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Old 17-03-21, 06:30 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 20th, ’21

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March 20th, 2021




'Evangelion' Creators Warn Against Pirating With 10-Year Prison Reminder

“It is our company policy to take strict actions against those committing such crimes.”
Jeff Yeung

In light of the release of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, the franchise’s creators have now issued a statement warning people who are attempting to pirate the movie.

Reminding people that piracy-related crimes could result in a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $96,900 USD, the creators adamantly wrote that “Recording movies in theaters is a crime according to the Act on Prevention of Unauthorized Recording of Films. The uploading of unauthorized recordings of films to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc., is also a copyright infringement. Copyright infringement violates the Act on Prevention of Unauthorized Recording of Films and the Copyright Act”

Adding that “It is our company policy to take strict actions against those committing such crimes,” they go on to explain that they’re working closely with publishers and distributors Toei and Toho on coordinating efforts to combat piracy. The statements were also released in English and Chinese, suggesting that the team behind Evangelion are fully ready to pursue legal action internationally.

It’s not all grim, however. Aside from issuing the warning statement to anyone pirating the new film, the anime’s creators also released two new teaser clips, giving fans a closer look at what’s to come. You can check those out above and below.
https://hypebeast.com/2021/3/evangel...ning-statement





Peer-to-Peer File Sharing, Copyright Trolls and Fair Balancing of Rights Key Take-Aways From the Opinion of a-g szpunar in the CJEU Mircom v Telenet and Others Case

Blog Re:Marks on Copyright and Trademark
Alexis Fierens, Elizabeth Daem, Emma Stockman

On 17 December 2020, Advocate General (A-G) Szpunar delivered his opinion on the highly anticipated Mircom International Content Management v Telenet and others case (C-597/19) before the European Court of Justice (CJEU) thus shedding a first light on several current hot topics in copyright law.

The opinion highlights to what extent users are making a communication to the public when sharing peer-to-peer files and emphasizes the importance of a company’s business model as to (i) the entitlement to exploit its copyrights and (ii) finding a balance between the right of information and the right to respect for private life and protection of personal data.


In brief, the A-G concluded in his opinion that

• users downloading files in a peer-to-peer network, and hereby making pieces of a file containing a protected work simultaneously available for download (even before the users have themselves downloaded that file in its entirety) are making communications to the public for which the rights holder’s consent is needed,
• undertakings whose economic business model depends on the existence of piracy and not on the exploitation of copyrights may be denied legal rights under the EU Enforcement Directive 2004/48, and
• the business model of such undertakings should be taken into consideration when striking a fair balance between copyright on the one hand and the right to respect for private life and protection of personal data on the other hand.

Preliminary questions referred

Mircom, a Cypriot company, holds licences for the communication to the public of erotic films of several producers on peer-to-peer and internet file-sharing networks in Europe. According to its licencing conditions, Mircom is not just entitled, but even required to take legal action, in its own name, against infringements by users of these producers’ exclusive rights committed on these platforms and networks in order to obtain compensation for damages, 50% of which it must pass on to the producers.

Mircom brought a legal action before the Commercial court of Antwerp against the Belgian internet service provider (ISP) Telenet for the peer-to-peer file sharing of certain films from the Mircom catalogue using the BitTorrent protocol. Mircom asked Telenet, amongst other ISPs, to hand over identification data of those customers whose internet connections had been used to share these files. The Commercial court of Antwerp referred the following questions to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling:

• Can the downloading of a file via a peer-to-peer network and the simultaneous provision for uploading of parts (‘pieces’) thereof (which may be very fragmentary as compared to the whole) (‘seeding’) be regarded as a communication to the public within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29?;
• Can a person who is the contractual holder of the copyright (or related rights), but does not himself exploit those rights and merely claims damages from alleged infringers — and whose economic business model thus depends on the existence of piracy, not on combating it — enjoy the same rights as those conferred by Chapter II of Directive 2004/48 on authors or licence holders who do exploit copyright in the normal way?;
• Are the specific circumstances set out in questions (1) and (2) relevant when assessing the correct balance to be struck between the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the rights and freedoms safeguarded by the Charter – such as respect for private life and protection of personal data, particularly on the assessment of proportionality?; and
• Is, in all those circumstances, the systematic registration and general further processing of the IP-addresses of a “swarm” of “seeders” (by the licence holder himself, and by a third party on his behalf) legitimate under EU GDPR Regulation 2016/679, and specifically under Article 6(1)(f)?

Hereinafter, we are looking into the A-G’s advice with respect to the first three copyright related questions.

Communication to the public by users on peer-to-peer networks

When a user shares files on peer-to-peer networks, it can use the BitTorrent protocol. This protocol relies on a network of users (“the swarm”) which connect with each other through a platform to share files in a decentralised manner. Typical of this protocol is that until an entire file has been downloaded, it cannot be uploaded in its entirety, but is broken down into small pieces (“seeds”). These small fragments are uploaded simultaneously to other peers, until the entire file has been downloaded.

In this regard, Telenet disputed that there has been any communication to the public on the part of users who download files on peer-to-peer networks. Rather, the initial uploaders of those files and the peer-to-peer platform itself should be held responsible. Telenet argued that the downloaders only provide facilities (i.e. their computer and their network connection) and are often not even aware that by downloading, they simultaneously upload the files as well. In response to the latter, the A-G states that it is irrelevant that the users of peer-to-peer networks may not be fully aware that by downloading works, they are uploading them simultaneously. With reference to the Stichting Brein v Ziggo (“The Pirate Bay”) case of 2017, the A-G confirms that full knowledge of the facts and the indispensable role of the user are indeed conditions which must be fulfilled in order to establish that there has been an act of communication to the public. However, this requirement of deliberate intervention is only necessary in order to establish whether an act of communication has taken place by players who are, as opposed to the case at hand, not responsible for the initial communication of the work. Thus, the general rule applies according to which the deliberate nature of the infringement of an intellectual property right is not a decisive element.

The other ISPs further argued that the pieces exchanged on peer-to-peer networks are unusable in themselves and should therefore not be treated as a work or even a part of work that enjoys copyright protection. The A-G however states that this reasoning is unfounded, pointing out that the pieces are parts of the files containing the copyright protected work. As those parts are the mechanism of transmission of the files and result in the making available of the files containing the work in itself, it is irrelevant whether the transmitted pieces are unusable in themselves. Furthermore, the A-G states that it is not relevant whether or not the transmission of the file of the work in question has actually taken place for the purposes of determining whether it has been made available to the public. In this regard, the A-G refers to the earlier CJEU case-law stating that “in order for there to be an act of making available, it is sufficient that a work is made available to the public in such a way that persons comprising that public may access it, from wherever and whenever they individually choose, irrespective of whether they effectively avail themselves of that opportunity”. In this regard, reference can be made to the SGAE case of 2006 of the CJEU.

The A-G hence concludes that the act of sharing pieces of a file containing a protected work by a user through the BitTorrent protocol, even before the user concerned has himself downloaded that file in its entirety, may be considered a communication to the public. The user’s knowledge of the facts is thereby not decisive.

Copyright trolls

‘Copyright trolls’ are persons who have acquired limited exploitation rights of copyright protected works for the sole purpose of being able to seek compensation from individuals who infringe those rights, particularly on the internet. Moreover, such trolls bring legal proceedings in order to obtain the names and addresses of those infringers, based on the previously identified IP addresses in order to then offer them an amicable settlement in return for the payment of a certain sum, in most cases without pursuing those court proceedings. Whilst copyright trolls are quite common in the United States, the phenomenon is little known in EU law.

In order for persons to be able to apply for the application of measures, procedures and remedies following an infringement of IP rights, they must be entitled to do so under Article 4 of the Enforcement Directive 2004/48. The A-G stresses the importance of the nature of Mircom’s business model as a ‘copyright troll’ in assessing whether it has legal enforcement rights. In this regard, the A-G refers to the general legal principle in EU law of abuse of rights, where provisions of EU law are relied upon “not for the purposes of achieving the objectives of those provisions but with the aim of benefitting from an advantage in EU law although the conditions for benefitting from that advantage are only fulfilled formally”.

Therefore, the A-G states that although Mircom was not only a licensee of the film producers but also an assignee of the producers’ infringement claims, it does not have the status to benefit from legal rights provided for in the Enforcement Directive 2004/48 since, it was not “using” the IP rights. Consequently, Mircom cannot order Telenet to produce the identification data for its customers whose internet connections have been used to share files on a peer-to-peer network. The A-G however emphasises that this assessment is up to the discretion of the national courts as the Enforcement Directive merely establishes a minimum level of protection and does not preclude Member States from attributing enforcement rights to companies operating in the way that Mircom does.

Balancing of rights

In striking a balance between the right of information as per Article 8(1) of the Enforcement Directive 2004/48, on the one hand, and the right to respect for private life and protection of personal data, on the other hand, the A-G cites the wording of the Article itself, which provides that “the request for information must be justified and proportionate”. According to the A-G, the business model of Mircom should be taken into account in this assessment. In this regard, the A-G states that if this business model is regarded to be abusive by the referring court, its request should be found to be unjustified. In the event where the court considers Mircom’s status as a licensee valid, it should still be taken into account that Mircom did not actually suffer any prejudice, making its action devoid of purpose and its request unjustified as well.

In our opinion, the A-G adopts a very strict approach as to the balancing of rights between intellectual property rights and the right to privacy in general, regardless of the nature of the business model of an undertaking, and this by referring to the La Quadrature du Net and Others case of 2020. In this case, the CJEU sets a high standard of protection of personal data by only allowing an interference to prevent serious threats to public security and to safeguard national security. The A-G mentions in this respect that “it is doubtful whether the interests relating to the protection of intellectual property rights are as important as those underlying the safeguarding of national security, combating serious crime and preventing serious threats to public security”. It remains to be seen how the CJEU will apply the A-G’s strict approach, and/or if it shall shed more light on finding this right balance. On top of that, the interaction with Article 126 of the Belgian Act on electronic communication of 13 June 2005, which legally prohibits ISPs to make available the identification data to anyone other than the authorities listed in the article, will have to be clarified as well.

Key take-aways

As the Stichting Brein v Ziggo (“The Pirate Bay”) case of 2017 did not provide guidance on the question whether users of a peer-to-peer network themselves make a communication to the public when sharing copyright works via these platforms, the CJEU’s ruling will certainly provide legal guidance on a highly important and problematic issue within copyright law. Whilst the A-G’s opinion regarding the interpretation of communication to the public in this respect is progressive, it seems to be in line with the CJEU’s established case law. The opinion further is a clear hint to the Court to strengthen the position of copyright holders in the digital landscape where peer-to-peer technology is pervasive.

Secondly, the CJEU’s ruling will provide clarity regarding the rather new phenomenon of ‘copyright trolls’ in intellectual property law and their legal rights to benefit from the measures, procedures and remedies under the Enforcement Directive.

Lastly, it will be interesting to see whether the CJEU will provide clarity on the relevance of the La Quadrature du Net and Others case in search of the right balance between the enforcement rights of intellectual property and the right to privacy. If the Court is to follow the opinion of the A-G, the right of information for rights holders of intellectual property may potentially be significantly eroded.
https://www.lexology.com/library/det...d-8a39d2ba7a92





The Giant Pool Of Unmatched Music Royalties
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, Cardiff Garcia

Chances are pretty good that if you listen to music these days, you do it using a streaming service like Pandora, Spotify, or Apple music. Sometimes you'll pay a monthly subscription fee to stream all you want, or sometimes you'll just pay by listening to ads between songs.

Either way, in theory those companies will use that subscription or ad money to cover their costs, and then they will pay the people who actually made the songs that we're all streaming: the performers, of course, but more importantly for the purposes of our story, the people who created the copyrightable intellectual property at the center of a song: the songwriters.

But as it turns it, many of those songwriters have actually not yet been paid for all those sweet tunes we've been streaming non-stop. Last month, news broke that 20 of the largest music streaming platforms had been sitting on no less than $424 million in so-called "unmatched royalties". That's money that they had collected but didn't know whom to pay.

On the Indicator: how did the big music streaming platforms end up owing $424 million dollars to the songwriters and music publishers they depend on? And what does that tell us about the state of the music business?

CARDIFF GARCIA, HOST:

Hey, everyone. This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Cardiff Garcia.

ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, HOST:

And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.

GARCIA: If you listen to music these days, chances are pretty good that you're doing it using a streaming service like Pandora or Spotify or Apple Music.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Yes. And we all know there are a few different models for how these platforms work. Sometimes you'll pay a monthly subscription fee to stream all you want, and sometimes you'll just pay by listening to a slew of paranoia-inducingly specific targeted ads between songs.

GARCIA: (Laughter) Yeah. But either way, in theory, those companies will use that subscription money or ad money to cover their costs and to pay the people who actually made the songs that power their platforms. That's the performers, obviously. But more importantly, for the purposes of our story, that's also the people who created the copyrightable intellectual property at the center of a song, the songwriters.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But as it turns out, Cardiff, many of those songwriters have actually not yet been paid for all those sweet, sweet tunes we've been streaming nonstop. Last month, news broke that 20 of the largest music streaming platforms had been sitting on no less than $424 million in so-called unmatched royalties. That is money that they'd collected but didn't know who to pay.

GARCIA: Today on the show, how did the big music streaming platforms end up owing $424 million to the songwriters and music publishers they depend on?

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And what does that tell us about the state of the music business?

GARCIA: All right. So in order to understand how we got to a place where the big music streaming platforms came to owe songwriters this huge sum of money, we need to talk about how the business of songwriting has changed over the past few decades.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And to help us with that, we called up songwriter Michelle Lewis. She's one of the co-founders of a trade group called the Songwriters Of North America, and she's been writing songs since the mid-'90s.

GARCIA: Writing original songs, Michelle explains, is a lot like writing books or poems. Songs are a form of intellectual property that fall under the copyright system.

MICHELLE LEWIS: As someone who creates copyrights, you want people to record your music. That's sort of how it gets out into the world...

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Yeah.

LEWIS: ...And how it earns money.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And the way that songs then earn money for a songwriter is divided into a few main categories. The first kind are known as performance royalties. So that's basically money that comes back any time the actual recording is played out loud, like when a radio station plays a song or when a department store pays to play background music.

LEWIS: Elevators.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: My favorite venue.

LEWIS: What's better than hearing a song in an elevator?

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: I like to be a captive audience member.

LEWIS: (Laughter) It's the best.

GARCIA: And the second stream of revenues - syncs. This is when a song is used in something like a TV show or a movie.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And the final important revenue stream for songwriters is something called a mechanical royalty. This is the fee that people pay to a songwriter through a publisher every time they duplicate or copy one of their songs for sale.

GARCIA: And the term mechanical actually dates back to the early 1900s, when licensing and copying a piece of music for the market meant actually physically, mechanically copying the music from one player piano roll to another.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: But the broader idea of mechanical royalties, of paying songwriters for every new saleable copy of their song, has applied to basically every form of duplication since then - vinyl records, cassette tapes, and for Michelle in the 90s, CDs.
LEWIS: The CD comes out. It goes into stores. People buy them. And then for the song that I co-wrote, I wrote it with two other people. We split that money. That one song on the CD will get a split of - I think it's 9.1 cents per song - per sale. That's your mechanical royalties.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And even though nine cents per song split among multiple songwriters and their publishers may not sound like a whole lot, Michelle says those royalties could add up pretty quickly.

LEWIS: You could write an album track on a platinum-selling album and make a decent living just from that song.

GARCIA: But then, Michelle explains, a couple of things happened that threw a wrench in the whole music industry model. First came Napster and other peer-to-peer file-sharing websites that undercut album sales.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: And then the respectable music-buying consumers moved to digital platforms like iTunes, which meant that more and more people started to buy individual songs they liked instead of whole albums. That meant the money that was still being spent on music was flowing to a shrinking number of songs and their writers.

LEWIS: And then the final, you know, punch in the perfect storm of punches to the music industry was around 2008 when YouTube came along, anybody any time could just sort of listen to the song for free.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: What did you think when you first saw that happening?

LEWIS: (Laughter) I didn't think it through, I think. I was like, this is great (laughter). I can hear anything I want.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: You're one of the people pressing play.

LEWIS: Along with everyone else in the world.

GARCIA: And all of this added up to a kind of collapse of the music industry as people knew it.

LEWIS: That sucked, I think, two-thirds of the value out of the entire music business.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Think about that for a second. The foundation for around two-thirds of the music industry had just disappeared. That is a shocking disruption. And so Michelle says the late 2000s were a really tough, competitive time for songwriters. But then, of course, came the rise of the streaming platforms, which by 2016 accounted for some 35% of music consumption.

LEWIS: And thank you, Spotify. Like, thank you, streaming services for figuring out a way to get people to pay for music again. The problem is - well, should we go into, like, the - where the problem is?

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Yeah, yeah. I want to know about the problem.

KRIS AHREND: The problem was that since 1909 under the Copyright Act, the rights to use musical works were cleared one work at a time and one share at a time.

GARCIA: This is Kris Ahrend, CEO of a non-profit organization called the Mechanical Licensing Collective.

AHREND: While that worked reasonably well in a physical marketplace where the number of records released in a given month may be in the thousands, it proved far less effective when today, some of the services claim that they are receiving as many as 60,000 new sound recordings and works a day.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Digital technology, Kris explains, has made it easier than ever for people from all over the world to make and upload their music.

GARCIA: So the streaming platforms have been inundated with millions of new songs, many of them with unclear or incomplete metadata about who should be credited or paid for any given track.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Basically, it led to, like, a huge backlog. What was happening with the money that was being collected that theoretically needed to go to creators?

AHREND: A backlog is a great way to describe it. So many of the digital services were holding monies that they knew they owed, but they didn't know who to pay those to. So those pools of money grew and grew. And that was the problem that Congress ultimately sought to solve when they passed the Music Modernization Act.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: The Music Modernization Act - this was a bill passed by Congress in 2018 after years of lobbying from music industry groups. And the idea behind the bill was to update the thicket of antiquated laws that had governed the music industry for decades.

GARCIA: And one of the major mandates of that law was the creation of a new organization to help solve this problem of unmatched streaming royalties. That organization is the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which Chris oversees and which would be charged with tallying up, collecting and eventually dispersing all that unmatched money that the streaming platforms had been setting aside.

AHREND: And the total of all of those accrued royalties was a little over $424 million.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: That sounds like a lot of money. What did you think when you saw that number?

AHREND: I agree. It's a lot of money. And certainly as someone working at the organization that's now responsible for finding the songwriters and publishers entitled to receive that money, it's a huge responsibility.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Did you take a deep gulp when you saw it?

AHREND: I'm sure I took one or two.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Kris says whatever happens now will be a mixture of outreach and a kind of forensic accounting process. He and his team are working to make a centralized database to help streamline the royalty payment system so they can start cutting checks.

AHREND: And whatever it is, it is money that a rights holder has earned. And our job is to get the right person their share, whatever it is.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Songwriter Michelle Lewis says she doesn't expect a huge personal windfall when that pool gets divvied up. But she says the fact that it's happening at all is a promising change within the structure of the music industry.

LEWIS: It gestures toward an understanding that publishing songwriters is important and worth paying for. And it's not enough, and we're always going to be sort of clawing money back from someone, but it's absolutely a great start.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: It's a big clawful (ph).

LEWIS: It's a big clawful. Yeah, it's a big clawful. So it shows that we can win and that the fight is worth it.

GARCIA: Today's episode was produced by Emma Peaslee, fact-checked by Sam Tsai (ph) and edited by Jolie Myers. THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/18/97892...usic-royalties





Streaming Milestone: Global Subscriptions Passed 1 Billion Last Year
Ryan Faughnder

The number of streaming service subscriptions passed 1 billion worldwide for the first time in 2020, highlighting massive growth in Hollywood’s direct-to-consumer business as the COVID-19 pandemic kept moviegoers glued to their sofas.

Online video subscriptions soared 26% to 1.1 billion last year, according to a report by the Motion Picture Assn. on the theatrical and home entertainment market. The Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group represents the legacy Hollywood studios and Netflix.

The report, released Thursday, reflects the staggering effect that COVID-19 has had on the entertainment industry. It’s also the result of legacy media companies investing heavily in their own streamers — such as Disney+, Apple TV+ and HBO Max — and Netflix and Amazon bringing more original movies and shows to their apps.

During theater closures, Disney funneled movies such as “Hamilton” and “Soul” to its streaming service, while Warner Bros. debuted “Wonder Woman 1984” simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. Sony sold the Tom Hanks picture “Greyhound” to Apple TV+, and Amazon acquired “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” for Prime Video. Disney recently reported 100 million subscribers for Disney+. Netflix has more than 200 million.

Meanwhile, global box office sales experienced a stunning downturn, dropping 72% to just $12 billion as multiplexes remained largely closed for the bulk of the year, according to the report.

That total includes an 80% dive for receipts in the U.S. and Canada, which contributed a paltry $2.2 billion. Less than half of the U.S. population went to the movies at least once in 2020, down 76% from 2019. International box office shrank less than the U.S. — dropping 68% — reflecting recovery in markets such as China that were able to reopen theaters after gaining better control of the coronavirus. China eclipsed the U.S. and Canada as the top box office market, with $3 billion in sales.

Movie houses in Los Angeles and New York have only just started to reopen due to relaxed restrictions amid the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, leading to hope that the industry can begin its long-awaited recovery.

While it's not a total wrap on theater attendance, it will significantly dim in 2021.

But 2020 was clearly the year of the living room-bound moviegoer, a trend also reflected in the 47 combined Oscar nominations earned Monday by Netflix and Amazon Studios.

Global consumer spending on home entertainment exploded, growing 23% to $68.8 billion, thanks to online viewing. The digital home entertainment market increased 33% in the U.S. and 30% internationally, according to the MPA report.

Digital entertainment accounted for 76% of global home entertainment and box office last year, compared with 48% in 2019. Physical discs continued their long-term decline, plummeting 20% to $7 billion. The numbers were even more lopsided in the U.S., with 82% of entertainment spending coming from digital.

Though the streaming surge helped make up for some of the declines in box office attendance, the combined theatrical and home entertainment market still shrank. The worldwide total for 2020 was $80.8 billion, an 18% decrease from a year earlier. The MPA’s report did not include the pay-TV industry.

Far fewer movies were released in theaters as studios delayed their big pictures to 2021, sold them to streaming services or sent them directly to their own online platforms.

Just 319 new feature films were released in theaters, down 63% from 2019. The number of theatrical releases from MPA members was 60, or less than half the previous year’s tally.

In a twist, though, the MPA — which provides parental guidance ratings — rated slightly more movies last year than in 2019. The board gave ratings for 497 pictures in 2020, up from 488 in the previous year. Those included movies that were rated in 2020 but not yet released.

Much of the increase was from growth in the number of movies streaming services such as Netflix produced and released. The MPA rated 194 movies from its members, up 23% from a year earlier. The number from non-MPA companies, including indie distributors, fell 8% to 303 from 330.

Much of the streamed viewing in the U.S. was driven by older material from traditional networks and studios.

The most-streamed movies of 2020 in order were Disney Animation’s “Frozen II,” “Moana” and Universal-Illumination’s “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” according to Nielsen. Those were followed by last year’s Pixar release “Onward,” 2018’s Illumination release “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch” and “Hamilton.”

Among series, acquired shows such as “The Office,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Criminal Minds” were top performers on streaming, all three of which were on Netflix but which originally aired on broadcast networks. The top original series were Netflix’s “Ozark,” “Lucifer,” “Tiger King,” “The Crown” and Disney+'s “The Mandalorian,” according to Nielsen.

Here are Nielsen’s U.S. top 10s for 2020, listed alongside their streaming providers:

Original series:

1. “Ozark,” Netflix
2. “Lucifer,” Netflix
3. “The Crown,” Netflix
4. “Tiger King,” Netflix
5. “The Mandalorian,” Disney+
6. “The Umbrella Academy,” Netflix
7. “The Great British Baking Show,” Netflix
8. “The Boss Baby: Back in Business,” Netflix
9. “Longmire,” Netflix
10. “You,” Netflix

Acquired series:

1. “The Office,” Netflix
2. “Grey’s Anatomy,” Netflix
3. “Criminal Minds,” Netflix
4. “NCIS,” Netflix
5. “Schitt’s Creek,” Netflix
6. “Supernatural,” Netflix
7. “Shameless,” Netflix
8. “New Girl,” Netflix
9. “The Blacklist,” Netflix
10. “Vampire Diaries,” Netflix

Films

1. “Frozen II,” Disney+
2. “Moana,” Disney+
3. “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” Netflix
4. “Onward,” Disney+
5. “Dr. Suess’ The Grinch,” Netflix
6. “Hamilton,” Disney+
7. “Spencer Confidential,” Netflix
8. “Aladdin,” Disney+
9. “Toy Story 4,” Disney+
10. “Zootopia,” Disney+

https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...a-theme-report





Mozilla Leads Push for FCC to Reinstate Net Neutrality
Lauren Feiner

• Firefox-maker Mozilla is leading a push for the Federal Communications Commission to swiftly reinstate net neutrality rules stripped away under the Trump administration.
• In a letter to FCC Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel Friday, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia joined Mozilla in calling net neutrality "critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth."
• Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should not be allowed to favor or throttle service for websites that rely on it.

Tech companies led by Mozilla are urging the Federal Communications Commission to swiftly reinstate net neutrality rules stripped away under the Trump administration.

In a letter to FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on Friday, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia joined Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, in calling net neutrality "critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth."

Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers should not be allowed to favor or throttle service for websites that rely on it. Net neutrality was instated under the Obama administration by reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, making them "common carriers" subject to greater regulation. The Trump FCC led by then-Chairman Ajit Pai moved to undo the rule and was ultimately successful in spite of a court challenge led by Mozilla.

While ISPs have made few changes in the absence of net neutrality rules, advocates have raised flags over a handful of actions. One example is AT&T's practice of excluding its own HBO Max streaming from counting against wireless customers' data caps.

AT&T announced Wednesday it would do away with such an arrangement after a federal court upheld California's net neutrality law that bans "sponsored data." AT&T said the change would apply beyond California, noting, "a state-by-state approach to 'net neutrality' is unworkable." The California law was created after the rule was rolled back on the federal level.

In a blog post Friday, Mozilla Chief Legal Officer Amy Keating said the Covid pandemic has made the need for net neutrality rules even more clear.

"In a moment where classrooms and offices have moved online by necessity, it is critically important to have rules paired with strong government oversight and enforcement to protect families and businesses from predatory practices," Keating said. "In California, residents will have the benefit of these fundamental safeguards as a result of a recent court decision that will allow the state to enforce its state net neutrality law. However, we believe that users nationwide deserve the same ability to control their own online experiences."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/19/mozi...eutrality.html





AT&T Lies about Calif. Net Neutrality Law, Claiming it Bans “Free Data”

AT&T is angry that it must stop charging HBO Max rivals for data-cap exemptions.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T lied about California's net neutrality law yesterday when it claimed the law requires AT&T to stop providing "free data" to mobile customers.

In reality, the California law allows AT&T to continue zero-rating HBO Max, its own video service, as long as it exempts all competing video services from data caps without charging the other video providers. But instead of zero-rating all video without collecting payments from its competitors in the online-video business, AT&T decided it would rather not exempt anything at all.

"Unfortunately, under the California law we are now prohibited from providing certain data features to consumers free of charge," AT&T claimed in its announcement that it is ending the "zero-rating" program that exempts some content from data caps. "Given that the Internet does not recognize state borders, the new law not only ends our ability to offer California customers such free data services but also similarly impacts our customers in states beyond California," the AT&T announcement also said.

Law allows zero-rating if it’s neutral

Going forward, AT&T will no longer exempt the AT&T-owned HBO Max from its mobile data caps and will stop the "sponsored data" program in which it charges other companies for similar exemptions from AT&T's data caps. But this is a business decision, not purely a legal one: as we already stated, AT&T could exempt all video streaming services including HBO Max from its mobile data caps without violating the California law as long as AT&T stops charging rival video companies for the same data-cap exemptions.

That's because California's net neutrality law allows zero-rating when it's implemented in a neutral manner. Specifically, the law bans "zero-rating in exchange for consideration, monetary or otherwise, from a third party," and bans "zero-rating some Internet content, applications, services, or devices in a category of Internet content, applications, services, or devices, but not the entire category."

The law further states that "[z]ero-rating Internet traffic in application-agnostic ways shall not be a violation... provided that no consideration, monetary or otherwise, is provided by any third party in exchange for the Internet service provider's decision whether to zero-rate traffic."

AT&T could choose a category of content, such as streaming video, and exempt everything in that category from its data caps. AT&T wouldn't be able to charge other video providers for the zero-rating, but providing such a perk to customers could help AT&T earn more revenue by signing up new customers and retaining existing ones who care about the perk. T-Mobile used to do something similar when it zero-rated video and music applications without seeking payments from the video and music providers, albeit with some technical requirements that online services had to meet to qualify for the zero-rating.

AT&T reported $20.1 billion in mobile-division revenue in the last quarter of 2020, and $7.1 billion in EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization).

“AT&T’s anti-competitive scheme”

AT&T confirmed to Ars that it has stopped zero-rating HBO Max and that it is ending its sponsored program throughout the US. This decision suggests that AT&T doesn't like the California law because it prevents preferential treatment of its own video services. AT&T had been zero-rating HBO Max at no extra cost to itself, as any money charged for that arrangement would simply be transferred from AT&T's WarnerMedia subsidiary to AT&T's wireless business. Meanwhile, AT&T charges WarnerMedia's online-video competitors for the same treatment, making them pay to be on a level playing field with HBO Max on AT&T's wireless network.

"California's net neutrality law doesn't ban all zero-rating; it bans anti-competitive forms of zero-rating," Stanford law professor Barbara van Schewick, who supported California in its court defense of the net neutrality law, told Ars today. "The law does ban AT&T's anti-competitive scheme where it counts almost everything people do on the Internet, including watching Twitch, Netflix, and their home security cameras, against users' data caps, but doesn't count the data from AT&T's own video services."

The law "does not ban AT&T from launching a program where it zero-rates all online video or all video chat/conferencing calls—which might be hugely popular in this pandemic. In that case, the California attorney general would retain the right to ensure such programs are actually open to all applications," van Schewick told us.

AT&T could also use zero-rating in different ways to help customers, van Schewick said. For example, AT&T would be allowed to let customers use unlimited data between 12 am and 6 am "when networks aren't busy and not count that data against users' caps," to help users back up their data and download videos and podcasts, she said.

Instead, AT&T's approach has been to only zero-rate data for its own services and for online service providers that pay AT&T to zero-rate a specific application.

The California law was enacted in 2018 but only took effect last month after a federal judge denied the broadband industry's motion for a preliminary injunction. Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced the legislation that became California's net neutrality law. A spokesperson for Wiener told Ars today that Wiener's office agrees with van Schewick's interpretation of the law's provisions on zero-rating.

AT&T didn’t answer key questions

When contacted by Ars today, AT&T declined to explain why it doesn't zero-rate all video as allowed under California's net neutrality law.

In an article yesterday, we pointed out another problem with AT&T's claims about the California law. AT&T said it has to shut off sponsored data in states other than California to comply with the California law, ignoring the fact that AT&T has the ability to shut off sponsored data for individual customers. The proof is that AT&T already lets customers opt out of sponsored data. To comply with a ban on sponsored data in California only, AT&T could shut the feature off for all California-based customers and perhaps use the device-location data AT&T already collects to make sure out-of-state customers don't get "free data" when they enter California.

"AT&T's zero-rating plan currently permits users to turn their zero-rating on and off," California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a court brief defending the state law in September 2020. "Thus, contrary to AT&T's assertions, it already has the capability to switch off zero-rating for users who opt out and can simply use that functionality to disable zero-rating for California users."

We asked AT&T why it doesn't disable sponsored data for California-based users only and did not get an answer.

Zero-rating requires a “low data cap”

In a blog post yesterday, van Schewick wrote that "[z]ero-rating only works when you have a low data cap. That creates an incentive for ISPs to keep low data caps and keep unlimited plans expensive."

Becerra made a similar point in the court brief while arguing that "communities of color and low-income communities" are disproportionately harmed by zero-rating.

"[i]t is indisputable that communities of color and low-income communities need fair access to the open Internet," Becerra wrote. "But the zero-rated plans to which these communities disproportionately subscribe cannot supply this, because zero-rating allows ISPs to set artificially low data caps for these plans, and leaves these customers with insufficient access for everyday needs."

The Democratic-led FCC in late 2016 found that AT&T violated net neutrality rules, saying that "the Sponsored Data program strongly favors AT&T's own video offerings while unreasonably discriminating against unaffiliated edge providers and limiting their ability to offer competing video services to AT&T's broadband subscribers on a level playing field."

Republican Ajit Pai quickly rescinded that finding after becoming FCC chairman in early 2017 and later repealed the federal net neutrality rules, paving the way for California to impose its own law.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ans-free-data/





Break up the Telecom Giants

Verizon and AT&T hold the keys to the internet for millions of Americans—and have enough power, online and off, to be just as worthy of scrutiny as the social media giants.
Osita Nwanevu

Early in February, a strange and humbly formatted quarter-page ad appeared in The Wall Street Journal. It was an open letter to AT&T CEO John Stankey from one Aaron M. Epstein of North Hollywood, California, who helpfully included his email address and phone number, should Stankey decide to get in touch about fixing his slow DSL connection.

“Although AT&T is advertising speeds up to 100 MBS for other neighborhoods, the fastest now available to us from ATT is only 3 MBS,” Epstein wrote. “Your competitors now have speeds of over 200 MBS. Why is AT&T, a major communications company, treating us so shabbily in North Hollywood? Sincerely, Aaron M. Epstein, an AT&T customer since 1960.” As his sign-off suggested, Epstein is quite old—90 years old, in fact. And, as he told Vice’s Motherboard in an interview, AT&T was part of the fabric of his life well before he was a paying customer. “My family,” he said, “has had Bell service since I was born in 1930.”

For nearly a century, American Telephone and Telegraph’s “Bell System”—a conglomerate that took its name from telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell—essentially controlled telephone service in the United States. In 1984, after decades spent fighting the company, regulators finally succeeded in breaking up AT&T’s extraordinary monopoly with a federal consent decree that divided the Bell System into seven regional companies, or “Baby Bells.” Since then, those companies have gathered themselves back up into three: Lumen Technologies, Verizon, and the new AT&T, a multi-industry behemoth.

This AT&T is still a major telephone company, with 100 million total customers. Unfortunately for Mr. Epstein and his 15.4 million fellow subscribers, AT&T is also America’s third-largest broadband internet service provider. And its 2015 purchase of DirecTV has made the company the nation’s second-largest provider of paid television. (In February, AT&T spun off DirecTV, but it still controls 70 percent of the company.)

When it acquired Time Warner in 2018, AT&T gained control over many of the things DirecTV’s users and the rest of the country might want to watch. Need to catch up on the news? Maybe hear from some pundits on how large and terrifyingly powerful social media companies have become? You’ll find them on the AT&T subsidiary CNN. How about some entertainment—a hit network series like Young Sheldon or classics from HBO like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones? All of those shows belong to AT&T. Want a movie instead? AT&T’s subsidiary the Warner Bros. Pictures Group produces and distributes, by its own count, 18 to 22 major films a year—from superhero flicks like Zack Snyder’s Justice League to awards season favorites like the Fred Hampton biopic Judas and the Black Messiah—and holds another 10,000 films in its catalog.

As big as it is, AT&T has another huge and powerful rival in Comcast—the country’s largest broadband internet provider and paid television provider, one of the biggest telephone providers, and the parent company of both NBCUniversal, which includes subsidiaries NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and Universal Pictures, and Sky, one of Europe’s largest media companies. There are other major conglomerates in the media and telecommunications industries—Disney, ViacomCBS, Fox, Charter—but the power AT&T and Comcast hold over both content and the means of distributing content sets them apart.

And yet the telecoms rarely enter our debates over “Big Tech” and corporate power in the internet age. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple have shaped the basic nuts and bolts of the internet. Facebook’s dominance over social media and its share of the online advertising market have made it another giant in the eyes of many. But the telecoms, which hold the keys to the internet itself for millions of Americans, have accrued more than enough power, online and off, to be just as worthy of concern and scrutiny as all of those Silicon Valley firms. The telecoms are tech companies, and they are big ones—so big that they’ve become much larger than tech itself.

When Ajit Pai’s Federal Communications Commission ended net neutrality in 2017, telecoms were given the freedom to speed up, slow down, or apply special prices to content on the internet for political, financial, or any other reasons salient to their executives. AT&T, for instance, has already exempted its HBO Max service from the data caps it imposes on competitors such as Netflix. This is where much of the power on the internet actually resides. Without net neutrality, internet service providers can simply cripple or boost entire websites as they see fit. Hot takes, viral videos, family photos, offbeat memes, and dangerous misinformation might get posted on Facebook and Twitter, where moderators can scrutinize their content, but both companies functionally sit atop a vast infrastructure they don’t actually command.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1615...up-att-verizon





Florida Teen Sentenced in Hack of Celebrity Twitter Accounts

A Florida teenager was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for his role in hacking the Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls and scamming people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin.

Graham Ivan Clark, 18, pleaded guilty to multiple fraud charges as part of a deal with Hillsborough County prosecutors, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

Clark was the mastermind behind the scheme to take over prominent Twitter accounts and send tweets seeking Bitcoin payments, prosecutors said. During the high-profile security breach on July 15, tweets were sent from the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also targeted.

Prosecutors said Clark was tried in state court instead of federal court because he was 17 at the time of the crimes, and state law allowed greater flexibility to try a minor as an adult in a financial fraud case.

Two other men also were charged in the case. Mason Sheppard, of the United Kingdom, and Nima Fazeli, of Orlando, were charged separately in federal court.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden...47cfa5f7540413





Despite Hacks, US not Seeking Widened Domestic Surveillance
Eric Tucker and Frank Bajak

The Biden administration is not planning to step up government surveillance of the U.S. internet even as state-backed foreign hackers and cybercriminals increasingly use it to evade detection, a senior administration official said Friday.

The official said the administration, mindful of the privacy and civil liberties implications that could arise, is not currently seeking additional authority to monitor U.S.-based networks. Instead, the administration will focus on tighter partnerships and improved information-sharing with the private-sector companies that already have broad visibility into the domestic internet, said the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.

The comment was an acknowledgement of the fraught political debate surrounding domestic government surveillance — nearly eight years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden triggered a scandal with leaked agency documents — and a recognition of the challenges in balancing the growing cyber defense imperative against privacy concerns that come with stepped-up monitoring.

Foreign state hackers are increasingly using U.S.-based virtual private networks, or VPNs, to evade detection by U.S. intelligence agencies, who are legally constrained from monitoring domestic infrastructure.

In the crucial second stage of the SolarWinds hacking campaign, for instance, the suspected Russian intelligence operatives used U.S.-based VPNs to siphon off data through backdoors in victims’ networks, establishing an account that made it seem like they were in the U.S.

That hack detected in December compromised at least nine federal agencies, and exposed “significant gaps in modernization and in technology of cybersecurity across the federal government,” the official said. Dozens of private-sector companies were also hit, the telecommunications and software sector most heavily.

The U.S. is also addressing a separate, far more widespread and indiscriminate hack that cyber sleuths blame on China and which became a global crisis last week.

It has exposed tens of thousands of servers running Microsoft’s Exchange email program to intrusion. Though Microsoft has patched the vulnerability, affected server owners had only a “short window” to get vulnerable servers fixed, the official said. Criminal and state-backed hackers seeking to exploit the underlying flaw are apt to cause more havoc, the administration says.

The official said President Joe Biden has been briefed on the incident, and private-sector cybersecurity sleuths were brought in to confer with White House officials on a response.

When it comes to the pursuit of new surveillance or monitoring authorities, the official described the administration’s posture as “not yet, not now.” The official said the administration is committed at the moment to improving the flow of information with cloud providers and private companies who have good visibility into U.S. networks but aren’t bound by the same government constraints.

Predictions from the cybersecurity community were proving correct, meanwhile, that ransomware attacks leveraging compromised Exchange servers would be inevitable given the scope of the hack.

Microsoft said it has detected a new family of ransomware, dubbed DearCry, exploiting the compromises. Ransomware expert Brett Callow of the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft said the website ID Ransomware had so far received six submissions of the malware — from victims in the United States, Australia, Austria, Canada and Denmark.

Microsoft said in a tweet that it was blocking the ransomware, but, said Callow, “That’ll not necessary stop attacks.” Antivirus products detect and block a lot of known ransomware — but hackers often disable those products prior to deployment, he said.

The global ransomware scourge — primarily the work of Russian-speaking and North Korean cybercriminals — has cost businesses, local governments, health care providers and even K-12 school districts tens of billions of dollars in the past few years.

____

Bajak reported from Boston.
https://apnews.com/article/edward-sn...70d37e035e89ce





Utah Campaign Against Porn Marches on with Phone Filter Plan
Lindsay Whitehurst and Sophia Eppolito

Conservative lawmakers in Utah have fired another salvo in their longtime campaign against online porn with a new requirement that all cellphones and tablets sold in the state automatically block pornography in a plan that critics call a significant intrusion on free speech.

Supporters and critics alike are now waiting to find out if new Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, will sign or veto a proposa l that the GOP-controlled Legislature passed this month.

Cox hasn’t indicated publicly which way he’s leaning. His spokeswoman, Jennifer Napier-Pearce, said only in an email that Cox “will carefully consider this bill during the bill signing period.” He has until March 25 to decide.

Supporters argue the restriction is a critical step to help parents keep explicit content away from kids — especially as more children have their own electronic devices and have been forced to spend more time online during the pandemic.

Combating porn is a perennial issue for Utah lawmakers who have previously mandated warning labels on print and online pornography and declared porn a “public health crisis.”

Utah’s generally conservative culture means racy mainstream magazines and lingerie catalogs can be considered risqué. Leaders of the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faith have also drawn attention to what they consider the harms of pornography.

Even if Cox signs the measure, it wouldn’t go into effect unless five other states also enacted similar laws, a provision added after manufacturers and retailers voiced concerns that it would be difficult to implement the filters for a single state.

There is some precedent for other states following Utah’s example on porn — more than a dozen states advanced similar resolutions to declare porn a public-health crisis after the state became the first to do so in 2016.

If Cox signs the bill, Utah appears poised to become the first state to mandate filters on devices, according to two prominent technology experts and the bill’s sponsor, though federal internet restrictions aimed at preventing kids from accessing porn were passed in the late 1990s and later stuck down in the courts.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an anti-porn group, cheered the bill, saying that while many electronic devices come with filters installed, turning them on can be challenging for parents.

“Utah has passed a critical, common sense solution to help protect vulnerable children from accessing harmful pornographic content on phones and tablets,” Executive Director Dawn Hawkins said in a statement. Adults would be able to turn off the filters if they chose.

Research has raised questions about how pornography shapes kids’ attitudes about sex, and content filters can be an important tool in keeping children from being exposed before it’s healthy, said Emily Rothman, a Boston University professor who has studied the issue.

But even more important is comprehensive sex education to counteract messages kids might get from porn, she said.

Moves to expand sex education face long odds in Utah, and this year a bill that would have required more discussion about consent in sexual encounters died at the state Legislature.

Republican Rep. Susan Pulsipher sponsored the pornography filter measure, though she acknowledged it isn’t a complete solution.

“A child that wants to find it and tries to would probably be able to still. It’s just one step in the right direction,” she said.

She contends the measure passes constitutional muster because adults can deactivate the filters, but experts said it still raises several legal concerns.

“You’ve basically got the state mandating the filtering of lawful content. That raises immediate First Amendment flags,” said Samir Jain, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based internet policy group.

The bill as written could apply to any device “activated” in Utah, raising the possibility that it could require location tracking to activate filters on the phones of anyone coming into the state, Jain said.

The new porn filtering plan harkens back to the attempts struck down in the 1990s, and if it does go into effect, “my guess is a device manufacturer would go into court the next day and have the law enjoined,” said David Greene, civil liberties director with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based internet civil liberties group.

The U.S. does allow for some explicit materials to be restricted from minors, but it’s a fine distinction that can require the courts to define, Greene said.

And he said no existing filters are that sophisticated: “It’s not like you put a judge in your phone,” he said.

The filters in the marketplace have also been known to block other types of content, such as nude art works, educational information and facts about sex and sexuality, said Mike Stabile, a spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, an adult-entertainment trade group.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah said the bill is an overreach that imposes the same standards on everyone.

“Parental filters already exist,” said attorney Jason Groth, “and every Utah parent can decide the level of access for their children.”
https://apnews.com/article/utah-camp...918d1718bf2504





Encrypted Messaging App Signal Blocked in China
Zen Soo

Encrypted messaging app Signal appears to have been blocked in mainland China, the latest foreign social media service to cease working in a country where the government tightly controls the flow of information.

As of Tuesday, users of the app within China had to connect to a virtual private network (VPN) that allows them to circumvent China’s so-called Great Firewall, a censorship system which blocks websites, services and apps deemed inappropriate by the Chinese government.

The move to silence Signal, one of the few remaining messaging apps in China that allowed users to engage in encrypted messaging, comes as China expands controls to shape public opinion and at times limit private discourse.

Users in China said Tuesday that they could not get the app to connect without a VPN service. Messages failed to send and calls did not go through.

In China, services like Facebook, Google and Twitter have been blocked for years. Most recently, popular social-audio platform Clubhouse was also shut down in the country, shortly after Chinese users on the app started taking part in real-time audio discussions deemed sensitive by authorities, such as China’s mass detentions of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a daily news briefing Tuesday that he was “not aware of the situation” around Signal being banned in China.

“What I can tell you is that as a principle, China’s internet is open, and the Chinese government manages internet-related affairs according to law and regulations,” Zhao said.

Signal could not be immediately reached for comment.

Signal uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging and calling services, which prevents any third-party from viewing conversation content or listening in on calls.

The app recently had grown popular among users in China concerned about privacy issues, although the numbers of Signal users in the country is still small compared to the ubiquitous WeChat messaging app. WeChat has over a billion users and is a mainstay of everyday life in China thanks to its payments services and social media features.

However, politically sensitive messages and content on WeChat are often censored, and authorities have detained users for spreading rumors online. Messages on WeChat are encrypted only between its servers and the users’ devices, and in theory could be accessed by Tencent, WeChat’s parent company.

To circumvent the China’s censorship and access sites like Twitter or Facebook, users in China often use VPN services, although the use of such services to access blocked services is illegal in the country.
https://apnews.com/article/media-soc...d635bf9b7b1369





The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption and Tell Congress About All the Encrypted Phones It’s Already Hacking Into
Joe Mullin

Federal law enforcement has been asking for a backdoor to read Americans’ encrypted communications for years now. FBI Director Christopher Wray did it again last week in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As usual, the FBI’s complaints involved end-to-end encryption employed by popular messaging platforms, as well as the at-rest encryption of digital devices, which Wray described as offering “user-only access.”

The FBI wants these terms to sound scary, but they actually describe security best practices. End-to-end encryption is what allows users to exchange messages without having them intercepted and read by repressive governments, corporations, and other bad actors. And “user-only access” is actually a perfect encapsulation of how device encryption should work; otherwise, anyone who got their hands on your phone or laptop—a thief, an abusive partner, or an employer—could access its most sensitive data. When you intentionally weaken these systems, it hurts our security and privacy, because there’s no magical kind of access that only works for the good guys. If Wray gets his special pass to listen in on our conversations and access our devices, corporations, criminals, and authoritarians will be able to get the same access.

It’s remarkable that Wray keeps getting invited to Congress to sing the same song. Notably, Wray was invited there to talk, in part, about the January 6th insurrection, a serious domestic attack in which the attackers—far from being concerned about secrecy—proudly broadcast many of their crimes, resulting in hundreds of arrests.

It’s also remarkable what Wray, once more, chose to leave out of this narrative. While Wray continues to express frustration about what his agents can’t get access to, he fails to brief Senators about the shocking frequency with which his agency already accesses Americans’ smartphones. Nevertheless, the scope of police snooping on Americans’ mobile phones is becoming clear, and it’s not just the FBI who is doing it. Instead of inviting Wray up to Capitol Hill to ask for special ways to invade our privacy and security, Senators should be asking Wray about the private data his agents are already trawling through.

Police Have An Incredible Number of Ways to Break Into Encrypted Phones

In all 50 states, police are breaking into phones on a vast scale. An October report from the non-profit Upturn, “Mass Extraction,” has revealed details of how invasive and widespread police hacking of our phones has become. Police can easily purchase forensic tools that extract data from nearly every popular phone. In March 2016, Cellebrite, a popular forensic tool company, supported “logical extractions” for 8,393 different devices, and “physical extractions,” which involves copying all the data on a phone bit-by-bit, for 4,254 devices. Cellebrite can bypass lock screens on about 1,500 different devices.

How do they bypass encryption? Often, they just guess the password. In 2018, Prof. Matthew Green estimated it would take no more than 22 hours for forensic tools to break into some older iPhones with a 6-digit passcode simply by continuously guessing passwords (i.e. “brute-force” entry). A 4-digit passcode would fail in about 13 minutes.

That brute force guessing was enabled by a hardware flaw that has been fixed since 2018, and the rate of password guessing is much more limited now. But even as smartphone companies like Apple improve their security, device hacking remains very much a cat-and-mouse game. As recently as September 2020, Cellebrite marketing materials boasted its tools can break into iPhone devices up to “the latest iPhone 11/ 11 Pro / Max running the latest iOS versions up to the latest 13.4.1”

Even when passwords can’t be broken, vendors like Cellebrite offer “advanced services” that can unlock even the newest iOS and Samsung devices. Upturn research suggests the base price on such services is $1,950, but it can be cheaper in bulk.

Buying electronic break-in technology on a wholesale basis represents the best deal for police departments around the U.S., and they avail themselves of these bargains regularly. In 2018, the Seattle Police Department purchased 20 such “actions” from Cellebrite for $33,000, allowing them to extract phone data within weeks or even days. Law enforcement agencies that want to unlock phones en masse can bring Cellebrite’s “advanced unlocking” in-house, for prices that range from $75,000 to $150,000.

That means for most police departments, breaking into phones isn’t just convenient, it’s relatively inexpensive. Even a mid-sized police department like Virginia Beach, VA has a police budget of more than $100 million; New York City’s police budget is over $5 billion. The FBI’s 2020 budget request is about $9 billion.

When the FBI says it’s “going dark” because it can’t beat encryption, what it’s really asking for is a method of breaking in that’s cheaper, easier, and more reliable than the methods they already have. The only way to fully meet the FBI’s demands would be to require a backdoor in all platforms, applications, and devices. Especially at a time when police abuses nationwide have come into new focus, this type of complaint should be a non-starter with elected officials. Instead, they should be questioning how and why police are already dodging encryption. These techniques aren’t just being used against criminals.

Phone Searches By Police Are Widespread and Commonplace

Upturn has documented more than 2,000 agencies across the U.S. that have purchased products or services from mobile device forensic tool vendors, including every one of the 50 largest police departments, and at least 25 of the 50 largest sheriffs’ offices.

Law enforcement officials like Wray want to convince us that encryption needs to be bypassed or broken for threats like terrorism or crimes against children, but in fact, Upturn’s public records requests show that police use forensic tools to search phones for everyday low-level crimes. Even when police don't need to bypass encryption—such as when they convince someone to "consent" to the search of a phone and unlock it—these invasive police phone searches are used “as an all-purpose investigative tool, for an astonishingly broad array of offenses, often without a warrant,” as Upturn put it.

The 44 law enforcement agencies who provided records to Upturn revealed at least 50,000 extractions of cell phones between 2015 and 2019. And there’s no question that this number is a “severe undercount,” counting only 44 agencies, when at least 2,000 agencies have the tools. Many of the largest police departments, including New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Boston, either denied Upturn’s record requests or did not respond.

“Law enforcement… use these tools to investigate cases involving graffiti, shoplifting, marijuana possession, prostitution, vandalism, car crashes, parole violations, petty theft, public intoxication, and the full gamut of drug-related offenses,” Upturn reports. In Suffolk County, NY, 20 percent of the phones searched by police were for narcotics cases. Authorities in Santa Clara County, CA, San Bernardino County, CA, and Fort Worth, TX all reported that drug crimes were among the most common reasons for cell phone data extractions. Here are just a few examples of the everyday offenses in which Upturn found police searched phones:

• In one case, police officers sought to search two phones for evidence of drug sales after a $220 undercover marijuana bust.
• Police stopped a vehicle for a “left lane violation,” then “due to nervousness and inconsistent stories, a free air sniff was conducted by a … K9 with positive alert to narcotics.” The officers found bags of marijuana in the car, then seized eight phones from the car’s occupants, and sought to extract data from them for “evidence of drug transactions.”
• Officers looking for a juvenile who allegedly violated terms of his electronic monitoring found him after a “short foot pursuit” in which the youngster threw his phone to the ground. Officers sought to search the phone for evidence of “escape in the second degree.”

And these searches often take place without judicial warrants, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s clear ruling in Riley v. California that a warrant is required to search a cell phone. That’s because police frequently abuse rules around so-called consent searches. These types of searches are widespread, but they’re hardly consensual. In January, we wrote about how these so-called “consent searches” are extraordinary violations of our privacy.

Forensic searches of cell phones are increasingly common. The Las Vegas police, for instance, examined 260% more cell phones in 2018-2019 compared with 2015-2016.

The searches are often overbroad, as well. It’s not uncommon for data unrelated to the initial suspicions to be copied, kept, and used for other purposes later. For instance, police can deem unrelated data to be “gang related,” and keep it in a “gang database,” which have often vague standards. Being placed in such a database can easily affect peoples’ future employment options. Many police departments don’t have any policies in place about when forensic phone-searching tools can be used.

It’s Time for Oversight On Police Phone Searches

Rather than listening to a litany of requests for special access to personal data from federal agencies like the FBI, Congress should assert oversight over the inappropriate types of access that are already taking place.

The first step is to start keeping track of what’s happening. Congress should require that federal law enforcement agencies create detailed audit logs and screen recordings of digital searches. And we agree with Upturn that agencies nationwide should collect and publish aggregated information about how many phones were searched, and whether those searches involved warrants (with published warrant numbers), or so-called consent searches. Agencies should also disclose what tools were used for data extraction and analysis.

Congress should also consider placing sharp limits on when consent searches can take place at all. In our January blog post, we suggest that such searches be banned entirely in high-coercion settings like traffic stops, and suggest some specific limits that should be set in less-coercive settings.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/0...crypted-phones

















Until next week,

- js.



















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