Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 22nd, '07

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Once you’re on MySpace, you’re trapped. You spend all your time online just trying to keep the negative stuff about you from spreading." – Jake Dobson, age 12


"I worry this is all going to disappear in a few months, and I’ll have to wait tables again. I get anxiety-ridden, and I can’t relax. I should sing my own songs to myself." – Ingrid Michaelson


"Were it not for radio's free promotional airplay of music on stations all over America, most successful recording artists would still be playing in a garage." - Dennis Wharton


"I took that same introduction [from Ike Turner's 'Rocket '88'] and made 'Good Golly, Miss Molly'. I took that same thing and made a huge hit." – Little Richard


"Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published." – Nick Ciarelli, publisher


"TorrentSpy.com is liable for extensive movie piracy because it destroyed evidence in a copyright case." – Bloomberg


"Accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged." – New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane


"The New York Times’ inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling." – White House press secretary Dana Perino


"Pernicious (pər-nĭsh'əs) adj. 1) a. Tending to cause death or serious injury; deadly: a pernicious virus. b. Causing great harm; destructive: pernicious rumors. 2). Archaic. Evil; wicked." – The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition
















"So here we are–facing a final decision on whether the telecommunications companies will get off the hook for good. The president’s allies are as intent as they ever were on making that happen. They want immunity back in this bill at all costs.

But what they’re truly offering is secrecy in place of openness. Fiat in place of law.

And in place of the forthright argument and judicial deliberation that ought to be this country’s pride, two simple words from our president’s mouth: 'Trust me.'

I cannot speak for my colleagues–but I would never take that offer, not even in the best of times, not even from a perfect president. I would never take that offer because our Constitution tells us that the president’s word is subject to the oversight of the Congress and the deliberation of the courts; and because I took an oath to defend the Constitution; and because I stand by my oath.

'Trust me.' It is the offer to hide ourselves in the waiting arms of the rule of men. And in these threatened times, that offer has never seemed more seductive. The rule of law has rarely been so fragile."

– Chris Dodd, The Democratic Senator from Connecticut

December 22nd, 2007





In Trade Ruling, Antigua Wins a Right to Piracy
James Kanter and Gary Rivlin

In an unusual ruling on Friday at the World Trade Organization, the Caribbean nation of Antigua won the right to violate copyright protections on goods like films and music from the United States — up to $21 million — as part of a dispute between the two countries over online gambling.

The award follows a W.T.O. ruling that Washington had wrongly blocked online gaming operators on the island from the American market at the same time it allowed online wagering on horse racing (see WiR-Nov. 18 ‘06).

Antigua and Barbuda had claimed damages of $3.44 billion a year. That makes the relatively small amount awarded Friday, $21 million, something of a setback for Antigua, which had been struggling to preserve its gambling industry. The United States claimed that its behavior had caused $500,000 damage to the Antiguan economy.

Yet the ruling is significant in that it grants a rare form of compensation: the right of one country, in this case Antigua, to violate intellectual property laws of another — the United States — by allowing it to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products.

“That has only been done once before and is, I believe, a very potent weapon,” said Mark Mendel, a lawyer representing Antigua, after the ruling. “I hope that the United States government will now see the wisdom in reaching some accommodation with Antigua over this dispute.”

Though Antigua is best known for its pristine beaches and tourist attractions, the dozens of online casinos based there are vital to the island’s economy, serving as its second-largest employer.

By pressing its claim, trade lawyers said, Antigua could set a precedent for other countries to sue the United States for unfair trade practices, potentially opening the door to electronic piracy and other dubious practices around the world.

Still, implementation will prove difficult, the lawyers say.

“Even if Antigua goes ahead with an act of piracy or the refusal to allow the registration of a trademark, the question still remains of how much that act is worth,” said Brendan McGivern, a trade lawyer with White & Case in Geneva. “The Antiguans could say that’s worth $50,000, and then the U.S. might say that’s worth $5 million — and I can tell you that the U.S. is going to dog them on every step of the way.”

The United States has aggressively fought Antigua’s claims.

A W.T.O. panel first ruled against the United States in 2004, and its appellate body upheld that decision a year later. In April 2005, the trade body gave the United States a year to comply with its ruling, but that deadline passed with little more than a statement from Washington that it had reviewed its laws and decided it has been in compliance.

From the start, the United States has claimed that it never intended to allow free, cross-border gambling or betting. Those activities are restricted in the United States, though some form of gambling is legal in 48 of 50 states.

In May, the UnitedStates announced that it was rewriting its trade rules to remove gambling services from the jurisdiction of the W.T.O. Washington has already agreed on deals with the European Union, Canada and Japan to change the treaty but it has yet to reach agreements with several other nations, including Antigua.

On Friday, the United States Trade Representative issued a stern warning to Antigua to avoid acts of piracy, counterfeiting or violations of intellectual property while negotiations are under way. Such behavior would “undermine Antigua’s claimed intentions of becoming a leader in legitimate electronic commerce, and would severely discourage foreign investment in the Antiguan economy.”

James Kanter reported from Paris, and Gary Rivlin from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/bu...2gambling.html





RIAA Backs Down On "Unlicensed Investigator"
NewYorkCountryLawyer

Texas grandmother Rhonda Crain got the RIAA to drop its monetary claims against her after she filed counterclaims against the record companies for using an investigator, MediaSentry, which is not licensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas. The RIAA elected to drop its claims rather than wait for the Judge to decide the validity of Ms. Crain's charges that the plaintiff record companies were "aware that the... private investigations company was unlicensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas specifically, and in other states as well... and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign." Similar questions about MediaSentry's unlicensed investigations were raised recently by the State Attorney General of Oregon in Arista v. Does 1-17
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/16/2033207





RIAA Writes its Own "News" for Local TV Stations
Nate Anderson

The holidays: they can be stressful for everyone, even local TV news producers who need to fill that two-minute gap between the waterskiing squirrel story and the house fire in the next state that injured no one. You could assign "reporters" to dig up some local "news" of actual community value, but that takes time and money, and frankly, who wants to watch anything that might make them think at 10 PM? Much easier just to let industry send the news in premade packets. This Christmas season, the RIAA has a present for local news divisions: a video news release about music piracy, complete with exhortations to buy iTunes gift cards and cell phone ringtones.

An anonymous reader, who claims to work for the company that distributed the video package, has posted the alleged video news release online. The video is shockingly bad—the narrator talks too slowly, the pacing is poor, and the "fly-in" bullet points look like they were produced in Windows Movie Maker.

Still, for the first half of the clip, it's generally accurate information about recent busts at duplication facilities. And then come the bullet points. "Watch for compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan," viewers are warned, a statement that only serves to highlight the fact that pirates do a better job of providing what music lovers want than the industry does. Whoops.

Beware the bullets

Then there's this gem: "Audio quality on pirated CDs is usually atrocious." Someone alert the RIAA to how digital copying actually works, please.

From there, the clip moves into straight-ahead advertising. "Make sure the music you buy is legitimate," says the narrator. How? Simple! Just use the "cool, innovative ways to get your favorite music" that the industry offers. The video then shows iTunes digital album gift cards and a cell phone, for which you can buy Christmas-themed ring tones.

The production values of the video initially led us to suspect it of being a fake, but the leaker has provided Ars with a copy of an alleged press advisory that went out promoting the clip. It's directed to "news assignment desk/consumer reporters," who are more likely to use the footage and basic "storyline" themselves than to simply run the unedited report. The RIAA has not yet responded to our request for authentication of the video.

Lending credence to the video, though, is the fact that it follows a recent RIAA press release almost exactly. Though that release says nothing about a video news feed, it does mention that the RIAA is launching a "holiday anti-piracy campaign" that "offers shoppers innovative gift ideas and tips for avoiding pirate product." The campaign is set to focus on 15 cities with "exceptionally high piracy rates" (every major US city, apparently).

For an industry already the target of so much consumer suspicion, feeding misleading claims and self-serving footage to ostensibly objective "news" outlets just doesn't seem like a great idea. Yes, piracy is bad; yes, we should shut down illegal commercial stamping operations. But trying to turn the news into such an explicit commercial? Unhelpful.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-own-news.html





Student Lawyers Act for Students in RIAA Case
p2pnet news

A student law clinic is about to cause a revolution in the P2P filesharing war launched by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG.

In what’s probably a world’s first, not lawyers, but student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic have themselves taken up the fight on behalf of fellow students.

Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki from the Cumberland clinic are now officially representing two Maine students.

Ames and Chmelecki are being guided by clinic director and U of M assistant professor Deirdre Smith (right).

They’ve filed a reply to the US Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic v Twombly, and the subsequent California decision, Interscope v Rodriguez, which dismissed the RIAA’s “making available” complaint as mere “conclusory”, “boilerplate” “speculation”.

“The two students represented by Cumberland join eight others represented by a Portland law firm, bringing to 10 the number of University of Maine students moving to dismiss the RIAA’s case,” says Recording Industry vs The People.

This could be the true beginning of the end for the RIAA in its attempts to bring students to heel, turning them into compliant consumers of corporate product under threat of legal persecution and severe financial penalties no student can afford.

If other student from clinics not only in the US but around the world follow the examples of Ames and Chmelecki, the stage will be set for a series of confrontations and lightning strikes even the highly paid expert Big 4 legal teams won’t be able to handle.

Smith is on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence, and governor John Baldacci’s Select Committee on Judicial Appointments.

She’s a former member of the Board of Directors of the Maine Bar Foundation and a founding board member of KIDS Legal.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14433





TorrentSpy Operators Held Liable

Online file-sharing service TorrentSpy.com is liable for extensive movie piracy because it destroyed evidence in a copyright case, a federal judge has ruled, handing a victory to Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and other studios.

TorrentSpy operators Justin Bunnell, Forrest Parker and Wes Parker were held liable for infringement because they deleted important case files and gave false statements, said the ruling by U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles.

The defendants "engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in an effort to hide evidence of such destruction," Cooper said in the Dec. 13 order, adding that sanctions were appropriate in this case because of "extraordinary circumstances."

No date was set for a hearing to determine damages.

Members of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, a film industry trade group, sued TorrentSpy in 2006, accusing it of illegally allowing users around the world to download and store full-length movies using software called BitTorrent. The software lets users share large files with others on the same network, making it popular for exchanging music and games.

TorrentSpy is based in Amsterdam, where its servers are located. The defendants are U.S. citizens.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ninav-business





uTorrent Gains Popularity, Azureus Loses Ground
Ernesto

With an install rate of more than 5% on Windows PCs worldwide, uTorrent is now by far the most popular BitTorrent client. Azureus, the most installed BitTorrent application of last year fell back to the third place.

The graph on the right (click to enlarge) is based on data published by Digital Music News based on reports from PC Pitstop, a company that gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of over a million PC’s.

The percentages reflect the percentage of PCs that has these applications installed. September last year Azureus was installed on more than 3% of all PCs but their install rate has declined by more than 30% this year, while uTorrent’s install rate nearly tripled.

In the table below we have listed the 5 most installed BitTorrent applications. It is interesting to not that Azureus moved from the first to the third spot over the past year. The BitTorrent mainline client is now runner up. This means that BitTorrent Inc. now owns the two most popular BitTorrent clients.

The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the most popular BitTorrent clients:

Rank Application Installed on % Desktops
1. uTorrent 5.56%
2. BitTorrent (a.k.a. mainline) 2.28%
3. Azureus 2.11%
4. Bitcomet 1.89%
5. Bitlord 1.27%


From the data where the report is based on we further learn that Limewire’s popularity is slowly declining. However, with an install base of almost 18% it is still the P2P application that is installed on most desktop computers. Unfortunately Digital Music News has trouble interpreting their own data, they claim in their press release that it is 36.4%, but that is the market share compared to other P2P clients (shame on you!).

Apart from this tiny mistake, there are a few more concerns about the usability of the data. For example, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. Secondly, it could be that Azureus and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on. Lastly, the report is based on a sample of people who voluntarily did an online spyware scan, something to think about.

Perhaps an even more important comment on the data collection for this report, uTorrent doesn’t necessarily use the Windows registry. So the real install rate for uTorrent might be even higher. Also, Azureus is a true multi-platform client, whilst this test is only for windows based systems.

In summing up we think it is (despite all the flaws) safe to say that uTorrent is becoming more popular while Azureus is losing ground. Whether this is due to negative factors affecting Azureus (such as the rebranding to Vuze, Java or the heavy use of resources), or positive factors around the mainline and µTorrent clients (such as the small install size, and low system requirements) it certainly shows a slide for Azureus.
http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-gai...ground-071216/





MediaDefender Stock Plunges Due to Leaked Emails
Ernesto

It has been a rough year for MediaDefender and their parent company ArtistDirect. This September nearly 700mb of MediaDefender’s emails leaked to the public. Initially it didn’t seem to affect the stock price much, but after the financial consequences became apparent, their net worth plunged.

With still a few days to go it is probably safe to say that MediaDefender is one of the biggest losers of 2007. The leaked emails, published by the notorious “MediaDefender-Defenders“, gave away a lot of sensitive information and details about how MediaDefender sabotaged BitTorrent trackers and other file-sharing networks. Despite the fact that their decoy and spoofing operations were hugely ineffective on most BitTorrent sites, the company collected millions of dollars from the entertainment industry for protecting their content.

Unfortunately for them, one of their employees was stupid enough to forward all his work email to his Gmail account, without using a proper password. To make it even worse, more sensitive information started to leak as the email leak was soon followed by a p2p tracking database, a phone call and a collection of anti-piracy tools they used for their daily operations.

Soon after this sensitive information became public, the Pirate Bay launched a counterattack. They decided to use the information from the emails to file charges against some of MediaDefenders customers including Paramount Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal Music Group for corrupting and sabotaging their BitTorrent tracker.

The leak did not have any effect on the stock price initially, but after the company announced that it had cost them $825,000, it started to drop hard. It turned out that MediaDefender’s parent company ArtistDirect spent $600,000 to compensate their customers and the rest of the money was used to cover legal expenses.

So what will happen now, will the company walk the plank to bankruptcy? Many people think it will, but MediaDefender still sees a future in the anti-piracy business. Sure, they were devastated by the leaks, but remarkably, they believe that it didn’t hurt the goodwill of the company. Makes you wonder what is needed to hurt this then, because it can’t get any worse if you ask me.

I’m sure we will hear from them again in 2008.
http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...emails-071222/





Chuck Norris Sues, Says His Tears no Cancer Cure
Christine Kearney

Tough-guy actor and martial arts expert Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.

Penguin published "The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 facts about the World's Greatest Human" in November. Author Ian Spector and two Web sites he runs to promote the book, including www.truthaboutchuck.com, are also named in the suit.

The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.

It includes such humorous "facts" as "Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried" and "Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits," the suit said, as well as "Chuck Norris can charge a cell phone by rubbing it against his beard."

"Some of the 'facts' in the book are racist, lewd or portray Mr. Norris as engaged in illegal activities," the lawsuit alleges.

Norris, who rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s as the star of such films as "The Delta Force" and "Missing in Action," says the book's title would mislead readers into thinking the facts were true.

"Defendants have misappropriated and exploited Mr. Norris's name and likeness without authorization for their own commercial profit," said the lawsuit.

The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks unspecified monetary damages for trademark infringement, unjust enrichment and privacy rights.

Norris, whose real name is Carlos Ray Norris, claims in the suit he is protective of what his name is associated with. He has recently made U.S. headlines for backing Republican presidential candidate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

A spokesman for Penguin, owned by Britain's Pearson, was not immediately available for comment.

(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Todd Eastham)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071222/...ris_lawsuit_dc





Yahoo! Found Guilty of Mass Copyright Infringement
enigmax

It is being reported by the IPFI that Yahoo China’s music search feature violates the law when it deep links users to pirated music. Yahoo China’s music search has been confirmed illegal in a Beijing court ruling which states that under new copyright laws it facilitates mass copyright infringement.

After being hounded by the IFPI since April 2006, Yahoo! China - partly owned by one the world’s most prominent internet businesses, Yahoo! - today had its music search (via deep linking) deemed illegal by a Beijing Court, who said the service violates Chinese law by facilitating mass copyright infringement.

Yahoo! China had appealed against the guilty verdict reached in the case in April, but this was today dismissed by the Court.

In an earlier case it was decided that another company, Baidu, also facilitated copyright infringement when it used similar methods to Yahoo!, but under Chinese laws in operation at the time they had committed no offense. However, new copyright laws came into force in 2006 and it was under these that Yahoo! China was found guilty, as explained by John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of the IFPI:

“We are disappointed that the court did not find Baidu liable, but that judgment was about Baidu’s actions in the past under an old law that is no longer in force.”

The IFPI say that when sites like Yahoo! and Baidu - or even Google - deep-link “to hundreds of thousands of pirate tracks” they are “a huge drain on efforts to develop a legitimate music market in China.”

According to IFPI statistics, music sales in China were just $76 million in 2006, with 99% of all music downloading done in a way that infringes copyright.

They also claim that Yahoo! China and Baidu “account for the bulk of the problem” so presumably now that both site’s searches are going to disappear, Chinese internet piracy will virtually end over night. That’s China sorted, then. Next stop, Russia.

John Kennedy said: “The ruling against Yahoo! China is extremely significant in clarifying copyright rules for internet music services in China. By confirming that Yahoo! China’s service violates copyright under new Chinese laws, the Beijing Court has effectively set the standard for internet companies throughout the country.”

“Our member companies seek partnership, not conflict, with China’s internet companies” he said, presumably as he decides who to take action against next.
http://torrentfreak.com/yahoo-found-...gement-071220/





Turn In A Software Pirate, Collect $500

Anyone who unwittingly buys fake software from an online fraudster can receive up to $500 if they report the scam to the Software & Information Industry Association.
Paul McDougall

A tech industry group is offering consumers up to $500 for reporting software counterfeiters who sell their goods on online auction sites like eBay.

Under the plan offered by the Software & Information Industry Association, anyone who unwittingly buys fake software from an online fraudster can receive up to $500 if they report the scam.

The SIIA said it hopes tipsters will use the reward money to buy legitimate, replacement software, but under the program rules they're free to use it any way they want.

SIIA officials said the program is a "don't get mad, get even" approach to stopping software piracy. It's "a way for unsuspecting buyers to get even with auction sellers who rip them off," said SIIA VP Keith Kupferschmid, in a statement.

The SIIA said it was forced to implement the program because it doesn't get enough anti-counterfeiting help from eBay and other online auctioneers. "These sites are unwilling to take the actions necessary to reduce the high-volume software piracy taking place on their sites," said Kupferschmid.

The campaign, launched December 13, is slated to run through January 30, 2008.

The SIIA membership includes dozens of major software developers, including Adobe, Symantec and Quark. Of late, it's been increasingly vigilant toward software pirates.

Earlier this month, the SIIA filed a lawsuit against the prestigious Philadelphia law firm Fox Rothschild. The group claimed the firm is using illegally copied versions of commercial software on its internal systems. The SIIA said it learned of the alleged violations from a tipster.

Fox Rothschild hasn't commented on the lawsuit.

Software piracy costs commercial developers billions of dollars in lost revenue each year, according to various industry estimates.
http://www.informationweek.com/softw...leID=205100007





BBC iPlayer Welcomes Linux (and Macs)
h4rm0ny writes

After previously limiting their iPlayer to only the Windows platform (as we discussed earlier here and here), the BBC's content is now available to UK-based users of Linux and Mac OSX. From their site: "From today we are pleased to announce that streaming is now available on BBC iPlayer. This means that Windows, Mac and Linux users can stream programs on iPlayer as long as their computer has the latest version of Flash. Another change is that you do not have to register or sign in any more to download programs..." It seems that the BBC have listened to people who petitioned them for broader support and an open format. Well, Flash isn't exactly open, but its a lot more ubiquitous than Windows Media and Real Player formats.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl.../12/17/0323202





Apple, Think Secret Settle Lawsuit

December 20, 2007 - PRESS RELEASE: Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, said "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/settlement.html





First Carrot, Now Stick
Fake Steve Jobs

Another update. Now they are really pissed. Just got another PDF letter from the same Rambo attorney (photo above; but I won't print his name) saying that in response to my last post about doing things transparently he wants to remind me that while this "course of action" is of course mine to take, he feels it is his duty to inform me that Apple's lawyers have identified at least three posts in my archive that they "deem to be actionable." He says Apple hopes this can be a "conversation rather than a confrontation" [isn't Johnnie Cochran dead? ed.] and that before I turn this into a public fight by continuing on my current "course of action" I should perhaps consider the potentially serious consequences to myself and my family of doing so.

This is followed by a recommendation that I retain an attorney to represent me. And then, I swear to friggin God, there's a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they've got a pretty thorough list, which means they've been doing some research on this and the offer didn't just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

Damn. And right at Christmas. I am going to go make myself a drink.
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/1...now-stick.html





Earth to Pogue

The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality
David Pogue

I've been doing a good deal of speaking recently. And in one of my talks, I tell an anecdote about a lesson I learned from my own readers.

It was early in 2005, and a little hackware program called PyMusique was making the rounds of the Internet. PyMusique was written for one reason only: to strip the copy protection off of songs from the iTunes music store.

The program's existence had triggered an online controversy about the pros, cons and implications of copy protection. But to me, there wasn't much gray area. "To me, it's obvious that PyMusique is designed to facilitate illegal song-swapping online," I wrote. And therefore, it's wrong to use it.

Readers fired back with an amazingly intelligent array of counterexamples: situations where duplicating a CD or DVD may be illegal, but isn't necessarily *wrong.* They led me down a garden path of exceptions, proving that what seemed so black-and-white to me is a spectrum of grays.

I was so impressed that I incorporated their examples into a little demonstration in this particular talk. I tell the audience: "I'm going to describe some scenarios to you. Raise your hand if you think what I'm describing is wrong."

Then I lead them down the same garden path:

"I borrow a CD from the library. Who thinks that's wrong?" (No hands go up.)

"I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer." (A couple of hands.)

"I have 2,000 vinyl records. So I borrow some of the same albums on CD from the library and rip those."

"I buy a DVD. But I'm worried about its longevity; I have a three-year-old. So I make a safety copy."

With each question, more hands go up; more people think what I'm describing is wrong.

Then I try another tack:

"I record a movie off of HBO using my DVD burner. Who thinks that's wrong?" (No hands go up. Of course not; time-shifting is not only morally O.K., it's actually legal.)

"I *meant* to record an HBO movie, but my recorder malfunctioned. But my buddy recorded it. Can I copy his DVD?" (A few hands.)

"I meant to record an HBO movie, but my recorder malfunctioned and I don't have a buddy who recorded it. So I rent the movie from Blockbuster and copy that." (More hands.)

And so on.

The exercise is intended, of course, to illustrate how many shades of wrongness there are, and how many different opinions. Almost always, there's a lot of murmuring, raised eyebrows and chuckling.

Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I'd ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.

In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, "O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it."

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

"Who thinks that might be wrong?"

Two hands out of 500.

Now, maybe there was some peer pressure involved; nobody wants to look like a goody-goody.

Maybe all this is obvious to you, and maybe you could have predicted it. But to see this vivid demonstration of the generational divide, in person, blew me away.

I don't pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I'm increasingly convinced that copy protection isn't it.)

I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/te...gue-email.html





F.C.C. Eases Media Ownership Rule
Stephen LaBaton

By the narrowest of margins, the Federal Communications Commission adopted proposals by its chairman to tighten the reins on the cable television industry while loosening 32-year-old restrictions that have prevented a company from owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

Last month the chairman, Kevin J. Martin, suffered a setback when he was unable to find two commissioners to support his proposal to more tightly regulate cable television.

But in a highly contentious meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Martin re-established control when he became the pivotal vote on two rules that could significantly reshape the nation’s media landscape by determining the size and scope of the largest news and cable companies.

In one 3-to-2 vote, he sided with the agency’s two other Republicans to relax the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules in the 20 largest markets. As part of that order, the commission also granted dozens of permanent waivers of newspaper-broadcast combinations in large and small markets that had been given temporary waivers as they awaited the outcome of the rulemaking.

In a second 3-to-2 vote, Mr. Martin joined with the two Democratic commissioners to impose a limit that would prevent the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast Communications, from growing much larger. Under that rule, no company can control more than 30 percent of the market. Analysts say that Comcast is close to that limit.

Mr. Martin has said that a relaxation of the ownership rules was a modest, though vital step toward assisting the newspaper industry as it struggled financially as advertising and readership migrates rapidly to the Internet. He has been critical of the cable television industry for raising rates far greater than the rate of inflation and for failing to offer consumers enough choices in subscription packages.

“We cannot ignore the fact the media marketplace is considerably different than when the media ownership rule was put in place more than 30 years ago,” he said of the newspaper-broadcast rule.

The dissenting commissioners complained strongly about the outcome.

Michael J. Copps, a Democratic commissioner who has led a nationwide effort against relaxing the media ownership rules, said the rule was nothing more than a big Christmas present to the largest conglomerates.

“In the final analysis,” Mr. Copps said, “the real winners today are businesses that are in many cases quite healthy, and the real losers are going to be all of us who depend on the news media to learn what’s happening in our communities and to keep an eye on local government.”

“Despite all the talk you may hear today about the threat to newspapers from the Internet and new technologies, today’s order actually deals with something quite old-fashioned,” Mr. Copps said. “Powerful companies are using political muscle to sneak through rule changes that let them profit at the expense of the public interest.”

And Robert M. McDowell, a Republican commissioner, was sharply critical of the cable restrictions.

“The cap is out of date, is bad public policy and is not needed in today’s public market,” he said. He called the cable rule “archaic industrial policy” that would surely be struck down by an appeals court, as an earlier rule was six years ago.

Although Mr. Martin appears to have won a high-stakes battle within the commission over some of the most important proposals of his tenure, he has expended significant political capital and made political enemies of powerful industry groups and influential lawmakers.

For opposite reasons, both proposals approved on Tuesday have been criticized by industry. The Newspaper Association of America has attacked the proposal for being too modest, and said that Mr. Martin did not go far enough.

“Today’s vote is only a baby step in the actions needed to maintain the vitality of local news, in print and over-the-air, in all communities across the nation,” the president of the Newspaper Association, John F. Sturm, said. “Eliminating the cross-ownership ban completely would enhance localism by enabling broadcasters to increase local news and would not distract from the diversity of viewpoints available to local audiences.”

The cable television industry has said it has repeatedly been an unfair target of Mr. Martin, and that his efforts to regulate the industry are at odds with the broader policies of the Bush administration to remove or lessen regulations.

Over the last year, the commission has approved a series of proposals over the objections of the cable television industry, including one last December to force municipalities to accelerate the local approval process for the telephone companies to offer video services in new markets. Another one last October struck down thousands of contracts that gave individual cable companies exclusive rights to provide service to an apartment building.

Consumer groups, which have long pushed for tighter cable television regulation, were split over the media ownership rules. Some were relieved that it did not go nearly as far as they had feared and that Mr. Martin tightened a loophole by making it more difficult for companies to get exemptions from the rules in smaller markets. Other groups were critical because they said the rule could open the door to further consolidation and a decline in the diversity of voices on the airwaves.

Moreover, a significant chorus in Congress has been deeply critical of Mr. Martin and repeatedly requested that he delay action on the media ownership vote. Earlier this week, 25 senators led by Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, sent Mr. Martin a letter in which they vowed to take legislative action to revoke any new rule or nullify Tuesday’s vote. But the administration expressed support for Mr. Martin.

In a significant victory for the newspaper and broadcast industries, Mr. Martin has signaled that he will not use the new rules to force any companies that already have waivers or exemptions to sell some assets. Some companies, including The New York Times Company, have been able to own both a newspaper and a radio station in the same market under permanent waivers because they held both properties before the restrictions were imposed in 1975. Others have been granted what are supposed to be temporary waivers while the agency considered how to rewrite the rules.

Under Tuesday’s order, 42 newspaper-broadcast combinations that had previously been granted temporary or grandfathered exemptions will not be forced to sell any assets to comply with the new rule.

Both the newspaper-broadcast ownership rule and the cable rule are certain to be reviewed by federal appeals courts. Three years ago, a federal appeals panel in Philadelphia struck down a series of deregulatory measures proposed by Mr. Martin’s predecessor, Michael K. Powell, including one that loosened the cross-ownership rules.

The court said that the agency had the authority to relax the rules, and that it also had the authority to impose some limits on ability of a conglomerate to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city. But the judges also concluded that that the commission had not provided a reasoned analysis to support the limits that it chose. The court has continued to hold the case and asked the commission to report back to it once it reconsidered the rules.

The cable concentration caps, as they are known, have long been the subject of debate and litigation at the commission. Six years ago a federal appeals court in Washington struck down a rule that was similar to the one adopted on Tuesday.

The three-judge panel concluded that the commission had failed to provide an adequate justification to overcome the First Amendment rights of the cable companies. But commission officials said that they had provided a different justification for the new rule, which they hoped would pass court muster.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/bu...18cnd-fcc.html





Reverse Payola: Group Pushing Radio Stations to Pay Performers
Adrian McCoy

In the past, the radio industry was plagued by payola scandals: Stations took money from record companies in exchange for airplay. Now, a group representing recording artists is seeking to turn the pay-for-play strategy on its head: It wants radio stations to pay artists and their record labels when the stations play their music.

Under the current copyright system, songwriters and music publishers are compensated by radio stations through royalties when a song is played on the radio, but the people performing on the record -- from superstars to session musicians -- are not. That's what the musicFIRST (Fairness in Radio Starting Today) Coalition is pushing to change.

Formed this summer, the coalition of music unions, performing artists and recording industry organizations including the Recording Industry Association of America is lobbying for a law requiring performance royalty payments to all performers on a recording, as well as to the label that released it. Other forms of radio -- including satellite, Internet radio and cable music services -- do this, as do radio stations in Europe and Canada.

"For almost the entire 50 years since the Grammys were created, artists have been talking about this inequity in compensation," says Daryl Friedman, vice president for advocacy and government relations at the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy awards. "The key issue is fairness. Every other platform compensates the creator of the recording -- except terrestrial radio. If radio is making a $20 billion business around playing sound recordings, the least they can do is compensate those who created them."

The musicFIRST initiative comes in the middle of a second contentious battle being waged by Internet broadcasters, who are required to pay performance royalties. Last March, the Copyright Royalty Board approved an increase in fees that Webcasters say will drive many of them, small and large, out of business. The Webcasters' efforts to reverse that decision is headed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., in February, with hearings scheduled throughout the coming months.

The musicFIRST push also is akin to the issue that is at the heart of the Hollywood film and TV writers' strike: The writers want to be compensated for their work that appears over the Internet. And like that very public and prolonged strike, in which the broadcasters have dug in their heels, radio station owners don't appear willing to cede any ground to the upstart coalition.

"Were it not for radio's free promotional airplay of music on stations all over America, most successful recording artists would still be playing in a garage," says Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of media relations at the National Association of Broadcasters, the radio/TV/broadcasting trade association.

Wharton believes the record labels should look for other ways to improve revenues for the artists they represent.

"The giant record companies have not adapted to the times and have seen their revenues shrinking because they didn't make music available on a digital basis. Instead of adapting their business model, they've spent the last few years suing college kids and grandmothers'' over illegal downloads of online music. "Now they see radio stations as an opportunity to make up the losses that are the result of really bad business decisions on their part."

Broadcasters also say they're providing a valuable service to performers by playing and promoting the music, and generating record and concert ticket sales. "The relationship between radio and recording artists is a symbiotic one," says John Rohm, regional vice president for radio giant Clear Channel. "The relationship as it exists is the appropriate one. It's been a working model that has been in place for decades."

But musicFIRST's supporters argue that radio's promotional punch isn't what it used to be, since both listeners and artists have other options for exposure to new music.

"We're going through a transformation," says Rich Bengloff, president of the American Association of Independent Music, an organization representing independent music labels in the United States. "It used to be that people went to a music store and bought music and took it home and listened to it. It was a pretty simple model and easy to work with.''

"Consumer trends have changed'' since those days, he said. "We're going from a model where people purchased music to a model where people are now doing more listening to music" -- through satellite radio, Webcasting, music on cable TV and podcasts, in addition to terrestrial radio. "More and more people are not being collectors of music in the conventional sense. Consumers are dictating how the business works."

As this new model evolves, Bengloff says, independent artists and labels "felt they were going to get less out of these new revenue streams. The people who create the music and the labels that invest in that creativity need to be compensated."

It's not clear where this dispute will end up. The musicFIRST coalition is hoping to get legislation introduced in Congress to revise the royalty rules for radio, which haven't changed in decades. Broadcasters contend such a change would force many local radio stations out of business or to stop playing music. "In a lot of cases, it could be devastating" for radio stations, said Clear Channel's Rohm.

But observers note that there really aren't that many "local'' stations left in the country -- the vast majority are owned by huge radio conglomerates such as Clear Channel, the nation's largest, with more than 1,200 stations.

While a precise dollar amount has yet to be established for the performance royalties -- the NAB has put estimates in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars -- advocates of the plan say large conglomerates such as Clear Channel would be able to afford it. But to protect smaller stations, college stations and public stations whose revenues fall under an established limits, musicFIRST is proposing exemptions or reduced fees.

From the independent labels' perspective, Independent Music's Bengloff says, small and noncommercial stations are "our lifeline to get access into the marketplace. In many markets, they're the only ones who are playing our music, and we would never allow anything to happen to them that would cause them to run into financial difficulty."
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07336/837887-42.stm





Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien to Return to the Air Jan. 2

Because they are members of the Writers Guild of America, the move is seen as a blow to the union. Both say that by resuming their shows, they won't have to fire non-writing staff members.
Matea Gold, Maria Elena Fernandez and Richard Verrier

On a day when NBC's Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien dealt a blow to striking film and television writers by announcing that they would cross the picket line to go back on the air -- and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel prepared to do the same -- the Writers Guild of America flexed its own muscles by denying waivers to the producers of the Golden Globes and the Oscars.

The decision means that Dick Clark Productions and the Foreign Press Assn. will not be able to employ writers to craft the script for the Globes, which airs Jan. 13 on NBC, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not be allowed to show clips of movies and past award shows in the February telecast of the Oscars without paying residuals for their use.

People close to the guild's board said the union also decided it would not permit writers to work on the Oscars, although the academy has not asked for such a waiver.

The WGA's stance essentially makes the high-gloss awards shows "struck productions." As such they probably would be boycotted by Hollywood's A-list writers and the actors sympathetic to their cause. The WGA said Monday that it was too early to discuss picketing plans. The move underscores the tensions between the guild and the major studios, which typically enjoy major promotional pushes from the telecasts.

In letters sent Monday night to the producers, Patric M. Verrone, president of WGA West, said the union decided that granting their requests would not help the guild's position in the 6-week-old strike.

"We must do everything we can to bring our negotiations to a swift and fair conclusion for the benefit of writers and all those who are being harmed by the companies' failure to engage in serious negotiations," Verrone wrote. "Our board concluded, reluctantly, that granting a waiver . . . would not advance that goal."

Bruce Davis, executive director of the academy, said he was taken aback by the WGA's refusal to grant the organization a waiver to use the film clips. The academy was planning to wait to make its request for a writing waiver for host Jon Stewart and his writing staff after "the dust settles," an effort that now appears futile.

"This is striking more at the heart of what we do," Davis said.

In a statement, Dick Clark Productions expressed its disappointment that its request was denied but said it hoped to work out a separate deal with the WGA so it could employ writers for the Globes.

The union's decision about the awards programs came on the heels of NBC's announcement that Leno and O'Brien would go back on the air Jan. 2. ABC plans to announce today that host Kimmel will return to the air the same night, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

The NBC comedians, who are both WGA members, said they supported their writing staff but must return to work to save the jobs of hundreds of others who work on the shows. Since NBC laid off the production crews at the end of November, Leno and O'Brien have been paying the salaries of their staff members themselves, a significant expenditure they appeared unwilling to shoulder indefinitely.

"Now that the talks have broken down and there are no further negotiations scheduled, I feel it's my responsibility to get my 100 non-writing staff, which were laid off, back to work," Leno said in a statement. "We fully support our writers, and I think they understand my decision."

O'Brien, who described himself as an "ardent supporter" of the guild, said in a separate statement that he had to decide whether to "go back to work and keep my staff employed or stay dark and allow 80 people, many of whom have worked for me for 14 years, to lose their jobs."

The decision by the NBC hosts to return to the air after their shows languished in reruns for six weeks marks a sobering turn for the union, which last month trumpeted Leno's appearance on the picket line as evidence of the high-profile support for the writers' cause.

NBC's Carson Daly, who is not a WGA member, had been the only late-night host to resume production in late November, a move that drew derision from many writers. The guild also lambasted Ellen DeGeneres last month when she resumed taping her syndicated daytime talk show.

The union's response to the decision by Leno and O'Brien seemed muted by comparison.

"NBC forcing Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien back on the air without writers is not going to provide the quality entertainment that the public deserves," the guild said in a statement.

Similarly, the shows' own writers took pains not to criticize Leno or O'Brien, whose personal payments to their staffs earned them substantial goodwill.

"We knew it was just a matter of time before late night would come back," said Joe Medeiros, head writer for "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," as he picketed outside NBC's Burbank headquarters. "But Jay has been very supportive to us, and we support him."
The news about Leno and O'Brien came two days after David Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, said it was seeking an interim deal with the guild that would allow its programs -- "Late Show With David Letterman" and "The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" -- to return to the air with their writing staffs. Such an agreement, which the guild said it was open to making, could put both CBS shows at a significant advantage over their competition, especially if prominent guests refuse to cross the WGA picket line to appear on the NBC programs.

Unlike Letterman, Leno and O'Brien do not own their shows and cannot make similar arrangements. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are also unable to make separate deals with the WGA because their programs are owned by their networks. On Monday, a Comedy Central spokesman said it was unclear when they would return to the air.

The sharp ratings declines suffered by most of the late-night programs contributed to a sense of urgency among the programs' producers in recent weeks. As the strike has dragged on, reruns of the shows have performed poorly, with NBC weathering the steepest drops. Both "Late Night" and "The Tonight Show" -- the latter earns $50 million in profit a year for NBC -- were down 38% during the first five weeks of the strike compared with the same period last year.

Debbie Vickers, executive producer of "The Tonight Show," said the slumping viewership wasn't the main factor behind the hosts' decision to return.

"I don't think it was the driving force," she said. "These guys want to do shows."

Jeff Ross, executive producer of "Late Night," said, "We put it off as long as we could."

NBC will begin paying the salaries of some producers and bookers this week as the shows ramp up, with Leno and O'Brien covering the rest of the payroll until the end of the year.

In announcing their return, the network compared Leno and O'Brien to Johnny Carson, who returned to the air without his writers during the 1988 writers strike. However, unlike his NBC successors, Carson was not a guild member and was able to perform his own material.

As members of the union, Leno and O'Brien face a trickier challenge. Under WGA strike rules, they are prohibited from writing material that otherwise would have been penned by guild writers -- including themselves.

"If they are employed as writers on the show, the rule as we see it is that they are barred from performing writing services," said Tony Segall, general counsel of WGA West.

That stance could rankle NBC executives, who said they hoped Leno and O'Brien would be able to write their own jokes.

O'Brien pledged to talk up the writers' cause on the air, adding that without his staff, "my show will not be as good. In fact, in moments it may very well be terrible."

The two programs will probably try to add more guest interviews to fill time, a prospect that presents its own hurdles because many actors have sided publicly with the WGA and could be reluctant to cross the picket line to appear on the program.

But some Hollywood veterans said they believed that many actors would have no problem appearing on the shows.

"You're going to find very few stars who are not going to go on," publicist Howard Bragman said.

Producers of both shows said they had heard similar sentiments recently from representatives of prospective guests.

"It does seem like people are warming to the idea," Vickers of "The Tonight Show" said. "January feels better than December did."

"I think there is some strike fatigue," she added. "You want to give everyone the opportunity to have resolution. But if there aren't resolutions, we can't just wait and wait and wait."

However, getting prominent actors to walk the red carpet at the Globes and the Oscars could be more difficult, if the past is any indication. In 1980, the Emmy Awards were held during a Screen Actors Guild strike. In a show of support for their union, 51 of the 52 nominated performers boycotted the event.

"I don't think there's anybody involved who's nominated who won't have this on his mind in a major way even if turns out there is no picket line," David Cronenberg, director of "Eastern Promises," said last week after being nominated for a Golden Globe. "It'd be hard to celebrate full blast given the way people are hurting. It makes it a difficult situation."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...ck=3&cset=true





More TV Viewers Turn to Web: Poll

More television viewers are turning to the Internet to watch videos, films and TV episodes, according to a new survey.

In the past year, YouTube has widened its lead as the top destination for online videos, while search engines and television networks have gained ground.

Approximately 65 percent of the 2,455 U.S. adults surveyed by Harris Interactive said they have watched a video on YouTube, compared to 42 percent during the same time last year.

"Viewing videos online seems to inspire a sense of adventure, particularly among younger viewers," Joan Barten Kline, a spokeswoman for the company, said in a statement.

More than one-third of viewers overall and half of those 18 to 24 said there is something they really enjoy about discovering a cool video online.

"They seem to take particular pride in their finds online and share them with friends," Barten Kline added.

More than 42 percent of YouTube viewers said they visit the site frequently, up from 33 percent last year.

Apart from YouTube, which most people favored because they felt it had almost every video they could find, 43 percent said they have watched a video on a TV network Web site, followed by 35 percent on news sites and less than 30 percent on search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook as well as music site iTunes also had a lower share of online viewers.

Online viewers said they would watch more TV episodes and full-length movies if more were available. There was less interest in viewing more amateur or user-generated videos, news and sports, according to the survey.

(Reporting by Claire Sibonney; Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifes...61913620071219





Bell Labs Is Gone. Academia Steps In.
G. Pascal Zachary

PAY me now, and pay me later.

That’s the new mind-set at some leading research universities in dealing with business — and the essence of an emerging model for how corporations can tap big brains on campus without having to pay their salaries.

Corporations have long been able to license intellectual property from universities, but these deals are cumbersome to negotiate and tend to work best when corporate researchers know exactly what they need to create.

They don’t always. Often, they explore scientific and technological frontiers without a map. After blue-sky thinking and random experimentation, they build new products without relying on neatly defined patents or published scientific papers — the bread-and-butter of academic knowledge production.

In the bygone days of innovation, large corporations — like RCA, Xerox and the old AT&T — maintained internal laboratories like Bell Labs. These corporate labs were essentially research universities embedded in private companies, and their employees published academic papers, spoke at conferences and even gave away valuable breakthroughs. Bell Labs, for instance, created the world’s first transistor after World War II — and never earned a dollar from the innovation.

Almost no corporate labs based on the Bell or Xerox model remain, victims of cost-cutting and a new appreciation by corporate leaders that commercial innovations may flow best when scientists and engineers stick to business problems.

The obsession with marrying research and markets, while generally a strength of American capitalism, leaves some needs unmet. To fill them, “companies need boots on the ground at universities,” says Henry Chesbrough, a business professor who studies innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

A vanguard group of universities is giving corporations greater access to ivory-tower laboratories — for a price. Stanford has paired with Exxon Mobil in a deal worth $100 million over 10 years. The University of California, Davis, is getting $25 million from Chevron. And Intel has opened collaborative laboratories with Berkeley, the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon.

The appeal of these arrangements is that “we get broad engagement with universities,” says Andrew A. Chien, Intel’s director of research. “Their researchers work on frontiers, in unexplored territory. We want explorers.”

Intel hopes to learn more about scientific and technical developments that might influence its business, even decades from now. The company says it benefits from having its own employees rub shoulders with professors, while gaining the chance to observe younger talent in Ph.D. programs.

“You can view this as a pure pipeline,” says Mr. Chien, himself a former professor.

Jean Stéphenne, president of the vaccine division of GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, says university partnerships with corporations will grow “because technology is changing so rapidly.” Even if companies have the resources to finance their own research and identify the right academic problems to tackle, they usually don’t have the time to assemble a staff to pursue these problems. Without help from university professors, Mr. Stéphenne asks, “How can we cope?”

Some people doubt that formal partnerships between corporations and universities can deliver real benefits.

“Universities don’t innovate,” says Curtis R. Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., that bought what remained of RCA’s lab. “Innovation means you get it out so people can use it. The university is not going to take it to the world.”

But corporations hope that universities can help them take innovations to the world faster and more efficiently. Last month, BP pledged to spend $500 million over 10 years on alternative-energy research to be carried out by a new Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, which will manage work done at a nearby Department of Energy lab and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“This is a new model we’re working through in real time,” says Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of Berkeley.

CRITICS of corporate-university partnerships fear limits on academic freedom or, worse, that companies might censor results that go against their interests. The risk of such interference seems small, however. Despite the large amount being offered by BP, the money will be divided three ways; of Berkeley’s annual research budget of $500 million (nearly all from the federal government), BP will be contributing less than 3 percent.

Under the terms of the partnership, meanwhile, Berkeley professors are free to publish results of BP-funded research. The university also will own the rights to any resulting intellectual property. BP would even have to license that intellectual property, though payments are capped and the company would get the first look at promising results.

The alternative to corporate funds is for universities to rely even more on government funds. And that raises parallel issues in the minds of some academics. The idea that government funding plays no role in prioritizing research “is completely at odds with reality,” says Michael Crowe, the president of Arizona State University.

The marriage of corporations and university researchers is still in its early days. “In the decades ahead, we will see more differentiation among universities in how they go about doing this,” Mr. Crowe says.

For universities, no matter what models emerge, the key is to deliver benefits to society and business.

“Will these partnerships produce products you won’t get from two people in a garage?” Mr. Birgeneau asks. “We don’t know that yet. It is an important question.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/business/16ping.html





Users Left in Lurch by Network Shutdown
Peter Svensson

When Adele Rothman bought her 16-year-old son a car in 2003, she made sure to pick one that had OnStar, the onboard communications and safety system.

What the Scarsdale, N.Y., resident didn't know was that the OnStar system in the car was already doomed to die. The federal government decided in 2002 to let cellular carriers shut down analog cell phone networks, used by Rothman's Saab and about 500,000 other OnStar-equipped cars, after Feb. 18, 2008.

It's the end of the nationwide network that launched the U.S. wireless industry 24 years ago, and it leaves a surprising number of users like Adele Rothman in the lurch.

OnStar told Rothman in March its service would stop at the end of this year, in anticipation of the network shutdown in February. "I was really upset," she said, "because that was my tieline" to her son.

Perhaps a million cell phones will lose service, but those are cheap and easy to replace. The effects will be felt the most by people who have things that aren't phones but have built-in wireless capabilities, like OnStar cars and home alarm systems.

The shutdown date has been known years in advance, but some industries appear to have a had a problem updating their technologies and informing their customers in advance, which raises the question of whether the effects will be even more widespread the next time a network is turned off, given the proliferation of wireless technology.

General Motors Corp., which owns OnStar, started modifying its cars after the 2002 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to let the network die, but some cars made as late as 2005 can't use digital networks for OnStar, nor can they be upgraded. For some cars made in the intervening years, GM provides digital upgrades for $15.

In 2006, OnStar said it had let customers know of the shutdown with a posting on its Web site. This year, it said it had notified all affected customers. Spokeswoman Cristi Chojnacki said she was unable to comment beyond those statements. General Motors and other car manufacturers with similar systems, including Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz, are facing a potential class-action lawsuit over the analog shutdown.

When Rothman complained, GM sent a $500 coupon toward the purchase of a new car. To compensate for the lack of OnStar, she outfitted her son's car with a handsfree system and a Global Positioning System.

A week before the end-of-year shutdown, the analog coverage map is still the first one presented on OnStar's Web site. The digital coverage map, showing large areas of "limited" service in out-of-the-way places, is available on another page.

On the home alarm side, about 400,000 systems still use analog service, according to Lou Fiore, chairman of the Alarm Industry Communications Committee. In most of those systems, the wireless link to the alarm center is a backup to the landline. But some homes lack a landline, so the wireless link is the only connection to the outside world.

Fiore doesn't know the current number of systems that only use analog wireless connections and no landline, but a survey by the AICC a few years ago put the number at 138,000.

"The larger (alarm) companies are in pretty good shape," Fiore said. "There are so many smaller companies out there that are probably, I'd say, in denial. They just don't know about it."

To complicate things, some alarm systems advertised as "digital" actually use a digital subchannel of the analog network. True digital alarm system modems did not become available until 2006, according to the AICC.

According to the FCC, many analog alarms that have not been replaced by the time the network is shut down will start beeping to warn that they've lost the connection to the alarm center.

The Central Station Alarm Association, an alarm industry group and the parent of the AICC, tried to get the FCC to delay the analog sunset.

The FCC turned away that request this year, saying digital networks are a much better use of the airwaves. The same spectrum can carry about 16 times more traffic using digital technology compared to analog.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc. and Alltel Corp. are the largest carriers that still have analog networks. Alltel will take more time than Verizon and AT&T to close its network, shutting down in three stages ending in September. Each carrier will keep its portion of the newly available spectrum, and will use it to boost their digital services.

A few rural cellular providers may keep their networks up. Plateau Wireless, which provides service in eastern New Mexico and western Texas, will maintain its analog network alongside a digital one "for the foreseeable future," according to Chief Executive Tom Phelps.

Many of the company's 75,000 customers are farmers and ranchers, and the network's superior range helps them because it fills gaps in the digital network. The larger carriers say their digital buildout will cover any gaps left by the demise of analog service.

Commercial service on the analog network, also known as the Advanced Mobile Phone Service, or AMPS, began in 1983; it was the first time coverage areas were divided into smaller areas known as cells, a move that boosted call capacity tremendously.

Rapid development in the wireless field now means a faster, better technology always lurks just around the corner, tempting carriers to upgrade. Digital networks will almost certainly have shorter life spans than the 24-year run for AMPS, causing problems for manufacturers who want to include wireless technology in things that have long life spans.

"If you've got a product that's going into the market for five years, for 10 years, for 15 years, how do you pick a technology that's going to be around that long?" asked Chris Purpura, senior vice president of marketing at Aeris Communications.

Aeris, in San Jose, runs a control center that manages automated wireless communications for alarm companies, trucking fleets, manufacturers and utilities. As late as last year, more than a million of its clients' devices, like remote-readable electricity meters and refrigerated shipping containers, used the analog network.

Purpura said the next generation of wireless devices could be 10 times as big, making the challenge of the next transition even greater. He said GPRS, or General Packet Radio Service, could be the next network to go, since this relatively slow second-generation digital technology isn't compatible with newer cellular broadband networks.

"I don't think anyone wants to go through this again in five years," Purpura said.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i...OHmQAD8TM1PKG0





Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft
Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft

A CEREBRAL computer-scientist-turned-executive, Eric E. Schmidt has spent much of his career competing uphill against Microsoft, quietly watching it outflank, outmaneuver or simply outgun most of its rivals.

At Sun Microsystems, where he was chief technology officer, Mr. Schmidt looked on as Scott G. McNealy, the company’s chairman, railed against Microsoft and its leaders, Steven A. Ballmer and Bill Gates, as “Ballmer and Butthead.” During a four-year stint as chief executive of Novell, Mr. Schmidt routinely opined that it was folly for any Microsoft rival to “moon the giant,” as he put it; all that would do, he argued, was incite Microsoft’s wrath.

Then, six years ago, Mr. Schmidt snared the C.E.O. spot at Google and today finds himself at the helm of one of computing’s most inventive and formidable players, the runaway leader in Internet search and online advertising. With its ample resources and eye for new markets, Google has begun offering online products that strike at the core of Microsoft’s financial might: popular computing tools like word processing applications and spreadsheets.

The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.

But in a lengthy interview at Google’s campus here, Mr. Schmidt, 52, follows past practices. He soft-pedals. As he coyly describes a move that most of the industry views as Google’s assault on Microsoft, he does his best to say that it is something entirely other than that.

No, he says, there was no thought of a Microsoft takedown when, earlier this year, Google introduced a package of online software offerings, called Google Apps, that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets. They are simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft’s lucrative Office business, and Google is offering them free to consumers.

Still, Google Apps aren’t anything other than a natural step in Google’s march to deliver more computing capability to users over the Internet, Mr. Schmidt says.

“For most people,” he says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.

To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?

“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”

Mr. Schmidt clearly believes that the arcs of technology and history are in Google’s corner, no matter how hard he tries to avoid mooning the giant. Microsoft, of course, isn’t planning to merely stand still. It has spent billions trying to catch Google in search and Web advertising, so far without success. And the companies are also fighting it out in promising new fields as varied as Web maps, online video and cellphone software.

“The fundamental Google model is to try to change all the rules of the software world,” says David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. If Google succeeds, Mr. Yoffie says, “a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.”

At Microsoft, Mr. Schmidt’s remarks are fighting words. Traditional software installed on personal computers is where Microsoft makes its living, and its executives see the prospect of 90 percent of computing tasks migrating to the Web-based cloud as a fantasy.

“It’s, of course, totally inaccurate compared with where the market is today and where the market is headed,” says Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, which includes the Office products.

TO Mr. Raikes, the company’s third-longest-serving executive, after Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, the Google challenge is an attack on Microsoft that is both misguided and arrogant. “The focus is on competitive self-interest; it’s on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do,” he says.

Microsoft, Mr. Raikes notes, has spent years and billions of dollars in product development and customer research, studying in minute detail how individual workers and companies use software. What they want, he says, is the desktop programs and features of Microsoft Office, and the proof is in the marketplace. “I mean, we have more than 500 million people who are using Microsoft Office tools,” he says.

Indeed, Microsoft is the wealthy incumbent with a huge lead in the market for personal productivity software, with a share of more than 90 percent. But the Google challenge, industry analysts say, is not so much a head-to-head confrontation with Microsoft in its desktop stronghold as it is a long-term shift toward Web software, which operates with different principles and economics.

Analysts note that Google is a different competitor from others Microsoft has dispatched in recent years: it is bigger, faster-growing, loaded with cash and a magnet for talent. And the technology of the Google cloud opens doors. Its vast data centers are designed by Google engineers for efficiency, speed and low cost, giving the company an edge in computing firepower and allowing it to add offerings inexpensively.

“Once you have those data centers, you want to go out and develop complementary products and services,” says Hal R. Varian, a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is Google’s chief economist. They can be offered free or at minimal cost to users, he says, because they bring more traffic to Google, generating more search and ad revenue.

Google, it seems, has a promising opening against Microsoft. But tilting at a giant and taking down a giant are very different things.

Microsoft, of course, isn’t standing still. Just as it squelched the first Internet challenge in the 1990s by linking Web browsing software to its mainstay products, it is now adopting a similar strategy for cloud computing by adding Internet features to its offerings. It is moving cautiously on this front, however, to avoid eroding the profitability of its desktop franchise.

More than any other Google foray, providing Web-based software to workers for communication, collaboration and documents promises to be the acid test of how far Google can go beyond Internet search. Will two of its formulas — its distinctive, hurry-up model of building products and services, and its rapid-fire approach to recruiting and innovation — succeed in new arenas?

Google’s quicksilver corporate culture can be jarring for some employees, even for Mr. Schmidt. He recalls that shortly after joining the company and its young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, he was frustrated that people were answering e-mail on their laptops at meetings while he was speaking.

“I’ve given up” trying to change such behavior, he says. “They have to answer their e-mail. Velocity matters.”

VELOCITY does, indeed, matter, and Google deploys it to great effect. Conventional software is typically built, tested and shipped in two- or three-year product cycles. Inside Google, Mr. Schmidt says, there are no two-year plans. Its product road maps look ahead only four or five months at most. And, Mr. Schmidt says, the only plans “anybody believes in go through the end of this quarter.”

Google maintains that pace courtesy of the cloud. With a vast majority of its products Web-based, it doesn’t wait to ship discs or load programs onto personal computers. Inside the company, late stages of product development are sometimes punctuated by 24-to-48-hour marathon programming sessions known as “hack-a-thons.” The company sometimes invites outside engineers to these sessions to encourage independent software developers to use Google technologies as platforms for their own products.

New features and improvements are made and tested on Google’s computers and constantly sprinkled into the services users tap into online. In the last two months alone, eight new features or improvements have been added to Google’s e-mail system, Gmail, including a tweak to improve the processing speed and code to simplify the handling of e-mail on mobile phones. A similar number of enhancements have been made in the last two months to Google’s online spreadsheet, word processing and presentation software.
Early this month, Google released new cellphone software, with the code-name Grand Prix. A project that took just six weeks to complete, Grand Prix allows for fast and easy access to Google services like search, Gmail and calendars through a stripped-down mobile phone browser. (For now, it is tailored for iPhone browsers, but the plan is to make it work on other mobile browsers as well.)

Grand Prix was born when a Google engineer, tinkering on his own one weekend, came up with prototype code and e-mailed it to Vic Gundotra, a Google executive who oversees mobile products. Mr. Gundotra then showed the prototype to Mr. Schmidt, who in turn mentioned it to Mr. Brin. In about an hour, Mr. Brin came to look at the prototype.

“Sergey was really supportive,” recalls Mr. Gundotra, saying that Mr. Brin was most intrigued by the “engineering tricks” employed. After that, Mr. Gundotra posted a message on Google’s internal network, asking employees who owned iPhones to test the prototype. Such peer review is common at Google, which has an engineering culture in which a favorite mantra is “nothing speaks louder than code.”

As co-workers dug in, testing Grand Prix’s performance speed, memory use and other features, “the feedback started pouring in,” Mr. Gundotra recalls. The comments amounted to a thumbs-up, and after a few weeks of fine-tuning and fixing bugs, Grand Prix was released. In the brief development, there were no formal product reviews or formal approval processes.

Mr. Gundotra joined Google in July, after 15 years at Microsoft. He says that he always considered Microsoft to be the epicenter of technological development, but that the rise of cloud computing forced him to reconsider.

“It became obvious that Google was the place where I could have the biggest impact,” he says. “For guys like me, who have a love affair with software, being able to ship a product in weeks — that’s an irresistible draw.”

Another draw is Google’s embrace of experimentation and open-ended job assignments. Recent college graduates are routinely offered jobs at Google without being told what they will be doing. The company does this partly to keep corporate secrets locked up, but often it also doesn’t know what new hires will be doing.

Christophe Bisciglia, a 27-year-old engineer, qualifies as a seasoned veteran at Google, having worked there for four years. Mr. Bisciglia has done a lot of college recruiting in the last two years and has interviewed more than 100 candidates.

“We look for smart generalists, who we can be confident can fulfill any need we have,” he explains. “We hire someone, and who knows what need we’ll have when that person shows up six months later? We move so fast.”

MR. SCHMIDT readily concedes that cloud computing won’t happen overnight. Big companies change habits slowly, as do older consumers. Clever software is needed — and under development, he says — to overcome other shortcomings like the “airplane issue,” or how users can keep working when they find themselves unable to get online.

Yet small and midsize companies, as well as universities and individuals — in other words, a majority of computer users — could shift toward Web-based cloud computing fairly quickly, Mr. Schmidt contends. Small businesses, he says, could greatly reduce their costs and technology headaches by adopting the Web offerings now available from Google and others.

“It makes no sense to run your own computers if you are a small business starting up,” he says. “You’d be crazy to buy packaged software.”

Still, in order to succeed, Google needs to win a broad array of converts, including corporations. That effort is led by Dave Girouard, the general manager of Google’s enterprise business, who joined the company in 2004, shortly after it decided to move beyond its search business and consumer focus.

Gmail, introduced just after Mr. Girouard arrived, illustrates Google’s strategic evolution as well as its increased willingness to take on Microsoft.

Paul Buchheit, a Google engineer, started on what became Gmail as far back as 2001. At the time, there was resistance inside the company to the project. Back then, Google was providing search service for Yahoo, a useful source of revenue for the young start-up, and Yahoo had its own Web e-mail system. Another concern was straying into Microsoft’s territory.

“Definitely one of the reasons people thought it was a bad idea is that it could incite Microsoft to destroy Google,” recalled Mr. Buchheit, who left Google last year and now works for a start-up.

Gmail, a full-fledged Web offering built by Google, took time to develop. Features had to be added and tested, and hundreds of Google engineers had to use it and approve. The company’s arsenal of data centers — highly efficient and designed by Google engineers — had to be equipped to offer ample free storage for users.

And as Google grew in size, profitability and stature during those years, riling a giant was less of a worry. By the time Gmail was ready, Mr. Buchheit says, “Google was much more established, and they were more comfortable competing with Microsoft.”

In the corporate market, Google sees itself as a powerful agent of change, breaking down old barriers. “For the last 30 or 40 years, there has been this huge Chinese wall between business and consumer technology,” Mr. Girouard says. “That was historical and no longer valid.”

Google’s push into the business market began in earnest only this year, but Mr. Girouard is already encouraged by the results. About 2,000 companies are signing up for Google Apps every working day, he said. Most are trying the free version. That’s fine, he says, because those users also generate more search-related advertising revenue for Google. After a 60-day free trial, companies with more than 50 users are beginning to sign up for the Google Apps Premier Edition at a charge of $50 a year per user, which includes customer support.

These applications are minimal, task-oriented tools that lack many of the features in Microsoft Office, but, Google managers say, most people use only a fraction of those fancier features anyway.

“If you’re creating a complex document like an annual report, you want Word, and if you’re making a sophisticated financial model, you want Excel,” Mr. Girouard notes. “That’s what the Microsoft products are great at. But less and less work is like that.”
Google’s entry, he says, has ignited interest in bringing cloud computing into corporations. Senior technology managers of large corporations, he says, are “talking to us every day of the week about where Google is going and what we can do.” A few large companies, notably General Electric and Procter & Gamble, have said publicly that they are at least trying out Google Apps.

Next year, Mr. Girouard predicts, “a lot of big companies” will be adopting Google Apps for tens of thousands of workers each.

Microsoft dismisses Google’s optimism as wishful thinking. Microsoft’s competitive tracking of the corporate market, says Mr. Raikes, the leader of the Office business, finds nothing like the momentum for Google that Mr. Girouard portrays. “It is not in any way, shape or form close to what he is suggesting,” Mr. Raikes says.

COUNTLESS decisions by corporate technology managers, office workers, university students and rank-and-file computer users of all kinds will ultimately determine Google’s success. How easy and inexpensive will it be to do e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and team projects on Web software? Will high-speed network connections soon become as ubiquitous and reliable as Google seems to assume? Will companies, universities and individuals trust Google to hold corporate and personal information safely?

At the corporate level, inexpensive, low-stress e-mail is the initial lure of Google Apps. About 160 employees of BankFirst Financial Services, a small bank in Macon, Miss., have been using Gmail for about two months, happily substituting it for an older system that had been overwhelmed by heavy traffic and spam. Bank workers are also using Google Apps’ instant messaging and calendar features to get immediate answers to customer questions and to set up meetings online.

But BankFirst isn’t using Google’s online word processing, presentation and spreadsheets, a package known as Google Docs. Like so many other companies, it still relies on the Microsoft Word and Excel programs for those tasks. “I really don’t see us migrating from that,” says Josh Hailey, the bank’s computer network manager.

According to Compete.com, a research firm, Google Docs is gaining popularity. It had 1.6 million users in November, seven times as many as a year earlier. That’s a nice lift, but the Microsoft Office suite, containing programs like Word and Excel, is nearly two decades old and runs on some 500 million PCs. The reality is that even if Mr. Schmidt and Google are right about the potential of cloud computing in the workplace, Microsoft is still seen inside most companies as the safe choice.

Another crucial battleground for both companies is the university market, where the stakes are less about making money and more about winning the loyalty of students who might become valuable customers later in life. Google and Microsoft each offer free Web-based e-mail to universities, for example.

When Arizona State University, one of the nation’s largest with 65,000 students, decided last year to choose a new e-mail system, it had concerns about the security and privacy of student information and messages stored on Google servers. “It’s like the virtue of banks over mattresses,” explains Adrian Sannier, the university’s chief technology officer. “You feel like keeping the money in your mattress and defending it with your own gun is the right thing to do.” But Arizona State decided that Google, with all its expertise, could do a better job than the university’s own technology department.

Microsoft, Mr. Sannier notes, also offered free Web e-mail to Arizona State, but for an online service the university decided Google was the smarter choice because the company is totally committed to Web software. “We saw Microsoft as a company that is divided on the issue of cloud computing,” Mr. Sannier says.

The university’s switch to Google-hosted e-mail has gone smoothly, and Mr. Sannier estimates that the school is saving $500,000 a year by not handling e-mail itself. Students, he added, also get more than e-mail. They have access to Google Apps, and thousands of them, he says, now use Google’s Web software for calendars, word processing and spreadsheets.

To be sure, Microsoft is not ceding cloud computing to Google. It is investing heavily in huge data centers and Web software. Inside Microsoft, there are engineers and product managers who sound a lot like Googlers.

Ellie Powers-Boyle, 25, a graduate of M.I.T., works on Microsoft’s Web e-mail products. In the last three years, she says, there have been a dozen significant upgrades of the Web e-mail product, and she has worked on three or four new features each time. “We iterate quickly,” she says. “For someone of my generation, the whole idea of waiting years to see if you made the right product makes no sense.”

The challenge for Microsoft is not the ability to do much of what Google does. Instead, the company faces a business quandary. The Microsoft approach is largely to try to link the Web to its desktop business — “software plus Internet services,” in its formulation. It will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine. That is a smart strategy for Microsoft and its shareholders for now, but it may not be sustainable.

Assuming that competition heats up, Office may continue to be an outstanding product, but Microsoft may not be able to charge as much for it — just as low-cost personal computers eventually undercut the mainframe business, and traditional publishing and media companies have grappled with Internet distribution. The traditional products remain popular, but they become much less profitable.

FOR its part, Google faces its own set of challenges: competition from Microsoft and from Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups like Zoho and Transmedia as well as more established players like Yahoo. A recent report by the Burton Group, a technology research firm, concluded that it was “unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it’s accelerating.”

Is Google “really committed to the productivity of information workers?” asks Chris Capossela, a vice president in Microsoft’s Office group. “Boy, there’s no question that we are. No customer on the planet thinks about Microsoft without thinking about Office. It’s part of the DNA of Microsoft.

“Needless to say, we are going to do everything we can to remain the leader in this space,” he adds. “And whoever comes our way, we’ll certainly be waiting for them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/te...gy/16goog.html





Deleting history

FTC Chairman Denies Conflict in Google Case

Majoras Refuses to Recuse Herself
Catherine Rampell

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said yesterday that she will not recuse herself from reviewing the proposed merger of Google and DoubleClick. Two privacy groups had asked her to step aside upon learning that her husband works for a law firm that represents DoubleClick.

Majoras also worked for the firm, Jones Day.

Commissioner William E. Kovacic, whose wife, Kathryn M. Fenton, works for Jones Day, also said he would not recuse himself from reviewing the merger. The privacy groups had not asked him to do so.

Google dominates the market for selling text-based online advertising. DoubleClick is the leader in online display ads.

In a written statement, Majoras said there was no ethical or legal conflict because her husband, John M. Majoras, is not an equity partner and therefore his compensation "will not be increased or affected by changes in the firm's income." Also, she said, the firm represents DoubleClick only in Europe.

Fenton also is a non-equity partner.

Jeffrey A. Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said Jones Day's Web site indicated otherwise. On Monday he noticed that the firm's site said it was "advising DoubleClick Inc . . . on the international and U.S. antitrust and competition law aspects of its planned $3.1 billion acquisition by Google Inc. . . . The transaction is currently under review by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and European Commission."

The page has since been removed from Jones Day's site.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, which also petitioned for Majoras to recuse herself, yesterday filed a Freedom of Information Act request to determine whether Jones Day lobbied the FTC on the Google-DoubleClick merger.

The privacy groups oppose the merger because, they said, it would give one company too much private information about consumers.

Commissioners Pamela Jones Harbour, Jon Leibowitz and J. Thomas Rosch issued a statement in support of Majoras's and Kovacic's decisions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...401735_pf.html





U.S. Approves Google's Purchase of Rival DoubleClick

The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday it approved Google's proposed $3.1 billion purchase of advertising rival DoubleClick.

The deal, which combines Google's dominance in pay-per-click Internet advertising with DoubleClick's market-leading position in flashier display ads, is also being scrutinized by European antitrust officials.

In a 4-1 vote, the FTC decided to end its eight-month investigation of the transaction, concluding that the deal would not substantially lesson competition. Critics of the combination, first announced in April, had said it could give Google too much control over online advertising.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz, editing by Dave Zimmerman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssT...00810620071220





Yes, There Can Be Life After Word
Damon Darlin

AS the clerk at Circuit City rang up my purchase of a new notebook computer last month, she started her up-selling.

Padded bag? No. Security lock? No. Windows Office?

For someone who processes words for a living, Microsoft’s software would seem to be an indispensable tool. But when one of the least expensive versions of Office costs $150, or 25 percent of the price of my new notebook, I needed an alternative.

Google let me slip Microsoft’s monopoly. Its Google Docs is a free suite of office applications. You can find it at docs.google.com. It works just like Office, but you use it online. The software that makes it work isn’t on your computer, but on one of Google’s.

You use the word processor just like Word, or I should say, the version you might remember from the early 1990s, before Microsoft added all the bells and whistles that you never need.

I had tried to use the stripped-down word processor from Microsoft that came installed on the notebook, Microsoft Works. But it didn’t allow me to paste 500 words into a document, or even a fraction of that, so it seemed too hobbled to use.

Google Docs also has a spreadsheet program that apes Microsoft’s Excel and a presentation application that can substitute for PowerPoint. There is also Calendar, replacing one function of Microsoft Outlook.

The advantage to Google Docs is that you can work on a document at home on one computer, store it and then grab the same document on another computer, even at the office. You could work on the document with any computer that has an Internet connection. (There’s the hitch: you can’t work on it while on a plane.)

Actually, there is another hitch. You store the documents on Google servers. That might make someone dealing with important documents nervous, if you think Google might be looking at them or that someone might hack in.

Those fears are exaggerated. But if you store documents there that prosecutors might want to look at, the documents are just as vulnerable to a search warrant or subpoena as they would be on your computer’s hard drive.

After you work on a document, you can save a copy to your drive. You can send it to others, and they can edit it in Word.

The other advantage to Google Docs is that if you give permission, other people can edit it online, even while you’re working on it. You don’t have to send the file anywhere.

The online collaboration function is particularly useful with Calendar. A family or a small office can coordinate activities.

Google isn’t the only company doing what is called computing in the cloud. Zoho (zoho.com) and ThinkFree (thinkfree.com) offer online word processing. In fact, some people think Zoho is actually the best online word processor available. (You can also get good free office applications that reside on your PC the old-fashioned way from Abiword.com or OpenOffice.org.)

I’ve lived for a month without Word. And it has set me free.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/te...gy/16docs.html





Serious Flash Vulns Menace Tens of Thousands Websites
Dan Goodin

Researchers from Google have documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash content which leave tens of thousands of websites susceptible to attacks that steal the personal details of visitors.

The security bugs reside in Flash applets, the ubiquitous building blocks for movies and graphics that animate sites across the web. Also known as SWF files, they are vulnerable to attacks in which malicious strings are injected into the legitimate code through a technique known as cross-site scripting, or XSS. Currently there are no patches for the vulnerabilities, which are found in sites operated by financial institutions, government agencies and other organizations.

The vulnerabilities are laid out in the book Hacking Exposed Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Security Secrets and Solutions. It is due to hit store shelves soon, but is already in the hands of many security professionals. The book's authors, who work for penetration testing firm iSEC Partners as well as for Google, say a web search reveals more than 500,000 vulnerable applets on major corporate, government and media sites.

"Lots of people are vulnerable, and right now there are no protections available other than to remove those SWFs and wait for the authoring tools and/or Flash player to be updated," says Alex Stamos, one of the book's authors. "In the mean time, people will have to think: 'What kind of flash am I using on my site,' and manually test for vulnerabilities."

Flash flood

That could be a mammoth task, because a half-dozen of the most popular Flash authoring programs automatically generate the buggy content. What's more, the people who crank out graphics frequently work separately from a site's security team. Removing the vulnerable content will require combing through website directories for SWF files and then testing them one by one. Updates in the Adobe software that renders SWF files in browsers are also likely, but they probably wouldn't quell the threat completely, according to Stamos.

The authors have been working since the summer with Adobe, the developer of Flash, and the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (http://www.us-cert.gov/) to coordinate a remedy. But so far there is no estimate when patches may be released. A security update Adobe released this week (http://www.adobe.com/support/securit...apsb07-20.html) for its Flash player doesn't fix the vulnerabilities, Stamos said. Adobe representatives didn't reply to emails seeking comment.

Attack scenarios work something like this: A bank website hosts marketing graphics in the form of a vulnerable Flash applet. Attackers who trick a customer into clicking on a malicious link are able to execute the SWF file but inject malicious code variables that cause the customer's authentication cookies or login credentials to be sent to the attacker.

"There are definitely lots of people who are vulnerable," Stamos said. "Tens of thousands is very conservative. Realistically, it's probably in the hundreds (of thousands)."

Shockwave to the system

One reason for the sheer volume of vulnerable applets: SWF files generated by six of the more popular content development tools automatically contain the bugs, according to the book. Those programs include DreamWeaver, Connect, Breeze - which are sold by Adobe - and TechSmith Camtasia, InfoSoft FusionCharts and software from Autodemo.

Stamos said Adobe is likely to update its Flash Player so it does a better job of vetting code variables before executing SWF files. But he said interaction with third-party code is such a core part of the way Flash works that updates to the player would likely provide only a partial fix.

Eradicating the problem will require updates for all of the graphics authoring tools so they no longer generate buggy Flash content. Even then, security pros will have to analyze all of a website's SWF files and recompile any found to be vulnerable.

The book was authored by Rich Cannings, a senior information security engineer at Google, and Himanshu Dwivedi, Zane Lackey, Chris Clark and Stamos of iSEC. It is published by The McGraw-Hill Companies.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...bility_menace/





On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data
Stephanie Rosenbloom

Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate “friends,” compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.

To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.

“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.

“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.

Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.

Much of the research is continuing and has not been published, so findings are preliminary. In a few studies, the Facebook users do not know they are being examined. A spokeswoman for Facebook says the site has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.

“For studying young adults,” said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review, “Facebook is the key site of the moment.”

Eliot R. Smith, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, and a colleague received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how people meet and learn more about potential romantic partners. “Facebook was attractive to us because it has both those kinds of information,” Professor Smith said.

S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.

In “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’” a paper this year in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being. (Note to parents: in an earlier paper the researchers found no correlation between grade-point average and intensity of Facebook use.)

An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.

Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.

Mr. Sundar of Penn State agreed. “You cannot keep it fake for that long,” he said. “It’s not a Match.com. You don’t make an impression and then hook somebody.”

But some scholars point out that Facebook is not representative of the ethnicity, educational background or income of the population at large, and its membership is self-selecting, so there are limits to research using the site. Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.

Facebook began in 2004 at Harvard and was restricted to students until 2006. As Ms. Hargittai points out in her paper, “Requiring such an affiliation clearly limited the number and types of people who could sign up for the service in the beginning.”

Most researchers acknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site’s vast amount of data. The site’s users have mixed feelings about being put under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, said she found it “fascinating that professors are using something that started solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment,” and she suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook’s “relationship status” box. “You’re not really dating until you put it on Facebook,” she said.

But Derrick B. Clifton, 19, a student at Pomona College in California, said, “I don’t feel like academic research has a place on a Web site like Facebook.” He added that if it was going to happen, professors should ask students’ permission.

Although federal rules govern academic study of human subjects, universities, which approve professors’ research methods, have different interpretations of the guidelines. “The rules were made for a different world, a pre-Facebook world,” said Samuel D. Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who uses Facebook to explore perception and identity. “There is a rule that you are allowed to observe public behavior, but it’s not clear if online behavior is public or not.”

Indiana University appears to have one of the stricter policies. Its Web site states that the university will not approve academic research without permission from social networking sites or specific individuals.

Professor Hargittai of Northwestern conducted her Facebook study through a writing course that is required of all students at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Some 1,060 participants answered survey questions on paper. Professor Ellison of Michigan State used a random sample of 800 undergraduates who were invited to participate via an e-mail message that included a link to an online survey.

Dr. Christakis of Harvard said he and his colleagues were studying the profiles of the East Coast college class with the approval of Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, and with the knowledge of the unnamed college’s administration — but unknown to the students being studied.

“Employers are looking at people’s online postings and Googling information about them, and I think researchers are right behind them,” said Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and internist who was an author of a study that received wide attention this year for its suggestion that obesity is “socially contagious.” (The researchers did not use Facebook.)

Among other topics, the Harvard-U.C.L.A. researchers are investigating a concept, first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel, known as triadic closure: whether one’s friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts.

“Triadic closure was first described by Simmel 100 years ago,” Dr. Christakis said. “He just theorizes about it 100 years ago, but he didn’t have the data. Now we can engage that data.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/st...cebook.html?hp





Free Trade Zones Ease Passage of Counterfeit Drugs
Walt Bogdanich

Along a seemingly endless row of identical gray warehouses, a lone guard stands watch over a shuttered storage area with a peeling green and yellow sign: Euro Gulf Trading.

Three months ago, when the authorities announced that they had seized a large cache of counterfeit drugs from Euro Gulf’s warehouse deep inside a sprawling free trade zone here, they gave no hint of the raid’s global significance.

But an examination of the case reveals its link to a complex supply chain of fake drugs that ran from China through Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Britain and the Bahamas, ultimately leading to an Internet pharmacy whose American customers believed they were buying medicine from Canada, according to interviews with regulators and drug company investigators in six countries.

The seizure highlights how counterfeit drugs move in a global economy, and why they are so difficult to trace. And it underscores the role played by free trade zones — areas specially designated by a growing number of countries to encourage trade, where tariffs are waived and there is minimal regulatory oversight.

The problem is that counterfeiters use free trade zones to hide — or sanitize — a drug’s provenance, or to make, market or relabel adulterated products, according to anticounterfeiting experts.

“Free trade zones allow counterfeiters to evade the laws of the country because often times the regulations are lax in these zones,” said Ilisa Bernstein, director of pharmacy affairs at the United States Food and Drug Administration. “This is where some of the Internet sellers work,” she added.

Dubai is particularly attractive to counterfeiters because of its strategic location on the Persian Gulf between Asia, Europe and Africa. Records show that nearly a third of all counterfeit drugs confiscated in Europe last year came from the United Arab Emirates. “Three or four years ago, Dubai did not even appear on the radar screen,” said an investigator for a major American drug company who is based in China and requested anonymity because he did not have authority to speak for his employer.

Dubai is vulnerable because of the huge volume of goods that move through its free trade areas, and because of what is perceived by some in the pharmaceutical industry to be a murky line of authority for rooting out counterfeits there. “It is not clear that the normal Dubai customs authorities have jurisdiction,” said Rubie Mages, a director of global security for Pfizer.

The authorities in Dubai do show a willingness to act when drug company investigators tip them to possible counterfeits, as they did in the raid announced earlier this year. “Dubai has taken a big step in fighting the counterfeiters,” said Ahmed Butti Ahmed, director general of Dubai customs.

But significant quantities of fake drugs are still getting through, international health officials say. And as countries create more free zones, counterfeiters have more options. “What happens is they move around,” said Ms. Bernstein of the F.D.A. Sometimes, in an attempt to avoid detection, they move products between free zones.

“It’s not just the U.A.E. trade zones that are a problem, but free zones around the world,” said Steve Allen, a senior investigator for Pfizer, who was in Dubai early this month to talk to customs officials.

One problem area, counterfeiting experts say, is the Colón Free Trade Zone, situated next to the Panama Canal.

In June, the Panamanian authorities raided a warehouse there that was used by an Australian, George Adams, to run his Internet pharmacy business. No charges were filed in connection with that raid, but about $50,000 in drugs were seized, Mr. Adams said. Several months earlier, Mr. Adams had been arrested for trying to sell counterfeit Viagra. He said he was “set up” and denies any wrongdoing.

Mr. Allen, of Pfizer, said his latest concern involves counterfeit shipments passing through Jordan and Mauritius, an island east of Africa.

In July, the authorities in Dubai said fake drugs from Mauritius had been seized at a free zone next to the Dubai airport. There were more than half a million pills of counterfeit Plavix, a blood-thinning drug made by the French company Sanofi-Aventis.

The Dubai health authorities say they do not know who made it.

Some pills, a government official said at the time, contained cement powder.

A Suspicious Shipment

On May 22, 2006, British customs officials made a troubling discovery at Heathrow Airport in London. They intercepted 846 pounds of pharmaceuticals, mostly counterfeits of products made by such well-known companies as Merck, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Procter & Gamble. Some medication contained traces of metal.

These were not just lifestyle drugs; this medicine was supposed to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, osteoporosis and acid reflux, among other ailments.

Where the drugs came from and where they were going struck inspectors as odd.

The shipment had arrived from the United Arab Emirates en route to its next destination: the Bahamas. This was not a route the drug companies used, said Nimo Ahmed, head of intelligence for the British drug regulatory agency. “What triggered this particular interception was that the pharmaceutical companies had conducted some awareness training with customs in Heathrow to explain suspicious routes,” Mr. Ahmed said.

Pfizer took a particular interest in the case. Thousands of pills of its cholesterol-fighting drug Lipitor had been among those counterfeited, the company said.

Pfizer, which runs one of the industry’s most sophisticated anticounterfeiting operations, contacted Bahamian law enforcement officials in the hope they would investigate the intended recipient of the Heathrow cache. In early June, the Bahamian authorities followed up and raided the Personal Touch Pharmacy in Freeport, seizing nearly $4 million in drugs, some of which turned out to be counterfeit, investigators said.

Eventually it was determined that the pharmacy did $8 million in annual business. The question was, with whom?

Meanwhile, back in London, there was the matter of tracing the drugs back to their source. That led to one of the many free trade zones in the United Arab Emirates. Those zones are major revenue producers for the emirates and, according to a 2006 State Department report, 17 of them were in operation, with 11 more in development.

“The government in Dubai, believing in the liberal market, adopted this concept,” said Mohammed Y. Rai Al Boom, a spokesman for the Dubai Airport Free Zone Authority. “It is very convenient to get products in and out of Dubai.”

Mr. Ahmed, the British health official, said the zones were set up to encourage legitimate trade. “They will process packages quicker, receive fees for them, and if everything is done legitimately it’s a win-win for everybody,” he said. But, he added, “counterfeiters are using it as a way to hide where their products are originally sourced.”

Free zones act as way stations for goods moving around the globe. Since most of the shipments do not officially enter the country, there are fewer bureaucratic entanglements. In the emirates’ zones, the usual requirement for local ownership of companies is waived, and there are no import and export fees or income tax.

Shipping records showed that the Heathrow container came from a company located in a free zone in Sharjah, one of the emirates.

Drug company investigators say that shortly after the raid in the Bahamas, an effort was made to hide additional drug stock by moving it from Sharjah to the Jebel Ali Free Zone.

Afaque Ahmed Khan, a business executive in Dubai, has seen Jebel Ali grow from nothing. “It’s literally like someone walking in the sand and placing his figure on a spot and saying, ‘This here is going to be the transit point for trade, globally,’” Mr. Khan said. “And that’s what happened, literally.”

By far the biggest and oldest free zone in Dubai, Jebel Ali is home to some 6,000 companies. A major new airport is being built to complement the seaport, where millions of containers from boats around the world are unloaded each year.

The counterfeit drugs were put in warehouse VC-08, which belonged to Euro Gulf, a trading house that sells laundry, household cleaning and personal care products, according to its Web site. “Our proactive international strategy has resulted in an increase in exports to more than 40 countries worldwide,” the Web site said.

But customs officials in Dubai had been alerted to what was inside. They swept in, found counterfeit drugs and charged seven people with various crimes.

A Canadian Pharmacy

In the Bahamas, investigators had also made an important discovery. The computers at Personal Touch Pharmacy were connected to a server hosting a Canadian Internet pharmacy Web site.

The site belonged to RxNorth, described by one trade association as the world’s first major online pharmacy.

A founder, Andrew Strempler, had been the subject of numerous profiles, including one in The New York Times in 2005 that described how at the age of 30 he had two Dodge Vipers, a Jaguar and a yellow Lamborghini with a license plate that reads “RX Boss.”

The article reported that Mr. Strempler’s innovation “created a whole new Canadian industry that has plugged a niche in America’s troubled health care system almost overnight, providing about $800 million worth of low-cost drugs a year to two million uninsured and underinsured Americans, many elderly.” Drugs have traditionally been cheaper in Canada because of its health care system.

The big pharmaceutical companies were not pleased. Pfizer and Merck cut off his supplies, forcing Mr. Strempler to buy from other wholesalers.

That was not Mr. Strempler’s only setback. According to the Manitoba Pharmaceutical Association newsletter, the group’s discipline committee concluded that in 2001 Mr. Strempler had improperly filled “in excess of 10,000 orders for medications for patients residing in the United States of America without receiving prescriptions from a medical practitioner or dentist licensed to practice in Canada.”

Mr. Strempler’s online business began to unravel last year when Edward Hector, a former customer service employee, complained to a Canadian television station about the company’s business practices. In a recent interview, Mr. Hector said he was told, “Under no circumstances are you to tell any customer that their medication comes from the Bahamas.” Mr. Hector said he left RxNorth in May 2006 after working there for a little more than a year.

Mr. Strempler did not return telephone messages seeking comment, but he has publicly defended his products. The television station also quoted him as saying customers were not told about the Bahamas because medicine coming through there might actually originate in Europe or Australia. It was not clear if he knew the true source of drugs being dispensed by the company in the Bahamas.

In fact, drug company investigators say, some of them were coming from China, a country known for producing counterfeit medicine.

“We traced the source of the medicines and determined that they had been manufactured in China,” said Ms. Mages of Pfizer. From the mainland it went to Hong Kong, then to the United Arab Emirates and the Bahamas, where individual prescriptions were filled and put into packets and addressed.

“Instead of sending it directly to the patient, it then went back to the U.K., where U.K. postage would be affixed, and then it would be mailed to the U.S.,” Ms. Mages said. “This was done to lend credibility to the medicine.”

Drug company investigators say they believe that at least some of the counterfeit drugs seized at the Jebel Ali zone were following that same route.

Mr. Ahmed, the British health official, said circuitous routes were used to avoid customs checks. “The chance of getting intercepted lessens if they use this route,” he said. And Ms. Mages cited another reason: “The whole purpose of going through multiple points of entry is to disguise the source.”

In August and September of last year, the F.D.A. intercepted 5,000 packages from the online pharmacy. At the same time, the agency also warned Americans not to buy 10 drugs from RxNorth or related Web sites because preliminary testing had found counterfeits.

The drugs named were: Lipitor, Crestor and Zetia, for cholesterol; Diovan and Hyzaar, for high blood pressure; Actonel for osteoporosis; Nexium for reflux disease; Celebrex for arthritis pain; Arimidex for breast cancer; and Propecia for baldness.

Trail’s End

Mr. Strempler has not been charged with any crime relating to RxNorth, and published reports say about a year ago he transferred dispensing operations to another Canadian online pharmacy.

The F.D.A. declined to comment on RxNorth. Health Canada, the national health agency, said it “cannot comment on ongoing investigations, specific companies or alleged violations with respect to possible counterfeit activity.”

In the Bahamas, a pharmacist and office manager for Personal Touch Pharmacy face trial next year on conspiracy and fraud charges, said Garvin Gaskin, chief counsel for the office of attorney general in the Bahamas.

In Dubai, seven officials associated with Euro Gulf were convicted recently and sent to prison, customs officials said. “We have been successful in getting customs authorities to work with us to inspect and to seize questionable goods, but we still have a long way to go,” Ms. Mages said.

And Mr. Ahmed, the British health official, said he expected individuals to be tried next year on charges relating to RxNorth’s links to Britain. He declined to elaborate.

But a critical piece of the puzzle remains missing — who made the counterfeit drugs? Investigators had obtained the license number of a truck that brought the suspect medicine into Hong Kong from mainland China. But that turned out to be a dead end.

And even if investigators do find the factory, there is no shortage of Chinese companies making fake, subpotent or adulterated drug products.

“Some of them in the morning, they manufacture good drugs and in the afternoon and evening they manufacture counterfeit medicine,” said Dr. Mohammed Abu Elkhair, a health official in Abu Dhabi who helped organize a conference last month in the capital city to educate United Arab Emirates officials on how to combat counterfeit medicine.

In October, The New York Times reported that scores of Chinese chemical companies were exporting drug ingredients even though they were not licensed to do so.

Calling counterfeit medicine a growing global threat, Dr. Abu Elkhair said one only had to look at a mass poisoning in Panama last year to understand the seriousness of the problem. More than a hundred people died there because the government had unwittingly mixed a counterfeit ingredient made by a chemical company in China into cold medicine.

“The people there lost faith in the whole health care system, not just in the drug regulations authority,” he said.

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York, and R. M. Koster from Panama.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/wo...eezone.html?hp





Bob Marley and Sons Take Top 3 Spots on Reggae Chart

More than 26 years after his death, Bob Marley continues to sell records, topping Billboard's year-end Top Reggae Albums chart.

The list-capping title, "Forever Bob Marley" (Madacy Special Products/Madacy), is a set of songs from the reggae great's pre-Island Records days.

Bob Marley & the Wailers also come in at No. 9 with "Africa Unite: The Singles Collection" (Island/Tuff Gong/UMe/IDJMG) and No. 10 with "Gold" (Tuff Gong/Island/Chronicles/UMe), both selections of such fan favorites as "Stir It Up" and "Get Up, Stand Up."
Carrying on the family tradition, Marley's sons Stephen and Damian claim the No. 2 and 3 rungs on the year-end reggae albums chart with "Mind Control" (Ghetto Youths/Tuff Gong/Universal Republic/UMRG) and "Welcome to Jam Rock" (Ghetto Youths/Tuff Gong/Universal Republic/UMRG), respectively. The brothers also rank at Nos. 3 and 4 on the Top Reggae Artists year-end chart.

For the second year in a row, New Yorker Matisyahu tops the Reggae Artists chart, continuing to garner new fans with his mix of hip-hop and reggae, as well as his lyrics about his Hasidic Jewish background. His three albums, "Youth" (Or/Epic/Sony Music), "No Place to Be" (One Haven/Or/Epic/Sony Music) and "Live at Stubb's" (Or/Epic/Sony Music), are Nos. 5, 6 and 11, respectively, on the Top Reggae Albums chart.

Longtime star Sean Paul's "The Trinity" (VP/Atlantic/AG) reaches No. 4 on the Top Reggae Albums chart for 2007, dropping from the No. 1 spot in 2006. Paul also comes in at No. 5 on the Top Reggae Artists recap.

Elsewhere, VP's "Reggae Gold" compilations continued to do well, with the 2006 edition rounding out the album chart at No. 15 and the 2007 edition coming in at No. 8.

Controversial artist Beenie Man, who has been accused of inciting violence against homosexuals in the past and was cited by a Jamaican court for tax evasion earlier this year, ranks at No. 14 on the Top Reggae Albums chart for "Undisputed" (Shocking Vibes/Virgin) and No. 10 on the Top Reggae Artists chart.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...33500220071217





Digital Business Heats Up For Latin Music

After years of modest results, the digital marketplace in 2007 finally began to yield considerable revenue streams for Latin labels and acts.

Sales of Latin digital albums numbered 477,000 units by December 10, according to Nielsen SoundScan -- 1.6 percent of all Latin albums sold. That figure is still significantly less than the 10.4 percent portion of album sales overall that were digital, but far exceeds the 293,000 digital album sales tallied for Latin music in 2006.

Growth has been bolstered by iTunes Latino's solidified status as a destination for a vast, well-catalogued library of music and by the proliferation of videos by Latin acts now found on YouTube. Ringtones and master ringtones are also growing sources of revenue for Latin labels.

Following are five digital stories that altered the Latin music business in 2007 and will likely have an impact in 2008.

1. Juanes: Worldwide, according to label Universal Music Latino, Juanes sold 6 million digital tracks the week prior to release of "La Vida Es ... Un Ratico." That number includes singles, master ringtones and digital albums broken down by tracks. It also includes digital albums preloaded onto mobile phones -- including 500,000 in Latin America, according to Universal. In the United States, bolstered by a major sponsorship with Sprint and heavy promotion on sites like iTunes, iTunes Latino and Univision.com, the album sold 8,000 digital copies during its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan -- a record for a Latin album.

2. Zune: In a sign that Microsoft is taking Latin music seriously, Zune launched its first custom device with reggaeton duo Wisin & Yandel. The W&Y Zune was sold as a limited edition exclusively via Wal-Mart and promoted in a massive multimedia campaign. Wisin & Yandel's "Los Extraterrestres" notched the second-highest debut for a Latin album this year. Zune promises more extensive alliances with Latin acts in coming months, including cross-promotion with properties like MSN and aggressive promotion of digital sales in its Zune marketplace.

3. Univision: The dominant label group in regional Mexican, finally made its catalog available as mastertones this year, giving the top-selling Latin subgenre a chance to translate its popularity to mobile. Results so far have been promising: Alacranes Musical's "Por Tu Amor" has shifted 39,000 master ringtones since it was made available in May, according to Nielsen RingScan, compared with 6,000 tones of the group's top-selling polyphonic, "No Voy a Llorar." Other Univision artists, like Ivy Queen, are also regulars on Nielsen RingScan's charts.

4. Preloaded music: Labels increasingly crafted deals with carriers and handset manufacturers to preload music and other music-related content onto cell phones. In Latin America, the practice is the norm for established acts, including Ricky Martin, Juanes, Mana and RBD. Newer acts will begin taking advantage of the trend when Sony Ericsson debuts its new Walkman phones by year's end in Latin America, featuring music from Sony/ATV Music Publishing's roster of proven and developing artists.

5. MySpace: 2007 saw the launch of MySpace Mexico, MySpace Latin America and MySpace Latino, a Spanish-language site directed at the U.S. market. Since the launches, MySpace says unique monthly visitors in Latin America have nearly doubled to about 4.3 million and in Mexico have more than doubled to 1.5 million. MySpace Latino sponsored its first tour this year, with the bilingual, U.S.-based band B-Side Players.
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...33511720071217





Celine Dion, She Went On and On
Melena Ryzik

For the final performance of “A New Day,” Celine Dion’s show at Caesars Palace here last weekend, M J Wylie, 49, a health-care consultant from Denver, decided to go formal. She wore a floor-length black gown and a sparkly white shawl; around her neck was a silver pendant in the shape of the show’s first logo, an elongated figure of a woman. Inside her $3,400 Judith Leiber clutch, bought at the gift shop adjacent to the theater and also bedazzled with the logo, were several autographed photos of Ms. Dion with Ms. Wylie. It was an undeniably elegant ensemble; the only problem, Ms. Wylie said, was that her dress hid her commemorative “New Day” tattoo.

It was her 62nd time at the show.

On Saturday night about 4,000 fans bid farewell to “A New Day,” which has been running in the custom-built Colosseum theater at Caesars since March 25, 2003. Over 717 performances, nearly three million people have seen the show, an elaborate hybrid of a concert and a Cirque du Soleil-style spectacle with a cast of 50 dancers and musicians.

“I’m trying to elongate the evening,” Ms. Dion said in the two-hour final show, during which she went through seven costume changes and several speeches about her career and family. Despite early negative reviews and her desire to stay home with her young son, Ms. Dion said she was glad she stuck it out. “It’s quite hard to believe that we’ve come to an end,” she said to the crowd. “I think you understand our emotions tonight.” Almost every number was punctuated by ovations; Ms. Dion said she was “extremely in shock that, night after night, week after week, year after year, you came, you were here.”

Ms. Wylie said, “It’s been my escape for the last five years.” She likened her fervor to a drug addiction — except, she said, “it’s legal, it’s wholesome.” But it’s also pricey: She estimated she had easily spent $15,000 to $20,000 on her Dion habit. Over the years fans like her, flocking to Las Vegas from all corners of the globe, have helped pull in $400 million in sales, the show’s producers said.

And between the hundreds of dancers, musicians, makeup artists, costumers, prop masters, and other technicians and staff members the production employs, and the gift shop hawking everything from branded golf balls to “Always Belong” perfume, a kind of Celine Dion cottage industry has sprung up around Caesars. On Saturday night the store did a brisk business in baseball hats, T-shirts, shot glasses and books — though, since it was the last night of the show, much was 50 percent off.

Gary Selesner, the president of Caesars Palace, credited Ms. Dion with revitalizing the fortunes of the hotel itself.

When Ms. Dion first came up with the idea of a residency in Las Vegas around 2000, that kind of success was far from assured, as she recounted in a behind-the-scenes documentary on the show’s DVD (released on Tuesday and already selling out). For starters there was nowhere to house her; Caesars built a 4,100-seat theater for her at a cost of $95 million. Inspired by a performance of Cirque du Soleil’s “O,” Ms. Dion hired its director, Franco Dragone. He brought in many signature high-tech and surrealist elements, like an enormous LED screen backdrop (cue the flying doves and celestial imagery), floating lampposts and trapezes. The choreography, by the pop mainstay Mia Michaels (“So You Think You Can Dance?”), was acrobatic. A white-clad dancer-mime was on the edge of nearly every scene.

But at the center of the production was Ms. Dion, the French-Canadian Grammy-winning, platinum-selling artist whose ballads, like “My Heart Will Go On” will be familiar to anyone who has ever been in a karaoke bar. Her nearly $100 million Las Vegas contract was considered one of the most lucrative — and risky — in the touring industry, but despite three-figure tickets, the show routinely sold out. The success helped spur a revival in artist residencies, a trend that last flourished during the Rat Pack era. Elton John is already performing at Caesars. In February Bette Midler will move into Ms. Dion’s theater, and Ms. Dion will begin a worldwide tour for her new album, “Taking Chances.”

In an interview outside the gift shop, Luc Plamondon, a Paris-based songwriter who has worked with Ms. Dion, said that many in the music industry initially questioned her decision to do a residency. “Nobody understood,” he said. “It was like she was sacrificing her career to do a revue in Vegas. But it was a great choice because instead of always fighting to be a pop singer” — in other words, fighting to have the latest big hit — “she put aside her pop career and she made a transition to a kind of diva career.”

Moments later, Mr. Plamondon was swarmed by people seeking autographs and photos.

The ferocity of Ms. Dion’s fan base (at least one person came to see the show more than 100 times, and a mother and son from Quebec admitted to having a Dion shrine in their home) may be surprising in this fractured, musical age.

“She sings about what every woman wants — love,” said Dana DiMatteo, from Orlando, Fla., who was taken to the show as an anniversary present. Mr. husband, Tony, said, “She’d be great if she weren’t so schmaltzy and cheesy.” (His musical taste runs more toward System of a Down.)

But Ms. Dion’s audience, which congregates online at celinedionforum.com, was not only after romance. Estevam Peric, 28, a financial analyst from São Paolo, Brazil, has amassed a collection of 450 Celine recordings of various kinds and had seen “A New Day” 25 times. Why? “For me, Celine is like an angel,” he said. “The energy and the strength that she brings is unbelievable.”

At the show fans posed for photos with a wax figurine of Ms. Dion. Their devotion was matched only by the performers’. By consensus Las Vegas’s tightly knit show-business community considered Ms. Dion’s show a good one to work on; many dancers and staff members stayed on for the full five-year run, a rarity in the industry, especially considering the grueling set-up. (The stage is raked at a punishing 5.7-degree angle, and injuries are common. Ms. Dion’s advice to Ms. Midler: “Tell them to fix the stage.”)

The longevity made the final performance bittersweet. “I didn’t sleep at all last night — I don’t think many of us did,” Trevelynn Henuset, the staff chiropractor for the duration of the run, said on Saturday. A few hours before curtain, the cast held an open mic to share their feelings, and their tears. “This is probably one of the greatest shows ever assembled in the world, as far as I’m concerned,” added Dr. Henuset, a well-known figure among Vegas dancers.

For Ms. Dion, a dedicated entertainer who performed — through tears — on the day her father died, the final show was a testament to her resolve over a process that sometimes felt, she said, “like the Titanic was going to sink again.”

In a post-show news conference in the theater, she said: “Tonight I was emotionally invaded. It was very important for me to pace myself, and try not to cry.” Showered by red rose petals from the ceiling, and joined by her husband and manager, René Angélil, and her 7-year-old son, René-Charles — whose appearance drew constant awws — she remained composed at the final curtain call. A standing ovation lasted nearly 10 minutes.

For fans who could not make it to Vegas to see the final spectacle, there is some solace: 200 movie theaters across the country will screen the show today (fathomevents.com has details). Of course, for mega-fans like Ms. Wylie and Mr. Peric, the show will go on; between them they already have tickets to Ms. Dion’s tour from Amsterdam to Denver.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/ar...17celi.html?hp





Singer/Songwriter Dan Fogelberg Dies At 56

Dan Fogelberg, the singer and songwriter whose hits "Longer," "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne" helped define the soft rock era, died today (Dec. 16) at his home in Maine after battling prostate cancer. He was 56.

"Dan left us this morning at 6:00 a.m. He fought a brave battle with cancer and died peacefully at home in Maine with his wife Jean at his side," reads a statement posted on Fogelberg's Web site. "His strength, dignity and grace in the face of the daunting challenges of this disease were an inspiration to all who knew him."

Fogelberg discovered he had advanced prostate cancer in 2004. In a statement then, he thanked fans for their support: "It is truly overwhelming and humbling to realize how many lives my music has touched so deeply all these years ... I thank you from the very depths of my heart."

Fogelberg's music was powerful in its simplicity. He didn't rely on the volume of his voice to convey his emotions; instead, they came through in the soft, tender delivery and his poignant lyrics. Songs like "Same Old Lang Syne," in which a man reminisces after meeting an old girlfriend by chance during the holidays, became classics not only because of his performance, but for the engaging storyline as well.

Fogelberg's heyday was in the 1970s and early '80s, when he scored several platinum and multi-platinum records fueled by such hits as "The Power of Gold" and "Leader of the Band," a touching tribute he wrote to his father, a bandleader.

Later in his career, he would write material that focused on the state of the environment, an issue close to his heart. Fogelberg's last album was 2003's "Full Circle," his first of original material in a decade. A year later, he would receive his cancer diagnosis, forcing him to forgo a planned fall tour.
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/..._id=1003686059





Ike Turner Dead At 76
FMQB

Rock & Roll pioneer Ike Turner passed away at the age of 76 on Wednesday. He died at his home in San Marcos, CA, right outside of San Diego, though the cause of death has not been released. While Turner is often remembered for his gruff image as the abusive and drug-addicted husband of Tina Turner, his impact on music cannot be denied. Turner's 1951 hit with his band the Kings of Rhythm, "Rocket 88," is widely credited as one of the first Rock & Roll songs, and Turner is a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

His rise to fame began when he discovered his future wife, then named Anna Mae Bullock, in the mid-1950s. She began singing with his revue and married him in 1958, assuming the stage name Tina Turner. In 1960, the couple launched their Ike and Tina Turner Review and became known for their many hits, including "River Deep, Mountain High" and "Proud Mary." But after a tumultuous relationship, Tina left Ike in 1976.

Though his image was tarnished and he spent time in jail in the early '90s on drug charges, Ike managed to get his career back on track later in life when he toured with the Kings of Rhythm again. He won a Grammy in 2007 for Best Traditional Blues Album for Risin' With the Blues.

The Recording Academy issued a statement saying, "There is no doubt that Ike Turner was one of Rock & Roll's great architects with his genre-defying sound as an instrumentalist and bandleader. As a two-time Grammy Award winner and recipient of The Recording Academy's 2004 Heroes Award, Ike's legacy as a groundbreaking pioneer in the music industry will never be forgotten."

Meanwhile, Tina Turner's rep issued a statement to celebrity blog TMZ.com saying, "Tina is aware that Ike passed away earlier today. She has not had any contact with him in 35 years. No further comment will be made."
http://fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=531391





Ike Turner's Memorial: Moving, Musical
Sandy Cohen

Ike Turner's funeral was part memorial service, part rock concert. The nearly three-hour remembrance Friday at Greater Bethany Community Church City of Refuge in Gardena featured Turner's eight-piece band, the Kings of Rhythm, which performed rollicking renditions of some of the musician's greatest hits, including ''Nutbush City Limits'' and ''Proud Mary.'' The songs brought the crowd of hundreds to its feet.

''Daddy wouldn't want any of us crying,'' said Turner's daughter, Mia Turner. ''He would want us to throw a party.''

Among those eulogizing Turner, who died Dec. 13 at age 76, were music producer Phil Spector and rock 'n' roll pioneer Little Richard, who described his friend as ''one of the greatest musicians I have ever met in my life.''

Richard said that Turner's breakthrough rock 'n' roll hit, ''Rocket 88,'' ''shook my soul.''

''I took that same introduction and made `Good Golly, Miss Molly,''' he said. ''I took that same thing and made a huge hit.''

Spector, who produced Turner's song ''River Deep, Mountain High,'' said, ''There was only one Ike, and I learned more from Ike than any professors I know.''

He went on to say that Turner was ''demonized and vilified'' by his ex-wife, Tina Turner. He called the 1993 film ''What's Love Got To Do With It,'' based on her autobiography, a ''piece of trash movie,'' inspiring applause from some mourners.

''Ike made Tina the jewel she was,'' Spector said.

Spector also accused Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg of ''demonizing'' Turner on their talk shows.

Of Turner's time in California state prison for a drug conviction in the mid-1980s, Spector said, ''He was sent to prison for no other reason than he was a black man in America.''

Other speakers included Ike Turner, Jr., who brought his father's two Grammy Awards on stage.

''He made billions and billions and billions of people happy,'' he said. ''He had the best life.''

The service began with a photo montage from throughout Turner's life set to his song ''Jesus Loves Me,'' which features the refrain ''I'm a bad boy, but Jesus loves me anyway.''
http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=114&sid=1315229





Singing of Love and Murder, and Then Dying
James C. McKinley Jr.

Mexico’s country music stars are being killed at an alarming rate — 13 in the past year and a half, three already in December — in a trend that has gone hand in hand with the surge in violence between drug gangs here.

None of the cases have been solved. All have borne the signs of Mexican underworld executions, sending a chill through the ranks of other grupero musicians, who sing to a country beat about love, violence and drugs in modern Mexico.

One of the most shocking attacks came when Sergio Gómez, the founder and lead singer of K-Paz de la Sierra, was kidnapped while leaving a concert in his home state of Michoacán early on the morning of Dec. 2.

His body was found the next day dumped on a roadside outside this city, the state capital. He had been beaten, tortured with a cigarette lighter, then strangled with a plastic cord, officials said. He was 34 and had just been nominated for a Grammy Award.
“We don’t understand why this happened,” his uncle, Froylán Gómez, said in an interview. “He never did anyone any harm.”

The motives for the killings remain a matter of speculation, and no evidence has been found to link them to a single killer. In some cases, the musicians appeared to have ties to organized crime figures, making them potential targets in reprisal attacks from rival gangs.

Others had composed ballads known as narcocorridos, glorifying the shadow world of drug dealers and hit men, which can offend other drug dealers and hit men. In still other cases, as the musicians’ fame grew, they may have become embroiled with criminals unwittingly.

“Sometimes there is a direct relationship between the musician and the narcotics trafficker,” said Miguel Olmos, a musicologist at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “But also there are a lot of passionate crimes. That is to say, the musician establishes some sort of sentimental relationship with people who are linked to this culture of violence and of narcotics trafficking, and somehow it gets out of hand. They always touch some nerve of the trafficker.”

In the case of Mr. Gómez, who was best known for his stirring love songs, prosecutors are investigating whether he had ties to organized crime. So far, however, the investigation into his abduction has been a morass of conflicting accounts, missing witnesses and loose ends unlikely to be tied up soon.

Investigators have yet to interview the two impresarios with Mr. Gómez when he was kidnapped, nor have they interviewed the other members of his group. “We hope we can locate all these people,” said María Elena Cornejo Chávez, the assistant attorney general of Michoacán State. “It’s very complicated for us because they all left the state.”

The killings have been particularly brutal. On Thursday, José Luis Aquino, 33, a trumpet player with Los Conde, was found beaten to death in Oaxaca State, with a plastic bag over his head and his hands and feet tied.

On Dec. 1, Zayda Peña, the raven-haired lead singer of Zayda y los Culpables, was shot in a motel room in Matamoros in Tamaulipas State. She survived the attack, but the killers followed her to the hospital and finished her off with two more bullets as she lay in bed. She was 28.

“We are in shock, because it’s a weird thing that in one week three members of the grupero wave would be killed,” José Ángel Medina, the leader of the group Patrulla 81, told reporters after the recent killings. “We are afraid because we are superexposed, and this could keep going. We don’t know who’s next.”

Entire groups have been targeted as well. Four members of Los Padrinos de la Sierra were shot and killed in Durango State on June 9. On Feb. 19, assassins with machine guns attacked the members of Tecno Banda Fugaz in the town of Puruarán, Michoacán, killing four and wounding one.

The toll in 2006 was equally grim. On Aug. 9, three members of Explosión Norteña, a group who dedicated themselves to songs about drug traffickers, were shot and seriously wounded in their offices in Tijuana, across the border from San Diego.

Nov. 25 of that year brought the assassination of the singer Valentín Elizalde, 25, along with his manager and driver, shortly after a show in the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, across from McAllen, Tex. More than 66 rounds from an AK-47 were fired into their car.

A month later, Javier Moralez Gómez, a member of Los Implacables del Norte, was shot to death in Huetamo, Michoacán.

All the victims played various genres of Mexican country music, distinguished by its oompah beat and maudlin lyrics about everything from unrequited love to famous bandits.

Some were known particularly for their narcocorridos. One of Ms. Peña’s hits, for instance, was “Tiro de Gracia,” a reference to gangland executions. Mr. Elizalde was also well known for his ballads about bandits and drug kingpins.

Mr. Gómez, of K-Paz de la Sierra, however, was different. His biggest hits were love songs like “Mi Credo” (My Creed) and “Volveré” (I Will Return.) His band played in the Durango dance style, characterized by the prominence of brass instruments and a superfast, march beat. Like many other grupero combos, the band members wore identical western suits and cowboy hats.

News of his death prompted some musicians to cancel concerts in Michoacán. Others said the killings made them nervous about appearing in public.

“These assassinations have been done with a lot of cruelty and this makes us tense,“ said Jorge Medina, a singer with La Arrolladora Banda, in a televised interview.

Michoacán investigators say Mr. Gómez left a stadium in Morelia after his concert at about 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 2, a Sunday. He was in the company of a driver and two music industry executives, Javier Rivera and Víctor Hugo Sánchez. They drove off in a sedan, the police said. The other seven musicians in the band and two of Mr. Gómez’s brothers followed in other cars.

A short while later, a member of the group called the federal police and reported that Mr. Gómez and the two businessmen had been abducted by armed men about three miles outside Morelia on the highway to Salamanca. The federal police informed the state police, the authorities said.

What happened next remains unclear. The state police maintain that when they arrived at the scene, federal agents told them they had interviewed the two businessmen and determined the kidnapping had been a false alarm, said Ms. Cornejo, the deputy state attorney general. A spokesman for the federal attorney’s office in Morelia, Miguel Ángel Hernández, confirmed this account.

Yet Mr. Gómez was tortured to death between 4:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Dec. 2 in an unknown place, an autopsy found. He had been beaten badly, around the head and chest. His thighs and genitals had been burned with a flame. He died of strangulation.

In Ciudad Hidalgo, a small farming town nestled in a valley about 60 miles east of Morelia, people remembered Mr. Gómez with warmth. He had grown up there, the son of a local singer who never made the big time, in a modest house in a poor neighborhood. While still a teenager, he married a girl from a nearby ranch, lived in his parent’s home, fathered his first child and went to work as a cabinet maker.

The entire family moved to Chicago during the financial crisis in the mid-1990’s, where Mr. Gómez worked menial jobs, fathered two more children and ran into trouble with immigration authorities. Eventually he found work as a sound technician for a band, Montéz de Durango.

In 2003, he and three musicians from that group formed K-Paz de la Sierra. His career took off. The band recorded four highly successful albums and regularly toured arenas and large concert halls venues in Mexico.

He also visited Ciudad Hidalgo every year and gave thousands of dollars to expand the grade school where he studied as a child. He never put on airs with his old friends, neighbors said. “He always behaved very well,” said one acquaintance, who asked not to be identified for fear of drug dealers. “He was not one to be very snobbish.”

His wife, Felicita, told reporters he seemed relaxed in the days just before his death and never mentioned any threats. “I never saw him nervous or expecting something bad,” she said.

Froylán Gómez noted that his nephew never sang about drug dealers or used drugs himself. “This man didn’t even smoke or drink,” he said. “We cannot understand why it happened. The whole family is demanding justice. We want to know who is the author of this crime.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/wo...mexico.html?hp





County Records Release Ordered

Judge rules Democratic Party has right to inspect '06 election files
Andrea Kelly

Pima County will have to turn over electronic database records from past elections to the Pima County Democratic Party, a judge ruled Tuesday.

The county must release records requested a year ago, including copies of the Diebold GEMS databases for the 2006 primary and general elections, because they fall under state public-records law, Pima County Superior Judge Michael Miller said. That means the Democratic Party will have a chance to inspect the records for transparency and security.

Without the records, the party cannot fully monitor elections, a job political parties are required by statute to do, Miller wrote in his ruling. That outweighs the risks associated with making the records public, he wrote.

The party requested the records to fulfill its duty of election monitoring, said the party's attorney Bill Risner.

The Pima County Democratic Party sued the county this year for the electronic databases from past elections. The party requested the databases and passwords be released according to Arizona public-records law. Pima County denied that part of the request, while turning over other records the party asked for.

In closing arguments of the four-day trial that began Dec. 4, Pima County argued the databases meet the definition of a computer program, which is protected by state law, said Deputy County Attorney Thomas Denker.

Releasing the databases could pose the risk of security flaws in future elections, Denker said. People could hack into the system and change the vote numbers or create fake ballots and submit them on election day, he said. There are also unknown risks associated with releasing the databases and associated passwords, he said.

"There is a significant risk these systems could be hacked or discredited," Denker said.

The county was also concerned releasing the passwords for the databases would more easily allow someone to manipulate the results and claim different results than the county had on record, he said. There's also no evidence the records requested would allow someone to discover fraud in an election, Denker said.

The county supervisors will likely meet in a closed-door session at the next scheduled meeting on Jan. 8 to decide whether to release the records or appeal the ruling, said Chris Straub, chief civil deputy Pima County attorney.

He emphasized there was no wrongdoing found on behalf of county elections employees.

During the trial Risner said the case was about the freedoms Americans have, including the ability to change the course of the system by voting.

"You get a cold sweat and think what if our vote was taken from us and then you think what if our vote has been taken from us?" Risner said.

He said the records should be released so the party can carry out its duty of monitoring elections to ensure they are transparent and secure.

While the county cited security issues as a reason the records should not be released, Risner said that's the exact reason they should be released.

"Our political party wants to carry out its role of ensuring our votes' accuracy," he said.

Allowing political parties access to these databases would allow confirmation of vote counts and could lead to a better, more secure system in the the future, he said during the trial.

He said the ruling, which releases the databases for the primary and general elections in 2006, will allow the party to fully monitor elections.

"No one is looking to see what goes on, and it's our role. We want to, and we're going to do it," Risner said.
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/216878





Voting Machines For Major Counties Decertified

Machines have problems with security, accuracy, Secretary Of State says

Colorado's top election official decertified electronic voting machines used in some of the state's largest counties on Monday, including Denver, Arapahoe and Jefferson.

The devices are also used in Pueblo, Mesa and Elbert counties.

Secretary of State Mike Coffman cited security or accuracy problems in the decertified machines.

A number of electronic scanners used to count ballots were also decertified, including a type used by Boulder County.

Coffman said the system had a 1 percent error rate when counting ballots. "So for every 100 ballots we tested, we found there was an error with one of those ballots," Coffman said.

The manufacturers have 30 days to appeal his ruling.

Coffman announced in March that he had adopted new rules for testing electronic voting machines after problems in the November election.

He said at the time that the four electronic voting systems used in all 64 Colorado counties would have to apply for recertification. The four systems are manufactured by Hart InterCivic, Premier Election Solutions -- formerly known as Diebold Election Systems -- Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software.

Coffman had also put Denver, Pueblo, Douglas, Montrose and Routt counties on an election watch list for problems in the November 2006 election. Pueblo has since been removed from the list.

Critics of electronic voting say there are no fixes that will work. Al Kolwicz told 7NEWS that with electronic voting, there is no way to know for certain that a vote has been properly counted.

More lawsuits are possible from both the election machine companies and public interest groups opposed to computerized voting.

On Tuesday, Colorado county clerks and members of the General Assembly will convene at 9 a.m. to hear an explanation from Hoffman about the results of the certification process.

Reaction From County Clerks

"This report is really just part of the larger equation for us. Once we feel we have the full picture of what the Secretary of State's report means, we can move forward with choosing our systems and preparing for the 2008 election season," said Denver Clerk and Recorder Stephanie O'Malley.

"Our number one priority is to ensure that anyone who is registered to vote in next year's election gets a ballot and their vote is counted accurately," said Boulder County Clerk & Recorder Hillary Hall.

She and the Boulder County Elections Division staff have already begun reviewing the Secretary's 188-page document detailing the certification process and its findings.

"We need time to review today's findings and to evaluate the impact on Boulder County's voting system," said Hall. "The document released today is an overview of the testing results and we expect to obtain additional information at tomorrow's hearing. Any statement at this point would be premature. We will keep the public informed as we proceed."
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/poli...34/detail.html





Ohio County to Switch Voting Machines
Julie Carr Smyth

Ohio's chief elections officer decided Friday to have the state's most populous county switch to a new voting system in time for the March 4 presidential primary.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner broke a 2-2 tie for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which deadlocked a day earlier on the issue.

She had been pressuring the board to scrap its $21 million electronic touch-screen machines for an optical-scan system, in which a computer scans ballots that voters fill out by hand. She issued a report last week citing security flaws with the current system.

''I find that the move to a high-speed central count optical-scan system for paper ballots for the March 2008 primary election is the best way to ensure a safe, reliable and trustworthy primary election,'' Brunner said in a letter to the director of the Cuyahoga board.

The county will lease equipment from Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software for about $1 million. That includes high-speed scanners to tally primary votes downtown at the board of elections.

''The question is no longer can we do this,'' said Jane Platten, the board's director. ''The situation is we must do this and we must do it right.''

One of the major jobs will be retraining poll workers.

Platten believes it won't be a difficult transition because this system will be more simple to use.

''They don't have the electronic devices to set up, it's more of a paper management system now,'' she said. ''They're already used to using the optical scan ballots at the precinct. They use them for provisional voting and curbside voting if someone can't get out of their car.''

Governments across the country have bought touch-screen machines to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act.

Many voting problems were reported in Ohio in the 2004 race between President Bush, a Republican, and Democrat John Kerry, including the accuracy of vote totals in precincts using electronic machines. Kerry conceded the election after narrowly losing Ohio's 20 electoral votes.

------

Associated Press writer Joe Milicia in Cleveland contributed to this report.
http://www.al.com/newsflash/national...ylist=national





Texas: Voting System Allows "Corrections"
Warren Stewart

A Houston Chronicle article last week described how, following the November 6 election, Harris County election administrator Johnnie German “used high-security codes to tap into the Harris County elections computer system last week and change some of the results manually.” It seems that the Hart Intercivic voting system used in Harris County allows anyone with access and a passcode to modify vote totals from an election without leaving any record of the modification.

But it gets worse. According to Dan Wallach of Rice University's Computer Security Lab, who served on the task force that recently studied the Hart system as part of the California Secretary of State’s electronic voting system review , the "encryption key" code can be extracted from voting equipment at any precinct.

The necessity for modifying the vote totals in Harris County was the result of confusion during early voting caused by split precincts resulted in 293 voters in Emergency Services District No. 9 being given the wrong ballot and therefore being unable to express an opinion on a sales tax referendum for a fire/ambulance district in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of the county since it didn't appear on their screens.

Computer expert John R. Behrman, who observed the vote adjustments, said he was “shocked” when he saw German use a series of passwords and an "encryption key" -- a series of numbers on a nail file-size computer memory storage device -- to reach a computer program that said "Adjustment." Shocking indeed.

"A hundred percent of precincts reporting, and everything had been distributed to the press," he said. "Then and only then did I see how they were going to do this, and frankly I never thought it was possible.

"Basically it turns out, without regard to any ballots that have been cast, you can enter arbitrary numbers in there and report them out in such a way that, unless you go back to these giant (computer) logs and interpret the logs, you wouldn't know it has been done."

It is reasonable that an electronic voting system should provide administrators with procedures with which to make such corrections - if such procedures are secure and accountable. However it seems that the Hart “Adjust” feature fails to provide adequate security or even follow fundamental accounting principles.

With reference to the section of the California team’s report on their review of Hart’s source code that describes the "vote adjustment" feature, Professor Wallach explained in an email posted on Charles Kuffner’s Blog:

Hart's tabulation system, "Tally" supports a feature that allows an election administrator (i.e., somebody who knows the special administrator password, has the appropriate USB key token, and has access to the Tally machine) to make pretty much arbitrary changes to the election totals. This functionality operates by directly editing the totals, which goes entirely against standard bookkeeping practices (where you never, ever overwrite a number in the books; you instead add a line to the books that states what the correction is and where the error occurred). Hart's basic design allows for innocent mistakes to go uncorrected, since there is no easy way to audit any corrections that may have been made. Corrections do not show up on official election reports.

As a secondary matter, the security features, intended to prevent unauthorized users from accessing this feature, are similarly inadequate. The password necessary to interact with the database is stored on the disk where any user of the machine can easily access it (see our report, pages 48-49, "Issue 15: Database passwords are stored insecurely"). Similarly, the USB tokens, used to manage cryptographic keys, turn out to all contain precisely the same key, which is used throughout the county. The very same key is stored inside machines in every precinct and can be easily extracted (see our report, pages 55-57, Section 6.7, "Cryptographic Key Management").

So, indeed, Hart has multiple lines of defense. Unfortunately, every one of them is incorrectly engineered, rendering the system entirely vulnerable to compromise. Of course, I am not stating that any such compromise has ever happened in Harris County. What I am saying is that the design of the Hart system is entirely insufficient to prevent such attacks, should a competent attacker wish to make them.

Wallach also notes that as a result of the review of Hart’s system, the California Secretary of State imposed a variety of conditions on the use of Hart systems, but that in Texas, such procedures are far behind the California standards – and in his opinion are unacceptably error-prone and insecure.

If Texas were to adopt all of the conditions of how voting systems are used in California (including parallel testing, mandatory paper trails, mandatory audits of the paper trails, limits on the number of DREs per precinct with most voters casting optical scan paper ballots, and so forth) that would be a great start.

Hart Intercivic equipment is used in 16 states nationwide. Some of those states have some of the security procedures that Wallach mentions in place, but many do not. Safeguards to help mitigate these security concerns like those required in California can and should be implemented in all jurisdictions using electronic voting systems.

Above all, it is important to note that the election official in Harris County rightly required bi-partisan observers to be present when he made the correction. Under no circumstances should this type of process occur without appropriate observers, so that everyone understands the purpose for the correction and can verify how it was accomplished. Ideally citizens should be invited to observe as well, not just representatives of political parties.
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation....le.php?id=6529





Ribbit Unveils Web Telephone Development Platform

Valley start-up Ribbit Corp on Monday unveiled a technology platform that will let developers put Web telephony in everything from business software to popular social network sites such as Facebook.

As well as planning to sell its own services directly to consumers in the first quarter, Ribbit said it is working with more than 600 outside developers who are using its technology to create their own voice applications.

Ribbit software serves as an interface between anything from Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging to mobile or regular phones. Developers do not need to be telephony experts to build services with Adobe's <ADBE.O> Flash software, which works on most computers.

"A developer can take telephony out of our sandbox and bring it to where you live," said Crick Waters, Ribbit's vice president for strategy and business development.

For example, he said that about four developers are using Ribbit to build services that consumers could incorporate into their personal pages on Facebook, a popular online hangout. These services could let members make and log calls and check their voicemail in transcript form without leaving Facebook.

Ribbit has already built an application that businesses will be able use within Salesforce.com Inc's <CRM.N> customer relationship management software. This lets workers dial clients via the Internet from within the application and automatically stores a log of client calls and voicemail transcripts alongside the rest of that client's information.

About 30 corporations are testing the service, which will cost $25 a month per person and be available to Salesforce.com users in the first quarter. Ribbit did not disclose financial terms of its agreement with Salesforce.com.

For other applications that Ribbit is not directly involved in the third-party developer would also pay Ribbit a subscription based on the number of users of their service.

Android For Web Telephony

Services such as Vonage and Skype, owned by eBay, already offer Web calling. But Ovum analyst Brett Azuma said Ribbit's openness to outside developers and its plan to offer new types of services could help it stand out.

"We're talking about a new type of phone company," Azuma said. "The other Web telephone companies such as Vonage are offering the same old stuff with a different technology."

However Azuma said it was less clear that consumers would pay extra to make calls from locations such as Facebook.

"I think the business applications will be the ones that are most attractive" because this will save time for users, Azuma said. "The consumer applications are a little less clear. I don't know what consumers are willing to pay for yet."

Ribbit's announcement comes as the idea of opening up phone networks -- which have long been tightly controlled by network operators such as AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications -- for the wider developer community gains momentum.

Verizon Wireless, the mobile unit of Verizon and Vodafone Group Plc, promised to open its network next year to any device and software that works on its network. Web Search leader Google Inc is creating an open source mobile phone platform "Android" with support from multiple companies.

Ted Griggs, Ribbit Chief Executive and co-founder, described his company as the "Android of Web telephony." He expects Ribbit to be cash-flow positive in the second quarter of 2009.

Ribbit raised $13 million funding from investors including Alsop-Louie Partners, Allegis Capital and KPG Ventures.

Ribbit did not give full details of its own retail service beyond saying it may include voice recording and "goofy" offers like call logs in the form of a picture of the world with red lines crossing between call origin and destination locations.

Ribbit expects in-house services to initially generate the bulk of revenue but marketing executive Don Thorson said the company is expecting enough outside developers will use the service that they will surpass Ribbit brand business.

"Over time we think the business model will change and the developers will overtake us," he said.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/techno...33365320071217





Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
John Markoff

When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the “software spiral” — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.

The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software.

“Microsoft is doing the right thing in trying to develop parallel software,” said Andrew Singer, a veteran software designer who is the co-founder of Rapport Inc., a parallel computing company based in Redwood City, Calif. “They could be roadkill if somebody else figures out how to do this first.”

Mr. Grove’s software spiral started to break down two years ago. Intel’s microprocessors were generating so much heat that they were melting, forcing Intel to change direction and try to add computing power by placing multiple smaller processors on a single chip.

Much like adding lanes on a freeway, the new strategy, now being widely adopted by the entire semiconductor industry, works only to the degree that more cars (or computing instructions) can be packed into each lane (or processor).

The stakes are high. The growth of the computer and consumer electronics industries is driven by a steady stream of advances in both hardware and software, creating new ways to handle audio, video, advanced graphics and the processing of huge amounts of data.

Engineers and computer scientists acknowledge that despite advances in recent decades, the computer industry is still lagging in its ability to write parallel programs.

Indeed, a leading computer scientist has warned that an easy solution to programming chips with dozens of processors has not yet been discovered.

“Industry has basically thrown a Hail Mary,” said David Patterson, a pioneering computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, referring to the hardware shift during a recent lecture. “The whole industry is betting on parallel computing. They’ve thrown it, but the big problem is catching it.”

The chip industry has known about the hurdles involved in moving to parallel computing for four decades. One problem is that not all computing tasks can be split among processors.

To accelerate its parallel computing efforts, Microsoft has hired some of the best minds in the field and has set up teams to explore approaches to rewriting the company’s software.

If it succeeds, the effort could begin to change consumer computing in roughly three years. The most aggressive of the Microsoft planners believe that the new software, designed to take advantage of microprocessors now being refined by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, could bring as much as a hundredfold computing speed-up in solving some problems.

Microsoft executives argue that such an advance would herald the advent of a class of consumer and office-oriented programs that could end the keyboard-and-mouse computing era by allowing even hand-held devices to see, listen, speak and make complex real-world decisions — in the process, transforming computers from tools into companions.

The chip industry will continue to be able to add more transistors to a silicon chip for the foreseeable future, but the problem lies in the amount of power they consume and thus the amount of heat generated. That will limit the rate at which processing speeds increase.

The need to get around what the industry is calling the “power wall” has touched off a frantic hunt for new computing languages, as well as new ways to automatically break up problems so they can be solved more quickly in parallel.

Although the Microsoft effort was started about five years ago by Craig Mundie, one of the company’s three chief technical officers, it picked up speed recently with the hiring of a number of experts from the supercomputing industry and academia.

Mr. Mundie himself is a veteran of previous efforts in the supercomputer industry during the 1980s and 1990s to make breakthroughs in parallel computing. “I’m happy that by hiring a bunch of old hands, who have been through these wars for 10 or 20 years, we at least have a nucleus of people who kind of know what’s possible and what isn’t,” he said.

The more recent arrivals at Microsoft include luminaries like Burton Smith, a supercomputer designer whose ideas on parallel computing have been widely adopted, and Dan Reed, an expert on parallel computing.

Dual-core microprocessors are already plentiful in consumer devices. For example, both Intel and A.M.D.’s standard desktop and portable chips now have two cores, and even the iPhone is reported to have three microprocessors.

Microsoft sees this as the company’s principal opportunity, and industry executives have said that the arrival of manycore microprocessors is likely to be timed to the arrival of “Windows 7.” That is the name the company has given to the follow-on operating system to Windows Vista.

The opportunity for the company is striking, Mr. Mundie said, because manycore chips will offer the kind of leap in processing power that makes it possible to take computing in fundamentally new directions.

He envisions modern chips that will increasingly resemble musical orchestras. Rather than having tiled arrays of identical processors, the microprocessor of the future will include many different computing cores, each built to solve a specific type of problem. A.M.D. has already announced its intent to blend both graphics and traditional processing units onto a single piece of silicon.

In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

There are those who argue that there will be no easy advances in the field — including some inside Microsoft.

“I’m skeptical until I see something that gives me some hope,” said Gordon Bell, one of the nation’s pioneering computer designers, who is now a fellow at Microsoft Research.

Mr. Bell said that during the 1980s, he tried to persuade the computer industry to take on the problem of parallel computing while he was a program director at the National Science Foundation, but found little interest.

“They told me, ‘You can’t tell us what to do,’” he said. “Now the machines are here and we haven’t got it right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/te...gy/17chip.html





Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost
John Markoff

Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.

Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.

While many photovoltaic start-up companies are concentrating on increasing the efficiency with which their systems convert sunlight, Nanosolar has focused on lowering the manufacturing cost. Its process is akin to a large printing press, rather than the usual semiconductor manufacturing techniques that deposit thin films on silicon wafers.

Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.

“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

The first Nanosolar panels are destined for a one-megawatt solar plant to be installed in Germany on a former landfill owned by a waste management company. The plant, being developed by Beck Energy, is expected to initially supply electrical power for about 400 homes.

The company chose to build its plant in southern San Jose, news that was cheered by local development officials. Much of the microelectronics industry created here has moved to Asia and new factories are a rare commodity in Silicon Valley.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/te...y/18solar.html





Pistol packing pundit

Boycotted Radio Host Remains Unbowed
Jacques Steinberg

The humbling of Don Imus last spring over his remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team has done nothing to quiet Michael Savage, a radio host with a far bigger following and far more checkered track record.

Mr. Savage, whose program reaches an estimated eight million listeners a week on nearly 400 stations, suggested over the summer that a group of college students on a hunger strike in support of easing immigration restrictions should “fast until they starve to death.” In October the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, the city from which Mr. Savage often broadcasts, took the unusual step of passing a resolution condemning him for the remarks.

Then, a few weeks ago, Mr. Savage uncorked a cascade of invective about Islam. Among his on-air comments: the Koran is “a book of hate”; some Muslims, at least, “need deportation”; and adherents of Islam would do well to “take your religion and shove it up your behind” because “I’m sick of you.”

In response the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose stated mission includes correcting mischaracterizations of Islam, tore a page from the playbook of Mr. Imus’s critics. It made Mr. Savage’s comments widely available on the Internet and called on advertisers to boycott his program, which is behind only Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s in number of listeners, according to Talkers magazine, an industry publication.

At least two of his major sponsors — Citrix, which sells remote access to computers, and Trusted ID, which provides protection against identity theft — have pulled their spots. Thus far, Mr. Savage said in an interview last week, the boycott had cost his program more than a million dollars in advertising revenue committed for next year.

On Dec. 3 Mr. Savage fired back at his critics in a way Mr. Imus never did: He filed a lawsuit in United States District Court against the council, not only for taking his comments out of context — he says they were made within a broader discussion of the president of Iran — but for then making audio of them available on its Web site, cair.com.

With his suit, Mr. Savage has put himself in an odd position for someone who makes his living talking and is a fierce advocate for free speech: He is complaining about others quoting him.

But in the interview Mr. Savage contended that the council had violated the copyright protections on his broadcast by using his words, in effect, to raise money. He cited the bright orange button labeled “Donate” that appears on the council Web site just to the right of the “Action Alert” it put out against him.

“If they are trying to hang me by my own petard, they have no right to use my petard,” Mr. Savage said after Monday’s show. “It’s my petard, not theirs.”

A spokesman for the council, Ahmed Rehab, said, “We think the suit is a P.R. ploy.” (A spokeswoman for Citrix would not discuss the reasons for the company’s decision; the chief executive of Trusted ID, Scott Mitic, said it had abandoned Savage’s program because his audience wasn’t buying the company’s product.)

Mr. Savage likened his remarks about the San Francisco protesters to those of a father frustrated with a child who won’t eat his peas: in other words, “Suit yourself, you can starve to death for all I care.”

“Remember, I’m a New Yorker,” he said. “I grew up on sarcasm and satire. People are too literal, No. 1, and they don’t have a true sense of humor, No. 2.”

Mr. Savage proudly calls himself conservative, even right wing, and his audience has proved to be both enormous and loyal, sticking with him after MSNBC pulled the plug on a simulcast of his radio show in 2003. The action came after he said he hoped a caller to his radio show, who had identified himself as gay, would die of AIDS.

Mr. Savage has always been regarded as a bit of a maverick, if not a loose cannon, in both Republican and talk-radio circles. In the interview he singled out two Republican presidential contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, for refusing to be on his show.

He also lamented that other conservative titans with microphones — Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Hannity and Bill O’Reilly — “won’t lift a finger to help me” fend off the council boycott.

That is not much of a surprise to Michael Harrison, the founder and publisher of Talkers.

“Michael Savage is one of the few high-profile conservative hosts who is politically independent and does not hesitate to criticize the superstars of the Republican movement,” he said. “As a result he is not the most popular host among his conservative peers.”

Mr. Savage agreed last week to allow a reporter to sit in on his program, but only on the condition that the reporter not reveal the location of the waterside house where he was broadcasting that day, or of two other homes where he has studios and which he treats as virtual safe houses. Mr. Savage, who is licensed to carry a pistol and does so, said the secrecy was warranted by his fears for his life, based on the sheaf of death threats he says he has received over the years.

Mr. Savage can be surprisingly unintimidating in person, standing 5-foot-7 and looking, on this day, like he had sprung from an L. L. Bean catalog in a bright orange corduroy shirt, black fleece vest and tan chinos, with a miniature poodle at his feet. He can also project charm, insisting that a visitor just off a cross-country flight pause to have a turkey sandwich with potato salad.

“Drew, did you get pastry?” he later asked his assistant, Drew Bader, sounding more like a grandmother than a firebrand.

“Yes,” Mr. Bader assured him wearily, “I got a hamantaschen and a piece of kugel.”

At one point Mr. Savage — who was born Michael Weiner, and who still is, legally, Michael Weiner — led a visitor to a glass case that included a photo of him as a boy wearing a tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. Asked if it was his bar mitzvah photo, he said it was, adding, “Tell that to my Muslim friends.” (Mr. Savage said later that when he became a talk show host 14 years ago, he took a “nom de voix,” as he referred to his pseudonym, to blunt any potshots at him as “a Jew from the Bronx,” which he happens to be.)

But whether on the air or off, Mr. Savage delights in being provocative.

He told his listeners last Monday that he had attended a boxing match in Las Vegas the previous weekend, which he characterized as between Floyd Mayweather, “the black guy,” and Ricky Hatton, “the white guy.”

“I rooted for the underdog, who was the little guy, Hatton,” Mr. Savage said. “I didn’t root for him because he was white.”

Mr. Savage insists that such comments aren’t just shtick. “I couldn’t do this for 14 years as an entertainer,” he said. “I’m not really a stealth liberal off the air.”

He readily acknowledged, though, that during his 20s and 30s he was “super left-wing,” including the times he worked as a welfare worker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and later as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine.

But he turned sharply to the right after, among other things, finding that his welfare clients were often living better than he, and that despite a Ph.D. he couldn’t get a college teaching job after five years of trying. “I was the wrong race,” he said. “I was the wrong sex.”

Eventually he made a demo tape and was hired by KGO, a San Francisco station.

These days Mr. Savage can be heard in San Francisco on a competitor, KNEW, as well as on WOR in New York City. Though none of his affiliates — a number of them owned by Clear Channel — has publicly expressed any intention of dumping him, à la Mr. Imus, he said he has lately been contemplating retiring. (Though he wouldn’t comment on his current deal, it pays him several million dollars annually and ends sometime in 2008, according to an industry executive who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the deal publicly.)

But in the same breath Mr. Savage acknowledged that he wasn’t sure he’d know what to do with himself without a microphone. And then there’s the prospect that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, two favorite Savage foils, could win the 2008 presidential election.

“It’s going to be the golden age of radio, at least until they pass the fairness doctrine,” he said, savoring the thought of a Clinton presidency in particular. “What fun we’re going to have, till they get around to that.”

“Then it’ll be Venezuela,” he predicted. “They’ll close down the opposition stations through legislation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/arts/17sava.html





Munch munch munch

NCAA Puts Limits On Live Blogging Sports Events

For years, we've been pointing out how ridiculous it is for professional sports leagues to try to claim ownership of game data. Facts cannot be covered by copyright -- and neither can your own description of the events on the field. However, many of the leagues still wanted to claim that you couldn't report the facts of the game without paying a license. Trying to show how ridiculous this claim was, I asked where it ended, saying: "If I'm at the game, and I use my mobile phone to report what I see, is that considered 'rebroadcasting' the game? What if I'm posting the information to a web site?" The point had been that no one would rationally think that was against the rules. How naive I was apparently...

Acting even worse than a professional sports league, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), got things rolling last summer by ejecting a live blogger from a college baseball game. Apparently, the NCAA had decided that this was too close to "rebroadcasting" and ridiculously believing that fans might just watch a liveblog report rather than the actual event on TV. This kicked up some attention -- and you would think that the NCAA would have realized what a dumb policy this was and backed down. Not so.

Instead, the NCAA has now instituted special "live-blogging rules" for anyone credentialed to cover NCAA events. The rules change per sport, but they limit how many times you can blog during the course of a game. For baseball: once per inning (not even once per half-inning!). For basketball, it's five times per half, once during half-time, and twice in overtime. Football is three times per quarter and once at half-time. It even covers the more obscure sports: you can only blog 10 times per day at a swimming match, for example. You can see all the details here (pdf).

Now, before anyone goes screaming censorship or free speech or anything along those lines -- these are the rules that the NCAA is setting for credentialed reporters. And, as a private organization, the NCAA can set whatever rules it wants for handing out credentials, no matter how mind-numbingly stupid they may be. If I were a publication covering NCAA sports, I would simply buy my reporters tickets to the games, rather than getting them in on a press pass under such rules. What's really idiotic, though, is that this makes no sense. Limiting live blogging only hurts the sport. The people who follow live blogs are the really passionate fans -- the ones who love the game the most. They follow the live blogs not as a substitute for watching the game on TV or attending in person -- but because they cannot view the games that way and/or they want to feel the camaraderie of discussing the event with other passionate fans. Cutting off the ability of a reporter to feed info to these fans simply makes no sense. It's hurting your most passionate fans for no good reason whatsoever.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071220/010939.shtml





Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons
Scott

Last week, Creative Commons turned five years old -- five years of phenomenal growth, thanks in no small part to advocates like the photo-sharing site Flickr.

Now, I don't want to piss on CC's birthday cake just for the fun of it. But it does seem clear that an increasing number of photographers -- not just professionals but high-end hobbyists also -- have become disenchanted with the Creative Commons system.

Why? Depending on who you ask, it's because:

1. It's taking money out of the pockets of working photographers;
2. It's putting money into the coffers of large corporations, whose executives like CC-enabled crowdsourcing even better than Third World child labor;
3. It's supposed to make sharing your work easier, but it often just makes it more confusing -- creating the kind of misunderstandings that lead to lawsuits.

Since the first two complaints are related, let's address them together. Creative Commons is a system that enables you to renounce some or all of your copyright protections -- in the name of sharing. This raises a question that doesn't get enough serious consideration: Who actually benefits from this?

Theoretically, we all do, since I can stick your Flickr photo on my blog and link back to you, and maybe this will cause more people to visit your Web site, and -- who knows -- maybe if you're a professional photographer, you'll get a paying gig or two out of it.

The fact is, though, that a Creative Commons license isn't necessary for this kind of sharing to happen. People are going to grab your photos anyway for their noncommercial use, because that's the common law of the Web today -- where "fair use" is interpreted very broadly. And if you really, really want to encourage people, you can put a note on your Web site explicitly giving people permission to use your photos, under whatever conditions you set forth. How hard is that? Why do you need a CC badge to say it?

The real issue is commercial use -- and this is where we get to who really benefits, at least over the long term. Before Creative Commons, a corporation or ad agency that wanted to use your photo would have to contact you or your photo agency for permission to use it. You could negotiate a price based on the particular use, making sure you got a fair deal.

Through CC, hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of photographers have thrown this right away forever. (Remember, CC says that once you choose a license for your work, it's irrevocable.) Photographers are generally doing this with good intentions or for idealistic reasons. But the end result is that you are building a system enabling commercial buyers to use your images without paying for them.

I know what you're thinking: "But you can choose a noncommercial use license to protect yourself from this." Sure you can, if:

1. You are informed enough to make the correct license choice;
2. The publisher of your photo is informed enough to know the differences among the various licenses; and
3. You, the publisher and the rest of the world can all agree on what "noncommercial use" actually means.
Gordon Haff offers just a few of the scenarios that can be interpreted either as commercial or noncommercial:

• What if I have some AdSense advertising on my Web page or blog?
• What if I put together an entire ad-supported Web site using noncommercial photos?
• What if I'm using those photos as "incidental" illustrative content in a presentation I'm being paid to give? (This was my case.)
• What if I print a book of these photos but only charge my cost? What if I cover my time at some nominal rate as well?

And if you and the entity that publishes your photo don't see eye to eye -- or you choose, as many CC users do, a simple attribution license? As Daryl Lang of Photo District News puts it:
If you're not careful, you might inadvertently grant permission for your photo to appear on a giant billboard for herpes medication, or in the newsletter of some political organization you despise. Images have commercial value that's very different from, for example, a piece of writing. Their rights need to be treated with care and respect.

Because it's so confusing (or, to be more generous, "open to interpretation"), Creative Commons licensing spawns false confidence and innocent mistakes -- giving sue-happy lawyers much to salivate over. Did you know that Creative Commons and Flickr can't even seem to agree on whether CC licenses are permanent? That would seem to be a rather basic point.

Earlier this month, blogger Jeremy Johnstone expressed his frustrations:
I license almost all of my photos under a CC license (attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works 2.0 specifically) and I have been finding that virtually _no one_ follows what I believe to be the intent of that license ...

I've come to accept my colleagues' and peers' opinions that non-commercial simply means they can't sell my work. Personally, I think this should also mean you can't put my photo on a page you are making money off of (aka advertising) either without my permission (which in most, but not all cases I would give automatically upon being asked), but apparently I am fairly alone in that belief...

Some say that I should be happy that people want to use my photos and I am getting free publicity (when they actually link back to me that is), but it becomes a whole different situation when you are getting flak about photos you took being used in manners not intended (like one I took of a leader of a foreign country a while back).

Jeremy's objections aren't the half of it. Creative Commons can -- and inevitably will -- lead to more Virgin Mobile-style lawsuits. It's nice to get your photo in the New York Times, until you realize you're not getting a dime for it. Let's face it: CC is confusing to the point of being a running joke.

So photographers, feel free to congratulate Creative Commons on its fifth birthday. Just don't celebrate by giving commercial users the gift that keeps on giving – a license to use your work for free, forever.
http://rising.blackstar.com/why-phot...e-commons.html





Once Broke, GameStop Moves Up to S.&P. 500
Dan Fost

Just over a decade ago, the company now known as GameStop was bankrupt, and analysts in the video game industry predicted that people would buy games online rather than in its mall stores.

But instead the franchise grew, pulled from its financial woes by a group of investors led by Leonard Riggio, the founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble. Spun off from Barnes & Noble in 2004, GameStop calls itself the world’s largest video game retailer.
Now the company can add a new distinction: member of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. On Thursday, after Dow Jones & Company was acquired by the News Corporation and lost its berth in that index, GameStop took its place, moving up from a midsize index.

For GameStop, the ascension puts a cap on a remarkable journey. The company has gone through a number of names and ownership configurations, but it is still essentially a chain that hires serious game enthusiasts to sell new and used software from relatively bare-bones stores.

GameStop executives declined to talk for this article, but did answer questions by e-mail. “The broadening landscape of consumers eager to visit our stores and interact with our knowledgeable sales associates has been very advantageous for GameStop,” wrote David W. Carlson, the company’s chief financial officer. “While our Internet operations are strong, our stores remain the cornerstone of our business.”

A move into the S.& P. 500 usually brings a stamp of legitimacy to a company as well as a boost in its stock price, according to Ben Schachter of UBS Securities, an Internet and video game analyst. Large mutual funds based on the index now need to buy shares of Game- Stop’s stock, he said.

GameStop’s stock price rose 66 cents on Friday, closing at $58.21 a share. The company’s market capitalization was $9.37 billion.

“If you look back five years, the stock was about a tenth of where it is now,” Mr. Schachter said. “It was a relatively small video-game retailer. Back then, everyone argued that games would be distributed online, and the business would go away. But these guys stuck to their game plan and exceeded everyone’s expectations.”

The company has its roots in NeoStar Retail, which was formed in the 1990s in the merger of Babbage’s and Software Etc. After NeoStar went into bankruptcy in 1996, Mr. Riggio, who remains one of GameStop’s largest investors, took it over.

He brought in a new management team, and some of those executives remain with the company today. Barnes & Noble sold shares of GameStop to the public in 2002 and spun off the company entirely in 2004.

The next year, GameStop bought a major competitor, Electronics Boutique, for $1.4 billion, in a deal that put the combined company ahead of Wal-Mart Stores in terms of video game sales.

“Almost every employee at every GameStop is pretty much a hard-core gamer,” Mr. Schachter said. The know- ledge of the sales staff, the broad selection of game titles, and GameStop’s role as a clearinghouse for used games helps give the company a leg up over big-box competitors like Wal-Mart, he said.

Standard & Poor’s picks companies for the index with market capitalizations of at least $5 billion and focuses on “leading companies in leading industries,” according to David Guarino, a spokesman. He would not say why Standard & Poor’s picked GameStop over other contenders.

Mr. Carlson of GameStop offered this comment: “The move to the S.& P. 500 is a reflection of GameStop’s real momentum in the video game business and a validation of our success as a specialty retailer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/te...7gamestop.html





Exclusive: Retail Chain Scalping Wii Allotment on eBay
Ben Kuchera

There is no doubt that this holiday season, one of the hottest gifts is the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo of America's president, Reggie Fils-Aime, warned gamers months ago that supplies would be short and tried to alleviate the problem with a voucher program through GameStop. It's clear this won't be enough to meet demand, causing Nintendo to strongly urge retailers not to force consumers to buy bundles of software and accessories in order to take advantage of the shortage. At Opposable Thumbs, we ran a post about how to deal with these bundles and asked readers to contact us with their horror stories. One worker followed up quickly with his own twist on holiday price gouging: instead of selling the systems with bundles, a chain of Illinois/Missouri gaming stores called Slackers is simply dumping its stock onto eBay for the Buy It Now price of $399.99, an almost $150 markup.

"In the past year, none of the 12 [Slackers locations] have sold any Wiis except for a one-time promotional deal, where we did force customers to buy a game with it," the employee told Ars Technica. "The real crime is that we get Wii shipments regularly. In fact, right now we have about 20, but none of them make it to the store front. They all get put on the store's eBay site at a minimum $499.99 buying price."

Our source then told us that the price has since been lowered to $399.99, (they weren't moving at $499) and sure enough, there are three Wiis available through Slackers' eBay storefront at $399.99. Looking back in the store's history, one can find other Wii sales in its feedback, with the auction advertising "NEW WITH GAME." The game of course being the bundled Wii Sports.

Ars Technica contacted the St. Louis Slackers location for confirmation of the practice. When asked if the allegations were true, there was a long silence. "That is something you'll have to speak with the owner about," we were told. We have since attempted to contact Slackers' owner multiple times, but have been unsuccessful. Nintendo has also not responded to our requests for comment on this story.

There are a couple of reasons Nintendo—and every other console manufacturer—is so strict on keeping one price point. Raising the price in this way hurts Nintendo's ability to position the Wii as the low-cost system, and it also cuts Nintendo out of a share in the higher profits. At the same time, Nintendo keeps retailers from offering the systems as low-priced loss leaders, dropping the console below the suggested retail price to get customers into the store. Nintendo wants to be sure it controls the pricing, and Fils-Aime has talked in the past about the power of the Wii's low price.

While dropping systems on eBay might seem like a quick and easy way for retailers like Slackers to make money, raising the price on Nintendo's system for one's own profit is a surefire way to get cut off from future shipments of games, systems, and accessories. "We don't have to remind retailers of the strength we have right now," Fils-Aime said in a recent interview with Reuters. "We are simply making an observation and that reinforces our point quite nicely with retailers."

Nintendo does indeed have the strength right now, and our source also told us he has reported his employer's practices to Nintendo. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that Slackers' customers hungry for the system are aware that Wiis are apparently being stockpiled in the store room for eBayers willing to pay $400 instead of on store shelves at Nintendo's MSRP of $249.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-on-ebay.html





Looking Beyond Megapixels
David Pogue

You may have your holiday traditions: caroling, stockings, candles, whatever. But here at The New York Times Institute of Gadgetology, we have a tradition of our own. Every December since 2001, we’ve asked: “How much digital camera can you get for $300?”

For years, that low price pretty much guaranteed low picture quality. Camera makers spent all their effort groveling at the altar of megapixels, in hopes that the public would come to associate megapixels with picture quality.

But the manufacturers are finally turning their attention to features that really do help your photos, like image stabilization (reduces blur in low light) and face recognition (ensures proper focus and exposure on human subjects). They haven’t eliminated shutter lag (the delay before the picture is snapped) — you’ll have to buy one of those big digital single-lens reflex cameras for that luxury — but there’s some improvement this year.

Here they are, then, presented roughly in order of photo quality: the cameras that the nine major manufacturers consider their finest sub-$300 work. Except as noted, they’re credit-card-size, eight-megapixel models with 3X optical zoom, SD memory cards and no eyepiece viewfinder. (Don’t miss the complete table of features, and the slide show of samples, at nytimes.com/tech.)

Casio Exilim EX-V8 ($240). With high-end features like a 7X zoom lens, image stabilizer and the ability to zoom while shooting movies, you’d think that this camera would get the highest marks. But no such luck; its photos consistently trailed the pack. In low light, some were truly awful: murky, sepia-toned, blurry. You can do light-years better.

Pentax Optio Z10 ($219). This sleek camera offers some unusual features. For example, it can help recover photos you’ve deleted accidentally. And its 7X zoom lens is astonishing, considering that it’s completely contained inside the camera; nothing telescopes outward when you turn the camera on.

Unfortunately, that zooming apparatus eats up a lot of space, leaving only enough room for a cylindrical battery the size of your pinky. You’ll get 180 shots per charge if you’re lucky (compared with 330 on, say, the Sony).

There are other problems, too: no image stabilizer, no autofocus-assist lamp for low light and severe graininess indoors or at night.

Samsung i85 ($266). One thing is for sure: this is the only camera here that comes with earbuds. That’s because it doubles as a basic MP3 music player and even acts as an e-book reader; it can page through text files copied onto it from a Mac or PC.

The Samsung is a looker, too: shiny stainless steel wrapped around an enormous three-inch screen. Its photos usually look good, and the flash is powerful. But because there’s no image stabilizer, flashless indoor or nighttime photos are blurry and doomed.

Nikon Coolpix S700 ($280). For years, Nikon had a split personality: it made phenomenal digital S.L.R. cameras, but mediocre pocket models. With this camera, Nikon might be starting to turn things around. The S700’s stabilizer virtually banishes blur, and graininess is a problem only in nighttime shots. The camera itself looks great, too.

Unfortunately, in sunlight, the 2.7-inch screen turns into a slab of onyx; without an eyepiece viewfinder, you can’t see well enough to take any pictures at all. (The Pentax has the same problem. The screens on the other cameras here are bright enough even in direct light.) And this camera’s 150-shot battery life is the worst of the batch.

Kodak Z812IS ($245). This camera won’t fit in a pants pocket; it’s shaped like a miniature S.L.R., complete with a sculptured hand grip (and, alas, a detached lens cap). The payoff, though, is the amazing 12X zoom, which is enormously useful in shooting sports, school plays and anything surreptitiously.

Of course, zooming magnifies your hand jitters; fortunately, the IS in this camera’s name stands for image stabilizer.

The camera takes great movies, even in high definition (at a full 30 frames a second). In fact, the Z812 can both zoom and refocus while you’re filming, which is a rarity in still cameras. Nice.

Most of the photos came out great; a nighttime shot of a Miami Beach restaurant festooned by neon signs was practically magazine-worthy. The Kodak muffed only a few shots, generally night scenes.

There is an eyepiece viewfinder on this camera, but it’s not a true optical one; it’s electronic, meaning that you’re peering into another screen, and a somewhat coarse one at that.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H3 ($270). This camera, like the Kodak, is also shaped like a mini-S.L.R. and has a stabilized superzoom lens (10X). It feels wonderful in your hand.

Other goodies: With a $40 component cable, you can display your photos in spectacular high definition on an HDTV. And the H3 has the clearest, easiest, smartest button and menu design of the year. The only question: On a bigger camera like this one, why not include an optical viewfinder?

Like many Sony cameras, this one sometimes produces a slight bluish cast. But otherwise, it does a terrific job, even indoors, even without the flash. It blurred only a single torture-test photo: palm trees at night, illuminated only by reflected swimming-pool light.

Panasonic Lumix FX55 ($300). The menus on this camera’s huge three-inch screen are something out of the Stone Age: huge, pixellated words in all caps, as though the camera is shouting at you.

On the other hand, the Lumix has an enormous wide-angle view; compared with the narrow fields of view on the Nikon and Sony, these photos are practically panoramas. The advertisements always promote the telephoto (zoom) powers of cameras, but wide-angle ability is arguably even more important, at least on vacations to scenic places.

And the Lumix’s photos are nearly impeccable. They’re grain-free, smoothly toned and perfectly exposed. Only one shot tripped up the Lumix: the same pool-and-palms shot that stymied the Sony.

Canon PowerShot SD850 IS ($256). This camera’s awesome predecessor cost $360 last year. Now you can get the same vivid photos and movies for $256.

But that’s not all! Yes, folks, you also get image stabilization, face recognition, 4X optical zoom and a genuine optical eyepiece viewfinder. It’s the only optical viewfinder of these $300 cameras, in fact. Canon, mercifully, is bucking the trend on this great little machine.

Fujifilm FinePix F50fd ($234). For the last several years, Fuji has been spending big R.& D. dollars on nailing the low-light problem. “If we can put a man on the moon,” they evidently muttered, “surely we can design a pocket camera that takes nighttime and indoor photos without grain, blur or flash.”

This camera is it. The 12-megapixel photos are delightful; indoors, outdoors, with the flash or without. Even those poolside palm trees came out sharp and clear.

One probable reason is that the F50fd’s sensor is more than 50 percent bigger than those on most of the other cameras: 0.625 inch diagonal, versus 0.4. Now that’s a statistic — not megapixels — that matters in a camera.

More good news: the F50fd accepts standard SD cards in addition to the proprietary, expensive XD memory cards that Fuji has been pushing for years. How can this be the second-least-expensive camera of the batch?

The bottom line: some of this year’s cameras truly rock. If you want a pocket model, consider the Lumix for its wide angle, the Canon for its 4X zoom and optical viewfinder or the Fujifilm for its amazing natural-light performance. If you’re willing to pack something bigger, you can get a lot more zoom for your buck with the Kodak or the Sony. Congratulations to these companies for getting back to photo-quality basics this year — and to you, dear customer, for doing your homework.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/te...h/06pogue.html





At Web Site for Journalists, Criticism of a Campaign Article Becomes a Melee
Maria Aspan

A usual round of media self-criticism turned into a schoolyard brawl last week, as editors, reporters and bloggers traded insults over a front-page article in The Washington Post, all at the very online water cooler where they usually get their news about the industry.

The Post article, which ran on Nov. 29, was about rumors of Barack Obama’s ties to the Muslim world. The piece drew widespread criticism: the Columbia Journalism Review said the article “may be the single worst campaign ’08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle.”

The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, devoted a column on Dec. 9 to the backlash against it, concluding that “the rumors were old” and that “convincing evidence of their falsity wasn’t included in the story.”

Then things got really ugly — and personal. On Dec. 10, Chris Daly, a Boston University journalism professor, posted an entry on his blog that turned the debate over the merits of the article’s reporting into a debate over the merits of its author, Perry Bacon Jr., a Post staff reporter.

“Since when does The Post assign 27-year-olds to write Page 1 presidential campaign pieces?," wrote Mr. Daly, who is 53 and had written for The Post as a freelance regional correspondent for eight years starting in 1989. “This is fast-tracking with a vengeance.”

After Jim Romenesko, who runs a popular media blog for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based nonprofit school for journalists, posted a link to Mr. Daly’s blog post, Mr. Bacon’s friends and colleagues rushed to defend him.

Soon the Romenesko Web site was full of letters of support from Mr. Bacon’s past and present colleagues and other reporters, including Michael Barbaro and Adam Nagourney of The New York Times, Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine, and Peter Baker of The Washington Post. Media critics on outside sites like The Huffington Post and Slate also weighed in, with posts that the site also linked to.

The most through-the-looking-glass moment of the week, however, came when The Post’s executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., criticized the Romenesko blog — in a publicly posted letter to Mr. Romenesko — for linking to Mr. Daly’s original complaint in the first place. Mr. Daly’s post was “an outrageous personal attack on a fine young journalist, and I’m disappointed that it has been given circulation on Romenesko,” Mr. Downie wrote.

Then he, too, got personal, taking a swipe at Mr. Daly. “Daly, however, during his time as a contract stringer for this newspaper, failed to earn a similar role for himself” by getting hired as a staff reporter, Mr. Downie wrote.

Mr. Downie said on Friday that he stood by his comments. His remark about Mr. Daly was accurate “and goes to motivation,” he said, adding that motivation was relevant because Mr. Daly’s “posting was so outside the bounds.”

He also stood by his criticism of the Romenesko site. “My response to Daly was not to say that Romenesko should not publish criticism of Washington Post journalism,” he said. “But that’s not what this was, this was an unjustified personal attack.”

As for Mr. Daly, he said by telephone on Friday that he had been “a little surprised at the sheer volume and intensity of the reaction” to his original post. In a follow-up entry on Dec. 11, he wrote that he had “meant no disrespect to Mr. Bacon personally. In my view, this is not about him.”

Instead, Mr. Daly said by telephone, he had meant to focus on “standards of journalistic practice,” like the guidance and editing of reporters at influential media organizations. He added that he regretted the way he had phrased his comments about Mr. Bacon.

“It didn’t come out right,” he said. “Blogging is very much an off-the-cuff enterprise, it’s not like the careful research that I do.”

Mr. Bacon declined to comment and referred a reporter to his editor, Bill Hamilton, the assistant managing editor for politics. “It’s just unfortunate that it went to that level,” Mr. Hamilton said of Mr. Daly’s comments. “I just think he got into an area that just wasn’t relevant. He should have just stuck to the merits of debating the story.”

And what did the man behind the curtain, who provided the forum for the intramedia hair-pulling, think of the fallout? “Mr. Downie’s letter didn’t surprise me,” Mr. Romenesko said in an e-mail message on Friday. “I’m sure most editors would prefer that I not link to stories that criticize their staffers. There’s no reason I should have passed on Chris Daly’s blog post.”

He added, “When I posted Daly’s item about Perry, I was most interested in getting readers’ reactions to the professor’s complaint about young journalists getting big assignments; I certainly got them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/bu...ia/17romo.html





Gone Wild and Gone All Wrong
Mireya Navarro

THE multimillionaire creator of “Girls Gone Wild” sits in a jail visiting room here, wearing a uniform of orange shirt and gray pants and looking pale but rested from eight months of incarceration. He talks to a visitor through glass, often yelling, sometimes tapping on the glass with his index finger for emphasis, railing into a handset against “evil” and “vengeful” government officials and vowing to sue them all.

“Enough is enough,” he spits out. “I am not a criminal.”

Joe Francis, 34, has long been a polarizing figure, having made his riches enticing young women at Spring Break locations (many of them drunk) to bare their breasts for the cameras for his popular videos. He has not been scoring brownie points by calling local officials in Florida — where Spring Break 2003 in Panama City Beach went terribly wrong for him — “Nazis” and “cockroaches.”

But, stuck in jail in Reno, Mr. Francis is now desperately trying to drum up public sympathy, if not win release, to expose how unfairly he believes authorities have treated him. For the last two and a half months, he has taken out ads, sent out news releases, appeared on dozens of radio and TV talk shows and used a Web site, www.meetjoefrancis.com, to relate his convoluted story while his lawyers file motions charging prosecutorial misconduct and ask for investigations.

And as he goes about trying to transform his image from soft-porn entrepreneur to victim of vindictive officials, support has come from unusual quarters. His most vocal allies are not the Hollywood A-listers who have vacationed at his Mexico estate, but conservative radio hosts and their listeners, who suspect government shenanigans.

“EVEN though I don’t approve of what Joe Francis does for a living, he’s caught up in a nightmare,” said Mike Gallagher, one of the syndicated radio hosts who have given Mr. Francis a platform in recent weeks via jail telephone. “There’s a real issue here of somebody not getting bail.”

But Florida officials have been doing some p.r. of their own. The prosecutor, State Attorney Steve Meadows, has sat down for interviews on “Nightline” and VH-1 and issued news releases vowing to “pursue the prosecution against Joe Francis at every stage and in every court.”

And the former mayor of Panama City Beach, Lee Sullivan, one of the first Florida officials to lock horns with Mr. Francis, maintains he has only his “arrogance and bad judgment” to blame for his travails. Last year, when Mr. Sullivan unsuccessfully ran for state representative, his campaign listed as his proudest mayoral achievement “taking ‘Girls Gone Wild,’ their slick California lawyers and their exploitation of young women to court and making certain their pornography would never be made on the Emerald Coast again.”

Mr. Francis’s troubles started nearly five years ago when he included Panama City Beach, a Panhandle city of white-sand beaches on the Gulf of Mexico, in a highly publicized pay-per-view event from three Spring Break locations. “Girls Gone Wild” camera crews, who usually film college women at bars, parking lots, hotel rooms and other party hangouts, had been to Panama Beach City before, but in 2003 they arrived with unusual hoopla.

Mayor Sullivan took exception and law enforcement officials cracked down on acts of lewd behavior, which interfered with the filming. Mr. Francis sued the officials, claiming violation of his First Amendment rights, and got them to settle and back down. But Mr. Francis and some of his crew were arrested when the father of one of two women filmed in a shower scene at the hotel room the filmmakers had rented contacted the county sheriff’s office, saying the girls were minors.

The officials came down hard: They confiscated Mr. Francis’s Ferrari and private jet, announcing cocaine had been found on the plane. Mr. Francis was charged with more than 70 counts, including racketeering, drug trafficking, prostitution and promoting the sexual performance of children.

A judge ended up throwing out all but six of the criminal counts, which revolve around the use of minors in a sexual performance, because of a flawed search warrant. And as it turned out, no cocaine was found on the plane.

But Mr. Francis was also saddled with a civil suit for emotional distress from the two girls, each 17, in the shower scene, along with five women. While he was out on bail in the criminal case, which is pending, the judge overseeing the suit ordered Mr. Francis to return to Florida to mediate the suit. That civil case landed Mr. Francis in jail in April when the women’s lawyers complained he was verbally abusive in negotiations. Judge John Richard Smoak Jr. of the Northern District of Florida held Mr. Francis in civil contempt for not properly participating in mediation and ordered him into custody. Mr. Francis, by then back home in Los Angeles, showed up to do his time four days late, which earned him another contempt order, this time for criminal contempt.

Mr. Francis settled the lawsuit while in jail in Bay County, Fla., but his troubles were not over. Before he could get out, guards found sleeping pills, prescription medication for anxiety and high cholesterol and $700 in cash in his cell, and he soon faced criminal charges for introducing contraband into a detention facility.

Because of the new charges, his bail on the 2003 criminal case was revoked, and bail in the contraband case was denied by Judge Dedee S. Costello of Bay County Circuit Court, who said Mr. Francis had “impugned the integrity of the judicial process.”

Mr. Francis would still be jailed in Florida if not for another twist: Federal officials in Nevada charged him with two counts of tax evasion, so in June he was transferred to Washoe County jail here to answer the new charges. He faces trial on the tax evasion case but denies any wrongdoing.

In fact, he says, he sees the tax evasion case as a godsend. That case keeps him from going back to Bay County, where he claims in court papers he suffered abusive treatment. He remains in Nevada while his lawyers, including the well-known Miami lawyer Roy Black, try to get the Florida charges dismissed. The chance of that happening is slim, his lawyers said, and Mr. Francis is looking at more jail time.

Here, Mr. Francis spends his days on the pay phone talking to his lawyers, arranging interviews and keeping tabs on “Girls Gone Wild” and Mantra Entertainment, his Los Angeles-based company. The business, with 350 employees, now brings in nearly $100 million a year in revenue, he said, and has branched out from DVDs to the Internet, mobile phones and apparel lines.

Mr. Francis admits having made mistakes. He said he regretted reporting to jail in Florida late while trying to get the judge’s order stayed.

But he is hardly contrite. He has a defense for every bad turn along the way: The two minors filmed in Panama City Beach lied about their age to the cameraman and would have been vetted before the video was released; the mediation of their suit turned sour on both sides and it didn’t help him that one of the girls’ lawyers was Judge Smoak’s former law partner; Mr. Francis says he walked into jail with pills and cash because he was not searched and didn’t know better.

Mr. Francis, who sees himself as a Larry Flynt figure, argues this is all payback for defying the power structure in Bay County with his First Amendment lawsuit. Mr. Sullivan, the former mayor, denied this, but said Mr. Francis’s “cavalier attitude” and “obvious disdain” for authority have not helped him.

“If he’s looking for his worst enemy, he’ll find it in the mirror,” he said.

JOE GRAMMER, a spokesman for the Florida attorney’s office, said Mr. Meadows, the prosecutor in the original underage-girls case, is no longer commenting because of a judge’s admonition to lawyers to limit public statements. In his latest salvo, Mr. Francis filed a motion last October to have charges dismissed, accusing Mr. Meadows of tainting the jury pool by making disparaging statements against him on national TV and showing a portion of the shower video to “Nightline.”

Greta Van Susteren, who has aired the feud between Mr. Francis and the Florida officials on her news show on the Fox News Channel since the beginning, said the case seemed out of control.

“This is a grudge match,” said Ms. Van Susteren, a lawyer. “They’re messing with him, without a doubt, and that’s because Joe has poked a stick in the eyes of the prosecutors who have the power to hold him.”

Mr. Francis and his company have faced numerous suits from women over his videos and have paid hefty fines for violating record-keeping laws by failing to document the ages of young women in his videos and for the unauthorized shipping and billing of his DVDs. A few years ago a man broke into Mr. Francis’s home in Bel Air, bound and gagged him at gunpoint and forced him to pose partly naked for a video as part of an extortion attempt. The man was sentenced to over 10 years in prison.

Mr. Francis was in the news again when a bachelor party in Mexico he gave for Richard Johnson, a gossip editor for The New York Post, figured in a scandal about Post gossip staff accepting favors from sources.

Mr. Francis’s Hollywood friends, some of whom have written testimonials for his Web site, say they don’t know what to make of his current situation.

“It’s been so long and no bail,” said Quincy Jones, a neighbor in Bel Air who accompanied Mr. Francis’s parents to Florida when Mr. Francis was first jailed. “I don’t know what that’s about.” Mr. Jones, 74, said he knew Mr. Francis as a “giving” person with a good heart.

E-mail messages to Mr. Francis at Mantra Entertainment get an automatic “I am out of the office” reply, as if he’s just momentarily gone on business. But Mr. Francis said he lost a $300 million offer for his business as a result of his legal problems. At least he has found a much friendlier jail atmosphere in Washoe County than in Florida. He’s in a special housing unit because of his high profile and sheriff’s deputies have accommodated his numerous press interviews. He has his own cell but works handing out meals and doing other chores and has posed no problems, a spokeswoman for the jail said.

Mr. Francis says his fellow inmates — bank robbers, drug dealers and the occasional hair stylist on D.U.I. who has cut his hair — have been sympathetic. Many are “Girls Gone Wild” fans, he said, and he has even signed autographs.

But while his money is good for phone calls all day long, ordering out for food and the best lawyers, it can’t buy his freedom.

“They joke with me every day here,” he said of his guards. “‘Another murderer got out, Francis! Call your lawyer!’ At least they know that I shouldn’t be here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/fa...16francis.html





When the Bullies Turned Faceless
Christopher Maag

LIKE most mobs, the one that pursued Megan Meier was cruel and unrelenting. Its members gathered on the social networking site MySpace and called Megan a liar, a fat whore and worse.

Megan, 13, fought back, insulting her tormenters with every profanity she knew. But the mob shouted her down, overwhelming her computer and her shaky self-confidence with a barrage of hateful instant messages.

“Mom, they’re being horrible!” Megan said, sobbing into the phone when her mother called. After an hour, Megan ran into her bedroom and hanged herself with a belt.

“She felt there was no way out,” Ms. Meier said.

Megan Meier’s suicide made headlines because she was the victim of a hoax. Lori Drew, another mother in the neighborhood, said in a police report that she had created a MySpace profile of a boy, an invention named “Josh Evans,” and that she and her daughter had manipulated Megan into thinking that this fabricated person liked her.

Then, after a few weeks, Ms. Meier said, girls posing as Josh wrote MySpace messages telling Megan that he hated her. He insulted her, and other girls — most unaware that Josh did not exist — viciously piled on. (Later, through her lawyer, Ms. Drew, 48, denied knowing about the hoax.)

In some ways, the hoax was a tragic oddity. Most mothers don’t pull vicious pranks, and few harassed adolescents become depressed and commit suicide. But Megan’s story is also a case study about cyberbullying.

Cellphone cameras and text messages, as well as social networking Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging, all give teenagers a wider range of ways to play tricks on one another, to tease and to intimidate their peers.

And unlike traditional bullying, which usually is an intimate, if highly unpleasant, experience, high-tech bullying can happen anywhere, anytime, among lots of different children who may never actually meet in person. It is inescapable and often anonymous, said sociologists and educators who have studied cyberbullying.

Even in this town, where Megan’s name is a constant reminder of the danger of the Web, adolescents say they love using the technology — and some do a little bullying of their own.

“I’m sure that every girl at this table has used cellphones or instant messaging to say something mean about somebody,” said Victoria Fogarty, as she discussed bullying with six other adolescents. Victoria, 14, is the daughter of Pam Fogarty, the mayor of Dardenne Prairie, and an eighth grader at West Middle School, which Megan attended.

Other children are afraid of becoming the next victim.

“Once you’re on MySpace, you’re trapped,” said Jake Dobson, 12, a seventh grader at West Middle School. “You spend all your time online just trying to keep the negative stuff about you from spreading.”

Megan Meier spent months begging for a MySpace page before her mother finally gave in. Ms. Meier thought that making friends online could be good for her daughter, a sensitive girl who craved an emotional connection.

But that neediness made Megan vulnerable. By the third grade Megan hated herself and talked of suicide, Ms. Meier said. The diagnosis was depression and attention deficit disorder, which meant Megan would receive weekly counseling and an evolving list of medications as treatment.

By the time she reached seventh grade at West Middle School, Megan was overweight but active, Ms. Meier said. She hung out with other volleyball players, who were in the second tier of popular girls, just beneath the soccer players, said Laura Rodgers, 14, Megan’s friend.

She aped the styles of those above her, Ms. Meier said. She favored clothes like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch. Sometimes she applied so much mascara that she resembled a raccoon. Occasionally she would gleefully accept a soccer girl’s invitation to sit at the popular table during lunch, Laura said.

These moments of success faded during gym class, when Megan had to trade her plus-size designer clothes for athletic shorts and T-shirts. “People in P.E. class called her fat every day,” Laura said. “I’d see her in the locker room crying.”

After a difficult year, Megan’s parents transferred their daughter to Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Dardenne Prairie. The school had strict policies aimed at avoiding cliques. Students wear uniforms, and they are assigned lunch tables so they can socialize with everybody.

“There aren’t really cliques there at all,” said Rachel Garzon, 14, who befriended Megan. “You might be closer friends with some people, but you can walk up and talk to anybody and they’ll be nice to you.”

Megan, who had escaped the old cliques, retained her old MySpace page. “She technically wasn’t old enough, because you have to be 14,” Ms. Meier said. “But I was the only one who knew the password. I read every message she received or sent. I thought I could keep it safe, and Megan could meet some friends.”

MySpace uses algorithms and people to strike harassing or bullying images and content, the company said in a written statement, and the site offers users opportunities to report cyberbullies.

But controlling the Web can be almost impossible, experts on children say, and most adolescents are simply not mature enough to handle the virtual world and its anonymous attacks. For instance, “Adolescents take what is said online as the literal truth,” said Justin Patchin, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, who studies cyberbullying.

And, as in the Megan Meier case, the victim of cyberbullying is often isolated, yet never free from attack. “The target sees this entire cyberuniverse where everybody is against them, and no one will come to their defense,” said Dr. Walter Roberts, professor of counselor education at Minnesota State University, Mankato. “The harassment is not limited to the portion of the day when the kids are in school. The targeted kids have no escape.”

Three years ago, before Megan’s suicide, the school system identified cyberbullying as a serious problem, said Kim Carter, assistant superintendent for student services in the Fort Zumwalt School District.

In 2005, the school surveyed students and teachers. And before and after Megan’s death, the district held a variety of assemblies, meetings and workshops to train students, parents, faculty and administrators how to recognize and react to cyberbullying.

While all the vigilance has helped, students say, cyberbullying remains common. Last month, a girl won $500 in a class raffle. Before her teacher even opened the door to excuse everyone, the rest of the school was abuzz with rumors that she had cheated, said Sarah Fogarty, another of the mayor’s children.

How was that possible? Cellphones are supposed to be turned off in school. Girls practice text messaging with their eyes closed, Sarah said. They’ve become adept at pressing buttons under their desks while keeping their focus on the teacher.

“I’m not good at it yet,” Sarah said.

This fall an unpopular boy started break dancing at a football game. People took cellphone photos and videos, which they immediately forwarded to hundreds of people. “They were egging him on because they wanted to keep making fun of him, and the photos made him look ridiculous,” said Jake Dobson, the seventh grader.

Even popular kids feel vulnerable.

Ryan Franklin, 12, was a star player on his Little League baseball team until he needed stomach surgery last summer, said his mother, Sonya Franklin. As he recovered, a friend sent e-mail messages to dozens of students falsely stating that Ryan had made sexual comments about a girl in class, Ms. Franklin said.

“The truth was that he’d stopped playing baseball and so he’d lost some of his status,” Ms. Franklin said. “Some people started picking on him because he was an easier target.” The e-mail messages stopped only when she threatened to call the boy’s mother.

Jake Dobson admits he’s not above an instant message making fun of someone, even if he knows that the same thing could happen to him.

“It’s like I can’t even do anything because everybody is sitting there with a cellphone just waiting for me to mess up,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/fa...ml?ref=fashion





The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident

DEIRDRE MULLIGAN
Affiliation Unknown
AARON K. PERZANOWSKI
Berkeley Center for Law & Technology

Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 22, p. 1157, 2007


Abstract:
Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers' computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided.

The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.

The Article concludes with two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and antitrafficking provisions that enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, the Federal Trade Commission should leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=1072229

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Police Blotter: Can Circuit City Techs Legally Peruse Files?
Declan McCullagh

What happened, according to court documents:
On October 15, 2004, Kenneth Sodomsky brought his computer to a Circuit City store in Wyomissing, Pa., and asked store technicians to install a DVD burner.

Circuit City told Sodomsky that the upgrade would be finished in about an hour. After installing the DVD burner, the technicians tested the drive's new software by searching the computer's hard drive for video files to play back. (Amusingly, the court refers to "codecs"--video compression and decompression software--as "code X.")

When searching the Windows XP computer for some sample video files, a technician named Stephen Richert allegedly spotted files that "appeared to be pornographic in nature" based on their names. Richert clicked on one that had listed a male name and an age of 13 or 14 and found a video he believed to contain child pornography.

Then the usual series of events happened: Richert called Wyomissing police, who promptly showed up, seized the computer, and, after Sodomsky returned to pick it up, seized its owner as well.

What makes this case relevant to Police Blotter is the question of what privacy rights govern Sodomsky's computer when he drops it off for an upgrade. If he had an expectation of privacy, then the allegedly incriminating files could be suppressed. If not, they could be used as evidence against him.

The trial court granted Sodomsky's request to suppress the information, but prosecutors appealed.

Making this case tricky for the appeals court is that there's not exactly a clear precedent, leaving the judges to reason through analogy. Is this a no-reasonable-expectation-of-privacy situation such as when a defendant hands illegal drugs to a third party? Or is it closer to tenants or bank customers, who retain some privacy rights under state or federal constitutions?

In the case of Sodomsky, the appeals court noted that he gave Circuit City technicians access to the hard drive and consented to the installation of a DVD drive. The court also noted that the technicians weren't randomly perusing the drive for contraband, but instead were testing its functioning in a "commercially accepted manner."

The appeals court reversed the previous order, allowed the evidence to be introduced, and sent the case back to the trial judge for additional proceedings.

Excerpts from appeals court's opinion:
Appellee implies that the DVD drive should have been tested by inserting and playing a DVD. Nevertheless, as noted, Appellee did not ask how the burner would be tested nor did he place any restrictions regarding the manner of that procedure. As Mr. Richert's testimony indicated, the playing of videos already in the computer was a manner of ensuring that the burner was functioning properly. Once the search for videos was initiated, the list of appellee's videos appeared automatically on the computer screen. The employee testing the burner was free to select any video for testing purposes, as appellee had not restricted access to any files. Therefore, Mr. Richert did not engage in a fishing expedition in this case...

The final factor we utilize is the volitional nature of appellee's actions. In this case, Appellee removed the computer from his home, took the computer to Circuit City, and left it there without either removing the videos containing child pornography or changing the titles of the videos so that they did not appear to have illegal content...Appellee was aware of the child pornography and could have elected to leave the store with the computer rather than risk discovery of the pornographic files.

This scenario also stands in contrast with the landlord case relied upon by the trial court. Although landlords routinely retain the right to inspect their premises upon notice, people still retain a privacy expectation in their home despite its status as rental property. Here, however, we find that under the facts and circumstances presented, appellee knowingly exposed to the public, the Circuit City employees, the contents of his video files. It is clear that Circuit City employees were members of the public; hence, if appellee knowingly exposed the contents of his video files to them, as members of the public, he no longer retained an expectation of privacy in those videos nor could he expect that they would not be distributed to other people, including police.

Our result in this case is consistent with the weight of authority in this area. If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents...

We also conclude that the incriminating nature of the video files was immediately apparent. Appellee suggests that it was unclear whether the videos depicted child pornography because police could not ascertain the age of the naked male, whose face was not revealed, from the portion of the video that they viewed. We disagree....Finally, police had the lawful right to access the videos because, as analyzed extensively above, appellant had abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy in them.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6222794.html





Watching the Watchers: Why Surveillance Is a Two-Way Street

If governments and businesses can keep an eye on us in public spaces, we ought to be able to look back.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Suddenly, cameras are everywhere. As this month's cover story notes, the recent boom in video monitoring—by both the state and businesses—means we're all being watched. It's like something out of George Orwell's 1984. Except that, unlike Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, we can watch back—and plenty of people are doing just that. Which makes a difference.

The widespread installation of recording devices is not all bad: ATM cameras helped prove that Duke students accused of rape couldn't have committed the crime. And we all sympathize with the goals of preventing terrorism and crime, though it is not proven that security cameras accomplish this.

Nonetheless, the trend toward constant surveillance is troubling. And even if the public became concerned enough to pass laws limiting the practice, it's not clear how well those laws would work. Government officials and private companies too often ignore privacy laws. (In a notorious recent case, Hewlett-Packard executives were caught spying on the phone records of reporters covering the company.) Besides, the technology of surveillance is becoming so advanced—biologists are now attaching tiny cameras to crows' tail feathers to observe the birds' tool use in the wild—that in reality there's not much we can do to ensure privacy anyway.

Maybe that doesn't matter. Privacy is a recent phenomenon. For most of human history, people lived in small tribes or villages where everyone knew everyone else's business. Ubiquitous surveillance may be just a case of the past as prologue.

There's a difference, though. In the old days, ordinary people didn't have much privacy, but neither did big shots. By contrast, today's government officials and big corporations often want to watch us, but they don't want to be watched in return. Shopping malls are full of security cameras, but many have signs at the entrance telling customers that no photography or video recording is allowed. Police cars have dashboard cameras, cities and counties are posting red-light and speed-limit cameras, and it seems that the dream of many government officials is to put every public space under 24-hour video watch. But try shooting photos or video of police or other public officials as they go about their business and you might find yourself in wrist restraints.

In recent months such cases have been piling up. Brian Kelly of Carlisle, Pa., was a passenger in his friend's car when the police pulled the vehicle over for speeding. When Kelly began videotaping, he was arrested and charged with violating a state wiretap statute and thrown in jail overnight. Charges were dropped when the district attorney recognized that recording police in public isn't much like wiretapping. In addition, the DA said that the police had no expectation of privacy when they themselves were recording the incident. Michael Gannon, of Nashua, N.H., faced similar charges when he used a front-door security camera to record what he considered to be overly aggressive behavior by a detective. The charges against Gannon were dropped. That's the eventual outcome in most such cases, though sometimes photographs and video are lost in the process.

Of course, it's understandable that police might be skittish. Ever since the Rodney King case, police have known that video images—whether recorded by citizens or by the authorities themselves—can provoke controversy. With video technology spreading so rapidly, such images are coming to light more often. In October 2007, an elite unit of the Chicago Police Department was disbanded after video emerged of its members shaking down barroom customers. A policeman in Puerto Rico is under FBI investigation because video—uploaded to YouTube—apparently shows him executing an unarmed man. And a Baltimore woman recently won a $180,000 false arrest and imprisonment lawsuit based on police videotape evidence that confirmed a different but similarly dressed woman was the one buying drugs.

Supporters of widespread surveillance often argue, "If you're obeying the law, you have nothing to fear." Why shouldn't the same go for police officers? The cases above all involve accusations of extreme misconduct or errors on the part of police. Let's hope those are rare. Far more common, I suspect, are cases where the existence of a video record helps protect honest cops from false charges. The "don't Tase me, bro" case became a YouTube sensation after footage emerged of University of Florida police using a Taser on an obstreperous student. But ultimately that same footage was instrumental in clearing the officers of charges of wrongdoing.

Under the law, citizens have no right not to be photographed in public places. So why should people who make their living on the taxpayers' dime enjoy greater freedom from public scrutiny than the taxpayers themselves? Civil liberties groups have begun supporting the trend toward a video-enabled populace. The Eastern Missouri chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sends out volunteers with cameras, though they have faced police hostility at times.

Over the long haul, such efforts may be superfluous. The widespread availability of digital cameras and video-capable cellphones means that ubiquitous surveillance on the part of the little guys is moving, if anything, even faster than ubiquitous surveillance on the part of the big boys. And distribution tools like YouTube make it easier to get the footage to a large audience.

I think that's a good thing. Today's pervasive surveillance may seem like something out of 1984, but access to technology has become a lot more democratic since Orwell's time. Big Brother had a network of security cameras, but could that oppressive regime have survived a network of cellphones?
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...w/4237005.html





The NSA has the ability to eavesdrop on your communications—landlines, cell phones, e-mails, BlackBerry messages, Internet searches, and more—with ease. What happens when the technology of espionage outstrips the law’s ability to protect ordinary citizens from it?
James Bamford

Big Brother Is Listening

On the first Saturday in April of 2002, the temperature in Washington, D.C., had taken a dive. Tourists were bundled up against the cold, and the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin were fast losing their blossoms to the biting winds. But a few miles to the south, in the Dowden Terrace neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, the chilly weather was not deterring Royce C. Lamberth, a bald and burly Texan, from mowing his lawn. He stopped only when four cars filled with FBI agents suddenly pulled up in front of his house. The agents were there not to arrest him but to request an emergency court hearing to obtain seven top-secret warrants to eavesdrop on Americans.

As the presiding justice of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, Lamberth had become accustomed to holding the secret hearings in his living room. “My wife, Janis … has to go upstairs because she doesn’t have a top-secret clearance,” he noted in a speech to a group of Texas lawyers. “My beloved cocker spaniel, Taffy, however, remains at my side on the assumption that the surveillance targets cannot make her talk. The FBI knows Taffy well. They frequently play with her while I read some of those voluminous tomes at home.” FBI agents will even knock on the judge’s door in the middle of the night. “On the night of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I started the first emergency hearings in my living room at 3:00 a.m.,” recalled Lamberth. “From the outset, the FBI suspected bin Laden, and the surveillances I approved that night and in the ensuing days and weeks all ended up being critical evidence at the trial in New York.

“The FISA court is probably the least-known court in Washington,” added Lamberth, who stepped down from it in 2002, at the end of his seven-year term, “but it has become one of the most important.” Conceived in the aftermath of Watergate, the FISA court traces its origins to the mid-1970s, when the Senate’s Church Committee investigated the intelligence community and the Nixon White House. The panel, chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church, exposed a long pattern of abuse, and its work led to bipartisan legislation aimed at preventing a president from unilaterally directing the National Security Agency or the FBI to spy on American citizens. This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court—made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States—as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The court’s job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright.

Such facts worry Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who worked for the NSA as an intern while in law school in the 1980s. The FISA “courtroom,” hidden away on the top floor of the Justice Department building (because even its location is supposed to be secret), is actually a heavily protected, windowless, bug-proof installation known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. “When I first went into the FISA court as a lowly intern at the NSA, frankly, it started a lifetime of opposition for me to that court,” Turley recently told a group of House Democrats looking into the NSA’s domestic spying. “I was shocked with what I saw. I was convinced that the judge in that SCIF would have signed anything that we put in front of him. And I wasn’t entirely sure that he had actually read what we put in front of him. But I remember going back to my supervisor at NSA and saying, ‘That place scares the daylights out of me.’”

Lamberth bristles at any suggestion that his court routinely did the administration’s bidding. “Those who know me know the chief justice did not put me on this court because I would be a rubber stamp for whatever the executive branch was wanting to do,” he said in his speech. “I ask questions. I get into the nitty-gritty. I know exactly what is going to be done and why. And my questions are answered, in every case, before I approve an application.”

It is true that the court has been getting tougher. From 1979 through 2000, it modified only two out of 13,087 warrant requests. But from the start of the Bush administration, in 2001, the number of modifications increased to 179 out of 5,645 requests. Most of those—173—involved what the court terms “substantive modifications.”

This friction—and especially the requirement that the government show “probable cause” that the American whose communications they are seeking to target is connected in some way to a terrorist group—induced the administration to begin circumventing the court. Concerned about preventing future 9/11-style attacks, President Bush secretly decided in the fall of 2001 that the NSA would no longer be bound by FISA. Although Judge Lamberth was informed of the president’s decision, he was ordered to tell no one about it—not even his clerks or his fellow FISA-court judges.

Why the NSA Might be Listening to YOU

Contrary to popular perception, the NSA does not engage in “wiretapping”; it collects signals intelligence, or “sigint.” In contrast to the image we have from movies and television of an FBI agent placing a listening device on a target’s phone line, the NSA intercepts entire streams of electronic communications containing millions of telephone calls and e-mails. It runs the intercepts through very powerful computers that screen them for particular names, telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and trigger words or phrases. Any communications containing flagged information are forwarded by the computer for further analysis.

The NSA’s task is to listen in on the world outside American shores. During the Cold War, the principal targets were the communications lines used by the Soviet government and military—navy captains calling their ports, fighter pilots getting landing instructions, army commanders out on maneuvers, and diplomats relaying messages to the Kremlin. But now the enemy is one that communicates very little and, when it does, uses the same telecommunications network as everyone else: a complex system of wires, radio signals, and light pulses encircling and crisscrossing the globe like yarn. Picking up just the right thread, and tracing it through the maze of strands, is difficult. Sometimes a thread leads back inside the United States. An internal agency report predicted a few years ago that the NSA’s worldwide sigint operation would demand a “powerful and permanent presence” on the global telecommunications networks that carry “protected American communications.” The prediction has come true, and the NSA now monitors not only purely “foreign” communications but also “international” ones, where one end of the conversation might be in the United States. As a result, the issue at hand since the revelation last December of the NSA’s warrantless spying on American citizens is not the agency’s access to the country’s communications network—it already has access—but whether the NSA must take legal steps in preparing to target the communications of an American citizen.

It used to be that before the NSA could place the name of an American on its watch list, it had to go before a FISA-court judge and show that it had probable cause—that the facts and circumstances were such that a prudent person would think the individual was somehow connected to terrorism—in order to get a warrant. But under the new procedures put into effect by Bush’s 2001 order, warrants do not always have to be obtained, and the critical decision about whether to put an American on a watch list is left to the vague and subjective “reasonable belief” of an NSA shift supervisor. In charge of hundreds of people, the supervisor manages a wide range of sigint specialists, including signals-conversion analysts separating HBO television programs from cell-phone calls, traffic analysts sifting through massive telephone data streams looking for suspicious patterns, cryptanalysts attempting to read e-mail obscured by complex encryption algorithms, voice-language analysts translating the gist of a phone call from Dari into English, and cryptolinguists trying to unscramble a call on a secure telephone. Bypassing the FISA court has meant that the number of Americans targeted by the NSA has increased since 2001 from perhaps a dozen per year to as many as 5,000 over the last four years, knowledgeable sources told The Washington Post in February. If telephone records indicate that one of the NSA’s targets regularly dials a given telephone number, that number and any names associated with it are added to the watch lists and the communications on that line are screened by computer. Names and information on the watch lists are shared with the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign intelligence services. Once a person’s name is in the files, even if nothing incriminating ever turns up, it will likely remain there forever. There is no way to request removal, because there is no way to confirm that a name is on the list.

In December of 1997, in a small factory outside the southern French city of Toulouse, a salesman got caught in the NSA’s electronic web. Agents working for the NSA’s British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, learned of a letter of credit, valued at more than $1.1 million, issued by Iran’s defense ministry to the French company Microturbo. According to NSA documents, both the NSA and the GCHQ concluded that Iran was attempting to secretly buy from Microturbo an engine for the embargoed C-802 anti-ship missile. Faxes zapping back and forth between Toulouse and Tehran were intercepted by the GCHQ, which sent them on not just to the NSA but also to the Canadian and Australian sigint agencies, as well as to Britain’s MI6. The NSA then sent the reports on the salesman making the Iranian deal to a number of CIA stations around the world, including those in Paris and Bonn, and to the U.S. Commerce Department and the Customs Service. Probably several hundred people in at least four countries were reading the company’s communications. The question, however, remained: Was Microturbo shipping a missile engine to Iran? In the end, at the insistence of the U.S. government, the French conducted a surprise inspection just before the ship carrying the mysterious crate was set to sail for Iran. Inside were legal generators, not illegal missile engines.

Such events are central to the current debate involving the potential harm caused by the NSA’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping operation. Even though the salesman did nothing wrong, his name made its way into the computers and onto the watch lists of intelligence, customs, and other secret and law-enforcement organizations around the world. Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe the next time he tries to enter the United States or Britain he will be denied, without explanation. Maybe he will be arrested. As the domestic eavesdropping program continues to grow, such uncertainties may plague innocent Americans whose names are being run through the supercomputers even though the NSA has not met the established legal standard for a search warrant. It is only when such citizens are turned down while applying for a job with the federal government—or refused when seeking a Small Business Administration loan, or turned back by British customs agents when flying to London on vacation, or even placed on a “no-fly” list—that they will realize that something is very wrong. But they will never learn why.

More than seventy-five years ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis envisioned a day when technology would overtake the law. He wrote:

Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government … The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home … Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?

Brandeis went on to answer his own question, quoting from an earlier Supreme Court decision, Boyd v. U.S. (1886): “It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging of his drawers that constitutes the essence of the offence; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty, and private property.”

Eavesdropping in the Digital Age

Today, the NSA’s capability to eavesdrop is far beyond anything ever dreamed of by Justice Brandeis. With the digital revolution came an explosion in eavesdropping technology; the NSA today has the ability to scan tens of millions of electronic communications—e-mails, faxes, instant messages, Web searches, and phone calls—every hour. General Michael Hayden, director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and now principal deputy director of national intelligence, noted in 2002 that during the 1990s, e-communications “surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million—an increase of nearly 50 times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million—an increase of over 90 times. Half as many land lines were laid in the last six years of the 1990s as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990s, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion. This year, the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in international calls alone.”

Intercepting communications carried by satellite is fairly simple for the NSA. The key conduits are the thirty Intelsat satellites that ring the Earth, 22,300 miles above the equator. Many communications from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the eastern half of the United States, for example, are first uplinked to an Intelsat satellite and then downlinked to AT&T’s ground station in Etam, West Virginia. From there, phone calls, e-mails, and other communications travel on to various parts of the country. To listen in on that rich stream of information, the NSA built a listening post fifty miles away, near Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Consisting of a group of very large parabolic dishes, hidden in a heavily forested valley and surrounded by tall hills, the post can easily intercept the millions of calls and messages flowing every hour into the Etam station. On the West Coast, high on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Okanogan River, near Brewster, Washington, is the major commercial downlink for communications to and from Asia and the Pacific. Consisting of forty parabolic dishes, it is reportedly the largest satellite antenna farm in the Western Hemisphere. A hundred miles to the south, collecting every whisper, is the NSA’s western listening post, hidden away on a 324,000-acre Army base in Yakima, Washington. The NSA posts collect the international traffic beamed down from the Intelsat satellites over the Atlantic and Pacific. But each also has a number of dishes that appear to be directed at domestic telecommunications satellites.

Until recently, most international telecommunications flowing into and out of the United States traveled by satellite. But faster, more reliable undersea fiber-optic cables have taken the lead, and the NSA has adapted. The agency taps into the cables that don’t reach our shores by using specially designed submarines, such as the USS Jimmy Carter, to attach a complex “bug” to the cable itself. This is difficult, however, and undersea taps are short-lived because the batteries last only a limited time. The fiber-optic transmission cables that enter the United States from Europe and Asia can be tapped more easily at the landing stations where they come ashore. With the acquiescence of the telecommunications companies, it is possible for the NSA to attach monitoring equipment inside the landing station and then run a buried encrypted fiber-optic “backhaul” line to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the river of data can be analyzed by supercomputers in near real time.

Tapping into the fiber-optic network that carries the nation’s Internet communications is even easier, as much of the information transits through just a few “switches” (similar to the satellite downlinks). Among the busiest are MAE East (Metropolitan Area Ethernet), in Vienna, Virginia, and MAE West, in San Jose, California, both owned by Verizon. By accessing the switch, the NSA can see who’s e-mailing with whom over the Internet cables and can copy entire messages. Last September, the Federal Communications Commission further opened the door for the agency. The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required telephone companies to rewire their networks to provide the government with secret access. The FCC has now extended the act to cover “any type of broadband Internet access service” and the new Internet phone services—and ordered company officials never to discuss any aspect of the program.

The NSA won’t divulge how many people it employs, but it is likely that more than 38,000 worldwide now work for the agency. Most of them are at Fort Meade. Nicknamed Crypto City, hidden from public view, and located halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the NSA’s own company town comprises more than fifty buildings—offices, warehouses, factories, laboratories, and a few barracks. Tens of thousands of people work there in absolute secrecy, and most never tell their spouses exactly what they do. Crypto City also houses the nation’s largest collection of powerful computers, advanced mathematicians, and skilled language experts.

The NSA maintains a very close and very confidential relationship with key executives in the telecommunications industry through their membership on the NSA’s advisory board. Created shortly after the agency’s formation, the board was intended to pull together a panel of science wizards from universities, corporate research labs, and think tanks to advise the agency. They keep the agency abreast of the industry’s plans and give NSA engineers a critical head start in finding ways to penetrate technologies still in the development phase.

One of the NSA’s strategies is to hire people away from the companies that make the critical components for telecommunications systems. Although it’s sometimes difficult for the agency to keep up with the tech sector’s pay scale, for many people the chance to deal with the ultimate in cutting-edge technology and aid national security makes working for the NSA irresistible. With the help of such workers, the agency reverse-engineers communication system components. For example, among the most crucial pieces of the Internet infrastructure are routers made by Cisco. “Virtually all Internet traffic,” says one of the company’s television ads, “travels across the systems of one company: Cisco Systems.” For the NSA, this is an opportunity. In 1999, Terry Thompson, then the NSA deputy director for services, said, “[Y]ou can see down the road two or three or five years and say, ‘Well, I only need this person to do reverse-engineering on Cisco routers (that’s a good example) for about three or five years, because I see Cisco going away as a key manufacturer for routers and so I don’t need that expertise. But I really need somebody today and for the next couple of years who knows Cisco routers inside and out and can help me understand how they’re being used in target networks.’”

The Temptations of Secrecy

The National Security Agency was born in absolute secrecy. Unlike the CIA, which was created publicly by a congressional act, the NSA was brought to life by a top-secret memorandum signed by President Truman in 1952, consolidating the country’s various military sigint operations into a single agency. Even its name was secret, and only a few members of Congress were informed of its existence—and they received no information about some of its most important activities. Such secrecy has lent itself to abuse.

During the Vietnam War, for instance, the agency was heavily involved in spying on the domestic opposition to the government. Many of the Americans on the watch lists of that era were there solely for having protested against the war. Among the names in the NSA’s supercomputers were those of the folk singer Joan Baez, the pediatrician Benjamin Spock, the actress Jane Fonda, the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and the newspaper editor David Kahn, whose standard history of cryptology, The Codebreakers, contained information the NSA viewed as classified. Even so much as writing about the NSA could land a person a place on a watch list. The NSA, on behalf of the FBI, was also targeting religious groups. “When J. Edgar Hoover gives you a requirement for complete surveillance of all Quakers in the United States,” recalled Frank Raven, a former senior NSA official, “and when Richard M. Nixon is a Quaker and he’s the president of the United States, it gets pretty funny.”

Of course, such abuses are hardly the exclusive province of the NSA; history has repeatedly shown that simply having the ability to eavesdrop brings with it the temptation to use that ability—whatever the legal barriers against that use may be. For instance, during World War I, the government read and censored thousands of telegrams—the e-mail of the day—sent hourly by telegraph companies. Though the end of the war brought with it a reversion to the Radio Act of 1912, which guaranteed the secrecy of communications, the State and War Departments nevertheless joined together in May of 1919 to create America’s first civilian eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, nicknamed the Black Chamber. By arrangement, messengers visited the telegraph companies each morning and took bundles of hard-copy telegrams to the agency’s offices across town. These copies were returned before the close of business that day.

A similar tale followed the end of World War II. In August of 1945, President Truman ordered an end to censorship. That left the Signal Security Agency (the military successor to the Black Chamber, which was shut down in 1929) without its raw intelligence—the telegrams provided by the telegraph companies. The director of the SSA sought access to cable traffic through a secret arrangement with the heads of the three major telegraph companies. The companies agreed to turn all telegrams over to the SSA, under a plan code-named Operation Shamrock. It ran until the government’s domestic spying programs were publicly revealed, in the mid-1970s. The discovery of such abuses in the wake of the Watergate scandal led Congress to create select committees to conduct extensive investigations into the government’s domestic spying programs: their origin, extent, and effect on the public. The shocking findings turned up by the Church Committee finally led to the formation of permanent Senate and House intelligence committees, whose primary responsibility was to protect the public from future privacy abuses. They were to be the FISA court’s partner in providing checks and balances to the ever-expanding U.S. intelligence agencies. But it remains very much an open question whether these checks are up to the task at hand.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Today, the NSA has access to more information than ever before. People express their most intimate thoughts in e-mails, send their tax returns over the Internet, satisfy their curiosity and desires with Google searches, let their hair down in chat rooms, discuss every event over cell phones, make appointments with their BlackBerrys, and do business by computer in WiFi hot spots.

NSA personnel, the customs inspectors of the information superhighway, have the ultimate goal of intercepting and reviewing every syllable and murmur zapping into, out of, or through the United States. They are close to achieving it. More than a dozen years ago, an NSA director gave an indication of the agency’s capability. “Just one intelligence-collection system,” said Admiral William O. Studeman, referring to a listening post such as Sugar Grove, “can generate a million inputs per half hour.” Today, with the secret cooperation of much of the telecommunications industry, massive dishes vacuuming the airwaves, and electronic “packet sniffers,” software that monitors network traffic, diverting e-mail and other data from fiber-optic cables, the NSA’s hourly take is in the tens of millions of communications. One transatlantic fiber-optic cable alone has the capacity to handle close to 10 million simultaneous calls. While most communications flow through the NSA’s electronic net unheard and unread, those messages associated with persons on the agency’s watch lists—whether guilty or innocent—get kicked out for review.

As history has shown, the availability of such vast amounts of information is a temptation for an intelligence agency. The criteria for compiling watch lists and collecting information may be very strict at the beginning of such a program, but the reality—in a sort of bureaucratic law of expansion—is that it will draw in more and more people whose only offense was knowing the wrong person or protesting the wrong war.

Moreover, as Internet and wireless communications have grown exponentially, users have seen a corresponding decrease in the protections provided by the two institutions set up to shield the public from eavesdroppers. The first, the FISA court, has simply been shunted aside by the executive branch. The second, the congressional intelligence committees, have quite surprisingly abdicated any role. Created to be the watchdogs over the intelligence community, the committees have instead become its most enthusiastic cheerleaders. Rather than fighting for the public’s privacy rights, they are constantly battling for more money and more freedom for the spy agencies.

Last November, just a month before The New York Times broke the story of the NSA’s domestic spying, the American Bar Association publicly expressed concern over Congress’s oversight of FISA searches. “The ABA is concerned that there is inadequate congressional oversight of government investigations undertaken pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the group stated, “to assure that such investigations do not violate the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.” And while the administration did brief members of Congress on the decision to bypass FISA, the briefings were limited to a “Gang of Eight”—the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate and the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees. None of the lawmakers insisted that the decision be debated by the joint committees, even though such hearings are closed.

Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who led the first probe into the National Security Agency, warned in 1975 that the agency’s capabilities could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it is done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capacity of this technology.

It was those fears that caused Congress to enact the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act three years later. “I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,” Senator Church said. “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/nsa-surveillance.





Surveillance Society: New High-Tech Cameras Are Watching You

In the era of computer-controlled surveillance, your every move could be captured by cameras, whether you're shopping in the grocery store or driving on the freeway. Proponents say it will keep us safe, but at what cost?
James Vlahos

The ferry arrived, the gangway went down and 7-year-old Emma Powell rushed toward the Statue of Liberty. She climbed onto the grass around the star-shaped foundation. She put on a green foam crown with seven protruding rays. Turning so that her body was oriented just like Lady Liberty's, Emma extended her right arm skyward with an imaginary torch. I snapped a picture. Then I took my niece's hand, and we went off to buy some pretzels.

Other people were taking pictures, too, and not just the other tourists—Liberty Island, name notwithstanding, is one of the most heavily surveilled places in America. Dozens of cameras record hundreds of hours of video daily, a volume that strains the monitoring capability of guards. The National Park Service has enlisted extra help, and as Emma and I strolled around, we weren't just being watched by people. We were being watched by machines.

Liberty Island's video cameras all feed into a computer system. The park doesn't disclose details, but fully equipped, the system is capable of running software that analyzes the imagery and automatically alerts human overseers to any suspicious events. The software can spot when somebody abandons a bag or backpack. It has the ability to discern between ferryboats, which are allowed to approach the island, and private vessels, which are not. And it can count bodies, detecting if somebody is trying to stay on the island after closing, or assessing when people are grouped too tightly together, which might indicate a fight or gang activity. "A camera with artificial intelligence can be there 24/7, doesn't need a bathroom break, doesn't need a lunch break and doesn't go on vacation," says Ian Ehrenberg, former vice president of Nice Systems, the program's developer.

Most Americans would probably welcome such technology at what clearly is a marquee terrorist target. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in July 2007 found that 71 percent of Americans favor increased video surveillance. What people may not realize, however, is that advanced monitoring systems such as the one at the Statue of Liberty are proliferating around the country. High-profile national security efforts make the news—wiretapping phone conversations, Internet monitoring—but state-of-the-art surveillance is increasingly being used in more every-day settings. By local police and businesses. In banks, schools and stores. There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.

We have arrived at a unique moment in the history of surveillance. The price of both megapixels and gigabytes has plummeted, making it possible to collect a previously unimaginable quantity and quality of data. Advances in processing power and software, meanwhile, are beginning to allow computers to surmount the greatest limitation of traditional surveillance—the ability of eyeballs to effectively observe the activity on dozens of video screens simultaneously. Computers can't do all the work by themselves, but they can expand the capabilities of humans exponentially.

Security expert Bruce Schneier says that it is naive to think that we can stop these technological advances, especially as they become more affordable and are hard-wired into everyday businesses. (I know of a local pizzeria that warns customers with a posted sign: "Stop stealing the spice shakers! We know who you are, we have 24-hour surveillance!") But it is also reckless to let the advances proceed without a discussion of safeguards against privacy abuses. "Society is fundamentally changing and we aren't having a conversation about it," Schneier says. "We are entering the era of wholesale surveillance."

Earlier this year, on a hot summer afternoon, I left my Brooklyn apartment to do some shoplifting.

I cruised the aisles of the neighborhood grocery store, a Pathmark, tossing items into my cart like a normal shopper would—Frosted Mini-Wheats, Pledge Wipes, a bag of carrots. Then I put them on the belt at checkout. My secret was on the lower level of the cart: a 12-pack of beer, concealed and undetectable. Or so I thought. Midway through checkout the cashier addressed me, no malice in her voice, but no doubt either. "Do you want to ring up that beer?"

My heist had been condoned by Pedro Ramos, Pathmark's vice president of loss prevention, though he didn't know precisely when or where I was going to attempt it. The beer was identified by an object-recognition scanner at ankle level—a LaneHawk, manufactured by Evolution Robotics—which prompted the cashier's question. Overhead, a camera recorded the incident and an alert was triggered in Ramos's office miles away on Staten Island. He immediately pulled up digital video and later relayed what he saw. "You concealed a 12-pack of Coronas on the bottom of the cart by strategically placing newspaper circulars so as to obstruct the view of the cashier."

Busted.

Pathmark uses StoreVision, a powerful video analytic and data-mining system. There are as many as 120 cameras in some stores, and employees with high-level security clearances can log on via the Web and see what any one of them is recording in real time. An executive on vacation in Brussels could spy on the frozen-food aisle in Brooklyn.

In 2006 theft and fraud cost American stores $41.6 billion, an all-time high. Employee theft accounted for nearly half of the total (shoplifting was only a third), so much of the surveillance aims to catch in-house crooks. If the cashier had given me the beer for free—employees often work with an outside accomplice—the system would know by automatically comparing what the video recorded with what the register logged. The technologies employed by Pathmark don't stop crime but they make a dent; weekly losses are reduced by an average of 15 percent.

Pathmark archives every transaction of every customer, and the grocery chain is hardly alone. Amazon knows what you read; Netflix, your taste in movies. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo retain your queries for months, and can identify searches by IP address—sometimes by individual computer. Many corporations log your every transaction with a stated goal of reducing fraud and improving marketing efforts. Until fairly recently it was impractical to retain all this data. But now the low cost of digital storage—you can get a terabyte hard drive for less than $350—makes nearly limitless archiving possible.

So what's the problem? "The concern is that information collected for one purpose is used for something entirely different down the road," says Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

This may sound like a privacy wonk's paranoia. But examples abound. Take E-ZPass. Drivers signed up for the system to speed up toll collection. But 11 states now supply E-ZPass records—when and where a toll was paid, and by whom—in response to court orders in criminal cases. Seven of those states provide information in civil cases such as divorce, proving, for instance, that a husband who claimed he was at a meeting in Pennsylvania was actually heading to his lover's house in New Jersey. (New York divorce lawyer Jacalyn Barnett has called E-ZPass the "easy way to show you took the offramp to adultery.")

On a case-by-case basis, the collection of surveillance footage and customer data is usually justifiable and benign. But the totality of information being amassed combined with the relatively fluid flow of that data can be troubling. Corporations often share what they know about customers with government agencies and vice versa. AT&T, for example, is being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, for allowing the National Security Agency almost unlimited access to monitor customers' e-mails, phone calls and Internet browsing activity.

"We are heading toward a total surveillance society in which your every move, your every transaction, is duly registered and recorded by some computer," says Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the late 18th century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up a new type of prison: the panopticon. It would be built so that guards could see all of the prisoners at all times without their knowing they were being watched, creating "the sentiment of an invisible omniscience," Bentham wrote. America is starting to resemble a giant panopticon, according to surveillance critics like Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. "Were Bentham alive today, he probably would be the most sought-after consultant on the planet," he recently wrote in a Washington Times op-ed.

One of the most popular new technologies in law enforcement is the license-plate reader, or LPR. The leading manufacturer is Remington-Elsag, based in Madison, N.C. Its Mobile Plate Hunter 900 consists of cameras mounted on the outside of a squad car and connected to a computer database in the vehicle. The plate hunter employs optical-character-recognition technology originally developed for high-speed mail sorting. LPRs automate the process of "running a plate" to check if a vehicle is stolen or if the driver has any outstanding warrants. The sensors work whether the police car is parked or doing 75 mph. An officer working the old-fashioned way might check a couple dozen plates a shift. The LPR can check 10,000.

New York's Long Beach Police Department is one of more than 200 agencies around the country that use LPRs, and I rode in a squad car with Sgt. Bill Dodge to see the technology at work. A computer screen mounted in front of the glovebox flashed black-and-white images of every photographed plate; low alarms, like the sounds of your character dying in an '80s video game, droned for the problem cars. Over the course of a couple of hours we didn't net any car thieves or kidnappers, but Dodge's LPR identified dozens of cars with suspended or revoked registrations. He said that the system doesn't violate anyone's privacy—"there's no magic technology that lets it see inside a garage"—and praised its fairness. "It doesn't matter if you're black, white, old, young, a man or a woman, the system cannot discriminate. It looks at everyone and everything."

In July, New York City officials unveiled the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, modeled after London's "Ring of Steel," which will include license-plate readers, automated roadblocks and 3000 new surveillance cameras—adding to the 250 already in place. Chicago, meanwhile, which has 560 anti-crime cameras deployed on city streets, revealed plans in September to add a sophisticated IBM video analytic system that would automatically detect abandoned bags, suspicious behaviors (such as a vehicle repeatedly circling the Sears Tower) and vehicles sought by the police. Expanded surveillance is perhaps to be expected for these high-profile cities, but they're hardly alone. Richmond, Calif.; Spokane, Wash.; and Greenville, N.C., are among the cities that have recently announced plans to add electronic spying eyes. According to iSuppli, a market research firm, the global surveillance-camera business is expected to grow from $4.9 billion in 2006 to $9 billion in 2011.

The ability of cameras to deter criminals is unproven, but their value in helping to solve crimes is not. Recall how videos led to several arrests in the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings. The problem with surveillance video is that there's simply too much of it. "It's impossible for mere mortals with eyeballs and brains to process all the information we're gathering," says Stephen Russell, the chief executive of 3VR, a company that makes video analytic software.

An investigator looking for a particular piece of video is like a researcher working in a library with a jumbled card catalog—or in books with no tables of contents. The solution of 3VR and other similar companies is software that automatically analyzes and tags video contents, from the colors and locations of cars to the characteristics of individual faces that pass before the lens. The goal is to allow rapid digital search; instead of functioning like a shoddy library, 3VR hopes to be "the Google of surveillance video," Russell says. "It took 1000 [British agents] six weeks to review all the video after July 7. Had 3VRs been in place, it might have taken a dozen or so agents a weekend," he claims.

I recently spent a night at Chicago's Talbott Hotel, a luxurious small retreat where the staff addresses you by name and you have to clear a dozen pillows from the cushy king-size bed before lying down. The Talbott is surveilled by 70 cameras, which cover every public area of the hotel and feed into a 3VR system.

Troy Strand, general manager of the hotel, showed me a computer screen divided into 16 panes with different camera views. He looked up my check-in time and seconds later retrieved video of my arrival the previous day. There I was, towing my carry-on toward room 1504.

Strand found a few other shots showing me, then instructed the software to begin facial analysis. The system assessed the balance of light and dark areas of skin tone and hair and gauged the distance between my eyes, nose and mouth. Strand instructed the system to search for all recorded videos showing my face, and the computer retrieved several dozen faces, none of which was mine. There was a woman and a black man. But Strand went through a few pages of results, and I started to show up. When he clicked on any image, an associated video of me played—crossing the lobby to go to breakfast, chatting with the front-desk clerk.

So-called "facial profiling" has been surveillance's next big thing for nearly a decade, and it is only now showing tentative signs of feasibility. It's easy to see why people are seduced by the promise of this technology. Twelve bank companies employ 3VR systems at numerous locations, which build a facial template for every single person that enters any branch. If somebody cashes a check that is later determined to be stolen, the person's face can be flagged in the system, and the next time the con artist comes in, the system is supposed to alert the tellers.

For Strand, the security system's fancier features are just a bonus. The cameras are in plain sight, so he believes that would-be criminals and misbehaving employees are deterred. "You can't have security people on every floor monitoring every angle of the building," he says.

There's a man in Salt Lake City who knows what I did last summer. Specifically, he knows what I did on Aug. 24, 2007. He knows that I checked my EarthLink e-mail at 1:25 pm, and then blew a half an hour on ESPN's Web site. He also knows that my wife, Anne, wanted new shoes, from Hush Puppies or DSW, and that she synced her electronic planner—"she has quite a busy schedule," the man noted—and downloaded some podcasts. We both printed out passes for free weeklong trials at 24 Hour Fitness, but instead of working out, apparently spent the evening watching a pay-per-view movie. It was Bridge to Terabithia or Zodiac, he thinks.

The man's name is Joe Wilkinson, and he works for Raytheon Oakley Systems. The company specializes in "insider risk management," which means dealing with the problem of employees who, whether through innocent accident or nefarious plot, do things they really shouldn't be doing at work. Oakley's software, developed for the U.S. government and now used by ten Fortune 100 companies, monitors computer use remotely and invisibly. Wilkinson had agreed to run a surveillance trial with me as the subject, and after accessing my computer via the Web, he installed an "agent" that regularly reported my activities back to him.

The modern desktop machine is a multimedia distraction monster: friend, lover, shopping mall, stereo, television, movie theater and adult video store are mere mouse clicks away. Raytheon Oakley's software caught me wasting valuable work time checking personal e-mails and reading digital camera reviews online. Companies are also concerned about hostile work environments caused by employees openly surfing porn in the office—conse-quently, my 10:14 am visit to a risqué site was duly noted. Employees also leak trade secrets. (Consider the case of DuPont chemist Gary Min, who, after accepting a job with a competitor in 2005, raided DuPont's electronic library for $400 million worth of technical documents. He was caught by the FBI last year.) If I had downloaded any large engineering drawings onto a removable hard drive, Oakley's software would have alerted Wilkinson. And employees bad-mouth the boss. I wrote an e-mail to Anne that mentioned my editor at Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene. Wilkinson rigged the software to flag anything with Derene's name, and alarm bells rang. Sorry, Glenn.

Surveillance of this sort is common. A 2005 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found that 36 percent of companies monitor workers on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis; 55 percent review e-mail messages, and 76 percent monitor Web sites visited. "Total Behavioral Visibility" is Raytheon Oakley's motto. The vice president of marketing, Tom Bennett, knows that some people fear workplace monitoring. But the technology has many positive aspects. "We are not Big Brother," he insists.

Employees are sometimes lazy or dishonest, but often they're simply careless. A parent who has to leave the office at midday to care for a sick child might copy sensitive company information onto a USB drive so that he can work at home. An account manager might carelessly send customer credit card numbers over an unsecured wireless network where they can be stolen. Bennett says that his company's software helps companies understand and improve how workers use their computers. The Oakley monitoring application works like a TiVo, allowing an instant video replay: where you pointed the mouse, when you clicked, what you wrote. This can catch the guilty but also exonerate the innocent, because the replay puts your actions in context.

The debate over surveillance pits the tangible benefits of saving lives and dollars against the abstract ones of preserving privacy and freedom. To many people, the promise of increased security is worth the exchange. History shows that new technologies, once developed, are seldom abandoned, and the computer vision systems being adopted today are transforming America from a society that spies upon a small number of suspicious individuals to one that monitors everybody. The question arises: Do people exercise their perfectly legal freedoms as freely when they know they're being watched? As the ACLU's Stanley argues, "You need space in your life to live beyond the gaze of society."

Surveillance has become pervasive. It is also more enduring. As companies develop powerful archiving and search tools, your life will be accessible for years to come in rich multimedia records. The information about you may be collected for reasonable purposes—but as its life span increases, so too does the chance that it may fall into unscrupulous hands.

Several months after I stayed at the Talbott Hotel, Derene, my editor, called Troy Strand to ask if he still had the security camera images of me at the hotel. He did. My niece Emma's Statue of Liberty shots are probably stored on a computer, as are the records of all my Pathmark purchases. Ramos could query my shopping trip of, say, Jan. 13, 2005, and replay video keyed precisely to any part of the register tape—from the fifth item scanned, pork chops, to the tenth, broccoli. That's innocuous and even humorous on the surface, but the more I thought about the store's power, the more it disturbed me.

"I would never do that," Ramos assured me. "But I could."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...w/4236865.html





Spy Planes to Recharge by Clinging to Power Lines
Paul Marks

The next time you see something flapping in the breeze on an overhead power line, squint a little harder. It may not be a plastic bag or the remnants of a party balloon, but a tiny spy plane stealing power from the line to recharge its batteries.

The idea comes from the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) in Dayton, Ohio, US, which wants to operate extended surveillance missions using remote-controlled planes with a wingspan of about a metre, but has been struggling to find a way to refuel to extend the plane's limited flight duration.

So the AFRL is developing an electric motor-powered micro air vehicle (MAV) that can "harvest" energy when needed by attaching itself to a power line. It could even temporarily change its shape to look more like innocuous piece of trash hanging from the cable.
Hanging about

AFRL's initial aim is to work out how to make a MAV flying at 74 kilometres per hour latch onto a power line without destroying itself or the line.

In addition, so as not to arouse suspicion, AFRL says the spy plane will need to collapse its wings and hang limply on the cable like a piece of wind-blown detritus. Much of the "morphing" technology to perform this has already been developed by DARPA, the Pentagon's research division. Technologies developed in that program include carbon composite "sliding skins", which allow fuselages to change shape, and telescopic wings that allow lift to be boosted in seconds by boosting a wing's surface area.

Challenges abound, though. Zac Richardson, a power-line engineer with National Grid in the UK, warns that if the MAV contacts an 11-kilovolt local power line, it could short circuit two conductors, causing an automatic disconnection of the very power the plane seeks.

And, on a 400 kilovolt inter-city power line, it risks discharging sparks. "It will hang there fizzing and banging and giving its position away anyway," says Richardson.

"Even kites falling across power lines cause breakdowns," adds Ian Fells, an expert in electricity transmission based in Newcastle, UK. "It's an utterly bizarre idea to try to land a plane on one."

Regardless of the challenges faced, AFRL plans test flights in 2008.
http://technology.newscientist.com/a...wer-lines.html





The Terror Train Bears Down
David Neiwert

Last week I tried to explain why Jane Harman's "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" is a profoundly bad idea, one likely to skew and misdirect the fight against genuine terrorism into an ideological witchhunt that poisons our constitutional rights.

What I neglected to mention, unfortunately, is that this Orwellian bill is very much on the verge of becoming reality. It has already passed the House by a 400-6 vote, and now sits before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs -- chaired by that "Independent Democrat" Joe Lieberman.

I think we can all see where this is heading. Joe loves him those Muslim-bashers, and this bill is tailor-made for them.

Amy Goodman raised the red flag about this bill the other day, and a point raised on her program by Kamau Franklin of the Center for Constitutional Rights really got to the heart of the problem with this bill:

KAMAU FRANKLIN: I just wanted to add to the Rand comment, particularly with Brian Michael Jenkins, supposed terrorist expert who’s mainly known according to Rand as someone who helped the United States in counter-insurgency measures in Vietnam, which is one of his claims to fame. In addition to that, he wrote a book and in his own book, I just want to quote that says “in their international campaign, the Jihadist will seek common ground with leftist, anti-American and anti-globalization forces who will in turn seek radical Islam comrades against a mutual foe.” So I think what Jessica’s talking about, is that, the breadth of it is not focused in on supposed terrorists who are threatening the United States, but folks who have real concerns about where this country is heading, folks who express dissent in various different ways including demonstrations and marches. These are the folks who this bill potentially good target.

This is also a powerful indicator of just how open to abuse this legislation will be. The reality of the radical Islam, both in ideology and practice, is such that it's clear that any alliances it forms in this are almost certainly going to be on the side of the extreme American right and not its left.

It's more than just the common ground of radical fundamentalism they share. It's also manifested in what has actually occurred: David Duke and other far-right figures appearing at Holocaust-denial conferences sponsored by radical Islamic fundamentalists; outreach efforts among the far right, such as the Aryan Nations' Ministry of Islamic Liaison; the ongoing theoretical work of David Myatt, the British ex-neo-Nazi who converted to Islam and frequently expounds on building bridges between the two factions; the ongoing shared rhetoric of hate.

George Michael's book The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extremist Right does a thorough job of examining and documenting this reality. Meanwhile, the evidence of any similar convergence of militant Islam and the antiglobalist left is very thin if not nonexistent.

But under the antiterrorism regime created by Harman's bill, all you need is for an "expert" (even if he has an ax to grind) to assert on the thinnest evidence that a convergence of radical Islam and antiglobalist, or just as likely, antiwar organizations exists, and the witchhunt will descend.

We should be at least alarmed if not outraged over the bill's passage, and yet it has hardly raised a blip on our political radars. As Goodman observes:

AMY GOODMAN: Jessica Lee, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act was passed in the house 400-6. That is a very big margin.

JESSICA LEE: Correct. It was actually passed under what is called the “Suspension of the Rules”, which is a provision the House uses to pass bills very quickly and these are usually bills deemed uncontroversial and do not need more debate. So we saw a quick vote. Six people voted against. One was presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. He was unavailable for comment unfortunately. So what we’re seeing not only the Republican congress giving the Bush administration swath of powers to confront the war on terrorism, but we are also seeing the democratically-led congress also extending these powers.

At this point, the bill certainly looks to be a fait accompli. Perhaps, somewhere in the Senate, someone will find the courage to stand up and question what this bill does and where it is taking us.

It would take an act of unusual courage this year, because you can be certain anyone doing so would be accused of being "soft on terrorism" -- and nothing sends politicians on both sides of the aisle scurrying faster than those dread words. And the Democrats voters put in power in 2006 have not exactly been profiles in courage so far, Chris Dodd notwithstanding.

Here are the Democratic members of the Senate Homeland Security committee:

Carl Levin, MI

Daniel Akaka, HI

Thomas Carper, DE

Mark Pryor, AR

Mary Landrieu, LA

Barack Obama, IL

Claire McCaskill, MO

Jon Tester, MT

Not exactly a promising list, I know. But it is what it is.

This bill is a runaway train loaded with nitroglycerin, and the wreckage it creates may be far worse than anyone anticipates. At this point, we may just want to prepare ourselves for the shock.
http://firedoglake.com/2007/12/20/th...in-bears-down/





FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics

$1 Billion Project to Include Images of Irises and Faces
Ellen Nakashima

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

The use of biometric data is increasing throughout the government. For the past two years, the Defense Department has been storing in a database images of fingerprints, irises and faces of more than 1.5 million Iraqi and Afghan detainees, Iraqi citizens and foreigners who need access to U.S. military bases. The Pentagon also collects DNA samples from some Iraqi detainees, which are stored separately.

The Department of Homeland Security has been using iris scans at some airports to verify the identity of travelers who have passed background checks and who want to move through lines quickly. The department is also looking to apply iris- and face-recognition techniques to other programs. The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person's prints.

"It's going to be an essential component of tracking," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's enabling the Always On Surveillance Society."

If successful, the system planned by the FBI, called Next Generation Identification, will collect a wide variety of biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes.

In an underground facility the size of two football fields, a request reaches an FBI server every second from somewhere in the United States or Canada, comparing a set of digital fingerprints against the FBI's database of 55 million sets of electronic fingerprints. A possible match is made -- or ruled out--as many as 100,000 times a day.

Soon, the server at CJIS headquarters will also compare palm prints and, eventually, iris images and face-shape data such as the shape of an earlobe. If all goes as planned, a police officer making a traffic stop or a border agent at an airport could run a 10-fingerprint check on a suspect and within seconds know if the person is on a database of the most wanted criminals and terrorists. An analyst could take palm prints lifted from a crime scene and run them against the expanded database. Intelligence agents could exchange biometric information worldwide.

More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a "rap-back" service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees' fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

Advocates say bringing together information from a wide variety of sources and making it available to multiple agencies increases the chances to catch criminals. The Pentagon has already matched several Iraqi suspects against the FBI's criminal fingerprint database. The FBI intends to make both criminal and civilian data available to authorized users, officials said. There are 900,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers who can query the fingerprint database today, they said.

The FBI's biometric database, which includes criminal history records, communicates with the Terrorist Screening Center's database of suspects and the National Crime Information Center database, which is the FBI's master criminal database of felons, fugitives and terrorism suspects.

The FBI is building its system according to standards shared by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.

Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.

Think of a Navy ship approaching a foreign vessel, said Bojan Cukic, CITeR's co-director. "It would help to know before you go on board whether the people on that ship that you can image from a distance, whether they are foreign warfighters, and run them against a database of known or suspected terrorists," he said.

Skeptics say that such projects are proceeding before there is evidence that they reliably match suspects against a huge database.

In the world's first large-scale, scientific study on how well face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The study found that the technology was able to match travelers' faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.

To achieve those rates, the German police agency said it would tolerate a false positive rate of 0.1 percent, or the erroneous identification of 23 people a day. In real life, those 23 people would be subjected to further screening measures, the report said.

Accuracy improves as techniques are combined, said Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's biometric services section chief. The Next Generation database is intended to "fuse" fingerprint, face, iris and palm matching capabilities by 2013, she said.

To safeguard privacy, audit trails are kept on everyone who has access to a record in the fingerprint database, Del Greco said. People may request copies of their records, and the FBI audits all agencies that have access to the database every three years, she said.

"We have very stringent laws that control who can go in there and to secure the data," Bush said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the ability to share data across systems is problematic. "You're giving the federal government access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate," he said.

In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to the FBI's exemption of the National Crime Information Center database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001 found that information in the system was "not fully reliable" and that files "may be incomplete or inaccurate." FBI officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law enforcement data collection, "it is impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and complete."

Privacy advocates worry about the ability of people to correct false information. "Unlike say, a credit card number, biometric data is forever," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster. He said he feared that the FBI, whose computer technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could not guarantee the data's security. "If someone steals and spoofs your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball," Saffo said.

In the future, said CITeR director Lawrence A. Hornak, devices will be able to "recognize us and adapt to us."

"The long-term goal," Hornak said, is "ubiquitous use" of biometrics. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera, he said.

"That's the key," he said. "You've chosen it. You have chosen to say, 'Yeah, I want this place to recognize me.' "

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122102544.html





If it’s good enough for Edgar…

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950
Tim Weiner

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/wa.../23habeas.html





6 States Defy Law Requiring ID Cards
Bob Child

Six state legislatures are defying a federal law requiring new driver's licenses that aim to prevent identity theft, fraud and terrorism.

The states have passed laws in the past two months, saying the federal law has a steep cost and invades privacy by requiring 240 million Americans to get highly secure licenses by 2013. The 9/11 Commission urged the first standards for licenses to stop fraud and terrorists such as the Sept. 11 hijackers, who lied on residency statements to get licenses and state IDs.

Lawmakers in Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Washington say new standards would be expensive to implement and result in a national ID card that compromises privacy. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that it will cost states more than $11 billion.

State resistance has drawn criticism from the Homeland Security Department. "I cannot imagine a state official anywhere that would want to have to testify before Congress about … how their non-compliant licenses contributed to a terrorist attack," department spokesman Russ Knocke said.

Knocke said the federal government can't force states to comply. But he said each state's residents are likely to bring pressure on their local governments when they learn they'll be barred from boarding airplanes because their state's licenses don't meet federal standards.

Airline passengers can use other government photo identification, such as passports and military IDs.

Some lawmakers say any inconvenience is outweighed by the cost and potential privacy invasion for each state to create a photo database of license holders.

"The people of New Hampshire are adamantly opposed to any kind of 'papers-please' society reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia," said Neal Kurk, a Republican state representative from New Hampshire. "This is another effort of the federal government to keep track of all its citizens."

The federal law requires everyone to renew licenses by 2013 with documents showing their Social Security number and home address, and that they are in the USA legally. State Sen. Larry Martin, a Republican from South Carolina, said the law will overwhelm states by requiring agencies to verify documents such as birth certificates.

The defiance by six states could force Congress to reconsider the law, said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union. "You can't have a national ID card if the residents of six states won't have one," Steinhardt said.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...id-cards_N.htm