Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 21st, ’19

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"So far the only gripe is that the service can’t be used on yachts or in private planes." – Kelly Gilblom


"We plan to appeal." – Cox






































December 21st, 2019




Cox Communications Hit With $1 Billion Verdict in Music Copyright Suit
Gene Maddaus

Cox Communications was hit with a $1 billion verdict on Thursday in a lawsuit alleging that it allowed its internet subscribers to illegally download music.

The jury delivered the verdict after a three-week trial in federal court in Alexandria, Va., finding that Cox was liable for infringement of 10,017 recordings and compositions, each infringement costing over $99,000.

Fifty-three music companies — including recording giants Sony Music, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and top publishers Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and Universal Music Publishing Group — filed suit in July 2018, alleging that Cox had ignored infringement notices and allowed repeat offenders to continue to use its service, essentially turning a blind eye to the practice.

“Rather than stop its subscribers’ unlawful activity, Cox prioritized its own profits over its legal obligations,” the suit alleged. “Cox’s profits increased dramatically as a result of the massive infringement that it facilitated, yet Cox publicly told copyright holders that it needed to reduce the number of staff it had dedicated to anti-piracy for budget reasons.”

The suit states that the music companies suing Cox sent “hundreds of thousands” of statutory infringement notices to notify of the internet service giant of “blatant and systematic use of Cox’s service to illegally download, copy, and distribute copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services.”

The jury’s verdict will not become final until after the court resolves post-trial motions.

In a statement, Cox said it was “disappointed” in the decision.

“The amount is unjust and excessive,” the company said. “We plan to appeal the case and vigorously defend ourselves. We provide customers with a powerful tool that connects to a world full of content and information. Unfortunately, some customers have chosen to use that connection for wrongful activity. We don’t condone it, we educate on it and we do our best to help curb it, but we shouldn’t be held responsible for the bad actions of others.”

Hailing the verdict was the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), whose chief legal officer Kenneth L. Doroshow commented: “The jury’s verdict sends a clear message – Cox and other ISPs that fail to meet their legal obligations to address piracy on their networks will be held accountable. The jury recognized these companies’ legal obligation to take meaningful steps to protect music online and made a strong statement about the value of a healthy music ecosystem for everyone – ranging from creators to fans to the available outlets for legitimate music consumption.”

Added NMPA president and CEO David Israelite: “Today’s victory on behalf of music publishers and record labels who own over 10,000 copyrights is a clear message to ISPs like Cox who refuse to take responsibility for infringers on their networks. The jury found that Cox was liable for its subscribers’ infringement to the tune of $1 billion dollars which serves as a warning to those who willingly turn a blind eye and enable their users to share music illegally. Cox received hundreds of thousands of notices of infringement and did not adequately respond or comply with its obligations to stop its subscribers from infringing on peer to peer networks. Cox had the right and ability to prevent the continued harm to music creators and it chose its own profits over complying with the law.”
https://variety.com/2019/music/news/...ct-1203449254/





First-Run Movies at Home for the Ultra-Rich at Just $2,500 a Pop
Kelly Gilblom

• Red Carpet Entertainment seeks 3,000 users for elite service
• For those who have to see ‘Ford v Ferrari’ at home right now

Meet Red Carpet Entertainment LLC, the opposite of Netflix in the fast-changing home-video world.

Unlike the famous streaming service, which serves up thousands of films and TV shows to millions of subscribers for about $13 a month, this startup by two entertainment-industry veterans is seeking just 3,000 rich Americans who’ll put up $15,000 and pay $2,500 per movie to watch the latest theatrical releases in their homes.

Since launching in October, Red Carpet has attracted just a sliver of the customers it hopes to sign up in the U.S. in the next two years, founders Fredric Rosen and Dan Fellman say. And they know they aren’t the first to market a high-end, first-run film service to the ultra-rich. But the two say their knowledge of the entertainment industry gives them a fighting chance.

“Everyone is looking for a new, ancillary business,” said Fellman, who spent 37 years at Warner Bros., retiring as president of domestic distribution. “So we thought: How do we start a small, ancillary business, but that’s not disruptive?”
relates to First-Run Movies at Home for the Ultra-Rich at Just $2,500 a Pop

He and Rosen, the former president of Ticketmaster, won’t disclose how their subscriber revenue gets divvied up, but say the studios get the majority. Red Carpet has deals with 10 distributors, including Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. With box-office sales slumping and projected to fall again next year, moviemakers are happy to have new customers.

The entrepreneurs, who came up with their plan on the golf course, aren’t alone in targeting super-rich people who don’t want to fight crowds at the theater. Bel Air Cinema has been providing such a service since 2015, mostly outside the U.S.

A few years ago, Imax Corp. invested in a similar project called Prima Cinema, but it never took off. And Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster and an early Facebook Inc. backer, started Screening Room in 2016. It charged $150 for a set-top box to store movies and $50 to see a film the same time it plays in theaters. The business never gained traction.

Know the Customer

Rosen said Screening Room failed to understand the clientele. The ultra-affluent can afford a perfectly functional $150 leather purse, but wait in line to buy $25,000 Hermes Birkin bags. They want the experience of hosting a dinner party and whisking their friends to their private home cinema after dessert to surprise them with a film that’s otherwise only available in theaters, he said.

“You can buy ‘Two-Buck Chuck’ or an expensive bottle of wine,” Rosen said. “People consume the way they can afford.”

Rosen and Fellman estimate there are 500 to 1,000 households that fit their criteria in both New York and Los Angeles, and then another 50 to 100 in each of the next 30 largest U.S. cities. Their small team at Red Carpet vets potential customers by assessing their credit and interviewing two references.

The pair say they have almost 100 customers, and they’ve made inroads in places that surprised them, like West Virginia and North Carolina. The company is backed by Los Angeles-based OCV Management LLC.

Their most popular movie today is “Ford v Ferrari,” starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon. Red Carpet won’t be able to screen the new “Star Wars” movie that opens Dec. 20 because it doesn’t have a deal with Walt Disney Co. No movie will be priced below $500, and customers get to see a picture twice in a 36-hour period, according to the company website.

So far the only gripe is that the service can’t be used on yachts or in private planes -- for now the company only has domestic rights.

However, Rosen and Fellman are happy to install the technology in summer homes in the Hamptons or ski chalets in Aspen. If the idea catches on, they’ll also launch internationally, to answer calls from potential customers in Europe and the Middle East.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...st-2-500-a-pop





No-Fiber Zone: FCC Funds 25Mbps, Data-Capped Satellite in Rural Areas

Viasat gets $87.1M for rural broadband; no word yet on price or exact data caps.
Jon Brodkin

The Federal Communications Commission is giving $87.1 million in rural-broadband funding to satellite operator Viasat to help the company lower prices and raise data caps.

The FCC's Connect America Fund generally pays ISPs to expand their networks into rural areas that lack decent home Internet access. Viasat's satellite service already provides coverage of 98 percent of the US population in 50 states, so it doesn't need government funding to expand its network the same way that wireline operators do. But Viasat will use the money to offer Internet service "at lower cost to consumers, while also permitting higher usage allowances, than it typically provides in areas where it is not receiving Connect America Fund support," the FCC said in its announcement yesterday.

Viasat's $87.1 million is to be used over the next 10 years "to offer service to more than 121,700 remote and rural homes and businesses in 17 states." Viasat must provide speeds of at least 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads.

While the funding for Viasat could certainly improve access for some people, the project helps illustrate how dire the broadband shortage is in rural parts of many states. Viasat's service is generally a last-ditch option for people in areas where there's no fiber or cable and where DSL isn't good enough to provide a reasonably fast and stable connection. Viasat customers have to pay high prices for slow speeds and onerous data limits.

Future services relying on low-Earth-orbit satellites from companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb could dramatically boost speeds and data caps while lowering latency. But Viasat's service still relies on satellites in geostationary orbits about 22,000 miles above the planet and suffer from latency of nearly 600ms, much worse than the 10ms to 20ms from fiber services (as measured in customer homes by the FCC in September 2017). Viasat's service is classified by the FCC's Connect America Fund as "high latency," which is less than or equal to 750ms.

The Connect America Fund is paid for by Americans through fees on their phone bills.

Prices and data caps not revealed

A Viasat spokesperson would not tell us what prices and data caps will be applied to the company's FCC-subsidized plans. Viasat said it will provide the required 25Mbps service "along with an evolving usage allowance, and at FCC-defined prices, to certain areas, where we will be subject to a new range of federal and state regulations."

The materials released by the FCC yesterday don't provide price and data-cap information, either. We contacted the FCC and will update this article if we get any answers.

Viasat's current prices and data allotments are pretty bad, so hopefully there will be a significant improvement. Plans and pricing vary by ZIP code; offers listed on BroadbandNow include $50 a month for download speeds of up to 12Mbps and only 12GB of "priority data" each month. The price rises after a two-year contract expires.

"Once priority data is used up, speeds will be reduced to up to 1 to 5Mbps during the day and possibly below 1Mbps after 5pm," BroadbandNow's summary says. Customers can use data without affecting the limit between 3am and 6am.

Other plans include $75 a month for speeds of 12Mbps and 25GB of priority data; $100 a month for 12Mbps and 50GB; and $150 a month for 25Mbps and "unlimited" data. Even on the so-called unlimited plan, speeds "may be prioritized behind other customers during network congestion" after you use 100GB in a month. Because of these onerous limits, Viasat lowers streaming video quality to reduce data usage. Viasat says it provides speeds of up to 100Mbps but only "in select areas."

Viasat also charges installation fees, a $10-per-month equipment lease fee, and taxes and surcharges. Viasat offers a two-year price lock, but this does not apply to the taxes and surcharges. In order to avoid signing a two-year contract, you have to pay a $300 "No Long-Term Contract" fee.

New satellites in 2021

Viasat doesn't have to offer the FCC-subsidized plans right away. Under FCC rules, providers must offer the specified plans to 40 percent of homes and businesses within three years, to 60 percent within four years, 80 percent within five years, and 100 percent within six years.

But Viasat won't wait for new satellite launches to provide subsidized service. "We will use our current satellite fleet to commence that FCC-defined service offering, and, as with all technologies, we anticipate introducing improvements over the next 10 years," Viasat told Ars.

New Viasat satellites planned for launch in 2021 and 2022 are expected to provide higher download speeds and total network capacity, but latency will still be a problem because of the planned satellites' 22,000-mile altitude.

Viasat's FCC funding must be used in rural parts of Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington state, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The FCC yesterday also announced another $2.1 million in funding for a few small companies to provide service to about 1,300 homes and businesses in parts of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

The newly distributed funding originates from a Connect America Fund auction held last year. "In total, the Connect America Fund Auction last year allocated $1.488 billion in support over the next 10 years to expand broadband to more than 700,000 unserved rural homes and small businesses nationwide," the FCC said.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...n-rural-areas/





Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices

The iPhone maker is ramping up hiring, hoping for the initiative to produce results within five years.
Mark Gurman

Apple Inc. has a secret team working on satellites and related wireless technology, striving to find new ways to beam data such as internet connectivity directly to its devices, according to people familiar with the work.

The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker has about a dozen engineers from the aerospace, satellite and antenna design industries working on the project with the goal of deploying their results within five years, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal company efforts. Work on the project is still early and could be abandoned, the people said, and a clear direction and use for satellites hasn’t been finalized. Still, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has shown interest in the project, indicating it’s a company priority.

Apple’s work on communications satellites and next-generation wireless technology means the aim is likely to beam data to a user’s device, potentially mitigating the dependence on wireless carriers, or for linking devices together without a traditional network. Apple could also be exploring satellites for more precise location tracking for its devices, enabling improved maps and new features.

It’s not clear if Apple intends to pursue the costly development of a satellite constellation itself or simply harness on-the-ground equipment that would take data from existing satellites and send it to mobile devices. Northrop Grumman Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. are some of the biggest satellite makers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Amazon.com Inc. plans to deploy more than 3,000 satellites as part of a future constellation. However, the industry is littered with failures. Iridium LLC filed for bankruptcy protection in 1999, and Teledesic abandoned its “internet from the sky” plan more than a decade ago. Newer efforts from Facebook, SpaceX and Amazon are a long way from generating revenue, and Apple rarely enters new categories without a clear way to make money.

“The lessons of prior failures like Iridium, Globalstar and Teledesic are that it’s really hard to find a viable business plan for multibillion-dollar satellite communications projects,” said Tim Farrar, a satellite expert and principal at TMF associates.

In recent months, Apple has started hiring new software and hardware experts for the team, seeking engineers with experience in designing components for communications equipment. The company has also hired additional executives from the aerospace and wireless data delivery fields.

The team is led by Michael Trela and John Fenwick, former aerospace engineers who helped lead satellite imaging company Skybox Imaging before it sold to Google in 2014. The pair led Google’s satellite and spacecraft operations until leaving together in 2017 to begin a new initiative at Apple, Bloomberg News reported at the time.

During their first year and a half at Apple, Trela and Fenwick explored the feasibility of developing satellite technology and understanding the problem they want to solve, and in recent months have started intensifying work on the project. The effort suffered a setback earlier this year when its previous leader, Greg Duffy, left Apple after joining in 2016. Duffy, the co-founder of camera startup Dropcam, which Google acquired in 2014, reported to Dan Riccio, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.

On his LinkedIn profile, Duffy said he worked on projects involving “satellite communications, wireless, and home products/technologies.” He declined to comment more specifically on his work at Apple.

Trela and Fenwick still work within Apple’s hardware engineering division, but now report to Riccio’s lieutenant in charge of iPhone engineering.

The team has recently added people from the wireless industry, including engineer Matt Ettus, who now helps lead the initiative, people familiar with the team said. Ettus is one of the foremost names in wireless technologies and created Ettus Research, a National Instruments Corp.-owned firm that sells wireless networking equipment.

Apple has also hired Ashley Moore Williams, a longtime executive from Aerospace Corp. who focused on communication satellites, and Daniel Ellis, a former Netflix Inc. executive who helped oversee the company’s Content Delivery Network, or CDN. Ellis has experience in building networks that can beam content and information on a global scale.

The work on satellite technology is one of several “special projects” -- an Apple term for skunkworks initiatives or development of major new product categories -- under way at the company.

As Bloomberg has previously reported, Apple also is working on a virtual reality headset to debut as early as 2021, augmented reality glasses for launch after that, MicroLED screens for future devices, new home products, self-driving car technology and a future Apple Watch that can analyze a user’s blood chemistry to determine glucose levels. Apple is also expanding its in-house chip development, seeking to replace Intel Corp. as its Mac processor maker, and Intel and Qualcomm Inc. as the providers of its modem component for phones.

Under Cook, Apple has rapidly expanded its research and development budget, spending $16 billion in the 2019 fiscal year, an increase of 14% from the prior year, according to company filings. One of Apple’s primary goals is to bring more of the technology behind its products in house, which is what work on satellites could eventually enable.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...net-satellites





Secret Surveillance Court Rebukes FBI, DOJ With Order To Re-Validate Their Work
Philip Ewing

The secret court that oversees intelligence collection upbraided the FBI and Justice Department on Tuesday with a highly unusual order for them to re-validate their work.

The extraordinary order, signed by Judge Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requires officials to submit an explanation in writing about how they're remediating the problems identified by the recent inspector general report about the Russia investigation.

Federal law enforcement leaders have until Jan. 10 to file a sworn submission about what they have done, or plan to do, "to ensure the statement of facts in each FBI application accurately and completely reflects information possessed by the FBI that is material to any issue presented by the application," she wrote.

Collyer also ordered a timetable for reforms and "an explanation of why, in the government's view, the information in FBI applications submitted in the interim should be regarded as reliable."

The judge, in short, ordered federal law enforcement officials to explain why the court should trust what they submit when they're requesting warrants to collect the communications of people who figure in investigations.

Doubt about the FBI and Justice Department's practices exploded followed the release of a report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz that found 17 omissions or other problems with the filings connected to Carter Page, who served as a junior foreign policy aide to Donald Trump's campaign for a time in 2016.

Investigators sought, obtained and renewed a warrant for Page into 2017, but as Horowitz documented, they left out vital information that might have prompted the judges involved to reach a decision other than authorizing the surveillance.

Horowitz and his investigators didn't opine as to whether judges might have rejected the surveillance if they'd been in possession of the full facts, but Collyer's order on Tuesday suggested that she was among the critics of the FBI and DoJ practices described in the report.

"The FBI's handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty" required of investigators, Collyer wrote.

Other critics observed that Tuesday was only the latest sign of problems with the secret court or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that governs it and the activities of the agencies involved.

"This was not the first time the government abused its surveillance powers, nor was it the first time the intelligence court was made aware of surveillance abuses," said Neema Singh Guliani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

She cited findings and admissions from an earlier era, in 2001 and 2000, about problems with surveillance applications. (Guliani's initial statement mistakenly referred to 2002, rather than 2000.)

"Congress must radically reform the FISA process to increase accountability, and to ensure that there is a meaningful opportunity to challenge the government's allegations in FISA applications," said Guliani. "We can't trust the secret intelligence court alone to police this process."

Feds vow reform

FBI Director Christopher Wray already has vowed that the FBI will adjust its procedures in response to the IG report. Wray also has said that the bureau may discipline people in connection with their actions in the Russia case.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and other supporters of Trump have condemned the FBI and Justice Department over the Russia investigation.

Trump and some other critics have blamed the Russia imbroglio on a few conspirators within officialdom who acted out of political animus toward Trump.

Horowitz did not find, however — as Trump often has charged — that the case was politically motivated, a "hoax" or a "witch hunt."

The big picture of the investigation, which later came to be led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller, was one opened properly and pursued largely by the books, Horowitz said.

Democrats in Graham's hearing sought to zoom back from the heavy focus on Page and underscore what they called the importance of the big picture: that the Russian attack on the election was real, that Mueller's findings are not in dispute and that the peril of foreign interference endures.
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/17/78904...ate-their-work





Facebook Fails to Convince Lawmakers it Needs to Track Your Location at All Times
Lauren Feiner

Key Points

• In response to a letter from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., Facebook explained why it tracks users’ locations even when their tracking services are turned off.
• The lawmakers now say Facebook should give users more control over their data.
• Facebook said it used location data to target ads and for certain security functions.

Facebook told two senators why it tracks users’ locations even when their tracking services are turned off. The lawmakers now say Facebook should give users more control over their data.

Facebook was responding to an inquiry from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who asked Facebook last month to “respect” users’ decisions to keep their locations private. In a letter dated December 12 that was released Tuesday, Facebook explained how it is able to estimate users’ locations used to target ads even when they’ve chosen to reject location tracking through their smartphone’s operating system.

Facebook said that even when location tracking is turned off, it can deduce users’ general locations from context clues like locations they tag in photos as well as their devices’ IP addresses. While this data is not as precise as Facebook would collect with location tracking enabled, the company said it uses the information for several purposes, including alerting users when their accounts have been accessed in an unusual place and clamping down on the spread of false information.

Facebook acknowledged it also targets ads based on the limited location information it receives when users turn off or limit tracking. Facebook doesn’t allow users to turn off location-based ads, although it does allow users to block Facebook from collecting their precise location, the company wrote.

“By necessity, virtually all ads on Facebook are targeted based on location, though most commonly ads are targeted to people with a particular city or some larger region,” the company wrote. “Otherwise, people in Washington, D.C. would receive ads for services or events in London, and vice versa.”

Hawley, a frequent tech critic, tweeted the letter, saying it showed Facebook “admits it. Turn off ‘location services’ and they’ll STILL track your location to make money (by sending you ads). There is no opting out. No control over your personal information. That’s Big Tech. And that’s why Congress needs to take action.”

“I appreciate Facebook’s attempts to inform users about their privacy choices. However, I am concerned that these efforts are insufficient and even misleading in light of how Facebook is actually treating user data,” Coons said in a statement. “In their response to our letter, Facebook confirmed that there is no way for users to prevent Facebook from using their location and serving them ads based on that information, even when location access has been turned off. Facebook claims that users are in control of their own privacy, but in reality, users aren’t even given an option to stop Facebook from collecting and monetizing their location information. The American people deserve to know how tech companies use their data, and I will continue working to find solutions to protect Americans’ sensitive information.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/face...ng-policy.html





Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.

If you lived in one of the cities the dataset covers and use apps that share your location — anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers — you could be in there, too.

If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again.

The data reviewed by Times Opinion didn’t come from a telecom or giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental surveillance operation. It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book. They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor.

The Times and other news organizations have reported on smartphone tracking in the past. But never with a data set so large. Even still, this file represents just a small slice of what’s collected and sold every day by the location tracking industry — surveillance so omnipresent in our digital lives that it now seems impossible for anyone to avoid.

[Work in the location tracking industry? Seen an abuse of data? We want to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, contact us on a secure line at 440-295-5934, @charliewarzel on Wire or email Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson directly.]

It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure the powers such always-on surveillance can provide an authoritarian regime like China’s. Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location 24 hours a day. Yet, in the decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies. Now, as the decade ends, tens of millions of Americans, including many children, find themselves carrying spies in their pockets during the day and leaving them beside their beds at night — even though the corporations that control their data are far less accountable than the government would be.

“The seduction of these consumer products is so powerful that it blinds us to the possibility that there is another way to get the benefits of the technology without the invasion of privacy. But there is,” said William Staples, founding director of the Surveillance Studies Research Center at the University of Kansas. “All the companies collecting this location information act as what I have called Tiny Brothers, using a variety of data sponges to engage in everyday surveillance.”

In this and subsequent articles we’ll reveal what we’ve found and why it has so shaken us. We’ll ask you to consider the national security risks the existence of this kind of data creates and the specter of what such precise, always-on human tracking might mean in the hands of corporations and the government. We’ll also look at legal and ethical justifications that companies rely on to collect our precise locations and the deceptive techniques they use to lull us into sharing it.

Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. In the United States, as in most of the world, no federal law limits what has become a vast and lucrative trade in human tracking. Only internal company policies and the decency of individual employees prevent those with access to the data from, say, stalking an estranged spouse or selling the evening commute of an intelligence officer to a hostile foreign power.

Companies say the data is shared only with vetted partners. As a society, we’re choosing simply to take their word for that, displaying a blithe faith in corporate beneficence that we don’t extend to far less intrusive yet more heavily regulated industries. Even if these companies are acting with the soundest moral code imaginable, there’s ultimately no foolproof way they can secure the data from falling into the hands of a foreign security service. Closer to home, on a smaller yet no less troubling scale, there are often few protections to stop an individual analyst with access to such data from tracking an ex-lover or a victim of abuse.

A DIARY OF YOUR EVERY MOVEMENT

The companies that collect all this information on your movements justify their business on the basis of three claims: People consent to be tracked, the data is anonymous and the data is secure.

None of those claims hold up, based on the file we’ve obtained and our review of company practices.

Yes, the location data contains billions of data points with no identifiable information like names or email addresses. But it’s child’s play to connect real names to the dots that appear on the maps.

In most cases, ascertaining a home location and an office location was enough to identify a person. Consider your daily commute: Would any other smartphone travel directly between your house and your office every day?

Describing location data as anonymous is “a completely false claim” that has been debunked in multiple studies, Paul Ohm, a law professor and privacy researcher at the Georgetown University Law Center, told us. “Really precise, longitudinal geolocation information is absolutely impossible to anonymize.”

“D.N.A.,” he added, “is probably the only thing that’s harder to anonymize than precise geolocation information.”

Yet companies continue to claim that the data are anonymous. In marketing materials and at trade conferences, anonymity is a major selling point — key to allaying concerns over such invasive monitoring.

To evaluate the companies’ claims, we turned most of our attention to identifying people in positions of power. With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables. We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night. We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school. We watched high-powered lawyers (and their guests) as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties. We did not name any of the people we identified without their permission.

The data set is large enough that it surely points to scandal and crime but our purpose wasn’t to dig up dirt. We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance.

Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.

Connecting a sanitized ping to an actual human in time and place could feel like reading someone else’s diary.

In one case, we identified Mary Millben, a singer based in Virginia who has performed for three presidents, including President Trump. She was invited to the service at the Washington National Cathedral the morning after the president’s inauguration. That’s where we first found her.
Mary Millben has performed for three presidents during her singing career. Getty Images

She remembers how, surrounded by dignitaries and the first family, she was moved by the music echoing through the recesses of the cathedral while members of both parties joined together in prayer. All the while, the apps on her phone were also monitoring the moment, recording her position and the length of her stay in meticulous detail. For the advertisers who might buy access to the data, the intimate prayer service could well supply some profitable marketing insights.

“To know that you have a list of places I have been, and my phone is connected to that, that’s scary,” Ms. Millben told us. “What’s the business of a company benefiting off of knowing where I am? That seems a little dangerous to me.”

Like many people we identified in the data, Ms. Millben said she was careful about limiting how she shared her location. Yet like many of them, she also couldn’t name the app that might have collected it. Our privacy is only as secure as the least secure app on our device.

“That makes me uncomfortable,” she said. “I’m sure that makes every other person uncomfortable, to know that companies can have free rein to take your data, locations, whatever else they’re using. It is disturbing.”

The inauguration weekend yielded a trove of personal stories and experiences: elite attendees at presidential ceremonies, religious observers at church services, supporters assembling across the National Mall — all surveilled and recorded permanently in rigorous detail.

Protesters were tracked just as rigorously. After the pings of Trump supporters, basking in victory, vanished from the National Mall on Friday evening, they were replaced hours later by those of participants in the Women’s March, as a crowd of nearly half a million descended on the capital. Examining just a photo from the event, you might be hard-pressed to tie a face to a name. But in our data, pings at the protest connected to clear trails through the data, documenting the lives of protesters in the months before and after the protest, including where they lived and worked.

We spotted a senior official at the Department of Defense walking through the Women’s March, beginning on the National Mall and moving past the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that afternoon. His wife was also on the mall that day, something we discovered after tracking him to his home in Virginia. Her phone was also beaming out location data, along with the phones of several neighbors.

The official’s data trail also led to a high school, homes of friends, a visit to Joint Base Andrews, workdays spent in the Pentagon and a ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall with President Barack Obama in 2017 (nearly a dozen more phones were tracked there, too).

Inauguration Day weekend was marked by other protests — and riots. Hundreds of protesters, some in black hoods and masks, gathered north of the National Mall that Friday, eventually setting fire to a limousine near Franklin Square. The data documented those rioters, too. Filtering the data to that precise time and location led us to the doorsteps of some who were there. Police were present as well, many with faces obscured by riot gear. The data led us to the homes of at least two police officers who had been at the scene.

As revealing as our searches of Washington were, we were relying on just one slice of data, sourced from one company, focused on one city, covering less than one year. Location data companies collect orders of magnitude more information every day than the totality of what Times Opinion received.

Data firms also typically draw on other sources of information that we didn’t use. We lacked the mobile advertising IDs or other identifiers that advertisers often combine with demographic information like home ZIP codes, age, gender, even phone numbers and emails to create detailed audience profiles used in targeted advertising. When datasets are combined, privacy risks can be amplified. Whatever protections existed in the location dataset can crumble with the addition of only one or two other sources.

There are dozens of companies profiting off such data daily across the world — by collecting it directly from smartphones, creating new technology to better capture the data or creating audience profiles for targeted advertising.

The full collection of companies can feel dizzying, as it’s constantly changing and seems impossible to pin down. Many use technical and nuanced language that may be confusing to average smartphone users.

While many of them have been involved in the business of tracking us for years, the companies themselves are unfamiliar to most Americans. (Companies can work with data derived from GPS sensors, Bluetooth beacons and other sources. Not all companies in the location data business collect, buy, sell or work with granular location data.)

Location data companies generally downplay the risks of collecting such revealing information at scale. Many also say they’re not very concerned about potential regulation or software updates that could make it more difficult to collect location data.

“No, it doesn’t really keep us up at night,” said Brian Czarny, chief marketing officer at Factual, one such company, said. He added that Factual does not resell detailed data like the information we reviewed. “We don’t feel like anybody should be doing that because it’s a risk to the whole business,” he said.

In absence of a federal privacy law, the industry has largely relied on self-regulation. Several industry groups offer ethical guidelines meant to govern it. Factual joined the Mobile Marketing Association, along with many other data location and marketing companies, in drafting a pledge intended to improve its self-regulation. The pledge is slated to be released next year.

States are starting to respond with their own laws. The California Consumer Protection Act goes into effect next year and adds new protections for residents there, like allowing them to ask companies to delete their data or prevent its sale. But aside from a few new requirements, the law could leave the industry largely unencumbered.

“If a private company is legally collecting location data, they’re free to spread it or share it however they want,” said Calli Schroeder, a lawyer for the privacy and data protection company VeraSafe.

The companies are required to disclose very little about their data collection. By law, companies need only describe their practices in their privacy policies, which tend to be dense legal documents that few people read and even fewer can truly understand.

EVERYTHING CAN BE HACKED

Does it really matter that your information isn’t actually anonymous? Location data companies argue that your data is safe — that it poses no real risk because it’s stored on guarded servers. This assurance has been undermined by the parade of publicly reported data breaches — to say nothing of breaches that don’t make headlines. In truth, sensitive information can be easily transferred or leaked, as evidenced by this very story.

We’re constantly shedding data, for example, by surfing the internet or making credit card purchases. But location data is different. Our precise locations are used fleetingly in the moment for a targeted ad or notification, but then repurposed indefinitely for much more profitable ends, like tying your purchases to billboard ads you drove past on the freeway. Many apps that use your location, like weather services, work perfectly well without your precise location — but collecting your location feeds a lucrative secondary business of analyzing, licensing and transferring that information to third parties.

For many Americans, the only real risk they face from having their information exposed would be embarrassment or inconvenience. But for others, like survivors of abuse, the risks could be substantial. And who can say what practices or relationships any given individual might want to keep private, to withhold from friends, family, employers or the government? We found hundreds of pings in mosques and churches, abortion clinics, queer spaces and other sensitive areas.

In one case, we observed a change in the regular movements of a Microsoft engineer. He made a visit one Tuesday afternoon to the main Seattle campus of a Microsoft competitor, Amazon. The following month, he started a new job at Amazon. It took minutes to identify him as Ben Broili, a manager now for Amazon Prime Air, a drone delivery service.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Mr. Broili told us in early December. “But knowing that you all can get ahold of it and comb through and place me to see where I work and live — that’s weird.” That we could so easily discern that Mr. Broili was out on a job interview raises some obvious questions, like: Could the internal location surveillance of executives and employees become standard corporate practice?
Ben Broili’s interview at Amazon was captured in the data. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

Mr. Broili wasn’t worried about apps cataloguing his every move, but he said he felt unsure about whether the tradeoff between the services offered by the apps and the sacrifice of privacy was worth it. “It’s an awful lot of data,” he said. “And I really still don’t understand how it’s being used. I’d have to see how the other companies were weaponizing or monetizing it to make that call.”

If this kind of location data makes it easy to keep tabs on employees, it makes it just as simple to stalk celebrities. Their private conduct — even in the dead of night, in residences and far from paparazzi — could come under even closer scrutiny.

Reporters hoping to evade other forms of surveillance by meeting in person with a source might want to rethink that practice. Every major newsroom covered by the data contained dozens of pings; we easily traced one Washington Post journalist through Arlington, Va.

In other cases, there were detours to hotels and late-night visits to the homes of prominent people. One person, plucked from the data in Los Angeles nearly at random, was found traveling to and from roadside motels multiple times, for visits of only a few hours each time.

While these pointillist pings don’t in themselves reveal a complete picture, a lot can be gleaned by examining the date, time and length of time at each point.

Large data companies like Foursquare — perhaps the most familiar name in the location data business — say they don’t sell detailed location data like the kind reviewed for this story but rather use it to inform analysis, such as measuring whether you entered a store after seeing an ad on your mobile phone.

But a number of companies do sell the detailed data. Buyers are typically data brokers and advertising companies. But some of them have little to do with consumer advertising, including financial institutions, geospatial analysis companies and real estate investment firms that can process and analyze such large quantities of information. They might pay more than $1 million for a tranche of data, according to a former location data company employee who agreed to speak anonymously.

Location data is also collected and shared alongside a mobile advertising ID, a supposedly anonymous identifier about 30 digits long that allows advertisers and other businesses to tie activity together across apps. The ID is also used to combine location trails with other information like your name, home address, email, phone number or even an identifier tied to your Wi-Fi network.

The data can change hands in almost real time, so fast that your location could be transferred from your smartphone to the app’s servers and exported to third parties in milliseconds. This is how, for example, you might see an ad for a new car some time after walking through a dealership.

That data can then be resold, copied, pirated and abused. There’s no way you can ever retrieve it.

Location data is about far more than consumers seeing a few more relevant ads. This information provides critical intelligence for big businesses. The Weather Channel app’s parent company, for example, analyzed users’ location data for hedge funds, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles this year that was triggered by Times reporting. And Foursquare received much attention in 2016 after using its data trove to predict that after an E. coli crisis, Chipotle’s sales would drop by 30 percent in the coming months. Its same-store sales ultimately fell 29.7 percent.

Much of the concern over location data has focused on telecom giants like Verizon and AT&T, which have been selling location data to third parties for years. Last year, Motherboard, Vice’s technology website, found that once the data was sold, it was being shared to help bounty hunters find specific cellphones in real time. The resulting scandal forced the telecom giants to pledge they would stop selling location movements to data brokers.

Yet no law prohibits them from doing so.

Location data is transmitted from your phone via software development kits, or S.D.Ks. as they’re known in the trade. The kits are small programs that can be used to build features within an app. They make it easy for app developers to simply include location-tracking features, a useful component of services like weather apps. Because they’re so useful and easy to use, S.D.K.s are embedded in thousands of apps. Facebook, Google and Amazon, for example, have extremely popular S.D.K.s that allow smaller apps to connect to bigger companies’ ad platforms or help provide web traffic analytics or payment infrastructure.

But they could also sit on an app and collect location data while providing no real service back to the app. Location companies may pay the apps to be included — collecting valuable data that can be monetized.

“If you have an S.D.K. that’s frequently collecting location data, it is more than likely being resold across the industry,” said Nick Hall, chief executive of the data marketplace company VenPath.

If this information is so sensitive, why is it collected in the first place?

For brands, following someone’s precise movements is key to understanding the “customer journey” — every step of the process from seeing an ad to buying a product. It’s the Holy Grail of advertising, one marketer said, the complete picture that connects all of our interests and online activity with our real-world actions.

Once they have the complete customer journey, companies know a lot about what we want, what we buy and what made us buy it. Other groups have begun to find ways to use it too. Political campaigns could analyze the interests and demographics of rally attendees and use that information to shape their messages to try to manipulate particular groups. Governments around the world could have a new tool to identify protestors.

Pointillist location data also has some clear benefits to society. Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics, natural disasters and demographics.

For individual consumers, the value of constant tracking is less tangible. And the lack of transparency from the advertising and tech industries raises still more concerns.

Does a coupon app need to sell second-by-second location data to other companies to be profitable? Does that really justify allowing companies to track millions and potentially expose our private lives?

Data companies say users consent to tracking when they agree to share their location. But those consent screens rarely make clear how the data is being packaged and sold. If companies were clearer about what they were doing with the data, would anyone agree to share it?

What about data collected years ago, before hacks and leaks made privacy a forefront issue? Should it still be used, or should it be deleted for good?

If it’s possible that data stored securely today can easily be hacked, leaked or stolen, is this kind of data worth that risk?

Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be served slightly more relevant ads? Or so that hedge fund managers can get richer?

The companies profiting from our every move can’t be expected to voluntarily limit their practices. Congress has to step in to protect Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.

Until then, one thing is certain: We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. This system wasn’t created deliberately. It was built through the interplay of technological advance and the profit motive. It was built to make money. The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ell-phone.html





Hundreds of ‘Pink Slime’ Local News Outlets are Distributing Algorithmic Stories and Conservative Talking Points
Priyanjana Bengani

An increasingly popular tactic challenges conventional wisdom on the spread of electoral disinformation: the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations. An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School has discovered at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories. Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media.

Titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times have appeared on the web ahead of the 2020 election. These networks of sites can be used in a variety of ways: as ‘stage setting’ for events, focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can then be used for political targeting.

On October 20, the Lansing State Journal first broke the story of the network’s existence. About three dozen local news sites, owned by Metric Media, had appeared in Michigan. Further reporting by the Michigan Daily, the Guardian and the New York Times identified yet more sites. Ultimately, previous reporting has identified around 200 of these sites. Our analysis suggests that there are at least twice that number of publications across a number of related networks, of which Metric Media is just one component.

Over a two-week period starting November 26, we tapped into the RSS feeds of these 189 Metric Media sites, all of which were created this year, and found over fifteen thousand unique stories had been published (over fifty thousand when aggregated across the sites), but only about a hundred titles had the bylines of human reporters. The rest cited automated services or press releases.

Many of the stories attributed to automated services (Metric Media News Service, Local Labs News Service, etc.) relied on data releases from federal programs like the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services, Congressional Research Service, the Federal Election Commission, and the Census Bureau. Another frequently used data sources in Metric Media’s automated stories is GasBuddy, a Boston-based startup that monitors gas station prices in North America and Australia. Some of the pieces attributed to human writers also rely on public data, from a Tax Foundation study that established the cents per gallon each state collected in wine taxes, in one instance, or a builders association study that rated structural deficiencies in bridges in another.

Interspersed between stories about real estate prices and the best place to purchase premium gas based on zip code, newsier pieces appear, sometimes to quote a state senator about how the federal government should not play a role in education. Others quoted various exclusively Republican officials like US senators, chairpeople, or communications staff of the state GOP, about the impeachment process being a witch hunt or abuse of power.

The networks can be traced back to conservative businessman Brian Timpone. In 2012, Timpone’s company Journatic, an outlet known for its low-cost automated story generation (which became known as ‘pink slime journalism’), attracted national attention and outrage for faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism. Journatic rebranded as Locality Labs in 2013; Locality Labs is behind many of the publications we discovered that mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations. These sites do not bear much information about their political use or funding, but some of them have been funded by political candidates and lobbying campaigns. Metric Media, Locality Labs (or LocalLabs), Franklin Archer, the Record Inc., and Local Government Information Services (LGIS) are the main organizations involved in operating these networks of publications, and Timpone is associated in one way or another with each of them. Michigan Daily has detailed the convoluted relationship between these organizations.

Some of these mysterious, partisan local news sites publish physical newspapers and many have minimal social media presence. At first, they do not appear to be owned by the same network or organization, but a number of clues suggest that they are intimately linked. Our analysis demonstrates the links between the networks by identifying shared markers, such as unique analytics tokens, server IP addresses, and even shared design templates and bylines on articles. Further, the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for many of these websites—but not all—suggest they are part of Locality Labs, LLC.

Websites and networks can aid campaigns to manipulate public opinion by exploiting faith in local media. The demise of local journalism in many areas creates an information vacuum, and raises the chance of success for these influence campaigns. The strategy is further made possible by the low cost of automating news stories, repurposing press releases (including obituaries from funeral homes), and replicating design templates, as well as the relative ease with which political or single-issue campaigns can obscure their funding and provenance.

One in five newspapers has closed in the past decade, and many other outlets have significantly cut staff and reporting. This bleak landscape for local news creates space for this cottage industry of outlets that claim to produce journalism—typically during election cycles—and create and amplify material to support political outcomes, sometimes even physically mailing advertising materials that masquerade as newspapers but are not labeled political advertising. These publications cover certain candidates and topics, including limited government, tort reform, and labour unions, with a conservative bias.

It is not clear how effective the sites are, but their architecture and strategy is useful to understand the way they co-opt the language, design and structure of news organizations. Automation has been touted as a way to create stories where there are few reporting resources, and it can be used to build credibility. It can also make a news organization look far more prolific than it is. Potentially adding to the credibility of these sites is their Google search ranking: in the case of some of the websites set up in 2015-2016, we observed that once sites had gained ample authority, they appeared on the first page of Google Search results just below the official government and social media pages.

The Lansing State Journal’s story highlights Metric Media’s intent to launch hundreds of such sites to “fill the void in local communities.” And, while Metric Media hasn’t been embroiled in controversies like its sibling organizations, the Journal’s story quotes Matt Grossmann, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, who said, “many [articles] on [Metric Media site The] Lansing Sun appeared to be right-leaning.”

Using multiple network analysis tools, we found at least 450 websites including the ones identified by previous reporting. There are dedicated networks with anywhere between five and forty sites per state in eleven states. Additionally, every state in the US (and Washington DC) has a dedicated “business daily” (e.g. Michigan Business Daily, Utah Business Daily), and there are several international “business daily” websites (e.g. Toronto Business Daily, Mexico Business Daily, Manila Business Daily) as well. These are augmented by several single-subject sites (e.g. American Security News, Tobacco Newswire, Farm Insurance News), and community sites that aggregate events, news, and business services information (e.g. Metro East Today, Wilton Review, Palmerton Guide).

450 sites, 12 state networks, 5 corporate entities

The 450 websites span twenty-one different networks operated by five distinct corporate entities. Below, we provide further detail about each of these organizations and how they’re linked.

The overall distribution of sites across the networks is shown in Figure 1, with Franklin Archer’s Local News Network the single largest network with almost 130 sites. In the case of Franklin Archer, we conflated nine standalone sites that bear all the heuristics of their local news sites, even though these sites were not explicitly listed on the organization’s website. These include Surprise Journal, El Paso Review, and Lansing Reporter.

With the Local News Network sites added to the 51 sites in the Metro Business network, the overall number under the Franklin Archer banner stands at 179, a close second to Metric Media, which has 189 publications across ten states. Metric Media’s North Carolina operation alone has 46 sites, making it the third biggest individual network in our dataset.

For clarity, we have also conflated 25 standalone sites—sixteen topical sites, and nine international sites—under “LocalLabs: International” and “LocalLabs: Topical” in Figure 1. These sites have a Locality Labs, LLC privacy policy or shared analytics identifier, but no other associations. In some cases, the privacy policy is not even linked on the homepage. The Mexico Business Daily, for example, doesn’t mention any affiliation in its “About Us” or “Contact” pages, and there is no privacy policy on its homepage. This link suggests it is a Locality Labs property. CISTRAN Finance follows the exact same pattern. In other cases, like the Toronto Business Daily or the Balkan News Wire, the privacy policy is linked to from the homepage, but no other affiliations are mentioned.

In our analysis so far, websites on the Metric Media state-centric networks only link to other sites from the same state, including stories from Franklin Archer’s Metro Business network. There are, however, few indicators that the sites are operated by the same organization. On sites in both networks, the privacy policies and terms of service suggest they are operated by Locality Labs, LLC. Stories covering vastly different topics across the network share bylines, as well as similar—often identical—templates.

These anecdotal pieces of evidence can only be gleaned after identifying the scale of the operation. To measure the scale of the operation, we relied on website metadata and network forensics: the sites shared IP addresses and various analytics identifiers. Within the same network—and even the same organization—that is expected behavior. It is highly unusual for sites to share IP addresses and analytics identifiers if they are not connected, but that’s exactly what we found in these networks, as can be seen below.

Shared IP addresses

Each domain maps to an IP address, which identifies the server where the site is hosted. Across this greater network of networks, including the domains for the organizations, we found about twenty-five unique IP addresses. Some of these networks, including the biggest—Franklin Archer: Local News Network—don’t share an IP address or server with any other network. Some only share IP addresses with other sites that belong to the same parent organization. For example, some state-level Metric Media properties—the publications in New Mexico, Arizona and Montana—share a server.

But, Metric Media’s Maryland properties (which includes North Baltimore Journal, Harford News, Montgomery News) also sit on the same server as the LGIS sites, which is more unusual. Similarly, it is improbable for sites within Franklin Archer’s Business Network to share an IP address with LocalLabs’ international or topical sites, unless the two organizations share resources.

Some of the parent organization’s websites live on the same server as some of the LocalLabs’ topical properties, too. To wit: The Record (therecordinc.com), Franklin Archer (franklinarcher.com) and Dan Proft’s super PAC Liberty Principles (libertyprinciples.com) are on the same server as Tobacco Newswire, FDA Reporter, and FDA Health News.

Shared Google Analytics IDs

Even though there were over twenty Google Analytics IDs, only five were used on more than one network. Of these, three identifiers were shared within Metric Media sites only, while another three were shared among Franklin Archer, LGIS, and the LocalLabs sites. It is highly unlikely for independent, supposedly unrelated organizations like LGIS and Franklin Archer to share analytics identifiers.

At the time of writing, the Franklin Archer organizational website (franklinarcher.com), publications belonging to LGIS, and topical websites like American Security News, Power Newswire, and Higher Education Tribune shared the same Google Analytics ID. International sites like Gulf News Journal and a handful of business dailies also had that same identifier.

A Single Shared NewRelic ID and Quantcast ID

Perhaps no other identifier illustrates the convoluted nature of these networks as well as the NewRelic ID.

Most of Metric Media’s properties didn’t have a corresponding NewRelic ID, nor did the Florida network’s. ther networks, though, shared the same identifier, including Metric Media’s Maryland sites. Also, for the first time, we see the publications within the Record network, the first site of which was established in 2004, sharing an identifier with the greater network.

Similarly, a single Quantcast identifier was used across LGIS, Record, and Metric Media sites. (Figure 5). Much like the NewRelic ID, this too shows the connected nature of the networks.

When we discovered the high volume of sites intricately linked across a convoluted network, we set about trying to identify the people behind these organizations, and their backgrounds. In reporting from the Lansing State Journal, Michigan Daily, and the Guardian, as well as our own analysis, one name appeared time and again: Brian Timpone.

The sites in our dataset go back to 2004 with the inception of the first publication—the Madison-St. Clair Record—which is now part of the Record network. In the next section, we’ll trace through the emergence of various publications, networks, and their impact.

The Record Network

The Record Network is a system of eleven publications, the first of which—the Madison-St. Clair Record—went live in 2004. The network’s publications cover the legal system in eight states; one of the outlets, Legal Newsline, is not bound to a single state.

Even before Journatic was set up in 2006, Timpone was the founding publisher of sites in the Record network, which have come under scrutiny for being run by advocacy groups disguised as media organizations. Timpone is currently listed as founding publisher of the Madison-St. Clair Record and the Louisiana Record identifies him as the publisher. According to the “About Us” page on a subset of Record network sites (including Legal Newsline, Madison-St. Clair Record and Florida Record), they are owned by the US Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce—an organization, according to OpenSecrets, that since 2008 has been one of the biggest “dark money” spenders in US elections. Fifteen years later, these sites are still very much active.

LocalLabs/Locality Labs

LocalLabs, another Timpone company, was a rebranding of Journatic in the aftermath of a 2012 scandal over plagiarism, falsified quotes, and fake bylines.

For the last twenty months or so, the website for LocalLabs has simply said “We’re improving our site. Stay tuned for a new and improved LocalLabs.com.” Previously, the website detailed the services the organization provided, declaring that “LocalLabs offers community news production, advertising and advertorial content, print special sections and web and mobile application management.”

We found over forty websites with the disclaimer “a product of LocalLabs” or a privacy policy/terms of service page suggesting the sites are operated by Locality Labs, LLC.

Fifteen of these sites, all registered in 2018, belong to a single network in a single state: Florida. At the time of writing, we had not found a Metric Media operation in Florida.

The remaining publications are single-topic sites or international business sites. Examples of these sites include Manila Business Daily, Toronto Business Daily, and Mexico Business Daily. The single-topic sites are more US-centric, such as American Security News, American Pharmacy News, and Higher Education Tribune. While these don’t say they are a product of LocalLabs, their privacy policies are attributed to Locality Labs.

Bylines on these sites are shared across other sites in other networks as well.

Newsinator and LGIS

In 2015, Timpone incorporated another organization: Newsinator, a firm that, among other things, had a “history of doing paid political work and offers marketing services to companies under the name Interactive Content Services,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

In 2015-16, according to the Illinois State Board of Election Expenditure data, Newsinator was paid over $300,000 for “Advertising – newspaper” by Liberty Principles, a conservative super PAC, run by Dan Proft, described as “one of the state’s most visible and controversial political figures.” According to the data, this $300,000 was split between twenty different candidates’ campaigns, most of whom were running for state office in Illinois in 2016.

The line between Locality Labs and Newsinator is blurry: Proft, in his own words, works with reporters at Locality Labs and “suggests stories and discusses what reporters should cover.” Newsinator, on the other hand, was responsible for mailing publications created by Proft’s organization to voters, in the form of weekly eight-page print editions. Additionally, a since-dismissed Federal Election Commission complaint says Proft created Local Government Information Services (LGIS) in 2016, which “took over production and distribution of newspapers.” State records confirm that Proft was the President of LGIS, but the complaint also says that as of January 2019, the corporation’s status was “dissolved” involuntarily. At the time of writing, LGIS has 33 Illinois-based sites, eleven of which have corresponding print publications.

The extent to which Locality Labs was involved in the business of LGIS and Newsinator is highlighted in an FEC lawsuit, filed for violating the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by “re-publishing campaign materials in a format designed to look like local community papers.” The respondents included the obvious suspects: the campaign (Khouri for Congress), the PAC (Liberty Principles), and LGIS (the company publishing the material). In addition, it also included Locality Labs. These entities were charged with violating the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by “re-publishing campaign materials in a format designed to look like local community papers.” The details of the lawsuit further stipulate that LGIS “contracts with various entities, including Locality Labs […], to prepare content for publications” including providing “local and state news in certain geographical areas in Illinois.” LGIS, however, has full editorial control. The lawsuit was dismissed in July 2019.

Newsinator, LLC also held the copyright for each of the Record network’s individual publication’s apps on the iOS App Store.

Franklin Archer

Two networks—DirecTech (Local News Network) and Metro Business Daily—and almost 180 sites sail under the banner of Franklin Archer, a company established in 2018. Brian Timpone’s brother, Michael Timpone, is CEO. On the Franklin Archer website, the company boasts that it is “the largest producer of local news in the United States” with over 200 active websites, over three million monthly page views, and 600 stories produced daily.

The 128 Local News Network sites we found promise communities a way to “browse the latest news, investigate upcoming events, stay in the know” by creating and maintaining “the most comprehensive and easily searchable database of all local businesses by placing an emphasis on consumer needs.” They are all “a product of LocalLabs.” (note: some of the sites mentioned under “Our Publications” lead to dead links; we also found nine websites that follow the exact same pattern, but are not explicitly mentioned on the Franklin Archer website.)

The Metro Business Network website also doesn’t explicitly state its connection to either Franklin Archer or LocalLabs, but its sites are the same as those in Franklin Archer’s “Metro Business Daily” network: one “business daily” per state and one for Washington DC. And, like the Metric Media websites, their privacy policy and terms of service indicate that they are Locality Labs properties.

Today, the Franklin Archer organizational website lives on the same server as Dan Proft’s super PAC: Liberty Principles. A Franklin Archer worker, who asked not to be named, said the company’s writers are paid by Newsinator. According to the Iowa corporate registry, Newsinator and Franklin Archer are both alternative business entity names for DirecTech, LLC.

Metric Media

The Metric Media Foundation was created in 2019 by Bradley Cameron, whose link to Timpone (if any) remains unclear. However, his sites too sport Locality Labs’ privacy policy and terms of service, and share servers and analytics identifiers with some of the other organizations.

Our analysis found Metric Media has 189 sites across ten states. According to their “About Us” page, the Metric Media Foundation “funds more than 900 news sites that generate over 3 million monthly page views” and its operation “also produces over 600 stories daily, making it the largest producer of local news content in the nation.” The names of these news sites are not listed on their website.

The numbers boasted by Metric Media are identical to the numbers boasted by Franklin Archer: the 3 million monthly page views and 600 stories produced daily. But the relationship between Franklin Archer and Metric Media is not articulated on either organization’s website.

When we asked about the emergence, structure and scale of these networks as well as their business model, Timpone said, “Locality Labs has used its proprietary technology to transform public records into news for major newspaper/media companies around the US, as well as digital start-ups like LGIS.” Previously, Brian Timpone has said, “I’m a biased guy. I’m a Republican.”

Despite the different organization and network names, it is evident these sites are connected. Other than simply sharing network metadata as described above, they also share bylines (including “Metric Media News Service” and “Local Labs News Service” for templated stories), servers, layouts, and templates.

Typically, creating entities that focus on communities, local news, and single issues important to the general public would be a worthwhile endeavour. But, the partisan material present on the more established networks along with the ideological leanings of some of the key personnel give us pause. The approach adopted by Dan Proft’s LGIS network during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles provide a model for these relatively newer networks. The Lansing State Journal has highlighted stories about voter fraud using data from the Heritage Foundation on the Metric Media Michigan sites. Similar stories have also been published on the Arizona, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Iowa sites.

Over the course of the 2020 campaign the Tow Center will continue to monitor these networks and others like it to better understand how these types of activity affect the course of campaigns, how they work, what their effects are, and, crucially, what the overall impact might mean for both news consumers and audiences. We intend to augment our initial analysis with further qualitative research across all the networks we find as the campaign progresses. In due course, we intend to release our datasets for other journalists and researchers to examine.

If you are a local reporter and have examples of similar networks operating in your area, please get in touch with us here. If you have written a piece about the phenomenon in your local community, then please send us links. The phenomenon is often associated with right-leaning causes and personalities, but we believe the strategies could be adopted across the political spectrum.

How we established the scope of the network

The majority of this research was conducted using a combination of tools and products available online. Below we provide a short introduction to these tools and outline our process for students/journalists wishing to conduct similar analyses. If you’d like further help or guidance for similar investigations, please get in touch.

To create a website, two basic steps need to be followed: the domain or web address needs to be registered, and a web host set up to house the actual content of the website. When the first step is taken, a WHOIS record is created, which may include the details of the registrar (private WHOIS entries, where the details of the registrant are hidden or redacted, are becoming increasingly common, especially due to recent regulation in Europe).

And, when a website goes live, the content is pulled from a web host or server, which has a corresponding IP address (analogous to a phone number for a person). The IP address not only tells us where the content for the website is hosted, but it can also reveal what other websites reside on the same IP address.

The code that drives the website can contain metadata, which reveals other identifying traits, including analytics identifiers. Tracking identifiers allow websites to get aggregate user information and analytics, including demographic details, the amount of time spent on a specific page on the site, and how users’ navigated the site. It is highly unlikely for unrelated websites to share tracking identifiers, because these analytics services provide business intelligence and insights that can result in competitive advantage.

Therefore, by finding domains registered by the same people, websites residing on the same server (i.e. websites pointing to the same IP address), and websites sharing the same analytics IDs, it is relatively straightforward to build out the network. There are various free, freemium, commercial, and open-source tools available that help extract information at this level.

To ensure thoroughness, manual analysis is necessary coupled with original reporting from outside sources and research tools that allow us to explore corporate (including non-profit) entities, look up campaign finance details, and see historical content of websites. And, to ensure no false positives (sites incorrectly identified to be part of the network) slip in, manual confirmation is necessary.

For our analysis, we used:

• RiskIQ to identify websites that shared tracking identifiers (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Quantcast, or NewRelic)
• SecurityTrails and Farsight DNSDB to determine which websites were housed on the same servers
• Whoxy to pull out WHOIS details
• ProPublica’s Non-Profit Explorer to find key people associated with the organizations
• Illinois Sunshine and Open Secrets to look at campaign finance disclosures
• Lexis Nexis to research the corporate entities and key people

Starting with one of the domains from the original Lansing State Journal story, we found that many of the stories were sourced from Michigan Business Daily. A quick look at the Michigan Business Daily website immediately informed us that similar business dailies existed in every state and Washington D.C.

We looked up one of these business dailies (Rhode Island Business Daily) on RiskIQ, a self-proclaimed “cyberthreat intelligence tool,” to find which other websites shared the same identifiers (Figure 6). One identifier type proved to be key: the NewRelic ID. RiskIQ found 138 sites shared the same NewRelic identifier. The sites included Chicago City Wire, Cook County Record, Legal Newsline, Florida Record, and Blockshopper.

The link to Blockshopper—and the subsequent WHOIS lookup—confirmed there was an overlap between sites registered by Brian Timpone and the sites identified by RiskIQ, including Chicago City Wire, Kane County Reporter, and SE Illinois News.

Manually exploring some of these sites, it was evident that some of the underlying technologies and templates they were using were identical, and yet part of separate networks. Anecdotally, one more thing stood out: different stories across states, topics, and networks had many of the same bylines.

Using these 138 sites as our base set, we input each of the domains into SecurityTrails and Farsight DNSDB to find which other sites were on the same IP address. Farsight DNSDB and Security Trails are both passive DNS tools, which amongst other things can give users details about website infrastructure, including what is the IP address of the server the website lives on (Figure 7.1) and who its mail provider is. Further, given an IP address, passive DNS tools provide users with all websites that share the same IP address (Figure 7.2). Websites with the same IP address are not necessarily related though. Websites hosted by companies like Squarespace and Wix (and many others) are likely to share IP addresses (lookups on two websites—one hosted by Squarespace and one by Wix—showed more than five million domains for each of the two IP addresses). Similarly, “parked” domains—domains that have been registered but not linked to any web-hosting—are likely to share IP addresses, as the web registrar will simply assign an IP address to said domain.

We used both tools, plugging in the IP addresses of the domains we had identified, to get all other websites that were hosted on the same server. It might seem redundant to use multiple services to do exactly the same thing. However, the algorithms and technologies that back each of these services are different, and the extent of their archival/historical data vary as well. Consolidating data across services increases the odds of getting a more complete dataset. (Note: you can use both tools to get both, the IP address of a website and the list of websites pointing to the same IP address; there are also quicker ways of doing this, but this is the easiest)

Once we extracted still more domains from passive DNS lookups, we cross-checked these domains on RiskIQ, and the cycle continued. Combining the outputs from these sources, we were able to map out the network.
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_repor...ing-points.php





Maria Strong Named Acting U.S. Copyright Register Amid Search for Permanent Chief
Tatiana Cirisano

The U.S. Copyright Office has appointed Associate Register of Copyrights Maria Strong as the new acting register of copyrights effective Jan. 5, 2020, when current chief Karyn Temple steps down.

Temple only just stepped into the official role in March, after holding the job on an acting basis for two and a half years. Strong, like Temple, was appointed by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Temple announced last week that she would be leaving the Copyright Office to accept a role as the Motion Picture Association's global general counsel.

“I am pleased to announce that Maria Strong has agreed to act as Register of Copyrights,” Hayden said in a statement. “Maria has had a stellar career here in the Copyright Office, and we are confident that she will ably guide the office and continue to advance its many ongoing initiatives like modernization while we undertake the search for a permanent appointee.”

Added Temple: "Maria Strong is an extremely talented lawyer and manager, and I have greatly enjoyed working with her over the years. She will serve the Copyright Office and the public well during this transition."

Strong was appointed to her previous role, associate register and director of policy and international affairs, in April. Prior to that, she served as deputy director of policy and international affairs since January 2015. She joined the Copyright Office in 2010 as senior counsel for policy and international affairs, and also served as acting general counsel from April to July 2013.

Now, Strong will serve as Acting Register while Hayden conducts a search for a permanent Register. The job includes directing the procedures and practices of the Copyright Office, establishing standards for copyright registration, and increasingly, influencing U.S. copyright policy.

While the process of appointing a new Register has historically been straightforward -- the Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress, in the legislative branch, and the Register is appointed by the Librarian -- it became controversial after Hayden removed former Register Maria Pallante in 2016. The Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017 aimed to make the position a presidential appointee and while it passed the House of Representatives in April 2017, it didn't get enough support to pass in the Senate.

Strong takes the helm at a time when copyright is becoming an increasingly contentious topic in the music industry, and as the Copyright Office is tasked with overseeing the Mechanical Licensing Collective, mandated to collect mechanical royalties under last year’s Music Modernization Act.

Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance nonprofit representing artistic creators, voiced his support for Strong in a statement, calling her a "thoughtful, knowledgeable and experienced stalwart on copyright law and policy."

“Maria and I have known one another for more than 20 years, so I take great pleasure in seeing her recognized for her impressive career, which includes nearly ten years at the Copyright Office," he said. "At this crucial time, when the Office is undergoing a complete modernization of its systems and processes and making changes to its registration system and other services, Maria’s thoughtful and steady approach will benefit all users of the Copyright Office as the search for the next permanent Register gets underway.”
https://www.billboard.com/articles/b...lack-rock-city





Celebs Who've Been Sued for Posting Photos of Themselves

The 'trend' of celebrities being sued by paparazzi for posting photos of themselves is in no way slowing down. Now actor Liam Hemsworth is the latest target.

But he's not alone. In recent years, a number of celebrities have been sued over the same allegations. It may sound bizarre that the paparazzi, who are constantly on top of celebs, are the ones to sue for using their pictures. But social media has added an extra layer of complexity to copyright law, so it's still early days to understand what will happen next.

Various celebrities have been affected by this wave of "copyright trolling," including Jennifer Lopez, Gigi Hadid, and Khloé Kardashian, and they have taken to social media to express their indignation.
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/entertainm...ves/ss-BBY4Ol7





Pirating Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in the 1840s

When Parley’s Illuminated Library published a pirated version of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens decided he had had enough.
Matthew Wills

At the end of the most famous Christmas ghost story ever, Tiny Tim exclaims, “God bless us, every one!” He encompasses Scrooge in his benediction, for the old miser has had a complete change of heart—maybe even a transplant—after having the bejesus scared out of him by a trio of phantoms. Probably not included in Tiny Tim’s final words were Messrs. Richard Lee, John Haddock, and Henry Hewitt, a trio of literary pirates who kept ripping Charles Dickens off.

During the tender youth of international copyright law, the wildly popular Dickens was constantly trying to get ahead of unscrupulous publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic. When Lee and Haddock’s London twopenny weekly, Parley’s Illuminated Library, published a pirated version of A Christmas Carol under the byline of Hewitt, Dickens had had enough. He sued. When he eventually won in court, he wrote in celebration: “[T]he pirates are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.”

Not quite. Parley’s never did publish the next installment of their version, called simply “Christmas Ghost Story,” but the pirate crew got out of any damages by claiming bankruptcy. The experience ended up costing Dickens’s hundreds of pounds and much aggravation. His unhappy engagement with the law would inform his novel Bleak House, written a few years later. In that masterwork, the ominous Court of Chancery is a corrupt institution where cases linger for years, lawyers grow fat, and justice is never served.

The literary scholar Michael Hancher describes Parley’s as being made up of “mainly reworded abridgments of popular works of the day.” Lee and Haddock called what they published “re-originated” stories. Hancher calls that “a nicely original word for the process of piracy.” Parley’s had already pirated Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge before “re-originating” A Christmas Carol.

This legal “debacle,” as Hancher calls it, has been discussed for years by Dickens scholars and legal historians. What hasn’t been available, however, were actual copies of the January 6th, 1844, issue of Parley’s. Of a print run of 50,000, barely any survived into the twentieth century. Most people who wrote about Dickens’s legal tribulations never saw the offending publication. Hancher, however, managed to track down a bound copy in the Bodleian Library. It had originally been collected and donated by the famed folklorists Iona and Peter Opie.

Dickens claimed in court that his work was travestied by Parley’s. In an affidavit, Hewitt countered that he’d improved the original. Hancher, likening the publication to a kind of shady Reader’s Digest, gives a measured opinion: “if young people find descriptions boring they will be less bored by Hewitt than by Dickens.”

But what intrigues Hancher most of all are the margins of the Parley’s pages. They are simply crawling with words. Maxims and poetic quotations run along the top, bottom, and sides of the central block of text. This style of layout was not original to Parley’s. It was instead a growing trend in the burgeoning children’s literature market. Such commentary had a “missionary function: by sampling, they recommend great works of literature.” Does it also smack of the postmodern, a paper hypertext avant la letter? Hancher suggests so:

The decorative frame of arresting maxims and discursive poems in the margins gave the reader something else to think about, moral, canonical, or sentimental, should her mind wander from the center of the page. Rhizomatic, paratextual, decentered, digressive, recycled, and unauthorized, Parley’s Illuminated Library is a book that we can appreciate, though Dickens could not.

Modern readers may also appreciate that the tribulations of Dickens v. Lee and related legal actions were interwoven into a much more complex work than A Christmas Carol. Bleak House, powered by Dickens’s reformist fires, doesn’t seem ever to have been “re-originated” for the juvenile market.
https://daily.jstor.org/pirating-cha...-in-the-1840s/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

December 14th, December 7th, November 30th, November 23rd

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


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