Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 8th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Almost everyone that shares popular films and music illegally will be connected to by a monitor and will have their IP address logged." – Tom Chothia



































September 8th, 2012




Members of Congress Demand Answers for Homeland Security’s Unjust Domain Name Seizures

This morning, a bipartisan group of Representatives, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), sent a pointed letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano protesting the recent spat of domain name seizures—executed on dubious copyright grounds—that have been censoring websites with no due process.

“Our concern centers on your Department’s methods, and the process given, when seizing the domain names of websites whose actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech,” the letter said, which was also signed by Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Ut.).

The Representatives’ letter focused on the case of former hip hop website Dajaz1. Dajaz1’s domain name had been seized for over a year, despite evidence that the website had lawful material, and that “many of the allegedly infringing links to copyrighted songs, and specifically the links that were the basis of the seizure order, were given to the site’s owner by artists and labels themselves” including Kanye West, Diddy, and a vice president of a major record label.

Adding to the injustice, the government refused to cooperate with Dajaz1’s attorneys for months, and sought numerous extensions of the seizure authority in secret. When the court records were finally released, it showed that the government was waiting on the RIAA to evaluate a "sampling of allegedly infringing content" and respond to other “outstanding questions.” While the RIAA fiddled, Dajaz1 lost the right to speak and the public lost its right to read what was published there.

Finally, after a year, control over dajaz1.com was handed back to the owners with no apology, and no explanation. It is disturbing enough that DHS has been effectively acting as the tax-funded hired gun of the content industry, but, even more horrifying, it censored the wrong targets, for no good reason, for a year.

Dajaz1’s case is far from unique, as we found out earlier this week when a similar situation happened to Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org, the popular sports streaming sites that were seized—again with no due process—back in February 2011. The sites, which have been in the midst of a court fight to return its domains, had been arguing that linking was not infringing, noting that a Spanish court had already found the sites legal. Yet the government still held onto their domain for 18 months. On Wednesday, they again handed back their domains with no explanation.

As we explained:

Dropping the case was, of course, the right move. The government's copyright arguments were incredibly weak (it’s pretty well-settled that linking is not infringement). Even more troubling, the seizures also captured plenty of legal and protected speech. Indeed, many (including EFF) have been making these arguments for well over a year. The real question is why it took so long.

We also demanded the government should explain why it reversed its position, and provide a clear policy rationale so websites around the world could assess their risk for unexplained and unjustified seizures.

The Representatives want answers to the same questions. At the end of their letter, they ask seven specific questions about DHS’ policy, their rationale, and what procedures they plan on implementing so websites’ rights aren’t trampled on again. You can read the full letter here.

EFF is encouraged that Congress is taking an increased interest in making sure First Amendment protected speech is not censored on the Internet due to draconian copyright policy, and we look forward to the Justice Deparment and Homeland Security’s official response.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...-name-seizures





Is Congress Getting Ready to Take on Patent Trolls?
Adi Kamdar

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), the research division of Congress known for its objective studies, recently released a report on the effects of patent trolls on innovation and the economy. The study presents a pretty thorough analysis of the patent troll problem, but what's striking is its existence at all: Could it be that Congress is really starting to pay attention when it comes to fixing the broken patent system?

Patent trolls are litigious entities that don't usually create new products or come up with new ideas. Instead, they buy up patents and use them offensively. Armed with often overbroad and vague patents, the trolls send out threatening letters to those they argue are infringing. According to the CRS report, "The vast majority of defendants settle because patent litigation is risky, disruptive, and expensive, regardless of the merits; and many [patent trolls] set royalty demands strategically well below litigation costs to make the business decision to settle an obvious one." Businesses lose both time and money, and innovation suffers.

We've known for some time just how much of a problem patent trolls pose. Last summer, This American Life made patent trolls mainstream with an extremely popular episode that covered such trolls' crusades against innvovation. Just recently, members of Congress introduced the SHIELD Act, legislation that would create a fee-shifting system, helping destroy any incentives behind trolls' frivolous lawsuits. And now publication of this CRS report shows that the patent troll problem is still on the minds of those with the power to fix it.

Without a doubt, [patent trolls] both add to and subtract from the incentives of patent law, but the FTC and many experts in the field indicate that they currently do more harm than good to innovation and the patent system. The extent of this imbalance—and whether Congress could or should recalibrate it to 'support the beneficial effects, and lessen the detrimental ones'—remains unclear, however.

These conclusions throughout the report reinforce why, now more than ever, it is important to give your feedback to our Defend Innovation campaign.

Here's the thing: if Congress is truly paying attention, we need to make sure they are getting the full story—and that's where our Defend Innovation project and you come in. Go to the site and check out our proposals. Let us know if you agree with them or if you have something better in mind. Once we've collected your feedback, comments, and stories—and we've had over 13,000 participants so far—we are going to bring them to D.C. and let Congress know exactly who is affected, how the system is flawed, and what they can do to really fix it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...-patent-trolls





European Commission Looks To Backdoor In ACTA By Pushing For Same Results Through 'Voluntarism'
Glyn Moody

This year saw two huge victories for digital activism: against SOPA in the US, and against ACTA in the EU. The big question is now: what will be the next moves of those behind SOPA and ACTA as they seek to regain the initiative? For SOPA, we've had a clue in the call for a "Son of SOPA" from the US Chamber of Commerce. But what about the European Commission?

Although it is supposedly waiting for the European Court of Justice to rule on the compatibility or otherwise of ACTA with European law, that's more a matter of saving face -- even a positive result there is not going to bring ACTA back in its original form. But two public consultations from the Commission that are currently open for comments share a common theme that points to one possible approach to bringing in some of ACTA's ideas through other means: the increased use of extrajudicial punishments.

The first one, which closes soon -- on 5 September -- concerns Europe's e-commerce directive. But its title makes clear that the consultation is actually much more tightly focused on one particular aspect. As "A clean and open Internet: Public consultation on procedures for notifying and acting on illegal content hosted by online intermediaries" suggests, the consultation is really about trying to stop online sharing. Although the use of the word "clean" is clearly intended to suggest that this is about removing extreme material like child pornography, the detailed questions reveal that the central concern is taking down unauthorized copies of legal content.

The method for achieving that is what the European Commission calls "notice and action" -- broadly similar to the DCMA's "notice and takedown" approach. The Commission tries to suggests that such "notice and action" has always been part of the e-commerce directive, but as Monica Horten points out in a recent post, that's not true:

the Commisson appears to be trying to re-write history. It says that Article 14 [of the e-commerce directive] forms the basis for Notice and Action procedures. That was certainly not the intention of Article 14.

The E-commerce directive, with its provisions for mere conduit and exemptions on the liabiilty was the result of a political compromise thrashed out in 2000 between the ISP industry and others, such as the copyright industries, who wanted it to incorporate a notice and takedown regime. However, that notion of notice and takedown was explicitly rejected.

Some of the questions in the e-commerce consultation give the impression that what the European Commission would like to see are voluntary notice-and-action agreements between service providers and media companies that would make allegedly infringing material simply disappear without any judicial process or appeals. It's the perfect solution, since it doesn't require new legislation, and is based on the service providers' fear that if they don't go along with this approach they will find themselves liable for the infringing activities of their customers.

This move to "voluntary" extrajudicial punishments is confirmed by the other consultation, which closes at the end of the month, and goes by the innocent-sounding name of "Code for Effective Open Voluntarism: Good design principles for self- and co-regulation and other multistakeholder actions". It is couched in the very vaguest terms, exemplified by this extraordinarily opaque question:

Please share your knowledge, ideas and opinions about how best to ensure that voluntarism receives its appropriate share of attention in the policy-making toolbox. How best can we address the grey area of self-regulation that are not quite as purely autonomous as the wording in the 2003 Inter-institutional Agreement on better lawmaking implies, and yet has none of the characteristics required in that Agreement for a system to qualify as co-regulation, and how best to give a new momentum to self- and co-regulation and open voluntarism to ensure that they are duly considered and practiced when they appear to be the most efficient route to the societal benefits in point. This does NOT mean voluntarism should substitute for lawmaking and regulation in any systematic manner, rather making the best possible use of voluntarism is critical to a highly effective policy approach. Please use the text box below or upload any additional relevant material.

Even though this comes across as harmless bureaucratic nonsense, it conceals a deadly serious intent: to shift from rules based strictly on those laid down by the relevant laws, to one "making the best possible use of voluntarism." Translated into English, it means that where the European Commission can't push through the legislation or treaties that it wants (as with ACTA), it will encourage ad-hoc "voluntary" agreements and self-regulation that achieve the same aim (as the e-commerce directive consultation seems to be pushing for).

It's a clever tack to take, because it is hard to motivate people to oppose something that is so ill-defined and therefore apparently unthreatening -- even the name "voluntarism" sounds rather appealing, especially compared to the more honest description of "extrajudicial punishment". But the danger lies in that very vagueness, which allows all kinds of rules and behavior that, if proposed in the normal way as traditional legislation, would be completely unacceptable and fiercely resisted.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...untarism.shtml





Honeytrap Reveals Mass Monitoring of Downloaders
Paul Marks

Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within 3 hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online - and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.

The news comes from this week's SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered "massive monitoring" of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been taking place for at least three years.

BitTorrent is a data distribution protocol that splits an uploaded digital media file into many parts and shares it around a swarm of co-operating servers. Birmingham's fake server acted like a part of a file-sharing swarm and the connections made to it quickly revealed the presence of file-sharing monitors run by "copyright enforcement organisations, security companies and even government research labs".

"We only detected monitors in Top 100 torrents; this implies that copyright enforcement agencies are monitoring only the most popular content music and movie on public trackers," the team says in its presentation paper. "Almost everyone that shares popular films and music illegally will be connected to by a monitor and will have their IP address logged," says Chothia.

Given the vast numbers of people whose IP addresses will have now been logged, the finding raises the question over what enforcement outfits now plan to do with their harvested data. Have they gathered a war chest of targets for future copyright infringement lawsuits? Or are they simply assessing the scale of the problem to make governments act?

If it is for lawsuits, the standard of evidence may not be enough, says Chothia. "All the monitors connected to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content. However, they did not actually collect any of the files being shared. So it is questionable whether the observed evidence of file-sharing would stand up in court."
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/on...yright-co.html





First Three Download Offenders Could Face Penalties as Low as $275
Rick Shear

The book is unlikely to be thrown at three Telecom customers, who are the first to be hauled up in front of the Copyright Tribunal under the new file sharing law.

The three, who face individual actions, could be faced with penalties of up to $15,000 under Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act (2011).

But lawyer and internet specialist Rick Shera notes, "Courts will err on the low side when a regime is only newly implemented."

Copyright Tribunal chairwoman Susy Frankel has not returned requests for comments.

Mr Shera says he doesn't know how the Tribunal will assess penalties, but told NBR it directed by regulation to consider whether or not the allegedly pirated work is available in New Zealand.

The Tribunal is also directed to take into account the flagrancy and frequency of offending.

Another factor is the degree of damage done to the copyright holder.

"The regulations also contemplate a costs award alone being sufficient (that is,. $275)," Mr Shera notes.

We need carrots as well as sticks

Even if Mr Shera is right, and the first three offenders get a modest penalty, my fear is will still have a chilling effect on New Zealand downloaders.

What's wrong with that?, you might say. Stealing is stealing.

The problem is that there are a number of issues with the file sharing law. Foremost that it puts the onus of proof on the accused (who is likely to have fewer legal resources than the copyright holder).

Then there are the significant logistical problems caused by the fact an account holder (who could be a parent, school principal, the head of a flat, and employer or the operator of a wi-fi network) is responsible for the actions of all those who use their internet connection (family members, staff, pupils, visitors, flatmates, random passersby).

But let's assume the first three cases are relatively clean.

My fear is still that it will cower the general public.

Broadcasters and copyright holders - often fighting a rear-guard action to maintain regional monopolies in the fact of fast-moving technological change - will feel emboldened to, well, keep sitting on their hands.

Their efforts to support new media options, and provide customers with a wide variety of street-legal content for download, will remain sluggish in this part of the world.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/opinion/first-t...alties-low-275





File Sharing Law: Three Telecom Customers Face Penalties Up to $15K
Chris Keall

The Copyright Tribunal is set to hear its first cases under the new file sharing law.

Three people are accused of downloading pirated music. Each faces a penalty of up to $15,000.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman confirmed Rianz (the Recording Industry Association of NZ) lodged three separate claims with the Tribunal under the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act (2011).

Telecom told NBR it had been told by Rianz that the three people involved were all Telecom customers.

A spokeswoman also flagged on the key issues with the Act - that an account holder, such as a parent or employer, is responsible for the actions of whoever uses their internet connection.

“This is a relatively new regime, and for customers proving just who has infringed copyright via file sharing networks within a household can be a challenge,” spokesperson Jo Jalfon says.

“Often the account holder is a parent but the person using the file sharing technology to upload or download material illegally is a child or even a guest. We are conscious of the need to educate all internet users and will be reminding customers of their legal obligations as well as offering to support the three customers in question.”

Making an example - but it won't work says InternetNZ

"What Rianz is doing is par for their course. The film and music industries have a long-standing pattern of 'making examples' of downloaders in the hopes that other users will modify their behaviour," InternetNZ policy lead Susan Chalmers told NBR.

"It never works."

Far larger fines than $15,000 have failed to modify behaviour.

"Take the example of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a woman from Minnesota who at one point, in 2009, faced $1.92 million in damages for copyright infringement, payable to the Recording Industry Association of America, for having downloaded 24 songs. This did not deter downloaders," Ms Chalmers said.

InternetNZ does not condone piracy, but the new law introduced a lot of negatives into the internet ecosystem in Ms Chalmers' view "with very little to show for it, even for the rightsholders that successfully lobbied for the law."

What was downloaded? Rianz isn't saying

The applications follows a series of three infringement and warning notices under the so-called “three strikes” law.

A spokesman for Rianz said the group would make no comment ahead of the Tribunal hearings. Rianz represents both multinational and local record labels.

The spokesman declined to comment whether local or international artists were involved. The first round of infringement notices issued by Rianz (in November last year) involved downloads of music by US-based artists Lady Gaga and Rihanna - seen in some quarters as a public relations misstep.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman told NBR there was no time frame for the Tribunal to hear the first case.

The Tribunal was waiting for direction from its chairwoman, Victoria University law professor Susy Frankel. Ms Frankel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice spokesman said Ms Frankel's first step would be to work with the ISPs involved (or, as it turns out, just Telecom) to verify details of the three alleged sets of offences.

"Telecom’s takes the issue very seriously and will continue to work with both the Ministry of Justice and Rianz to comply with its obligations under the law," Ms Jalfron said.

Setting precedents

Thomas Beagle, head of lobby group Tech Liberty, which has been monitoring infringement notices, told NBR, “We're looking forward to seeing what happens at the Copyright Tribunal.

“We're hoping that we get some clear direction from them around admissibility of evidence and the level of proof required.

“It will also be very interesting to see what the awards will be.”

Lowndes Jordan partner Rick Shera said the penalty would depend on factors such as whether illegally content was available locally, and the frequency of offending.

Lobbying by InternetNZ, Tuanz and others saw internet disconnection withdrawn from the list of sanctions available to the Tribunal (although it remains a possibility if an Order in Council is signed off by the Governor General).

However, a second controversial element of the legislation – that the onus of proof is on the accused pirate – made it to the final version of the law. The three internet users about to face the Tribunal now face the sharp end of that decision.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/file-sh...-15k-ck-127572





File Sharing Infringement Notice Fee to Stay at $25

Minister of Commerce resists pressure from music and film industry to lower the fees which are paid to ISPs for issuing notices to suspected copyright infringers
Michael Foreman

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has decided that the fee paid to ISPs for issuing notices to suspected copyright infringers will remain at $25 for the time being.

In a cabinet paper released today, Commerce Minister Craig Foss says that submissions from the music and film industry, which wanted the fee to be lowered, and from ISPs, which wanted the fee to be increased, were taken into account.

However Foss says he considers there is “currently no case for either increasing or decreasing the fee.”

Foss says the current $25 fee is appropriate firstly because, according to submissions, there has been “a significant reduction in the volume of illegal file sharing” in the first six months since the Copyright Amendment (Infringing File Sharing) Act came into force. Secondly, lowering the fee at this time would “impose an inappropriate level of costs” on ISPs.

Several submissions to MBIE cited a Waikato University study which found that traffic downloaded using P2P applications decreased to less than half the volume it had been prior to the Act coming into force, and that this decline had persisted at least until January 2012

However the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) had submitted that “since August 2011 overall P2P use in New Zealand is down 18 percent but still remains at a very high level with over 700,000 people still engaging in P2P on a monthly basis.”

Meanwhile the MBIE says that a submission by the New Zealand Federation Against Copyright Theft (NZFACT had “provided evidence showing there had been around 110,000 infringing downloads of major US movies in August 2011, but from that date downloads had plateaued at between 40,000 and 60,000 per month.”

The cabinet paper also reveals that a total of 2168 infringement notices were sent out in the first six months of the current anti file-sharing regime. Of these notices, the largest number were issued by Telecom (1238) followed by Vodafone (417), TelstraClear (398) and Orcon (115).
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...-to-stay-at-25





uTorrent Lands on Android Phones
Janko Roettgers

BitTorrent Inc. released a beta version of uTorrent for Android Wednesday, making it possible for Android users to download torrents straight onto their mobile handsets and tablets.

The new software, which works on Android 2.1 and up, comes with some basic search functionality as well as the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds for serialized downloads. Users can set upload and download limits to make sure that their BitTorrent activity doesn’t interrupt any other mobile data use, and downloads can be made over 3G or 4G data connections. Of course, torrenting movies on your handset is a sure-fire way to burn through those data caps in no time.

It’s worth noting that this is still a beta version, and a first quick test left some things to be desired. There is search, but any searches are simply sent as basic Google queries to the browser. That means you’ll have to fish around quite a bit before you can actually download anything. BitTorrent promised that it will also use the Android app to provide access to featured legal content, but this doesn’t seem to be implemented yet.

BitTorrent Inc. previously released a remote control app for Android phones which makes it possible to remotely start torrent downloads on your PC, and the company said Wednesday that it is already reaching almost four million mobile users.
http://gigaom.com/2012/09/05/utorrent-android/





Apple Lifts Ban on BitTorrent Apps, Or So It Seems
Ernesto

Ever since the inception of the App Store, Apple has notoriously banned all apps related to BitTorrent. However, those who conduct a search for BitTorrent in the App Store today will be surprised to see that Apple returns two search results. One app allows users to control the mufti-platform BitTorrent client Transmission and the other one does the same for uTorrent. This begs the question, did Apple lift its BitTorrent ban?

Over the past years dozens of apps have been rejected from the App Store because they mention the word BitTorrent.

Apple defended this policy and told developers that their apps were not allowed “because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights.”

This BitTorrent aversion is also one of the main reasons why popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent, Vuze and Transmission don’t have an Apple-approved presence on the iPhone and iPad.

However, last week “Conttrol” was added to the App Store. The application allows uTorrent users to interact with their desktop client through the Web-UI in order to start, stop, add or delete torrents.

“Currently the app supports connections to uTorrent & BitTorrent clients but there are future plans to support Transmission on the Mac, as well as planned development of a native iPad version,” Conttrol developer Craig Donnelly told TorrentFreak.

While other BitTorrent apps slipped by Apple’s review team for a day or two, Conttrol’s entrance into the App store is not an isolated incident. A few months ago Apple also blessed Transmission RPC, a remote control for the Transmission popular client.

An interesting development to say the least.

It’s worth pointing out that neither app allows users to download files to the iPhone or iPad, they merely serve as a remote interface for desktop clients. However, that didn’t prevent Apple from issuing a publication ban on similar apps in the past.

Could it be that Apple has lifted its BitTorrent ban, or were these apps given the green light by mistake?

Conttrol developer Craig Donnelly told TorrentFreak that he hopes Apple changed its tune after realizing that there are many perfectly legal uses for BitTorrent.

“We all know there is a stigma associated with the BitTorrent protocol and that it is heavily associated with piracy. But I think this attitude has changed in recent years, and will change even further in the future.”

Earlier this week BitTorrent Inc. released their first mobile uTorrent client for Android. The company told TorrentFreak that there are no concrete plans for an iOS version of uTorrent, but perhaps that will change if Apple keeps accepting BitTorrent apps.

Time will tell…
https://torrentfreak.com/apple-lifts...-seems-120907/





Cambodia Arrests The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Gottfrid Svartholm, Sweden Offers $59.4 Million in Aid
Emil Protalinski

At the start of this month, news broke that The Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm had been arrested in Cambodia. A bunch of updates followed, including that Svartholm would be deported to Sweden, and that the two countries of course collaborated on his capture. The latest tidbit, as of today, is the craziest one yet: Sweden essentially paid Cambodia tens of millions of dollars for the deed.

Now, the announcement of course didn’t come quite like that, but that’s to be expected. Let’s just say it’s hard to believe Sweden didn’t suddenly become interested in aiding Cambodia with millions of dollars.

The Swedish government has agreed to give 400 million Swedish Kronor ($59.4 million) to Cambodia for various reasons, including democratic development, human rights, education, environment protection, climate change, sustainable development, and poverty reduction. You name it (just don’t say international arrests).

Keat Chhon, the Cambodian deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, signed the agreement with Anne Hoglund, the Ambassador of Sweden to Cambodia. “Cambodia considers Sweden as a highly valued development partner and we will make every best effort to ensure that the aid be utilized effectively in an efficient and transparent manner,” Chhon told Xinhua.

TorrentFreak points out that this is hardly just a coincidence. Neither is the fact that Swedish authorities were in Cambodia on Tuesday for a meeting with National Deputy Police Commissioner General Sok Phal. Since there is no extradition treaty between the two nations, Sweden made a request for Svartholm to be deported in the immediate future, and Phal agreed.

“We will use the Immigration Law against him to deport him out of our country and Minister of Interior Sar Kheng will sign on the deportation request letter from the police commissioner soon,” said Phal told the The Phnom Penh Post . “We will have to just deport him, wherever he goes, we don’t know, but he has to be out of Cambodia.”

Sweden has been on the lookout for Svartholm ever since he failed to appear for his 12-month sentence after he was found guilty of aiding copyright infringement in 2009. The 27-year-old’s sentence was upheld even though he was absent from court hearings in 2010 due to ill-health. Along with the 12 month sentence, Svartholm is also due to pay 30 million kronor ($4.48 million) in damages.

Svartholm has yet to be deported, and as far as we know he is still in Cambodian detention.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/0...rid-svartholm/





Svartholm Arrested for Alleged Hack
David Kravets

It turns out that last week’s arrest of The Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm seems to be unrelated to his pending one-year prison sentence for running Sweden’s and the world’s most notorious and illicit file-sharing service.

Swedish media is reporting that Svartholm’s confinement in Cambodia is in connection to a 2010 hack into a Swedish company called Logica. Logica contracts with Swedish tax authorities, and “tax numbers of 9,000 Swedes leaked online” earlier this year, notes TorrentFreak, a prominent source when it comes to The Pirate Bay news.

Two other Swedes have been arrested in relation to the Logica hack.

Sweden’s Supreme Court in February upheld the prison sentences of the four men convicted of running The Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde faces eight months; Fredrik Neij, 10 months; Carl Lundström, four months; and Gottfrid Svartholm, one year. They share combined fines of more than $6.8 million. They have not yet been ordered to serve their time.

They were convicted in 2009 in a joint civil and criminal proceeding in Sweden that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants and the torrent-based file-sharing site, which points the way to free games, movies, software and music. The service is used by millions and is notorious for its rebellious nature.

Their failed defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way the bittorrent protocol works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay’s servers. Instead the site provides a searchable index of torrent files — some on its servers, some elsewhere — that direct a user’s client software to the content elsewhere.

Cambodian authorities, who arrested Svartholm at his apartment in the capital of Pnom Penh, where he was living, are said to be planning to eventually deport him to Sweden. Once there, he is likely to face hacking charges.

According to Swedish site DN.se, Svartholm was in “poor condition, weighing less than 40 kg and with serious drug problems.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ounder-arrest/





Cambodia to Deport Pirate Bay Co-Founder Sought by Sweden

Cambodia will deport a Swedish co-founder of Pirate Bay, one of the world's biggest free file-sharing websites, who was convicted and sentenced to prison in Sweden for breaching copyright laws, a police official said on Tuesday.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 27, has been living in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and was arrested last week after a request from Sweden, but he may not necessarily be sent back home directly.

"We will deport him based on our immigration law," police spokesman Kirth Chantharith said, adding the decision was reached after talks between Cambodian and Swedish officials.

Cambodia and Sweden do not have an extradition treaty and Kirth Chantharith could not say where Warg would be sent.

"We just know we will deport him. As to which country, that would be up to the Swedish side," he said, adding no date had been set yet for the deportation.

Pirate Bay, launched in 2003, provides links to music and movie files that are stored on other users' computers.

Swedish subsidiaries of prominent music and film companies had taken the company to court claiming damages for lost revenue.

Mainstream media firms have also taken steps to have it blocked in other countries, including the Netherlands and Finland, as they struggle to combat illegal downloads.

Pirate Bay says no copyrighted material is stored on its servers and no exchange of files actually takes place there so it cannot be held responsible for what material is being exchanged.

An appeals court in Sweden sentenced three others behind the Pirate Bay site to between four months and 10 months in prison plus fines in 2010.

Warg failed to attend that hearing due to illness and his sentencing was deferred. He had originally been sentenced to a year in prison in 2009.

Cambodian website Khmer440.com, which originally reported Warg's arrest, said he had been living in Phnom Penh for four years.

Cambodia has a practice of deporting foreigners once they have served sentences.

(Reporting by Prak Chan Thul; Editing by Alan Raybould)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8830A720120904





Bruce Willis to Fight Apple Over Rights to Music Collection After His Death

Legal fight ... Bruce Willis is preparing to take on Apple over his music collection
Fran Wetzel

BRUCE Willis is preparing to take Apple to court over who owns his huge digital music collection after he dies.

The Die Hard actor, 57, wants to leave the haul to his daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallulah.

But under iTunes' current terms and conditions, customers essentially only 'borrow' tracks rather than owning them outright.

So any music library amassed like that would be worthless when the owner dies.

Willis has asked advisers to set up a trust that holds his downloads, which reportedly include classics from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin, to get around this rule.

The action star is also backing legal moves to increase the rights of downloaders.

Apple can freeze users’ accounts if they suspect them of sharing tunes with others.

Chris Walton, an estate specialist at Irwin Mitchell, told a newspaper: “Lots of people will be surprised on learning all those tracks and books they have bought over the years don’t actually belong to them.

“It’s only natural you would want to pass them on to a loved one.”
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...his-death.html





How Much Does an Artist Make from a Single Stream of a Song on iTunes Match and Spotify?
Matthew Panzarino

Streaming, subscription-based music is the future. We’ve been hearing that claim for years now although it always seems to be right on the cusp of happening. It’s a dream for consumers, really, pay a single monthly fee and stream all of the music that you want, with no up-front cost to own each song.

But how does this ‘stream rental’ framework look on the other side of the coin, to the artist? Figuring out just how lucrative streaming services like Spotify or Apple’s iTunes Match cloud feature, which streams you songs you already own from the cloud, is tough. Mostly, that’s because there is a lack of transparency from both parties. The artists are at times reluctant to share numbers and the streaming services don’t want those deals exposed either.

So here are some interesting numbers shared today by Josh Davison of Centro about streaming revenue garnered from his band Parks and Gardens on both Spotify and iTunes Match. They shed what I feel is an interesting and harsh spotlight on just how little each song play nets him just under 1/3 of a cent when streamed from Apple’s cloud music service and slightly more than that from Spotify:

Correction: iTunes Match pays $0.00330526797710 per stream. Spotify actually pays us more, at $0.00966947678815 per stream.

— Josh Davison (@stringbot) September 3, 2012

So Parks and Gardens would need to see over 3 plays for any song to get them a cent of revenue from a song on iTunes Match. And they already pay distribution service TuneCore $50 a year just to get their music out there on these services. So they need over 15,127 plays of their songs to break even on distributing them alone. The number is better on Spotify, where they’d need to see 5,171 plays. TuneCore takes no slice of their sales.

The difference between iTunes Match and Spotify, of course, is that iTunes Match earnings are a bonus being earned on top of an outright purchase of the song. Once a user has purchased the song and a user subscribes to iTunes Match, they’re allowed to stream that song from the cloud.

Following Davison’s numbers, web developer Scott Buscemi also shared numbers for popular services like Spotify, Spotify Free, iTunes Match and Rhapsody from his client HoneyBoy Dupree. You can see that the numbers aren’t much better.

How much does an artist make from a single stream of a song on iTunes Match and Spotify?

We talked about those numbers earlier, over 15k plays to break even on distributing via iTunes Match, a bit better at Spotify. But, at least in the case of these small artists, the streaming numbers aren’t even close to that. Davison says he gets ‘very few’ streams through any of the services and Buscemi broke it down by service, saying “I’m at 6 iTunes Match, 10 Rhapsody, 45 SpotifyFree, 150 Spotify Subscribed.”

The numbers aren’t really new. We’ve known for a while now just how bad of a deal streaming services were for artists that don’t have millions of fans to boost their numbers. Crikey did a bit earlier this year on the Australian launch of Spotify and called streaming services a ‘black hole’ for artists. It noted at the time that streaming accounted for about 42% of all record label revenues in Sweden last year, about the same as CDs. But as far as how much that made the artists, that’s a harder pill to swallow.

This summary from The Trichordist back in April of this year detailed the income from an independent catalog covering 87 albums and 1,280 songs. It’s numbers are actually a bit worse for Spotify, at about $.005 per stream, 1/140th of the revenue from 1 single iTunes song download.

That’s not to say that there isn’t growth, though. The data reported in this posting by Hans Handgraaf at the SpotiDJ blog notes that, as the user base of Spotify has grown, so has the percentage of revenue earned by his label. As of the September statement 57.7% of the revenue came from Spotify.

The moral of the story? If you hear a band that you love on your favorite streaming service then buy their stuff outright from wherever you can find it. Because they’re not exactly raking in the dough for streaming.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/...-stinkin-cent/





With 'Access Codes,' Textbook Pricing Gets More Complicated Than Ever
Jeffrey R. Young

The story of one University of Maine student's quest for a reasonably priced textbook reveals just how complicated course materials have become as the textbook industry makes its awkward transition from print to digital.

The student is Luke Thomas, a senior majoring in business on the Orono campus, who last semester took a 250-person introductory English course called "The Nature of Story." The required textbook was compiled by the professor, John R. Wilson, and published by Cengage. Mr. Wilson also asked students to purchase access to online supplementary materials that came bundled with new copies of the textbook. Total price tag for the book and an access code to get to the online system: $150.

Mr. Thomas was taking the course with his then-fiancée (now wife), so he hoped to buy just one textbook they could share. The trick, though, was that each student in the course needed his or her own access code to get to the online discussion board and homework-submission system. And Mr. Thomas was told by the professor and by officials at the campus bookstore that the textbook and code came only as a package deal, meaning the couple would have to pay $300 to get the two access codes and an extra book they didn't need.

Mr. Thomas says he complained to the professor, who brushed off his questions. He then took his case to the campus bookstore, but when its director, Richard Young, called the publisher, he was told that selling just the online-access code "was not an option." The professor did not return repeated calls to comment for this article.

"The professor had put a wall between course content, and purchasing his textbook was the only route," Mr. Thomas wrote in a blog post complaining about the situation. Soon after he posted his story, it was picked up by a popular technology Web site, leading other students to post similar frustrations with textbook access codes.

No Simple Approach

In the good-old days when print was the only option, students had plenty of free or cheap ways to get required textbooks. Borrow one from a friend. Check out a copy from the library. Buy a used copy for a fraction of the price. Or rent a copy through one of several companies providing that service.

But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online, threaten to displace all of those alternatives. Most access codes are good only for a limited time, and once they are activated they can't be used by other students.

"This is the next generation of tactics to undermine the used-book market," said Nicole Allen, textbooks-campaign director for the Student Public Interest Research Groups, when asked about Mr. Thomas's situation.

But this is not a simple case of big-textbook-company-as-villain. When Mr. Thomas called Cengage, officials there were sympathetic to his situation and allowed him to buy a stand-alone access code for $20.

The company now says that it intended for access codes to supplementary materials for that textbook to be available to purchase separately. "It's our standard practice to separate them," said Nader Qaimari, senior vice president of marketing for Cengage, in an interview. "We simply made a mistake in our system and didn't unbundle it." He stressed that the code gives students access to a digital version of the textbook's complete contents as well as the homework system and other online features, so those who choose a digital-only option get quite a discount over buying a printed book.

Even Ms. Allen concedes that when done well, new online enhancements for textbooks can save professors time and "increase students' learning." Her main complaint about textbook access codes is that the prices aren't always as reasonable as the deal offered to Mr. Thomas. In some cases, publishers charge almost as much for the access code alone as they do for a new printed textbook.

"It's common sense that things that are digital should be less expensive and better for consumers," Ms. Allen said. "But with textbooks, the underlying problem with the market is the fact that publishers get to set the price of textbooks without any input from students because students need to buy whatever they're assigned. In other areas, if students don't like the price they can go buy something else."

But Mr. Qaimari, of Cengage, argues that students are still key in shaping prices, and that the publisher is working to develop a business model for new kinds of digital materials that works for all parties, including professors and students.

"Without their satisfaction in the resources and them seeing value in those resources, we're not going to survive," he said. Confusion seems to be a key ingredient when access codes are thrown into the textbook mix. A Google search for "textbook access codes" reveals plenty of concerned students wondering whether what they're buying from Amazon or other sellers contains all the material they need for class.

"From what I understand, if you bought it off Amazon, there will be no access code," wrote one student in an online forum. "You should be able to purchase the access code individually for the specific book from the publisher, but it will probably cancel any savings made (or increase the cost past what it would have been as a new book)."

Is that right? I asked Richard Hersh#man, vice president of government relations for the National Association of College Stores. His long answer basically boiled down to: sort of. "If you are buying a brand-new textbook from Amazon and that textbook comes with an access code or packaged with an access code, then you are fine," he said. But individuals also sell textbooks through Amazon Marketplace, and they self-report whether the code is included or not. "For used books, most of the codes are likely already used, so either they are no good or are missing from the book. In those cases, then, if you must have the access code to take the class, then you buy it separately from a retailer or publisher who is selling them."

Got it? Essentially, buying access to online textbook supplements is more like buying a software app than a book. Once you've paid to download software for your phone or computer, you know there's no easy way to resell it.

More Bundling

The majority of university courses still use printed textbooks without requiring online supplements. But the use of added online materials is growing fast, and certainly faster than all-digital options, in which a printed book is cast aside completely.

At the University of Kansas' bookstores, for instance, the number of courses requiring print textbooks that are bundled with supplemental access codes is up to about 25 to 30 a semester, compared with 10 to 15 two years ago, says Estella McCollum, director of KU Bookstores. And those courses are typically introductory ones with large enrollments, so thousands of students are affected.

In many cases, the codes do affect a student's ability to buy a used copy. But she said that the online access, which typically costs from $50 to $70 when sold separately, is usually worth the money. "The same students who are complaining about the price, they're going to pay $50 for a Wii game," said Ms. McCollum. "Some of the online-learning environments are dynamic enough that as a parent I'd be willing to pay that."

The codes can push bookstores into a new and unwanted role: tech support. When a new code bundled with a book fails, some students take their complaints to the campus store. Typically, the codes are packaged on a card that requires purchasers to scratch off a silver coating to reveal the number, much like gift cards sold by retailers. Ms. McCollum says that one textbook caused headaches this summer because scratching off the coating with a coin made the underlying numbers illegible. "It was just a very poorly done access card," she said.

The digital textbook market essentially needs a sign that says "pardon our dust." It's a work in progress, with many unanswered questions.

Some students are already sold on the possibility of enhancing their textbooks with online exercises.

One of them is Caroline Liu, a junior bioengineering major at the University of California at San Diego. She recently took an economics course that required paying about $110 for a printed book and access code to a digital system. "In retrospect, the program was really useful," she told me. "It was like, quiz yourself on the material, and it re#inforced the concepts."

She could have purchased just the access code without the book, for about $90, but she wanted to have the printed copy as well, so she bought the bundle. Because the code worked for a whole year, she was able to use it for a three-course sequence. "I actually think it was not unreasonable."
https://chronicle.com/article/What-I...Worth-/134048/





Amazon’s Writing Is On The Wall For Physical Books
Alexia Tsotsis

For those keeping track at home, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos continued his one man attack on the print publishing industry with the announcements of the Kindle Paperwhite, new Kindle Fire, new Kindle Fire HD and an updated Kindle — Four new e-reading-focused services gadgets in total, without counting the Wifi or 3G+Wifi versions.

“Let me show you an amazing graph,” Bezos exclaimed, giddy as he whipped out the above money shot (thanks The Verge!), “I look at this and I say ‘Wow.’”

While in traditional Bezos fashion, the graph doesn’t actually have any numbers on its Y axis (:/) — it seems to be chronicling the hockey stick growth of all Kindle Books sold through Amazon, versus the linear growth of physical books sold through the platform.

Kindle book sales surpassed hardcover sales in 2010 and surpassed physical book sales in 2011. Here’s the same curve at an Amazon conference a year ago. Bezos seems to really like this slide.

Even though we all probably still have modest looking print libraries, looking at these, granted very vague, graphs, I can’t picture a future where physical books aren’t collectors items — nostalgic artifacts like records or typewriters.

For it is written.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/mene-mene/





All New Kindle Fire Models Are Ad-Supported
Sam Byford

Amazon's new lineup of tablets don't just differ from the original Kindle Fire in their hardware. Like last year's cheapest Kindle e-reader, all three new models — that's the Fire, the HD 7, and the HD 8.9 — will display Amazon's "Special Offers" promotions and advertisements on their lock screens. Unlike the low-end Kindle, however, Amazon isn't offering the devices in more expensive, ad-free models, nor is it making mention of any way to opt out for a fee.

Considering the aggressive pricing of the new Fires we imagine many people won't mind, especially as the offers include deals such as a $5 credit for Amazon's movie and music services. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with paying for devices that advertise at you, on the other hand, so it's notable that Amazon doesn't seem to be giving customers the option.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/6/329...special-offers





Ubisoft Gives Up On Its Stupid PC DRM
Luke Plunkett

For the last few years, Ubisoft's attempts at battling piracy have been something of a running punchline, seeming to achieve little but annoy the company's actual paying customers.

Looks like all the protests have finally sunk in, because the publisher has told Rock, Paper, Shotgun it'll be rolling back most of its most offensive methods.

Firstly, the controversial "always on" DRM is gone, and bizarrely, has apparently been missing from new releases for some time.

Also gone is the limit on the number of times a product can be activated, as well as the limit on the number of PCs a game can be activated on.

All you'll need to do now is activate a new game once, online, and that'll be that.

It's a welcome move from the publisher. Now, if it can just work on its customary PC version delays, they might actually get in PC gamer's good books!
http://kotaku.com/5940535/ubisoft-gi...-stupid-pc-drm





Copyright Protectionism

The Award for Irony Goes To...
G.F.

FANS of Neil Gaiman held their breath as the American author stepped to the podium to receive the Hugo award, dispensed by the World Science Fiction Society at its annual Worldcon shindig on September 2nd. Mr Gaiman opened his mouth and, almost before he could finish a sentence, at precisely 10:43pm Eastern Time an automated copyright-violation analysis killed the broadcast. It never went back up. The legions of Gaiman buffs online, presumably no longer breathless, heaved a sigh of disappointment and tweeted their displeasure like mad.

Instead of their idol's speech, thanking Hugo voters for recognising his screenplay of an episode of the British sci-fi series "Doctor Who", viewers were treated to a message that the feed was banned "due to copyright infringement". The television excerpts shown for nominees had apparently been matched against stored "signatures" (a kind of mathematical shorthand) of registered protected material. No matter that the footage was in keeping with fair-use principles and the producers of the nominated programmes, including "Doctor Who", had themselves submitted the video in question for the express purpose of being played at the live ceremony and streamed. Such niceties carry no truck with robots.

Ustream, the firm behind the internet broadcast, was immediately aware of the glitch but its boss, Brad Hunstable, explained that there was nothing it could do. The company had relied on a third-party clearance house, Vobile, to identify copyright violations. (Ustream has now suspended the contract until Vobile gets to grips with such glitches.) Mr Hunstable adds that the paid version of his service faces no shutdowns, and that users of the free, ad-supported variety (like Worldcon) may have been unaware they needed to notify Ustream in advance, a communication failure he hopes to improve.

This was not an isolated incident. Following the descent of Curiosity in August, NASA's uploaded video related to the event was pulled for several hours due to a rogue copyright claim. Amd on September 4th, YouTube's mechanical minions briefly took down Michelle Obama's speech from the Democratic National Convention because of background music and accidental matches from footage uploaded by news agencies that are automatically claimed.

The bigger question is whether automated tools can properly evaluate the use copyrighted content is put to. Fair-use exemptions apply in a variety of contexts, including certain kinds of mash-ups and remixes, as well as lengthy critiques. In America, the fair-use litmus involves determining whether commercial gain is at stake; the extent of the excerpt; the copyright holder suffers from losing the ability to sell his work; and the nature of the use. For example, in a case involving Righthaven, a controversial firm founded to pursue small claims of rights' abuses, a judge found that the reproduction online of an entire newspaper article was covered by fair use because of the social purpose involved.

The recent fiascos highlight a fear aired more than a decade ago by opponents of digital rights management (DRM), a type of encryption which enables playback only on licensed devices. Critics of DRM argued then that the film and music industry might use the system to block content with no recourse, regardless of whether the use infringes the copyright or not.

Such digital protectionism already exists in desktop and mobile video playback. Try to capture a stream of video or a screenshot in most operating systems, and the OS declines to do so or produces a blurred or blacked-out display. There is, of course, software which enables extracting protected video, but finding, installing and using it requires a bit of effort—not something a casual viewer will bother with, although not a bar to anyone with any determination.

Streaming-video services are not required to scan for offences, though they may argue to the contrary. Studios and television-production firms which co-operate with YouTube insist on active scanning. But the safe-harbour provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 provides an exemption against monitoring, so long as services are not aware content they host infringes, and when informed of such respond to "takedown notices". US circuit courts of appeal have reaffirmed this exemption in the last nine months. By scanning for infringement, such services put themselves outside of such protections because they no longer can claim ignorance.

However, the DMCA provides enforcement only against infringement; it says nothing about how to enforce legitimate exemptions like the one which should have kept Mr Gaiman on the air. The many individuals who lose out as a result of such a blunderbuss approach are dispersed and lack the content producers' co-ordination and lobbying heft. As vocal advocates go, they could do worse than Mr Gaiman, who will no doubt now put his oar in.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba...-protectionism





Ustream Apologizes For Shutting Down The Hugo Awards Livestream, Says It Will ‘Recalibrate’
Anthony Ha

Maybe you haven’t heard of the Hugo Awards, but to science fiction geeks, especially print science fiction geeks, they’re a big deal. They’re given out at the World Science Fiction Convention, and as io9′s Annalee Newitz writes, they’re “kind of like the Academy Awards,” where “careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi.”

Of course, not everyone can attend the convention, held this year in Chicago, but for those of us who couldn’t, we had a chance to follow along the ceremonies last night thanks to live video via Ustream (I probably would’ve been watching if I wasn’t taking my mom out to dinner). Or at least, fans had a chance to watch the beginning of the ceremony, up until Neil Gaiman was accepting his award in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category. That’s when the broadcast shut off abruptly, and the account was supposedly “banned due to copyright infringement.”

Mostly likely, the infringement alarms were set off by the clips of nominated TV show episodes that were shown before the award was announced — which, as Newitz notes, was silly, since the studios provided the clips for the ceremony, and showing short clips should be protected by fair use anyway. The incident was, as you can imagine, a bummer for science fiction fans, but beyond that, it also suggests Ustream’s infringement-detection system was overreacting. That’s especially problematic on a livestreaming site, where taking time to sort out situations like this can mean you’ve missed the window to broadcast something live.

Also, if you’re going to halt a live broadcast, you might not want to do it when a bestselling author with more than 1.7 million Twitter followers takes the stage.

Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable has published a blog post apologizing for the incident. He says the company relies on a service called Vobile to monitor for infringing content, and yes, the system was automatically triggered by the show clips. He adds:

Our editorial team and content monitors almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages about the ban and attempted to restore the broadcast. Unfortunately, we were not able to lift the ban before the broadcast ended. We had many unhappy viewers as a result, and for that I am truly sorry.

Hunstable notes that if the convention organizers had a paid for a Pro account, this wouldn’t have happened, because those accounts are “automatically white listed to avoid situations like this.” The “pay us and this won’t happen again” argument may not win people over, but maybe this will: “I have suspended use of this third-party system until we are able to recalibrate the settings so that we can better balance the needs of broadcasters, viewers, and copyright holders.”

So it’s not just an apology — it’s a commitment to do better.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/ust...l-recalibrate/





YouTube Flags Democrats’ Convention Video on Copyright Grounds
Ryan Singel

While First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech won rave reviews on Twitter Tuesday night, those who got inspired to try to watch the livestream of the convention on BarackObama.com or YouTube found the video flagged by copyright claims shortly after it finished.

YouTube, the official streaming partner of the Democratic National Convention, put a copyright blocking message on the livestream video of the event shortly after it ended, which was embedded prominently at BarackObama.com and DemConvention2012. Would-be internet viewers saw a message claiming the stream had been caught infringing on the copyright of one of many possible content companies:

This video contains content from WMG, SME, Associated Press (AP), UMG, Dow Jones, New York Times Digital, The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA), Warner Chappell, UMPG Publishing and EMI Music Publishing, one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds. Sorry about that.

When contacted by Wired for comment late Tuesday, Erica Sackin, an Obama campaign staffer who works on digital outreach, had no knowledge of the outage, asked this reporter for the url and then upon seeing the takedown, said, “I’ll have to call you back.”
After this story was published, the video was subsequently marked “private.”

A YouTube spokesman downplayed the blockage: “After tonight’s live stream ended, YouTube briefly showed an incorrect error message,” he said via e-mail. ” Neither the live stream nor any of the channel’s videos were affected.”

It’s not clear what he meant by none of the channel’s videos were affected as the video was unplayable.

The most likely culprit is YouTube’s pre-emptive content filters, which allow large media companies to upload content they claim to own and automatically block videos that an algorithm decides matches their own. That would make the glitch the second livestream copyright-policing snafu in the span of a few days: On Sunday, a similar algorithm at uStream interrupted the livestream of the Hugo science fiction awards. The award show included clips of copyrighted videos, though the algorithm didn’t know that the clips had been authorized.

In early August, an official NASA recording of the Mars landing was blocked hours after the successful landing, due to a rogue DMCA complaint by a news network.

Under the DMCA, sites have to respond promptly to written DMCA requests, but as services like uStream and Google court large entertainment companies as advertisers and content partners, they’ve created systems to make blocking automatic or to allow partners to put ads on videos they claim are infringing.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...right-grounds/





The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords
Geeta Dayal

As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech.

On Tuesday, some visitors trying to get to the livestream of Michelle Obama’s widely lauded speech at the Democratic National Convention were met with a bizarre notice on YouTube, which said that the speech had been blocked on copyright grounds.

On Sunday, a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them.

“I thought it was a huge pity, and ridiculous,” said Gaiman in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “But I also think it highlights a potential problem that’s just getting bigger.”

Last month, footage from NASA’s triumphant Curiosity rover landing was blocked numerous times on YouTube, despite being in the public domain, because several companies — such as Scripps Local News — claimed copyright on the material.

Those incidents foretell an odd future for streaming video, as bandwidth and recording tools get cheaper, and the demand for instant video grows. Just in the last year, Google Hangouts, a feature of Google+ that allows multiple people to video conference, became a cult hit. Now it’s used by news sites, such as the Huffington Post, for live video interview segments. Ustream and Justin.tv have made it simple to livestream book readings, Meetups and the police siege of Julian Assange’s embassy sleepover.

Copyright bots are being wired into that infrastructure, programmed as stern and unyielding censors with one hand ever poised at the off switch. What happens if the bot detects snippets of a copyrighted song or movie clip in the background? Say a ringtone from a phone not shut off at a PTA meeting? Or a short YouTube clip shown by a convention speaker to illustrate a funny point? Will the future of livestreaming be so fragile as to be unusable?

A swarm of tech companies are rushing in to provide technical solutions to enforce copyright in online sharing communities and video-streaming sites. Those players include Vobile, Attributor, Audible Magic, and Gracenote. And they’re thriving, despite the fact that U.S. copyright law, as modified by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, doesn’t require sites that host user-created content to preemptively patrol for copyright violations.

“The companies that are selling these automated takedown systems are really going above and beyond the requirements set for them in the DMCA, and as a result are favoring the interests of a handful of legacy media operators over the free-speech interest of the public,” says Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The notice-and-takedown regime created by the DMCA allows copyright holders to send a written notice to an online hosting service when they find their copyright being violated. The online service can then escape legal liability by taking down the content fairly promptly, and the original poster has the opportunity to dispute the notice and have the content reinstated after two weeks.

But that regime breaks down for livestreaming. For one, if a valid copyright dispute notice is filed by a human, it’s unlikely that a livestream site would take it down before the event ends, nor, under the law, is it actually required to. On the flipside, if a stream is taken down, the user who posted it has no immediate recourse, and the viewership disappears.

Brad Hunstable, Ustream’s CEO, says the volume of content is overwhelming and content-blocking algorithms are key to keeping copyright holders happy.

“To give you a sense, more video is uploaded on Ustream per second than even YouTube, per minute, per day,” Hunstable said in a phone interview with Wired.

“The thing to understand is that at any given time, we can have tens of thousands of simultaneous broadcasts on the site, which is coming through the free service, which is why we’ve implemented these automated procedures to monitor copyright, as part of our partnership with these larger media brands,” added David Thompson, Ustream’s VP of marketing. “From the system’s point of view, [the Hugo Awards] were just one of tens of thousands of people broadcasting at one particular time.”

But after the embarrassing Hugo Awards incident, Ustream suspended the use of Vobile — the third-party company that Ustream uses to compute automated takedowns of copyrighted material.

“We’re doing a full review, and we’re not prepared to talk about the details of what those are yet,” said Ustream’s Hunstable. The Hugo Awards, he said, were not using the paid “pro” version of Ustream’s live streaming service. The paid version of Ustream does not use Vobile.

“The Hugo Awards were using the free ad-supported capability,” Hunstable said. “And unfortunately Ustream was not contacted ahead of the time about their use of the platform.”

Vobile computes a “fingerprint” for audiovisual content and matches it against a “reference fingerprint database, known as the Vobile DNA Database (VDDB)” according to materials provided on their website. The company has become as one of the leading copyright-infringement detection companies relied on by content creators and online services alike. The company’s services, developed by Chinese scientists, are used by a large number of companies in the U.S., including major Hollywood studios, record labels, and sports leagues — as well as the popular live streaming sites Ustream and Justin.tv.

A representative from Vobile did not return a call seeking comment.

“In the statement Ustream made after the awards, they said that they were unable to override the system in time to get the awards back online,” says EFF’s Higgins. “So not only have they surrendered control of their own content filters to a third party, and to an automated third party, but they don’t have the ability to take it back, apparently.”

There’s arguably good economic reasons for livestreaming sites to use the technology. For instance, a site might want to prevent the site from getting a reputation as being a site to watch unauthorized streams of sports. A site might, as both Ustream and YouTube are, want to have close ties with big content creators in order to land deals.

Google, for instance, now even takes DMCA requests into consideration when ranking search results, a move it made after the debut of both Google TV and its Google Play store, both of which require deals with Big Content to function.

Moreover, getting sued by a big record label is expensive, time-consuming, distracting and possibly ostracizing.

Google is still dealing with a lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube. Grooveshark, an online music site, is itself being sued and has been repeatedly kicked out of Google’s Android app store (so much for brothers-in-arms).

And if that’s not bad enough, the federal government has gotten trigger-happy with domain seizures of sites it deems to be infringing American company’s copyrights. In 2011, the feds seized the domain names of a Spanish site, RojaDirecta, a year after it seized the names, alleging the company violated criminal copyright laws for allowing users to see embedded livestream video of sports matches — even though the files weren’t on their servers. The feds returned the names last week, sans apology note, after begrudgingly admitting it couldn’t put together a criminal case.

Given all that, it’s likely that this collision between algorithmic defense of copyright versus spontaneous speech isn’t going to be resolved soon.

Kembrew McLeod, a professor at the University of Iowa and author of several books on copyright and culture, including Creative License and Freedom of Expression, said that the so-called copyright “bots” don’t have the ability to take fair use into account. In the case of the Hugo Awards, the takedown was apparently triggered by footage of an episode of Doctor Who being shown immediately before Gaiman accepted an award for his work on Doctor Who — a scenario which implies fair use, even if the clips hadn’t been cleared ahead of time.

“The most important issue on the table is the fact that these technologies do an end run around fair use,” McLeod said in a phone interview with Wired. “Fair use still exists in the books, in legal theory, but fair use does not exist in practice in a world where companies that are relying on these databases of copyrighted works can immediately shut off the public’s access.”

“A lot of fair use is really easy, but it’s not coded into these algorithms,” Higgins said. “A human can tell very easily that the clip from Doctor Who that they showed was actually fair use. There’s no question about that. But there’s no way for a robot to tell.”

Which is another way of saying, the future might be live-streamed from Google Glasses, but be prepared to have streams go dark at any moment, replaced with a retro-future message saying, “We pause this program for copyright identification.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ight-cops/all/





UK Tells Ecuador Assange Can't be Extradited if he Faces Death Penalty

William Hague says Wikileaks founder could only be sent to US if both Britain and Sweden believe human rights would not be breached
Nicholas Watt

Assange gives public statement from balcony of Ecuadorian embassy, London, Britain - 19 August 2012
Julian Assange gives a public statement from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy last month. Photograph: Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features

Britain has assured Ecuador that Julian Assange has a double guarantee that he cannot face extradition from Sweden to the US if he were to face the death penalty or his human rights were to be breached.

In a written statement to MPs, the foreign secretary, William Hague, said it was a "matter of regret" that the government of Ecuador had decided to offer asylum to Assange after Britain offered a series of assurances to Quito.

Britain is seeking to extradite Assange to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual misconduct. The WikiLeaks founder, who sought protection in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in June, has been granted asylum by Quito on the grounds that he could face extradition from Sweden to the US where, it is feared, he could face the death penalty for his role in publishing hundreds of thousands of leaked US government documents.

Hague told MPs the double guarantee meant Assange could only be extradited to the US from Sweden if both Britain and Sweden believed he would not face the death penalty and his human rights would not be breached.

The foreign secretary said: "Both the United Kingdom and Sweden are signatories to the European convention on human rights and the British government has complete confidence in the independence and fairness of the Swedish judicial system. As we have discussed with the government of Ecuador, the United Kingdom and Sweden robustly implement and adhere to the highest standards of human rights protection.

"The suggestion that Mr Assange's human rights would be put at risk by the possibility of onward extradition from Sweden to a third country is also without foundation. Not only would Sweden – as a signatory to the European convention on human rights – be required to refuse extradition in circumstances which would breach his human rights, but the authorities in Sweden would also be legally obliged to seek the United Kingdom's consent before any extradition to a non-EU member state could proceed.

"Our consent may only be given in accordance with the international conventions by which the UK is bound, including the European convention on human rights, and also our domestic law. In practice, this means that the United Kingdom could only consent to Mr Assange's onward extradition from Sweden to a third country if satisfied that extradition would be compatible with his human rights, and that there was no prospect of a death sentence being imposed or carried out."

The foreign secretary expressed disappointment that Ecuador decided to grant asylum to Assange after officials had explained the guarantees to Quito in detail.

"It is a matter of regret that instead of continuing our discussions, the foreign minister of Ecuador announced on 16 August that Ecuador had decided to grant diplomatic asylum to Mr Assange … We wish to continue our dialogue with the government of Ecuador. We believe that our two countries should be able to find a diplomatic solution. We have invited the government of Ecuador to resume, as early as possible, the discussions we have held on this matter to date."

In his statement, Hague did not repeat his warning to Ecuador last month that Britain could invoke the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 to arrest Assange inside the embassy.

Hague simply told MPs: "Throughout our exchanges, we have noted that the rights of diplomatic missions conferred by the 1961 Vienna convention on diplomatic relations come with responsibilities. Article 41 of the Vienna convention sets out the obligations of diplomatic missions to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state – in this case the United Kingdom. These include the duty not to impede the due legal process of that state."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...-death-penalty





Putin Weighs in on Assange: 'It's Political'

Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday said the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared "political", accusing Britain of double standards over his extradition order to Sweden on sex crime accusations.

Assange is currently holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London in a bid to avoid arrest and extradition to Sweden, from where he fears he could be extradited on to the United States to face potential accusations of treason.

"They (the British judiciary) decided to extradite him. What is this? Of course it is double standards, that is clear," Putin told state-controlled English language network Russia Today in an interview whose transcript was released by the Kremlin.

"As far as I know, Ecuador asked Sweden for guarantees that Assange will not be extradited from Sweden to the United States. It has received no such guarantees."

"Of course this leads one to think that this is a political case," Putin said.

Putin added: "We are always being told about the independence of the judicial system in Britain -- that it takes a decision and no-one can influence it."

The US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in late 2010 provided uncomfortable reading for Russian officials, notably a description of the country as a "mafia state".

But Russian state media has warmed to Assange as an alternative-thinking anti-Western crusader and Russia Today earlier this year broadcast a series of interviews Assange recorded with controversial world figures.

These included the leader of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah and the man who would later allow Assange sanctuary at the Ecuador embassy in London, Ecuador President Rafael Correa.
http://www.thelocal.se/43050/20120906/





Official Swedish Websites Targeted in Cyber Attack

A number of official websites in Sweden were rendered inaccessible on Monday, in what some have claimed to be a cyber-attack by supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Websites around the country went offline after 10am, including the Courts Administration, the Swedish Armed Forces and the Swedish Institute. The Local was also affected for a number of hours.

Anna Dahlén, a spokeswoman at the Government Offices confirmed that they had had problems but for security reasons couldn’t make any further comment.

“The site hasn't been down all day but it has been down sporadically," she told The Local on Monday afternoon.

Another victim of the attacks was the Swedish Armed Forces.

“We started having problems sometime after lunch - the site was working fine before that,” confirmed Therese Fagerstedt of the Swedish Armed Forces Communications and Public Affairs department to The Local.

According to Fagerstedt, the armed forces’ IT staff is working on the problem and suspect a DDOS attack on their site.

“Many different agencies have had trouble today, the Swedish Courts Administration and even Interpol as far as I know,” said Fagerstedt.

Fagerstedt told The Local that it is suspected that the attack was carried out by a Free Assange group, claiming responsibility via Twitter.

“We haven’t had it confirmed or anything but that is what they are saying,” she said.

Meanwhile, Per Gårdehall, web master at Sweden.se, explained that their site had also been targeted.

"We've been down since around 10am. We've talked to our host; they're experiencing problems from a DDOS attack,” he told The Local.

“I thought it was random at first until I noticed other Swedish sites going down. I've got no idea who is behind this or why they're doing it."

The CEO of Netnod, Kurtis Lindquist, explained more about these kind of attacks, after having helped fend off a massive denial of service attack against Estonia in 2007.

"DDOS attacks aren't uncommon, but they're not exactly common. And one can only speculate as to who or what is behind them,” he told The Local.

"In a hacktivist attack, someone is usually trying to make a statement or prevent someone from making a statement. These attacks can be extremely hard to defend against; they can have enormous resources behind them.”

When asked whether Assange supporters could be behind the attack, Lindquist said it wasn't out of the question.

"It's a high profile case, but it's impossible to say for sure until they claim responsibility. Of course, even then, it has happened that groups have claimed responsibility for others' attacks just to ride the wave.”

A hacktivist group supporting Assange and going by the name of “Anonymous” later claimed responsibility for the attack via their Twitter account. However this information is yet to be officially confirmed.
http://www.thelocal.se/42982/20120903/





Phone Hacking Investigations and Prosecutions 'Could Take Three Years'

Stephen Kavanagh to take over Sue Akers's role in overseeing investigations as Met predicts process will cost £40m
Jason Deans

Sue Akers, who is retiring as a deputy assistant commissioner in October, was speaking before the Commons home affairs select committee

Senior Scotland Yard officer Stephen Kavanagh is to take over Sue Akers's role overseeing the investigations into phone hacking and other alleged illegal activities by journalists, with the police budgeting for the process to last another three years and cost about £40m.

Akers, who is retiring as a deputy assistant commissioner in October, told the Commons home affairs select committee on Tuesday that her role overseeing the three interlinked investigations will go to Kavanagh, a deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan police's territorial policing division.

She also told MPs that the inquiries – Operation Weeting (phone hacking), Operation Elveden (illegal payments to public officials) and Operation Tuleta (computer hacking and other breaches of privacy not covered by Weeting) – were budgeted to cost just less than £9m this year, and in the region of £40m over four years.

Akers added that the Met had 185 officers and civilian staff working on the investigations – 96 on Operation Weeting, 70 on Operation Elveden and 19 on Operation Tuleta.

When pressed on how much longer the investigations would take, Akers replied that "resources have been factored in for the next three years".

Kavanagh is expected to add the role to his existing job in the territorial division, which is responsible for day to day, on the street policing across London. Akers is a DAC in the Met's specialist crime and operations division, overseeing specialist investigations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...investigations





News International Attempts to Block Phone-Hacking Damages Case

News of the World publisher argues lawsuit by Elle Macpherson's former adviser has no legal merit
Lisa O'Carroll

Mary-Ellen Field, former adviser to Elle Macpherson, lodged a civil lawsuit for invasion of privacy in March 2011 and is awaiting a full trial date. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

News International is trying to have a phone-hacking damages case involving Elle Macpherson's former adviser thrown out of court, 18 months after her claim was launched.

Mary-Ellen Field, who acted as the model's financial adviser, faces a legal battle against the publisher of the now defunct News of the World, with a hearing listed for October.

News International is applying for a summary judgment against Field and will argue for her case to be struck out on the grounds it has no legal merit.

The move comes despite repeated claims by Field, unchallenged in public, that her life was destroyed after her phone was allegedly hacked by the News of the World.

It is believed to be the first time News International has tried to have one of the numerous damages lawsuits relating to phone hacking struck out rather than settled. This could indicate a change in tack by News International parent company News Corporation, which has seen costs relating to the phone-hacking scandal, including legal bills, rise to $224m (£140m).

Field's civil lawsuit for invasion of privacy was originally lodged in March 2011 but is awaiting a full trial date along with at least 50 other cases being managed by the high court judge, Mr Justice Vos.

News International has decided it is going to challenge Field's case on the grounds that there is not enough evidence to substantiate her claims.

News International and Field declined to comment.

In evidence to the Leveson inquiry, Field said her reputation was "trashed" after MacPherson said she had leaked stories to the press.

She recalled how in 2005 the model became concerned that Field was leaking stories to the press, although she denied this. Macpherson then proposed that Field go to rehab to treat an alcohol problem, even though she told the model that she hardly drank. However, Field agreed to go into rehab, believing she would lose her job if she did not.

Lord Justice Leveson, after hearing her evidence, said that "all one can say is that you've correctly described your own position" and that what had happened was "not your fault" and that she was "collateral damage".

Field was one of more than 60 individuals who took legal action against News International last year in the first tranche of cases presided over by Vos at the high court.

Almost all were settled, including claims by actors Jude Law and Steve Coogan, singer Charlotte Church, former deputy prime minister John Prescott, Sara Payne, the mother of murdered schoolgirl Sarah, and Shaun Russell, whose wife and daughter were bludgeoned to death in a country lane in 1996.

Field's case and that of Nicola Phillips, assistant to PR man Max Clifford, were held over for the second tranche of civil phone hacking cases, which now include at least 50 claims due to be heard next year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...-block-damages





Firefox, Opera Allow Phishing by Data URI Claims New Paper
Ravi Mandalia

A student at the University of Oslo, Norway has claimed that Phishing attacks can be carried out through the use of Data URI and users of Firefox and Opera are vulnerable to such attacks.

Phishing is an attack through which criminals design sites that look similar to that of banks, e-commerce sites and by masquerading them as legitimate sites they get gullible users into entering personal information, credit card details and the likes. The main hurdle that these criminals face is to find a server to host such a site and to quickly fool as many users as possible before hosting companies and law enforcement authorities block them.

The new paper claims that malicious web pages can be stored into data URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) whereby an entire webpage’s code can be stuffed into a string, which if clicked on will instruct the browser to unpack the payload and present it to the user in form of a page.

Till recent times, stuffing a web page into a URI would have definitely raised suspicion because of the size of the data string – pretty long in most of the cases. But, with the advent of link shortening services, this URI can now fit into just few characters and it can be shared through social networking sites, file sharing sites, emails, etc.

This is where the whole thing gets a bit dangerous. In his paper, Phishing by data URI, Henning Klevjer has claimed that through his method he was able to successfully load the pages on Firefox and Opera. The method however failed on Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

The new phishing method can also get around defense systems such as web filtering. Sophos notes that criminals may also stuff malicious Java applet into data URIs and this is particularly dangerous in wake of recent Java vulnerabilities.
http://paritynews.com/security/item/...aims-new-paper





Anonymous Leaks 1m Apple Device UDIDs Stolen from FBI

A file containing a million and one record sets containing Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) and some other general information about the devices has been made available online by Anonymous hackers following an alleged breach of an FBI computer.

"During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java," the hackers claim.

"During the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of 'NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv' turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no
other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose."

According to the hackers' statement, the point of publishing a redacted list of only one million UDIDs, Apple Push Notification Service DevTokens, device names and device types was not to compromise Apple users in any way, but to make them and everybody else realize that the FBI is likely using the device information to track citizens.
https://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=13519





No Proof Hackers Stole Apple Data from Laptop: FBI
Basil Katz

The FBI said on Tuesday there was "no evidence" to support claims that hacking group Anonymous infiltrated an FBI agent's laptop and lifted a file with identification numbers for more than 12 million Apple Inc products.

Anonymous affiliate "AntiSec" posted a file on the Internet on Monday that it said contained more than 1 million of the Apple numbers. AntiSec said it had taken them from a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent's laptop in March.

"At this time there is no evidence indicating that an FBI laptop was compromised or that the FBI either sought or obtained this data," an FBI spokesman said in a statement.

Apple representatives were not immediately available to comment.

The Apple numbers, called unique device identifiers or UDIDs, are a sequence of letters and numbers assigned to Apple products, such as iPhones or iPads. Many web-based mobile applications and gaming networks use UDIDs to identify users.

In an Internet post explaining the data dump, AntiSec said it removed personal data associated with the UDIDs, such as consumers' names and telephone numbers.

AntiSec said it breached FBI agent Christopher Stangl's PC by exploiting a flaw in the computer's Java software. The group said it downloaded a list from Stangl's computer that was found to contain UDIDs for 12,367,232 Apple devices.

Stangl did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"If AntiSec and related folks were doing that kind of attack, this would be an upping of the game," said Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer of security firm BeyondTrust.

That said, the data dump itself, while serious, would not prove to be very damaging to consumer privacy, Maiffret added.

"It is not something that is going to allow hackers to break into peoples' iPhones," he said, adding that the UDIDs appeared to be genuine.

Anonymous and other loosely affiliated hacking groups have taken credit for carrying out attacks against the CIA, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency, Japan's Sony Corp, Mexican government websites and the national police in Ireland. Other victims included Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper arm News International, Fox Broadcasting and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Authorities have been attempting to beat back the intrusions and have arrested a number of the groups' key players.

(Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta. Editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88314C20120904





Here Is a Picture of a Gawker Writer Wearing a Tutu with a Shoe on His Head
Adrian Chen



As a journalist, I am sworn to bring facts to light by any means necessary. So here is a picture of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head at Gawker HQ. (A size 9 1/2 men's Reebok Question, to be exact.)

Anonymous had demanded that Gawker post this picture before they granted interviews to anyone about their latest hack that's freaked out the internet: 12 million Apple device IDs, allegedly stolen from an FBI cybersecurity agent's laptop. If true, the revelation of an enormous database of iPhones and iPads on an FBI computer would have worrying privacy implications.

But yesterday Anonymous wrote in a press release accompanying the leak of one million of the IDs:

no more interviews to anyone till Adrian Chen get featured in the front page of Gawker, a whole day, with a huge picture of him dressing a ballet tutu and shoe on the head.

And so far, Anonymous hasn't released any more details about the alleged hack—even as the FBI has claimed the group lied about the data coming from them.

I wanted at least some sense that Anonymous' offer wasn't just for the lulz, as they say, before I posted this and further stained my already-pretty-stained Google results. So I signed on to Anonymous' IRC chatroom and asked why I should trust the author of press release.

"I do understand your position, i'd like a word before stunting like that, too xD," one of his colleagues said. "On the bright side, I've worked with him for long time now and the man does live up to his word." The author himself went offline soon after posting the press release and hasn't returned.

So, there's me in a tutu. Get used to it because it's going to be up until around 6:30pm tomorrow. (I left my shirt on, because nobody needs to see that. )

My email address is Adrian@gawker.com, and I'm on Twitter at @AdrianChen if any Anonymous hackers and/or journalism prize committees would like to chat.
http://gawker.com/5940444/here-is-a-...oe-on-his-head





Roxon Edges Towards Keeping Online Data for Two Years
Dylan Welch, Ben Grubb, Bianca Hall and Lucy Battersby

The Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, appears to have swung her support behind a controversial plan to capture the online data of all Australians, despite only six weeks ago saying ''the case had yet to be made'' for the policy.

The data retention plan - which would force all Australian telcos and internet service providers to store the online data of all Australians for up to two years - is the most controversial element of a package of more than 40 proposed changes to national security legislation.

If passed, the proposals would be the most significant expansion of national security powers since the Howard-era reforms of the early 2000s.

In a speech to be delivered at the Security in Government conference in Canberra today, Ms Roxon will say that law enforcement agencies need the data retention policy in order to be able to effectively target criminals.

''Many investigations require law enforcement to build a picture of criminal activity over a period of time. Without data retention, this capability will be lost,'' she will say, in a draft of the speech provided to Fairfax Media yesterday.

She will also say technological advancement since the advent of the internet is providing increasing room to hide for criminals and those who threaten Australia's security.

''The intention behind the proposed reform is to allow law enforcement agencies to continue investigating crime in light of new technologies. The loss of this capability would be a major blow to our law enforcement agencies and to Australia's national security."

But in an interview with Fairfax Media in mid July, Ms Roxon appeared to have a different view. ''I'm not yet convinced that the cost and the return - the cost both to industry and the [privacy] cost to individuals - that we've made the case for what it is that people use in a way that benefits our national security,'' she said.

''I think there is a genuine question to be tested, which is why it's such a big part of the proposal.''

Her apparent change of mind may be a result of conversations with the Australian Federal Police, who have long pushed for mandatory online data retention. Neil Gaughan heads the AFP's High Tech Crime Centre and is a vocal advocate for the policy.

''Without data retention laws I can guarantee you that the AFP won't be able to investigate groups such as Anonymous over data breaches because we won't be able to enforce the law,'' he told a cyber security conference recently.

But Andrew Lewman, the executive director of the Tor software project, which disguises a person's location when surfing the web, challenges that view. In July he told Fairfax Media data retention impedes the effectiveness of law enforcement.

''It sounds good and something sexy that politicians should get behind. However, it doesn't stop crime, it builds a massive dossier on everyone at millisecond resolution, and creates more work and challenges for law enforcement to catch actual criminals.

''The problem isn't too little data, the problem is there is already too much data.''

Proposals 'characteristic of a police state'

The proposals are being examined by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security to provide partial scrutiny of Australia's intelligence community.

The committee has thus far received almost 200 submissions from the agencies, members of the public as well as civil liberties and online rights groups.

In a heated submission to the inquiry, Victoria's Acting Privacy Commissioner, Anthony Bendall, dubbed the proposals ''characteristic of a police state'', arguing that data retention in particular was ''premised on the assumption that all citizens should be monitored''.

''Not only does this completely remove the presumption of innocence which all persons are afforded, it goes against one of the essential dimensions of human rights and privacy law: freedom from surveillance and arbitrary intrusions into a person's life."

ISP iiNet said government had failed to demonstrate how current laws were failing or how criminals and terrorists posed a threat to networks, and said asking carriers to intercept and store customers' data for two years could make them ''agents of the state'' and increase costs.

A joint submission from telco industry groups argued it would cost between $500 million and $700 million to keep data for two years. It called for full compensation from the government's security agencies.

The Australian Federal Police and the Australian Taxation Office were among the few supporting the proposal to retain telecommunications data.

The ATO said the proposal would be consistent with European practices and that being able to access real-time telecommunications data would allow it to ''respond more effectively'' to attempts to defraud the Commonwealth.

The AFP, in its submission, said interception capabilities were increasingly being ''undermined'' by fundamental changes to the telecommunications industry and communications technologies. It said telco reform was needed "in order to avoid further degradation of existing capability".

Through the use of case studies, the AFP argued that on numerous occasions it had been restricted by what it could do under current telecommunications laws, and said that many offences went un-prosecuted because of this.

Costs may be passed on to consumers

The AFP conceded that the volume of data and its retention by telcos for use as evidence for agencies presented "challenges", but didn’t disclose how such challenges could be tackled.

Such challenges were highlighted in submissions. Mr Bendall said smaller ISPs, for instance, "may not be able to afford the data storage costs, and these costs may be passed on to consumers".

"It would appear that public support for this type of proposal is largely absent," he said.

Users may abandon web

Mr Bendall also said that data retention could "create an extreme chilling effect" not only on technology but on social interactions, many of which are now conducted solely online.

"Users may move away from using online services due to the fear that their communications are being monitored," he said. "Simply put, the proposal could mean that individuals, due to concerns about surveillance, revert back to offline transactions.

"If this occurred, it would affect existing efficiencies of both businesses and government," he said.

The Australian Privacy Foundation was just as scathing.

"Too many of the proposals outlined ... would herald a major and unacceptable increase in the powers of law enforcement and national security agencies to intrude into the lives of all Australians," it said, adding that the discussion paper was "misleading, and probably intentionally so".

Fears for journalist's sources

It’s not just privacy advocates and telcos that expressed concern with the proposals, but the journalist union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance. In its submission it said it was concerned that any expansion of interception powers and the powers of intelligence agencies had "the potential to threaten press freedom".

"There is considerable concern about the power of police and intelligence agencies to intercept communications, a concern not given proper consideration in the terms of reference," the MEAA said.

Online users' lobby group Electronics Frontiers Australia raised similar concerns to others but pointed out that one of the 40 proposed changes to national security legislation, which required people to divulge passwords, could lead to self-incrimination. It said should such a law be enacted it would undermine "the right of individuals to not co-operate with an investigation".

The lobby group also highlighted concerns with another proposal which would allow the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to use an innocent person's computer to get into a suspect's computer. "The proposal that ASIO would be permitted to 'add, delete or alter data or interfere with, interrupt, or obstruct the lawful use of a computer' could lead to some very serious consequences," it said.

Such consequences could include, it said, pollution of evidence, potentially leading to failures of convictions. It could also provide the means for evidence to be "planted" on innocent parties, it said.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/tec...903-25amz.html





Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Attacks Government's 'Snooper's Charter'

Jimmy Wales says his website would encrypt all connections with Britain, and called the plans 'technologically incompetent'
Alan Travis

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, has described the government's 'snooper's charter' as 'technologically incompetent'. Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has sharply criticised the government's "snooper's charter", designed to track internet, text and email use of all British citizens, as "technologically incompetent".

He said Wikipedia would move to encrypt all its connections with Britain if UK internet companies, such as Vodafone and Virgin Media, were mandated by the government to keep track of every single page accessed by UK citizens.

The entrepreneur said he was confident there would be a general move to encryption across the internet if British-based communication service providers were required to collect and store data for 12 months from overseas companies, such as Google and Facebook, for possible access by the police and security services.

He said the British government would have to resort to the "black arts" of hacking to break encryptions: "It is not the sort of thing I'd expect from a western democracy. It is the kind of thing I would expect from the Iranians or the Chinese and it would be detected immediately by the internet industry," he told MPs and peers.

His intervention came as leading UK internet companies, including Vodafone and Virgin Media, also raised concerns about the responsibility for retaining and storing sensitive data from overseas third-party companies, which, they said, would damage their commercial relationships and entail a competitive disadvantage.

The internet industry, which is giving evidence to a parliamentary special select committee on the draft communications data bill, said the legislation could create new opportunities for hackers and "malicious agents" wanting sensitive private information about individuals.

The London Internet Exchange (Linx), told MPs it had serious concerns that the proposals would create a "profiling engine", a filtering system that would produce detailed profiles on all users of electronic communications systems and allow sophisticated data mining.

In a written submission Linx said it would be a challenge to safeguard this profiling engine, and that a breach would be "a significant threat to national security".

The organisation stated that the profiling engine amounted to "an enormously powerful tool for public authorities". Its submission said: "Its mere existence significantly implicates privacy rights, and its extensive use would represent a dramatic shift in the balance between personal privacy and the capabilities of the state to investigate and analyse the citizen."

The £1.8bn scheme will require UK-based internet and phone providers to retain and store for 12 months the "traffic data" – who sent what, to whom, from where – of every British citizen's internet, text and mobile phone use. The move would exclude the contents of messages.

The Home Office has admitted it cannot force foreign companies like Google and Facebook to store and hand over sensitive personal data. Instead it is hoping for voluntary agreements. But the legislation includes powers to require British communication firms to collect and store third-party data that cross their networks.

Home Office security officials estimate that the rapidly evolving nature of the internet stops them tracking up to 25% of communications data despite such information being used as evidence in the majority of terrorist and serious crime cases. Internet and phone companies currently only keep data collected for their own business billing.

The Internet Service Providers Association said the government estimated that this "gap" could be cut by 10% and questioned whether this was sufficient to justify the proposals or whether it represented value for money.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...oopers-charter





Sir Tim Berners-Lee Accuses Government Of 'Draconian' Internet Snooping

The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has accused the government of invading the privacy by monitoring internet use
Lucy Kinder

Sir Tim warned that plans to monitor individuals' use of the internet would result in Britain losing its reputation as an upholder of web freedom

The plans, by Theresa May, would force service providers to keep records of every phone call, email and website visit in Britain.

Sir Tim told the Times: "“In Britain, like in the US, there has been a series of Bills that would give government very strong powers to, for example, collect data. I am worried about that."

Yesterday was the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation's first global Web Index analysing the state of the web in 61 countries using indicators such as the political, economic and social impact of the web, connectivity and use.

Britain came third in the list which was topped by Sweden and the United States in second place.

Speaking at the launch, Sir Tim said that Britain would soon slip down the rankings if the draft Communications Data Bill became law.

“If the UK introduces draconian legislation that allows the Government to block websites or to snoop on people, which decreases privacy, in future indexes they may find themselves farther down the list,” he said.

The draft bill extends the type of data that internet service providers must store for at least 12 months. Providers would also be required to keep details of a much wider set of data, including use of social network sites, webmail and voice calls over the internet.

Mrs May has justified the need for the new legislation by saying that it is necessary to combat organised crime and terrorism.

Sir Tim's comments came on the same day as he denied that there was an 'off'; switch for the internet.

He said the only way the internet could only ever be completely shut down is if governments across the world coordinated to make it a centralised system:

"At the moment, because countries connect to each other in lots of different ways, there is no one off switch, there is no central place where you can turn it off.

"In order to be able to turn the whole thing off or really block, suppress one particular idea then the countries and governments would have to get together and agree and coordinate and turn it from a decentralised system to being a centralised system.

"And if that does happen it is really important that everybody fights against that sort of direction."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-snooping.html





Feds Say Mobile-Phone Location Data Not ‘Constitutionally Protected’
David Kravets

The Obama administration told a federal court Tuesday that the public has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in cellphone location data, and hence the authorities may obtain documents detailing a person’s movements from wireless carriers without a probable-cause warrant.

The administration, citing a 1976 Supreme Court precedent, said such data, like banking records, are “third-party records,” meaning customers have no right to keep it private. The government made the argument as it prepares for a re-trial of a previously convicted drug dealer whose conviction was reversed in January by the Supreme Court, which found that the government’s use of a GPS tracker on his vehicle was an illegal search.

With the 28 days of vehicle tracking data thrown out of court, the feds now want to argue in a re-trial that it was legally in the clear to use Antoine Jones’ phone location records without a warrant. The government wants to use the records to chronicle where Jones was when he made and received mobile phone calls in 2005.

“A customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records that were never in the possession of the customer,” the administration said in a court filing Tuesday. ”When a cell phone user transmits a signal to a cell tower for his call to be connected, he thereby assumes the risk that the cell phone provider will create its own internal record of which of the company’s towers handles the call. Thus, it makes no difference if some users have never thought about how their cell phones work; a cell phone user can have no expectation of privacy in cell-site information.”

The government’s position comes as prosecutors are shifting their focus to warrantless cell-tower locational tracking of suspects in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in Jones’ case that law enforcement should acquire probable-cause warrants from judges to affix GPS devices to vehicles.

Just after the Jones decision, the FBI pulled the plug on 3,000 GPS-tracking devices.

Jones, as one might suspect, wants the court to find that the feds should get a probable cause warrant for phone records, too.

“In this case, the government seeks to do with cell site data what it cannot do with the suppressed GPS data,” Jones’ attorney Eduardo Balarezo wrote U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle.

The government does not agree.

“Defendant’s motion to suppress cell-site location records cannot succeed under any theory. To begin with, no reasonable expectation of privacy exists in the routine business records obtained from the wireless carrier in this case, both because they are third-party records and because in any event the cell-site location information obtained here is too imprecise to place a wireless phone inside a constitutionally protected space,” the administration wrote the federal judge presiding over the Jones re-trial.

Just as the lower courts were mixed on whether the police could secretly affix a GPS device on a suspect’s car without a warrant, the same is now true about whether a probable-cause warrant is required to obtain so-called cell-site data. During the investigation, a lower court judge in the Jones case authorized the five months of the cell-site data without probable cause, based on government assertions that the data was “relevant and material” to an investigation.

“Knowing the location of the trafficker when such telephone calls are made will assist law enforcement in discovering the location of the premises in which the trafficker maintains his supply narcotics, paraphernalia used in narcotics trafficking such as cutting and packaging materials, and other evident of illegal narcotics trafficking, including records and financial information,” the government wrote in 2005, when requesting Jones’ cell-site data.

That cell-site information was not introduced at trial, as the authorities used the GPS data instead.

The Supreme Court tossed that GPS data, along with Jones’ conviction and life term on Jan. 23 in one of the biggest cases in recent years combining technology and the Fourth Amendment.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority.

That decision, the Obama administration claimed, is “wholly inapplicable” when it comes to cell-site data.

The administration noted that the high court said the physical act of affixing a GPS device to a vehicle amounts to a search and generally requires a warrant. “But when the government merely compels a third-party service provider to produce routine business records in its custody,” the government wrote, “no physical intrusion occurs, and the rule in Jones is therefore wholly inapplicable.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...lly-protected/





FBI vs. Google: The Legal Fight to Unlock Phones
Julia Angwin

A legal battle is brewing between technology companies and the U.S. government over whether law-enforcement agents have the right to obtain passwords to crack into smartphones of suspects.

Google Inc. earlier this year refused to unlock an alleged pimp's cellphone powered by its Android software—even after the Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained a search warrant.

Google's unusual and controversial challenge to the search warrant indicates how murky the legal standards are for new technologies such as smartphones. Under the Supreme Court's so-called Third Party Doctrine, government agents can often obtain data stored with third parties without obtaining a search warrant.

But that standard doesn't take into account data as sensitive as a password—which can be the key to unlocking a larger trove of information such as emails, texts, calls and address lists.

Asking a third party for a password "is awfully new and aggressive," said Paul Ohm, associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School and former federal prosecutor. "Generally, we don't like the FBI to have access to our keys even with a warrant."

An FBI spokesman declined to comment about the agency's policies on cellphone unlocking.

Law enforcement agents often use forensic equipment to simply download the contents of a phone's memory, without attempting to unlock the phone.

But sometimes officers fail to break into a phone or the data they find is encrypted. In that case, they can send a grand jury subpoena to the cellphone owner asking them to turn over their password.

Those requests are legally tricky because the Constitution's Fifth Amendment protects people from self-incrimination. As a result, passwords—and the data protected by those passwords—obtained by grand jury subpoena often cannot be used for prosecution, says Adam Gershowitz, professor of law at William & Mary Law School.

Federal agents now appear to be turning to smartphone software makers such as Google and Apple Inc. for help bypassing cellphone passwords. There is little public data about how many times such requests are made—but law enforcement documents recently obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests from the American Civil Liberties Union contained templates that officers can submit to Apple and Google for help in bypassing passwords.

Neither Apple or Google would comment about the documents or the prevalence of such requests. And since most such requests are not publicly available, it's difficult to determine how often it happens. Google releases a list of total requests it receives each year from law enforcement—but it doesn't provide details about the type of requests. Apple doesn't release a similar list.

"Right now, we cannot have a reasonable informed debate about this issue because we don't have any data," said Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

But it's clear that smartphone software makers are cautious about turning over smartphone passwords. An Apple spokeswoman said the company "won't release any personal information without a search warrant, and we never share anyone's passcode. If a court orders us to retrieve data from an iPhone, we do it ourselves. We never let anyone else unlock a customer's iPhone."

Spokeswomen for Microsoft Corp. and Research In Motion Ltd. say their companies don't collect or store passwords, and hence can't provide them to the government even in the case of a warrant.

Marc Zwillinger, an attorney who practices Internet law, and has challenged governmental legal process on behalf of tech companies including Yahoo Inc. and Myspace LLC, says that requests for account passwords are infrequent but that when companies get them, they should think carefully about whether to comply.

"It creates a situation where a company could be viewed as helping law enforcement do an illegal wiretap if the device is in their possession and the account is still live," he says.

If a company receives a search warrant it doesn't agree with, it can challenge it in court or negotiate directly with law enforcement to narrow the request, Mr. Zwillinger said.

Google has a history of challenging government requests it views as over-reaching. In 2006, Google fought a subpoena from the Department of Justice that sought all the search queries it had received during a two-month period, and all the URLs that it had indexed at that time. Eventually, a judge ruled Google only had to turn over only 50,000 URLs and no search queries.

In that case, U.S. District Judge James Ware wrote that possibility that Google might be forced to turn over search strings such as "[user name] third trimester abortion san jose]…gives this Court pause as to whether the search queries themselves may constitute potentially sensitive information."

In the current Google case involving the alleged primp, FBI Special Agent Jonathan R. Cupina obtained a search warrant in March allowing him to request that Google provide "any and all means of gaining access, including login and password information, password reset, and/or manufacturer default code" for an Android phone—the Samsung Galaxy Exhibit— belonging to Dante Dears.

According to Mr. Cupina's affidavit, Mr. Dears is the founding member of the "Pimpin' Hoes Daily (PhD)" gang, and is on parole. He wears a GPS electronic monitor and has signed a waiver agreeing that his person and property can be searched without a warrant.

In May 2011, the FBI learned from a confidential source that Mr. Dears might be engaged in human trafficking activities. While conducting surveillance, the agents witnessed Mr. Dears "utilizing a cellular telephone frequently for a period of nearly six hours" despite having previously denied to his parole agent that he possessed a cellular phone.

In his affidavit, Mr. Cupina states he suspected Mr. Dears had become something known as a "telephone pimp"—using cellular phones to arrange sexual services of prostitutes—because his electronic monitor limits his physical movements.

In January, the parole agent visited Mr. Dears at his residence in Chula Vista, Calif., and obtained the cellular phone. But Mr. Dears refused to allow the agent to access the phone or to answer any further questions—allegedly in violation of the terms of his parole.

On Feb. 13, Magistrate Judge William V. Gallo in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California issued a warrant to let agents search the phone. The next day, FBI agents worked with computer forensics technicians to attempt to gain access to the contents of the phone, but they were unable to do so.

The agents say they were stumped by the "pattern lock" on the phone— which requires users to move their finger over the touch screen in a precise pattern.

Magistrate Judge Nita L. Stormes approved a search warrant in March to be issued to Google seeking access to the cellphone.

On March 26, the warrant was filed in court with a handwritten note from Mr. Cupina stating, "No property was obtained as Google Legal refused to provide the requested information."

Google didn't reveal its legal reasoning in filings made earlier this year in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the need "to protect user privacy."

A person familiar with the company's legal views said that whenever possible, it seeks to narrow legal requests that are overly broad or that don't adequately notify a user.

A spokesman for the FBI in San Diego said the issue with Google has been resolved, but declined to elaborate citing the fact that aspects of the case were still pending. An attorney for Mr. Dears couldn't be located.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...jEwNDYyWj.html





Leave Your Cellphone at Home

Interview with Jacob Appelbaum
Sarah Resnick

Earlier this year in Wired, writer and intelligence expert James Bamford described the National Security Agency’s plans for the Utah Data Center. A nondescript name, but it has another: the First Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center. The $2 billion facility, scheduled to open in September 2013, will be used to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store the agency’s intercepted communications—everything from emails, cell phone calls, Google searches, and Tweets, to retail transactions. How will all this data be stored? Imagine, if you can, 100,000 square-feet filled with row upon row of servers, stacked neatly on racks. Bamford projects that its processing-capacity may aspire to yottabytes, or 1024 bytes, and for which no neologism of higher magnitude has yet been coined.

To store the data, the NSA must first collect it, and here Bamford relies on a man named William Binney, a former NSA crypto-mathematician, as his main source. For the first time, since leaving the NSA in 2001, Binney went on the record to discuss Stellar Wind, which we all know by now as the warrantless wiretapping program, first approved by George Bush after the 2001 attacks on the twin towers. The program allowed the NSA to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in charge of authorizing eavesdropping on domestic targets, permitting the wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and emails. In his thirty years at the NSA, Binney helped to engineer its automated system of networked data collection which, until 2001, was exclusively directed at foreign targets. Binney left when the organization started to use this same technology to spy on American citizens. He tells of secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities, controlled by the NSA, and powered by complex software programs examining Internet traffic as it passes through fiber-optic cables. (At a local event last week, Binney circulated a list of possible interception points, including 811 10th Avenue, between 53rd & 54th St., which houses the largest New York exchange of AT&T Long Lines.) He tells of software, created by a company called Narus, that parses US data sources: any communication arousing suspicion is automatically copied and sent to the NSA. Once a name enters the Narus database, all phone calls, emails and other communications are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders.

The NSA wasn’t the only intelligence-gathering agency to have its domestic surveillance powers expanded in the wake of September 11th. The USA PATRIOT Act, for instance, allows the FBI to spy on US citizens without demonstrating probable cause that its targets are engaged in criminal activities. Under Section 215 of the Act, the now infamous National Security Letters—which formerly required that the information being sought pertain to a foreign power or agent of a foreign power—can compel the disclosure of sensitive information held by banks, credit companies, telephone carrier, and Internet Service Providers, among many others, about US citizens. The recipient of an NSL is typically gagged from disclosing the fact or nature of the request.

It’s no secret that, whereas the Fourth Amendment prevents against unreasonable search and seizure, concerns over “national security” occasioned its disregard and the violation of privacy rights of even the most ordinary citizens. Activists have all the more reason to worry, repeatedly turning up as the subject of terrorist investigations. For instance, in 2006 the ACLU revealed that the Pentagon was secretly conducting surveillance of protest activities, antiwar organizations, and groups opposed to military recruitment policies, including Quakers and student organizations. Relying on sources from the Department of Homeland Security, local police departments, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Pentagon collected, stored, and shared this data through the Threat and Local Observation Database, or TALON, designed to track terrorist threats. Or take Scott Crow, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer in the global justice movement, who, as the New York Times reported last year, is one of dozens of political activists across the country to have come under scrutiny from the FBI’s increased counterterrorism operation. The FBI set up a video camera outside his house, monitored guests as they came and went, tracked his emails and phone conversations, and picked through his trash to identify his bank and mortgage companies, presumably to send them subpoenas. Others to have been investigated included animal rights activists in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When in 2008, President Obama took the reigns from George W. Bush, there was an expectation that much, or at least some, of this activity would be curbed. Yet, as Bamford’s article attests, the goverment’s monitoring and collection of our digital data remains steadfast.

When the Occupy protests started in mid-September of last year, I relied on data-generating technologies increasingly, more so than I had ever before. Within a few weeks I had joined multiple OWS-related listservs; I’d started following Twitter with unprecedented commitment; I spent more hours on Facebook than I care to acknowledge. I doubt I am the only one. At the same time, there was a widespread sense of precaution—just because we were engaging in legal activities, covered by our First Amendment rights, no one, it seemed, should presume herself exempt from the possibility of surveillance. Sensitive conversations took place in loud bars, never over email. Text messages were presumed unsafe. In meetings, cell phone batteries were removed on occasion. Nevertheless, it was easy to feel unimportant (why would anyone watch me?) and equally easy to let standards relax—especially when it meant reclaiming conveniences that, once enjoyed, we’re difficult to give up. Leaving a trail of potentially incriminating digital data seemed inevitable. But how bad could it really be? And was there no way to use these same tools while safeguarding our privacy?

In late April, I sat down with the independent security researcher, hacker, and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum, who knows a thing or two about the surveillance state. Appelbaum is one of the key members of the Tor project, which relies on a worldwide volunteer network of servers to reroute Internet traffic across a set of encrypted relays. Doing so conceals a user’s location, and protects her from a common form of networking surveillance known as traffic analysis, used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Tor is both free (as in freedom) and free of charge. Appelbaum is also the only known American member of the international not-for-profit WikiLeaks.

Resnick: The recent article in Wired describes where and how the NSA plans to store its share of collected data. But as the article explains, the Utah facility will have another important function: cryptanalysis, or code-breaking, as much of the data cycling through will be heavily encrypted. It also suggests that the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), expected to remain durable for at least another decade, may be cracked by the NSA in a much shorter time if they’ve built a secret computer that is considerably faster than any of the machines we know about. But more to the point—is encryption safe?

Appelbaum: Some of it is as safe as we think it can be, and some of it is not safe at all. The number one rule of “signals intelligence” is to look for plain text, or signaling information—who is talking to whom. For instance, you and I have been emailing, and that information, that metadata, isn’t encrypted, even if the contents of our messages are. This “social graph” information is worth more than the content. So, if you use SSL-encryption to talk to the OWS server for example, great, they don’t know what you’re saying. Maybe. Let’s assume the crypto is perfect. They see that you’re in a discussion on the site, they see that Bob is in a discussion, and they see that Emma is in a discussion. So what happens? They see an archive of the website, maybe they see that there were messages posted, and they see that the timing of the messages correlates to the time you were all browsing there. They don’t need to know to break a crypto to know what was said and who said it.

Resnick: And this type of surveillance is called …?

Appelbaum: Traffic analysis. It’s as if they are sitting outside your house, watching you come and go, as well as the house of every activist you deal with. Except they’re doing it electronically. They watch you, they take notes, they infer information by the metadata of your life, which implies what it is that you’re doing. They can use it to figure out a cell of people, or a group of people, or whatever they call it in their parlance where activists become terrorists. And it’s through identification that they move into specific targeting, which is why it’s so important to keep this information safe first.

For example, they see that we’re meeting. They know that I have really good operational security. I have no phone. I have no computer. It would be very hard to track me here unless they had me physically followed. But they can still get to me by way of you. They just have to own your phone, or steal your recorder on the way out. The key thing is that good operational security has to be integrated into all of our lives so that observation of what we’re doing is much harder. Of course it’s not perfect. They can still target us, for instance, by sending us an exploit in our email, or a link in a web browser that compromises each of our computers. But if they have to exploit us directly, that changes things a lot. For one, the NYPD is not going to be writing exploits. They might buy software to break into your computer, but if they make a mistake, we can catch them. But it’s impossible to catch them if they’re in a building somewhere reading our text messages as they flow by, as they go through the switching center, as they write them down. We want to raise the bar so much that they have to attack us directly, and then in theory the law protects us to some extent.

Resnick: So if I were arrested, and the evidence presented came from a targeted attack on my computer, and I knew about the attack, I would have some kind of legal recourse?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s an interesting question. What is the legal standard for breaking into someone’s computer because they were at a protest? Congratulations, take that to the Supreme Court, you might be able to make some really good law. I think the answer is that it’s a national newsworthy incident—nobody knows the cops break into people’s computers. The cops break into someone’s house, the Fourth Amendment is super clear about that—it can’t be done without a warrant.

Resnick: In January of last year, it was reported that the records for your Twitter account— along with those of Julian Assange, Private Bradley Manning, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrjp, and Icelandic lawmaker Brigatta Jonsdottir—were subpoenaed by the US government. What is perhaps most notable in this case is not that the accounts were subpoenaed, but that the orders, usually gagged and carried out in secret, became public knowledge. Twitter contested the secrecy order and won the right to notify you. Several months later, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Google and the Internet service provider Sonic.net, had received similar orders to turn over your data.

Appelbaum: Twitter notified me. But as for Google and Sonic.net, I read about it in the Wall Street Journal like everybody else. So now I can talk about it because it was in a public newspaper. Those are “2703(d) administrative subpoenas,” and they asked for IP addresses, and the email addresses of the people I communicated with, among other things. The government asserts that it has the right to get that metadata, that “signaling” or relationship information, without a warrant. They get to gag the company, and the company can’t fight it, because it’s not their data, it’s my data, or it’s data about me, so they have no Constitutional standing. And the government asserts that I have no expectation of privacy because I willingly disclosed it to a third party. And in fact my Twitter data was given to the government—no one has really written about that yet. We are still appealing but we lost the stay, which means Twitter had to disclose the data to the government, and whether or not they can use it is pending appeal. Once they get the data, it’s not like it’s private or secret—and even if they can’t use it as evidence, they can still use it in their investigations.

Resnick: In January of this year, the Twitter account of writer and OWS protester Malcolm Harris was subpoenaed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. I think it’s safe to assume these incidents are not anomalies. In which case, is there a way to use social media sites like Twitter without putting our private data at risk? Because these sites can be very useful tools of course.

Appelbaum: In the case of something like Twitter, you can use Tor on the Android phone—we have a version of Tor for Android called Orbot—and Twitter together and that’s essentially the best you’re going to do. And even that isn’t particularly great. Twitter keeps a list of IP addresses where you’ve logged in, but if you use Tor, it won’t know you are logging in from your phone. It’s powerful, but the main problem is that it’s kind of complicated to use. On your computer, you can use the Tor browser, and when you log into Twitter, you’re fine, no problem all—your IP address will trace back to Tor again. So now when the government asserts that you have no expectation of privacy, you can say all right, well I believe I have an expectation of privacy, which is why I use Tor. I signal that. And the private messaging capability of Twitter—don’t use it for sensitive stuff. Twitter keeps a copy of all its messages.

Resnick: During the perceived wave of Internet activism throughout the 2009 Iranian election protests, a new proprietary software called Haystack received a lot of media attention. Haystack promised Iranian activists tightly encrypted messages, access to censored websites, and the ability to obfuscate Internet traffic. You later tested the software and demonstrated its claims to be false. For those of us who don’t have your technical skill set, how can we assess whether a particular tool is safe to use, especially if it’s new?

Appelbaum: First, is the source code available? Second, if the claims are just too good to be true, they probably are. There’s a thing called snake oil crypto or snake oil software, where the product promises the moon and the sun. When a developer promises that a proprietary software is super secure and only used by important people, it’s sketchy. Third, are the people working on this part of the community that has a reputation for accomplishing these things? That’s a hard one, but ask someone you know and trust. How would you go on a date with someone? How would you do an action with someone? Transitive trust is just as important in these situations.

Another thing to look at is whether it’s centralized or decentralized. For example Haystack was centralized, whereas Tor is decentralized. Also, how is it sustained? Will it inject ads into your web browser, like AnchorFree, the producer of the Hotspot Shield VPN? Or is it like Riseup.net, whose VPN service monetizes not through your traffic, but through donations and solidarity and mutual aid? And if they can inject ads, that means they can inject a back door. That’s super sketchy—if they do that, that’s bad news. So you want to be careful about that.

Finally, remember: The truth is like a bullet that pierces through the armor of charlatans.

Resnick: What should we know about cell phones? It’s hard to imagine going to a protest without one. But like all networked technologies, surely they are double-edged?

Appelbaum: Cell phones are tracking devices that make phone calls. It’s sad, but it’s true. Which means software solutions don’t always matter. You can have a secure set of tools on your phone, but it doesn’t change the fact that your phone tracks everywhere you go. And the police can potentially push updates onto your phone that backdoor it and allow it to be turned into a microphone remotely, and do other stuff like that. The police can identify everybody at a protest by bringing in a device called an IMSI catcher. It’s a fake cell phone tower that can be built for 1500 bucks. And once nearby, everybody’s cell phones will automatically jump onto the tower, and if the phone’s unique identifier is exposed, all the police have to do is go to the phone company and ask for their information.

Resnick: So phones are tracking devices. They can also be used for surreptitious recording. Would taking the battery out disable this capability?

Appelbaum: Maybe. But iPhones, for instance, don’t have a removable battery; they power off via the power button. So if I wrote a backdoor for the iPhone, it would play an animation that looked just like a black screen. And then when you pressed the button to turn it back on it would pretend to boot. Just play two videos.

Resnick: And how easy is it to create something like to that?

Appelbaum: There are weaponized toolkits sold by companies like FinFisher that enable breaking into BlackBerries, Android phones, iPhones, Symbian devices and other platforms. And with a single click, say, the police can own a person, and take over her phone.

Resnick: Right—in November of last year, the Wall Street Journal first reported on this new global market for off-the-shelf surveillance technology, and created “Surveillance Catalog” on their website, which includes documents obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks has also released documents on these companies. The industry has grown from almost nothing to a retail market worth $5 billion per year. And whereas companies making and selling this gear say it is available only to governments and law enforcement and is intended to catch criminals, critics say the market represents a new sort of arms trade supplying Western governments and repressive nations alike.

Appelbaum: It’s scary because [accessing these products is so] easy. But when a company builds a backdoor, and sells it, and says trust us, only good guys will use it… well, first of all, we don’t know how to secure computers, and anybody that says otherwise is full of shit. If Google can get owned, and Boeing can get owned, and Lockheed Martin can get owned, and engineering and communication documents from Marine One can show up on a filesharing network, is it realistic to assume that perfect security is possible? Knowing this is the case, the right thing is to not build any backdoors. Or assume these backdoors are all abused and bypass them so that the data acquired is very uninteresting. Like encrypted phone calls between two people—it’s true they can wiretap the data, but they’ll just get noise.

When Hillary Clinton and the State Department say they want to help people abroad fight repressive governments, they paint Internet freedom as something they can enable with $25 million. Whereas in reality the FBI makes sure that our communications tech isn’t secure. This makes it impossible for people like me to help people abroad overthrow their governments because our government has ensured that all their technology is backdoor ready. And in theory, they try to legitimize state surveillance here, and there they try to make it illegitimate. They say, “In over-there-a-stan, surveillance is oppressive. But over here, it’s okay, we have a lawful process.” (Which is not necessarily a judicial process. For example, Eric Holder and the drones . . . sounds like a band, right?)

Resnick: Okay, so one thing I’ve heard more than once at meetings when security culture comes up is that . . . well, there’s a sense that too much precaution grows into (or comes out of) paranoia, and paranoia breeds mistrust—and all of it can be paralyzing and lead to a kind of inertia. How would you respond to something like that?

Appelbaum: The people who that say that—if they’re not cops, they’re feeling unempowered. The first response people have is, whatever, I’m not important. And the second is, they’re not watching me, and even if they were, there’s nothing they could find because I’m not doing anything illegal. But the thing is, taking precautions with your communications is like safe sex in that you have a responsibility to other people to be safe—your transgressions can fuck other people over. The reality is that when you find out it will be too late. It’s not about doing a perfect job, it’s about recognizing you have a responsibility to do that job at all, and doing the best job you can manage, without it breaking down your ability to communicate, without it ruining your day, and understanding that sometimes it’s not safe to undertake an action, even if other times you would. That’s the education component.

So security culture stuff sounds crazy, but the technological capabilities of the police, especially with these toolkits for sale, is vast. And to thwart that by taking all the phones at a party and putting them in a bag and putting them in the freezer and turning on music in the other room—true, someone in the meeting might be a snitch, but at least there’s no audio recording of you.

Part of informed consent is understanding the risks you are taking as you decide whether to participate in something. That’s what makes us free—the freedom to question what we’re willing to do. And of course it’s fine to do that. But it’s not fine to say, I don’t believe there’s a risk, you’re being paranoid, I’m not a target. When people say that they don’t want to take precautions, we need to show them how easy it is to do it. And to insist that not doing it is irresponsible, and most of all, that these measures are effective to a degree, and worth doing for that reason. And it’s not about perfection, because perfection is the enemy of “good enough.”

I would encourage people to think about the activity they want to engage in, and then say, Hey, this is what I want to do. Work together collaboratively to figure out how to do that safely and securely, but also easily without needing to give someone a technical education. Because that’s a path of madness. And if people aren’t willing to change their behaviors a little bit, you just can’t work with them. I mean that’s really what it comes down to. If people pretend that they’re not being oppressed by the state when they are literally being physically beaten, and forced to give up retinal scans, that’s fucking ridiculous. We have to take drastic measures for some of these things.

The FBI has this big fear that they’re going to “go dark,” which means that all the ways they currently obtain information will disappear. Well, America started with law enforcement in the dark; once, we were perceived to be innocent until proven guilty. And just because the surveillance is expanding, and continues to expand, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push back. If you haven’t committed a crime they should have no reason to get that information about you, especially without a warrant.

Resnick: Are there any other tools or advice you would suggest to an activist, or anyone for that matter?

Appelbaum: Well, it’s important to consider the whole picture of all the electronic devices that we have. First, you should use Tor and the Tor browser for web browsing. Know that your home internet connection is probably not safe, particularly if it’s tied to your name. If you use a Mac or Windows operating system, be especially careful. For instance, there’s a program called Evilgrade that makes it easy for attackers to install a backdoor on a computer by exploiting weaknesses in the auto-update feature of many software programs. So if you have Adobe’s PDF reader, and you’re downloading and installing the update from Adobe, well, maybe you’ll get a little extra thing, and you’re owned. And the cops have a different but better version of that software. Which is part of why I encourage people to use Ubontu or Debian or Linux instead of proprietary systems like a Mac or whatever. Because there are exploits for everything. If you’re in a particularly sensitive situation, use a live bootable CD called TAILS—it gives you a Linux desktop where everything routes over Tor with no configuration. Or, if you’re feeling multilingual, host stuff in another country. Open an email account in Sweden, and use TAILS to access it. Most important is to know your options. A notepad next to a fireplace is a lot more secure than a computer in some ways, especially a computer with no encryption. You can always throw the notepad in the fireplace and that’s that.

For email, using Riseup.net is good news. The solutions they offer are integrated with Tor as much as possible. They’re badass. Because of the way they run the system, I’m pretty sure that the only data they have is encrypted. And I’d like to think that what little unencrypted data they do have, they will fight tooth and nail to protect. Whereas, yes, you can use Tor and Gmail together, but it’s not as integrated—when you sign in, Gmail doesn’t ask if you want to route this over Tor. But also, Google inspects your traffic as a method of monetization. I’d rather give Riseup fifty dollars a month for the equivalent service of Gmail, knowing their commitment to privacy. And also knowing that they would tell the cops to go fuck themselves. There’s a lot of value in that.

For chatting, use software with off-the-record messaging (OTR)—not Google’s “go off the record,” but the actual encryption software—which allows you to have an end-to-end encrypted conversation. And configure it to work with Tor. You can bootstrap a secure communication channel on top of an insecure one. On a Mac, use Adium—it comes with OTR, but you still have to turn it on. When you chat with people, click verify and read the fingerprint to each other over the telephone. You want to do this because there could be a “man in the middle” relaying the messages, which means that you are both talking to a third party, and that third party is recording it all.

As for your cell phone, consider it a tracking device and a monitoring device and treat it appropriately. Be very careful about using cell phones, but consider especially the patterns you make. If you pull the battery, you’ve generated an anomaly in your behavior, and perhaps that’s when they trigger people to go physically surveil you. Instead, maybe don’t turn it off, just leave it at home. Because, as I said earlier, in a world with lots of data retention, our data trails tell a story about us, and even if the story is made of truthful facts, it’s not necessarily the truth. On a cell phone, you can install stuff like OStel, which allows you to make encrypted voice-over-the-Internet calls, or PrivateGSM—it’s not free, but it’s available for BlackBerries, Android phones, iPhones and so on. Which means that if they want to intercept your communication, they have to break into your phone. It’s not perfect. Gibberbot for the Android allows you to use Tor and Jabber—which is like Google Chat—with OTR automatically configured. You type in your Jabber ID, it routes over Tor, and when you chat with other people, it encrypts the messages end-to-end so even the Jabber server can’t see what’s being said. And there are a lot of tools like that to choose from.

Another thing to consider is the mode in which we meet. If we want to edit something collaboratively, there’s a program called Etherpad. And there’s a social networking application called Crabgrass, and hosted at we.riseup.net. It’s like a private Facebook. Riseup still has a lot of the data, but it’s private by default. So it’s secure, short of being hacked, which is possible, or short of some legal process. And if you use it in a Tor browser, and never reveal information about yourself, you’re in really good shape. Unlike Facebook, which is like the Stasi, but crowdsourced. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. I once had a Facebook account—it’s fun and a great way to meet people. But it is not safe for political organizing, especially when you’re part of the minority, or when you’re not part of the minority, but you are part of the disempowered majority.

As a final thought, I’d say just to remember that a big part of this is social behavior and not technology per se. And a big part of it is accepting that while we may live in a dystopian society right now, we don’t always have to. That’s the tradeoff, right? Because what is OWS working toward? The answer is, something different. And if we want an end to social inequality, the surveillance state is part of what we have to change. If we make it worthless to surveil people, we will have done this. So, it needs to be the case that what we do doesn’t hang us for what we wish to create.
http://nplusonemag.com/leave-your-cellphone-at-home





Once All Our Cars Can Talk to Each Other, What Will They Reveal About Us?

In the future, cars will be networked, personalized, and connected to the cloud. The laws protecting personal data collected from these cars? Still largely road kill.
Dan Tynan

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the IFA 2012 consumer electronics show in Berlin as a guest of the IFA organizers. When not drinking Pilsner and eating bratwurst I managed to squeeze in a panel on the future of the car, featuring representatives from Ford, Microsoft, Inrix (the leading provider of aggregated traffic data to onboard GPS systems), and TuneIn Radio, makers of a music app for cars. I also interviewed Pim van der Jagt, a managing director for Ford Europe.

Bottom line? In a few short years our cars will be connected and talking to each other. They will also be able to collect vast amounts of data about who we are, where we go, and what we do. Some of these things will undoubtedly make our vehicles much safer; some may erase what little roadside privacy we have left.

This is more than just Jetsons-like fantasy. Last month the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and eight major car manufacturers launched a year-long test of car-to-car communications in Ann Arbor. Some 2800 cars, trucks, and city buses have been equipped with gear that will broadcast their size, speed, and location to each other as they roll down the road, using a special band of WiFi spectrum reserved for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. If another car gets too close or a pedestrian suddenly steps into the intersection, drivers receive an alert and can react accordingly.

Some 70 percent of all accidents can be avoided if cars are networked, says van der Jagt. But that’s really just the beginning. Technology already exists that would allow your car’s computer to take control of the brakes and accelerator to avoid a collision, or to moderate the speed of each car to keep traffic flowing. And while we’re still a long ways away from being able to climb into the backseat and take a nap while our cars drive us to our destination (sorry Google Car fans), systems that can take the wheel during certain situations - like when stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic -- are likely to appear much sooner, says van der Jagt. The only question is whether drivers would be willing to hand the wheel over to their computer.

Because the cars in the Ann Arbor test only need to know the location of other vehicles within 300 meters, there’s no need to connect to the Internet or record your car’s location, says van der Jagt. And since the system doesn’t collect any data from the car’s registration or VIN, there’s no way for Ford or anyone else to know who you are and where you’re going, he adds.

But that’s just one aspect of the connected car. The car of the future will also be personalized. It will be able to tell who just climbed behind the wheel and adjust the seats, mirrors, environmental controls, and radio stations accordingly. Using your smart phone, it will be able to connect to your data in the cloud, download your Outlook calendar, remind you about your next meeting, calculate when you’ll get there, and send an email to other attendees if you’re running late. It will know the music you like to listen to, the routes you like to take each day and how fast you drive to get there. Van der Jagt says Ford is even working on sensors built into the seats that can monitor your heart rate to determine if you’re about to fall asleep at the wheel or just had a heart attack. For those features, the car (and its various mobile service providers) will definitely need to know who you are and where you are.

The question then becomes, what happens to all this data? At this point, Inrix collects all its traffic data anonymously, and Ford and Microsoft’s philosophy is the customer owns the data. But exactly what that means is unclear. Are identity and location data stored, and if so, by whom and for how long? What other entities will have access to this information? Will the cops demand this data in order to nab speeders? And what about companies that want to monetize that data – like an insurance company that offers discounts for good drivers while penalizing those who put the pedal to the metal on a semi-regular basis, as Progressive Insurance already does via its “black box” electronic data recorders? What’s to keep a mobile service provider from selling that data to the highest bidders?

We’ve already seen what happens with cell phone data that’s collected by the wireless companies: Police made more than 1.3 million requests for location data last year alone, roughly two thirds of them in non-emergency situations. It was up to the wireless companies’ attorneys to determine whether those requests would be honored and their customers’ location data shared. Federal courts have recently ruled that sharing such data without a warrant is not a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure. And while commercial use of location data is still in its infancy, in part because wireless companies fear a privacy backlash, that won’t last forever. That data too could be a target of law enforcement requests.

If the tests in Ann Arbor prove successful, car-to-car networking is likely to be mandated by NHTSA – and may appear in cars as early as 2018. The notion of cloud-connected cars is less certain, but also seems inevitable. The question will be whether we will gain the legal right to control how our car data is used, or if the mobile service companies will be the ones with their hands firmly on the wheel.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...eveal-about-us





Lord Camden on NSA Surveillance
Julian Sanchez

I’m doing a deep dive into the pre-history of the Fourth Amendment, and am continuously amazed at how perfectly the condemnations of the “general warrants” that incensed the Framers apply to the programmatic authority granted the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act. The legal challenge to that statute is currently hung up on questions of standing, which will shortly be before the Supreme Court in the case of Amnesty v. Clapper. The government’s position is that only those who can prove they’ve actually been wiretapped are entitled to challenge the sweeping and highly discretionary surveillance programs authorized by the law—and since FISA surveillance is permanently secret by default, nobody can have that proof unless the government volunteers it.

Which is funny (if you have a morbid sense of humor), because in one of the three seminal cases historians regard as the inspiration for the Fourth Amendment, Entick v. Carrington, Lord Camden’s ruling cites this exact situation as a key reason why general warrants should be forbidden:

[The general warrant] is executed by messengers with or without a constable (for it can never be pretended, that such is necessary in point of law) in the presence or the absence of the party, as the messenger shall think fit, and without a witness to testify what passes at the time of the transaction; so that when the papers are gone, as the only witnesses are the trespassers, the party injured is left without proof.

If this injury falls upon an innocent person, he is as destitute of remedy as the guilty: and the whole transaction is so guarded against discovery, that if the officer should be disposed to carry off a bank bill he may do it with impunity, since there is no man capable of proving either the taker or the thing taken.

Because a general warrant, unlike a specific or particularized one, left it to the discretion of the executor who would be searched, it would give rise to an intolerable scenario where many innocent people might be subject to the exposure or seizure of their private papers, with no realistic prospect of remedy for the invasion. The Framers of the Bill of Rights, naturally, found this intolerable too—and thus scholars pretty much universally recognize that the primary purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to prohibit such general warrants.

If the government’s argument is allowed to fly, we have to conclude that the Framers utterly failed in their attempt to remedy the kind of problem Lord Camden identified, because the problem just reappears at a higher level. General warrants, abhorrent for a host of reasons Camden and his contemporaries identified, are formally prohibited. But if you want to enlist the courts to enforce that prohibition, by challenging a law that rather blatantly establishes a system of general warrants, you’ve got to prove you were actually searched under one of those general warrants. When the digital papers are acquired, as the only witnesses are the eavesdroppers, the party injured is left without proof, and the whole transaction is so guarded against discovery that there is no man capable of proving either the interceptor or the thing intercepted.

Take a deep breath and appreciate the chutzpah involved here for a second. The government is effectively saying they’re immune from Fourth Amendment challenges because they have managed to create the exact, explicitly described scenario the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. Maybe next they can pass a law making it illegal to publicly complain that your First Amendment rights have been violated.
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2012/09...-surveillance/





We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena
David Kravets

When Golden Valley Electric Association of rural Alaska got an administrative subpoena from the Drug Enforcement Administration in December 2010 seeking electricity bill information on three customers, the company did what it usually does with subpoenas — it ignored them.

That’s the association’s customer privacy policy, because administrative subpoenas aren’t approved by a judge.

But by law, utilities must hand over customer records — which include any billing and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data — to the DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is “relevant” to an investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this month.

Meet the administrative subpoena: With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.

In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative subpoena, according to interviews and government reports.

“I think this is out of control. What has happened is, unfortunately, these statutes have been on the books for many, many years and the courts have acquiesced,” said Joe Evans, the utility’s attorney.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that federal officials from a broad spectrum of government agencies issue them hundreds of thousands of times annually. But none of the agencies are required to disclose fully how often they utilize them — meaning there is little, if any, oversight of this tactic that’s increasingly used in the war on drugs, the war on terror and, seemingly, the war on Americans’ constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable government trespass into their lives.

That’s despite proof that FBI agents given such powers under the Patriot Act quickly began to abuse them and illegally collected Americans’ communications records, including those of reporters. Two scathing reports from the Justice Department’s Inspector General uncovered routine and pervasive illegal use of administrative subpoenas by FBI anti-terrorism agents given nearly carte blanche authority to demand records about Americans’ communications with no supervision.

When the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, perhaps the nation’s most liberal appeals court based in San Francisco, ordered Golden Valley to fork over the data earlier this month, the court said the case was “easily” decided because the records were “relevant” to a government drug investigation.

With the data the Alaska utility handed over, the DEA may then use further administrative subpoenas to acquire the suspected indoor-dope growers’ phone records, stored e-mails, and perhaps credit-card purchasing histories — all to build a case to acquire a probable-cause warrant to physically search their homes and businesses.

But the administrative subpoena doesn’t just apply to utility records and drug cases. Congress has spread the authority across a huge swath of the U.S. government, for investigating everything from hazardous waste disposal, the environment, atomic energy, child exploitation, food stamp fraud, medical insurance fraud, terrorism, securities violations, satellites, seals, student loans, and for breaches of dozens of laws pertaining to fruits, vegetables, livestock and crops.

Not one of the government agencies with some of the broadest administrative subpoena powers Wired contacted, including the departments of Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, would voluntarily hand over data detailing how often they issued administrative subpoenas.

The Drug Enforcement Administration obtained the power under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and is believed to be among the biggest issuers of administrative subpoenas.

“It’s a tool in the toolbox we have to build a drug investigation. Obviously, a much, much lower threshold than a search warrant,” said Lawrence Payne, a DEA spokesman, referring to the administrative subpoena generically. Payne declined to discuss individual cases.

Payne said in a telephone interview that no database was kept on the number of administrative subpoenas the DEA issued.

But in 2006, Ava Cooper Davis, the DEA’s deputy assistant administrator, told a congressional hearing, “The administrative subpoena must have a DEA case file number, be signed by the investigator’s supervisor, and be given a sequential number for recording in a log book or computer database so that a particular field office can track and account for any administrative subpoenas issued by that office.”

After being shown Davis’ statement, Payne then told Wired to send in a Freedom of Information Act request, as did some of the local DEA offices we contacted, if they got back to us at all. “Would suggest a FOIA request to see whether you can get a number of administrative subpoenas. Our databases have changed over the years as far as how things are tracked and we don’t have access to those in public affairs unfortunately,” Payne said in an e-mail.

He said the agency has “never” been asked how many times it issued administrative subpoenas.

Amy Baggio, a Portland, Oregon federal public defender representing drug defendants for a decade, said DEA agents “use these like a doctor’s prescription pad on their desk.” Sometimes, she said, they issue “hundreds upon hundreds of them” for a single prosecution — often targeting mobile phone records.

“They are using them exponentially more in all types of federal criminal investigations. I’m seeing them in every drug case now,” Baggio said. “Nobody is watching what they are doing. I perceive a complete lack of oversight because there isn’t any required.”

A typical DEA investigation might start with an informant or an arrested dealer suspected of drug trafficking, she said. The authorities will use an administrative subpoena to get that target’s phone records — logs of the incoming and outgoing calls — and text-message logs of the numbers of incoming and outgoing texts. Then the DEA will administratively subpoena that same information for the phone numbers disclosed from the original subpoena, and so on, she said.

Often, Baggio said, the records not only show incoming and outgoing communications, they also highlight the mobile towers a phone pinged when performing that communication.

“Then they try to make a connection for drug activity and they do that again and again,” Baggio said. “They used a subpoena to know that my client used a phone up in Canada, but he said he was playing soccer with his kids in Salem.” That client is doing 11 years on drug trafficking charges, thanks to an investigation, Baggio said, that commenced with the use of administrative subpoenas.

The FBI was as tight-lipped as the DEA about the number of administrative subpoenas it issues.

Susan McKee, an FBI spokeswoman, suggested that some of the bureau’s figures for how many administrative subpoenas it has issued, for as many years back as possible, “may be classified.”

In a follow-up e-mail, McKee offered the same advice as the DEA.

“I am sorry the statistics you are looking for are not readily available. I would suggest that you explore the FOIA process,” she said.

If all of those statistics are classified, that would be very odd. The FBI is required to report annually how often they use the terrorism and espionage-specific administrative subpoenas known as National Security Letters to target Americans.

In all, the bureau has reported issuing 290,000 National Security Letters directed at Americans in the past decade.

But those aimed at foreigners are not required to be accounted for publicly. Likewise, FBI anti-terrorism requests for subscriber information — the name and phone numbers associated with phone, e-mail or Twitter accounts for example, aren’t included in that tally either, regardless if the account holder is an American or foreigner.

All of which means that, even in the one instance where public reporting is required of administrative subpoenas, the numbers are massively under-reported, according to Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I think it’s ridiculous they won’t release the real numbers,” she said. Richardson speculated that the government has “something to hide.”

Some of the stranger statutes authorizing administrative subpoenas involve the Agriculture Department’s power to investigate breaches of the Floral Research and Consumer Information Act and the Fresh Cut Flowers and Fresh Cut Greens Promotion and Information Act. The Commerce Department has administrative subpoena power for enforcing laws relating to the Atlantic tuna and the Northern Pacific halibut. It also has those powers when it comes to enforcing the National Weather Modification Act of 1976, requiring “any person to submit a report before, during, or after that person may engage in any weather modification attempt or activity.”

In a 2002 government report, the Commerce Department said it had not used its administrative subpoena powers to enforce the National Weather Modification Act “in the recent past.” Susan Horowitz, a Commerce Department spokeswoman, urged Wired to send in a FOIA in a bid to obtain data surrounding how often it issues administrative subpoenas.

Lacking in all of these administrative subpoenas is Fourth Amendment scrutiny — in other words, judicial oversight. That’s because probable cause — the warrant standard — does not apply to the administrative subpoena. Often, the receiving party is gagged from disclosing them to the actual targets, who could, if notified, ask a judge to quash it.

And even when they are challenged in court, judges defer to Congress — the Fourth Amendment notwithstanding.

In one seminal case on the power of the administrative subpoena, the Supreme Court in 1950 instructed the lower courts that the subpoenas should not be quashed if “the inquiry is within the authority of the agency, the demand is not too indefinite and the information sought is reasonably relevant.”

In the mobile age, one of the biggest targets of the administrative subpoena appears to be the cellphone. AT&T, the nation’s second-largest mobile carrier, replied to a congressional inquiry in May that it had received 63,100 subpoenas for customer information in 2007. That more than doubled to 131,400 last year. (AT&T did not say whether any of the subpoenas were issued by a grand jury. AT&T declined to elaborate on the figures.)

By contrast, AT&T reported 36,900 court orders for subscriber data in 2007. That number grew to 49,700 court orders last year, a growth rate that’s anemic compared to the doubling of subpoenas in the same period.

In all, the nation’s mobile carriers reported that they responded to 1.3 million requests last year for subscriber information. Other than AT&T, most of the figures that the nine mobile carriers reported did not directly break down the numbers between warrants and subpoenas.

In a letter to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), AT&T said it usually always positively responds to subpoenas except when “law enforcement may attempt to obtain information using a subpoena when a court order is required.” While there is much confusion as to when a court order is needed, they are generally required for wiretapping and sometimes for ongoing locational data.

Markey’s office did not respond for comment.

Many, including Baggio, charge that the government’s use of administrative subpoenas is often nothing less than a “fishing expedition.” And the courts don’t seem to mind.

In the Golden Valley case, the San Francisco federal appeals court said the outcome was a no-brainer, that Congress had spoken.

“We easily conclude that power consumption records at the three customer residences satisfy the relevance standard for the issuance of an administrative subpoena in a drug investigation,” the court ruled.

The decision seemingly trumps a Supreme Court ruling in 2001 that the authorities must obtain search warrants to employ thermal-imaging devices to detect indoor marijuana growing operations. Ironically, the justices ruled that the imaging devices, used outside a house, carry the potential to “shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy.”

Rewind to 1996, when the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the drug-trafficking conviction of a man arrested aboard an Amtrak train in December 1993. A DEA agent issued an administrative subpoena demanding Amtrak hand over passenger lists and reservations for trains stopping in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the agent was based.

The agent reviewed the reservation information looking for passengers who paid cash, booked sleeping cars, and purchased tickets on the day of departure, “all of which in his experience suggested possible drug trafficking,” the appeals court said, in upholding the challenged subpoena.

Hilman Moffett was found to be carrying 162 pounds of baled marijuana in his luggage.

In one high-profile case, the Securities and Exchange Commission used the administrative subpoena power to help unwind the Enron financial scandal in 2003.

And a decade ago, the Justice Department used administrative subpoenas to investigate a Cleveland, Ohio, podiatrist for an alleged kickback scheme with two medical testing labs. The subpoenas sought the doctor’s professional journals, copies of his and his children’s bank and financial records, files of patients who were referred to the labs in question, and his tax returns.

In another example, a judge sided with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in 2007, ordering publisher McGraw-Hill to turn over documents concerning data used in one of its publications to calculate the price of natural gas as part of the government’s probe into a price-manipulation scandal.

Records obtained by a federal agency don’t have to stay with that agency or be destroyed, either. Some of them may be transferred to other agencies if “there is reason to believe that the records are relevant to a legitimate law enforcement inquiry of the receiving agency,” according to a Justice Department Criminal Resource Manual.

The records can be transferred to state agencies, too.

But the states may not need the federal government’s assistance. They have an undetermined number of statutes authorizing the issuance of their own administrative subpoenas. For instance, most every state has that authority when it comes to investigating child-support cases.

Consider the Boston case in which Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley issued an administrative subpoena in December demanding “subscriber information” for several alleged members of Anonymous as part of an investigation into who sabotaged Boston police’s website and released officers’ e-mails.

A Suffolk County judge in February sided with Conley’s administrative subpoena that ordered Twitter to hand over IP addresses of accounts identified as “Guido Fawkes,” “@p0isAn0N,” and “@OccupyBoston.”

Christopher Slobogin, a Vanderbilt Law School scholar who has written extensively on administrative subpoenas, said the power of the administrative subpoena was born at the turn of the 20th century, when the U.S. began developing the regulatory state.

Administrative subpoenas initially passed court muster since they were used by agencies to get records from companies to prosecute unlawful business practices, he said. Corporations weren’t thought to have the same privacy rights as individuals, and administrative subpoenas weren’t supposed to be used to get at private papers.

When the Supreme Court upheld that the Federal Trade Commission’s administrative subpoena of internal tobacco company records in 1924, Justice Wendell Holmes limited the power to companies, writing that anyone “who respects the spirit as well as the letter of the Fourth Amendment would be loath to believe that Congress intended to authorize one of its subordinate agencies to sweep all our traditions into the fire and to direct fishing expeditions into private papers.”

But times have changed.

“In some ways, they were a good thing if you were liberal,” Slobogin said of the administrative subpoena. “But they have migrated from corrupt businesses to people suspected of crime. They are fishing expeditions when there is no probable cause for a warrant.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...subpoenas/all/





Big Data in the (Heated or Cooled) Air Around You
Quentin Hardy

Nest Labs makes a smart thermostat that promotes energy saving by studying its owner’s habits and predicting things about when people are home and what they are likely to do with their home heating and cooling. Using a clever system of awards for the homeowner (green “leaves” for doing the energy-efficient thing), the thermostat is intended to save money through efficiency.

Since its ballyhooed launch in October, the $249 device has sold “in the mid-hundreds of thousands” of units, according to the company. That is not yet a barn burner, so to speak, but it’s not bad for a device that costs about twice what a standard energy-saving thermostat does.

The device also collects enough data that Nest can start to draw from really large data sets on consumption and correlate that knowledge with information from other sources, like weather forecasts, to make a more powerful product.

Each Nest thermostat “is as powerful as a high-end smartphone, and they communicate with each other inside a house,” says Tony Fadell, Nest’s founder and chief executive. “We can gather all that data, mix it with other data we store in the cloud, and push different algorithms to different houses to see how people react.”

That approach, continually testing one feature against another and going with the one that consumers respond to best, is called A/B testing when done with Internet software. It is how Google and others make their products. As more physical objects fill up with software and develop two-way interactions with the network, Mr. Fadell says, they can be developed the same way.

The data from the thermostats includes things like when people are home. Cats and small dogs can be separated out from humans, since the thermostats have motion sensors that can determine the relative masses of different-size critters. Data in Nest’s cloud servers crunches their information with things like the customer’s ZIP code, location and weather forecasts. If it looks like it’s getting cold, the system can then turn on the heating faster.

As with much of the software released over the Internet and then adjusted as its creators see what customers do with it, the thermostat’s actions have changed as the company has learned about human habits.

“We found that people are more predictable in their habits, things like when they go out in the morning,” Mr. Fadell says.

Part of what the company needs to do, he says, is to make sure people feel that their machine understands them. “It’s really important to give a lot of weight to any errors in prediction, so you don’t make them again,” he says.

The company also sends customers reports on their energy-saving behavior (including how many “leaves” they earned) and compares that information with local and national averages. Nothing like a little competition to keep people interested.

Some of the education has been specific to a single house. A feature introduced last spring focused on the time an air conditioner’s compressor needed to be on to generate enough cool air to bring a specific home’s temperature down. Usually the compressor is on the whole time fans are blowing over it and circulating the air, so limiting the use of the compressor saved about 30 percent of energy expended.

Mr. Fadell, who earlier played important roles in the creation of the iPod and the iPhone at Apple, indicated that Nest’s data-driven education about the home won’t just go into that thing on the wall.

“Algorithms can really change the way we use energy and how we interact with all kinds of products,” Mr. Fadell says. “The company is called ‘Nest,’ not ‘Thermostat.’”

I also asked Mr. Fadell about energy savings in general. Even more important than his device, or solar panels, or anything else, he said, was decent insulation and well-fitted doors and windows.

“Worry about that before anything else,” he said.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...ir-around-you/





Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath
Robert McMillan

You want to know a fast way to cool down a computer? Dunk it in a big tank of mineral oil.

That’s a technique that Intel has been testing out over the past year, running servers in little oil-filled boxes built by an Austin, Texas, company called Green Revolution Cooling. As Gigaom reported on Friday, it turns out that once you take out the PC’s fans and seal up the hard drives, oil-cooling a server works out pretty well.

In its tests, Green Revolution’s CarnotJet cooling system used a lot less energy than their air-cooled counterparts, Dr. Mike Patterson, a power and thermal engineer with Intel, tells Wired. Intel found that oil-cooled systems only needed another 2 or 3 percent of their power for cooling. That’s far less than your typical server, which has a 50 or 60 percent overhead. The world’s most efficient data centers — those run by Google or Facebook, for example — can get that number down to 10 or 20 percent.

Intel’s research is part of a much larger effort to significantly reduce power consumption in the data center. Power is one of the most costly aspects of data center operation, particularly if you’re running the sort of massive computing facilities that underpin web services as popular as Google or Facebook.

Although it’s still considered a cutting-edge technology, Green Revolution Cooling hopes to have a big effect on data centers. As Green Revolution’s director of marketing David Banys sees it, an oil-cooled data center could be set up just about anywhere, cheaply. “There’s no need for chillers; there’s no need for raised floors,” he says. “You can put our servers in a barn that’s 110 degrees.”

Does that oil hurt the hardware in any way? After running the servers for a year in its New Mexico data center, Intel popped them open them and found that the oil hadn’t harmed things at all. In fact, because oil-cooled servers are kept at a common temperature, it may turn out that they’re even more reliable than their air-cooled counterpart, Patterson says. But that’s an area for future research.

There is a downside, though. If you need to pop open an oil-cooled server to change a part, it can get a little messy. One of the Intel techs working on the tests in the company’s New Mexico data center brought in a change of clothes each day, just in case he needed to pull the plug, drain the oil, and tinker with one of the systems.

Green Revolution recommends an oil change every decade.

Still, the CarnotJets are so power-efficient, that Patterson thinks that the data-center set will eventually want to try them out. “If and when server manufacturers get around to doing this, then I think the adoption could be pretty reasonable,” he says.

In addition to removing fans and sealing up hard drives — or switching the servers to solid state drives, which have no moving parts — server makers also need to remove the conductive grease between the server’s processor and its heat sink, because it can leach out into the mineral oil, Intel says.

According to Green Revolution Cooling, at least one server company is getting ready to ship this type of oil-bath-ready servers: SuperMicro. David Banys says that SuperMicro should be announcing its servers any day now. SuperMicro couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...ious-oil-bath/





The Danger In Exempting Wireless From Net Neutrality
David Merrell

Nearly two years ago, the FCC outlined its rules for net neutrality. Notably absent were rules for wireless networks. There are several legitimate reasons that the same rules applied to wired networks can not apply to wireless networks. However, the same danger lies in leaving wireless networks unguarded against the whims of its administrators. As we move more and more towards a wireless dominated internet, those dangers will become more pronounced.

The importance of wireless data can not be understated. Facebook’s plummeting stock is a primary example. One of the reasons Facebook is taking a beating is because investors do not believe the company can properly monetize its mobile product. Investors are already punishing large companies that fail to monetize on the mobile front. When money talks, it is wise to listen.

Smartphones would have changed the internet landscape by themselves, but with tablets joining them on the mobile front there is no doubt that it will become at least on par with wired access. The quick emergence of products like the iPad and the Kindle Fire have many harking the end of the desktop era. While that may be premature, there is no doubt that these new platforms are going to command a large portion of the market place.

It is perfectly understandable that wireless networks can not be managed the same way that wired networks are. The technology is not quite good enough for wireless networks to run as smoothly and efficiently as wired networks do. A massive amount of infrastructure is needed if this goal is ever to be accomplished, and that is not an easy task to undertake.

Improving wireless internet infrastructure means building more towers. People are generally not happy with the number of towers that dot the landscape now. Red tape is also a factor, as it can take years to get approval to put up new towers. That will not suffice when wireless data traffic is growing at over 100% a year for the last several years.

We are going to need a massive investment in infrastructure in this country regardless of net neutrality rules. Demand for wireless is going to continue to grow for many years to come, and providers are not going to be able to let up. Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth. Eventually, demand will slow, and these practices will have to be addressed.

This is where allowing internet providers to regulate themselves becomes an issue. Self regulation usually does not end well for the consumer. Imagine allowing power plants and oil refineries to determine what chemicals they could pour into the air. Would they have the population’s best interest at heart when making that determination?

In the future when the infrastructure can match the demand, what will stop internet providers from picking winners and losers over their wireless networks? As conglomerates like Comcast gobble up content providers like NBC, a conflict of interest begins to emerge. There would be nothing from stopping one of the big wireless providers like AT&T or Verizon from scooping up a content provider and prioritizing its data speed over the network.

The internet community has had a good year in terms of influence in 2012. The wireless issue is one the community must keep a watchful eye on in the future. It is not a matter of if the service providers will abuse the system, but when. As wireless internet becomes the dominant or even default medium, the problem will become more pronounced.
http://www.northmobilepost.com/the-d...et-neutrality/





Google Fiber Splits Along Kansas City’s Digital Divide
Marcus Wohlsen

The Google Fiber project has stirred up long-simmering emotions in Kansas City, Missouri, where most of the neighborhoods that have pre-registered enough households to qualify for the service lie on the city’s more affluent west side. Screenshot taken around noon Friday. Image: Google

Two days before the deadline to get neighborhoods signed up, Google’s effort to bring ultra-high-speed internet to a major American city could end up reinforcing the digital divide.

When Google Fiber launched last month, the announcement of the service came with the caveat that to get the super-fast 1 gigabit broadband hookups, neighborhoods would have to pre-register a certain percentage of households for the service. The deadline for pre-registrations is Sunday at midnight.

Google has a map publicly tracking which neighborhoods meet the goal. As of Friday afternoon, Kansas City, Missouri, looks divided pretty much straight down the middle. On the western half of the city, nearly all neighborhoods have turned green, indicating they’ve met the goal. To the east, most are still yellow, meaning they haven’t met the goal. Right down the middle between the two halves runs Troost Avenue, the city’s historical socioeconomic and racial dividing line. Based on the map generated by the signup data, Google’s project is the latest to fall short of bridging that gap.

“The white, affluent neighborhoods qualified and the primarily black, lower-income neighborhoods didn’t,” says Michael Liimatta, who runs a Kansas City nonprofit that works to bring broadband access to low-income residents. Liimatta’s group, Connect for Good, focused on getting one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas, qualified. They succeeded thanks to heavy campaigning and door-to-door efforts, he says.

Google did not go into Kansas City blind to the issue of the digital divide, says company spokeswoman Jenna Wandres. It has 60 representatives on the streets trying to convince people without internet access of the benefits of getting their homes online, Wandres says. (That number will go up to about 100 for this final weekend, she says.) But the process is a challenge, with typical conversations lasting around 25 minutes per resident. Before coming into Kansas City, Wandres says Google did a survey that found about 25 percent of residents didn’t have internet access at home. While affordability is one part of the equation, she says Google found another factor keeping people offline was relevance. “They don’t think they need it,” Wandres says. “They don’t see why.”

A week ago, Google effectively lowered the minimum number of households needed for qualification for about one-third of Kansas City’s neighborhoods after complaints from residents. The company said in a blog post that it had overestimated the number of residents in those neighborhoods in part by miscounting vacant lots and abandoned homes. The adjusted count means fewer households now need to pre-register in 73 neighborhoods. But that lower threshold hasn’t helped in many neighborhoods, according to Google’s map, at least not yet.

The company says its pre-registration model helps it keep construction costs down by only bringing the service to areas showing demand. Wandres says those savings get passed on to customers, who will be able to get a connection the company is calling 100 times faster than the average broadband connection, but for about the same price – around $70 per month. Without the efficiencies created by not digging trenches and laying down fiber until demand reaches a critical mass, Wandres says Google wouldn’t be able to offer its free service at all. She points to the free service as a clear sign of Google’s commitment to internet access for everyone.

‘The challenging part is there has been a digital divide before Google got here. They didn’t create this, but in their attempt to bridge it, they may end up widening it.’
— Rick Chambers

But Liimatta says the pre-registration process itself set a high bar for those already on the wrong side of the digital divide. To pre-register, residents needed to be willing to pony up $10. They also needed a credit or debit card, a Google Wallet account, and a Gmail account, which are harder to come by if you never had internet access in the first place. “Many don’t even have bank accounts,” Liimatta says. “That’s why there are so many check-cashing places out there.”

Wandres says Google’s field representatives have 3G-enabled Chromebooks to help get people signed up. She says Google will also accept a pre-paid debit card.

The lowest tier of service offered by Google Fiber guarantees a free broadband connection for at least seven years, though customers must still come up with a $300 startup fee (which Google says covers its construction costs). Google has also promised to offer broadband for free to public institutions such as schools. The catch: The neighborhoods surrounding the schools need to reach the pre-registration goal to get Google’s fiber unspooled to the area in the first place.

Take for example the Genesis School, a public school for kindergarten through eighth grade in a neighborhood well east of Troost Avenue designated by Google Fiber as Vineyard Northwest. According to the Google Fiber website, Vineyard Northwest has 12 pre-registrations as of Friday afternoon. The neighborhood needs 37 more for the Genesis School to get a free connection. Average listing price for a home in the ZIP code that includes Vineyard Northwest and the Genesis School: about $35,000, according to real estate website Trulia.

West of Troost Avenue, Border Star Montessori School in the Wornall Homestead neighborhood will be getting a free Google Fiber connection thanks to the 175 residents who put the neighborhood above the preregistration threshold several times over. Average home listing price in that zip code: $398,000, again according to Trulia.

Rick Chambers, executive director of the Center Education Foundation, which raises money for a school district that includes many students east of Troost Avenue, has organized a pavement-pounding effort to get poorer neighborhoods pre-registered. He says Google has supported his campaign even though those neighborhoods won’t likely be profitable for the company, since most residents who sign up will choose the free service. Still, he says the latest gulf that’s opened along Troost Avenue has stirred up old emotions with deep roots in the city’s segregated history.

“The challenging part is there has been a digital divide before Google got here. They didn’t create this,” Chambers says. “But in their attempt to bridge it, they may end up widening it.”
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/0...igital-divide/





New Index Ranks Sweden 'Best' at Using the Web

Sweden is the most effective country at using the internet to better people's lives, according to a new ranking released on Wednesday by a foundation headed by Tim Berners-Lee, British inventor of the World Wide Web.

The new Web Index ranking, released by the World Wide Web Foundation, measures the political, social, and economic impact of the internet in 61 countries.

Sweden came out on top of the global league table, which was calculated by the World Wide Web Foundation using indicators such as the political, economic and social impact of the web, connectivity and use.

The US came in second, ahead of Britain, Canada and Finland. France came in at 14th place. Yemen ranked bottom, closely followed by Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and Benin.

Specific criteria used in the ranking include the percentage of people online, the quality of a country's communications infrastructure, as well as the use of social networks and e-services.

”The Web Index was created to measure the state of the Web in the world," Berners-Lee said in a statement.

"Each country will see not only where they rank compared to others, but also what the World Wide Web Foundation thinks they need to do to improve.”

On Wednesday Berners-Lee also warned governments that attempts to block the internet were doomed to failure due to its scattered structure.

Speaking at the launch of a league table showing which countries use the web most effectively, Berners-Lee said the lack of a global internet "off-switch" meant authoritarian regimes could not stem the influx of digital information.

"The way the internet is designed is very much as a decentralized system," he explained at the London launch.

"At the moment, because countries connect to each other in lots of different ways, there is no one off switch; there is no central place where you can turn it off.

"In order to be able to turn the whole thing off or really block, suppress one particular idea then the countries and governments would have to get together and agree and co-ordinate and turn it from a decentralized system to being a centralized system.

"And if that does happen, it is really important that everybody fights against that sort of direction."

Berners-Lee, who was honoured during the London Olympics opening ceremony, launched the first web page on Christmas Day 1990.

He is credited with creating the World Wide Web, which enables users to store and access information via the internet.
http://www.thelocal.se/43040/20120906/





Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
David Carr

There are many ways to measure the traction of a social media platform: time spent, page views or unique users. But it might be useful to add one more metric: if the leader of the free world stops by to answer questions from your users, you’re probably doing O.K.

On Thursday, President Obama signed up for an “Ask Me Anything” (A.M.A. in geekspeak) session at Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups.

The president answered a few benign questions — Michael Jordan is his favorite basketball player! — along with a few tough ones, including a request to explain his administration’s approach to Internet regulation. He even posted a picture to prove he was the one at the keyboard when he typed, “Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.”

While the Republicans were celebrating the potential and might of American business at their convention in Tampa, Mr. Obama was validating one example of business success on an entirely different platform. Reddit, which was founded by two fresh graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005, has just 20 employees, but serves up more than three billion page views a month.

With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

So who are the silky venture capitalists or young lions of Valley technology who own this vast unruly kingdom? That would be Advance Publications, the home of Condé Nast, the magazine company that bought Reddit back in 2006 for a reported $20 million. That kind of deal is usually a signal that a ritual sacrifice was about to begin in which a clueless old media company snaps up a hot Web property and proceeds to squeeze the life out of what it just bought.

But that is not what happened. Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”

Its two founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, stayed on after the sale for three years — a feat unto itself. And when it became clear that Reddit was hamstrung in competition for leadership and engineers as part of Condé Nast, the company was spun out as an operationally independent subsidiary in 2011.

During that time, it threatened to become an also-ran in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world of social media. Then Digg, which had been the leader among communities formed around the aggregation of links, made some poorly received changes and users fled to Reddit.

“Strategically, what they have done should be a model of how to create and support a virtual start-up within a larger corporation,” said Anil Dash, a writer and entrepreneur in digital realms. “Condé gave it enough rope and left the people there to their own devices. I don’t know whether it was a brilliant strategy or accidental neglect, but the founders did not leave, the community stayed intact, and the site grew beyond anybody’s expectations.”

In the context of a company that owns Vogue and The New Yorker, Reddit is a deeply weird place. Links are voted up or down by a community that is full of pseudonyms, which has the odd effect of prompting users to be very intimate and remarkably candid, albeit as avatars. The community is chiefly young, male and extremely wired. It can be a casually misogynistic place, and the site has all the retro graphic appeal of Craigslist, which is to say, not much.

Reddit is not an exception to every rule in the digital world. Like many digital media companies, it has a big audience and minuscule revenue. Bob Sauerberg, president of Condé Nast and a member of the board of the independent company, says that is fine by him.

“We think it has huge potential and we want to make sure that we scale that,” he said. “There will be ample opportunity to monetize what they have built as it grows, and it will be a very big business.”

In the spring, Advance hired Yishan Wong, a former software engineer at Facebook and engineering manager at PayPal, as the chief executive — an unconventional choice because he had little executive management experience. And Mr. Ohanian came back as a board member, yet another odd circumstance.

“When we sold the site, I ended up with a life-changing — at least for me — amount of money, and I thought the least I could do was make good on my end of it, so I knew I would stay for the life of the contract,” he said. “We’d have quarterly meetings with Steve, but for the most part, Steve just seemed to think that if we were able to start the company on $12,000, that we probably wouldn’t screw it up. ”

It can make for some jarring juxtapositions. Advance is a privately held company that keeps a tight rein on information of all sorts, yet Reddit is built on open-source software free for the taking or tweaking. The site has harnessed user energy and creativity to self-police the forums and grow in all sorts of unpredictable directions. It is, in media terms, about as far away from the glossy editorial values of Condé Nast as you can get.

“We ran into some annoying human resources bureaucracy when we tried to hire people, but we run lean and don’t make a lot of hires, so that didn’t come up a lot,” Mr. Ohanian said. “For the most part, we were given a ludicrous level of autonomy. You have to give them credit where credit is due.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/b...k-or-swim.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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