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Old 03-07-13, 07:38 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 6th, '13

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July 6th, 2013




Swedish TV Pirate Slapped with Hefty Fine

A man in eastern Sweden has been sentenced to pay 12.5 million kronor ($1.9 million) in damages after he was found to be the mastermind behind an extensive TV piracy network.

The convicted man, a 43-year-old from Norrköping in eastern Sweden, arranged cable TV channels to be streamed to an estimated 500 people.

He was sentenced to probation by the Norrköping District Court for violating laws that ban access to certain types of decoders, and ordered to pay over 12 million kronor in damages to the six companies affected by the piracy.

The man is said to have made large amounts of money by setting up the decoders and then selling access to the cable channels through card sharing. The operation began in 2004, and was run partly from his apartment in Norrköping and partly from a neighbour's.

The channels came from Swedish services including Boxer, Canal Digital, Com Hem and Viasat, according to the Norrköping Tidning newspaper.

As the man's income increased, he partnered up with other TV pirates, with the earnings being delivered into the bank account of the 43-year-old's mother.

Police caught the man in 2008 during a raid related to a separate case. When they arrested him they discovered a suspiciously high number of computers in his flat.

While the convicted man admitted to running the business, he denied that all of customers were his.

The man has previous convictions for violating Swedish alcohol laws, and also has debts at the Swedish Enforcement Agency (Kronofogden).
http://www.thelocal.se/48852/20130703/





Firms to Continue ‘Three Strikes’ Rule Against Illegal Music Downloaders
Mary Carolan

Four major music companies will be able to continue to implement a “three strikes and you’re out” agreement with Eircom which cuts off the broadband connection of people repeatedly sharing music online.

The Supreme Court today upheld a challenge by four music companies to a notice of the Data Protection Commissioner which they feared would effectively unwind their “three strikes and you’re out” agreement with Eircom aimed at combating the widespread illegal downloading of music.

The companies claimed the commissioner’s enforcement notice of December 5th, 2011, directing Eircom to stop implementing the three strikes agreement, arising from his view it breached data protection and privacy laws, amounted to an unlawful and irrational attempt to reopen data protection issues already determined in their favour by the High Court.

In a High Court judgment of June 2012, Mr Justice Peter Charleton ruled as invalid the enforcement notice due to its failure to include any reasons specifying what provisions of the Data Protection Acts had been contravened by the protocol.

The state of the relevant law, particularly regarding the potential conflict between the privacy rights of some people and the intellectual property rights of others, had been “regrettably misconstrued” by the Commissioner, he said. “The law does not set intellectual property rights at naught because of the involvement of the internet.”

He dismissed further arguments the companies’ decision to seek judicial review of the Commissioner’s decision amounted to an abuse of process in circumstances where the the enforcement order had been appealed by Eircom to the Circuit Court.

The Supreme Court today unanimously dismissed the Commissioner’s appeal against the High Court decision.

Giving the judgment, Mr Justice Frank Clarke, with whom Mr Justice Niall Fennelly and Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell agreed, said significant and important questions relating to music piracy and intellectual property rights lay at the heart of the appeal.

Those issues could be summarised into the question whether the protocol, the product of a private contractual arrangement, could legitimately result in a subscriber to an internet service provider having their broadband terminated.

However, the specific questions the Supreme Court had to answer were much narrower, he said.

These were whether the trial judge had correctly quashed the notice on the basis of absence of reasons and whether judicial review was appropriate in this matter.

He found the trial judge correctly concluded there was “a complete absence of reasons” and therefore, the notice was unlawful and made in breach of Section 10.4 of the Data Protection Acts. It was particularly important Section 10 required such a notice to specify the reasons for the Commissioner having formed an opinion there has been a breach of data protection laws, he said.

He was not convinced, as argued on behalf of the commissioner, the reasons for the notice were obvious form the process engaged in. Legal certainty requires the reasons can be determined “with some reasonable measure of precision”, he said.

On the evidence and materials available, it was not inherently obvious why the protocol would involve a breach of date protection law, he added. The protocol, he noted, worked via Eircom getting IP addresses of suspected illegal downloaders from the record companies, writing an appropriate letter to the customer involved and invoking suspension or termination provisions as appropriate.

It was also relevant, while the enforcement notice was issued to Eircom, the music companies were potentially affected by it and, as such, were entitled to known the reasons so as to consider what legal options might be open to them.

The judge also ruled this was one of those cases where, exceptional to the general rule, the music companies were entitled to maintain judicial review proceedings despite the “highly conditional availability” of a statutory appeal against the commissioner’s notice and the fact the companies sought initially to join that appeal. Eircom had a right of appeal against the notice but the record companies had not, although it was possible they might be joined as a notice party, the judge said.

The proceedings were taken by EMI Records (Ireland), Sony Music Entertainment Ireland, Universal Music Ireland and Warner Music Ireland.

The enforcement notice was issued following the Commissioner’s investigation into a complaint from an Eircom subscriber about receiving a notification under the three strikes protocol, agreed with Eircom under a January 2009 settlement of court actions by the companies against it.

In January 2011, the Commissioner notified Eircom of a complaint by a subscriber who received a notification under the protocol but insisted he was not engaged in any illegal downloading.

Eircom investigated and told the commissioner in February 2011 it had discovered, due to a “minor technical issue”, its notification to that subscriber and 390 others was incorrectly issued but the relevant accounts would be amended to remove any record of infringement.

In September 2011, the Commissioner told Eircom the complainant subscriber had restated his original complaint and alleged Eircom’s monitoring of his internet use breached his data protection rights.

The Commissioner contended the monitoring activities being carried out by Eircom as an agent of the music companies under the settlement scheme were not permitted unless the internet users in question had consented to such monitoring.

Four major music companies will be able to continue to implement a “three strikes and you’re out” agreement with Eircom which cuts off the broadband connection of people repeatedly sharing music online.

The Supreme Court today upheld a challenge by four music companies to a notice of the Data Protection Commissioner which they feared would effectively unwind their “three strikes and you’re out” agreement with Eircom aimed at combating the widespread illegal downloading of music.

The companies claimed the commissioner’s enforcement notice of December 5th, 2011, directing Eircom to stop implementing the three strikes agreement, arising from his view it breached data protection and privacy laws, amounted to an unlawful and irrational attempt to reopen data protection issues already determined in their favour by the High Court.

In a High Court judgment of June 2012, Mr Justice Peter Charleton ruled as invalid the enforcement notice due to its failure to include any reasons specifying what provisions of the Data Protection Acts had been contravened by the protocol.

The state of the relevant law, particularly regarding the potential conflict between the privacy rights of some people and the intellectual property rights of others, had been “regrettably misconstrued” by the Commissioner, he said. “The law does not set intellectual property rights at naught because of the involvement of the internet.”

He dismissed further arguments the companies’ decision to seek judicial review of the Commissioner’s decision amounted to an abuse of process in circumstances where the the enforcement order had been appealed by Eircom to the Circuit Court.

The Supreme Court today unanimously dismissed the Commissioner’s appeal against the High Court decision.

Giving the judgment, Mr Justice Frank Clarke, with whom Mr Justice Nial Fennelly and Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell agreed, said significant and important questions relating to music piracy and intellectual property rights lay at the heart of the appeal.

Those issues could be summarised into the question whether the protocol, the product of a private contractual arrangement, could legitimately result in a subscriber to an internet service provider having their broadband terminated.

However, the specific questions the Supreme Court had to answer were much narrower, he said.

These were whether the trial judge had correctly quashed the notice on the basis of absence of reasons and whether judicial reveiw was appropriate in this matter.

He found the trial judge correctly concluded there was “a complete absence of reasons” and therfore, the notice was unlawful and made in breach of Section 10.4 of the Data Protection Acts. It was particularly important Section 10 required such a notice to specify the reasons for the Commissioner having formed an opinion there has been a breach of data protection laws, he said.

He was not convinced, as argued on behalf of the commissioner, the reasons for the notice were obvious form the process engaged in. Legal certainty requires the reasons can be determined “with some reasonable measure of precision”, he said.

On the evidence and materials available, it was not inherently obvious why the protocol would involve a breach of date protection law, he added. The protocol, he noted, worked via Eircom getting IP addresses of suspected illegal downloaders from the record companies, writing an appropriate letter to the customer involved and invoking suspension or termination provisions as appropriate.

It was also relevant, while the enforcement notice was issued to Eircom, the music companies were potentially affected by it and, as such, were entitled to known the reasons so as to consider what legal options might be open to them.

The judge also ruled this was one of those cases where, exceptional to the general rule, the music companies were entitled to maintain judicial review proceedings despite the “highly conditional availaibility” of a statutory appeal against the commissioner’s notice and the fact the companies sought initially to join that appeal. Eircom had a right of appeal against the notice but the record companies had not, although it was possible they might be joined as a notice party, the judge said.

The proceedings were taken by EMI Records (Ireland), Sony Music Entertainment Ireland, Universal Music Ireland and Warner Music Ireland.

The enforcement notice was issued following the commissioner’s investigation into a complaint from an Eircom subscriber about receiving a notification under the three strikes protocol, agreed with Eircom under a January 2009 settlement of court actions by the companies against it.

In January 2011, the Commissioner notified Eircom of a complaint by a subscriber who received a notification under the protocol but insisted he was not engaged in any illegal downloading.

Eircom investigated and told the commissioner in February 2011 it had discovered, due to a “minor technical issue”, its notification to that subscriber and 390 others was incorrectly issued but the relevant accounts would be amended to remove any record of infringement.

In September 2011, the Commissioner told Eircom the complainant subscriber had restated his original complaint and alleged Eircom’s monitoring of his internet use breached his data protection rights.

The Commissioner contended the monitoring activities being carried out by Eircom as an agent of the music companies under the settlement scheme were not permitted unless the internet users in question had consented to such monitoring.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime...ders-1.1451820





Appeals Court Calls for “Fair Use” Ruling in Google Books Case
Jeff John Roberts

In a major new ruling in the Google Books case, the Second Circuit decertified a class action and told Judge Denny Chin to rule on whether Google’s book scanning is fair use.

In a victory for Google in its long-running fight with the Authors Guild, the Second Circuit of Appeals overturned a lower court’s decision to grant class action status, and told the judge in the case to rule on whether Google’s book scanning was “fair use” under copyright law.

The decision, issued Monday in New York, is the latest twist in a case that began in 2005 when the Authors Guild and publishers sued to stop Google from scanning the world’s libraries. The parties reached a settlement that would have created a bookselling partnership, but Judge Denny Chin rejected the arrangement in 2011 following objections from some scholars and Google’s corporate rival.

The new ruling is a blow to the Authors Guild, which revived the original law suit in late 2011, because it unplugs Chin’s earlier decision to let the case proceed as a class action — allowing every registered author in America to sue together. Google had objected to the class action status, claiming it forced authors who liked the scanning project into a lawsuit with those who didn’t. The appeals court appeared to agree with Google’s position, writing that is “an argument which, in our view, may carry some force.”

But the most significant part of the ruling is that Chin must now directly rule on whether Google’s activities are “fair use” — a four-part test that looks at issues like the purpose of the copying and its effect on market sales. Google has long argued that its scanning of more than 20 million books has not hurt authors, but helps to make forgotten or hard-to-find works available to larger audience.

The new ruling also creates a political issues among the judges due to the fact that Judge Chin is now on the Second Circuit too (but continues to have the original Google case as a holdover from his time as a District judge). Monday’s unanimous ruling amounts to a challenge of sorts from his colleagues, who include Judge Pierre Leval, a noted fair use scholar.

Finally, the new ruling raises questions on how much longer the Authors Guild is willing to continue the expensive litigation. The appeals court’s decision to decertify the class action likely crushes the Guild’s hopes of a big settlement payoff; meanwhile, the Guild has also suffered setbacks in a parallel lawsuit known as “HathiTrust” that involves a copyright suit against university libraries.

Update: Google stated by email: “We are delighted by the court’s decision. The investment we have made in Google Books benefits readers and writers alike, helping unlock the great pool of knowledge contained in millions of books.” We’re still waiting for a statement from the Guild.

Here’s a copy of the ruling:

2nd Circ Google
http://paidcontent.org/2013/07/01/ap...le-books-case/





For the First Time, You Can Actually Own the Digital Comics You Buy
Laura Hudson

If you’ve ever bought a digital comic book, your experience probably went something like this: You opened up an app like ComiXology, paid around $1.99 to $3.99 — likely, the same price as a print issue — but never downloaded the file for the comic to your hard drive. That’s because you don’t really own it — you’ve simply licensed the right to look at it in someone else’s library.

It’s a digital sales model that has been adopted by every major U.S. comics publisher — and most e-book publishers as well — and was inspired by fears that piracy of digital copies could hurt not just digital but also print sales. It has also essentially prevented the comic book readership (or at least, the legal comic book readership) from truly owning any of the books they buy. At least until this morning, when comic book publisher Image Comics announced at its Image Expo convention that it will now sell all of its digital comics as downloadable via its website for both desktop and mobile users, making it the first major U.S. publisher to offer DRM-free digital versions of comics. Readers can even choose the file format they prefer: PDFs, EPUBs, CBRs or CBZs.

“My stance on piracy is that piracy is bad for bad entertainment,” Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson told Wired in an exclusive interview. “There’s a pretty strong correlation with things that suck not being greatly pirated, while things that are successful have a higher piracy rate. If you put out a good comic book, even if somebody does download it illegally, if they enjoy it then the likelihood of them purchasing the book is pretty high. Obviously we don’t want everybody giving a copy to a hundred friends, but this argument has been around since home taping was supposedly killing music back in the ’70s, and that didn’t happen. And I don’t think it’s happening now.”

And while Image comic books will still be offered for sale on ComiXology, iBooks, and every other platform where they were previously available, Image’s Director of Business Development Ron Richards says that offering the direct-to-consumer downloads is important. “There’s something to be said for the ownership factor. If readers purchase a book on ComiXology, that may be their library [on the service] but from what I understand that could be revoked. And God forbid, if ComiXology goes under or their data center has an earthquake all their hard drives go away — then you’ve got nothing.”

Indeed, there have been several snafus so far that have illustrated the limitations of ComiXology’s model of digital sales. In March, a server crash caused by massive demand for a Marvel Comics promotion not only shut down sales of new comics, but also user access to the reader and any comics stored in the cloud. In April, ComiXology refused to submit an issue of Brian K. Vaughan’s popular Image comic Saga to Apple’s iOS store based on its sexual content, and later removed 56 other comics for content issues. Other comics have been “pulled back” after they were purchased by readers and locked until a later date.

Image, whose comics include The Walking Dead and Saga, is currently the third-largest comics publisher after the “Big Two” superhero companies Marvel and DC, and has a long history of breaking away from the corporate model of doing business. Founded in 1992 by a group of high-profile comics creators who wanted to keep the rights to their work, Image remains a publisher of creator-owned content — meaning writers and artists get to keep the rights to their work — rather than the work-for-hire model that dominates mainstream comics, where creators typically receive no further royalties. This distinction, which sits at the heart of the most contentious legal and ethical issues within the industry, has made Image an attractive home for the original work of numerous A-list superhero writers and artists.

But despite Image’s history of innovation — and thumbing its nose at the corporate status quo — its decision was informed not just by ideas but by data. Despite the industry’s initial fears that digital comics would hurt print sales, or disrupt the fragile balance of the direct market in comic book shops, the exponential growth of digital sales hasn’t hurt print — and may have even helped it.

“Over the last several years, we’ve learned the answer to the big question, and guess what: Digital comics have not destroyed the industry. Digital has shown tremendous growth, but we’ve also seen growth in the direct market and the book market,” said Richards. “If you look at other publishers, they’re seeing the same thing.”

Image has the statistics to back it up — and even more surprising in an industry where publishers have been notoriously cagey about providing data about digital sales, actually shared them. Although the publisher only started selling digital comics in 2009, digital sales now make up more than 11 percent of the company’s overall revenue, and is currently projecting sales of 15 percent by the end of 2013. Image’s best-selling comic, The Walking Dead, sees 22 percent of its sales in digital. And when measured solely against print comics sold in the direct market at comic book stores, digital makes up 27 percent of revenue.

Digital comics has transformed from a threat to a boon, a new channel for sales that not only serves existing readers in new ways but opens to the door to a different and far larger audience than brick and mortar stores. “There’s a lot more potential for outreach with digital comics,” said Stephenson. “I mean, how many comic stores are there? Maybe 2,000 or 2,500 in the United States? There are more radio stations than that. If you’re trying to convince casual [and new] customers to find comics, we’d be better off selling to radio stations than comic book stores.”

Still, says Stephenson, it may take time for certain calcified ideas within the industry to change, particularly regarding digital comics and piracy. “Piracy is not going to stop; everybody’s doing a completely ineffectual job of stopping it now, and I don’t think that this is going to add to it… Now that the technology has caught up to us, then the attitudes and the opinions [in the industry] have to catch up as well. And that takes time, because it’s a shift in the paradigm. There are a lot of people who still don’t quite understand it.”

The Image Comics website, which relaunched today with its new DRM-free offerings, will focus initially on releasing new comics and best-selling series like The Walking Dead, with more of the back catalog to be added as time goes on. And while the new downloadable format will not retroactively be available for Image comics purchased on other apps like ComiXology or iBooks at the time of the launch, Richards says it’s something they’re looking into.

But for any comics that readers buy directly from Image moving forward, the model is simple. “As long as you purchased them, they won’t go away,” said Richards. “If you bought it, you own it.”
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/...ownload-image/





The Easiest Way in the World to Share Files P2P – and How it Works
Andy

There are dozens of ways to share files on the Internet but one site has made it so simple that anyone with a Firefox or Chrome browser can share content in seconds. In fact, Sharefest is so simple there’s barely anything to talk about, but behind the scenes it’s a different matter. TorrentFreak caught up with its creators for the lowdown on their super-simple, drag-and-drop, BitTorrent-like swarming system.

Sharing files is now something that many Internet users do on a daily basis, whether that’s documents, images or video.

There are plenty of ways to distribute those files, such as via email, public file-hosting sites, Dropbox-like operations, BitTorrent…the list goes on.

But what if all of those options – even email – are just too complicated?

Sharefest is without doubt the most simple way to share files available today. Fire up the Sharefest website and drag a file to the middle of the page. A link will appear – paste that to as many people as you like. Wait for the transfer to complete. Done.

Simplicity aside, what’s so neat about Sharefest is the technology going on behind the scenes.

Sharefest operates on a mesh network similar to BitTorrent and all transfers are executed peer-to-peer. Files can be shared with many people at once and the technology can swarm to speed up transfers, just like BitTorrent. It’s Open Source and apart from Chrome or Firefox, no additional software is required.

TorrentFreak caught up with Hadar Weiss from Peer5, the outfit behind the project, for the lowdown. Weiss says that the key is bringing file-sharing to the web.

“We are fascinated with the potential of P2P communication within the browser,” Weiss explains.

“We think that P2P is very powerful and there are great implementations such as BitTorrent. But P2P can reach its full potential only when it reaches the Web. Until then, it’s not really for the mainstream. For example, we like to ask ourselves, why can’t my mother use P2P filesharing? The answer, (we believe) is in a user friendly web technology.”

Sharefest uses WebRTC, a technology that can enable browser-to-browser communications such as file-sharing and video/chat applications without need for a plug-in. The technology is present in the latest Chrome and Firefox browsers.

“People talk a lot about the WebRTC revolution, and they mostly refer to the audiovisual world. We believe the change is bigger and that we will see many web applications that use the WebRTC Data API for things other than audio or video. Many of them would need a ‘BitTorrent-like’ many-to-many system, and that’s what we build.

“Sharefest actually started just as the canonical example for many-to-many sharing that uses our technology. We wanted to Open Source some of the stuff we developed at Peer5, and file-sharing was the coolest use-case,” Weiss says.

So, using a real-world example in which I want to share a 250MB video with half a dozen friends, how does that work behind the scenes? Presumably there’s a BitTorrent-like tracker to coordinate transfers among peers who swarm to share the data and speed up downloads?

“There’s a swarming technique, and mesh networking. Meaning that any peer can be connected to number of different peers and can send and receive data. So if there are six others, you might be connected to all of them, or just one,” says Weiss.

“The tracker decides who is connected to you, depending on many parameters (we call it the matching algorithm). The most trivial is what blocks you have. Two peers with roughly the same blocks are rarely connected. Geography, ISP, available bandwidth are also important factors of course, and we will put even more in the future. The nice part, because it is server based, is that peers discover each other very quickly.”

Interestingly, Weiss says that the Sharefest tracker doesn’t need to know the IP addresses of peers.

“To match two peers, the tracker sends the relevant peers a message through a WebSocket channel. They then start a standard WebRTC handshake – SDPs which describe the local peer capabilities are sent through the server, and they start talking with the STUN server. The STUN server help the two peers create the real P2P connection, overcoming firewalls and NATs,” Weiss adds.

Also, Sharefest peers are able to discriminate in a way similar to BitTorrent peers, taking more data from better performing peers while taking less from others.

Sharefest is a work-in-progress and will have more features added over time. One that we’d really like to see is the ability to resume partially completed uploads. Weiss told us that this feature is not only in the works, but just about to be released. Perfect.

Sharefest is available here – why not give it a spin with a few friends?
https://torrentfreak.com/the-easiest...-works-130706/

Ongoing discussion at Hacker News – Jack.





Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers
Ernesto

Following the introduction of restrictions against file-sharing services, Mastercard and Visa have now started to take action against VPN providers. This week, Swedish payment provider Payson cut access to anonymizing services after being ordered to do so by the credit card companies. VPN provider iPredator is one of the affected customers and founder Peter Sunde says that they are considering legal action to get the service unblocked.

Payment providers are increasingly taking action against sites and services that are linked to copyright infringement.

There’s an unwritten rule that Mastercard and Visa don’t accept file-hosting sites that have an affiliate program and PayPal has thrown out nearly all cyberlockers in recent months.

It now turns out that these policies have carried over to VPN providers and other anonymizing services. Before the weekend customers of the popular Swedish payment service provider Payson received an email stating that VPN services are no longer allowed to accept Visa and Mastercard payments due to a recent policy change.

“Payson has restrictions against anonymization (including VPN services). As a result Payson can unfortunately no longer give your customers the option to finance payments via their cards (VISA or MasterCard),” the email states, adding that they still accept bank transfers as deposits.

The new policy went into effect on Monday, leaving customers with a two-day window to find a solution.

While the email remains vague about why this drastic decision was taken, in a telephone call Payson confirmed that it was complying with an urgent requirement from Visa and Mastercard to stop accepting payments for VPN services.

One of these customers is the iPredator VPN, launched by Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and friends. Sunde tells TorrentFreak that he is baffled by the decision, which he believes may be an effort to prevent the public from covering their tracks online and preventing government spying.

“It means that US companies are forcing non-American companies not to allow people to protest their privacy and be anonymous, and thus the NSA can spy even more. It’s just INSANE,” Sunde says.

Sunde explains that iPredator will always have plenty of other payment options, but sees it as an outrage that Mastercard and Visa have apparently decided to ban a perfectly legal technology.

“For iPredator there are always other payment methods, like Bitcoin, but it’s insane to censor a totally legit system that is there to avoid censorship and surveillance,” Sunde says.

Despite these alternatives, Sunde is not going to stand idly by. He informs TorrentFreak that Ipredator considering taking legal action, citing the Wikileaks win against the credit card companies as a favorable precedent.

Ipredator is far from the only VPN provider that is affected by the policy change. Anonine, Mullvad, VPNTunnel, Privatvpn and several others are also using Payson’s services.

At this point it’s unclear why the two companies are taking a stand against anonymizing services. It seems likely that an industry or authority has been pushing for the policy change behind the scenes. However, with privacy high on the agenda with the PRISM scandal, the move comes at an odd time.

TorrentFreak has reached out to Mastercard and Visa but we have yet to hear back from the companies. We are not aware of any other payment service providers who have taken action against VPN providers, so the scope of the actions are unknown at this point.
https://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-...viders-130703/





Encryption Has Foiled Wiretaps for First Time Ever, Feds Say
David Kravets

For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps, U.S. officials said today.

The disclosure, buried in a report by the U.S. agency that oversees federal courts, also showed that authorities armed with wiretap orders are encountering more encryption than before.

The revelation comes as encryption has come front and center in the wake of the NSA Spygate scandal, and as Americans consider looking for effective ways to scramble their communications from the government’s prying eyes.

According to today’s report from the U.S. Administrative Office of the Courts:

Encryption was reported for 15 wiretaps in 2012 and for 7 wiretaps conducted during previous years. In four of these wiretaps, officials were unable to decipher the plain text of the messages. This is the first time that jurisdictions have reported that encryption prevented officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications since the AO began collecting encryption data in 2001.

Those figures are just a blip on the screen in the office’s 2012 Wiretap Report, which said there were 3,395 authorized wiretaps from federal or state judges. (The figures, a significant increase from 2011′s reported 2,732, do not account for those secretly authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is at the center of the Spygage firestorm.)

To be sure, the encryption numbers begin to highlight the government’s stated fear, and its propaganda railing against encryption — which is a standard feature on today’s Apple computers.

Consider that, when federal law enforcement officials were clamoring for legislation authorizing a backdoor into most all electronic communication methods during the President Bill Clinton administration, FBI Director Louis Freeh told Congress in 1997, “all of law enforcement is also in total agreement on one aspect of encryption. The widespread use of uncrackable encryption will devastate our ability to fight crime and prevent terrorism.”

Sixteen years later, and judging by the government’s own accounting, we’re not even close to Freeh’s fears becoming reality, despite the government’s continued push for a backdoor into virtually everything.

The report, meanwhile, said that 97 percent of the wiretaps issued last year were for “portable devices” such as mobile phones and pagers. About 87 percent of the wiretaps were issued in drug-related cases, the report said. Other equipment tapped included computers, phone land lines, fax machines and, among other things, microphones.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...iled-wiretaps/





Secret Court Declassifies Yahoo’s Role in Disclosure Fight
Claire Cain Miller and Nicole Perlroth

Yahoo’s lawyers filed a motion earlier this month for the secret court that authorizes national security surveillance requests to publish records related to a 2008 case in which Yahoo was involved.Robert Galbraith/Reuters Yahoo’s lawyers filed a motion earlier this month for the secret court that authorizes national security surveillance requests to publish records related to a 2008 case in which Yahoo was involved.

In the secret court that authorizes national security surveillance requests, everything is considered confidential — even the existence of communications between companies and the court. But this week, the court drew back the curtain slightly, declassifying the fact that Yahoo was the company that fought the court in a momentous case in 2008.

In an article on June 13, The New York Times identified Yahoo as the petitioner in the secret court case, which paved the way for the government to force Internet companies to hand over information about foreigners to the National Security Agency‘s Prism program, authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The court used a heavily redacted version of the decision by the FISA court of review, published in 2008 without Yahoo’s name, to warn other companies that they need not even try to test the legality of FISA requests.

The day after The Times ran the story, Yahoo’s lawyers filed a motion for the secret court to publish records related to the case, including Yahoo’s name.

They argued that the release was “now in the public interest” as a result of the current debate about surveillance and material that the government had recently declassified. This week, the government agreed.

The FISA court also agreed to make public a redacted version of the original decision that prompted Yahoo to appeal at the court of review.

Yahoo fought a part of FISA known as the Protect America Act, elements of which were folded into a 2008 amendment to FISA. Yahoo argued, unsuccessfully, that broad, warrantless Internet surveillance violated the Constitution. Yahoo appealed at the secret court of review, and that court also ruled against Yahoo, writing in its decision that “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/0...closure-fight/





New NSA Leaks Show How US is Bugging its European Allies

Exclusive: Edward Snowden papers reveal 38 targets including EU, France and Italy

Berlin accuses Washington of cold war tactics
Ewen MacAskill in Rio de Janeiro and Julian Borger

US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.

Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of targets includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states.

One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which, according to a 2007 document, is "implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC" – an apparent reference to a bug placed in a commercially available encrypted fax machine used at the mission. The NSA documents note the machine is used to send cables back to foreign affairs ministries in European capitals.

The documents suggest the aim of the bugging exercise against the EU embassy in central Washington is to gather inside knowledge of policy disagreements on global issues and other rifts between member states.

The new revelations come at a time when there is already considerable anger across the EU over earlier evidence provided by Snowden of NSA eavesdropping on America's European allies.

Germany's justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, demanded an explanation from Washington, saying that if confirmed, US behaviour "was reminiscent of the actions of enemies during the cold war".

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported at the weekend that some of the bugging operations in Brussels targeting the EU's Justus Lipsius building – a venue for summit and ministerial meetings in the Belgian capital – were directed from within Nato headquarters nearby.

The US intelligence service codename for the bugging operation targeting the EU mission at the United Nations is "Perdido". Among the documents leaked by Snowden is a floor plan of the mission in midtown Manhattan. The methods used against the mission include the collection of data transmitted by implants, or bugs, placed inside electronic devices, and another covert operation that appears to provide a copy of everything on a targeted computer's hard drive.

The eavesdropping on the EU delegation to the US, on K Street in Washington, involved three different operations targeted on the embassy's 90 staff. Two were electronic implants and one involved the use of antennas to collect transmissions.

Although the latest documents are part of an NSA haul leaked by Snowden, it is not clear in each case whether the surveillance was being exclusively done by the NSA – which is most probable as the embassies and missions are technically overseas – or by the FBI or the CIA, or a combination of them. The 2010 document describes the operation as "close access domestic collection".

The operation against the French mission to the UN had the covername "Blackfoot" and the one against its embassy in Washington was "Wabash". The Italian embassy in Washington was known to the NSA as both "Bruneau" and "Hemlock".

The eavesdropping of the Greek UN mission was known as "Powell" and the operation against its embassy was referred to as "Klondyke".

Snowden, the 30-year-old former NSA contractor and computer analyst whose leaks have ignited a global row over the extent of US and UK electronic surveillance, fled from his secret bolthole in Hong Kong a week ago. His plan seems to have been to travel to Ecuador via Moscow, but he is in limbo at Moscow airport after his US passport was cancelled, and without any official travel documents issued from any other country.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...uropean-allies





How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe
Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach, Fidelius Schmid, Holger Stark and Jonathan Stock

Top secret documents detail the mass scope of efforts by the United States to spy on Germany and Europe. Each month, the NSA monitors a half a billion communications and EU buildings are bugged. The scandal poses a threat to trans-Atlantic relations.

At first glance, the story always appears to be the same. A needle has disappeared into the haystack -- information lost in a sea of data.

For some time now, though, it appears America's intelligence services have been trying to tackle the problem from a different angle. "If you're looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack," says Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff to ex-CIA head Leon Panetta.

An enormous haystack it turns out -- one comprised of the billions of minutes of daily cross-border telephone traffic. Add to that digital streams from high-bandwidth Internet cables that transport data equivalent to that held in Washington's Library of Congress around the world in the course of a few seconds. And then add to that the billions of emails sent to international destinations each day -- a world of entirely uncontrolled communication. And also a world full of potential threats -- at least from the intelligence services' perspective. Those are the "challenges," an internal statement at the National Security Agency (NSA), the American signals intelligence organization, claims.

Four-star General Keith Alexander -- who is today the NSA director and America's highest-ranking cyber warrior as the chief of the US Cyber Command -- defined these challenges. Given the cumulative technological eavesdropping capacity, he asked during a 2008 visit to Menwith Hill, Britain's largest listening station near Harrogate in Yorkshire, "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time?"

All the signals all the time. Wouldn't that be the NSA's ideal haystack? So what would the needle be? A trail to al-Qaida, an industrial facility belonging to an enemy state, plans prepared by international drug dealers or even international summit preparations being made by leading politicians of friendly nations? Whatever the target, it would be determined on a case by case basis. What is certain, however, is that there would always be a haystack.

A Fiasco for the NSA

Just how close America's NSA got to this dream in cozy cooperation with other Western intelligence services has been exposed in recent weeks by a young American who, going by outward appearances, doesn't look much like the hero he is being celebrated as around the world by people who feel threatened by America's enormous surveillance apparatus.

The whole episode is a fiasco for the NSA which, in contrast to the CIA, has long been able to conduct its spying without drawing much public attention. Snowden has done "irreversible and significant damage" to US national security, Alexander told ABC a week ago. Snowden's NSA documents contain more than one or two scandals. They are a kind of digital snapshot of the world's most powerful intelligence agency's work over a period of around a decade. SPIEGEL has seen and reviewed a series of documents from the archive.

The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.

No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as "top secret" states that, "The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do."

'We Can, and Often Do Target Signals'

For all other countries, including the group of around 30 nations that are considered to be 3rd party partners, however, this protection does not apply. "We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners," the NSA boasts in an internal presentation.

According to the listing, Germany is among the countries that are the focus of surveillance. Thus, the documents confirm what had already been suspected for some time in government circles in Berlin -- that the US intelligence service, with approval from the White House, is spying on the Germans -- possibly right up to the level of the chancellor. So it comes as little surprise that the US has used every trick in the book to spy on the Washington offices of the European Union, as one document viewed by SPIEGEL indicates.

But the new aspect of the revelations isn't that countries are trying to spy on each other, eavesdropping on ministers and conducting economic espionage. What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance. Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.

The documents show that, in this situation, the services did what is not only obvious, but also anchored in German law: They exchanged information. And they worked together extensively. That applies to the British and the Americans, but also to the BND, which assists the NSA in its Internet surveillance.

Unimaginable Dimensions

SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing the related internal code words. However, this does not apply to information about the general surveillance of communications. They don't endanger any human lives -- they simply describe a system whose dimensions go beyond the imaginable. This kind of global debate is actually precisely what Snowden intended and what motivated his breach of secrecy. "The public needs to decide whether these policies are right or wrong," he says.

The facts, which are now a part of the public record thanks to Snowden, disprove the White House's line of defense up until now, which has been that the surveillance is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, as President Barack Obama said during his recent visit to Berlin. NSA chief Alexander has sought to justify himself by saying that the NSA has prevented 10 terrorist attacks in the United States alone. Globally, he says that 50 terrorist plots have been foiled with the NSA's help. That may be true, but it is difficult to verify and at best only part of the truth.

Research in Berlin, Brussels and Washington, as well as the documents that have been reviewed by the journalists at this publication, reveal how overreaching the US surveillance has been.

Germany, for its part, has a central role in this global spying system. As the Guardian newspaper, which is working together with Snowden, recently revealed, the NSA has developed a program for the incoming streams of data called "Boundless Informant." The program is intended to process connection data from all incoming telephone calls in "near real time," as one document states. It doesn't record the contents of the call, just the metadata -- in other words, the phone numbers involved in the communication.

It is precisely the kind of data retention that has been the subject of bitter debate in Germany for years. In 2010, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe even banned the practice.

"Boundless Informant" produces heat maps of countries in which the data collected by the NSA originates. The most closely monitored regions are located in the Middle East, followed by Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The latter two are marked in red on the NSA's map of the world. Germany, the only country in Europe on the map, is shown in yellow, a sign of considerable spying.

Spying on the European Union

An NSA table, published for the first time here by SPIEGEL, documents the massive amount of information captured from the monitored data traffic. According to the graph, on an average day last December, the agency gathered metadata from some 15 million telephone connections and 10 million Internet datasets. On Dec. 24, it collected data on around 13 million phone calls and about half as many Internet connections.

On the busiest days, such as Jan. 7 of this year, the information gathered spiked to nearly 60 million communications processes under surveillance. The Americans are collecting metadata from up to half a billion communications a month in Germany -- making the country one of the biggest sources of streams of information flowing into the agency's gigantic sea of data.

Another look at the NSA's data hoard shows how much less information the NSA is taking from countries like France and Italy. In the same period, the agency recorded data from an average of around 2 million connections, and about 7 million on Christmas Eve. In Poland, which is also under surveillance, the numbers varied between 2 million and 4 million in the first three weeks of December.

But the NSA's work has little to do with classic eavesdropping. Instead, it's closer to a complete structural acquisition of data. Believing that less can be extrapolated from such metadata than from intercepted communication content would be a mistake, though. It's a gold mine for investigators, because it shows not only contact networks, but also enables the creation of movement profiles and even predictions about the possible behavior of the people participating in the communication under surveillance.

According to insiders familiar with the German portion of the NSA program, the main interest is in a number of large Internet hubs in western and southern Germany. The secret NSA documents show that Frankfurt plays an important role in the global network, and the city is named as a central base in the country. From there, the NSA has access to Internet connections that run not only to countries like Mali or Syria, but also to ones in Eastern Europe. Much suggests that the NSA gathers this data partly with and without Germany's knowledge, although the individual settings by which the data is filtered and sorted have apparently been discussed. By comparison, the "Garlick" system, with which the NSA monitored satellite communication out of the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling for years, seems modest. The NSA listening station at Bad Aibling was at the center of the German debate over America's controversial Echelon program and alleged industrial espionage during the 1990s.

The relationship between the US and Germany has traditionally been "as close as it could be," American journalist and NSA expert James Bamford recently told German weekly Die Zeit. "Due to the close proximity to the Soviet Union, we probably had more surveillance stations in Germany than anywhere else."

Such foreign partnerships, one document states, provide "unique target access."

'Privacy of Telecommunications' Is 'Inviolable'

But the US does not share the results of the surveillance with all of these foreign partners, the document continues. In many cases, equipment and technical support are offered in exchange for the signals accessed. Often the agency will offer equipment, training and technical support to gain access to its desired targets. These "arrangements" are typically bilateral and made outside of any military and civil relationships the US might have with these countries, one top secret document shows. This international division of labor seems to violate Article 10 of Germany's constitution, the Basic Law, which guarantees that "the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable" and can only be suspended in narrowly defined exceptions.

"Any analyst can target anyone anytime," Edward Snowden said in his video interview, and that includes a federal judge or the president, if an email address is available, he added.

Just how unscrupulously the US government allows its intelligence agencies to act is documented by a number of surveillance operations that targeted the European Union in Brussels and Washington, for which it has now become clear that the NSA was responsible.

A little over five years ago, security experts discovered that a number of odd, aborted phone calls had been made around a certain extension within the Justus Lipsius building, the headquarters of the European Council, the powerful body representing the leaders of the EU's 27 member states. The calls were all made to numbers close to the one used as the remote servicing line of the Siemens telephone system used in the building. Officials in Brussels asked the question: How likely is it that a technician or service computer would narrowly misdial the service extension a number of times? They traced the origin of the calls -- and were greatly surprised by what they found. It had come from a connection just a few kilometers away in the direction of the Brussels airport, in the suburb of Evere, where NATO headquarters is located.

The EU security experts managed to pinpoint the line's exact location -- a building complex separated from the rest of the headquarters. From the street, it looks like a flat-roofed building with a brick facade and a large antenna on top. The structure is separated from the street by a high fence and a privacy shield, with security cameras placed all around. NATO telecommunications experts -- and a whole troop of NSA agents -- work inside. Within the intelligence community, this place is known as a sort of European headquarters for the NSA.

A review of calls made to the remote servicing line showed that it was reached several times from exactly this NATO complex -- with potentially serious consequences. Every EU member state has rooms at the Justus Lipsius building for use by ministers, complete with telephone and Internet connections.

Unscrupulous in Washington

The NSA appears to be even more unscrupulous on its home turf. The EU's diplomatic delegation to the United States is located in an elegant office building on Washington's K Street. But the EU's diplomatic protection apparently doesn't apply in this case. As parts of one NSA document seen by SPIEGEL indicate, the NSA not only bugged the building, but also infiltrated its internal computer network. The same goes for the EU mission at the United Nations in New York. The Europeans are a "location target," a document from Sept. 2010 states. Requests to discuss these matters with both the NSA and the White House went unanswered.

Now a high-level commission of experts, agreed upon by European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding and US Attorney General Eric Holder, is to determine the full scope of the routine data snooping and discuss the legal protection possibilities for EU citizens. A final report is expected to be released in October.

The extent of the NSA's systematic global surveillance network is highlighted in an overview from Fort Meade, the agency's headquarters. It describes a number of secret operations involving the surveillance of Internet and international data traffic. "In the Information Age, (the) NSA aggressively exploits foreign signals traveling complex global networks," an internal description states.

Details in a further, previously unpublished document reveal exactly what takes place there. It describes how the NSA received access to an entire bundle of fiber-optic cables, which have a data-transfer capacity of several gigabytes per second. It is one of the Internet's larger superhighways. The paper indicates that access to the cables is a relatively recent development and includes Internet backbone circuits, "including several that service the Russian market." Technicians in Fort Meade are able to access "thousands of trunk groups connected worldwide," according to the document. In a further operation, the intelligence organization is able to monitor a cable that collects data flows from the Middle East, Europe, South America and Asia (see graphic).

But it is not just intelligence agencies from allied nations that have willingly aided the NSA. Revelations related to the Prism program make it clear that agents likewise access vast quantity of data from US Internet companies.

NSA 'Alliances With Over 80 Major Global Corporations'

Heads of these companies have vociferously denied that the NSA has direct access to their data. But it would seem that, outside of the Prism program, dozens of companies have willingly worked together with the US intelligence agency.

According to the documents seen by SPIEGEL, a particularly valuable partner is a company which is active in the US and has access to information that crisscrosses America. At the same time, this company, by virtue of its contacts, offers "unique access to other telecoms and (Internet service providers)." The company is "aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors," according to a secret NSA document. The cooperation has existed since 1985, the documents say.

Apparently, it's not an isolated case, either. A further document clearly demonstrates the compliance of a number of different companies. There are "alliances with over 80 major global corporations supporting both missions," according to a paper that is marked top secret. In NSA jargon, "both missions" refers to defending networks in the US, on the one hand, and monitoring networks abroad, on the other. The companies involved include telecommunications firms, producers of network infrastructure, software companies and security firms.

Such cooperation is an extremely delicate issue for the companies involved. Many have promised their customers data confidentiality in their terms and conditions. Furthermore, they are obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which they do business. As such, their cooperation deals with the NSA are top secret. Even in internal NSA documents, they are only referred to using code names.

There have long been very close and very secret relationships between many telecommunications companies and the NSA, explains Bamford, the expert on the NSA. Each time partnerships like this are revealed, he continues, they are ended for a short time only to be resumed again later anew.

The importance of this rather peculiar form of public-private partnership was recently made clear by General Alexander, the NSA chief. At a technology symposium in a Washington, DC, suburb in May, he said that industry and government must work closely together. "As great as we have it up there, we cannot do it without your help," he said. "You know, we can't do our mission without the great help of all the great people here." If one believes the documents, several experts were sitting in the audience from companies that had reached a cooperation deal with the NSA.

In the coming weeks, details relating to the collaboration between Germany's BND and the NSA will be the focus of a parliamentary investigative committee in Berlin responsible for monitoring the intelligence services. The German government has sent letters to the US requesting additional information. The questions that need to be addressed are serious. Can a sovereign state tolerate a situation in which half a billion pieces of data are stolen on its territory each month from a foreign country? And can this be done especially when this country has identified the sovereign state as a "3rd party foreign partner" and, as such, one that can be spied on at any time, as has now become clear?

So far, the German government has made nothing more than polite inquiries. But facts that have now come to light will certainly increase pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government. Elections, after all, are only three months away, and Germans -- as Merkel well knows -- are particularly sensitive when it comes to data privacy.

The NSA's Library of Babel

In a story written by the blind writer Jorge Luis Borges, the Library of Babel is introduced as perhaps the most secretive of all labyrinths: a universe full of bookshelves connected by a spiral staircase that has no beginning and no end. Those inside wander through the library looking for the book of books. They grow old inside without ever finding it.

If an actual building could really approach this imaginary library, it is the structure currently being erected in the Utah mountains near the city of Bluffdale. There, on Redwood Road, stands a sign with black letters on a white background next to a freshly paved road. Restricted area, no access, it reads. In Defense Department documents, form No. 1391, page 134, the buildings behind the sign are given the project No. 21078. It refers to the Utah Data Center, four huge warehouses full of servers costing a total of €1.2 billion ($1.56 billion).

Built by a total of 11,000 workers, the facility is to serve as a storage center for everything that is captured in the US data dragnet. It has a capacity that will soon have to be measured in yottabytes, which is 1 trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes. Standard external hard drives sold in stores have a capacity of about 1 terabyte. Fifteen such hard drives could store the entire contents of the Library of Congress.

The man who first made information about the Utah center public, and who likely knows the most about the NSA, is James Bamford. He says: "The NSA is the largest, most expensive and most powerful intelligence agency in the world."

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the NSA's workforce has steadily grown and its budget has constantly increased. SPIEGEL was able to see confidential figures relating to the NSA that come from Snowden's documents, though the statistics are from 2006. In that year, 15,986 members of the military and 19,335 civilians worked for the NSA, which had an annual budget of $6.115 billion. These numbers and more recent statistics are officially confidential.

In other words, there is a good reason why NSA head Keith Alexander is called "Emporer Alexander." "Keith gets whatever he wants," says Bamford.

Still, Bamford doesn't believe that the NSA completely fulfills the mission it has been tasked with. "I've seen no indications that NSA's vastly expanded surveillance has prevented any terrorist activities," he says. There is, however, one thing that the NSA managed to predict with perfect accuracy: where the greatest danger to its secrecy lies. In internal documents, the agency identifies terrorists and hackers as being particularly threatening. Even more dangerous, however, the documents say, is if an insider decides to blow the whistle.

An insider like Edward Joseph Snowden.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-908609.html





EU to Vote to Suspend U.S. Data Sharing Agreements, Passenger Records Amid NSA Spying Scandal

Summary: The European Parliament will vote — ironically of all days, on U.S. Independence Day on July 4 — whether existing data sharing agreements between the two continents should be suspended, following allegations that U.S. intelligence spied on EU citizens.
Zack Whittaker

The European Parliament will vote on Thursday to adopt a resolution on measures against the U.S. government over the mass surveillance operation conducted by the National Security Agency.

In a plenary sitting in Strasbourg, numerous members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have called for the suspension of EU-U.S. trade talks, which are currently under way, until the picture surrounding the activities of the U.S.' intelligence activities becomes clearer.

Also on the cards is the suspension of crucial EU-U.S. agreements, such as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) and the Passenger Name Records (PNR), which could see flights suspended between the two continents.

The U.S. government has been embroiled in an international diplomatic crisis over its intelligence agencies' spying on foreign nationals. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a number of programs the U.S. employs to acquire masses of data on citizens around the world, including those in the European Union.

The U.K. government was embroiled in the NSA spying saga after it's Cheltenham-based listening station GCHQ was found to have tapped under-sea fiber optic cables, in an operation codenamed Tempora.

EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding told the parliament that she had sent U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague a letter seeking clarification on Tempora.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the European Commission is examining if the U.K. broke EU law, which could lead to an infringement procedure against the British government. This could lead to financial sanctions imposed by the European Court of Justice.

British MEP Sarah Ludford warned that other EU member states "also need to look at their cooperation with the NSA," and noted that Westminster had been "deafeningly silent" on the matter, and hoped the U.K.'s parliamentary committee on security and intelligence "did a better job."

PNR suspension could ground flights between EU, U.S.

In the resolution, submitted to the Parliament on Tuesday, more than two-dozen politicians from a range of political parties call the spying "a serious violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations," and call on the suspension of the Passenger Name Records (PNR) system.

Prior to leaving the airport, airlines must make passenger data available to the U.S. Names, dates of birth, addresses, credit or debit card details and seat numbers are among the data — though critics say the information has never helped catch a suspected criminal or terrorist before.

Should the PNR system be suspended, it could result in the suspension of flights to the U.S. from European member states.

MEPs mixed on suspension of free trade discussions

One of the options available to the EU is to suspend discussions on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, otherwise known as the TTIP, is thought to be worth billions of dollars for both continents on each side of the Atlantic. It will help to eliminate tariffs on trade, and open up the doors to transatlantic partnerships and a boon to the technology and science industries, among other sectors.

German MEP Axel Voss said the Obama administration should be "adequately explained," demanding that the delegations on the TTIP should be suspended, as did French MEP Marie-Christine Vergiat‎, who was one of two MEPs who called on the EU to give Snowden asylum in the 28 member state bloc.

Spanish MEP Juan Fernando López Aguilar, who chairs the European Parliament's Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee, also called on the suspension of the free trade agreement negotiations.

But other MEPs speaking in the Parliament on Wednesday instead suggested the suspension of exchange of data between the two continents.

"The U.S. systematically comes into our homes, our embassies, and our institutions," said Italian MEP Salvatore Iacolino. "But it would be wrong to block EU-U.S. negotiations which have just gotten under way, as this would penalize EU citizens twice over," he noted, instead pointing the figure at the "exchange of data" with the United States.

His comments were in regard to reports in the German media, which claimed EU institutions and embassies in the U.S. had been bugged by U.S. law enforcement.

Dutch MEP Sophie in 't Veld, a strong advocate of privacy and data protection rights in the EU, said she was against suspending the trade talks, but said the EU should make it "absolutely clear we cannot sign an agreement with a partner we cannot fully trust."

She told her colleagues: "I do not want to hear the argument of national security anymore," she added. "Sorry, bugging the EU offices in Washington is a matter of 'national security'? Blanket surveillance of millions of innocent citizens is a matter of 'national security'? I do not buy that anymore."

A number of MEPs specifically called on U.S. President Barack Obama to meet with the Parliament to explain his government's actions. PRISM began during President George W. Bush's administration after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
EU justice chief: Citizen redress, or no deal

Reding, in spite of the parliamentary resolution on deck for an upcoming, she will not sign off on an "umbrella agreement" between the U.S. and the EU, a decision that was met with a round of applause for the European vice-president.

The agreement is designed to make it much easier for the U.S. and EU to share data that will cover future transfer arrangements for anti-terror operations between the two continents, from banking data and passenger name records, for instance.

Citing reciprocity between the two continents, "some progress was made on around half of the provisions," she told members on Wednesday.

"But it is now time to address key issues on the equal rights of EU and U.S. citizens, and effective judicial redress," Reding said. "I can not understand why a U.S. citizen has the right to redress in the EU, but an EU citizen does not have the right to redress in the U.S. We continue to negotiate because I keep that on the table. If we had given up that right, we would have already signed the agreement."

"And I will not sign the agreement so long as we do not have the reciprocity. And as long as we have not found the solutions in accordance with EU law on difficult issues, such as data retention."
http://www.zdnet.com/eu-to-vote-to-s...al-7000017635/





PRISM Fallout Could Cost US Cloud Industry Billions, Warns Europe's Digital Chief

Summary: US cloud service providers could miss out on business from EU firms because of anger of US government surveillance programmes, warns the EU's digital chief.
Nick Heath

US cloud providers could miss out on billions of Euros-worth of deals as a result of European concerns around US government surveillance programmes, the EU's digital chief has warned.

Revelations about the PRISM surveillance project, and other initiatives allowing the US government to access data held by American tech firms, could damage willingness by EU firms to host data with US cloud providers, said Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda.

"If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out," Kroes said at the meeting of the European Cloud Partnership Board in Tallin, Estonia.

"Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally, and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.

"If European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government or their assurances, then maybe they won't trust US cloud providers either. That is my guess. And if I am right then there are multi-billion euro consequences for American companies."

Kroes warned US cloud providers could fall foul of future European regulation designed to limit EU firms' ability to use cloud providers that didn't meet "security guarantees".

European cloud service providers should take advantage of concerns about data security and "provide services with better privacy protection", she said.

"The cloud has a lot of potential. But potential doesn't count for much in an atmosphere of distrust. European cloud users and, American cloud providers and policy makers need to think carefully about that," she said.

In Kroes' speech questioning US cloud service providers data security, she didn't mention the impact large-scale surveillance projects run by EU member states would have on the data security of EU cloud service providers.

In recent weeks it has been reported that the UK's intelligence agency GCHQ is tapping undersea internet fibre links and French authorities are running a programme to collect and store metadata from internet traffic "for years".

On Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a joint, cross-party resolution to begin investigations into widespread surveillance of Europeans by the NSA.
http://www.zdnet.com/prism-fallout-c...ef-7000017712/





France Has its Own PRISM-Like Surveillance Program, Report Suggests
David Meyer

Le Monde says it has exposed a secret scheme, being carried out by the French intelligence service DGSE, that stores metadata for communications inside the country and possibly beyond.

French president François Hollande has been vocal in his objections to the U.S. bugging European institutions but, when the PRISM scandal broke, some criticized him for staying silent – after all, PRISM appears to have sucked in data from people all around the world, including France. Now, if a Le Monde scoop is to be believed, we know why Hollande held back.

The article, published on Thursday, claims that France’s intelligence agency, the DGSE, has its own PRISM-like scheme that collects metadata from communications within the country, as well as those flowing into and out of France. The data is reportedly stored in the DGSE’s basement, where the agency has a supercomputer to chew through it.

Other French intelligence services apparently also have access to this data. The program may be illegal, as French surveillance laws require case-by-case warrants.

France isn’t the only European country whose clandestine espionage activities have been exposed post-PRISM. Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a British program called Tempora, which involves the tapping of the internet’s backbone at locations around the world.

At the European level, there is some clear push-back against PRISM. Justice commissioner Viviane Reding said on Wednesday that her first list of questions to the U.S. about the program had not been satisfactorily answered in full, and further questions had since been sent across the Atlantic.

“The fact that the programs are said to relate to national security does not mean that anything goes,” Reding said.

However, the treaties that govern the European Union leave national security in the hands of individual member states, so it’s possible that – even under a revised data protection regime — European lawmakers will have their hands tied if the UK and France decide to legitimize and/or continue with their activities.
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/04/france-...port-suggests/





Beware the Internet and the Danger of Cyberattacks
Robert J. Samuelson

If I could, I would repeal the Internet. It is the technological marvel of the age, but it is not — as most people imagine — a symbol of progress. Just the opposite. We would be better off without it. I grant its astonishing capabilities: the instant access to vast amounts of information, the pleasures of YouTube and iTunes, the convenience of GPS and much more. But the Internet’s benefits are relatively modest compared with previous transformative technologies, and it brings with it a terrifying danger: cyberwar. Amid the controversy over leaks from the National Security Agency, this looms as an even bigger downside.

By cyberwarfare, I mean the capacity of groups — whether nations or not — to attack, disrupt and possibly destroy the institutions and networks that underpin everyday life. These would be power grids, pipelines, communication and financial systems, business record-keeping and supply-chain operations, railroads and airlines, databases of all types (from hospitals to government agencies). The list runs on. So much depends on the Internet that its vulnerability to sabotage invites doomsday visions of the breakdown of order and trust.

In a report, the Defense Science Board, an advisory group to the Pentagon, acknowledged “staggering losses” of information involving weapons design and combat methods to hackers (not identified, but probably Chinese). In the future, hackers might disarm military units. “U.S. guns, missiles and bombs may not fire, or may be directed against our own troops,” the report said. It also painted a specter of social chaos from a full-scale cyberassault. There would be “no electricity, money, communications, TV, radio or fuel (electrically pumped). In a short time, food and medicine distribution systems would be ineffective.”

I don’t know the odds of this technological Armageddon. I doubt anyone does. The fears may be wildly exaggerated, as Thomas Rid of Kings College London argues in his book “Cyber War Will Not Take Place” (already published in Britain, due out this fall in the United States). In living memory, there are many threats that, with hindsight, seemed hyped: the “missile gap” in 1960; the Y2K phenomenon in 2000 (the date change was allegedly going to disable many computer chips); and, so far, the prophecies of widespread terrorism after 9/11.

Still, the Internet creates new avenues for conflict and mayhem. Until now, the motives for hacking — aside from political activists determined to make some point — have mostly involved larceny and business espionage. Among criminals, “the Internet is seen as the easiest, fastest way to make money,” says Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer for Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm. Recently, federal prosecutors alleged that a gang of cyberthieves had stolen $45 million by hacking into databases of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash from ATMs.

Stealing trade secrets likely dwarfs ordinary crime. From its clients, Mandiant identifies four industries as receiving the bulk of attacks: aerospace and defense (31 percent); energy, oil and gas (17 percent); pharmaceuticals (15 percent); and finance (11 percent). Mandiant identified one unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army that allegedly has hacked 141 companies and organizations since 2006, removing “technology blueprints, propriety manufacturing processes, test results, business plans.”

What’s unclear is how “infrastructure” systems (electricity grids and the like) have been penetrated and, on command, might be compromised. In the mid-1980s, most of these systems were self-contained. They relied on dedicated phone lines and private communications networks. They were hard to infiltrate. Since then, many systems switched to the Internet. “It’s cheaper,” says James Andrew Lewis, an Internet expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The architects of these conversions apparently underestimated the risk of sabotage.

As yet, there has been little. One publicized incident occurred in 2012 when hostile software (“malware”) infected an estimated 30,000 computers of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s oil company. Business operations suffered, but oil production and delivery continued. More powerful was the Stuxnet virus, reportedly developed by the United States and Israel to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. The future could be more tumultuous. If the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, Lewis thinks it would retaliate with cyberattacks against banks and electricity networks. Press stories report that Iran has already increased its attacks. There’s a race between cyber offense and defense.

All this qualifies our view of the Internet. Granted, it’s relentless. New uses spread rapidly. Already, 56 percent of U.S. adults own smartphones and 34 percent have tablets, says the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But the Internet’s social impact is shallow. Imagine life without it. Would the loss of e-mail, Facebook or Wikipedia inflict fundamental change? Now imagine life without some earlier breakthroughs: electricity, cars, antibiotics. Life would be radically different. The Internet’s virtues are overstated, its vices understated. It’s a mixed blessing — and the mix may be moving against us.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...f30_story.html





Snowden, in New Statement, Accuses Obama of Using ‘Old, Bad Tools of Political Aggression’
Max Fisher

Edward Snowden, in his first public message since arriving at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport eight days ago, has issued a statement accusing President Obama of deploying “the old, bad tools of political aggression” and “using citizenship as a weapon” in order to silence him. It describes the Obama administration as “afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.”

The message also accuses Vice President Biden of pressuring foreign leaders to deny Snowden’s asylum requests.

Here is Snowden’s statement in full, as it appears on the Wikileaks Web site:

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat from my government for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic “wheeling and dealing” over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America have been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person.

Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.


The official Twitter feed of Wikileaks announced the statement in advance, another sign of the group’s efforts to assist Snowden in finding a country that might shelter him. Sarah Harrison, a researcher with WikiLeaks, reportedly traveled with Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow. News agencies in Russia reported Monday that she had filed an asylum request with Russian officials on behalf of Snowden.

Snowden has been in limbo since arriving at the transit area of Moscow’s airport. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a news conference earlier on Monday, suggested that Snowden could stay in Russia as long as he stopped releasing information damaging to the United States. “There is one condition,” Putin said. “He has to stop his work undermining our U.S. partners, as odd as it may sound coming from me.”

Snowden reportedly sent a letter to President Rafael Correa of Ecuador thanking him for examining his request for asylum there, according to Reuters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ssion/?hpid=z1





Venezuela and Nicaragua Offer Asylum to Edward Snowden

President Maduro offers to protect NSA whistleblower 'from persecution by the empire' and rejects US extradition request

US request for extradition – full text

Jonathan Watts and agencies

Venezuela and Nicaragua have offered asylum to Edward Snowden, the US whistleblower who is believed to have spent the past two weeks at a Moscow airport evading US attempts to extradite him.

The Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his Nicaraguan counterpart, Daneil Ortega, made the asylum offers on Friday, shortly after they and other Latin American leaders met to denounce the diversion of a plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, due to suspicions that Snowden might have been on board.

The invitations came as Snowden sent out new requests for asylum to six countries, in addition to the 20 he has already contacted, according to WikiLeaks, which claims to be in regular contact with the former National Security Agency contractor.

Most of the countries have refused or given technical reasons why an application is not valid, but several Latin American leaders have rallied together with expressions of solidarity and welcome.

"As head of state of the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela, I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the young Snowden … to protect this young man from persecution by the empire," said Maduro who, along with his predecessor Hugo Chávez, often refers to the US as "the empire".

The previous day, Maduro told the Telesur TV channel that Venezuela had received an extradition request from the US, which he had already rejected.

A copy of the request, seen by the Guardian, notes that Snowden "unlawfully released classified information and documents to international media outlets" and names the Guardian and the Washington Post. Dated 3 July and sent in English and Spanish, it says: "The United States seeks Snowden's provisional arrest should Snowden seek to travel to or transit through Venezuela. Snowden is a flight risk because of the substantial charges he is facing and his current and active attempts to remain a fugitive."

It adds that he is charged with unauthorised disclosure of national defence information, unauthorised disclosure of classified communication intelligence and theft of government property. Each of these three charges carries a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment and a fine of $250,000.

Describing Snowden as "a fugitive who is currently in Russia", it urges Venezuela to keep him in custody if arrested and to seize all items in his possession for later delivery to the US. It provides a photograph and two alternative passport numbers – one revoked, and one reported lost or stolen.

Maduro said he did not accept the grounds for the charges.

"He has told the truth, in the spirit of rebellion, about the US spying on the whole world," Maduro said in his latest speech. "Who is the guilty one? A young man … who denounces war plans, or the US government which launches bombs and arms the terrorist Syrian opposition against the people and legitimate president, Bashar al-Assad?"

The Bolivian government, which has said it would listen sympathetically to an aslyum request from Snowden, said it too had turned down a pre-emptive US extradition request.

Ortega said Nicaragua had received an asylum request from Snowden and the president gave a guarded acceptance.

"We are an open country, respectful of the right of asylum, and it's clear that if circumstances permit, we would gladly receive Snowden and give him asylum in Nicaragua," Ortega told a gathering in Managua.

So far, the countries that have been most vocal in offering support are close allies of Venezuela. Ecuador has also expressed support for Snowden, though the government there has yet to decide whether it would grant aslyum. It is already providing refuge for the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for about a year.

Many in Latin America were furious when the Bolivian president's flight from Russia was denied airspace by European countries, forcing it to land in Vienna, where Morales had to spend more than half a day waiting to get clearance to continue his journey.

Morales said the Spanish ambassador to Austria arrived at the airport with two embassy personnel and asked to search the plane. He said he refused.

The Spanish foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, acknowledged on Friday that the decision to block Morales plane was based on a tip that Snowden was on board.

"They told us that the information was clear, that he was inside," he told Spanish TV, without clarifying who the tip was from.

It is assumed the US was behind the diversion, though US officials have said only that they were in contact with the countries on the plane's route.

France has apologised to Bolivia.

Morales said when he finally arrived in La Paz: "It is an open provocation to the continent, not only to the president; they use the agent of North American imperialism to scare us and intimidate us."

At a hastily called meeting of the Unasur regional bloc, many governments condemned the action against Morales plane.

"We are not colonies any more," Uruguay's president, José Mujica, said. "We deserve respect, and when one of our governments is insulted we feel the insult throughout Latin America."

The Argentinean president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was also present, along with a senior representative of President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil.

Regional support may make it easier for the country offering asylum to resist US pressure for extradition. But whether Snowden can make it to South America remains uncertain, as are his current circumstances. He has not been seen or heard in public since he flew to Russia from Hong Kong. WikiLeaks says it is in touch with him and that he has widened his search for aslyum by adding six new countries.

In a tweet, the group said it would not reveal the names of the nations "due to attempted US interference".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...edward-snowden





You May Not Like Weev, But Your Online Freedom Depends on His Appeal
Hanni Fakhoury

“The Internet’s best terrible person.” A “disappointment.” “Reviled/Beloved.” Those are just a few of the things people have called convicted AT&T/iPad “hacker” Andrew Auernheimer — a.k.a. “Weev” — currently sitting in federal prison serving a 41-month sentence.

Whether you love him or hate him, whether you disagree with him or disagree with AT&T, even if you’re indifferent — you should hope Weev wins his appeal filed last night before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

The future of the Internet may well depend on it.

Because the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) — the very statute that was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz for downloading scholarly articles he had access to — has run amok. The outdated law has been abused to cover situations far removed from the type of criminal hacking Congress had in mind when it passed the law in 1986. Nothing highlights that more than the fact that the CFAA is now the subject of a bill named after Aaron Swartz to fix it.

Weev’s case is just another example of a dangerous prosecution that covers all sorts of innocuous, common internet behavior. Perhaps more dangerously, it’s an example of a prosecution that tries to regulate a person, not just his or her crime.

From Hero to Villain: What Happens When Companies Can Stretch the CFAA

Here’s a reminder of what happened: Weev and Daniel Spitler discovered and publicized a security hole in AT&T’s website. After spoofing his web browser to look like an iPad, Spitler discovered that AT&T’s website published iPad users’ email addresses when someone entered a URL that included an iPad’s unique identification number. He created a script to keep entering random numbers to emulate the iPad IDs and got more than 114,000 email addresses as a result. Weev disclosed this security hole by telling journalists about the discovery and shared the list with Ryan Tate (then at Gawker, now at Wired), who published a story — not the email addresses — on the incident.

AT&T got around to closing the hole after the story got national attention.

In one version of this story, Auernheimer and Spitler were hailed as heroes. They were awarded a “Crunchie” for their public service in bringing attention to AT&T’s leaky website.

But in another version of this story, Auernheimer and Spitler were treated as criminals. The feds indicted Weev for identity theft and unauthorized access to a computer under the CFAA, even though it was AT&T — not them — that made the email addresses publicly available on the internet. Swayed by the government’s arguments that Weev and Spitler had engaged in “theft” (unfortunately, Weev’s own words) when Spitler “tricked” and “deceived” AT&T’s servers into giving him the email addresses, the jury found Weev guilty in short order.

The appeal filed yesterday argues that AT&T’s servers weren’t “deceived”. They did exactly what AT&T had programmed them to do whenever a correct URL was entered: publish email addresses. (The spoofing was irrelevant; Spitler would have gotten the same email addresses if he had manually inputted the URLs on an iPad rather than a spoofed desktop browser.) In short, one can’t violate the CFAA by accessing information on a freely available, public website.

So why is Weev sitting in prison? Because the CFAA makes it a crime to obtain information from a computer “without authorization.” That term isn’t defined in the statute and has been dangerously interpreted to cover all sorts of innocuous behavior, from lying about yourself on your MySpace page to misusing data you’re otherwise allowed to access.

The CFAA was stretched in Weev’s case to permit website owners like AT&T who make their data publicly available to anyone — without security restrictions like a login and password — to still grant or deny “authorization” to view that information. But it’s not just the government that’s relying on this strained interpretation of the CFAA. Companies like craigslist have tried to use this same argument under the CFAA in court, too.

Let’s consider what that means for us. How’s a person surfing the internet supposed to know when they can or can’t view information if there’s no technical barrier to access? If Wired decided only people from the U.S. could read its otherwise publicly available Opinion pieces, and someone tries to access the site from the U.K., get ready for a prison jumpsuit.

Placing publicly available data within the purview of the CFAA allows companies — not the normal legislative process — to dictate what is and isn’t criminal behavior, and to do so in arbitrary ways.

And here, it allows AT&T to avoid blame for exposing its customer’s data by pointing the finger at Weev. (Not to mention getting him to pay the bill for notifying its customers by mail, too.)

Yet Weev’s case is more than just another abusive CFAA prosecution. His story doesn’t start with the iPad “hack.” Before Weev was a “martyr” he was a “troll.” And nothing’s easier to blame than the “troll” with a reputation worse than the “hacking” charges that made him a “felon.”

When the Government Can Prosecute a Personality, Not Just a Crime

“I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” Weev infamously told The New York Times in 2008. That quote follows Weev everywhere and landed in the letter the government sent the trial judge asking for his lengthy prison sentence.

Of course, everyone’s entitled to an opinion about someone. Especially about a personality as colorful as Weev. The danger is when it’s those opinions — about Weev the man, not of the alleged crime — that become the focus of a government prosecution.

At sentencing, instead of hearing about the effects of the iPad “hack,” the government recounted in detail Weev’s “attitudes” towards others on the internet.

Instead of victim impact statements from affected iPad users, nasty emails sent by Weev in 2009 resurfaced in court four years later. (What would the affected iPad users have said anyway? Their email addresses were never revealed publicly or sold to spammers.) When AT&T was asked to provide an official “victim” statement, it didn’t bother to send one in — because there was no “impact.” At trial, an AT&T representative testified its reputation suffered as a result of the hack; today it’s still the largest wireless phone provider in the U.S.

Instead of hearing about how AT&T itself acknowledged that its website was designed “poorly,” the government submitted news articles about Weev discussing his flip attitude towards the entire proceeding.

The result? Weev got the top of the 33- to 41-month sentencing range.

Ultimately the government was keen on making sure Weev’s past finally caught up to him. Deterrence (especially given Weev’s past actions) is indeed an important consideration in criminal sentencing. But we should all be worried when the government digs up our past and puts us on trial for who we are and what we stand for by using an expansive interpretation of the what has been called “the worst law in technology” to make criminals out of millions.

It’s hard to escape the power of the government when it’s aimed right for us and technology allows it to never forget.

For us, it means we can never move beyond the things we’ve done or said, stupid or otherwise, on the internet. For Weev, it means he lost his freedom for three and a half years. For Swartz, it meant he’d drawn the scrutiny of the feds long before he downloaded JSTOR articles by liberating court records and publishing the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (and later took his own life after facing unchecked prosecutorial discretion).

This opinion isn’t intended to defend the harmful things Weev or others have done in the past. It’s a reminder that we should be wary of giving companies too much control in loosely interpreting the law. And that decisions about who should be prosecuted — and for what crimes — have to be based primarily on the crime itself … not the person.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07...cts-all-of-us/





Internet Troll “Weev” Appeals 41-Month Sentence for AT&T/iPad Hack

The EFF and law professor Orin Kerr join forces to reverse a federal conviction.
Megan Geuss

Yesterday, the EFF filed a formal appeal with the Third Circuit US Court of Appeals to overturn the conviction of Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who is currently serving a 41-month sentence at Allenwood Low Federal Correctional Institute in White Deer, Pennsylvania.

Auernheimer, a hacker and self-described Internet troll, was sentenced in March. The court found him guilty of encouraging his co-defendant, Daniel Spitler, to collect about 114,000 e-mail addresses through a security vulnerability on AT&T's servers. The two defendants found that AT&T was running a script that would return an iPad user's e-mail address if the iPad's ICC-ID was entered into a URL that AT&T was using to auto-populate its website with account holders' addresses for easy log-in. Because ICC-ID's come in a predictable range, Spitler was able to gather these e-mail addresses en masse using a program he wrote called the “account slurper.” Auernheimer then disclosed the information that Spitler obtained to Gawker. In doing so, he was charged with identity theft and with felony hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Spitler entered into a plea agreement and has not been sentenced.

In the appeal, the lawyers representing Auernheimer took issue with sentencing the hacker for gathering data that was unprotected by AT&T. “First, Auernheimer’s conviction on Count 1 must be overturned because visiting a publicly available website is not unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act... AT&T chose not to employ passwords or any other protective measures to control access to the e-mail addresses of its customers.”

The appeal also makes reference to some of the unflattering chat logs that the prosecution presented to the court in November to discredit Auernheimer's motives. “It is irrelevant that AT&T subjectively wished that outsiders would not stumble across the data or that Auernheimer hyperbolically characterized the access as a 'theft.' The company configured its servers to make the information available to everyone and thereby authorized the general public to view the information.”

The CFAA, which was instated in 1986, has been the center of debate since the death of Aaron Swartz, who was charged under the same law. There has been some momentum in Congress to reform the law, and the success or failure of this appeal may prove instructive as to how the CFAA will be applied in the future.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-attipad-hack/





BBC Blocking Articles from UK Residents

This is getting tiresome.

I click an article on Hacker News, like this one for example…

Sounds interesting. I’m always getting phantom phone vibrations. What’s that all about?

Oh, woops, because I live in the UK – home of the BBC – I get this:

Er, yeah.

this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes.

So basically, it’s not available, due to “reasons”.

The BBC have created the world’s first anti-paywall. In the UK, we all (well, pretty much all) pay for the BBC through what is effectively a mandatory tax – so we can’t view this.

Yeah, that makes total sense!

I love the BBC, but this is idiocy. It may be convenient for the BBC to imagine that people in the UK are only viewing and sharing links with other people from the UK, but that’s not how the internet works.

For now, we’ll just have to use a workaround when somebody posts a link to BBC.com. Here are a couple of options:

• Go to US Web Proxy and paste the link there
• Add nyud.net after the bbc.com in the domain name, so http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2013...hone-calls/all becomes http://www.bbc.com.nyud.net/future/s...hone-calls/all




Discussion of this article at Hacker News (including a handy JS bookmark which should totally be turned into a simple Chrome extension if the BBC don’t fix this)
http://alexwarren.co.uk/2013/07/03/b...-uk-residents/





This MIT Website Tracks Your Digital Footprint Through Gmail

While the world is still trying to figure out how much the NSA is spying on them, this MIT website offers a glimpse at the personal data email users reveal online every day
Claire Groden

Metadata is a word that was once reserved for the halls of high-tech companies and academia. But since the revelation of mass surveillance programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) — which collect troves of big-picture data on American citizens — the concept of data about data has entered the lexicon. Now, the techies over at MIT’s Media Lab are giving us a glimpse at our own metadata, giving us a cold, hard look at the bread crumbs of personal data we freely scatter across the Web.

Immersion, which launched on June 30 after years in development, asks participants for access to their Gmail accounts, and in exchange, it creates a visual map of their networks. Each “collaborator” — or person with whom the participant has exchanged at least three e-mails — is represented by a circle, which is then connected to all the other circles in one big web of relationships. Professor César Hidalgo, who spearheaded the project, told TIME that the result is a piece of very personal art. “It’s a picture you’ve been painting not with pigments and brushes, but every time you send an e-mail or get in touch with someone,” he says.

The program received such heavy Web traffic — more than 43,900 views between Monday and Tuesday alone — that the site temporarily broke. Hidalgo and his team are working to equip the program to handle the thousands of requests for metadata mapping, and currently, interested participants must add their name to a queue.

Much like the government phone-surveillance programs, Immersion doesn’t need to access the content of communications. Instead, by gathering information about the senders and recipients of all the e-mails in an inbox, it can create a detailed portrait of the user’s social connections. Each person’s picture on Immersion is as unique as a fingerprint, but much more informative.

In this case, metadata isn’t just about numbers and grids: it’s personal. “Immersion shows you the data that you already share with others,” says Hidalgo. “You log into your e-mail every day, but just by taking a small fraction of your e-mail data and presenting it in a different way, we’re showing how much information people can learn about you from this data.”

The MIT Media Lab team began working on the project long before the NSA surveillance leaks, so Immersion is not an overt commentary on the NSA. However, it is a commentary on privacy — and how little of it we have when companies like Google collect mountains of our metadata. While reports have surfaced that the government has direct access to servers for Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other online companies, the Internet giants have vehemently denied knowledge of the program.

There are many differences between a site like Immersion where people share information voluntarily and government-run programs, but a key one has been especially warmly received; Immersion allows participants to permanently delete their information from the database. And in the world of metadata, that’s a pretty revolutionary idea.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/07/05/...through-gmail/





AT&T Considers Selling Your Browsing History, Location, And More To Advertisers. Here’s How To Opt Out
Greg Kumparak

Good news, everyone! Wait, no. Not that one. The other one.

Bad news, everyone!

AT&T is considering selling your usage data (location, web browsing history, etc.) to advertisers, having seemingly decided that it’s been too long since everyone was mad at them.

They noted the plan in a preview of an upcoming change to their privacy policy published earlier this week.

AT&T is quick to point out that other companies, like Verizon, have been doing this for a while. (Oh, okay — as long as everyone else’s data is getting thrown about, too, I guess it’s okay. Cough.)

They also note that Facebook and Google do similar things, somehow forgetting that those users generally aren’t already paying those guys $100 a month for a phone that can only make or receive calls when it feels like it.

If there’s any upside, it’s that AT&T is promising to anonymize and aggregate the data before they sell it. It’s just too bad that “anonymizing” large chunks of data doesn’t really work.

At least you’ll be getting a sweet discount on your bill since AT&T is making a bit of change slingin’ your daterbits around, right? Just kidding, you won’t. They’re just going to use it to show you “more relevant advertising.”

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to opt out — you just have to know to do it, and then dig around AT&T’s site to find the link.

Don’t feel like digging? Here’s the link you’ll need: http://att.com/cmpchoice. Sign in, opt out, and you’re done. If you feel like digging a bit deeper, here’s AT&T’s entire page about opting-out of things like this.

And for all of you who might’ve just learned that your carrier probably does something similar:

Here’s Verizon’s program. You can opt out by calling 1-800-333-9956.
Here’s Sprint’s program. Opt out at http://www.sprint.com/mychoices
Here’s T-Mobile’s program. T-Mobile goes through a company called Network Advertising Initiative, and doesn’t seem to offer an account-wide opt-out. The closest thing I can find is a browser-by-browser, cookie-based opt-out system, found here.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/05/att...ow-to-opt-out/

Consider installing “Self-Destructing Cookies” – a FireFox add-on – Jack.





This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting

New School Student's System Confuses Ad Targeting With Cookie Misinformation
Kate Kaye

Meet Rachel Law, a 25-year-old graduate student from Singapore, who has created a game that could literally wreak havoc on the online ad industry if released into the wild.

Her creation, called "Vortex," is a browser extension that's part game, part ad-targeting disrupter that helps people turn their user profiles and the browsing information into alternate fake identities that have nothing to do with reality.

People who use the browser tool, which works with Firefox and Chrome, effectively confuse the technologies that categorize web audiences into likely running shoe buyers, in-market auto buyers, or moms interested in cooking and football.

"It's a way of masking your identity across networks," said Ms. Law. Ad Age visited the recent Design and Technology Masters grad at Parsons New School in Manhattan, where she sat working on her laptop in a sun-filled yet desolate lab space dedicated to collaboration among design and tech students.

It's a bit like the ad blocker extensions of yore, except it scrambles information to trick ad targeters, all in service of an addictive game deemed "Site Miner," which allows players to fish for cookies visualized as sea creatures. Players can gobble up cookies Pac-Man style, creating a pool of profile information that has nothing to do with their actual web behavior.

Cookies that misinform

"I made it so that you give out misinformation," said Ms. Law, who spoke with Mozilla representatives via Skype last week about Vortex. When asked whether Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, is considering enabling a version of Vortex as a Firefox plugin, David Ascher, Mozilla Labs Director told Ad Age, "We have no such plans."

The Vortex system will build a database of cookies gathered by players. Cookies are little pieces of software left by web sites on web browsers that hold information telling advertisers what type of consumers people are and how to target them.

Part of the goal is to understand how ad targeting algorithms peg people in specific audience segments. "That's why it needs critical mass, because only when enough people are playing can we start seeing patterns in what kind of cookies or attribute-identifiers companies look for and discriminate with," she said.

Though users will only be able to access the cookies they've gathered, a wiki will expose the kinds of cookies available, she said.

"It acts like a translator…. It basically fucks up algorithims," said Ms. Law, who stressed she isn't against advertising. She does have concerns about the societal effects of data-informed targeting, however.

"I think targeting is harmful when confidential information, such as your medical issues or criminal records, is used against you as a form of price discrimination. Retailers should not be able to discriminate based on health history, whether or not you've committed a crime before, your sexual preferences or history, etc., because this is private information pertaining to an individual," she said.

"I like to imagine in the future targeted advertising becomes a targeted choice for both advertisers and users," she said. "For instance, if a user decides to go shoe-shopping for summer, he or she could equip their browser with the cookies most associated and aligned with shopping, shoes and summer ... users can choose what kind of advertisements they want to see."

Vortex features a profile switcher that people can use and share to take on a new identity while browsing the web. "It's a way of masking your identity across networks," she said.

If, for instance, several people have access to a Twitter profile, they might all use the same profile accessible through the Player Switcher in Vortex. A private mode only accesses third party cookies associated with a profile, rather than logins, passwords and other more sensitive data.

Part of the draw is that everyone operating via the same profile will have the same experience. Search results on Google, for example, often vary depending on an individual's previous searches. This way, everyone sees the same results.

Privacy tool or weapon?

Vortex isn't available publicly or even in a closed beta form, so it's unclear what impact it could have if released into the wild. Ms. Law plans to launch the Site Miner component -- the cookie eating game -- as an open source technology by the end of September. Her aim is to help people understand what cookies and metadata are, and potentially prevent users from falling prey to data-driven targeting that serves up higher prices for products or airline tickets to some people depending on information such as the average household income level associated with their geographic location.

Though they can change their location data, the system automatically labels users as residents of Narnia, the fantastical realm created by C.S. Lewis.

Vortex has security holes that could be exploited by nefarious actors, which is one reason Ms. Law refuses to release the full platform. A hacker could create a profile that expires, allowing him to run a distributed attack via that one profile which -- to put it in espionage terms -- self-destructs before law enforcement can track it down.

"In its current state now it's a weapon," said Ms. Law. "Do I want it to get in the hands of the Syrian Electric Army? No!"

To be fair, Ms. Law is not the most experienced computer programmer, so she said she needs assistance to make Vortex more secure. She has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Photography from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and "crash-learned" programming.
http://adage.com/article/privacy-and...geting/242955/





AdBlock Plus Lets Some Advertisers Pay to Play

The hugely popular browser extension charges a fee from big advertisers such as Google to let some ads go through
Andrew Leonard

If you use AdBlock Plus to keep your Web browsing experiencing free of annoying clutter, this is the kind of tweet that might grab your attention:

Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted https://t.co/fe6YfOLSOz
— Amit Agarwal (@labnol) July 5, 2013

Millions of people use AdBlock Plus. Per Wikipedia, AdBlock Plus is the single most popular extension of any kinde for Firefox. But I’m betting that a hefty percentage of those millions don’t realize that major advertisers, including Google, can pay to have some of their ads “whitelisted” — in essence, given a free pass through AdBlock Plus.

The so-called “Acceptable Ads” feature is turned on by default, meaning that users have to specifically opt-out if they don’t want to see such ads. There seems to be no doubt that AdBlock is generating some sort of revenue stream from the practice. AdBlock Pro’s own Frequently Asked Questions section addresses the issue:

Do companies pay you for being added to the list?

Whitelisting is free for all small websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That’s why we are being paid by some larger properties that serve nonintrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.


Earlier this year, Ad Block Plus co-founder Till Faida told Digital Trend’s Molly McHugh that “the initiative was not intended to maximize revenues for large companies,” but should be seen as part of an effort to influence the entire advertising ecology in a direction that works for both users and advertisers.

”The success of our initiative is dependent on the support of our contributors who believe in our vision to have a positive impact on online advertising,” he told Digital Trends. “Financial interest will never be more important than that. If we lose credibility, users will just disable the Acceptable Ads functionality or look for a different ad blocker. Then our efforts to find a reasonable compromise will have failed, and ad blocking will eventually be destructive for the free Internet.”

That’s a noble sentiment, but the practice of charging for participation poses obvious conflict-of-interest issues, and surely changes how some AdBlock Plus users will view the software.

In March, I reported on how Google had banned AdBlock Plus’s mobile app from the Google Play store, on the grounds that the app was interfering “with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.” But it seems like Google is playing both sides of the fence. Banning AdBlock Plus from the Google Play store, while at the same time paying AdBlock Plus to make sure ads get through on the browser extension.

In the case of the Google Play ban, I saw AdBlock Plus as defending user preferences against an onslaught of online advertising. But the picture of the company that emerges from the “Acceptable Ads” initiative is entirely different. AdBlock Plus appears to be positioning itself as a gatekeeper at a key bottleneck. That’s a potentially lucrative vantage-point, and it’s definitely something to watch.
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/05/adbl...lay/singleton/





Rupert Murdoch Caught on Tape: “We Will Hit Back”
Nitasha Tiku

ExaroNews a British investigative web site, has just published the full transcript of a secretly recorded meeting between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the staff of The Sun, a U.K. tabloid owned by News Corp., in which Murdoch admitted that he was aware for decades that journalists from his newspapers had been bribing both police and public officials.

According to the site (which is behind a paywall), the meeting took place in a boardroom at The Sun's headquarters in East London with Murdoch at the head of the table. Present were nearly two dozen executives and reporters from The Sun, who had been arrested on allegations of illegal newsgathering practices.

In the wake of the phone-hacking scandal that shut down the News of the World—the Sun's sister title—News Corp. established a management and standards committee (MSC) with the assistance of Linklaters, a law firm, in order to gather any evidence of purported wrongdoing on the part of its reporters and hand it over to the police.

The Sun staffers were irate over Murdoch's decision to supply mass internal communications to the police "that had betrayed confidential sources, some of whom were public officials who received no payment for information," reports ExaroNews.

The journalists felt that News Corp. had turned them into "scapegoats." It was with that mindset that some entered the room with hidden digital recorders.

As the meeting began, Murdoch came across as angry at the authorities and said his newspaper group had been "picked on."

Graham Dudman, The Sun’s former managing editor, began by telling Murdoch that everyone in the room was loyal to the company up until their arrest:

One thing that everybody in this room shares – everybody in this room shares – whether we are 20-something, 30-something, 40-something, 50-something or 60-something, is that we were arrested, thrown into police cells, treated as common criminals in front of our children, our families, and our neighbours, and our friends and our colleagues, for doing nothing more than the company expected of us – nothing.

"I’m just as annoyed as you are at the police, and you’re directing it at me instead, but never mind," Murdoch responded, with no small bit of sympathy for himself:

"And if you want to accuse me of a certain amount of panic, there’s some truth in that. But it was very, very— I don’t know— it’s hard for you to remember it, it was such— but it was— I was under personal siege – not that that mattered – but it was—the whole place was— all the Press were screaming and yelling, and we might have gone too far in protecting ourselves. And you were the victims of it. It’s not enough for me to say you’ve got my sympathy. But you do have my total support. But go ahead, please.”

In response, Dudman asked what assurances Murdoch could offer about the individual's future at News International in the event that staffers go to court or are convicted.

"I’ve been told that I must not give guarantees, but I can give you something," said Murdoch, asking staffers to "just trust me":

"RM: “Yeah, but emotional support is not enough. I’ve got to do more. I mean, at least, everybody will be paid. You’re all innocent until proven guilty. What you’re asking is, what happens if some of you are proven guilty? What afterwards? I’m not allowed to promise you- I will promise you continued health support- but your jobs – I’ve got to be careful what comes out – but frankly, I won’t say it, but just trust me. Okay?”"

It's at this point that Murdoch acknowledges that illegal newsgathering practices were a long-standing part of the culture (emphasis added):

I guarantee you that [medical support] will continue. And I will do everything in my power to give you total support, even if you’re convicted and get six months or whatever. I think it’s just outrageous, but—and I don’t know of anybody, or anything, that did anything that wasn’t being done across Fleet Street and wasn’t the culture. And we’re being picked on. I think that it was the old right-wing establishment, [Lord] Puttnam, or worse, the left-wing get-even crowd of Gordon Brown. There was a sort of—we got caught with dirty hands, I guess, with the News of the World, and everybody piled in. It was a get-even time for things that were done with The Sun over the last 40 years, 38 years, whatever it is.

He went further, specifically acknowledging he had long been aware of the News of the World's routine practice of lining the pockets of cops for information:

RM: We’re talking about payments for news tips from cops: that’s been going on a hundred years, absolutely. You didn’t instigate it....

I remember when I first bought the News of the World, the first day I went to the office… and there was a big wall-safe… And I said, "What’s that for?"

And they said, "We keep some cash in there."

And I said, "What for?"

They said, "Well, sometimes the editor needs some on a Saturday night for powerful friends. And sometimes the chairman [the late Sir William Carr] is doing badly at the tables, (laughter) and he helps himself…"


Throughout the meeting, Murdoch tried to shift blame to officials: "But why are the police behaving in this way? It’s the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing." Murdoch also promised revenge. That vow came during an exchange with Geoff Webster, The Sun’s deputy editor, who referenced police corruption:

GW: Keir Starmer, the head of the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], making a statement today which relates to the Savile inquiry and historic sexual offences and all the rest of it, also includes children. The Met Police have got 13 coppers dedicated to chasing paedophiles, and they’ve got nigh-on 200 looking at us. And the support staff that goes with that 200 will be at least another 100.

RM: Yeah, I’ve heard bigger figures… They’ve had waves of people come in. The second wave has knocked over the first wave. It goes on, and on, and on. It doesn’t help you to know that the police are incompetent.

GW: It would be nice to hit back when we can.

RM: We will, we will.


The mood of the meeting, which began angry, turned sorrowful, reports ExaroNews, when Deidre Sanders, the Sun's "agony aunt" (advice columnist) began to speak. Sanders had been a source of emotional support for staffers during the ordeal and she read a letter written by the wife of a Sun journalist.

The heart-wrenching letter details the effects of her family after her husband was arrested:

After he’d been led away the police went into our house, room by room, looking for evidence. By then I was comforting my two-year-old grand-daughter, who was a witness to her granddad being led away to prison. The police left with all our old video-tapes: ‘If you can’t prove what’s on it, we have to take it,’ and a small bag of expenses sheets and letters from the editor etc. Seven hours later, after most of the TV crews had gone, he came home shattered by the unending questions, as well as by the betrayal at the hands of the MSC.

The letter goes on:

And one 15-year-old girl has had her hair fall out in clumps because of the stress. Characters have changed. There have been suicide attempts. For what? A hideous political game: for what end? To save News International’s integrity, put way before the well-being of its employees. They deserve better, these are… not the debris. They’ve been on the firing line, literally for you, and have loved every minute. Those people will never come back, they’ve been lost forever.

In response, Murdoch directs the blame at the lawyers he employed in order to keep the blame out of the executive suite:

Thank you very much. That’s very moving… I’ll go and shove it down the throat of the company lawyers. That was the most ups—

[Sun executive sobs.]

It’s a very, very moving letter. Alright?


Another revelation from the meeting, besides Murdoch's self of victimization and thirst for vengeance, is an indication of his succession plan. He laid that out in response to a question from Dudman, the Sun's former managing editor, making it clear that his son James Murdoch is not in the picture.

GD: “Will the company’s support vanish overnight if you’re not here?”

RM: “Yes—If I wasn’t here, the decision would be— Well, it will either be with my son, Lachlan, or with Robert Thomson [News Corporation chief executive]. And you don’t have any worries about either of them.”

Got that in your digital recorders? Nothing to worry about there.
http://gawker.com/rupert-murdoch-cau...back-660365967





Talk of Mergers Stirs Cable TV’s Big Players
Michael J. De La Merced and Brian Stelter

Over 40 years, John C. Malone has made his name through countless displays of shrewd deal-making that transformed the telecommunications industry. Now Mr. Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media, appears to be trying to drum up a new round of consolidation in the sector where he first made his fortune.

This time, he is weighing a deal for Time Warner Cable, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. In this deal, Charter Communications, a cable operator in which Liberty owns a 27 percent stake, would buy Time Warner Cable. Should he reach a deal, he will most likely use the combined company to roll up other cable operators, upending a status quo dominated by giants like Comcast.

Those possibilities are helping to build expectations for deals in an industry that investors and some analysts think is ready for more. Mr. Malone has recently become among the most vocal proponents, declaring in April that “there is more consolidation yet to be done.”

Investors and analysts have speculated about transactions involving Cablevision and the privately held Cox Communications, as well as the satellite TV providers Dish Network and DirecTV.

Shares in several paid-television companies have risen in the last month, with stock in Charter and Time Warner Cable jumping by double-digit percentages after media reports about Mr. Malone’s interest in a deal.

“Frothy is probably too polite a word” for the current climate, said Craig Moffett, the longtime Sanford C. Bernstein analyst who recently formed his own firm, Moffett Research.

Behind that push are visions of battles on multiple fronts. Uniting cable or satellite television companies would give them more power in negotiating with programming providers like the Walt Disney Company and Viacom, which are demanding ever-higher rates for their channels.

Mergers could also help blunt new challenges from companies like Intel, which is working on a subscriber TV service that would be delivered via the Internet.

But just as big a target is the broadband Internet service that cable companies also provide. While cable television is mature and will most likely decline in the future, Mr. Malone believes broadband has only one direction to go: up. The emerging online rivals to cable TV, like Netflix and Hulu, require the kind of fast data connections that companies like Charter supply.

Standing before cable executives in Denver last September, at the naming of a theater in his honor, Mr. Malone, 72, praised high-speed Internet as “the stickiest product that I’ve ever seen.” People “would give up food before they would give up the Internet,” he added.

One potential source of profits would emerge if the government allowed cable companies to broadly charge their Internet customers more for heavy use of data. Comcast is already testing billing based on use in two small markets. And Mr. Malone told investors last month that cable companies could sell “various tiers of connectivity” in the future.

Other companies have aimed to shake up the field’s stalwarts, like Comcast as well as Verizon and AT&T. Dish Network has begun a hunt for merger partners — which so far has failed to land either Sprint Nextel or the wireless network operator Clearwire — in the hopes of creating a new pairing of satellite TV and wireless broadband services.

Still, Mr. Malone, a former engineer who built TCI into a giant over decades, is one of the oldest hands at wheeling and dealing. People close to him say that he is interested in fostering more cooperation in the cable industry, and in the past he has criticized Comcast, the biggest provider, for what he sees as a lack of initiative.

“He wants to assert some leadership,” one of these people said.

At the moment, one way of gaining a bigger podium for his views appears to be in helping Charter pursue a potential deal for Time Warner Cable.

Liberty’s chief executive, Gregory Maffei, met with his counterpart at Time Warner Cable, Glenn A. Britt, in late May to sell the benefits of a merger, the people briefed on the matter said. They declined to be named because the talks were private. The meeting didn’t conclude with a specific offer, though Mr. Britt was largely unmoved by the approach, which envisioned no takeover premium for his company.

Since then, Liberty and Charter executives have strongly hinted to investors that they remain interested in a deal, done only on a friendly basis, in what observers say appears to be a quiet effort to move Time Warner Cable shareholders into the deal camp.

One person close to Mr. Malone cautioned that Liberty and Charter had not made a firm decision on which companies to pursue yet.

Time Warner Cable’s management is skeptical and uninterested, though it would be compelled to consider any offer that delivers a significant takeover premium for shareholders, one of the people briefed on the matter said.

A combination of Charter and Time Warner Cable, which both have nationwide coverage, would have about 15 million television subscribers. That would make it the third-biggest such service in the United States, behind only Comcast and DirecTV. The combined company would be the second-biggest broadband provider, behind Comcast.

A merger would give Charter more regional scale and clout with content providers. Merging with Time Warner Cable could allow Charter to cut programming costs by close to $400 million, according to several analysts.

It would also give the company more money to chase other deals.

Thomas M. Rutledge, the chief of Charter Communications. He has been suggested as a leader for Time Warner Cable.Jamie McCarthy/Getty ImagesThomas M. Rutledge, the chief of Charter Communications. He has been suggested as a leader for Time Warner Cable.

Liberty has also implied that a deal would provide Time Warner Cable with a replacement for Mr. Britt, who is expected to retire this year, in the form of Thomas M. Rutledge, Charter’s chief executive and a longtime cable industry executive.

But any deal could be complex. Time Warner Cable’s market value is $32.7 billion, nearly three times Charter’s $12.5 billion. And Time Warner Cable executives are uncomfortable with many aspects of a potential merger. They are pressing ahead with their own strategic plans; they think Charter’s market reach does not necessarily mesh with their own company’s; and they may be wary of the amount of debt that a transaction would involve.

Not everyone believes that big-ticket mergers are in the industry’s future. Mr. Moffett said he expected more action at the lower end of the marketplace, among the obscure cable companies that would be better off merging. It is there that Mr. Malone may find the most targets.

“The small operators simply can’t stand toe-to-toe with the big guys,” Mr. Moffett said. Mr. Malone, he added, probably thinks that “Charter is my ticket for the fire sale.”
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/06/...s-in-cable-tv/





Tribune to Buy 19 TV Stations for $2.7 Billion
Michael J. De La Merced and Brian Stelter

The Tribune Company agreed on Monday to buy 19 television stations for about $2.7 billion, making it one of the nation’s biggest owners of commercial local TV outlets amid a groundswell of consolidation in the industry.

The stations are in 16 regions, including Denver, Cleveland and St. Louis, and many of their local news broadcasts are ranked first or second in their markets. They will complement Tribune’s 23 existing stations and its WGN America cable channel. Tribune is buying the stations from Local TV Holdings, a company owned by the investment firm Oak Hill Capital Partners.

The deal comes less than a month after the Gannett Company agreed to buy the Belo Corporation for about $1.5 billion, nearly doubling its local television holdings. In that transaction, which is expected to close by the end of the year, Gannett will pick up 20 television stations owned by Belo.

Another of the biggest station owners in the country, Sinclair, has spent about $2 billion acquiring a series of smaller station owners in the past year and a half, and it has said it is on the lookout for more such opportunities.

But Tribune’s deal eclipses all the others. It comes as the conglomerate is weighing a potential sale or spinoff of its newspaper properties, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Advisers of Tribune have been in touch with potential bidders, ranging from the Koch brothers to the billionaire Eli Broad.

“2013 will go down as the year of transformational consolidation, forever changing the landscape of local market television ownership and operation,” said Steve Ridge, the president of the media strategy group at Frank N. Magid Associates, which consults with many local stations.

Such consolidation is intended to help media companies gain more scale, giving them additional negotiating clout with programming and distribution partners. It will also give them more exposure to political battleground states, where election candidates spend enormous amounts of money on advertising every two years.

Peter Liguori, the new chief executive of Tribune, contended that the combination with Local TV makes his company “the No. 1 local TV affiliate group in America.”

Seven of Local TV’s 19 stations are affiliates of the Fox network. Tribune already owned seven, and through the acquisition it will become the biggest holder of Fox affiliates. The company will remain the biggest holder of affiliates of the CW, a small broadcast network jointly owned by CBS Corporation and Warner Brothers.

Tribune indicated that the acquisition would also benefit WGN America, which is somewhat obscure and surely low-rated despite being available in about 75 million homes across the country. Mr. Liguori, a cable veteran, has signaled that the channel is a priority for him, and last month it ordered an original scripted drama for the first time. The drama, called “Salem,” is scheduled to debut sometime next year.

Tribune said in a news release on Monday that the increased leverage that comes from the Local TV stations “will also lead to more meaningful conversations with affiliates about distribution, which is especially important to the future of WGN America.”

Mr. Ridge said the combination of Tribune and Local TV “is an absolute natural given the history and close association of the companies.” The two have been linked for years through various contracts sometimes known as shared service agreements and local marketing agreements. In some markets, stations owned by both companies have been run out of the same building and have shared the same reporters, cameras and vehicles. These arrangements have become a common cost-cutting tactic in local television.

Mr. Ridge also predicted that more station groups would buy or sell by the end of the year. “Nearly every group owner in the country is in overdrive this summer considering the various combinations,” he said. “It is a time to gobble or get gobbled.”

Tribune plans to finance the deal through cash on hand and up to $4.1 billion in loans from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse. Some of the new bank debt will go toward refinancing Tribune’s existing obligations.

The transaction is expected to close this year.

Guggenheim Securities and the law firms Debevoise & Plimpton and Covington & Burling advised Tribune. Moelis & Company, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank and the law firm Dow Lohnes advised Local TV.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/...r-2-7-billion/





From Texas Statehouse to YouTube, a Filibuster Is a Hit
Brian Stelter

Wendy Davis turned into a progressive political hero in the span of about 12 hours last Tuesday as a result of the stand (literally) that she took against a Texas Senate bill that would have placed strict new limits on abortions in that state. By Sunday, the two-term state senator was a guest on the Sunday political talk shows on ABC, CBS and NBC.

Wearing running shoes, Wendy Davis spoke for about 11 hours on Tuesday in an effort to prevent an abortion bill from passing.

But her abortion rights advocacy and her pink sneakers might have never gained national attention had she been in a state without a reliable live stream of the Legislature. Ms. Davis’s 11-hour filibuster inadvertently illuminated the stark technological differences that exist from state to state when it comes to broadcasting the public’s business.

In nearly a dozen states, there is no live video of legislative proceedings, only audio; in some other states that purport to provide video, the Web streams barely work. Even the audio, though, is of value to reporters, activists and ordinary citizens.

As journalism organizations continue to cut back on the number of reporters stationed at statehouses across the country, state-level equivalents to C-Span on television and online are supplying new ways to bear witness to the machinations of state and local government.

Some of Ms. Davis’s supporters and detractors will surely be watching on Monday when the Texas Legislature reconvenes and takes up the bill again. In Texas last week, The Texas Tribune made up for the state Senate’s digital shortcomings. Months before Ms. Davis’s vivid protest, the nonprofit news organization, based a few blocks from the state Capitol building in Austin, had gained access to the stream provided by state-controlled cameras there and set up a live YouTube channel for the legislative session.

While the same stream was also accessible through the Senate’s own Web site, that site looked almost comically old-fashioned compared with YouTube. Thus it was through YouTube that Ms. Davis’s filibuster was widely seen and shared.

“It’s great to see a channel like The Texas Tribune using YouTube to take a local story national — and probably won’t be the only time we’ll see this happen,” said Kevin Allocca, a trends manager at YouTube.

Online videos have been going viral for almost a decade, but what came out of the filibuster in Texas was something distinct: viral live video. Whether from a statehouse balcony or an activist’s smartphone, scenes that were once edited and distilled for television are increasingly being streamed live to an audience that spreads the news, or at least the pictures, themselves.

Streams from independent journalists at Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 sometimes drew tens of thousands of viewers. More recently, links to live streaming video of mass protests in Turkey, Brazil and, as late as Sunday, Egypt, have been popular on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

When the Texas Senate stream on YouTube peaked in popularity shortly after midnight Wednesday, as the end of the legislative session dissolved into chaos, 182,000 people were tuned in, about the same number watching MSNBC, one of the cable news channels that was mercilessly criticized for not broadcasting the Texas debate live.

People didn’t necessarily need MSNBC, though, because they had YouTube.

The theatrical aspects of Ms. Davis’s filibuster and the seriousness of what was at stake “all resulted in people saying to their friends, ‘You have to look at this!’ ” said Andrew Lih, a professor of journalism and director of new media at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Many, probably most, of the online viewers wanted to see the Senate bill fail. They organized around Twitter hashtags like #StandWithWendy. But some anti-abortion campaigners followed the filibuster too, along with the politically minded who simply enjoyed watching what The Dallas Morning News called a “knife-fight within the confines of Robert’s Rules of Order.”

The heavy online viewership helped to prompt television networks and other news outlets to follow up the next morning and subsequently. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ms. Davis said she and other state Democrats would keep battling against the abortion bill and said even if it passes, as many analysts expect, “obviously there will be challenges to it going forward.”

Thanks to the heightened interest in the bill, The Texas Tribune Web site had “far and away the highest traffic day in our history,” said Evan Smith, its editor in chief. Visitors have pledged about $37,000 to the nonprofit organization, from a total of 37 states, reflecting the nationwide scope of the sudden attention.

Mr. Lih said that The Tribune had done something significant “by getting the Senate video, which existed already, into a portal where the people hang out,” that is, YouTube. “That is pretty simple but powerful,” he said. (The Texas Tribune has a partnership with The New York Times to provide expanded coverage of the state.)

Data from the National Conference of State Legislatures indicates that all 50 states stream live audio of floor proceedings. Most also stream video, but the quality and accessibility varies widely. In some states, lack of funds has caused hardware and software upgrades to be postponed.

In Texas and in most other states the productions are handled in-house, raising concerns about potential interference. (At several points during the abortion bill debate last Tuesday, the stream was muted while private discussions took place, much to the consternation of viewers who were unaware that this was standard procedure.)

But in eight states, there are nonprofit groups that produce gavel-to-gavel coverage of all three state branches of government, according to Paul Giguere, the head of the Connecticut Public Affairs Network and a national association of ones like it.

“Ordinary citizens have an inherent right to watch their state government in action if they choose to,” Mr. Giguere said.

His association is piecing together a national strategy with the hope that it can convert more states to a more independent model. “We can’t replace reporters. What reporters do is critical,” he said. “But we can be a primary source.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/b...-is-a-hit.html





Google's TV White Space Database Approved for Operation
Tammy Parker

Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) TV white space (TVWS) database system won approval for operation from the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology.

TVWS supporters such as Google contend the unlicensed spectrum is suitable for bringing cost-effective broadband service to rural and remote areas in the United States and around the world. The FCC has authorized use of five spectrum blocks for TVWS operations: 54 to 60 MHz, TV channel 2; 76 to 88 MHz, TV channels 5 and 6; 174 to 216 MHz, TV channels 7 to 13; 470 to 608 MHz, TV channels 14 to 36; and 614 to 698 MHz, TV channels 38 to 51.

Database systems such as Google's, which provides a list of available TVWS channels, are necessary to support unlicensed radio devices transmitting in the spectrum bands used by broadcast television. In order to avoid creating interference, TV band devices (TVBDs) must contact an authorized database system to obtain a list of channels that are available at their individual locations and operate only on those channels.

Google concluded a trial of its database system on April 17. Rival database operator Key Bridge Global wrapped up a similar trial one week later on April 24. The FCC has not yet announced approval of Key Bridge's database system.

TVWS databases operated separately by Spectrum Bridge and Telcordia, which is now owned by Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), were the first to gain FCC approval.

Google's TVWS database system is part of the company's efforts to make more spectrum available for broadband access through dynamic spectrum sharing. Google is deeply involved in numerous international TVWS development efforts, as is Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).

"White spaces could help bridge the digital divide by providing wireless internet to rural areas and help enable technology innovation," said Google.

Google's recently announced balloon-powered Project Loon, currently being tested in New Zealand, is yet another of Google's plethora of initiatives designed to expand broadband access to people in underserved markets.

TVWS database systems are required to protect many services including TV stations, fixed broadcast auxiliary service (BAS) links (regular licensed and temporary), multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), private land mobile and commercial mobile radio service operations as well as certain approved unlicensed wireless microphone venue sites.

TVWS databases extract much of their information from FCC databases. However, operators of MVPD receive sites, and wireless microphone users and operators of temporary BAS links must specifically register their sites to receive protection from TVBDs. Google is providing facilities for registering for these operations through its database system's website.
http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.c...ion/2013-06-28





Europe and Japan Aiming to Build 100Gbps Fibre Optic Internet
Mark Jackson

The European Commission (EC) and Japan have announced the launch of six joint research projects, supported by £15.3m+ (€18m) in funding, that aim to build networks which are “5000 times faster than today’s average European broadband ISP speed (100Gbps compared to 19.7Mbps)“.

The telecoms experts among you will know that 100Gbps+ (Gigabits per second) fibre optic links are nothing new but most of these are major submarine or national cable links. The new effort appears to be looking further ahead, with a view to improving the efficiency of such networks and perhaps even bringing them closer to homes.

It’s frequently noted that demand for data is putting a growing strain on broadband connections (the EU expects data traffic to grow 12-fold by 2018), which is partly fuelled by ever faster fixed line ISP and mobile broadband connectivity. But technology is always evolving to keep pace.

Neelie Kroes, EC Vice-President, said:

“Our Future Internet should know no barriers, least of all barriers created because we did not prepare for the data revolution.”
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php...-internet.html





Ultrafast Internet Service Launched by Vancouver Startup

OneGigabit to offer Google Fiber-like internet speeds for $45-$65 a month
Emily Chung

A new Vancouver-based internet provider says it will be offering fibre internet at a speed of one gigabit per second — 60 times faster than the Canadian average — for a comparable price to that lumbering average connection.

OneGigabit, a small start-up launched by computer networking and telecommunications specialist Eric Kuhnke, says that for $45 to $65 a month, he will be offering speeds comparable to those offered by Google Fiber, and also with no bandwidth caps. Google's blazing-fast internet service caused a buzz in the U.S. when it first launched last summer in Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., for a modest $70 a month.

A recent report from internet metrics company Ookla showed the average monthly Canadian internet bill is $54 for an average download speed of just 16.6 megabits per second. A gigabit per second is the equivalent of 1000 megabits per second.

According to Google, with its gigabit connection speed:

• You can stream at least five high-definition videos at the same time (allowing multiple people to watch different things in different rooms of a house or download).
• You can download an entire 14-gigabyte digital movie in less than two minutes.
• You can transfer data over the internet faster than you can write it to a thumb drive.

But ultra-fast internet speeds are typically only possible if the "last mile" — the wiring that connects a building to the rest of a telecommunications network — is made of fibre optic cable. That is only the case if the traditional copper wiring has been recently upgraded to fibre technology.

Because of that, the availability of fibre internet is limited in Canada, mainly to certain buildings and neighbourhoods in urban centres, and it isn't cheap.

Advertised fibre internet packages from major internet providers such as Bell, Rogers and Shaw top out at 175 to 250 megabits per second and cost $115 to $226 a month.

In Vancouver, Shaw offers one gigabit per second internet service in small pockets and 250 megabit service in other areas for $115 per month. Novus, a Vancouver-based internet provider launched by the Concord Pacific Real Estate Group, offers 300 megabit per second service for $113 a month in certain buildings in B.C.'s lower mainland, mostly highrises, including many built by Concord Pacific, which put fibre optic cable in them when they were constructed.

However, Kuhnke estimates that 98 per cent of Vancouver buildings don't have fibre, and most buildings that do are large office towers.

Real estate clients targeted

OneGigabit's plan is to negotiate with real estate owners, managers and developers and hook up entire small- and medium-sized apartment, condominium and office buildings that don't currently have a fibre connection.

"To be frank, it's uneconomical to serve a single client, with the construction costs that are involved to run fibre to one particular tenant to the building," Kuhnke explained in a phone interview.

That's why he is targeting as clients the owners and managers of both existing buildings and those that are about to be built — in fact, he said, costs are significantly reduced if plans to run fibre to the building are made during pre-construction planning.

Building owners and OneGigabit would share the cost of running the fibre to the building, which is cheap if it's strung on telephone poles and more expensive if it is run underground using a technique called microtrenching. The fibre inside the building, connecting directly to each unit, would be paid for and owned by the building itself.

In cases where the building's location makes fibre installation problematic, Kuhnke has a backup strategy — he is installing rooftop microwave transmitters similar to those used by mobile phone carriers to beam the data from building to building.

According to OneGigabit, the technology can transmit data at up to two gigabits per second over distances of up to eight kilometres.

OneGigabit would cover the cost of the networking equipment, and building owners would commit to a monthly fee per unit for internet service for a fixed length of time, such as three years, with the option to continue the service after the contract is up.

That fee, which would vary between $45 and $65 per month depending on the cost of connecting that particular building, could be passed on to residents in their maintenance fees. Residents would have the option of subscribing to competing services if they wish, but the building would still have to pay the contracted fee to OneGigabit for its service.

Kuhnke, whose start-up is backed by two private investors, said advances in technology are what has made his business model viable.

"We could not have done this two years ago or even 18 months ago," he said. "The radio equipment was half the speed and double the cost."

The cost of fibre has also fallen dramatically in recent years, thanks to the economies of scale provided by its large-scale installation in Taiwan and China, said Kuhnke, who spent many years working in Asia as a network and telecom contractor.

"Those cities are so far ahead of us."

Kuhnke said that, following OneGigabit's launch last week, the company quickly signed up a condo developer who wants to get fibre in before the concrete for the foundation is poured as well as another real estate company that is renovating a building in Vancouver's Gastown neighbourhood in order to attract tenants at a higher lease rate.

He added that if OneGigabit does well in Vancouver, he would like to expand it to other urban centres in Canada.

'There's no reason why it can't work'

Catherine Middleton, a professor at Ryerson University who holds a Canada Research Chair in Communication Technologies, told CBCNews.ca in an email that she expects Kuhnke's business model to be successful, since it allows for financing of the network and provides a high-quality service to residents.

Len Waverman, Dean of the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, and a researcher whose specialties include the telecommunications business, said he thinks the microwave technology that Kuhnke is taking advantage of is "very exciting."

"There's no reason why it can't work," he said, although he cautioned that microwave transmission is less reliable than fibre, especially in bad weather.

Waverman said he could see a demand for gigabit speeds among smaller businesses, but he questioned whether many people would want it in their homes.

"I just don't see what a gig to the home would do," he said. "It's nice to say you have it available, but if you're using it just to download lots of movies, I don't see what the business proposition behind that [would be]."

Middleton said affordability is the key to consumer demand. She noted that a 2012 CRTC report showed 75 per cent of Canadian households had access to download speeds of 50 megabits per second or higher in 2011, but at that time only 0.3 per cent of households subscribed to those speeds.

She added, "If the price were comparable to lower speed services, as it is in Kansas City [with Google Fiber], I expect that demand would be high."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/britis...-internet.html





$20 for 768Kbps Internet? AT&T “Deal” Shows Sad State of US Broadband

And did I mention the fees?
Nate Anderson

For many years, I was an AT&T DSL customer with a "top of the line" 6Mbps connection. Eventually, the company's inability to offer faster speeds in the Chicago area drove me into the waiting arms of Comcast, which was substantially more expensive but had the great virtue of at least offering speeds of 20+ Mbps.

Now, AT&T wants me back. Having finally brought its fiber-to-the-local-node U-Verse system to my town, AT&T sent me a letter this week offering "great low prices" and "a whole lot more." The low price turned out to be $19.95 a month. The "whole lot more" turned out to be:

• A one-year term commitment
• Up to $180 in early termination fees
• $99 installation charge
• $6/month fee to rent a DSL modem/router, should I need one
• "Up to 768k" connection speeds

Yes, you read that last point right. This incredible deal package provides Internet so slow that it is still measured in kilobits per second. (The upside? No real worries about burning through your 250GB/month data limit.)

Adding insult to this already significant injury, $19.95 is only the promotional price. After a year, the "standard rate applies unless canceled by customer." The letter doesn't bother to explain what the "standard rate" actually is.

Visiting AT&T's U-Verse website is, if anything, more amazing than reading this letter. The website says that, for my home, AT&T would prefer to bill me a shocking $28/month for 768kbps Internet, making the $19.95 a "discount" if certainly not a "deal." Of course, it's all a ploy. The real plan is to use the lowest possible price to get you to investigate U-Verse and then sign up for a higher priced tier. How else can you explain the fact that U-Verse offers me almost 25x the speed for twice the price (18Mbps for $56/month)?

In a nutshell, the AT&T offer represents everything that's too often wrong with American broadband: high prices, modest speeds, extra fees, and time commitments (I know first hand Comcast has many of the same issues). To see what's truly possible, compare these abysmal speeds and prices to those available from three different providers who are building new fiber networks to avoid incumbents:

• Google Fiber: $70/month (1Gbps, no construction fee)
• City of Seattle: $80/month (1Gbps, one year contract required, no install charge)
• City of Chattanooga, TN: $70/month (100Mbps, some additional fees)

768kbps is so slow that Google and the City of Seattle both offer (much faster) 5Mbps connections for free. Chattanooga doesn't even offer service under 50Mbps. But apparently, in my town, this is still "high speed Internet."

Update: A reader points out that Google Fiber's free tier requires a one-time $300 fee to bring the fiber drop to your house, so it's not completely free (though the fee doesn't appear to be charged to any future users of the service at that location).
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013...-us-broadband/





Eager Beaver Blamed for New Mexico Internet Outage
AP

Officials have finally identified the culprit behind a 20-hour Internet and cellphone outage last week in northern New Mexico —an eager beaver.

CenturyLink spokesman David Gonzales told The Associated Press on Friday that a hungry beaver chewed through the fiber line last week. He says the biting evidence was discovered by contractors who worked to repair the outage.

Officials say more than 1,800 Internet users were affected by the blackout. The number of cellphone users without service during that time is still unknown.

CenturyLink owns a fiber-optic cable that runs from Taos to Interstate 25.

The cable carries wireless data for many residents around Taos County.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ge-4634916.php





Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse
John Markoff

Douglas C. Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world.

He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do something more with his life, something of value that might last, even outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might be safely called a complete vision of the information age.

The epiphany spoke to him of technology’s potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he spun out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of inventions that became the basis for the Internet and the modern personal computer.

In later years, one of those inventions was given a warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.

Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure.

Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction. But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind.

In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II. The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.

It was his great insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called their “collective I.Q.”

A decade later, during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International). The unit, the Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department. Even so, in the main, computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart as a quixotic outsider.

In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.

For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

In contrast to the mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created, called the oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.

The conference attendees were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The technology would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and Microsoft would transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change the course of modern life.

Years later, people in Silicon Valley still referred to the presentation as “the mother of all demos.” It took until the late 1980s for the mouse to become the standard way to control a desktop computer.

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born in Portland, Ore., on Jan. 25, 1925, to Carl and Gladys Engelbart. He spent his formative years on a farm in suburban Portland, graduated from high school in 1942 and attended Oregon State College. Toward the end of World War II, he was drafted. He spent two years in the Navy, one of them in the Philippines, as a radar technician.

One day he was in a reading library on a small island when an article titled “As We May Think” caught his eye. The article, by Vannevar Bush, a physicist and inventor who oversaw the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, described a universal information retrieval system called Memex. The idea stuck with Dr. Engelbart, and he made it his life’s work.

After returning to Oregon State and graduating, he was hired to work at Ames Research Center, a government aerospace laboratory in California run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, NASA’s forerunner. While there, working as an electronics technician, he saw how aerospace engineers started with small models of their designs and then scaled them up to full-size airplanes.

The idea of scaling remained with him. After getting his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and starting work at SRI, he wrote a seminal paper on the importance of scaling in microelectronics. He presented it in 1960, a year after the invention of the planar transistor, which had improved the electrical output of transistors and made them cheaper to manufacture and available to a mass market.

Dr. Engelbart grew convinced that computers would quickly become more powerful and that there would be enough processing power to design the Memex-like Augment system that he envisioned. He was proved right.

The idea for the mouse — a pointing device that would roll on a desk — occurred to Dr. Engelbart in 1964 while he was attending a computer graphics conference. He was musing about how to move a cursor on a computer display.

When he returned to work, he gave a copy of a sketch to William English, a collaborator and mechanical engineer at SRI, who, with the aid of a draftsman, fashioned a pine case to hold the mechanical contents.

Early versions of the mouse had three buttons, because that was all the case could accommodate, even though Dr. Engelbart felt that as many as 10 buttons would be more useful. Two decades later, when Steve Jobs added the mouse to his Macintosh computer, he decided that a single button was appropriate. The Macintosh designers believed in radical simplicity, and Mr. Jobs argued that with a single button it was impossible to push the wrong one.

(When and under what circumstances the term “the mouse” arose is hard to pin down, but one hardware designer, Roger Bates, has contended that it happened under Mr. English’s watch. Mr. Bates was a college sophomore and Mr. English was his mentor at the time. Mr. Bates said the name was a logical extension of the term then used for the cursor on a screen: CAT. Mr. Bates did not remember what CAT stood for, but it seemed to all that the cursor was chasing their tailed desktop device.)

The importance of Dr. Engelbart’s networking ideas was underscored in 1969, when his Augment NLS system became the application for which the forerunner of today’s Internet was created. The system was called the ARPAnet computer network, and SRI became the home of its operation center and one of its first two nodes, or connection points. (The other node was at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two others followed, at the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara.).

Dr. Engelbart saw his ARC group grow rapidly after 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War, it swelled to more than 50 researchers — a significant number of them young men who had taken to computing in part to avoid the military draft.

The group disbanded in the 1970s, and SRI sold the NLS system in 1977 to a company called Tymshare. Dr. Engelbart worked there in relative obscurity for more than a decade until his contributions became more widely recognized by the computer industry. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-M.I.T. Prize and the Turing Award.

His first wife, the former Ballard Fish, died in 1997. Besides his wife, his survivors include his daughters, Gerda and Christina Engelbart and Diana Mangan; a son, Norman; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Engelbart was one of the first to realize the accelerating power of computers and the impact they would have on society. In a presentation at a conference in Philadelphia in February 1960, he described the industrial process of continually shrinking the size of computer circuits that would later be referred to as “Moore’s Law,” after the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

Speaking of the future, he said, “Boy, are there going to be some surprises over there.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/t...ies-at-88.html





U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
Ron Nixon

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.

“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.

“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.

In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed.

In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.

Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”

But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”

For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.

The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.

Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed because judges have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for information contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not revisited the issue.

The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, was awarded nearly $1 million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his immigration raids in Arizona, who, among other things, obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.

In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.

A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.

Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.

Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.

Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.

“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”

Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us...nail-mail.html





Lawmakers Question White House Account of an Internet Surveillance Program
James Risen

When the existence of a vast Internet surveillance program run by the National Security Agency was disclosed last month, Obama administration officials quickly took credit for having shuttered the effort in 2011. But two Democratic senators who have been longtime critics of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance operations are now challenging the administration’s version of events, and say the program was abandoned only after they repeatedly questioned its usefulness and criticized its impact on the privacy of American citizens.

In a lengthy statement issued late Tuesday, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado said the Internet surveillance was discontinued only after administration officials were unable to provide evidence to them, in closed-door hearings in 2011, that the program was useful.

Last week a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., issued a statement saying that the program was abandoned “by the executive branch as result of an interagency review.” The statement omitted any mention of a closed-door controversy in the Senate over the program in 2011, and seemed to be part of an administration effort to defuse yet another controversy stirred up by leaked documents from Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.

The issue underscored the criticism over the Obama administration’s inconsistent statements about N.S.A. surveillance operations, and also suggested growing restiveness within Congress about the scope of domestic spying programs.

Late Tuesday, Mr. Clapper released a letter of apology to the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for what he said were “clearly erroneous” statements during public testimony before the panel in March. At that time Mr. Clapper denied that the N.S.A. collected private data on millions of American citizens, but his statements were proven wrong by the disclosures made by Mr. Snowden.

Mr. Clapper’s apology, made in a June 21 letter to the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, came after he admitted, in a television interview earlier in June, that in his testimony he had used the “least untruthful” way to answer a question about domestic surveillance. Mr. Clapper’s statement was made in response to a question from Mr. Wyden, who has made it clear he already knew the answer and was trying to force Mr. Clapper into a public admission on the scope of the domestic collection.

In their letter on Tuesday, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall said that before the Internet data collection program was discontinued, American intelligence officials had repeatedly exaggerated its value in classified statements made both to Congress and to a secret court that oversees national security surveillance.

The Internet surveillance program was originally part of a Bush administration program that included the warrantless wiretapping of the phone calls of Americans. But in 2004, the legality of the Internet data collection program so concerned top Justice Department officials that it led to a showdown between the department and White House officials in the hospital room of ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft. After the confrontation the program was briefly stopped, then resumed under a new legal framework. It continued into the Obama administration.

Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall wrote in their letter that their experience in sparring with intelligence officials over the Internet data program in closed door hearings “has also led us to be skeptical of claims about the value of the bulk phone records collection program in particular.” They said, “It is up to Congress, the courts and the public to ask the tough questions and press even experienced intelligence officials to back their assertions up with actual evidence, rather than simply deferring to these officials’ conclusions without challenging them.”

Last week, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall were part of a group of 26 senators who wrote to Mr. Clapper raising questions about how broadly the N.S.A. has used the Patriot Act to collect the private data of American citizens. Given the fact that as members of the Senate intelligence committee they have been fully briefed on the surveillance operations, the questions in their letter suggest they are simply trying to force intelligence officials to provide answers for the public record.

For example, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall know whether the N.S.A. has collected “or made plans to collect” the cell-site location data from the cellphones of millions of Americans. In trying to force a public response to that question, Mr. Wyden and Mr. Udall appear to think that the answer is yes.

They also asked whether there have been any violations of the court orders permitting bulk data collection, which is another issue on which they would have already been provided answers in classified hearings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/u...e-program.html





Did You Know John Roberts is Also Chief Justice of the NSA’s Surveillance State?
Ezra Klein

Chief justice of the United States is a pretty big job. You lead the Supreme Court conferences where cases are discussed and voted on. You preside over oral arguments. When in the majority, you decide who writes the opinion. You get a cool robe that you can decorate with awesome gold stripes.

Oh, and one more thing: You have exclusive, unaccountable, lifetime power to shape the surveillance state.

To use its surveillance powers — tapping phones or reading e-mails — the federal government must ask permission of the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A FISA judge can deny the request or force the government to limit the scope of its investigation. It’s the only plausible check in the system. Whether it actually checks government surveillance power or acts as a rubber stamp is up to whichever FISA judge presides that day.

The 11 FISA judges, chosen from throughout the federal bench for seven-year terms, are all appointed by the chief justice. In fact, every FISA judge currently serving was appointed by Roberts, who will continue making such appointments until he retires or dies. FISA judges don’t need confirmation — by Congress or anyone else.

No other part of U.S. law works this way. The chief justice can’t choose the judges who rule on health law, or preside over labor cases, or decide software patents. But when it comes to surveillance, the composition of the bench is entirely in his hands, and, as a result, so is the extent to which the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can spy on citizens.

“It really is up to these FISA judges to decide what the law means and what the NSA and FBI gets to do,” said Julian Sanchez, a privacy scholar at the Cato Institute. “So Roberts is single-handedly choosing the people who get to decide how much surveillance we’re subject to.”

There’s little evidence that this is a power Roberts particularly wants. Tom Clancy, a professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law, has analyzed Roberts’s record on surveillance issues and been impressed mostly by how little interest in them Roberts displays. The chief justice doesn’t push the Supreme Court to take cases related to surveillance powers, and when such cases do come up, he tends to let another justice write the opinion. “He does not have much of a record in this area at all,” Clancy said.

To the degree Roberts’s views can be divined, he leans toward giving the government the authority it says it needs. “He’s been very state-oriented,” Clancy said. “He’s done very little writing in the area, but to the extent he has, almost without exception, he’s come down in favor of the police.”

Roberts’s nominations to the FISA court are almost exclusively Republican. One of his first appointees, for instance, was Federal District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida, who not only struck down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate but the rest of the law, too. (The Supreme Court disagreed.) Vinson’s term expired in May, but the partisan tilt on the court continues: Only one of the 11 members is a Democrat.

Critics contend the FISA court is too compromised to conduct genuine oversight. It meets in secret, and the presiding judge hears only the government’s argument before issuing a decision that can’t be appealed or even reviewed by the public. “Like any other group that meets in secret behind closed doors with only one constituency appearing before them, they’re subject to capture and bias,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.

A Reuters investigation found that from 2001 to 2012, FISA judges approved 20,909 surveillance and property search warrants while rejecting only 10. Almost 1,000 of the approved requests required modification, and 26 were withdrawn by the government before a ruling. That’s a startling win rate for the government.

Perhaps the federal government is simply very judicious in invoking its surveillance authority. But it’s also possible that empowering the chief justice — especially one with an expansive view of state police powers — to appoint every FISA judge has created a tilted court. That’s probable even if the chief justice has been conscientious in his selections.

Harvard Law School professor and Bloomberg View columnist Cass R. Sunstein has found that judges are more ideologically rigid when their fellow judges are from the same party, and more moderate when fellow judges are from the other party. “Federal judges (no less than the rest of us) are subject to group polarization,” he wrote.

The FISA court is composed of federal judges. All are appointed by the same man. All but one hail from the same political party. And unlike judges in normal courts, FISA judges don’t hear opposing testimony or feel pressure from colleagues or the public to moderate their rulings. Under these circumstances, group polarization is almost a certainty. “There’s the real possibility that these judges become more extreme over time, even when they had only a mild bias to begin with,” Cato’s Sanchez said.

Just as the likelihood of polarization in the FISA court is more pronounced than in normal courts, the stakes are also higher. If trial judges are unduly biased, their rulings can be overturned on appeal. But FISA judges decide the momentous questions of whom the government may spy on and how. Their power is awesome, and their word is final. As the great legal scholar Kanye West said, no one man should have all that power.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...illance-state/





NSA Recruitment Drive Goes Horribly Wrong

Staff from the National Security Agency got more than they bargained for when they attempted to recruit students to their organisation earlier this week …
Bim Adewunmi

On Tuesday, the National Security Agency called at the University of Wisconsin on a recruitment drive.

Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be "adversaries", and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.

She has posted a recording of the session on Soundcloud, which you can hear above, and posted a rough transcript on her blog, The Mob and the Multitude. Here are some highlights.

The session begins ...

Tahir: "Do you consider Germany and the countries that the NSA has been spying upon to be adversaries, or are you, right now, not speaking the truth?"

Recruiter 1: "You can define adversary as 'enemy' and, clearly, Germany is not our enemy. But would we have foreign national interests from an intelligence perspective on what's going on across the globe? Yeah, we do."

Tahir: "So by 'adversaries', you actually mean anybody and everybody. There is nobody, then, by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?"

Recruiter 1: "That is not correct."

Recruiter 2: "… for us, our business is apolitical, OK? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us ... We might use the word 'target'."

Tahir: "I'm just surprised that for language analysts, you're incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn't seem to be clear."

Later ...

Tahir: "... this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren't true. And we also know that the NSA took down brochures and factsheets after the Snowden revelations because those factsheets also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them, right? So how are we supposed to believe what you're saying?"

Even later ...

Tahir: "I think the question here is do you actually think about the ramifications of the work that you do, which is deeply problematic, or do you just dress up in costumes and get drunk?" [A reference to an earlier comment the recruiter made about NSA employees working hard and going to the bar to do karaoke.]

Recruiter 2: "... reporting the info in the right context is so important because the consequences of bad political decisions by our policymakers is something we all suffer from."

Unnamed female student: "And people suffer from the misinformation that you pass along so you should take responsibility as well."

Later still ...

Male student: "General Alexander [head of the NSA] also lied in front of Congress."

Recruiter 1: "I don't believe that he did."

Male student: "Probably because access to the Guardian is restricted on the Department of Defence's computers. I am sure they don't encourage people like you to actually think about these things. Thank God for a man like Edward Snowden who your organisation is now part of a manhunt trying to track down, trying to put him in a little hole somewhere for the rest of his life. Thank God they exist."

And finally ...

Recruiter 2: "This job isn't for everybody, you know ..."

Tahir: "So is this job for liars? Is this what you're saying? Because, clearly, you're not able to give us forthright answers. I mean, given the way the NSA has behaved, given the fact that we've been lied to as Americans, given the fact that factsheets have been pulled down because they clearly had untruths in them, given the fact that Clapper and Alexander lied to Congress – is that a qualification for being in the NSA? Do you have to be a good liar?"

Recruiter 1: I don't believe the NSA is telling complete lies. And I do believe that you know, I mean people can, you can read a lot of different things that are, um, portrayed as fact and that doesn't make them fact just because they're in newspapers."

Unnamed female student: "Or intelligence reports."

Recruiter 1: "That's not really our purpose here today and I think if you're not interested in that ... there are people here who are probably interested in a language career."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/shor...ruitment-drive





Mass Protests Planned Over Web NSA Spying Revelations
BBC

Some of the web's biggest names have backed mass protests over internet surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The Restore the Fourth movement - referring to the US constitution's fourth amendment - said it wants to end "unconstitutional surveillance".

Reddit, Mozilla and Wordpress are among the big web names backing the action, due to take place on Thursday.

Almost 100 events have been planned across the US.

An interactive map detailing their locations has been published.

The site quotes a line from the fourth amendment which pledges "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".

As well as the "real-world" protests, many influential websites plan to display messages of protest on their homepages on Thursday, co-ordinated by a group called the Internet Defence League (IDL).

The action has taken inspiration from similar efforts that took place last year.

Wikipedia, Google and others went "dark", or put black boxes over parts of their pages, to show their disagreement with proposed anti-piracy measures being discussed by US lawmakers.

In reaction to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Mozilla, maker of the widely used Firefox browser, launched stopwatching.us - a petition calling for full disclosure of the US's "spying" programmes.

At the time of writing, the site had amassed 536,559 signatures. Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is listed as being among the petition's backers.

The demand comes at a time when one top US intelligence official was forced to apologise for telling Congress in March that the NSA did not have a policy of gathering data on millions of Americans.

National intelligence director James Clapper said in a letter to the Senate intelligence committee that his answer had been "clearly erroneous".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23160309

































Until next week,

- js.



















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