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Old 20-11-13, 08:25 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 23rd, '13

Since 2002



Volume XII, Issue Number I































"It’s impossible to build an Internet where the good guys can eavesdrop, and the bad guys cannot." – Bruce Schneier






































November 23rd, 2013




Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire Blocked in the UK
Mittal Mandalia

Movie industry in the UK is having a ball as far as blocking of sites allegedly involved in piracy is concerned as courts have asked UK ISPs to enforce a blockade on Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire and others in its latest order.

ISPs in the UK have given up on the idea of standing up against the blockade and copyright right holders have made it their point to expand the blocklist as much as possible. About two weeks back, a court ordered blockade of SolarMovie and TubePlus, which will be enforced sometime next month.

This week the High Court has asked all major ISPs including BT, EE, O2, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to block access to YIFY-Torrents, PrimeWire, Project Free TV, Vodly, and WatchFreeMovies. It seems that Sky has already implemented the blockade on YIFY-Torrents as our sources have revealed that Sky is displaying an “Access Blocked” message while visiting the site.

Getting a torrent or steaming site blocked in the UK is a mere paperwork formality since ISPs have completely stopped defending against these orders. As it stands a total of 33 sites have been blocked in the UK including The Pirate Bay, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Torrentz, 1337x, Fenopy, H33T, KickAssTorrents, among others.

The Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) of the City of London police managed to successfully order take downs of several major torrent indexes including ExtraTorrent, SumoTorrent, and MisterTorrent without any sort of court orders in October.
http://www.techienews.co.uk/973203/p...re-blocked-uk/





Filesharing Search Engines Take to Dark Web and Bitcoin to Escape Hollywood

Indexing sites such as NewsNab+ follow drugs marketplaces hiding within Tor and the web’s underground, funded by Bitcoin
Samuel Gibbs

Filesharing indexing sites that operate like search engines for piracy links, are taking to the dark web to escape the clutches of copyright owners.

A new piracy indexing site funded solely by Bitcoins, NewsNab+, has set up shop within the Tor network – commonly referred to as the dark web due to the fact that it is not indexed by search engines and cannot be accessed via the open internet or Google – using its anonymity to protect the piracy site’s location and identity from litigation from copyright owners and their representatives like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

"By using Tor as the base of operations, we have reduced the risk of our users being discovered, as well as the risk of the site being discovered, therefore providing a more reliable, long-term solution for indexing,” the administrator of NewsNab+ known only as Tyrion told filesharing news site TorrentFreak.
NewzNab+ offers links via Tor to download copyrighted media using the usenet filesharing service.

The Tor project is a non-profit organisation that conducts research and development into online privacy and anonymity. It is designed to stop people – including government agencies and corporations – learning your location or tracking your browsing habits.

It offers a browser that bounces internet users' and websites' traffic through "relays" run by thousands of volunteers around the world, making it extremely hard for anyone to identify the source of the information or the location of the user.

Anonymity protection for both administrators and users

Hiding within Tor affords both the administrators of the site some anonymity protection as well as its users. However, it isn’t entirely foolproof, as action taking down the online drugs marketplace Silk Road in October, which also operated solely within the Tor network, proved.

Tyrion describes the use of Tor as like having a heavy bouncer on the door of a club – he only lets in clientele that NewsNab+ wants through the door, but given enough resources and manpower, he could be overwhelmed. The amount of effort required to overwhelm the Tor protection would be prohibitively expensive, at least that’s what Tyrion hopes.

Recent action by media groups, putting pressure on payment providers like Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, resulted in several high-profile usernet indexing pirate sites like NZBMatrix folding due to lack of funding. NewsNab+ hopes to avoid that kind of situation by adopting bitcoin as its primary funding strategy, accepting donations in the digital peer-to-peer currency and not relying on ads or other funding sources.

Forced underground

The move further underground has been fuelled by increasing pressure from media groups like the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, the BPI and the Federation Against Copyright Theft. It is unknown whether other sites like the notorious Pirate Bay would follow suit, or whether NewsNab+ is likely to be popular.

Tor was relatively unknown until high-profile sites like Silk Road and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s use of the anonymity network hit the mainstream media, but now it is slowly becoming more well known as more and more allegedly illegal sites move into the dark web to escape monitoring and prosecution by the authorities.
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...itcoin-newznab





The Anonymous Tor Network Now Comes in a Box
Meghan Neal

I have the Tor browser running on my computer, and it took me about two minutes to download. Once you're surfing through the network there are plenty of daunting technical options to dig into, but accessing the onion network for basic, everyday web use was as easy as clicking download, opening the program, and then struggling to remember all my no-longer-stored passwords.

Still, Tor is best known as a niche tool for hackers, whistleblowers, criminals, activists, or folks with otherwise something to hide. To your average internet user, the covert network of relays and whatchamacallits can come off as too complex and intimidating to bother with—even as people are increasingly concerned with their online privacy in light of the NSA scandal.

So goes the thinking behind Safeplug, a new hardware adapter that basically puts Tor in a box. It takes 60 seconds and 50 bucks to plug the privacy box into your router, and you’re good to go, the company claims. Like anonymous browsing for dummies.

The adapter comes from hardware company Pogoplug, which announced its new product yesterday and hopes it will bring Tor to the mass market by offering more consumer-friendly access. "We want to just take what is currently available today to a more technical crowd and democratize it, making it easier to use for an average user," CEO Dan Putterman told GigaOM.

Sure, more people using Tor would be great. Even though it's not 100 percent secure and anonymous, it does give a lot of control back to web users who are watching their privacy slip out of their grasp everyday. Also, the more people that join the network and volunteer to host a relay, the faster connection speeds will get, making Tor-based browsing less of a slow drag. To that point, you can opt to use your Safebox device as a relay, so it has the potential to strengthen the underground network if it is widely adopted.

But as appealing as it is to plug in a little black box instead of downloading and running a hodgepodge of web-based security programs, the device isn't a privacy panacea. On its website, the Tor Project points out that accessing the web through Tor isn't in itself enough to assure anonymity; users can unwittingly leak information that identifies them through Flash plug-in or add-ons. Tor recommends disabling these, and offers a list of other tips and best-practices for secure browsing.

Nor is the adapter necessarily easier to use than the downloadable Tor browser bundle. In both cases, you can also cherry-pick which sites to access through the hidden network by whitelisting "trusted" web pages—say, online streaming sites that are a pain to use with slower connection speeds. One small differentiation is that with the browser version of Tor, you have to download separate versions for your computer, tablet, and cell phone, while Safebox will anonymize traffic on any device that’s using wi-fi from the router the box it's hooked up to.

Curiously, the folks at Pogoplug didn't work with or communicate with the Tor Project while developing their product with its open-source software. I reached out to Tor to gauge their thoughts on new hardware tool, and will update this post as soon as they respond.

For its part, Safebox is looking to appeal to Joe and Jane Schmoes that would prefer to keep their IP address and web habits private—the same way you wouldn’t want government agencies or ad companies snooping around your home and watching your every move.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the...comes-in-a-box





You Can't Beat Politics with Technology, Says Pirate Bay Cofounder Peter Sunde
Olivia Solon

Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde spoke to Wired.co.uk about the problems with the file-sharing website in its current form, the "imminent death" of peer-to-peer and the centralised services that leave us open to NSA surveillance. He also urges people to dispel their political apathy to prevent the emergence of a new Stasi-style era of oppression.

People who are disenchanted with politics and the financial system should try and engage with the democratic process rather than turn to technology for alternative methods of doing things, says Peter Sunde, cofounder of The Pirate Bay.

"You can't beat politics with new technology all the time. Sometimes you have to actually make sure that politics are in line with what people want. A lot of people are giving up on politics and thinking they can solve issues with technology. These kind of arrogant behaviours towards the rest of the society are a bit disgusting," Sunde told Wired.co.uk in a Skype interview.

His response was provoked by a question about Bitcoin, a technology that he thinks is "interesting" and has a fascinating story behind it, but one that he feels is symbolic of a depressing widespread lack of trust in politics.

"We are a community of people, we have politicians that we elect, we can demand that they do things," he says, "but we are way too lazy to do that today".

His concern is that "we are just giving up". "We have this hatred of politicians who we just see as being corrupt and we don't trust them any more so we try to do things outside of where they can bother us." This includes setting up cryptocurrencies that are difficult to monitor and tax (Sunde is a firm believer in taxation, since it allows communities to build shared infrastructure).

"The distrust of the political system is unhealthy," he says. Instead of building tools such as Bitcoin, which he believes give "a carte blanche" to politicians and bankers, we should be forcing them to change -- in Sunde's view we should be aiming towards community-owned banks. "We need a revolution instead of a technology evolution."

The lack of engagement with the democratic process and reliance on technology is a particular problem now because we consider "the clever people" to be those who know about technology. He describes "nerds" as the "new elite" -- the very people who should be helping to fix the political system. But they "are kind of lazy bastards who are too arrogant to go onto the streets. They are too arrogant to see it's important to not think that we can solve problems with better technology".

He says that you are not going to stop the police from chasing you just because you have the best encryption in the world. "You actually need to go somewhere and vote and make sure you don't have corrupt police," he explains. "But there's a faith in technology as the saviour, as the new Messiah, and that's definitely not the case. I really don't see any revolution happening."

Political ambitions

Sunde hopes to try and instigate that revolution in his quest to become a member of the European Parliament as a candidate for the Pirate Party. His campaign will launch in January 2014 and he is planning his policies until then. He wanted to run independently, but the EU doesn't allow for this, "which is kind of weird". He's actually more of a socialist and would be more likely to vote for the left-wing parties in the Nordics ("where they are sane"), but they consider him to be too controversial a character.

Although he doubts he'll win a seat in the European Parliament, he hopes he can inspire people to take an interest in European politics. "If I get in there are so many things I could draw attention to even if I was just going there to make fun of things."

He finds it "really strange" how detached people in European countries feel from the European Parliament when it has so much influence over national legislation. We tend to joke about extraordinary Brussels-originated policies relating to the dimensions of fruit and vegetables or the fact that politicians are sent there and no one knows what they are doing. "It's just this grotesque monster and you don't see anything happening except when you want to stop some of the crazy legislation they come up with some times. We have this union and we have voting rights and we don't care enough. It's just insane that we agreed to have this parliament if that's the way we look at it."

Digital rights

The EU isn't the only grotesque monster. A major looming threat is TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), another secretly-negotiated trade agreement in the ilk of Acta and Sopa. Instead of taking a whack-a-mole approach to fighting these treaties, we should be more aggressive in enshrining our digital rights in "some sort of internet human rights bill" to prevent TPP from simply reemerging under another guise.

He suggests that people might be apathetic towards politics because "we've already given up". People complained about the NSA surveillance revelations, but "nothing is really happening" -- there's no one storming American embassies. "I worry that we don't really care about our digital rights any more and we are not fighting for them."

Part of the problem is that most people don't currently feel that their digital rights are being repressed in any major way. "We don't really know what it's going to be like if we lose all these rights or what happens when the data about you starts to be abused. That's not going to happen until it's too late," he says.

Sunde suggests learning from history. He was inspired by a recent visit to the Stasi Museum in Berlin with Anka Domscheit-Berg, wife of former Wikileaks' spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who grew up in East Germany under constant Stasi surveillance. "When bad people have all of the information about you -- even though that information might not seem incriminating -- it can be abused," Sunde explains. In the case of Eastern Germany, the Stasi went too far and there was a revolution. "It's better to stop right now than having to break down another wall."

Hemlis

When he's not taking on political apathy, Sunde is continuing to work on Flattr, VPN IPredator, a comedy show (!) and a new secure messenger app called Hemlis, which means "secret" in Swedish. So far the app is being beta tested by ten people using it every day and Sunde says the encryption is working well and it has a "really nice" user interface. He won't be drawn into offering a release date. "It's finished when it's finished -- we don't want to stress anything when we are dealing with something as serious as people's secrets."

Much of his time has been spent dealing with "haters" from the encryption community. He admits that "there's always going to be a better solution" but that many of Hemlis's critics are "not that helpful". One of the main criticisms levied at Hemlis is that it wants to control the network (it doesn't allow individuals to connect their own trusted servers) and that there are no plans to release the source code ("even though controlling the network is currently the only thing you can do to keep from being spied on," says Sunde).

Sunde sees these critics as elitist. "We want to give decent encryption to everyone -- not just tech people. But the tech people are the ones who are really upset that they can't connect their own server. We decided quite early on to stop listening to them."

The Pirate Bay

It's not just the encryption community that has riled Sunde, but the people who are currently running The Pirate Bay (which Sunde cofounded back in 2003). "I don't know the people left and I don't like what I see," he says, adding that he wishes it had closed down on its tenth birthday in August this year. He said that the lack of new development in the BitTorrent file sharing scene symbolises the "imminent death" of peer-to-peer.

"Sometimes it's good to burn things so something else comes out of the ashes. Otherwise you get to this stale position. It's like money. If you don't spend money it's worth less because of inflation. The same applies to technology: if you don't actually make it better, it becomes worse," Sunde declares.

"A lot of people say that BitTorrent is good enough, but it doesn't really matter because the scene itself is dying," he adds, explaining that there are "no alternatives" to Spotify or Netflix. He admits that they are both good services, but is worried about the fact that a single player dominates in every silo of the internet. "We are centralising everything on the internet," Sunde says, pointing out that Facebook is the dominant social network, Twitter is the dominant microblogging site, Skype is the videophone chat service of choice. "All of them are based on central servers owned by an American company, which is giving me a really bad vibe when you consider the revelations about the NSA," he adds. "It would be impossible to have as much surveillance if we didn't all use these centralised services."

Sunde thinks Netflix and Spotify are good services, but he stopped using the latter after it deleted some of the music he listened to. He had already deleted some music he couldn't get hold of any more from a hard drive because he "trusted Spotify to have it". He was scared away from the service permanently "because I realised that someone else is controlling the music that I listen to".

"Even though they [Netflix and Spotify] might have their heart in the right place, they are totally dependent on the same shitty companies -- the same shitty Universal and Warner Bros and all these companies that have given them the rights to license their music."

This goes against the tenets of decentralised file-sharing, where people cared more about culture and the music that was spread than who had the copyright. "It goes against the idea I have about how we should handle culture and cultural heritage."
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...litical-apathy





Study Shines Light On What Makes Digital Activism Effective
Peter Kelley

Digital activism is usually nonviolent and tends to work best when social media tools are combined with street-level organization, according to new research from the University of Washington.

The findings come from a report released today (Nov. 20) by the Digital Activism Research Project run by Philip Howard, UW professor of communication, information and international studies. Founded by Howard in 2012, the project applies rigorous empirical social science methods to the study of global digital activism.

“This is the largest investigation of digital activism ever undertaken,” Howard said. “We looked at just under 2,000 cases over a 20-year period, with a very focused look at the last two years.”

Howard and coauthors Frank Edwards and Mary Joyce, both UW doctoral students, oversaw 40 student analysts who reviewed news stories by citizen and professional journalists describing digital activism campaigns worldwide. A year of research and refining brought the total down to between 400 and 500 well-verified cases representing about 150 countries. The research took a particularly focused look at the last two years.

Howard said one of their main findings is that digital activism tends to be nonviolent, despite what many may think.

“In the news we hear of online activism that involves anonymous or cyberterrorist hackers who cause trouble and break into systems,” Howard said. “But that was 2 or 3 percent of all the cases — far and away, most of the cases are average folks with a modest policy agenda” that doesn’t involve hacking or covert crime.

Other findings include:

• Digital activism campaigns tend to be more successful when waged against government rather than business authorities. There have been many activist campaigns against corporations, but they don’t seem to have succeeded as well as those that had governments for a target, Howard said.

• Effective digital activism employs a number of social media tools. Tweeting alone is less successful, Howard said, and no single tool in the study had a clear relationship with campaign success.

• Governments still tend to lag behind activist movements in the use and mastery of new social media tools. They sometimes use the same tools, Howard said, but it’s always months after others have tried them.

Howard said these factors, taken together, “are the magic ingredients, especially when the target is a government — a real recipe for success.”

Edwards is a doctoral student in sociology; Joyce is a doctoral student in communication.

Howard added that, in time, the data gathered for this work might yield more insight into the world of digital activism.

Unanswered questions include why there are regional disparities among digital tool use, why phones are prevalent but text messaging is rare in digital campaigns, and whether external political, social or cultural phenomena influence patterns and the effectiveness of digital activism.

Funding for the research came from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation and the UW Department of Communication.

###

The report is available for download at http://www.digital-activism.org/. For more information contact Howard at 206-612-9911 or pnhoward@uw.edu, Edwards at 312-608-1716 or Fedwards@uw.edu and Joyce at 857-928-1297 or Mjoyce@uw.edu.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/...ism-effective/





FCC Relaxes Rule Limiting Foreign Ownership of Media Stations
Brian Fung

The Federal Communications Commission has voted unanimously to relax a decades-old rule that kept foreigners from owning more than a 25 percent stake in a U.S. radio or television station.

In a 5-0 vote, the FCC said it was open to considering investment proposals from international companies or individuals on a case-by-case basis. Tom Wheeler, the body’s new chairman, said the change would grant U.S. broadcasters access to new funding from foreigners and diversify programming on the air. The idea was floated last month by then-acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn.

“It will encourage ownership diversity,” said Wheeler.

The loosened restriction could also benefit large foreign companies. Grupo Televisa, a Mexican company with a minority stake in the Spanish-language station Univision, might now be able to increase its ownership. Under the terms of a $1.2 billion deal struck in 2010, Univision, which is based in New York, acquired the rights to broadcast Televisa’s soap operas in exchange for a 5 percent stake.

Televisa last quarter made over $71 million off of royalties from Univision. The 2010 deal included other provisions that sought to grant Televisa as much as a 40 percent stake in Univision. But the FCC’s foreign ownership rule prevented that from happening.

The FCC’s decision also paves the way for companies such as Qatar-based Al Jazeera to consider expanding its American presence. Currently, its Al Jazeera America service operates on cable and satellite channels only. Adding over-the-air television to the mix would allow for greater reach.

FCC officials said the agency would still examine foreign ownership deals, and would heed to concerns raised by administration officials over national security, trade policy and law enforcement.

The original 25-percent rule was never intended to be a hard cap, said Matt Wood, policy director at the interest group Free Press. Instead, companies have rarely asked the government for permission to exceed 25 percent — which ended up creating a norm against doing so.

“There’s always been room for waiving that rule or granting an application that might exceed that,” he said. “This does nothing more than clarify what the law has always been.”

Unlike before, however, the FCC now faces an important auction in the coming year, during which television broadcasters will be encouraged to give up valuable airwaves and auction them off to wireless companies eager to upgrade mobile broadband. Wheeler indicated the FCC would be more likely to approve of foreign broadcast investment proposals if they included channel-sharing or other attempts to clear up this spectrum.

“Efficient use of spectrum is key to considering applications for what will result from this decision,” Wheeler said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...le-the-tv-biz/





How Amazon Studios Went from Grassroots Idealist to Hollywood Threat

Amazon's arm for making movies and TV shows veered away from its early ambitions with a grander plan to lure Prime customers and crush Netflix. Now it has some in Hollywood on edge.
Joan E. Solsman

The small army of comedians that swarmed Portland, Ore., last April for the Bridgetown Comedy Festival were sleeping off their hangovers from the previous night's festivities, or still drunkenly stumbling through the hallways of the Hotel Fifty.

Except for two of them.

Ben Roy and Adam Cayton-Holland -- members of the three-man Denver comedy gang, the Grawlix -- woke up early in their shared hotel room and grabbed their laptops to watch their sitcom pilot, "Those Who Can't," debut on Amazon.com. Their act had never had such a large stage, and the two men followed in real time as hundreds of customers banged out reviews. Their phones started ringing with interview requests.

"It was like Christmas morning," said Roy, a tattoo-covered dad, punk-band frontman and longtime stand-up comic.

This was exactly the sort of success story that Amazon envisioned when it unveiled its Hollywood arm, Amazon Studios, three years ago. Its purpose: Invest in video projects from Hollywood outsiders and let the world's biggest focus group -- Amazon's customer base -- approve or not. The idea was to help talent bubble up and, along the way, collect valuable data about what Amazon customers watch.

It's also a mission Amazon quickly downgraded from star to extra. Top customer ratings aren't enough for Amazon Studios and what it wants to achieve: namely, to challenge Netflix, upend the traditional studios and, above all, persuade millions of people to sign up for Amazon Prime, the $79-a-year service for second-day shipping on some items and for access to streaming movies and TV shows.

"Those Who Can't" earned the highest customer score of any Amazon pilot, but Amazon is betting potential Prime customers are more interested in big-named talent than the Gawlix gang. And so Amazon is spending as much as cable heavyweight HBO and others to create programs with top stars. To some degree, we've read this script before: Jeff Bezos bleeds millions -- think Kindle -- to bulk up and plow through an entrenched industry that he remakes in Amazon's image.

So when "Alpha House," Amazon's first full series, debuts Friday, it will star John Goodman, and include cameos by Stephen Colbert and Bill Murray. "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau, the first comic-strip artist to win a Pulitzer, created the half-hour political comedy.

As one top talent agent put it, "Amazon has the potential to be very scary to its competitors because content is a very small part of its business." In other words, what's $10 million here and $10 million there when you're trying to overhaul the movie business as a way to lure lifelong Amazon customers?

Idealistic beginnings

When Roy Price, the founding director of the studio, rolled out Amazon Studios in November 2010, he positioned it as the "movie studio of the future," a sort of anti-Hollywood shop that helps aspiring movie makers and empowers them with Amazon's reach. "Today, the movie business is organized and decisions are made pretty much in one place, Hollywood," Price said in a promotional video aimed at amateur actors and screenwriters. "At Amazon Studios, we hope to discover voices that might not otherwise be heard."

Anyone could join, and Price invited members to submit scripts and suggest revisions, with the enticement that Warner Bros. could option films. If the projects went to theatrical release, the creator would get $200,000, plus a $400,000 bonus if the movie earned $60 million at the box office. So far, Warner Bros. has optioned none.

Amazon sweetened the pot for writers with the prospect of instant cash, promising to dole out $2.7 million in prize money to projects submitted in 2011. (The top prize, $1 million, went to a 34-year-old music composer from Mesa, Ariz., named Rob Gardner. He made a rudimentary full-length animation mockup of his children's musical about princesses. Gardner, who didn't reply to requests for comment, is still raising money, most recently on Kickstarter.)

Each step of the way, Amazon learned a bit more. The data showed, for instance, that many of the most popular scripts were comedies. Price used the submission system and customer reaction to scripts to test out stories before shooting anything, he said. It was the first of many ways Amazon would use data to decide which movies and shows to bankroll.

The premise, however, wasn't quite right. The customers involved didn't represent the audience Amazon ultimately needed -- people who like to shop a lot online. People who read scripts, Price said, are a rare niche.

Jack Epps Jr., who co-wrote "Top Gun," is a University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts professor and was an unofficial adviser to Amazon early on. He said this kind of pre-testing is vulnerable to the same trap as all focus groups: they're all supposed to represent what people want, but often they don't.

"Nobody knows what they want until it's there," he said. He gave the example of AMC's critical and ratings darling "Breaking Bad." What focus group would have ever applauded a show about a cancer-stricken high-school teacher cooking meth?

It didn't help Amazon Studios that the submitted scripts needed work.

"Some were better than others, but there was nothing that jumped out at me and said "God, I'd like to option this,'" said Michael Taylor, a producer and another USC professor who judged Amazon movie scripts in the early days. "It's probably a very good idea that they evolved to the in-house development....They've taken control over the process."

Falling behind Netflix

In early 2012, Amazon Studios was far behind the original content race. It had been a year since Netflix, looking at its viewer data, outbid HBO with a reported $100 million commitment for two seasons of "House of Cards." Its first original TV show, "Lilyhammer," premiered that February, and Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings was telling investors that Netflix would lavish its original series with up to 15 percent of its content budget, which was already three times the size of Amazon's. Amazon's service, he declared, was "a confusing mess."

And so began the march to make it all more professional, although Price wouldn't talk about why Amazon changed strategy. He brought on a television development team with people whose resumes boast stints at 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures Family Entertainment.

"We explicitly decided to include both an open online process of submitting ideas and have a robust traditional development process, reaching out to top talent, top producers," Price said. "With TV, the goal was to get the best shows we could and to make progress quickly."

Epps, the "Top Gun" screenwriter and one of the first people to publicly applaud Amazon Studio's open-invitation system, said the new direction is smarter if Amazon wants to make headway. "At the end of the day, they still went to a successful writer to pull off their series," said Epps.

Price has stayed mum about the budget for "Alpha House," but he did say that Amazon is spending as much as big production houses would on any high-end TV series. The set, at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York, reflects that, including a replica of the Russell Senate Office Building, precise down to the mailbox slots and marble. On the day I visited, one of the stars, Mark Consuelos, half joked that the quality of a show's catering matches the quality of the production. "The food is hard-core," he said, gratified that the spread included almond milk.

A data-driven operation

Even if Amazon isn't outspending Netflix -- remember, Netflix paid a reported $100 million for "House of Cards" -- it's likely beating Netflix's data dedication. The company has also culled from statistics about what movies and shows people buy on Amazon.com and what they look up on the Internet Movie Database, which Amazon bought in 1998.

"Amazon customers like 'Breaking Bad' and they like 'Downton Abbey,' so maybe we should develop a show about aristocrats in Surrey who are also crystal meth dealers?" Price said in an October keynote at an entertainment conference in France. "Too simplistic."

So Amazon plowed deeper into the data. In April of this year, Amazon Studios put 14 pilots up for all customers to watch and rate, including "Alpha House" and "Those Who Can't." It used those customer ratings plus viewing data to help pick programs to make into full series. Joe Lewis, a former Fox development manager who was Price's first hire to work on television, said the company looked at how many people finish watching a pilot, how many watch more than once, and how many write a review. Price noted that different shows draw in different audience segments, and "it helps to be attracting the right group."

In essence, it made Amazon the first studio with ratings for its shows before they're really "shows" -- that is, before it gives the green light to a full series.

Price likened it to owning a restaurant, and testing out a special entree one night before printing up entirely new menus. He also has said that human oversight is essential too. "It's not just like you walk in Tuesday morning and the computer tells you which shows to order," he said at the conference in France. "You still have to apply human judgment."

Amazon is still starkly behind Netflix in several respects. A study by Sandvine, which runs fixed and mobile data networks worldwide, found that Netflix commands the largest amount of North American Internet traffic of any Web property, 31 percent of the total volume during the peak part of the day. Amazon Video represented just 1.61 percent.

Part of the problem is simple awareness, said Edward S. Williams, an analyst for BMO Capital Markets. People think of Amazon Prime for its shipping bargains, he said, but most Prime subscribers -- estimated at 12 million people -- seem unaware that a premium video service comes with the membership. Netflix, by contrast, has more than 43 million members worldwide.

But others involved with Amazon Studios productions noted how Amazon has quickly become a peer to industry heavyweights in other ways.

"Amazon is now considered up there with Netflix, FX, anywhere you would go to pitch," said Jill Soloway, the writer and director of a pilot Amazon is shooting, "Transparent," as well as an Emmy nominee for her work writing for "Six Feet Under."

There are differences, she said: if anything, working with Amazon was easier and better than with a typical studio. "Amazon had a business model that felt incredibly fast. Because they're so new, they don't have the levels of infrastructure," she said. "You're usually going through three rounds of notes at each stage, and things can really get paralyzed over the years."

Retailer versus entertainer

The most fundamental way that Amazon differs from its competition, however, is its identity. At its core, Amazon is a retailer. And Bezos, competitors know all too well, willingly sacrifices profits to build out his businesses.

In the new book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," journalist Brad Stone recounts how Amazon was in a bidding war with Walmart over Quidsi, the operator of Diapers.com, at the same time it launched Amazon Mom, which offered a yearlong Prime subscription and a 30 percent discount on diapers. Quidsi executives calculated that the program would cost Amazon $100 million over three months just on diapers. And one of Bezos' deputies warned that the CEO would drive diaper prices to zero if Walmart won Quidsi.

"Ultimately, any established player should be concerned when Amazon decides to enter your market, invest heavily to take away market share, with no accountability for traditional measures of profitability, while Wall Street continues to reward them on their long-term strategy," said Steve Felter, who launched digital projects at Warner Bros. and Disney before leaving to run his own gaming startup, GameSalad.

How does Amazon Studios fit into that long-term strategy? It comes down to Prime, which is becoming ever more powerful for the company. Analysts estimate that Prime subscribers spend between two and four times as much on Amazon as nonmembers do. Additional features, like original shows from Amazon Studios, could reel in new types of customers. Amazon's decision to release most episodes of its original series week to week, in contrast with the Netflix approach of unleashing them all in one bingeable bunch, supports that idea -- tease your viewers, keep them coming back to the store.

Amazon is also giving everyone a free taste of its originals, having found that a good proportion of the people who sign up for free trial memberships end up as paying subscribers. The first three episodes of its series will be available for anyone to watch, but the rest are reserved for Prime.
(Credit: Joan E. Solsman/CNET)

Next up, Amazon is casting Prime as a true Netflix challenger by moving into edgy dramas, the type of originals that made a name for Netflix in Hollywood. Since Netflix won three Emmys for "House of Cards," Amazon's unofficial stance is to win awards like that too, said Jonathan Alter, an "Alpha House" executive producer.

Late last month, Amazon announced plans for two hour-long drama pilots from Chris Carter, the creator of "The X-Files," as well as best-selling author Michael Connelly and Eric Overmyer, who wrote for "The Wire" and co-created the HBO drama "Treme."

Even the creator of "Alpha House" couldn't resist lampooning the oddity of a television studio creating content to get more people to sign up for rush orders of blenders and Blu-Ray discs. At the New York premiere of the series, in a 700-seat theater of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Garry Trudeau thanked Bezos -- he called him "Mr. B" -- and Amazon before addressing the audience.

"We hope you enjoy our show," he said, "and will spread the word about our sex, our violence, and of course, our free two-day shipping." Which, funny as it sounds, is exactly what Mr. B hopes will happen.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-576...lywood-threat/





After 15 Years of Llama-Whipping, AOL Shuts Down Winamp for Good

Former Winamp employees blame AOL mismanagement that began over a decade ago.
Cyrus Farivar

Winamp, the storied MP3 player bought by AOL in June 1999 for over $80 million, is set to shut down in exactly one month. According to a post that went live Wednesday at 12:00pm ET on the Winamp website:

Winamp.com and associated Web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.

On Wednesday, Ars confirmed the announcement with Geno Yoham, Winamp’s general director since October 2008. He declined immediate comment but said that he would try to arrange a future interview.

Ars wrote an extensive feature on the rise and fall of Winamp in June 2012, detailing AOL’s mismanagement of the property since its dotcom-boom acquisition. As we reported then, Winamp continued to receive updates and make a tiny amount of money for AOL throughout the last 15 years. AOL even released the first Android version in 2010 and a Mac version in 2011.

While the company has declined to release official figures, former employees who worked on Winamp estimate its current revenue at around $6 million annually. And Winamp still has an estimated user base of millions worldwide, a small fraction of which live in the United States. All of that appears to be water under the bridge now.

“There's no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition,” Rob Lord, the first hire and first general manager of Winamp, told Ars in 2012.

Justin Frankel, Winamp's primary developer, seemed to concur in an interview he gave to BetaNews. (He declined to be interviewed by Ars in 2012.) “I'm always hoping that they will come around and realize that they're killing [Winamp] and find a better way, but AOL always seems too bogged down with all of their internal politics to get anything done.”

Ars is currently reaching out to former Winamp employees and developers as this story develops. If that includes you, please get in touch.

UPDATE 2:57pm ET: Doug Serton, an AOL spokesperson, told Ars: "We decline to comment beyond the note posted on the site earlier."

Venture capitalist Josh Felser, who founded Spinner.com, another online music property that was acquired by AOL at the same time as Winamp, told Ars, "Such a bummer. [AOL] had been trying to sell it for months... Spinner was shut down first. It's the end of Music 1.0."

Felser added that he recently seriously considered buying Winamp from AOL, too.

"I spoke with the [corporate development] folks at AOL a couple times. Even reached out to [Winamp creator] Justin [Frankel], who was totally not interested. I think we talked about $5 million with some trailing equity."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013...namp-for-good/





Studios Formally Drop $200M LimeWire Copyright Lawsuit
Dominic Patten

And with a signature and a date today, the more than $200 million copyright lawsuit by Hollywood against the file sharing site is over. A NYC-based federal judge today granted final approval to Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Viacom, Disney, Comedy Partners and Warner Bros’ request to dismiss their almost two year case against LimeWire and its founder Mark Gorton. Filed on October 30, the motion for a voluntary dismissal with prejudice was approved by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr on Thursday (read it here). None of the plaintiffs gave any official reason for ending the case against the now-closed-down LimeWire. However, sources tell me that the studios received a hefty multimillion-dollar settlement.

Hollywood first took LimeWire and Gorton to court on back on February 1, 2012 over thousands of its films and TV shows that it claimed the file sharing provider fostered the illegal downloading by the site’s users. Just over a year ago the studios declared that they wanted LimeWire found liable before their lawsuit even went to trial because they claimed that their case against the online service was so similar to one LimeWire lost to the record labels in May 2010 that there just wasn’t even a need to continue litigation. They never got that judgment but now it really doesn’t matter. Gianni Servodidio and Steven Fabrizio of Jenner & Block’s NYC office represented Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Viacom International Inc., Comedy Partners, Disney Enterprises, Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, And Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. The defendants were represented by Michael Shuster and Avi Brian Israeli of Holwell Shuster & Goldberg.
http://www.deadline.com/2013/11/stud...ement-lawsuit/





How Plain, Old WiFi Will Revolutionize the Cellular Industry
Brian Fung

It's easy to forget that WiFi has actually gotten faster over time. In 2003, your garden variety WiFi network managed theoretical speeds of 54 Mbps. Fast forward a decade, and we're now browsing over WiFi, in some cases, at 1 Gbps or more.

Those advances aren't just creating faster Internet experiences. They're also giving rise to a new crop of cellular services. These alternatives to the traditional wireless carrier take advantage of the spread of cheap and plentiful WiFi to deliver low-cost voice, SMS and data in ways that should make the giants in the industry deeply jealous. If the budget-minded upstarts get their way, they could wind up overturning the entire way that cellular service is bought and sold. Here's how.

The country is dominated by four national wireless carriers that operate their own networks. These companies charge relatively high prices. Some of the cost is justified; in addition to providing your mobile service, the companies have to invest in upgrading towers, buying the airwaves over which your calls travel, and other infrastructure costs.

But the small cellular companies now moving aggressively to shake up this system pay no such costs. Collectively, these businesses are called MVNOs — mobile virtual network operators. By signing deals with the larger businesses, MVNOs get to use those companies' infrastructure without actually having to build it all themselves. In some cases, MVNOs also cut costs by foregoing customer service teams. That can add up to savings that are passed on to consumers.

The idea isn't all that new; in fact, MVNOs are really popular overseas. The United States itself is home to dozens of cellular operators that piggyback off of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. But the business model that helped sustain MVNOs through the 1990s and 2000s is changing.

Consider Republic Wireless, a Raleigh-based business that announced this month it would sell Motorola's new flagship phone, the Moto X. Republic enjoys all the traditional advantages of an MVNO — low capital expenditures on infrastructure and spectrum — but it's taken the additional step of cutting out 3G and 4G data use whenever it can. Technically, Republic operates on Sprint's network, but it's more appropriate to think of Sprint as a backup for when a call or message can't be completed over WiFi.

Yes, you read that right: WiFi. Republic's business depends on shunting all of your communications — data, voice, everything — onto the free stuff you get in your office or in coffee shops. What makes this beautiful is that whenever a Republic customer chooses to place a call over WiFi, that saves Republic money. As a result, Republic can offer a $5-a-month plan for unlimited talk, text and data. For another $5 a month, customers get access to Sprint's cellular network (minus 3G). Higher-tier plans provide 3G and 4G Internet on Sprint, though it's almost a joke to call them "higher-tier" when the most expensive plan tops out at just $40 a month. The tiered plan supersedes an old, $19-a-month all-you-can-eat plan.

"The crazy plans at $5 and $10 have never been tried," said CEO David Morken. "That's because we focus on unlicensed spectrum as the primary, and licensed spectrum as the secondary."

That's the opposite of the way traditional wireless companies work. Most national providers place a premium on "licensed spectrum," or spectrum that only they have the rights to. The problem is that while valuable spectrum can help increase call quality, buying the rights is expensive. T-Mobile, for example, is reportedly eyeing a $3 billion spectrum deal with Verizon.

Republic pays none of those costs. What's more, because its parent company is the same one that handles calls made over Google Voice, Vonage and a host of other VoIP services, it's gotten incredibly experienced at not dropping your WiFi calls.

It almost sounds too good. And your mileage will certainly vary, depending on where you are and the strength of your connection. But the business model alone is extraordinary, because it threatens one of the main ways that national wireless companies make their money: selling network access.

Other MVNOs are catching on, too. Toronto-based Ting, which charges you separately for minutes, text and data as you use them (rather than bundling it into one opaque monthly rate), reports seeing data consumption drop by between 50 percent and 75 percent as a result of WiFi offloading.

"Our users switch on WiFi at home and at work on their smartphones so much more than the average user," said Elliot Noss, Ting's CEO.

There's some evidence that the large carriers are relying more heavily on WiFi to manage loads, as well — they're just not talking about it much. The growing demand for WiFi all around is one argument for allocating more spectrum for unlicensed usage ahead of a major spectrum auction in 2014. A recent New America Foundation study reports that WiFi offloading saves the wireless industry $20 billion a year, which amounts to 29 percent of its total annual revenues.

That poses a couple of big problems for us all, actually. In a future where MVNOs and large carriers alike push more of their traffic onto WiFi, the incentives to build new mobile infrastructure begin to erode. Why should a carrier invest in expensive network upgrades if it can provide the same experience by dumping traffic onto a customer's home or office network?

Not only does that create potential pitfalls over the long term, but it also transfers more business to providers of fixed, wireline broadband providers like cable companies, giving them a great deal more bargaining power in the process.

Asked whether he was concerned about potentially kneecapping one incumbent only to replace it with another, Morken laughed.

"One dragon at a time," he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ular-industry/





LG Smart TVs Logging USB Filenames and Viewing Info to LG Servers
DoctorBeet

Earlier this month I discovered that my new LG Smart TV was displaying ads on the Smart landing screen.

After some investigation, I found a rather creepy corporate video advertising their data collection practices to potential advertisers. It's quite long but a sample of their claims are as follows:

LG Smart Ad analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences. For example, LG Smart Ad can feature sharp suits to men, or alluring cosmetics and fragrances to women.

Furthermore, LG Smart Ad offers useful and various advertising performance reports. That live broadcasting ads cannot. To accurately identify actual advertising effectiveness.

In fact, there is an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info:" which is set ON by default. This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no "balloon help" to describe what it does.

At this point, I decided to do some traffic analysis to see what was being sent. It turns out that viewing information appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off.

Here you can clearly see that a unique device ID is transmitted, along with the Channel name "BBC NEWS" and a unique device ID.

Here is another example of a viewing info packet.

GB.smartshare.lgtvsdp.com POST /ibs/v2.2/service/watchInformation.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: GB.ibis.lgappstv.com
Accept: */*
X-Device-Product:NETCAST 4.0
X-Device-Platform:NC4M
X-Device-Model:HE_DTV_NC4M_AFAAABAA
X-Device-Netcast-Platform-Version:0004.0002.0000
X-Device-Country:GB
X-Device-Country-Group:EU
X-Device-ID:2yxQ5kEhf45fjUD35G+E/xdq7xxWE2ghu0j4an9kbGoNcyWaSsoLgyk8JJoMtjRrYRsVS6mHKy/Zdd6nZp+Y+gK6DVqnbQeDqr16YgacdzKU80sCKwOAi1TwIQov/SlB
X-Authentication:YMu3V1dv8m8JD0ghrsmEToxONDI= cookie:JSESSIONID=3BB87277C55EED9489B6E6B2DEA7C9FD.node_sdpi bis10; Path=/
Content-Length: 460
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
&chan_name=BBC TWO&device_src_idx=1&dtv_standard_type=2
&broadcast_type=2&device_platform_name=NETCAST 4.0_mtk5398&chan_code=251533454-72E0D0FB0A8A4C70E4E2D829523CA235&external_input_name=Antenna &chan_phy_no=&atsc_chan_maj_no=&atsc_chan_min_no=&chan_src_i dx=1&chan_phy_no=&atsc_chan_maj_no=&atsc_chan_min_no=&chan_p hy_no=47&atsc_chan_maj_no=2&atsc_chan_min_no=2&chan_src_idx= 1&dvb_chan_nw_id=9018&dvb_chan_transf_id=4170&dvb_chan_svc_i d=4287&watch_dvc_logging=0

This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel, even if you have gone to the trouble of changing the setting above to switch collection of viewing information off.

It was at this point, I made an even more disturbing find within the packet data dumps. I noticed filenames were being posted to LG's servers and that these filenames were ones stored on my external USB hard drive. To demonstrate this, I created a mock avi file and copied it to a USB stick.

This file didn't really contain "midget porn" at all, I renamed it to make sure it had a unique filename that I could spot easily in the data and one that was unlikely to come from a broadcast source.

And sure enough, there is was...

Sometimes the names of the contents of an entire folder was posted, other times nothing was sent. I couldn't determine what rules controlled this.

I think it's important to point out that the URL that the data is being POSTed to doesn't in fact exist, you can see this from the HTTP 404 response in the next response from LG's server after the ACK.

However, despite being missing at the moment, this collection URL could be implemented by LG on their server tomorrow, enabling them to start transparently collecting detailed information on what media files you have stored.

It would easily be possible to infer the presence of adult content or files that had been downloaded from file sharing sites. My wife was shocked to see our children's names being transmitted in the name of a Christmas video file that we had watched from USB.

So what does LG have to say about this? I approached them and asked them to comment on data collection, profiling of their customers, collection of usage information and mandatory embedded advertising on products that their customers had paid for. Their response to this was as follows:

Good Morning

Thank you for your e-mail.

Further to our previous email to yourself, we have escalated the issues you reported to LG's UK Head Office.

The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us again.

Kind Regards

Tom
LG Electronics UK Helpdesk
Tel: 0844 847 5454
Fax: 01480 274 000
Email: cic.uk@lge.com
UK: [premium rate number removed] Ireland: 0818 27 6954
Mon-Fri 9am to 8pm Sat 9am-6pm
Sunday 11am - 5pm


I haven't asked them about leaking of USB filenames due to the "deal with it" nature of the above response but I have no real expectation that their response would be any different.

So how can we prevent this from happening? I haven't read the T&Cs but one thing I am sure about is that I own my router and have absolute jurisdiction of any traffic that I allow to pass, so I have compiled an initial list of internet domains that you can block to stop spying and advertising on TVs that we, as customers have actually paid for.

• ad.lgappstv.com
• yumenetworks.com
• smartclip.net
• smartclip.com
• llnwd.net
• smartshare.lgtvsdp.com
• ibis.lgappstv.com

This will free you from seeing ads plastered on your screen and having your viewing habits monitored, whilst it should still allow firmware updates to be applied.
http://doctorbeet.blogspot.ru/2013/1...names-and.html





LG Smart TV Snooping Extends to Home Networks, Second Blogger Says

Internet-connected TVs from LG phone home with file names in shared folders.
Dan Goodin

A second blogger has published evidence that his LG-manufactured smart television is sharing sensitive user data with the Korea-based company in a post that offers support for the theory that the snooping isn't isolated behavior that affects a small number of sets.

In addition to transmitting a list of shows being watched and the names of files contained on USB drives, the Internet-connected TV also sent the names of files shared on home or office networks, the blogger reported. He made the discovery after plugging the Wireshark packet-sniffing program into his home network and noticing that an LG TV—model number 42ls570, purchased in April—was transmitting file names that sounded vaguely familiar even though there was no USB drive plugged in.

"It turns out it was pulling filenames from my shared folders over the network and broadcasting those instead," he wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "I moved all the media out of the folder and put a few duds in named 'GiantPorn,' turned the TV off and on and it was still broadcasting the old filenames. The TV couldn't see those files whilst browsing manually so I'd hazard a guess it’s caching some of these locally."

Within about 10 minutes, voilà. The name of the GiantPorn MPEG file was transmitted to 193.67.216.135, an IP address belonging to LG Electronics, according to Whois records.

Mark, a Web developer who asked Ars not to publish his last name, said he also noticed that his TV sent an authorization code to LG as soon as he turned it on and a deauthorization code each time he turned it off.

"I'm not sure how unusual this practice is, but it gives LG a pretty precise measurement of when and how long you are using the TV," he wrote.
Enlarge / An LG TV reporting when it has been shut down. A similar report is sent when the TV is turned on.

As was the case with the previous blogger, the HTTP POST requests containing file names that Mark observed returned a 404 error typically used to indicate that a requested file wasn't found at a specified address. That could indicate the file information the smart TVs are sending wasn't received, but that's by no means certain since it's trivial for that information to be logged even when such errors are broadcast. And even if the data isn't currently being received for whatever reason, the packet captures provide almost irrefutable proof that the data is being sent to LG servers, whether or not they're actually accepting it. With minor fuss, those servers can be tweaked to permanently log the data.

What's more, since LG TVs are sending the data unencrypted, it's trivial for anyone on the same home or office network to monitor the communications. That data is similarly available to anyone who has the ability to monitor communications sent over the larger Internet.

Representatives of LG didn't respond to a request for comment for both this story and a previous post.

On Thursday, security blogger Graham Cluley posted a statement issued by LG representatives confirming the monitoring and pledging to stop it. The statement read:

At LG, we are always aiming to improve our Smart TV experience. Recently, it has been brought to our attention that there is an issue related to viewing information allegedly being gathered without consent. Our customers’ privacy is a very important part of the Smart TV experience so we began an immediate investigation into these claims. Here’s what we found:

Information such as channel, TV platform, broadcast source, etc. that is collected by certain LG Smart TVs is not personal but viewing information. This information is collected as part of the Smart TV platform to deliver more relevant advertisements and to offer recommendations to viewers based on what other LG Smart TV owners are watching. We have verified that even when this function is turned off by the viewers, it continues to transmit viewing information although the data is not retained by the server. A firmware update is being prepared for immediate rollout that will correct this problem on all affected LG Smart TVs so when this feature is disabled, no data will be transmitted.

It has also been reported that the names of media files stored on external drives such as USB flash devices are being collected by LG Smart TVs. While the file names are not stored, the transmission of such file names was part of a new feature being readied to search for data from the internet (metadata) related to the program being watched in order to deliver a better viewing experience. This feature, however, was never fully implemented and no personal data was ever collected or retained. This feature will also be removed from affected LG Smart TVs with the firmware update.

LG regrets any concerns these reports may have caused and will continue to strive to meet the expectations of all our customers and the public. We hope this update clears up any confusion.


The revelations that LG TVs actively transmit viewing habits provide a good opportunity for consumers to evaluate just how many of their home devices they want to have Internet connectivity. No doubt, smart devices offer convenience by, for instance, allowing us to turn on a furnace a half-hour before we're scheduled to arrive home from work. But they can also offer a dark side, since the temptation to mine all that easily available data is apparently too strong for some companies to resist.

And even if manufacturers can be trusted to avert their eyes, there's the issue of security, as demonstrated last year when researcher Luigi Auriemma uncovered a vulnerability in many Samsung smart TVs that allowed him to remotely take control of devices that were connected to the same local network he was on. If Apple, Microsoft, and Google have trouble securing their devices, what reason is there to think the LGs and Samsungs of the world will do better?
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013...-blogger-says/





US Senators Say There’s “No Evidence” Bulk Metadata Surveillance is Useful

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) and others join as amici to lawsuit filed against NSA.
Cyrus Farivar

As we reported back in July 2013, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its allies filed a new federal lawsuit challenging government spying in the wake of the Snowden leaks.

This case, First Unitarian Church v. NSA, challenges the government's collection of telephone call information, saying the practice violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The complaint states that Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all participate in the government's collection of data, including originating and terminating phone numbers, trunk identifiers, calling card numbers, and time and duration of calls.

New lawsuit is broadest challenge yet to NSA spying

Marijuana users, gun owners, civil rights groups unite—helped by Snowden leaks.
Now, the First Unitarian Church and its fellow plaintiffs have new allies in three United States senators who have been at the forefront of surveillance policy reform. In a new amicus brief filed on Tuesday, Senators Mark Udall (D-CO), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) say that they “have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through less intrusive means.”

In this case, the plaintiffs argue that the National Security Agency's collection of phone data is unconstitutional, not just because it affects their rights to be free of illegal searches but because it affects their free speech rights as well. The lawsuit alleges that the government is impinging on First Amendment rights of activist groups to communicate anonymously, as well as "the right to associate privately and the right to engage in political advocacy free from government interference."

The new brief critiques several prominent cases that government officials have used to justify their spying program, including the Najibullah Zazi case and the Basaaly Moalin case. Zazi pleaded guilty in 2010 to an attempted bombing of the New York City subway system and is scheduled for sentencing in February 2014. Moalin’s attorneys continue to challenge the government’s case. The government has also argued that Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the September 11, 2001 hijackers who had been living in the United States, could have been identified earlier with the bulk phone records program in place.

The senators write:

Just as in the cases of Mr. Medunjanin and Mr. Moalin, however, it appears that Mr. al-Mihdhar’s phone number could also have been obtained by the government using a variety of alternate means. Before September 11, the government was surveilling a safe house in Yemen but failed to realize that Mr. al-Mihdhar, who was in contact with the safe house, was actually inside the United States. The government could have used any number of authorities to determine whether anyone in the United States was in contact with the safe house that it was already targeting. It did not need a record of every American’s phone calls to establish that simple connection.

. . .

Of note, intelligence officials have repeatedly asserted that additional examples, which remain secret, show that the bulk phone-records collection program has “contributed to” or “provided value in” the investigation of a total of twelve different “homeland-related terrorist events.” Amici have reviewed all twelve of these examples and have yet to see any evidence that the bulk phone-records program provided any information that was materially useful to any terrorism cases other than those involving Mr. Moalin and Mr. Medjunanin. In the opinion of Amici, the claim that the bulk phone-records collection program has “contributed to” twelve different counterterrorism investigations would not withstand public scrutiny, unless it were accompanied by new evidence that has not been provided to Amici.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...nce-is-useful/





Surveillance Infrastructure Showing Signs of Decay
Dennis Fisher

Buried underneath the ever-growing pile of information about the mass surveillance methods of the NSA is a small but significant undercurrent of change that’s being driven by the anger and resentment of the large tech companies that the agency has used as tools in its collection programs.

The changes have been happening since almost the minute the first documents began leaking out of Fort Meade in June. When the NSA’s PRISM program was revealed this summer, it implicated some of the larger companies in the industry as apparently willing partners in a system that gave the agency “direct access” to their servers. Officials at Google, Yahoo and others quickly denied that this was the case, saying they knew of no such program and didn’t provide access to their servers to anyone and only complied with court orders. More recent revelations have shown that the NSA has been tapping the links between the data centers run by Google and Yahoo, links that were unencrypted.

That revelation led a pair of Google security engineers to post some rather emphatic thoughts on the NSA’s infiltration of their networks. It also spurred Google to accelerate projects to encrypt the data flowing between its data centers. These are some of the clearer signs yet that these companies have reached a point where they’re no longer willing to be participants, witting or otherwise, in the NSA’s surveillance programs. Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer and security expert who has seen some of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, wrote in a new analysis of the current climate that there appears to be a “fraying” of the surveillance partnerships that have existed for years.

“The Snowden documents made it clear how much the NSA relies on corporations to eavesdrop on the Internet. The NSA didn’t build a massive Internet eavesdropping system from scratch. It noticed that the corporate world was already eavesdropping on every Internet user — surveillance is the business model of the Internet, after all — and simply got copies for itself,” Schneier wrote in his essay.

“Now, that secret ecosystem is breaking down. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote about transparency, saying ‘Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.’ In this case, it seems to be working.”

A partnership requires at least two parties, however, and the disinfectant that has helped bring the anger and disappointment of tech companies out into the open has so far not made its way into the NSA. There are several bills making their way through Congress at the moment, and surely more to come, and some of them are designed to require more transparency of the NSA’s activities. Transparency is one thing; reform is quite another.

The surveillance programs that the NSA and other intelligence agencies have been conducting for years now have relied on weaknesses in the Internet infrastructure, ones that they have taken advantage of in order to gobble massive amounts of data.As many security experts have pointed out, those same weaknesses can be exploited by any other kind of attacker, and their presence makes the Internet itself weaker. Fixing those weaknesses will take some doing, as many of them lie in the basic infrastructure of the network, but as Schneier points out, the job needs doing.

“It’s impossible to build an Internet where the good guys can eavesdrop, and the bad guys cannot. We have a choice between an Internet that is vulnerable to all attackers, or an Internet that is safe from all attackers. And a safe and secure Internet is in everyone’s best interests, including the US’s,” he wrote.
http://threatpost.com/surveillance-i...f-decay/102933





NSA Grapples with 988% Increase in Records Requests
Yamiche Alcindor

Fueled by the Edward Snowden scandal, more Americans than ever are asking the NSA if their personal life is being spied on.

And the NSA has a very direct answer for them: Tough luck, we're not telling you.

Americans are inundating the National Security Agency with open-records requests, leading to a 988% increase in such inquiries. Anyone asking is getting a standard pre-written letter saying the NSA can neither confirm nor deny that any information has been gathered.

"This was the largest spike we've ever had," said Pamela Phillips, the chief of the NSA Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act Office, which handles all records requests to the agency. "We've had requests from individuals who want any records we have on their phone calls, their phone numbers, their e-mail addresses, their IP addresses, anything like that."

Spy shoes to drones: How U.S. surveillance changed

News reports of the NSA's surveillance program motivates most inquirers, she said.

During the first quarter of the NSA fiscal year, which went from October to December, it received 257 open-records requests. The next quarter, it received 241. However, on June 6, at the end of NSA's third fiscal quarter, news of Snowden's leaks hit the press, and the agency got 1,302 requests.

In the next three months, the NSA received 2,538 requests. The spike has continued into the fall months and has overwhelmed her staff, Phillips said.

Joel Watts, 35, of Charleston, W.Va., put in an open-records request in June, days after learning about Snowden's leaks and the NSA's surveillance tactics. Some three weeks later, he received a letter telling him the agency wouldn't say if they had collected information on the health and safety administrator.

"It's a sign of disrespect to American citizens and the democratic process," he said. "I should have the right to know if I'm being surveyed if there's no criminal procedures in process."

Watts said he understands the need for secrecy when dealing with terrorism but thinks the NSA is violating constitutional rights by withholding information it might have on the American public. He also said the NSA's non-responses highlight problems with FOIA requests.

"We should not have to fill out forms and pay money for the government to be transparent," he said. "It's just a way for them to legally say no."

The spike in requests, a large backlog in responses and lack of information illustrates the limits of open-records requests and the determination of NSA to remain mum despite Snowden's historic leaks, experts say.

"People are legitimately troubled by the idea that the government is monitoring and collecting information about their e-mail traffic, phone calls and who knows what else," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group. "There is a growing sense of horror every time there is a new report about the data."

She said the NSA's failure to provide people with answers shows that the agency is burying its head in the sand despite Snowden's huge document dump. The tactic is successful, she said, because most people don't have the resources to fight for information through appeals or in court.

And even if people do fight, courts often side with intelligence agencies who say they want to protect national security, Weismann said.

Last fiscal year, the NSA spent close to $4.8 million processing FOIA requests, appeals and dealing with litigation in connection with the requests. However, Phillips said, because of sequester cuts the agency spent less money last fiscal year than in previous ones.

Some requests simply state that a person wants any and all information the NSA has about them. Others, however, go into detail and ask for specifics about how the NSA is run, how its surveillance program works as well as how the NSA has gone about collecting information.

While the NSA is hearing mostly from the public, journalists and civil rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center are also digging, Phillips said.

Her 19-person staff is grappling to deal with the boom in requests, she said. More than 900 are still pending, although the NSA tries to get back to people in the 20 days required by law, she said.

Sometimes it can take months, even years, to get a response.

Even after a long wait, the agency for the most part is sharing nothing about the topic people want the most information about.

That frustrates Weismann.

"They can monitor in the most sophisticated way, and they say they are getting overwhelmed. I think that's facially ludicrous," she said.

Meanwhile, Phillips said her staff doesn't do searches on the majority of requests.

Workers don't look for any information when people request data on themselves because the NSA FOIA office doesn't have access to surveillance files, she said. She also explained that the agency doesn't confirm or deny if they have records on individuals because it doesn't want to tip off surveillance targets.

"We know we're dealing with frustrated people and people who are upset by what they're hearing," Phillips said. "But that's the only response that we're able to provide them on that topic."

Phillips estimates that her office will continue to get a lot of requests.

In 2006, the office saw a two-week spike of 500 or 800 requests with news of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program, she said. A year and half ago, there was a 200-request spike when a TV program mentioned a NSA surveillance program.

This time, Snowden's leaks have caused a months-long spike that seems only to be intensifying. The NSA has declassified some information and is working on releasing more, Phillips said.

"It just confirms that in the case of the NSA, leaks work," said Nate Jones, FOIA coordinator with the National Security Archive, a non-profit research institution. "They don't release anything through normal means. The only way the public really learns about them is through leaks."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...uests/3519889/





Court Order that Allowed NSA Surveillance is Revealed for First Time

Fisa court judge who authorised massive tapping of metadata was hesitant but felt she could not stand in the way
Spencer Ackerman

A secret court order that authorised a massive trawl by the National Security Agency of Americans' email and internet data was published for the first time on Monday night, among a trove of documents that also revealed a judge's concern that the NSA "continuously" and "systematically" violated the limits placed on the program.

The order by the Fisa court, almost certainly its first ruling on the controversial program and published only in heavily redacted form, shows that it granted permisson for the trawl in part beacause of the type of devices used for the surveillance. Even the judge approving the spying called it a “novel use” of government authorities.

Another later court order found that what it called "systemic overcollection" had taken place.

Transparency lawsuits brought by civil liberties groups compelled the US spy agencies on Monday night to shed new light on the highly controversial program, whose discontinuation in 2011 for unclear reasons was first reported by the Guardian based on leaks by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In a heavily redacted opinion Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former presiding judge of the Fisa court, placed legal weight on the methods of surveillance employed by the NSA, which had never before collected the internet data of “an enormous volume of communications”.

The methods, known as pen registers and trap-and-trace devices, record the incoming and outgoing routing information of communications – traditionally phone calls made between individual users. Kollar-Kotelly ruled that acquiring the metadata, and not the content, of email and internet usage in bulk was harmonious with the “purpose” of Congress and prior court rulings – even though no surveillance statute ever authorized it and top officials at the justice department and the FBI threatened to resign in 2004 over what they considered its dubious legality.

“The court recognizes that, by concluding that these definitions do not restrict the use of pen registers or trap-and-trace devices to communication facilities associated with individual users, it is finding that these definitions encompass an exceptionally broad form of collection,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly in an opinion whose date is redacted.

The type of data collected under the program included information on the "to", "from" and "bcc" lines of an email rather than the content. According to the government’s declaration to Kollar-Kotelly the NSA would keep the internet metadata “online” and available to analysts to search through for 18 months, after which it would be stored in an “‘offline’ tape system” available to relatively few officials. It would have to be destroyed four and a half years after initial collection.

Metadata, wrote Kollar-Kotelly, enjoyed no protection under the fourth amendment to the US constitution, a precedent established by the supreme court in 1979 in a single case on which the NSA relies currently.

Still, Kollar-Kotelly conceded that she was blessing “a novel use of statutory authorities for pen register/trap and trace surveillance”.

While at times Kollar-Kotelly appeared in her ruling to be hesitant about granting NSA broad authorities to collect Americans’ internet metadata, “deference”, she wrote, “should be given to the fully considered judgment of the executive branch in assessing and responding to national security threats and in determining the potential significance of intelligence-related information.”

The legal status of the internet metadata program was highly controversial. In March 2004 several justice department and FBI individuals threatened to resign – including James Comey, George W Bush’s deputy attorney general and now Barack Obama’s FBI director – if the Bush White House and NSA persisted in authorizing the program over their objections that the internet metadata bulk collection was insufficiently legally grounded.

An internal NSA draft history, first reported by the Guardian, noted that the program paused in March 2004, while the White House quelled the secret rebellion, but resumed in July after then NSA director Michael Hayden sought to reassure Kollar-Kotelly, who “signed the first” so-called Pen Register/Trap and Trace Order on 14 July 2004.

It is unclear if the order from Kollar-Kotelly released on Monday is her order of 14 July 2004 as the date is redacted.
Systemic overcollection

A later opinion on the internet metadata program, by Kollar-Kotelly’s successor, John Bates, states that the “NSA exceeded the scope of authorized acquisition continuously” after Kollar-Kotelly’s initial approval.

Bates wrote that subsequent NSA reporting to the court revealed that "systemic overcollection" had taken place from almost the beginning of the program. "Virtually every" record generated by the program "included some data that had not been authorized for collection". A footnote suggests that Kollar-Kotelly grew worried that the content of communications was collected at times despite her initial confidence that the collection methods of the pen registers and trap and trace devices could not permit that.

"The government has provided no comprehensive explanation of how so substantial an overcollection occurred," Bates wrote in another undated opinion, whose redactions suggest the NSA blamed "noncommunication with the technical personnel directly responsible".

A senior intelligence official, Shawn Turner of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the Guardian in July that the Obama administration shut down the bulk internet metadata collection program in 2011 “for operational and resource reasons” and it had not been restarted.

Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, who has campaigned against the scope of NSA domestic surveillance, has suggested in several statements that the program was wasteful, violated Americans’ privacy and did not lead to useful counterterrorism information.

Hundreds of pages

The NSA also released hundreds of pages of documents on Monday related to training on use of its vast data troves; its certifications to Congress and the court about its bulk phone records collections on Americans; and its internal checks to prevent abuse.

The release was prompted by a lawsuit sponsored by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Monday’s disclosure represented the final round of court-compelled document disclosures as part of the civil liberties organization’s attempts to learn more about what they contend is legally dubious mass surveillance on Americans phone records.

“On the logic of these opinions almost every digital footprint we leave behind can be vacuumed up by the government – who we talk to, what we read, where we go online," said Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the ACLU. "Like previous releases these materials show the danger of a government that sidesteps public debate and instead grounds its surveillance powers in the secret opinions of a secret court. The more we learn the clearer it is that our surveillance laws and oversight rules are in dramatic need of reform."

The release comes at the beginning of an important week in Washington for the NSA’s bulk phone records collection. On Thursday the NSA deputy director is scheduled to testify before a Senate panel that is considering a bill to strip the surveillance agency of its power to collect phone data from Americans without individual warrants. Legislators are also discussing attaching surveillance restrictions to an annual defence authorization bill that the Senate is taking up this week.

Monday was also a busy day for the NSA’s bulk surveillance in the courts. The supreme court declined to take a case about the bulk phone records collection, while a judge on a lower federal court considered an injunction against the NSA.

“I don't know, frankly, how I'm going to come out,” said Judge Richard Leon, who heard arguments for and against an injunction on the bulk phone records surveillance on Monday brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch in his US district court for the District of Columbia.

“It's going to the court of appeals and probably to the supreme court – one way or the other,” news organizations quoted Leon saying after the hearing.

At least one document related to bulk surveillance was not released.

The Fisa court announced on Monday afternoon that the intelligence agencies and the justice department decided that it would not declassify a court opinion from 19 February 2013 related to the court’s interpretation of Section 215. It is unclear if the opinion refers to bulk phone records collection or to the other sorts of records that the government contends the Patriot Act provision allows it to collect – such as financial data of the sort the Obama administration disclosed last week to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that the CIA gathers.

The document disclosures came the same day that the US supreme court declined a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to review the legality of the bulk phone records collection.

A terse statement announcing several court orders did not address the reasons the court denied the review, brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which argued that the Fisa court had no right to order telecoms to turn over customer data in bulk to the government.

Several other legal challenges to the bulk phone records collection are pending before lower federal courts. One of them, brought by the ACLU, will begin oral arguments on Friday in the Southern District of New York.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of Epic, said in a statement that he was “disappointed” in the supreme court’s decision as he called the bulk surveillance order “clearly illegal”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...for-first-time





N.S.A. Report Outlined Goals for More Power
James Risen and Laura Poitras

Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence. “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.

Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”

The strategy document, provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, was written at a time when the agency was at the peak of its powers and the scope of its surveillance operations was still secret. Since then, Mr. Snowden’s revelations have changed the political landscape.

Prompted by a public outcry over the N.S.A.’s domestic operations, the agency’s critics in Congress have been pushing to limit, rather than expand, its ability to routinely collect the phone and email records of millions of Americans, while foreign leaders have protested reports of virtually unlimited N.S.A. surveillance overseas, even in allied nations. Several inquiries are underway in Washington; Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A.’s longest-serving director, has announced plans to retire; and the White House has offered proposals to disclose more information about the agency’s domestic surveillance activities.

The N.S.A. document, titled “Sigint Strategy 2012-2016,” does not make clear what legal or policy changes the agency might seek. The N.S.A.’s powers are determined variously by Congress, executive orders and the nation’s secret intelligence court, and its operations are governed by layers of regulations. While asserting that the agency’s “culture of compliance” would not be compromised, N.S.A. officials argued that they needed more flexibility, according to the paper.

Senior intelligence officials, responding to questions about the document, said that the N.S.A. believed that legal impediments limited its ability to conduct surveillance of terrorism suspects inside the United States. Despite an overhaul of national security law in 2008, the officials said, if a terrorism suspect who is under surveillance overseas enters the United States, the agency has to stop monitoring him until it obtains a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“N.S.A.’s Sigint strategy is designed to guide investments in future capabilities and close gaps in current capabilities,” the agency said in a statement. “In an ever-changing technology and telecommunications environment, N.S.A. tries to get in front of issues to better fulfill the foreign-intelligence requirements of the U.S. government.”

Critics, including some congressional leaders, say that the role of N.S.A. surveillance in thwarting terrorist attacks — often cited by the agency to justify expanded powers — has been exaggerated. In response to the controversy about its activities after Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, agency officials claimed that the N.S.A.’s sweeping domestic surveillance programs had helped in 54 “terrorist-related activities.” But under growing scrutiny, congressional staff members and other critics say that the use of such figures by defenders of the agency has drastically overstated the value of the domestic surveillance programs in counterterrorism.

Agency leaders believe that the N.S.A. has never enjoyed such a target-rich environment as it does now because of the global explosion of digital information — and they want to make certain that they can dominate “the Sigint battle space” in the future, the document said. To be “optimally effective,” the paper said, “legal, policy and process authorities must be as adaptive and dynamic as the technological and operational advances we seek to exploit.”

Intent on unlocking the secrets of adversaries, the paper underscores the agency’s long-term goal of being able to collect virtually everything available in the digital world. To achieve that objective, the paper suggests that the N.S.A. plans to gain greater access, in a variety of ways, to the infrastructure of the world’s telecommunications networks.

Reports based on other documents previously leaked by Mr. Snowden showed that the N.S.A. has infiltrated the cable links to Google and Yahoo data centers around the world, leading to protests from company executives and a growing backlash against the N.S.A. in Silicon Valley.

Yet the paper also shows how the agency believes it can influence and shape trends in high-tech industries in other ways to suit its needs. One of the agency’s goals is to “continue to invest in the industrial base and drive the state of the art for high performance computing to maintain pre-eminent cryptanalytic capability for the nation.” The paper added that the N.S.A. must seek to “identify new access, collection and exploitation methods by leveraging global business trends in data and communications services.”

And it wants to find ways to combine all of its technical tools to enhance its surveillance powers. The N.S.A. will seek to integrate its “capabilities to reach previously inaccessible targets in support of exploitation, cyberdefense and cyberoperations,” the paper stated.

The agency also intends to improve its access to encrypted communications used by individuals, businesses and foreign governments, the strategy document said. The N.S.A. has already had some success in defeating encryption, The New York Times has reported, but the document makes it clear that countering “ubiquitous, strong, commercial network encryption” is a top priority. The agency plans to fight back against the rise of encryption through relationships with companies that develop encryption tools and through espionage operations. In other countries, the document said, the N.S.A. must also “counter indigenous cryptographic programs by targeting their industrial bases with all available Sigint and Humint” — human intelligence, meaning spies.

The document also mentioned a goal of integrating the agency’s eavesdropping and data collection systems into a national network of sensors that interactively “sense, respond and alert one another at machine speed.” Senior intelligence officials said that the system of sensors is designed to protect the computer networks of the Defense Department, and that the N.S.A. does not use data collected from Americans for the system.

One of the agency’s other four-year goals was to “share bulk data” more broadly to allow for better analysis. While the paper does not explain in detail how widely it would disseminate bulk data within the intelligence community, the proposal raises questions about what safeguards the N.S.A. plans to place on its domestic phone and email data collection programs to protect Americans’ privacy.

N.S.A. officials have insisted that they have placed tight controls on those programs. In an interview, the senior intelligence officials said that the strategy paper was referring to the agency’s desire to share foreign data more broadly, not phone logs of Americans collected under the Patriot Act.

Above all, the strategy paper suggests the N.S.A.’s vast view of its mission: nothing less than to “dramatically increase mastery of the global network.”

Other N.S.A. documents offer hints of how the agency is trying to do just that. One program, code-named Treasure Map, provides what a secret N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation describes as “a near real-time, interactive map of the global Internet.” According to the undated PowerPoint presentation, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, Treasure Map gives the N.S.A. “a 300,000 foot view of the Internet.”

Relying on Internet routing data, commercial and Sigint information, Treasure Map is a sophisticated tool, one that the PowerPoint presentation describes as a “massive Internet mapping, analysis and exploration engine.” It collects Wi-Fi network and geolocation data, and between 30 million and 50 million unique Internet provider addresses — code that can reveal the location and owner of a computer, mobile device or router — are represented each day on Treasure Map, according to the document. It boasts that the program can map “any device, anywhere, all the time.”

The documents include addresses labeled as based in the “U.S.,” and because so much Internet traffic flows through the United States, it would be difficult to map much of the world without capturing such addresses.

But the intelligence officials said that Treasure Map maps only foreign and Defense Department networks, and is limited by the amount of data available to the agency. There are several billion I.P. addresses on the Internet, the officials said, and Treasure Map cannot map them all. The program is not used for surveillance, they said, but to understand computer networks.

The program takes advantage of the capabilities of other secret N.S.A. programs. To support Treasure Map, for example, the document states that another program, called Packaged Goods, tracks the “traceroutes” through which data flows around the Internet. Through Packaged Goods, the N.S.A. has gained access to “13 covered servers in unwitting data centers around the globe,” according to the PowerPoint. The document identifies a list of countries where the data centers are located, including Germany, Poland, Denmark, South Africa and Taiwan as well as Russia, China and Singapore.

Despite the document’s reference to “unwitting data centers,” government officials said that the agency does not hack into those centers. Instead, the officials said, the intelligence community secretly uses front companies to lease space on the servers.

Despite the N.S.A.’s broad surveillance powers, the strategy paper shows that N.S.A. officials still worry about the agency’s ability to fend off bureaucratic inertia while keeping pace with change.

“To sustain current mission relevance,” the document said, Signals Intelligence Directorate, the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence arm, “must undertake a profound and revolutionary shift from the mission approach which has served us so well in the decades preceding the onset of the information age.”

James Risen reported from Washington, and Laura Poitras from Berlin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us...ore-power.html





NSA Infected 50,000 Computer Networks with Malicious Software
Floor Boon, Steven Derix and Huib Modderkolk

The American intelligence service - NSA - infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this.

A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software.

One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom. For a number of years the British intelligence service - GCHQ – has been installing this malicious software in the Belgacom network in order to tap their customers’ telephone and data traffic. The Belgacom network was infiltrated by GCHQ through a process of luring employees to a false Linkedin page.

NSA special department employs more than a thousand hackers

The NSA computer attacks are performed by a special department called TAO (Tailored Access Operations). Public sources show that this department employs more than a thousand hackers. As recently as August 2013, the Washington Post published articles about these NSA-TAO cyber operations. In these articles The Washington Post reported that the NSA installed an estimated 20,000 ‘implants’ as early as 2008. These articles were based on a secret budget report of the American intelligence services. By mid-2012 this number had more than doubled to 50,000, as is shown in the presentation NRC Handelsblad laid eyes on.

Cyber operations are increasingly important for the NSA. Computer hacks are relatively inexpensive and provide the NSA with opportunities to obtain information that they otherwise would not have access to. The NSA-presentation shows their CNE-operations in countries such as Venezuela and Brazil. The malware installed in these countries can remain active for years without being detected.

‘Sleeper cells’ can be activated with a single push of a button

The malware can be controlled remotely and be turned on and off at will. The ‘implants’ act as digital ‘sleeper cells’ that can be activated with a single push of a button. According to the Washington Post, the NSA has been carrying out this type of cyber operation since 1998.

The Dutch intelligence services - AIVD and MIVD – have displayed interest in hacking. The Joint Sigint Cyber Unit – JSCU – was created early in 2013. The JSCU is an inter-agency unit drawing on experts with a range of IT skills. This new unit is prohibited by law from performing the type of operations carried out by the NSA as Dutch law does not allow this type of internet searches.

The NSA declined to comment and referred to the US Government. A government spokesperson states that any disclosure of classified material is harmful to our national security.
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/...ious-software/





AT&T and Verizon Pressed to Detail Roles in U.S. Surveillance Efforts
Brian X. Chen

Shareholders are putting AT&T and Verizon Wireless on notice: Tell the public more about the companies’ role in government surveillance efforts or risk a ding to the bottom line.

Two separate but similar shareholder resolutions, from New York State’s comptroller and a large investment firm, say that the two dominant wireless carriers hurt customers’ trust by not disclosing more about the data they share with governments. The resolutions are the latest sign that the flurry of revelations about American spying efforts is putting business pressure on the companies lassoed into providing customer data to the government.

“If a customer is concerned about their privacy perhaps being compromised, they could switch to another service,” said Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York’s comptroller, the trustee of the $160.7 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund. He filed a resolution with AT&T this month demanding that the carrier publish reports on the information it collects and shares.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which juggle enormous amounts of phone calls and Internet data over their networks, have been quiet about the types of information they share about their customers. Internet giants like Yahoo and Google, meanwhile, have published so-called transparency reports detailing the types of information they share with government agencies.

Some tech companies, including Microsoft and Apple, have also been outspoken about their desire to release more information on government requests, including how many orders they receive to disclose the contents of email and other communications.

The comptroller and Trillium Asset Management, an independent investment adviser with over $1.3 billion in assets under management, are pushing for similar disclosure from AT&T and Verizon. They say their investments in AT&T and Verizon are at stake because a lack of trust could make customers look for other service providers.

Trillium, which describes itself as a leader in shareholder advocacy, filed its resolution with Verizon Communications this month. “Transparency is essential if individuals and businesses are to make informed decisions regarding their data,” Trillium wrote in its proposal.

Some analysts and American tech executives are also worried that the spying revelations will hurt profits. Many analysts have predicted the government’s actions would especially hurt companies with major business cloud computing services, which have been a particular target of the spying efforts. Cisco recently attributed a decline in sales in China partly to hostility toward American companies.

In the last several months, AT&T and Verizon have come under scrutiny for their cooperation with government surveillance programs. A court order revealed that the Obama administration secretly collected records for calls made between the United States and abroad, as well as calls within the United States. This month, it was revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency paid AT&T $10 million a year for access to its enormous database of phone records, including Americans’ international phone calls.

Historically, there are stronger laws protecting phone information than Internet traffic, said Harold Feld, senior vice president for Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that focuses on information policy. That is why government requests for phone information is limited to so-called metadata like the name of a caller, the time the call was made and the recipient of the call, as opposed to tapping the phones, he said.

Compared with tech companies, the American carriers have had a closer working relationship with the government. They provide communications services to the American government. And unlike Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, which have global operations, the carriers have less at stake overseas, where foreign customers might be angry about the revelations of American surveillance.

The carriers also work with regulators to obtain spectrum licenses to operate their networks, so it benefits them to get along, Mr. Feld said. “From an economic perspective they have less incentive to fight” pressure from the government, he said. “The carriers have wanted to stay on the good side.”

Bob Varettoni, a Verizon spokesman, confirmed receiving Trillium’s proposal, but declined to comment on the topic of government requests. “We’ve received the proposal and we’re currently evaluating it,” he said.

Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said, “As standard practice we look carefully at all shareholder proposals but at this point in the process we do not expect to comment on them.”

It may be difficult for the shareholders to convince AT&T and Verizon, the two biggest American carriers, that they will lose customers because of a lack of trust. In general, very few customers leave those networks. At AT&T, for example, churn, the rate at which subscribers leave, was 1.07 percent in the third quarter, compared with 1.08 percent in the same quarter a year ago. Many customers are subscribed to family plans or corporate accounts, making it tricky to switch devices to a different carrier.

But Trillium believes an enormous amount of money is at stake. It cited the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which estimates that controversy around surveillance programs could cost the information technology industry at least $21 billion in business over the next three years if foreign customers lose trust in American companies.

Both resolutions may be voted on at shareholder meetings in the spring.

Mr. DiNapoli said privacy was a relatively new issue for AT&T and eventually may become a factor for customers when they choose a provider. “I certainly think there’s a heightened sensitivity that could redirect and reinform consumer behavior,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/te...ance-role.html





Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Says 'Privacy May Actually be an Anomaly'
Jacob Kastrenakes

Google's chief internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, suggests that privacy is a fairly new development that may not be sustainable. "Privacy may actually be an anomaly," Cerf said at an FTC event yesterday while taking questions. Elaborating, he explained that privacy wasn't even guaranteed a few decades ago: he used to live in a small town without home phones where the postmaster saw who everyone was getting mail from. "In a town of 3,000 people there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing."

"It will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."

Rather than privacy being an inherent part of society that's been stripped away by new technology, Cerf says that technology actually created it in the first place. "It’s the industrial revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity," Cerf said. Cerf warned that he was simplifying his views — "I don't want you to go away thinking I am that shallow about it" — but overall, he believes "it will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve privacy."

Though Cerf's comments may echo concerns over NSA surveillance, he appears to be interested primarily in privacy as it relates to social networks like Facebook. "Our social behavior is also quite damaging with regard to privacy," Cerf says. He gives an example how a person could be exposed doing something that they wanted to keep secret by being tagged in the background of a stranger's photo — a photo they never expected to be caught in. "The technology that we use today has far outraced our social intuition, our headlights. ... [There's a] need to develop social conventions that are more respectful of people’s privacy."

"We are gonna live through situations where some people get embarrassed, some people end up going to jail, some other people have other problems as a consequence of some of these experiences," Cerf said. More respectful privacy conventions will likely develop as we move forward, he says, but for now, "This is something we're gonna have to live through. I don't think it’s easy to dictate this."
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/20/5...may-be-anomaly





Google's Schmidt Predicts End of Censorship Within a Decade
Alina Selyukh

Google Inc Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt has a bold prediction: Censorship around the world could end in a decade, and better use of encryption will help people overcome government surveillance.

In a lecture at Johns Hopkins University on Wednesday, the executive of the world's biggest web search company made a pitch for ending censorship in China and other countries with restricted freedom of speech by connecting everyone to the Internet and protecting their communication from spying.

"First they try to block you; second, they try to infiltrate you; and third, you win. I really think that's how it works. Because the power is shifted," he said.

"I believe there's a real chance that we can eliminate censorship and the possibility of censorship in a decade."

Schmidt has long spoken out against limitations to the freedom of expression and restricted Internet access around the world. Earlier this year, he traveled to North Korea, a country disconnected from the rest of the world, to promote the cause.

"It's clear that we failed. But we'll try again. We have not been invited back," he said of the personal trip, the timing of which was later criticized by the U.S. State Department as being not helpful because it came shortly after North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket.

The goal for North Korea, Schmidt said, was not democracy for now but to merely get the people to connect with the rest of the world: "My view is that if we can get some connectivity, then they'll begin to open the country, they'll begin to understand other systems."

On the home front, too, Google is now one of several tech companies embroiled in the controversy over the reach of U.S. government spying. Top secret documents disclosed by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden have suggested the National Security Agency has tapped Google's and others' communications links to aid in its gathering of intelligence.

Schmidt at the time said that the NSA's activity, if true, was outrageous and potentially illegal.

Google, at which Schmidt served as CEO until 2011, has faced its own criticism for intercepting data over the years. The company acknowledged in 2010 that a fleet of cars it operates to map the world's streets had mistakenly collected passwords and other personal data from home consumers' wireless networks over a two year-period.

Earlier this week, Google agreed to pay $17 million to settle a probe by 37 U.S. states that it bypassed privacy settings on the iPhone's Web browser and tracked Web users.

"The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everyone," Schmidt said on Wednesday, referring to the process of encoding data to secure it.

He acknowledged that encryption can be broken and said Snowden's revelations showed the NSA has indeed done it, but added: "With sufficiently long keys and changing the keys all the time, it turns out it's very, very difficult for the interloper of any kind to go in and do that."

Google has recently increased the length and complexity of its encryption keys, Schmidt said, calling it a constant "game of cat and mouse" between the governments and Internet users.

"It's pretty clear to me that government surveillance and the way in which governments are doing this will be here to stay in some form, because it's how the citizens will express themselves, and the governments will want to know what they're doing," Schmidt said.

"In that race, I think the censors will lose, and I think that people would be empowered."

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Ken Wills)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AK03D20131121





Google Vows to Block Child Pornography

David Cameron has welcomed Google promises to tackle illegal images as a “significant step forward”. Microsoft is expected to follow suit
Hayley Dixon

Google, the Internet search giant, has promised a worldwide block on search results linked to child abuse.

In an about turn the media firm has agreed to make changes which will prevent illegal child pornography appearing for more than 100,000 different searches.

The news comes ahead of Downing Street summit on online pornography later today, when Microsoft, which operates Bing and Yahoo search engines, is expected to announce it is introducing similar terms.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the Daily Mail the decision by the two Internet giants represented a “really significant step forward" after the companies had insisted that it "couldn't be done, shouldn't be done".

Google says it has developed the technology to tag the illegal images and videos so that all duplicates can be removed across the Internet.

The restrictions will be launched in the UK first, before being expanded to other English-speaking countries and 158 other languages in the next six months.

A further 13,000 search terms linked with child sex abuse will flash up with warnings from Google and charities telling the user that the content could be illegal and pointing them towards help.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, said: 'We've listened. We've fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”

Despite praising the efforts of the company, Mr Cameron said that the move may not go far enough, threatening legislation if the firms refuse to do more.

“We learnt from cases like the murder of Tia Sharp and April Jones that people will often start accessing extreme material via a simple search in one of the mainstream search engines,” the Prime Minister said.

Google and Microsoft, who cover 95 per cent of the market, had originally argued against the very principle of blocking the material, claiming it could not and should not be done.

New algorithms, sets of instructions for software, have now been developed which block illegal pornography and pathways to illegal content.

Auto-complete features which prompt child abuse search terms will also be blocked. The system is designed to pick up on new code words or terms paedophiles start to use and block search results for these too.

Google has offered to share the technology it has developed in the fight against online pornography with other companies.

While Mr Schmidt admitted that “no algorithm is perfect”, he pledged that his company would give technical support to those trying to combat child pornography.

“While society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm,” he said.

The Internet companies will also work alongside the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation to target “peer to peer” file sharing networks which paedophiles use to contact each other.

Mr Cameron added: “If the search engines are unable to deliver on their commitment to prevent child abuse material being returned from search terms used by paedophiles, I will bring forward legislation that will ensure it happens.

“There are some terms that are so shocking and unambiguous that I believe they should return nothing at all. It's not an infringement of free speech, it's responsible business practice.”

Peter Barron, Google spokesman, said: “The sexual abuse of children ruins young lives. It’s why we proactively remove these awful images from our services--and report offenders to the authorities.

"But the government’s right that our industry can do more. So we’ve developed new technology to detect and remove videos of abuse, we are showing warnings against search terms related to child sexual abuse, and we are fine tuning our search engine to prevent this material appearing in our results.

" We hope this will make difference in the fight against this terrible crime”

John Carr, a child protection campaigner, added: “Google and Microsoft have really pulled out the stops. This is a very impressive initiative.

"It is narrowing the spaces in which paedophiles and collectors of child abuse images can operate. The challenge now is to work out how to gauge the effectiveness and learn from the various measures that are being put in place but I am sure there is a will so we can find a way.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...rnography.html
















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