioned by the MPAA, which was based on a sampling of Hotfile downloads, seemingly showed that a majority of the site’s content was infringing. Duke University law professor James Boyle, expert witness for the defense, issued a rebuttal demonstrating the flaws in the methodology used by the Hollywood study.

Professor Boyle’s statement, which cites the results of a more comprehensive statistical analysis of the content stored on Hotfile, was included in a sealed filing that was leaked this week by TorrentFreak. Boyle’s research highlighted an extensive volume of non-infringing Hotfile usage that had been overlooked by the plaintiff’s study.

Boyle found that some of the most popular items distributed through Hotfile are open source software applications, computer programs that are made available by their creators under terms that broadly allow redistribution.

In fact, he found that the two single most widely-downloaded files on the site are sn0wbreeze and iReb, open source applications designed for iPhone jailbreaking that are deliberately published on Hotfile by their creator. Those applications are entirely legal to distribute through services such as Hotfile. In addition to the two jailbreaking applications, he also evaluated the prevalence of JDownloader, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Ubuntu on Hotfile’s network.

"I determined that there is a high volume of usage of the Hotfile system for distribution of free and open source software. My non-comprehensive study found more than 1.7 million downloads of the six open source programs examined," he wrote.

Open source software wasn’t the only kind of legally-distributable content that Boyle found on Hotfile. He also found that it was used to distribute literature that is in the public domain and movies that are published under Creative Commons licenses by organizations such as the Blender Foundation.

The Hollywood-commissioned study largely assumed that infringement took place any time a piece of copyright-protected content was downloaded from the site. As Boyle pointed out in his rebuttal, that’s simply a poor assumption. Looking at the licenses under which the content is released paints a very different picture. Boyle said that the Hollywood study also misrepresented the nature of some of the content that it evaluated. For example, it mistakenly treated perfectly legitimate and legal third-party game mods as if they were cracks.

Another key point raised by Boyle is that there are a large number of files uploaded to Hotfile that are never subsequently downloaded. Because the Hollywood study only looked at downloads, it failed to account for that phenomenon. Boyle’s study found that files that had never been downloaded account for over half of the total content on Hotfile, suggesting that the service is heavily used for backups and not just distribution.

Boyle, who was a founding member of the Creative Commons board, has made a strong argument that Hotfile is a legitimate distribution channel with a variety of potential uses. His arguments could pose a serious challenge for the inducement case against Hotfile, which will depend on the MPAA being able to convince a court that the site doesn’t have substantial non-infringing uses.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ource-apps.ars





Liberal Democrats Threaten to 'Kill' Online Surveillance Plans

Liberal Democrat President Tim Farron today vowed the party would "kill" proposals for increased monitoring of emails and internet use if they were not watered down.
Tim Farron

Mr Farron said he was "prepared" to look at draft legislation, dubbed a "snoopers charter", when it is published but warned he was "in no mood" to back "authoritarian" laws.

Many Lib Dems were "horrified" by the plans, which would allow Government listening post GCHQ to monitor internet traffic – times, dates, numbers and addresses – in real time.

Mr Farron told BBC 1's Andrew Marr Show: "I am prepared to recognise that there is obviously a need in modern society with new technology to have a look at what needs to be given to the security services but only if it is absolutely clear there is no universal access.

"But we are prepared to kill them, be absolutely clear about that, if it comes down to it.

"If we think this is a threat to a free and liberal society then there would be no question of unpicking them or compromising, this just simply must not happen."

The Government has faced an intense backlash over the plans, with senior Conservatives joining Lib Dems and civil rights campaigners in warning they would cause a gross intrusion into freedom and privacy.

Mr Farron said he would be "surprised" if the Bill ended up looking "anything like the press reports we have had this week".

He said: "My conversations with the Deputy Prime Minister and others reveal that there has been significant movement this week."

Mr Farron added: "It is important to be reasonable and look at the draft legislation, as it now will be, and see what it says and look at it on its own merit.

"But I have to say I'm in no mood whatsoever to apologise for, or to amend or unpick authoritarian legislation.

"It strikes me that a Government that includes Liberal Democrats should ensure that Britain ends up a more liberal place, not less."

Nick Clegg insisted earlier this week the Government was simply "updating the rules" to allow the police and security services "to go after terrorists and serious criminals" who are using the internet to communicate.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...nce-plans.html





After Killing SOPA, Internet Activists Take Aim at a New House Cybersecurity Bill
Brendan Sasso

Online activists who helped sink the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) earlier this year have now turned their sights to a House cybersecurity bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

In recent days, posts comparing CISPA to SOPA have received thousands of "up votes" on Web forum Reddit and have reached the front page of the popular link and discussion site.

Reddit helped rally opposition to SOPA and was one of the first major websites to declare that it would black out in protest of the anti-piracy bill. The massive Web protest, which was joined by Google and Wikipedia, caused a public outcry and forced Congress to scrap the anti-piracy bill.

Recent posts on Reddit have called CISPA the "return of SOPA," "the latest attempt by Congress to try to regulate and control the Internet" and a "draconian privacy invasion bill."

A Google search for "CISPA" now returns numerous blogs that decry the legislation as an attempt to censor the Internet. One online petition opposing the bill has already gathered more than 300,000 signatures.

But a House aide who supports CISPA said the measure has nothing to do with anti-piracy enforcement or censorship.

"There's no authority to censor or block sites in the bill," he said. "The only authority is to share information with the private sector and for them to voluntarily share it with the government. There's nothing in here that would allow you to block or shutdown a website."

CISPA, which is authored by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and has more than 100 co-sponsors, is expected to come to the House floor for a vote during the week of April 23.

The goal of legislation is to help companies beef up their defenses against hackers who steal business secrets, rob customer financial information and wreak havoc on computer systems.

“Every day U.S. businesses are targeted by nation-state actors like China for cyber exploitation and theft,” Rogers said in a statement last month. “The broad base of support for this bill shows that Congress recognizes the urgent need to help our private sector better defend itself from these insidious attacks."

The bill would tear down legal barriers that discourage companies from sharing information about cyber attacks. Some companies are worried that antitrust laws bar them from cooperating with each other to address cyber threats, and some fear they could be held liable if they reveal information after an attack.

Kendall Burman, a senior fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology, said her concern with the bill is really about privacy.

She said her organization is not opposed to all legislation that encourages companies to share information about cyber attacks, but she warned that the broad language in CISPA could lead to companies handing over people's personal information to the government.

The bill encourages companies to share "information directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to a system or network." Burman argued that definition could be interpreted broadly and could include data unrelated to real cyber threats, including information about people illegally downloading movies or music.

The House aide who supports the bill said the definitions are intentionally broad so that Congress won't have to update the law every time a new technology emerges. The aide also said the bill does not cover copyright infringement.

"Some kid in the Dallas suburbs illegally downloading movies doesn't come close to our definition," he said.

Unlike other cybersecurity bills pending in Congress, CISPA does not require that companies strip out personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses or phone numbers, from the data they turn over to the government.

Burman expressed concern that the information could be shared with military spy agencies, like the National Security Agency. She argued that a domestic agency, such as the Homeland Security Department, would be more appropriate for handling cyber threat information.

"This bill drives a truck through privacy law," Burman said.

In addition to the Center for Democracy Technology, privacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are also rallying opposition to CISPA.

Burman said she is "encouraged" that people are starting to pay attention to the cybersecurity debate, and she criticized lawmakers for not taking more time to debate the measures.

"People understand that these issues matter," she said. "Congress can't regulate in a black box on something that affects the Internet like this."

But the House aide expressed skepticism that the protests will attract the same level of attention as the SOPA blackouts in January.

He said the "real muscle" behind the SOPA protests were Web giants like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia.

Most Web companies have either sat on the sidelines in the cybersecurity debate or some, including Facebook, have endorsed CISPA.

"The Internet industry loves this bill," the aide said. "They want these authorities."
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...rsecurity-bill





CISPA Is A Really Bad Bill, And Here's Why
Leigh Beadon

The forces behind HR 3523, the dangerous Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act which is going to move forward in Congress at the end of the month, are beginning to get cagey about the growing backlash from the internet community. In an attempt to address some of the key concerns, the bill's authors, representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, hosted a conference call specifically geared at digital reporters. The invitation was for "Cyber Media and Cyber Bloggers" (seriously) and took place at 7am Silicon Valley time—thus demonstrating that they are totally in touch with the tech community. During the call, the representatives were intent on hammering certain points home: that the bill respects privacy and civil liberties, is not about surveillance, is targeted at actions by foreign states, and is nothing like SOPA.

Unfortunately, none of that is really true. The text of the bill, even with the two key amendments made since (all pdf links and embedded below), is still full of extremely broad definitions which fail to create the safeguards that the representatives insist are present, and which leave room for dangerous unintended consequences.

CISPA at a Glance

In broad terms, CISPA is about information sharing. It creates broad legal exemptions that allow the government to share "cyber threat intelligence" with private companies, and companies to share "cyber threat information" with the government, for the purposes of enhancing cybersecurity. The problems arise from the definitions of these terms, especially when it comes to companies sharing data with the feds.

Is CISPA the new SOPA?

This is the notion that the reps behind the bill are most desperate to kill. Their primary response is that CISPA has nothing to do with seizing domains or censoring websites, but that's only true on the surface. The bill defines "cybersecurity systems" and "cyber threat information" as anything to do with protecting a network from:

‘(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or

‘(B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.

It's easy to see how that definition could be interpreted to include things that go way beyond network security—specifically, copyright policing systems at virtually any point along a network could easily qualify. And since one of the recipients of the shared information would be Homeland Security—the department that includes ICE and its ongoing domain seizures—CISPA creates the very real possibility for this information to be used as part of a SOPA-like crusade to lock down the internet. So while the bill itself has nothing to do with domain seizures, it gives the people behind such seizures a potentially powerful new weapon.

The reps insist that when they refer to intellectual property, they are not thinking about media piracy or even counterfeiting, but about foreign-based attacks on domestic companies to steal their research and development (they tout examples like the plans for jet fighters). Unfortunately, the bill's definitions create no such restriction, leaving the door wide open for more creative interpretations.

How can the government use the information?

The original text of the bill was really bad, simply saying the government cannot use the information for "regulatory purposes." This was amended to be more restrictive, but not by much: now, the same broad "cybersecurity" definition applies to what they can use the data for, and as if that wasn't enough, they can also use it for "the protection of the national security of the United States." I don't need to tell you that the government is not exactly famous for narrowly interpreting "national security."

So is CISPA a surveillance bill?

The bill specifically prohibits the government from requiring anyone to hand over information, or offering any sort of "quid pro quo" data sharing arrangement. Sharing information is voluntary, and as far as the bill's supporters are concerned, that should end the debate. Of course, as we've seen with things like the warrantless wiretapping scandal, complicity between companies and the government, even when legally questionable, is common and widespread. But even if the safeguards work, CISPA will undoubtedly allow for invasions of privacy that amount to surveillance.

Firstly, while the reps insist that the bill only applies to companies and not individuals, that's very disingenuous. CISPA states that the entity providing the information cannot be an individual or be working for an individual, but the data they share (traffic, user activity, etc.) will absolutely include information about individuals. There is no incentive in the bill to anonymize this data—there is only a clause permitting anonymization, which is meaningless since the choice of what data to share is already voluntary. Note that any existing legal protections of user privacy will not apply: the bill clearly states that the information may be shared "notwithstanding any other provision of law".

So we've got the government collecting this data, potentially full of identifying information of users in the U.S. and elsewhere, and they are free to use it for any of those broadly defined cybersecurity or national security purposes. But, it gets worse: the government is also allowed to affirmatively search the information for those same reasons—meaning they are by no means limited to examining the data in relation to a specific threat. If, for example, a company were to provide logs of a major attack on their network, the government could then search that information for pretty much anything else they want.

Can CISPA be fixed?

Most of the new provisions currently being considered for CISPA have to do with adding oversight and liability to prevent the government from violating any of the terms—but that doesn't address the problems in the bill at all, since the terms are already so broad. CISPA would require significant new restrictions to come anywhere close to being a good bill—a fact that points to Congress' inability to effectively design internet regulation. Moreover, there isn't even clear evidence that new cybersecurity laws are necessary. This is a bill that needs to die.

The EFF has a tool to help you contact your representative about CISPA and the broader issue of cybersecurity legislation. The bill is going to the House the week of April 23rd, so now is the time to get involved. As with SOPA, this is not an issue that solely effects Americans: the data may come from U.S. companies, but it will involve people from all over the world—and, indeed, foreign entities are one of the bill's prime targets. It's once again time for the internet to speak up and send a clear message to Congress: don't mess with something you don't understand.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...eres-why.shtml





Why Microsoft and Facebook are Pro-CISPA but Anti-SOPA

Just months after the internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA were taken off the floor, a new and similarly scrutinized bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has been gaining momentum and support from big technology companies like Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, and others. Although the bill is fundamentally different than SOPA it raises many of the same privacy concerns. Let's take a look at the basics of how it might work and dig into why tech companies are currently supporting the bill.

The Basics of CISPA

If passed, CISPA would amend the National Security Act of 1947 to allow government agencies to swap customer data from Internet service providers and websites if that data is a threat to "cyber-security." On a basic level the bill is meant to provide a means for companies and the government to share information with one another to fight against cyber threats. These threats are defined as:

Information in the possession of an element of the intelligence community directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy; or theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property or personally identifiable information.

CISPA currently has over 100 co-sponsors in Congress and 28 corporate supporters. While CISPA's similarities to SOPA and PIPA (here's a refresher on both if you need it) aren't immediately visible, activists are claiming CISPA is a cause for concern.

The differences between CISPA and SOPA are pretty clear. CISPA makes it possible for private companies to share potential cyber threat information with the government if the government concludes it needs it for cyber security information (and vice versa). SOPA gave courts the power to remove DNS listings if a site was hosting copyrighted information. CISPA is more about security whereas SOPA was about intellectual property.

Why Technology Companies Are Supporting CISPA

The main reason companies are supporting CISPA is because it takes the pressure to regulate users off the private company. SOPA required private companies to keep track of what its users were doing and held private companies liable for its users. CISPA transfers that role and responsibility over to a government entity. Effectively, it makes it so a company cannot be sued by a user for handing their information over to the law.

In Facebook's letter of support, Joel Kaplan, Vice President of U.S. Public Policy, puts the reason behind its support simply:

Your legislation removes burdensome rules that currently can inhibit protection of the cyber ecosystem, and helps provide a more established structure for sharing within the cyber community while still respecting the privacy rights and expectations of our users. Through timely sharing of threat information, both public and private entities will be able to more effectively combat malicious activity in cyberspace and protect consumers.

CISPA transfers the burdensome task of regulating its users content and activity to a government entity and this makes a company's job simple. For instance, if you were posting code snippets of a proposed cyber attack on your private Facebook page the government could request the information and Facebook would be able to hand over every piece of information they have on you immediately. However, this is an entirely voluntary step. If Facebook said no, the government agency asking for the information would have to find another means to get the information. From a company's perspective, CISPA is an opportunity to share information about potential cyber attacks with a branch of the government that could act on it. Where SOPA sought to block the rights of users and punish companies who allowed its users to do illegal things, CISPA offers companies a place to send that information to.

On the surface it's not that horrible of a thing, but activists worry about the language used in the bill and how it could be construed in a variety of ways to violate a person's privacy.

Why Technology Rights Groups Are Worried About CISPA

Much like SOPA, the wording in CISPA is broad and the broadness is the root of many of the concerns. A number of activists and rights groups have spoken out against the bill, including Anonymous who reportedly took down trade websites USTelecom and TechAmerica's in retaliation for their support. Digital rights group The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), spoke out against CISPA last month in a statement that targets the broad language used in the bill:

The broad language around what constitutes a cybersecurity threat leaves the door wide open for abuse. For example, the bill defines "cyber threat intelligence" and "cybersecurity purpose" to include "theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information."

Yes, intellectual property. It's a little piece of SOPA wrapped up in a bill that's supposedly designed to facilitate detection of and defense against cybersecurity threats. The language is so vague that an ISP could use it to monitor communications of subscribers for potential infringement of intellectual property. An ISP could even interpret this bill as allowing them to block accounts believed to be infringing, block access to websites like The Pirate Bay believed to carry infringing content, or take other measures provided they claimed it was motivated by cybersecurity concerns.

The language the EFF is referring to is in the bill's definition of cybersecurity and what constitutes a threat. The above example provided by the EFF is an extreme one, but the privacy implications of the broadly defined "cybersecurity threat" is the cause for concern among CISPA's opposition. On top of using CISPA to fight against piracy it's feared the information gathered would be released too easily and would violate the Fourth Amendment because it offers a simple, warrantless means to acquire personal data.

Companies like Facebook and Microsoft are supporting CISPA because it's beneficial for them to do so where SOPA could have potentially harmed their business. The opposition is against it because it worries the bill could be used as a simple way to spy on people.

You can read the full text (it's surprisingly short) of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's website and track its amendment progress to see if the language is tightened up over the coming weeks. If you find yourself against CISPA, civic organization Avaaz currently has over 600,000 signatures on a petition and Demand Progress has set up a link to contact your representative.
http://lifehacker.com/5900962





Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011

See what major US corporations and business associations have to say about the new bipartisan
'Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011'

Letters in Support
AT&T
Boeing
BSA
Business Roundtable
CSC
COMPTEL
CTIA - The Wireless Association
Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association
Edison Electric
EMC
Exelon
Facebook
The Financial Services Roundtable
IBM
Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance
Information Technology Industry Council
Intel
Internet Security Alliance
Lockheed Martin
Microsoft
National Cable & Telecommunications Association
NDIA
Oracle
Symantec
TechAmerica
US Chamber of Commerce
US Telecom - The Broadband Association
Verizon

http://intelligence.house.gov/bill/c...ction-act-2011





The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
James Bamford

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.

A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”

And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.

Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.

Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.

Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”

The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.
The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.

The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.

But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”

When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).

Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.

The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the “secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.

In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.

Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the ex-NSA computer expert.

At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.

The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”
The NSA believes it’s on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.

In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.

Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...nsadatacenter/





US Government Hires Company To Hack Into Video Game Consoles
Emil Protalinski

Summary: The U.S. Navy is paying a company six figures to hack into used video game consoles and extract sensitive information. The tasks to be completed are for both offline and online data.

The U.S. government recently posted a project asking for the “Development of Tools for Extracting Information from Video Game Systems.” The listing was posted just two months ago, and last week a contract was signed with the California-based company Obscure Technologies. The U.S. is paying $177,237.50 for the job.

The U.S. Navy says it is looking to hack into used consoles to extract any sensitive information exchanged through their messaging services. The organization says it will only use the technology on consoles belonging to nations overseas, because the law doesn’t allow it to be used on any “US persons.”

Here’s the official description from the U.S. Navy listing, posted on February 15: “This project involves furnishing video game systems, both new and used, and creating prototype rigs for capturing data from the video game systems.” Obscure Technologies responded three days later.

Even better is the description from the actual contract from the Federal Business Opportunites website, posted on March 26: “R & D effort for the development and delivery of computer forensic tools for analyzing network traffic and stored data created during the use of video game systems.”

The Statement of Work document gives more insight into what the project is all about.

Obscure Technologies will have to perform the following online monitoring tasks:

• Provide monitoring for 6 new video game systems, a maximum of 2 of any type from any given vendor.
• Generate clean data (data that does not contain any identifiable information from real people) from new video game systems.
• Design a prototype rig for capturing data from new video game systems.
• Implement the prototype rig on the new video game systems.
• Provide data captured by the prototype rig in the following formats: Packets shall be delivered in PCAP format, Disk images shall be delivered in E01/EWF format.
• Write a final report, between 10 and 20 pages, to include details of work performed, the engineering approach used and the reason why, any engineering decisions that were made and why, what work remains to be done, and any failings of the approaches followed.

It will also be required to implement the following offline monitoring tasks:

• Provide used video games systems purchased on the open market.
• Used systems provided shall be likely to contain data from previous users.
• Extend tool development to implement creating signatures over sections.
• Survey console chat room technology and identify potential chokepoints where data may be committed to storage.
• Identify data storage points on used video game systems and attempt to demonstrate proof of concept.
• Extract real data from used video game systems.
• Provide data captured from used video game systems in the following formats: Packets shall be delivered in PCAP format, Disk images shall be delivered in E01/EWF format.
• Provide video game system extraction software and/or hardware.
• Write a final report, between 10 and 20 pages, to include details of work performed, the engineering approach used and the reason why, any engineering decisions that were made and why, what work remains to be done, and any failings of the approaches followed.

Obscure Technologies was chosen because it “is the only US company that appears to offer the purchasing of used computer equipment for access to the contained information as a commercial service,” according to the Contracting Activity document (docx). The company also has “substantial experience in working with such systems” including a “lead scientist having previously reverse engineered the Microsoft Xbox.”

Leveraging content on video game consoles to watch and understand what citizens are up to isn’t a exactly a new idea. Gaming studios and academic minds have been tracking gamers for a long time: the former typically want to know how customers use their products while the latter often use the findings for psychological research.
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/...consoles/11395





Code Not Physical Property, Court Rules in Goldman Sachs Espionage Case
Kim Zetter

Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov, who downloaded source code for the investment firm’s high-speed trading system from the company’s computers, was wrongly charged with theft of property because the code did not qualify as a physical object under a federal theft statute, according to a court opinion published Wednesday.

“Because Aleynikov did not ‘assume physical control’ over anything when he took the source code, and because he did not thereby ‘deprive [Goldman] of its use,’ Aleynikov did not violate the [National Stolen Property Act],” the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in its opinion.

The three-judge panel in New York also ruled that Aleynikov was wrongly charged with espionage, since the code was not a product designed for interstate or foreign commerce, a requirement under the Economic Espionage Act with which he was charged and convicted. The court found that Goldman’s system was neither “produced for” nor “placed in” interstate or foreign commerce, nor did the company have any intention of selling its system or licensing it to anyone.

The opinion finally provides explanation for why the judges delivered a surprise ruling last February that reversed Aleynikov’s conviction and sprung him from prison a year after he had begun to serve an eight-year sentence.

The ruling also deals a blow to the government’s ability to prosecute others for similar thefts of trade secrets under the EEA.

Aleynikov, 42, was convicted in 2010 under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA), in a high-profile case that was held up by federal prosecutors as an example of the Justice Department’s serious intent to prosecute the theft of intellectual property and trade secrets.

Aleynikov had acknowledged that he violated the bank’s confidentiality policy in downloading the source code from the company’s computers, but he’d asserted that what he’d done was not a criminal act under the EEA because the code wasn’t used in interstate commerce.

In February, the federal appeals court, led by Chief Justice Dennis G. Jacobs, agreed and reversed the conviction. The judges announced their ruling without explanation just hours after hearing Aleynikov’s attorney argue the appeal. Chief Justice Jacobs said at the time that the court’s written opinion explaining the ruling would follow “in due course.”

In discussing whether the code qualified as a product of commerce under the EEA, the judges wrote in their opinion this week that contrary to Goldman Sachs’ source code being something the company distributed in the commercial realm, the company “went to great lengths to maintain the secrecy of its system.

“The enormous profits the system yielded for Goldman depended on no one else having it,” the judges wrote. “Because the HFT system was not designed to enter or pass in commerce, or to make something that does, Aleynikov’s theft of source code relating to that system was not an offense under the EEA.”

The judges also addressed the government’s argument that the code was physical property under a 1988 amendment to the NSPA. Prosecutors had asserted that the amendment reflected an intent by Congress to include the transfer and transmission of non-physical forms of stolen property in the law, thereby covering the theft of source code. But the judges rejected this claim, stating that the 20-year-old amendment clearly had been meant to cover the transfer and transmission of money, not the theft of source code in the computer age.

“We decline to stretch or update statutory words of plain and ordinary meaning in order to better accommodate the digital age,” the judges wrote.

They added that although Aleynikov should have known that his actions were in breach of his confidentiality agreement with Goldman Sachs, and were dishonest in ways that would subject him to sanctions, he “could not have known that it would offend this criminal law or this particular sovereign.”

Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi agreed with the majority opinion and the way the judges had reached it, but at the same time suggested in a concurring opinion that Aleynikov would not have gotten off if the Electronic Espionage Act had been better written.

“[i]t is hard for me to conclude that Congress, in this law, actually meant to exempt the kind of behavior in which Aleynikov engaged” he wrote. He also expressed “hope that Congress will return to the issue and state, in appropriate language, what I believe they meant to make criminal in the EEA.”

The Russian-born Aleynikov worked for Goldman Sachs until June 2009, when authorities said he siphoned source code for the company’s valuable software on his way out the door to take a new job with another company.

Aleynikov, a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from the disintegrating Soviet Union in 1991, earned nearly $400,000 a year as a vice president with Goldman Sachs. He was arrested in July 2009 at the Newark Airport in New Jersey as he returned from a trip to Chicago to meet his new employers.

Authorities said he stole “hundreds of thousands of lines” of source code from Goldman Sachs in the days before he left the company, downloading various software from the Goldman Sachs network and transferring it to a storage website hosted in Germany, before trying to erase his tracks from Goldman Sachs’ network.

The software is used to make sophisticated, high-speed, high-volume stock and commodities trades and had earned the company “many millions of dollars in profits” each year, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors said Aleynikov made several copies of the code and had it on his laptop when he met his new employers at Teza Technologies in Chicago, although a later search of Teza computers uncovered no copies of Goldman Sachs’ source code.

Goldman Sachs only uncovered the theft after it began monitoring HTTPS transfers and saw a large volume of data leaving its network, according to court documents. The company initiated the monitoring after noticing suspicious activity on the network.

At the time of his arrest, Aleynikov acknowledged taking the code, but told FBI agents he only intended to collect open source software files on which he had worked, and that his collection of proprietary files on his last day of work had been inadvertent.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ical-property/





Blogger Exposes Links Between UK Journos, Shady PI
Raphael Satter

The names of three dozen journalists allegedly involved with a shady private investigator were leaked to the Internet on Tuesday, posing another potential embarrassment for Britain's scandal-tarred media.

Paul Staines, who blogs under the name Guido Fawkes, published what he said were more than 1,000 recorded transactions between staffers at Rupert Murdoch's News International and freelance detective Steve Whittamore, who was convicted of trading in illegally obtained information.

In a blog post, Staines said he wanted to expose "industrial scale criminality" perpetrated by Britain's press, accusing newspaper groups of refusing to name names because they "do not wish to report their own crimes."

Whittamore worked with hundreds of reporters, breaking or bending the law to keep clients supplied with unlisted numbers, vehicle registrations records, and other confidential information. The private eye was convicted in 2005, but none of the journalists named in his files were ever punished.

Interest in Whittamore and his associates has been revived by Britain's phone hacking scandal, which erupted last year after it emerged that Murdoch's News of the World tabloid routinely hacked phones and bribed officials to win scoops.

Several organizations — including the Guardian, The Independent, and ITV News — have run stories based on the documents recovered from Whittamore's office, but so far none have identified the journalists involved.

Staines did so Tuesday, publishing a spreadsheet naming 35 journalists from News International — a small subset of the more than 300 reporters named in Whittamore's files.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office — which investigated Whittamore — declined to authenticate the spreadsheet, but in a statement his organization said that authorities had been mulling whether to release the information before it appeared online.

"It's most unfortunate that Guido Fawkes has chosen to jump the gun," the statement said.

News International did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

___

Online:

Guido Fawkes' blog: http://order-order.com/

http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...PI-3470748.php





Hacking Report Threatens Murdoch's Grip on BSkyB

Kate Holton and Georgina Prodhan

A British parliamentary report into a phone hacking scandal may lead eventually to News Corp being forced into cutting or selling its stake in the highly profitable pay-TV firm BSkyB, having already dropped its bid to buy it outright last year.

Parliament's culture committee is widely expected to criticize News Corp in its long-awaited report, raising the possibility that the British broadcast watchdog Ofcom will take action against Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate.

News Corp lies at the centre of a long-running scandal over phone and computer hacking, in which journalists intercepted the voicemails of celebrities and crime victims, and now faces allegations that police officers were also paid for information that was used in newspaper reports.

Ofcom, which has to ensure that directors of TV companies are "fit and proper" to hold a broadcast license, is already conducting its own investigation into News Corp and BSkyB's directors, including Murdoch's youngest son James, who resigned as BSkyB chairman last week but remains on the board.

Meanwhile, Murdoch's influential British newspapers, which were subdued for a time at the height of the scandal, have gone on the offensive against Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his coalition government.

"From a political standpoint, Rupert Murdoch's attacks could have really burned his bridges with the government," said Ian Whittaker, a media analyst at London investment bank Liberum Capital, who follows BSkyB.

"From the point of view of News Corp's opponents, if you wanted to lance this whole boil once and for all with News Corp and its stake in Sky, this would be a very good opportunity to do that," he said.

"The more this investigation goes on, and the more that is disclosed, the greater the risks for News Corp that it could be forced to sell its stake," he said. "It's not probable at the moment but increasingly possible."

Culture committee member Tom Watson, a dogged critic of the Murdochs, said Ofcom was awaiting the report. "Ofcom have already written to the committee at the start of this inquiry to say that as they seek to apply the 'fit and proper' test, that they will be looking at the report," he told Reuters.

The lawmakers may blame the culture at News Corp, following the scandal at the News of the World tabloid, which the group closed down last July. However, they are debating how far they can assign blame on individuals without prejudicing any future criminal trials.

After summoning father and son to parliament for a grilling last summer, the culture select committee could publish its findings and recommendations by the end of April. The government must respond within two months.

The committee has already accused News Corp of "collective amnesia" in a previous report after a host of company executives said they couldn't remember who had done what and when.

The final report may encourage Ofcom, which has kept a deceptively low profile so far, to take a fresh look at News Corp's 39 percent stake in BSkyB. Ofcom already reminded the public of its duty to ensure directors and owners of TV companies are "fit and proper" during News Corp's ultimately aborted bid to buy the rest of BSkyB in 2011.

GREAT INFLUENCE

News Corp also owns around 40 percent of the British national newspaper market, which has helped 81-year-old Murdoch senior to wield great influence for decades.

Tackling Murdoch's level of media ownership would, critics say, reduce his influence, which they also blame for an initial reluctance by the police and some politicians to investigate the hacking allegations thoroughly.

While the "fit and proper" test is vague and rarely applied, it has rattled investors in BSkyB. Ofcom played a role in forcing BSkyB to sell down a stake in commercial TV rival ITV in 2010, even though it was below a legal threshold.

Analysts now believe News Corp is more likely to be forced to reduce its stake in BSkyB than to be allowed to increase it, far less to pursue a full takeover again in the near future.

One executive who has worked alongside James Murdoch told Reuters that no one had realized last year quite how important the Ofcom investigation would become. "That's no longer the case," the executive said, requesting anonymity.

"Ofcom are likely to look very closely at what the select committee says," said Becket McGrath, a competition law partner at Edwards Wildman.

"While Ofcom taking away Sky's license seems unlikely, if they find a wider problem concerning the corporate culture at News Corp, this may necessitate a stronger 'cordon sanitaire' between the companies to protect Sky from any fallout."

A separate judicial inquiry into press standards, which is due to hear evidence from Rupert and possibly James Murdoch later this month, is also likely to examine the report as it draws up new recommendations to regulate the press.

Both News Corp and BSkyB declined comment for this article.

DELAYS

The cross-party committee has taken months to produce its findings, which had been expected before Christmas, highlighting the difficulty that members from the Conservative and opposition Labour parties are having in agreeing their verdict.

The committee reopened its inquiry last year to find out whether it had been lied to in its original investigation.

Feeling that an important element of British democracy had been cast aside by a company that did not take the inquiry seriously, this time around the 11 members interviewed all News Corp's main executives from Rupert Murdoch down.

They will now decide whether James Murdoch, who stood down at BSkyB in the hope of shielding the company from the scandal, showed incompetence or dishonesty in his dealings.

The government is not obliged to follow the report's recommendations, but political analysts say the committee's power has already been demonstrated through its ability to summon and interrogate high-profile witnesses in hearings that have been broadcast around the world.

Two people familiar with workings of the committee said members wanting to criticize James Murdoch appeared to have the upper hand over those who accepted he did not realize the scale of the problem at the News of the World.

The Labour politicians have traditionally been more hostile to News Corp, but the committee, which also has one member from the junior coalition Liberal Democrat party, is not split strictly along party lines.

"If the Labour people all turn up on the day and can keep the Liberal Democrat MP on side, they should have the edge," one of the people familiar with the committee's workings said. "But they are unlikely to want to roll over the Conservatives completely; the committee tradition prefers consensus."

Watson told Reuters there might be some areas of contention, but declined to say what they were. "It's difficult to say, even now, but my sense is most of the report will be published with the unanimous support of all members. There might be one or two points where we disagree."

LEGAL DANGERS

The committee may be hamstrung by the fact that some of the executives it questioned have already been arrested, meaning it may have to tone down its language. Britain's attorney general is due to brief the committee on Monday, and is expected to advise its members on how to avoid prejudicing any future trial.

One way to do that, lawyers and academics say, would be to avoid specific criticism of individuals and instead target the company as a whole.

"In the longer term, the health of the media sector may benefit more if the committee focuses on the company and the structural issues that were discovered rather than individuals," said Jonathan Tonge, head of politics at Liverpool University.

Watson said caution was one reason why the report's publication has been repeatedly delayed. "The reason it's taking so long is we've been very, very cautious. We test the meaning of words within phrases within sentences within paragraphs."

(Reporting by Kate Holton and Georgina Prodhan; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and David Stamp)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...83C0FD20120413





"Anonymous" Says Plans More Attacks Against China Sites

The activist hacker group Anonymous plans to launch further attacks on Chinese government websites in a bid to uncover corruption and lobby for human rights, a member of the group said on Monday.

Anonymous, a loosely knit group that has attacked financial and government websites around the world, hacked into Chinese government websites last week, defacing several, media reports said.

The group used the Twitter account "Anonymous China" to publicize the attacks, posting links to data files that contained passwords and other personal information from the hacked websites. (twitter.com/#!/AnonymousChina)

"First we want to alert the Chinese government that we aren't afraid, and we are going to show the truth and fight for justice," Anonymous hacker "f0ws3r" told Reuters.

The hacker, who declined to provide any personal details, was contacted through Anonymous China's Twitter page. F0ws3r said the group planned more serious attacks against Chinese websites.

"Yes, we are planning more attacks, a few at a time," f0ws3r said, adding that the plan was to take down the "Great Firewall of China".

China blocks Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many other websites citing a need to maintain social stability.

F0ws3r said the Anonymous China group consisted of 10 to 12 hackers, most of whom were not based in China, and had "hundreds" of translators working with them to hack the Chinese websites.

The hacker declined to give further details on the next round of attacks, except to say it may hit bigger targets.

The United States says it has suffered many high-profile hacking attacks that appear to come from China, often targeting human rights groups as well as U.S. companies. China maintains that it too is a victim of hacking attacks.

The various local Chinese governments whose websites were reportedly hacked last week could not be reached for comment and were operating normally on Monday.

In March, the U.S. authorities revealed that leading Anonymous hacker "Sabu" was arrested in June and was acting as an informant for authorities.

Anonymous and LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous that took credit for a range of hacking attacks on government and private sector websites worldwide, leapt to prominence in late 2010 when they launched what they described as the "first cyber war" in retaliation for attempts to shut down the Wikileaks website.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Nick Macfie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...83808H20120409





This Internet Provider Pledges to Put Your Privacy First. Always.

Step aside, AT&T and Verizon. A new privacy-protecting Internet service and telephone provider still in the planning stages could become the ACLU's dream and the FBI's worst nightmare.
Declan McCullagh

Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.

Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.

The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

A decade of revelations has underlined the intimate relationship between many telecommunications companies and Washington officialdom. Leading providers including AT&T and Verizon handed billions of customer telephone records to the National Security Agency; only Qwest refused to participate. Verizon turned over customer data to the FBI without court orders. An AT&T whistleblower accused the company of illegally opening its network to the NSA, a practice that the U.S. Congress retroactively made legal in 2008.

By contrast, Merrill says his ISP, to be run by a non-profit called the Calyx Institute with for-profit subsidiaries, will put customers first. "Calyx will use all legal and technical means available to protect the privacy and integrity of user data," he says.

Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act's expanded police powers -- and win.

In February 2004, the FBI sent Merrill a secret "national security letter" (not an actual court order signed by a judge) asking for confidential information about his customers and forbidding him from disclosing the letter's existence. He enlisted the ACLU to fight the gag order, and won. A federal judge barred the FBI from invoking that portion of the law, ruling it was "an "unconstitutional prior restraint of speech in violation of the First Amendment."

Merrill's identity was kept confidential for years as the litigation continued. In 2007, the Washington Post published his anonymous op-ed which said: "I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government," especially because "I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation." He wasn't able to discuss his case publicly until 2010.

His recipe for Calyx was inspired by those six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that's stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can't read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year.

"The idea that we are working on is to not be capable of complying" with requests from the FBI for stored e-mail and similar demands, Merrill says.

A 1994 federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was highly controversial when it was enacted because it required telecommunications carriers to configure their networks for easy wiretappability by the FBI. But even CALEA says that ISPs "shall not be responsible for decrypting" communications if they don't possess "the information necessary to decrypt."

Translation: make sure your customers own their data and only they can decrypt it.

Merrill has formed an advisory board with members including Sascha Meinrath from the New America Foundation; former NSA technical director Brian Snow; and Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project.

"I have no doubt that such an organization would be extremely useful," ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer wrote in a letter last month. "Our ability to protect individual privacy in the realm of telecommunications depends on the availability of phone companies and ISPs willing to work with us, and unfortunately the number of companies willing to publicly challenge the government is exceedingly small."

The next step for Merrill is to raise about $2 million and then, if all goes well, launch the service later this year. Right now Calyx is largely self-funded. Thanks to a travel grant from the Ford Foundation, Merrill is heading to the San Francisco Bay area later this month to meet with venture capitalists and individual angel investors.

"I am getting a lot of stuff for free since everyone I've talked to is crazy about the idea," Merrill says. "I am getting all the back-end software written for free by Riseup using a grant they just got."

While the intimacy of the relationship between Washington and telecommunications companies varies over time, it's existed in one form or another for decades. In his 2006 book titled "State of War," New York Times reporter James Risen wrote: "The NSA has extremely close relationships with both the telecommunications and computer industries, according to several government officials. Only a very few top executives in each corporation are aware of such relationships."

Louis Tordella, the longest-serving deputy director of the NSA, acknowledged overseeing a project to intercept telegrams in the 1970s. Called Project Shamrock, it relied on the major telegraph companies including Western Union secretly turning over copies of all messages sent to or from the United States.

"All of the big international carriers were involved, but none of 'em ever got a nickel for what they did," Tordella said before his death in 1996, according to a history written by L. Britt Snider, a Senate aide who became the CIA's inspector general.

Like the eavesdropping system that President George W. Bush secretly authorized, Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was initially intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, but at its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Even if Calyx encrypts everything, the surveillance arms of the FBI and the bureau's lesser-known counterparts will still have other legal means to eavesdrop on Americans, of course. Police can remotely install spyware on a suspect's computer. Or install keyloggers by breaking into a home or office. Or, as the Secret Service outlined at last year's RSA conference, they can try to guess passwords and conduct physical surveillance.

That prospect doesn't exactly please the FBI. Last year, CNET was the first to report that the FBI warned Congress about what it dubbed the "Going Dark" problem, meaning when police are thwarted in conducting court-authorized eavesdropping because Internet companies aren't required to build in back doors in advance, or because the technology doesn't permit it. FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said at the time that agents armed with wiretap orders need to be able to conduct surveillance of "Web-based e-mail, social networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications technology."

But until Congress changes the law, a privacy-first ISP like Calyx will remain perfectly legal.

"It's a really urgent problem that is crying out for a solution," Merrill says.

Update 12:05 p.m. PT: This article sparked a lengthy Reddit thread, complete with repeated suggestions that Nick Merrill should turn to Kickstarter to raise money. Merrill told me this morning that Kickstarter "wouldn't accept Calyx as a campaign because it's not a physical product, or arts-related." But he has set up a contribution page, with a $1 million target, on IndieGogo.com, a self-described crowdfunding platform. "There has been a ton of interest in the idea," Merrill told me. "Due to popular demand I have decided to try crowd-sourced funding the idea in order to prove that the demand exists." If he makes the $1 million target, IndieGogo takes a smaller percentage. Internet privacy aficionados, what say you?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57...-first-always/





Carriers Band to Fight Cellphone Theft
Rolfe Winkler

The nation's major wireless providers have agreed to a deal with the U.S. government to build a central database of stolen cellphones—part of a broad effort to tame an explosion of thefts nationwide.

The database, which the wireless companies will build and maintain, will be designed to track phones that are reported as lost or stolen and deny them voice and data service. The idea is to reduce crime by making it difficult or impossible to actually use a stolen device, reducing resale value.

Currently, Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. block phones that are reported stolen from being reactivated. AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA don't. All four have agreed to be part of the new database.

"New technologies create new risks," said Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which negotiated the database proposal. "We wanted to find a way to reduce the value of stolen smartphones."

Cellphone theft is one of the fastest growing crimes in the U.S., law-enforcement officials nationwide say. The deal between the FCC and the wireless carriers is partly the result of pressure from frustrated police chiefs. The Major Cities Chiefs Association, an affiliation of 70 police chiefs from large cities across the U.S. and Canada, published a resolution in February calling on the FCC to require telecom companies to implement technology to disable stolen devices.

Behind the increase in crime: A lucrative market for used phones. Thieves can sell pilfered devices to local merchants or street-corner middlemen—or hawk them on sites such as eBay.com, Amazon.com or Craigslist.org, where a used iPhone, for instance, can fetch several hundred dollars.

In New York there were more than 26,000 incidents of electronics theft in the first 10 months of 2011—81% involving mobile phones—according to an internal police-department document reported by the New York Daily News.

The report said electronics are now the most stolen type of property, surpassing cash. In Washington, D.C., cellphone-related robberies jumped 54% from 2007 to 2011 according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Details of the national stolen-phone database have yet to be worked out, but a broad outline has been agreed to.

Wireless phones that have been reported stolen to the carrier will be listed in the database using unique serial numbers associated with mobile gadgets. The carriers will block listed phones from accessing carrier networks for voice and data service.

Carriers will roll out their own individual databases within six months. The individual databases will be integrated and centralized over the 12 months thereafter. Smaller, regional wireless carriers are expected to join the database over two years, according to a person familiar with the plan. As part of the agreement, wireless carriers will also roll out initiatives to encourage mobile-phone users to set up passwords on their devices to deter theft.

Design of the stolen-phone database is complicated by the fact that the carriers use very different cellphone technologies. Verizon and Sprint operate what is known as a CDMA network. A CDMA handset possesses an electronic serial number on the device itself, which enables the two companies to block handsets from being reactivated if they are stolen.

AT&T and T-Mobile, by contrast, use a different technology, GSM, which identifies individual handsets by a tiny, removable SIM card. This makes GSM phones particularly attractive to thieves, since it is easy to install a new SIM card on a stolen device.

Despite the differing network technologies, it is important to have one central database of stolen phones. One reason is because, as carriers switch their networks to the next-generation LTE standard, it could become easier for thieves to transfer stolen phones among them.

Officials from AT&T and T-Mobile said the carriers are working on technologies to block reuse of stolen phones on their networks. "We are working toward an industrywide solution to address the complexity of blocking stolen devices from being activated on ours or another network with a new SIM card," T-Mobile said in a statement. "This is not a simple problem to solve."

According to an FCC official, the SIM-card problem will likely be solved by the carriers' making an additional check to ensure that the devices themselves are authorized to work on the network, not just the SIM card.

A Sprint official voiced support for the national database plan. An official from Verizon declined to comment late Monday.

Similar stolen-phone databases are already in use abroad, including in the U.K., Germany, France and Australia. The U.K. database was set up in 2002. Australia's was set up in 2004. Crime hasn't stopped, but the number of incidents has declined.

In London, cellphone-related crimes last fiscal year averaged roughly 8,000 per month, a decline from more than 10,000 per month in the fiscal year ending April 2004, according to the U.K.'s National Mobile Phone Crime Unit.

That was despite a near-doubling in the number of handsets in circulation over that time, according to Jack Wraith of the Telecommunications U.K. Fraud Forum, a telecom industry group that helped with the U.K. database.

Mr. Wraith credits the database with the fact that crime hasn't grown alongside the dramatic increase in total number of handsets.

The databases aren't perfect, said David Rogers, a mobile security expert at consulting firm Copper Horse Solutions in London. Phones that are blocked from receiving voice service "still have lots of functions." They can still connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, for instance, as well as play music or games.

As a result, tablets that use only Wi-Fi connections will receive no protection under the proposed plan. Tablets that connect to carriers' cell networks are expected to be covered, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Another problem is that stolen phones often are exported to China and countries in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere for sale. The agreement forged by the FCC calls for U.S. carriers to make their stolen-phone database interoperable with others abroad, though many developing countries don't have stolen-phone databases in place.

Tech-savvy thieves might be able to use software to alter the identity number on stolen devices. In the U.K., altering such numbers without authorization is a crime. It is currently legal in the U.S., though members of Congress are expected to propose legislation to make it a crime, according to a person familiar with the matter at the FCC.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...199453024.html





A Ballooning Megabyte Budget
Brian X. Chen

Everyone knows how long a minute is. And your cellphone carrier keeps close tabs on how many you have used this month. Now, in the smartphone era, more people are being forced to think about how many megabytes of data they are using.

But what, exactly, is a megabyte?

If a sampling of pedestrians on the streets of Brooklyn is any guide, most people have only a vague idea. One said a megabyte was “the amount of something we have to use the Internet,” adding, “We should have three or four.”

Miranda Popkey, 24, was closer: “It’s a measure of how much information you store. If there are too many of them, I can’t send my e-mail attachment.”

A megabyte is, in this context, 1,000 kilobytes — or about the size of a photo taken with a decent digital camera, or roughly one minute of a song, or a decent stack of e-mail.

Therein lies the problem: Counting things like minutes and text messages is fairly easy, but there is no intuitive or natural way to gauge data use.

The carriers say they are doing their best to help customers keep tabs on their data diet. But the potential for confusion — and unexpected charges — is growing as people upgrade to faster devices running on faster networks.

Even the most sophisticated of mobile customers can be tripped up — people like Paul DeBeasi, a research vice president at Gartner specializing in wireless technology. He said that he once streamed a Netflix movie to his iPad and was charged extra for exceeding his data plan limit.

Mr. DeBeasi did the math and found that watching two hours of a standard-definition Netflix video consumes two gigabytes — or 2,000 megabytes — of data.

“Even if you’re just watching a standard-definition movie and you’re only watching five movies in a month, it’s costing you $100 just to watch those five movies,” he said. Mr. DeBeasi suggested using Wi-Fi networks whenever possible, as this does not run up your carrier’s data meter.

A vast majority of smartphone owners do not come near their data limits, many studies say. But data use is predicted to climb considerably over the next few years. Cisco, the networking company, recently published a study showing that mobile data more than doubled in 2011, and it predicts that by 2016 it will have grown by a factor of 18.

Faster fourth-generation or 4G networks are driving that increase. The faster speeds encourage customers to use more data-intensive applications like video, so a smartphone on a 4G network is likely to generate 50 percent more traffic than it would on a slower one, Cisco says. The 4G-ready model of the latest iPad is potentially a data hog, given that its big, extra-high-resolution screen makes high-definition video streams especially tempting.

And soon your personal data plan may not be the only one you will have to worry about. Verizon and AT&T have said they are working on data plans that can be shared among multiple devices, similar to family plans for cellphones. That means parents will not only have to keep an eye on the number of text messages and phone calls their children are burning through, but also the amount of video, music and games they are streaming over the cellular network.

Michael Weinberg, senior staff lawyer of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that advocates more transparency in the billing from telecommunications companies, goes as far as to question why smartphone customers even have to pay more to use more data. He said the carriers have not provided evidence that limiting the amount of data a person uses reduces congestion. He added that there was a disconnect between what the carriers’ advertisements say and what customers can really do with their data allowances.

“There’s a problem with understanding exactly what the data means in the real world, and also matching up some of the advertising that networks do with the actual reality,” Mr. Weinberg said. “You have these ads with people doing things like Facebook and watching videos, and you realize how quickly you can burn through it.”

Public Knowledge hosts a Web site called What Is My Cap? that explains to people how much video and music they can enjoy before they hit their data limits for each carrier. AT&T and Verizon offer different tiers of data plans. AT&T, for example, charges $20 for 300 megabytes of data on its 3G network, $30 for three gigabytes or $50 for five. Customers who go over the limits on the costlier plans are charged $10 for each extra gigabyte.

T-Mobile USA prices its data, minutes and text messages as a single package; one of its plans includes unlimited voice and text messages and two gigabytes of high-speed data for $60 a month; once customers exceed that, their connections are slowed. Similar to T-Mobile, Sprint prices its data, minutes and text messages as a single package, with plans starting at $70 a month. It still offers unlimited data but charges an extra $10 a month for it as a “premium.”

Some cellphone users still have older “unlimited” plans from carriers other than Sprint — but AT&T and Verizon enforce throttling, or slowing of data speeds, for customers who they determine are using the most.

Schwark Satyavolu, chief executive of Truaxis, a company that offers tools for consumers to manage their utility bills, said it was in the best interest of carriers like AT&T and Verizon to keep consumers in the dark.

“They make more money if they don’t inform you of anything,” Mr. Satyavolu said. “Their interest is in not informing you and having you go over.”

AT&T and Verizon dispute that, saying they offer several ways for customers to monitor their data. For example, each has a Web site with a data calculator so people can see how much data a specific activity uses. Verizon customers can register with a service called My Verizon to get alerts when they have reached a certain percentage of their monthly data allowance.

“We do our best to provide the tools customers need to manage their wireless services,” Brenda Raney, a Verizon spokeswoman, said by e-mail. “There is no sustainable business model based on customer confusion.”

AT&T customers also can check how much data they use online. On its Web site, AT&T says it alerts customers when they approach their data limit — but in some cases, as when they are watching a movie, users could miss an alert.

“We’ve gone to great lengths to make it as easy as possible for our customers to understand how much data they are using at any given time,” said Emily Edmonds, an AT&T spokeswoman. “Our customers can be notified of their data usage via text messages, and they can check it themselves at any time via their phone or our Web site.”

Mr. DeBeasi of Gartner expressed doubt that most customers would check the data-monitoring tools. “Who’s going to do that? No one’s really going to do that,” he said, adding that higher cellphone bills were inevitable as data use climbs.

“Watch your telecom expense,” he said. “As people become more mobile, they will use more of the cellular network. It’s going to cost businesses more and consumers more. There’s no two ways around it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/t...for-users.html





Microsoft’s AOL Deal Intensifies Patent Wars
Steve Lohr

The global gold rush in technology patents gained speed on Monday when Microsoft agreed to pay more than $1 billion for 800 patents held by AOL.

The lofty price — $1.3 million a patent — reflects the crucial role that patents are increasingly playing in the business and legal strategies of the world’s major technology companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung and HTC.

Patents that can be applied to both smartphones and tablet computers, which use much the same technology, are valued assets and feared weapons, as the market for those devices booms. Companies are battling in the marketplace and in courtrooms around the world, where patent claims and counterclaims are filed almost daily.

“Microsoft is increasing its arsenal, even if it is expensive,” said James E. Bessen, a patent expert and lecturer at the Boston University School of Law.

And AOL, an online pioneer, is increasingly shifting its focus to media, acquiring The Huffington Post and TechCrunch, a technology news and gossip site. The patents it is selling include early Internet patents that involve search, e-mail, instant messaging and custom online advertisements, according to an analysis by 3LP Advisors, a patent consulting firm in Silicon Valley.

“This is all stuff that companies want to — and are putting in smartphones,” said Kevin G. Rivette, a managing partner of 3LP.

Microsoft has used its deep stockpile of computing patents to prod smartphone makers to pay it licensing fees. So, analysts say, adding more patents promises to strengthen its negotiating and legal position with rivals like Google and Apple — and handset makers using Google’s Android software including HTC, Samsung and LG.

Prices for patents are rising as the big companies load up. Google last August agreed to pay $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, a mobile phone maker with a trove of 17,000 patents. That portfolio, analysts estimate, could represent more than half the value of the deal, or more than $400,000 a patent.

Last year, Apple and Microsoft teamed up with four other companies to pay $4.5 billion for the 6,000 patents held by the bankrupt Canadian telecommunications maker Nortel Networks. That worked out to $750,000 a patent, or nearly four times the average for computer, software and telecommunications patents a few years earlier, experts say.

Last month, Facebook said it had bought 750 patents from I.B.M. for an undisclosed sum, shortly after the social networking giant was hit with a patent lawsuit by Yahoo.

Fierce patent battles have occurred throughout industrial history. The steam engine, automobile and airplane, as they opened big new markets, prompted patent wars, noted David J. Kappos, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

“But those wars played themselves out in slow motion compared to what we’re seeing now,” Mr. Kappos said. “What’s different is the pace of technological change and market development. So the stakes are a lot higher, a lot faster.”

In the past, patents were often bought by specialist patent firms from start-ups that had failed, and used in suits against major technology companies to reach lucrative settlements or win big paydays in court. These days, though, big companies are increasingly using patents as strategic tools, said Colleen Chien, an assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

The specialist patent holders, sometimes called trolls, are still around, but the main litigation and deal-making now are among big companies themselves, Professor Chien said. “These major companies are using patents to gain competitive advantage rather than just seeing patents as financial assets,” she said.

AOL’s slow progress as it transforms into a media company supported by advertising has brought pressure from restive institutional shareholders. The patent sale — AOL will hold onto 300 others — is intended to help with both objectives.

The deal “unlocks current dollar value for our shareholders and enables AOL to continue to aggressively execute on our strategy,” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief, said in a statement.

While Microsoft is struggling in the smartphone market, it is doing a brisk business in licensing its intellectual property to smartphone makers using rival software, analysts say.

The company has struck licensing deals with handset makers that account for 70 percent of sales of Android-powered phones in the United States, including HTC, Samsung and LG. Analysts estimate that Microsoft makes more on every Android phone sold than on each phone running its Windows Phone software.

Microsoft has roughly 20,000 granted patents, not counting applications pending — about four times what Apple holds, estimates M-Cam, a patent advisory firm. A smartphone is essentially a combination of computer and telecommunications technology, and Microsoft has a deep store of patents in computing.

Microsoft’s large intellectual property team tracks patent portfolios and has been scrutinizing AOL’s for years, said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel. Some of the patents in AOL’s portfolio would be quite familiar to Microsoft, since they came from its former rival in Internet browsing software, Netscape Communications, which AOL bought in 1998 for $4.2 billion.

The $1.056 billion that Microsoft paid for the patents was higher than most patent research firms had estimated, ranging from about $300 million to $650 million. David E. Martin, chairman of M-Cam, suggested that Microsoft’s high bid at the AOL auction might have been with an eye toward improving its bargaining position in licensing and legal negotiations.

“It sends the message that these giant patent estates have value, even if they don’t,” Mr. Martin said.

Patents are supposed to be fuel for innovation — a temporary period of ownership for the holder as an incentive to invent and disclose the invention. But whether the system works as intended in a field like smartphones, with its myriad overlapping claims and various software programs, is in doubt.

David C. Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, estimated that a modern smartphone might be susceptible to as many as 250,000 potential patent claims, depending on how broadly those patents and claims were interpreted.

In a study published in 2008, Mr. Bessen and a colleague, Michael J. Meurer, an economist and professor at the Boston University School of Law, concluded that patents were a net benefit in two industries, pharmaceuticals and chemicals. But in industries like software, the researchers said, the costs of litigation are more than twice the benefits in terms of gains to inventors.

“In pharmaceutical and chemical industry, the boundaries of a chemical composition patent are well defined,” Mr. Bessen said. “But in fields like software and telecommunications, the claims are often so broad and vague that it is completely unpredictable what the patents cover and don’t.”

Yet Professor Chien is less certain. “The patent system is making innovation more expensive, but I also think that there has been a lot more focus on the costs than the benefits,” she said.

“In a case like AOL, this patent sale is keeping it alive and giving it a chance to innovate elsewhere,” she said.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/t...1-billion.html





Microsoft Revs Dump-XP Campaign, Says 'Time to Move On'

Reminds users that the most popular OS on the planet has about 1,000 days to live
Gregg Keizer

Computerworld - Microsoft on Monday made its most aggressive move yet to convince customers to drop Windows XP and adopt Windows 7, telling them that there were only 1,000 days of support life left in the older operating system.

Stephen Rose, IT community manager for the Windows commercial team, noted the 1,000 days remaining for Windows XP support in a post to a Microsoft blog.

"Windows XP had an amazing run and millions of PC users are grateful for it. But it's time to move on," Rose said, adding that the operating system exits security support in "less than 1,000 days."

The 10-year-old XP actually has a little longer to live than that: Microsoft has promised to patch XP through April 8, 2014, 1,002 days from Monday.

"Bottom line, PCs running Windows XP will be vulnerable to security threats" after that date, said Rose. "Furthermore, many third-party software providers are not planning to extend support for their applications running on Windows XP, which translates to even more complexity, security risks, and ultimately, added management costs for your IT department."

According to usage statistics and research firm surveys, Microsoft has its work cut out for it in moving users off XP.

Web metrics firm Net Applications now has Windows 7's usage share at 27%, for example, but XP still powers 51% of the world's personal computers. If the trends of each over the past three months continue, Windows 7 usage won't surpass that of XP until the second quarter of 2012.

Businesses are even more reliant on Windows XP, said Forrester Research, when it recently estimated the aging operating system's share at 60% of enterprise PCs.

Monday's blog post wasn't the first time Microsoft has portrayed XP as yesterday's OS. Earlier this year, executives on the Internet Explorer team called XP the "lowest common denominator" as they explained why the OS wouldn't run IE9 or any future browsers.

And the company has taken firm steps to kill off other products it considers obsolete. Since mid-2009, Microsoft has urged users to give up IE6, the browser that shipped shortly before XP. Four months ago, it upped the ante by launching a deathwatch website that highlights IE6's dwindling usage share.

The push to abandon XP coincided with the opening of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, the company's annual reseller meeting. CEO Steve Ballmer kicked off WPC by celebrating another Windows 7 milestone: selling 400 million licenses for the OS.

Tami Reller, head of product marketing for the Windows group, cited that number to compare Windows 7's uptake with XP's in the same span of time.

"That is three times the pace of Windows XP," Reller said.

Unmentioned Monday -- for some time, actually -- was Windows Vista, the hapless 2007 version that has been called Microsoft's first OS failure since 2000's Windows Millennium. Customers agree: Vista peaked at just under 19% in October 2009 but has lost about half its share since.

Instead, Reller talked up not just Windows 7 as the replacement for XP, but its successor, Windows 8, as well, which is widely expected to ship next year.

While Reller encouraged corporate customers to continue deploying Windows 7, she promised that Windows 8 would run on the same hardware.

"For our business customers, your customers," she said, speaking to the partners at WPC, "this is an important element, because the ability of Windows 8 to run on Windows 7 devices ensures that the hardware investments that these customers are making today will be able to take advantage of Windows 8 in the future."

While neither Reller nor Ballmer mentioned Windows 7's life cycle, the company will push consumers now running Windows 7 to upgrade to Windows 8 too. According to Microsoft's longstanding practice, it will support Windows 7 Home Premium, the most popular edition for consumers, for five years, half the time slated for enterprise support.

Windows 7 Home Premium will be retired from security support in January 2015.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...me_to_move_on_





End of Windows XP Support Era Signals Beginning of Security Nightmare

Consumer, corporate and even SCADA systems could be at risk when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP.
Colin Neagle

Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will end support for the Windows XP operating system in two years signals the end of an era for the company, and potentially the beginning of a nightmare for everyone else.

When Microsoft cuts the chord on XP in two years it will effectively leave millions of existing Windows-based computers vulnerable to continued and undeterred cyberattacks, many of which hold the potential to find their way into consumer, enterprise and even industrial systems running the latest software.

Jason Miller, manager of research and development at VMware, says the introduction of Windows XP “was the hey-dey of buying computers,” with markets having become familiar with Windows 95 or 98 and manufacturers like Dell releasing affordable options. With such an influx of new users, it comes as no surprise that Windows XP remains one of the most common operating systems despite the introduction of two entirely new versions in the decade since it hit shelves. In fact, March 2012 statistics from NetMarketShare.com show XP in the lead for operating system market share, at 43.09%.

Although that number is on a steady decline, its high volume just two years before support is cutoff is cause for concern, Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek says. Most enterprises are likely to upgrade their operating systems in the wake of the announcement that XP support would be cutoff. They have plenty of reasons to, such as security concerns raised by the IT department or the need for the latest version of Word or Excel to open new document formats.

Remaining consumers, though, will be much less inclined to make an upgrade.

Several trends account for this. First, and foremost, is cost. At-home computer users who are still content with XP are unlikely to purchase a new operating system without any financial incentive, especially considering that many of the features for Windows 7 require hardware upgrades. Try telling someone who uses their home computer to just check their email and read the latest Yahoo News headlines that they need to spend $500 for a new one.

Then there’s the awareness issue. How many at-home consumer users will even know that Microsoft will be cutting off XP support? How many will know what “the end of support” means for them at the user level, and how many will actually care? Microsoft is of course doing what it can to help spread the word, providing a deployment toolkit and its "Springboard Series" to hold its users hands through the process. Microsoft can only lead these XP-running horses to water, though. It can’t make them drink it.

Finally, the burgeoning tablet market could present a roadblock to PC software upgrades. Amol Sarwate, director of Vulnerability Labs for Qualys, says that many entertainment-minded users who purchase a tablet may still have XP-based PCs still kicking around their homes.

“If I have a Windows XP machine and I go buy a new tablet, for most of my needs I will use my tablet, but I still keep my XP machine for doing some chores that only a desktop can do. So that could also play a role here,” Sarwate says.

Although most of the subsequent security issues appear to be at the consumer level, it may not be long until they find a way into corporate networks or industrial systems, Miller says.
https://www.networkworld.com/communi...rity-nightmare





Sharing in the Time of Facebook, or Why I’m Not a Pirate
Nishant Shah

It is now over a month that my favourite network has been dead.

Library.nu the rare space for sharing of academic resources to a free and open community has succumbed to the pressures of publishing industry stalwarts who, in their quest for promoting the knowledge industry, are killing sources through which knowledge survives.

Sharing information is what social networks are based on: Reuters

True, Library.nu, that Mecca for those of us who live in countries where public libraries are not well stocked and resources for procurement of books are low, was essentially a file sharing network. It allowed people to offer digital copies of books in their possession to be shared around the world for no commercial gain.

For scholars and learners around the world, this was the place to find books which would otherwise be unavailable in their local contexts without expending a lot of time and effort. And now it is closed with an R.I.P. sign on their website which once offered such promises of joy.

This shutting down of Library.nu is not new or unexpected. Large scale global networks of sharing information online have been persecuted ever since the emergence of the WWW. From the historic battles that Napster had to fight to allow users to share music which was under copyright to large companies, to the persistent wars that ThePirateBay resolutely fights, networks which counter the logic of the libertarian web dream have always come under huge pressures to shut down.

This is a part of a much larger debate around intellectual property rights and infringement within the digital world that we live in, and voices on both the sides are always going to be strident in their discussions of free and open knowledge. However, what I want to talk about is how these acts of sharing, which are being condemned as acts of ‘stealing’ or ‘piracy’ are actually endemic conditions of building digital networks.

The network is not merely a combination of elements. While the infrastructure and logistics of a network are crucial to its sustenance, the mere assemblage of these objects does not make a network.

It is now known that the networks that we occupy are alive and need different investments of human and non-human efforts and energies to sustain them. Or in other words, just putting together of servers and platforms is not what Facebook is about. Or what is the most important thing on Pinterest is actually what you do with it.

Similarly, just getting people on to the networks is not enough – Remember Diaspora? You don’t? That’s the point. It is highly possible to have failed networks that have all requisite infrastructures and a wide corpus of people who are a part of it. What really sustains a network is the ability of the members to act within them. Networks are not only places to occupy but also sites where people can perform different activities.

And it should come as a surprise to nobody that within the digital networks, the primary activity that people perform, is sharing. We share information about our lives, relationships, likes, political causes, and cultural objects that we are fond of. We share data about things that intrigue us, things we are concerned about, things that we need to know about. We share content including books that we like, videos that amuse us, and music that we need to connect through. All these social networks of sharing and collaboration form the basis of innovation and radical change, shaping our futures.

nd yet, these corporate networks which also allow for sharing are never looked at as piracy. Once in a while, a video on YouTube gets revoked because it has a sound track that might be owned by a big Music Industry. There might be an instance where Orkut or Google Plus might take down content which might be objectionable. Facebook alleges that it has bots which check for possible pirated content. But all in all, because these networks are so obviously tied in to both the circulation and production of capital and filling the coffers of wealthy corporate houses, remain unaffected by charges of piracy.

However, smaller independent networks – networks that are established to realise the true potentials of openness, sharing and collaboration – and do not necessarily run up big balances for private sectors, immediately get vilified as vice houses of piracy. The introduction of piracy as the demon to fight on the Internet has provoked many false advertisements that equate it to stealing a car, or robbing a bank.

In this, they try to obscure the fact that piracy – sharing of material – is a community activity. It subscribes to the logical flows of information and opens it to new audiences, interpretations and dialogues continually. What is often pathologised as piracy, is the basis of new and innovative knowledge practices, granting access to knowledge for constituencies and demographies which have been excluded from knowledge practice in the past.

What piracy threatens is not knowledge but the industries that seek to make their wealth out of knowledge economies. And to protect the interests of these limited few, independent file-sharing networks get targeted as promoting piracy whereas activities within corporate social networks are tolerated as benign.

Piracy, when it affects small scale producers or independent artists does need to be thought about. But at stake in those events is the larger conditions of commoditised cultural production and the alienation of the artist from their own products – forfeiting their rights to large corporate houses. What sharing as a phenomenon offers to us, is the promise of a new knowledge economy where affordability or remoteness do not become discriminatory factors for those keen to consume and share cultural products and knowledge.

The Pirate Party in Sweden has announced that File Sharing is a religion and is trying to make it into a practice that is sacred to all of us who thrive in these conditions of free and open knowledge. I want to join my voice to theirs, in the memory of that Promised Land – Library.nu – and the lords of free books, and ask for my right to Pirate Share in networks of my choice.
http://www.firstpost.com/tech/sharin...te-269717.html





Lawyer Creates New P2P Platform
mikeliu8

I'm a former corporate lawyer who's decided to use my powers for good. I've made an open-source program that can copy/lend/share files and media privately with friends. It plugs into a website where you can add friends and recommend stuff to them. I'm starting beta today. Invite key: Nekothecat

I was a programmer before I was a lawyer. I'm a long-time Redditor, but I'm launching this under a new account using my real name. The open-source system is called the Mixologist. The website that it works with is called LibraryMixer.

Many have tried before to create software that builds darknets (decentralized, private networks that connect only to your friends). However, darknets have a lot of difficulties that have kept them from being user-friendly enough to gain traction.

I've designed a hybrid system where basic, non-sensitive information such as lists of friends and media recommendations are handled through the website, and adding friends or notifying them of your activity is as easy as using Facebook. LibraryMixer helps you easily track the latest movies, books, or music that your friends are into, and when they add stuff to their libraries, you click one button to get it. All of the communications and file transfers over the Mixologist are direct, encrypted P2P connections that are completely private.

The world of media is oversaturated with interesting stuff out there, making the problem not how you should get stuff you want, but how you should find the wheat among the chaff. The real benefits of this hybrid system over everything that has come before emerge when you add reviews and lists of what you have on Librarymixer, highlighting them for your friends to get on the Mixologist.

Each part of this system is independently functional, so it's also possible to just drag-and-drop entire folders on your computer into the Mixologist, which your friends can then browse, without listing them one by one on LibraryMixer. Or, if you're purely interested in media reviews and listings of your friends' libraries, LibraryMixer can be used as a fully standalone website, and you don't even have to install or use the Mixologist at all.

Unlike past P2P file sharing services that have realistically only had minimal non-copyright infringing uses, this system provides a whole range of other functionality besides just sending copies of files, such as lending and borrowing files (the file on the lender's computer is deleted until the borrower returns it), responding with automatic messages (think: "Got your request, will bring it next time I see you."), privately browsing and downloading from your friends' personal collections such as their photos, etc. In this sense, like GMail or instant messengers that are neutral tools, it makes it possible to treat users as adults and place the responsibility of staying within legal limits on the users of the tool. In other words, like back when we had VCRs (if you guys still remember what those are), the VCR had the capacity to record ten thousand copies of that Blockbuster video tape you rented, but at the end of the day, it was only you that prevented yourself from doing that.

But unlike GMail and Facebook, nothing is stored by any middleman on any third-party central servers, so any communication is direct and encrypted between you and your friend, and your private data cannot be breached during the transfer process or used to direct ads towards you.

This project has so far taken me over 2 years, full-time, with no outside funding. I've gone way out on a limb, and taken a stab at creating something that I've always wished existed, and tried to make it the way that I would have wanted it as a user. I hope you'll agree and try it out.

If you do try it out and run into any bugs during this beta release, I'd be grateful for your patience as I work through them, this is a really complicated project. My personal email address goes out to all new users that sign up, I'd love to hear from you.
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/c...to_use/c4c7on8





Digital Diary: Instagram and the Internet’s ‘Secret’ Places
Jenna Wortham

Are the golden days of Instagram over?

In the last year, Instagram became the main back channel where most of my friends and I documented the minutiae of our lives. At any moment, I could tune into a raw, dizzying feed of images chronicling what my friends were making for dinner (and who it was for), the books they were reading, a view of their lazy Sunday afternoon spent on a hammock. I felt comfortable posting blurry shots from a pulsing dance floor at 3 in the morning, and no one ever faulted me for showing them what I ate for lunch — that was the entire point of the service. It was an outlet for all the content that increasingly does not feel suited for Facebook or Twitter, which now feel like the most public of all of our online hubs.

Of course, Instagram is by no means private. Like Twitter, Instagram operates under a strict binary. Either all photos are public and accessible to anyone who follows you, or they are private and visible only to the select few you give permission to view your feed. But the service’s seeming remoteness — the app was limited to smartphone users, and there was no built-in way to copy or repost pictures — lent it a sense of privacy and intimacy, separate from the rest of our online lives. Its ability to let its users delicately toe the line between public and private gave us a little breathing room from the all-pervasiveness of Facebook, and to see it whisked away feels like a tangible loss.

The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading. The few safe havens that do exist are quickly being encroached upon or are next on the shopping list for a company like Google, Apple or Facebook. The few proposed alternatives are still in their infancy. (Diaspora? Hello. Hi. Still there? ) And it is clear that our personal data and online interactions are so valuable that they are powering the Web’s future.

Some people I know have tried to balance their public-facing digital personas and the need for a private outlet online with secret Tumblrs and Twitters, anonymous blogs and private iMessage threads.

But even there, privacy is an illusion. There is no fail-safe way to publish privately online. Top-secret tweets and conversations can always be captured by screen shot and texted or e-mailed. Not to mention that it is time-consuming and complicated to maintain multiple online identities — my secret Twitter account was hacked by a spammer and it was weeks before I noticed.

Of course, there are services like Path that emphasize limiting the number of people you share with. And Facebook does have elaborate controls to let people make sure their parents and employers don’t see the same photos and updates as their high school and college friends do. But managing all of that can be exhausting.

The counterargument to all of this is that we should just be our authentic selves the old-fashioned way — offline, most likely in a dimly lit bar with friends. And sure, we do that too. But that’s only a fraction of our lives, and as more of our waking moments are spent behind a screen, it’s increasingly important that we find little reprieves online, as well as offline.

It’s something that we’re all trying to figure out. Matt Buchanan, the editor at Fwd, BuzzFeed’s technology blog, proposed a “private mode” for the entire Internet, which I endorse — although it seems unlikely we’ll ever see anything so ambitious.

To be entirely honest, I have no plans to stop using Instagram. It’s too firmly rooted in my daily repertoire to go back now. And I’ve come to love the quirky cast of followers, some friends, some strangers that I’ve gotten to know through Twitter or games like Words With Friends.

So the search continues for that next secluded corner of the Web, the next service or app where we can set up shop, invite all our friends and enjoy the fun while it lasts.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...on-of-privacy/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

[multi]

Sweden Grants Religious Recognition To File-Sharing Church


The Swedish government has formally recognised a “church” whose main belief is the right to file-share, in a move that is unlikely to be well-received by the Hollywood studios.

The recognition of the Church of Kopimism as a religion by the state of Sweden was revealed in a statement on the Church’s Website, after more than a year of trying to gain formal recognition.

“Just before Christmas, the Swedish government agency Kammarkollegiet registered the Church of Kopimism as a religious organisation. This means that Sweden is the first country to recognise Kopimism as a religion,” said the church’s statement.

It said that board chairman for the organisation Gustav Nipe had to apply three times.

“I think it might have something to do with the government organisations abiding by a very copyright-friendly attitude, with a twisted view on copying,” Nipe was quoted as saying.

According to the statement, the Church of Kopimism regards information as holy, and copying as a sacrament. It also holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V (the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste) as sacred symbols.

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...medium=twitter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y9gMhTyM-E





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission...ch_of_Kopimism