From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 1 10:33:01 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2012 11:33:01 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Dave_Barry=92s_Year_in_Review?= Message-ID: <1B540AFB-CB3E-485B-9F74-4A4894D6A662@infowarrior.org> Dave Barry?s Year in Review: The 2011 Festival of Sleaze By Dave Barry, Updated: Sunday, January 1, 12:00 AM It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill. Granted, the oil spill was bad. But it did not result in a high-decibel, weeks-long national conversation about a bulge in a congressman?s underpants. Which is exactly what we had in the Festival of Sleaze that was 2011. Remember? There were days when you could not escape The Bulge. At dinnertime, parents of young children had to be constantly ready to hurl themselves in front of their TV screens, for fear that it would suddenly appear on the news in high definition. For a brief (Har!) period, The Bulge was more famous than Justin Bieber. And when, at last, we were done with The Bulge, and we were able to turn our attention to the presidential election, and the important issues facing us, as a nation, in these troubled times, it turned out that the main issue, to judge by quantity of press coverage, was: groping. So finally, repelled by the drainage ditch that our political system has become, we turned for escape to an institution that represents all that is pure and wholesome and decent in America today: college football. That was when we started to have fond memories of the oil spill. I?m not saying that the entire year was ruined by sleaze. It was also ruined by other bad things. This was a year in which journalism was pretty much completely replaced by tweeting. It was a year in which a significant earthquake struck Washington, yet failed to destroy a single federal agency. It was a year in which the nation was subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of highly publicized pronouncements from Charlie Sheen, a man who, where you have a central nervous system, has a Magic 8-Ball. This was a year in which the cast members of ?Jersey Shore? went to Italy and then ? in an inexcusable lapse of border security ? were allowed to return. But all of these developments, unfortunate as they were, would not by themselves have made 2011 truly awful. What made it truly awful was the economy, which, for what felt like the 17th straight year, continued to stagger around like a zombie on crack. Nothing seemed to help. President Obama, whose instinctive reaction to pretty much everything that happens, including sunrise, is to deliver a nationally televised address, delivered numerous nationally televised addresses on the economy, but somehow these did not do the trick. Neither did the approximately 37 million words emitted by the approximately 249 Republican-presidential-contender televised debates, out of which the single most memorable statement made was, quote: ?Oops.? As the year wore on, frustration finally boiled over in the form of the Occupy Various Random Spaces movement, wherein people who were sick and tired of a lot of stuff finally got off their butts and started working for meaningful change via direct action in the form of sitting around and forming multiple committees and drumming and not directly issuing any specific demands but definitely having a lot of strongly held views for and against a wide variety of things. Incredibly, even this did not bring about meaningful change. The economy remained wretched, especially unemployment, which got so bad that many Americans gave up even trying to work. Congress, for example. Were there any positive developments in 2011? Yes: ? Osama bin Laden, Moammar Gaddafi and the New York Yankees all suffered major setbacks. ? Kim Kardashian finally found her lifetime soul mate for nearly 21 / 2 months. ? Despite a prophecy by revered Christian radio lunatic Harold Camping, the world did not end on May 21. Come to think of it, that last development wasn?t totally positive, not when we consider all the other things that happened in 2011. In case you?ve blotted it out, let?s take one last look back, through squinted eyelids, at this train wreck of a year, starting with ... < - big hysterical snip - > http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/dave-barrys-year-in-review-the-2011-festival-of-sleaze/2011/12/08/ From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 1 13:48:45 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2012 14:48:45 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Un-Internet Message-ID: <280009F2-5247-4AA8-A362-BA6AB74F1C4E@infowarrior.org> The Un-Internet By Dave Winer on Saturday, December 31, 2011 at 11:00 AM. http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12/31/theUninternet.html The tech world is in an infinite loop. I've written about it so many times, but that's how it goes with loops. You don't have to write original stuff more than once. Each time around the loop, at some point, everything comes back into style. No need to list all the loops, other than to say Here We Go Again! At issue is this: Control. For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it. I wrote in 1994, my first time as a chronicler of the loops: "The users outfoxed us again. It happens every fifteen years or so in this business, We lost our grounding, the users rebelled, and a new incarnation of the software business has been created." In the same 1994 piece: "Once the users take control, they never give it back." You can see it playing out in the Twitter community, and now the Tumblr community. It isn't a reflection on the moral quality of the leaders of the companies, to want to control their users. But it's a short-term proposition at best. Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be sidelined. Unless the laws of technology are repealed, and I don't think laws like that can be repealed. Lest you think I was smart enough to see this coming in my own early experience as a tech entrepreneur, I wasn't. We were scared of software piracy, didn't understand how we could continue to be in business with software that could be easily copied. So we established controls that made it difficult for non-technical users to copy the software. That created a market of other software that would copy our software. So it was reduced down to whether or not the users would knowingly do something we disapproved of. Many of our users were honorable, they did what I would have done in their place. They stopped using our products. I would regularly receive letters from customers, people who had paid over $200 for the disks our software came on, with the disks cut in half with a scissor. These letters made their point loud and clear. One day everyone took off their copy protection, and the users got what they wanted. I came to believe then that this is always so. This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they're protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it's not going to harm the computer. I wouldn't mind what Apple was doing if that's all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that's not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn't see anything there that you wouldn't see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie. The sad thing is that Apple is providing a bad example for younger, smaller companies like Twitter and Tumblr, who apparently want to control the "user experience" of their platforms in much the same way as Apple does. They feel they have a better sense of quality than the randomness of a free market. So they've installed similar controls. Your content cannot be displayed by Twitter unless you're one of their partners. How you get to be a partner is left to your imagination. We have no visibility into it. Tumblr has decided that a browser add-on is unwelcome. Presumably it's only an issue because a fair number of their users want to use it. So they are taking issue not only with the developer, but with the users. They have admitted that the problem is that they must "educate" their users better. Oy! Does this sound familiar. In the end, it will be the other way around. It has to be. It's the lesson of the Internet. My first experience with the Internet came as a grad student in the late 70s, but it wasn't called the Internet then. I loved it because of its simplicity and the lack of controls. There was no one to say you could or couldn't ship something. No gatekeeper. In the world it was growing up alongside, the mainframe world, the barriers were huge. An individual person couldn't own a computer. To get access you had to go to work for a corporation, or study at a university. Every time around the loop, since then, the Internet has served as the antidote to the controls that the tech industry would place on users. Every time, the tech industry has a rationale, with some validity, that wide-open access would be a nightmare. But eventually we overcome their barriers, and another layer comes on. And the upstarts become the installed-base, and they make the same mistakes all over again. It's the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 1 17:43:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2012 18:43:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Obama Signs Defense Bill Despite 'Serious Reservations' Message-ID: <5372510A-1CAD-4658-A8C2-49CD59232B1D@infowarrior.org> Obama Signs Defense Bill Despite 'Serious Reservations' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/31/obama-defense-bill_n_1177836.html First Posted: 12/31/11 03:25 PM ET Updated: 12/31/11 06:22 PM ET WASHINGTON -- Indefinite military detention of Americans became the law of the land Saturday, as President Barack Obama signed a defense bill that codified that authority, even as he said he would not use it. The National Defense Authorization Act states how the military is to be funded, but also includes a number of controversial provisions on arresting and holding suspected terrorists, which at first drove Obama to threaten a veto. He retreated from that threat after Congress added provisions that took the ultimate authority to detain suspects from the military's hands and gave it to the president. Congress also clarified that civilian law enforcement agencies -- such as the FBI -- would still have authority to investigate terrorism and added a provision that asserts nothing in the detention measures changes current law regarding U.S. citizens. Still, the signing on New Year's Eve as few people were paying attention angered civil liberties advocates, who argue that the law for the first time spells out certain measures that have not actually been tested all the way to the Supreme Court, including the possibility of detaining citizens in military custody without trial for as long as there is a war on terror. "President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,? said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield," Romero added. "The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress or internationally.? The administration was especially sensitive about the law and about reaction to the president signing it. In addition to enacting the measure while few people were paying attention -- and many opponents still had hopes the president would veto the bill -- the White House added a signing statement specifying that the Obama administration would not detain Americans without trial. The White House also sent out a notice to its online community highlighting Obama's complaints with the law, in a tacit admission that many of the president's more ardent supporters despise the detention provisions. "I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists," Obama said in the signing statement. Presidents issue such statements when they feel a law conflicts with the executive's constitutional powers. Obama criticized them during the Bush administration, but has found the practice useful on a handful of occasions. In this case, Obama argued that the changes Congress made to the bill affirm only authorities that the Bush and Obama administrations have already claimed in fighting terrorism. But he noted that the codification of those powers in law was unnecessary and perhaps harmful. And he insisted he would not use the powers to detain citizens without trial. "I want to clarify that my administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens," Obama wrote. "Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My administration will interpret section 1021 [of the bill] in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law." Civil liberties advocates like Romero pointed out that once the provisions are law, however, they will be available to a President Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney or any future president, who could choose to use the powers granted more aggressively. "We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court," said Romero. "Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today." Because of the provisions specifying that the new legislation does not change current law, the new law leaves the authority it grants open to interpretation and to the possibility -- albeit in very difficult circumstances -- of someone challenging a detention through the courts. "Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority," Romero said. "But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created, because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA's detention authority." Obama also said he will not abide by the law's requirement to detain terror suspects using the military. "I reject any approach that would mandate military custody where law enforcement provides the best method of incapacitating a terrorist threat," Obama said. "While section 1022 is unnecessary and has the potential to create uncertainty, I have signed the bill because I believe that this section can be interpreted and applied in a manner that avoids undue harm to our current operations." Finally, he rejected a number of other provisions, saying the White House is concerned they interfere with the president's constitutional powers and ability to fight terrorism. "My Administration will aggressively seek to mitigate those concerns through the design of implementation procedures and other authorities available to me as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief, will oppose any attempt to extend or expand them in the future, and will seek the repeal of any provisions that undermine the policies and values that have guided my Administration throughout my time in office," Obama warned. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 1 21:24:41 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2012 22:24:41 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Joy of Quiet Message-ID: December 29, 2011 The Joy of Quiet http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html By PICO IYER ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on ?Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.? Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began ? I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign ? was stillness. A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? ?I never read any magazines or watch TV,? he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. ?Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.? He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because ?I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.? Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I?m reliably told, lies in ?black-hole resorts,? which charge high prices precisely because you can?t get online in their rooms. Has it really come to this? In barely one generation we?ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them ? often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel?s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others. THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book ?The Shallows,? in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing). The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. The urgency of slowing down ? to find the time and space to think ? is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. ?Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,? the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, ?and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.? He also famously remarked that all of man?s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content ? and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends ? Henry David Thoreau reminded us that ?the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.? Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, ?When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.? Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that ?Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,? but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister. Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because ?breaking news? is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, ?Dancing with the Stars?), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us ? between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there ? are gone. We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we?re so busy communicating. And ? as he might also have said ? we?re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don?t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can?t be found on any screen. MAYBE that?s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren?t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an ?Internet sabbath? every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing ? or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours. Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to ?forget? their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects ?exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.? More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are ?inherently slow.? The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for. In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I?ve yet to use a cellphone and I?ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day?s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event. None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it?s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better ? calmer, clearer and happier ? than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It?s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it?s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as ?that kind of happiness that doesn?t depend on what happens.? It?s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what?s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it?s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20 years, therefore, I?ve been going several times a year ? often for no longer than three days ? to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don?t attend services when I?m there, and I?ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it?s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I?ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders. ?You?re Pico, aren?t you?? the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we?d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he?d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks. ?What are you doing now?? I asked. ?I work for MTV. Down in L.A.? We smiled. No words were necessary. ?I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,? he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. ?My oldest son? ? he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother ? ?this is his third time.? The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what?s new, but what?s essential. Pico Iyer is the author, most recently of ?The Man Within My Head.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 4 10:56:51 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 11:56:51 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - FOIA watchdogs: Exemptions up 33 percent under Obama Message-ID: (c/o jh) FOIA watchdogs: Exemptions up 33 percent under Obama By SEAN REILLY | Last Updated:December 15, 2011 http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20111215/AGENCY04/112150302/ Some federal agencies are relying more heavily on exemptions to withhold information under the Freedom of Information Act, two watchdog groups said in an analysis released Thursday. The study examined FOIA performance at 15 major agencies in fiscal 2008 and 2010. It found the nine statutory exemptions were used 33 percent more often in fiscal 2010 ? the first full fiscal year under President Obama ? than in fiscal 2008, the last full year of President Bush's administration. Without changes to the "culture of secrecy" still prevalent at many agencies, the Obama administration will fail to meet its goal of being the most transparent and accountable in history, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which produced the report with OpenTheGovernment.org. The Justice Department, which sets FOIA policy for the rest of the government, was one of the agencies citing some exemptions more frequently, the study found. The Treasury Department showed the most significant decline in its use of exemptions. The groups found, however, that agencies had generally made major progress in cutting their FOIA request backlogs, with the cumulative total dropping from about 126,200 at the end of fiscal 2008 to 64,500 at the same point in 2010. At the 15 agencies reviewed, the overall number of requests increased by 11 percent during the two-year period. In an e-mail, Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona called it unsurprising that agencies would assert more exemptions as more requests are processed. She also said agencies are increasing the number of requests in which they release at least some information, as opposed to making full denials. The analysis also questioned the accuracy of the data that the government uses to assess agencies' handling of FOIA requests. The average processing times published in the Interior Department's 2010 annual report, for example, were contradicted by figures listed on FOIA.gov, an online clearinghouse Justice launched in March , the study found. Justice had already found and corrected some of the problems flagged in the report, Talamona said. At the same time, she said, the department "recognizes that the [FOIA.gov] site is new and evolving and is committed to making improvements." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 06:58:15 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 07:58:15 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - RIAA: Kodak/Apple/RIM patent tangle proves we need Web censorship fast Message-ID: RIAA: Kodak/Apple/RIM patent tangle proves we need Web censorship fast By Matthew Lasar | Published about 13 hours ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/big-content-applerim-vs-kodak-infrin The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says that a proposed alternative to the draconian Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) won't work, and that it has found the patent case to prove it: Kodak's patent claims against Apple and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM). Two days before the new year, the US International Trade Commission announced that the Commission will place the "target date" for review of the case at September 21, 2012. Aha! declares Mitch Glazier, Senior Executive Vice President for the RIAA, in a blog post. This delay means that the ITC "will have taken 33 months to decide on a high-stakes and time-sensitive issue. So this is the 'expedited' process SOPA opponents are embracing as an alternative in the proposed OPEN bill?" Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) are the principal advocates of OPEN, which moves antipiracy enforcement from the Department of Justice and relevant courts to the ITC. Infringement appeals effectively become trade sanction questions rather than criminal disputes. That's the problem, Glazier insists. "Why in the world would we shift enforcement against these sites from the Department of Justice and others who are well-versed in these issues to the ITC, which focuses on patents and clearly does not operate on the short time frame necessary to be effective?" Yet "more proof" that "the OPEN Act is not a meaningful solution to a serious problem," his post warns. Scene preview This instance may indicate that the ITC can't handle these matters. Other observers have raised legitimate questions about the agency's qualifications to tackle copyright infringement issues. On the other hand, delay is also a necessary corollary to a truly adversarial process in which the other side objects and introduces evidence and arguments. That is, in fact, what happens in patent disputes like the aforementioned. In January of 2010, Kodak presented the ITC with its complaint against Apple and RIM, which the agency accepted for consideration. The camera company cited five allegedly infringed patents, among them two digital imaging related holdings: "Electronic Camera for Initiating Capture of Still Images while Previewing Motion Images" (US Patent #6,292,218) and Single Sensor Color Camera with User Selectable Image Record Size" (US Patent #5,493,335). Patent 218, the complaint noted, describes and claims: an image capture and processing device with certain components for "previewing" the scene to be captured. The patent discloses the first effective color preview for a digital camera - a key feature that requires managing the enormous amounts of data present in color images, accounting for the complex manner in which the color pixels of an image interact, and processing image data at speeds sufficient to present moving images on a display that accurately reflect the scene to be captured. Kodak asked the ITC for an order excluding from US markets any RIM or Apple mobile devices and related components that infringe on these patents. As you might guess, Apple and RIM aggressively sought to defend their methods from Kodak's charges, given how indispensable image previewing has become to mobile gadgetry. Apple fired back with a series of patent counter-complaints against Kodak filed in a US District Court and at the ITC. But the Commission rejected those charges about five months ago. To be specific, it decided not to review an ITC Administrative Law Judge's call clearing Kodak of Apple's patent infringement claims. Following that call, the Commission partially accepted, partially rejected, and partially remanded an Admin Judge's ruling concluding that Apple and RIM hadn't violated any Kodak patents, either. When throwing the case back in the ALJ's court, however, the presiding judge retired and a new one hadn't been recruited yet. A search for and shuffling of personnel ensued; hence, the target date for final resolution of the great Kodak/RIM/Apple patent war is now set for September. Such delays are unlikely to be common. 28 days later Obviously, the RIAA wants people to see this lengthy deliberative process as a refutation of OPEN's "expedited" processing claims. What Glazier's post is less interested in noting are the actual provisions of the bill itself, which really, truly do include expedited action rules. These provisions allow a rightsholder to ask for preliminary (and temporary) cease and desist orders against Internet sites, "upon a showing of extraordinary circumstances by the complainant filing a petition" for the temporary order. These can last for as long as 28 days, and the law sets a 30 day deadline for determining if a cease and desist should be granted following the beginning of a formal investigation. Once the cease and desist is issued, the complainant can take the ITC judgment to credit card companies and ad networks and cut off the rogue site's income?a wake up call, no matter what the duration of the order. "SOPA was introduced to address the devastating and immediate impact of foreign rogue sites dealing in infringing and counterfeiting works and products," Glazier's commentary concludes. "Every day that these sites operate without recourse can mean millions of dollars lost to American companies, employees, and economy, and an ongoing threat to the security and safety of our citizens." Perhaps, but a bill like SOPA, with its vague "dedicated to the theft of US property" provisions allowing ISPs and payment processors to block access to sites on their own also poses a threat?to a nearly uncountable number of websites, search engines, and applications that create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Maybe handing this problem over to some government agency that takes its time with complex intellectual property questions isn't such a bad idea. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 07:01:16 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 08:01:16 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Filesharing is a religion in Sweden Message-ID: <87C50717-9DF0-46C4-9E54-A05A697C2477@infowarrior.org> Filesharing is a religion in Sweden http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2135462/filesharing-religion-sweden A CHURCH DEVOTED to filesharing has won official recognition in Sweden. The church, called the Church of Kopimism has some rather interesting beliefs, and while its legitimacy has been denied several times, it finally won official recognition this week. At its heart is the belief that people should have the right to share and that people whose work is shared should be glad about that. "The missionary kopimistsamfundet is a religious group centered in Sweden who believe that copying and the sharing of information is the best and most beautiful that is," says the information on its web site, which is presently unavailable due to overwhelming traffic load. "Throughout history, various groups around the world have been persecuted by oppressors. It has since taken refuge in religion and wanted a peaceful coexistence. Without threats and harassment.In our belief, communication is sacred. Communication needs to be respected. It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people.The absolute secrecy is holy in the church of kopimism." The fact that the religion is officially recognised does not mean that its members can lawfully download and share material without inspection by ISPs and such, but it does show some progress in attitudes around filesharing, at least according to the chap behind it. "I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public, but at least to their close ones," said philosophy student and church founder Isak Gerson in an interview with TorrentFreak. "There's still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change." ? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 13:06:08 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 14:06:08 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law Message-ID: <1E0F8B64-4693-45B9-9D35-90DFF5CC034F@infowarrior.org> US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law ? enigmax ? January 5, 2012 http://torrentfreak.com/us-threatened-to-blacklist-spain-for-not-implementing-site-blocking-law-120105/ In a leaked letter sent to Spain?s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of ?retaliatory options? but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals. United States government interference in Spain?s intellectual property laws had long been suspected, but it was revelations from Wikileaks that finally confirmed the depth of its involvement. More than 100 leaked cables showed that the US had helped draft new Spanish copyright legislation and had heavily influenced the decisions of both the government and opposition. Now, another diplomatic leak has revealed how the US voiced its anger towards outgoing President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last month upon realizing that his government was unlikely to pass the US-drafted Sinde (site blocking) Law before leaving office. In a letter dated December 12th and sent by US Ambassador Alan D. Solomont to the Spanish Prime Minister?s office, the US expressed ?deep concern? over the failure to implement the SOPA-style censorship law. ?The government has unfortunately failed to finish the job for political reasons, to the detriment of the reputation and economy of Spain,? read the letter obtained by El Pais. Racing against the clock in the final days of the government, Solomont had one last push. ?I encourage the Government of Spain to implement the Sinde Law immediately to safeguard the reputation of Spain as an innovative country that does what it says it will, and as a country that breeds confidence,? he wrote. But along with the pleas came the stick. In the letter, which was also sent to Minister of Culture ?ngeles Gonz?lez-Sinde after whom the law is named, Solomont noted that Spain is already on the Special 301, the annual report prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) detailing ?trade barriers? based on intellectual property issues. Solomont?s threat was that should Spain not pass the Sinde Law (described by some as the Spanish SOPA) then the country would be degraded further and placed on the Priority Watch List. This serious step would mean that Spain was in breach of trade agreements and could be subjected to a range of ?retaliatory actions?. In the event Zapatero?s government left office without passing the law, but the incoming Partido Popular (People?s Party) were quickly pressured by the US to take the necessary action. In another media leak it?s now been revealed that American Chamber of Commerce in Spain chief Jaime Malet wrote a cautionary letter to incoming Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. He warned of the potential flight of foreign investment from Spain and urged him to take action on the protection of intellectual property once in office. ?[The law's] lack of approval before the elections has been a blow to the country?s seriousness in this matter of such importance,? said Malet, while urging Rajoy to ?to retrieve the consensus reached.? Rajoy?s government quickly responded and fully implemented the legislation within 10 days of taking office. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 13:07:38 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 14:07:38 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Vint Cerf: Internet Access Is Not a Human Right Message-ID: January 4, 2012 Internet Access Is Not a Human Right By VINTON G. CERF Reston, Va. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet-access-is-not-a-human-right.html FROM the streets of Tunis to Tahrir Square and beyond, protests around the world last year were built on the Internet and the many devices that interact with it. Though the demonstrations thrived because thousands of people turned out to participate, they could never have happened as they did without the ability that the Internet offers to communicate, organize and publicize everywhere, instantaneously. It is no surprise, then, that the protests have raised questions about whether Internet access is or should be a civil or human right. The issue is particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped down on Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters. In June, citing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a report by the United Nations? special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had ?become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.? Over the past few years, courts and parliaments in countries like France and Estonia have pronounced Internet access a human right. But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn?t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I?m not sure where I would put it. The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information ? and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. What about the claim that Internet access is or should be a civil right? The same reasoning above can be applied here ? Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important ? though the argument that it is a civil right is, I concede, a stronger one than that it is a human right. Civil rights, after all, are different from human rights because they are conferred upon us by law, not intrinsic to us as human beings. While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a ?right? to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of ?universal service? ? the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available even in the most remote regions of the country. When we accept this idea, we are edging into the idea of Internet access as a civil right, because ensuring access is a policy made by the government. Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights. In this context, engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users online. That means, for example, protecting users from specific harms like viruses and worms that silently invade their computers. Technologists should work toward this end. It is engineers ? and our professional associations and standards-setting bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ? that create and maintain these new capabilities. As we seek to advance the state of the art in technology and its use in society, we must be conscious of our civil responsibilities in addition to our engineering expertise. Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection ? without pretending that access itself is such a right. Vinton G. Cerf, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is a vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 13:18:09 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 14:18:09 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Pentagon Guidance Emphasizes Asia-Pacific, Cyber Message-ID: <88BB0716-7178-478E-995D-C7177355665B@infowarrior.org> (Strategy guidance @ http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/rtbo6TqExx1Q) Pentagon Emphasizes Asia-Pacific, Cyber By Tony Capaccio and Roxana Tiron - Jan 5, 2012 1:58 PM ET http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-05/pentagon-s-latest-defense-strategy-places-emphasis-on-asia-cybersecurity.html President Barack Obama presented a revamped U.S. military strategy for an era of budget cuts that pledges to emphasize Asia and space and cyber capabilities while preserving missions such as defeating al-Qaeda. The new strategy outlined today calls for investments in cybersecurity to defeat electronic attacks, in expanded space- based intelligence platforms and for ?developing a new stealth bomber.? At the same time, it raises the possibility that U.S. ?deterrence goals can be achieved with a smaller nuclear force? and says the U.S. presence in Europe ?must evolve,? without providing specifics. ?Our military will be leaner, but the world must know: The United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats,? Obama said today in an appearance at the Pentagon. Defense SecretaryLeon Panetta said in an introduction to the strategy review that future U.S. forces ?will be smaller and leaner? while more ?technologically advanced.? Republican lawmakers, in e-mailed statements, criticized the strategy from different angles -- as cutting too much, doing too little to root out waste or putting the U.S. nuclear deterrent at risk. ?Retreat from World? Representative Howard P. ?Buck? McKeon of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Obama has packaged ?a retreat from the world.? ?An honest and valid strategy for national defense can?t be founded on the premise that we must do more with less, or even less with less,? he said in an e-mailed statement. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon and lawmakers must act to end cost overruns and ?the waste, inefficiency, and ineffective programs that result from an overly consolidated military-industrial-Congressional complex.? Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, chairman of the House Armed Services panel on strategic forces, said the strategy would lead to cuts in U.S. nuclear forces ?at the same time Russia and China are modernizing and growing their forces and Iran and North Korea?s illegal programs continue to develop unchecked.? $450 Billion Reduction The review was presented by Obama, Panetta and Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was commissioned last year to determine strategic choices for the U.S. military as it faces $450 billion in additional reductions (USBODEFN) through 2021, including about $261 billion through 2017. The Pentagon strategy says ?terrorist access to simple nuclear devices poses the prospect of devastating consequences for the United States. Accordingly, the Department of Defense will continue to enhance its capabilities, acting with an array of domestic and foreign partners, to conduct effective operations to counter the proliferation? of weapons of mass destruction by nations such as Iran and North Korea. One goal is ?an active, whole-of-government effort to frustrate the ambitions of nations bent on developing WMD, to include preventing Iran?s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability,? the report finds. While specific cuts won?t be detailed until Obama?s budget (USBODEFN) proposal is released next month, the report today signals coming cuts in personnel and changes in priority. War, Deterrence The new strategy departs from standing doctrine calling for forces sufficient to fight two almost simultaneous major wars, calling instead for the capacity to fight one major war while deterring a second confrontation. ?Even when U.S. forces are committed to a large-scale operation in one region, they will be capable of denying the objectives of -- or imposing unacceptable costs on -- an opportunistic aggressor in a second region,? the review finds. U.S. forces ?will have a global presence emphasizing the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East while still ensuring our ability to maintain our defense commitments to Europe and strengthening alliances and partnerships across all regions,? Panetta said in his introduction to the strategy. Obama said in November, during a visit to Australia, that ?reductions in U.S. defense spending will not -- I repeat, will not -- come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific? region. Panetta said in a November speech that ?even as we enhance our presence in the Pacific, we will not surrender our status as a global power and a global leader.? Trade-Offs Any Pentagon trade-offs ?in one area? to beef up the Pacific ?will bear consequences in another,? MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, which opposes major cuts in defense spending, said in advance of the report?s release. ?As DoD squeezes U.S. force posture in Europe, including bases, it will have a direct impact on the military?s ability to respond to future conflicts like the no-fly zone in Libya, rapid response in Afghanistan post-9/11, and treating the wounded out of Iraq the past decade,? she said in an e-mail. ?There are no consequence-free decisions.?? Dov Zakheim, a former Pentagon Comptroller under George W, Bush and now an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the Pentagon needs to explain clearly any modification in strategy to avoid sending the wrong message to Iran or North Korea. ?Suppose there is a threat from Iran and threat from Korea,? he said. ?What are we going to do? Ignore Iran or ignore North Korea?? To contact the reporters on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio at bloomberg.net; Roxana Tiron in Washington at rtiron at bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9 at bloomberg.net --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 13:57:17 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 14:57:17 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Rep. Lamar Smith Decides Lying About, Insulting And Dismissing Opposition To SOPA Is A Winning Strategy Message-ID: Rep. Lamar Smith Decides Lying About, Insulting And Dismissing Opposition To SOPA Is A Winning Strategy from the we-shall-see dept It appears that SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith has decided that his best strategy continues to be to ignore any and all criticism of SOPA and pretend that none of it "is legitimate." That's kinda funny since we've shown, in great detail, where many of the problems in the bill are (see here, here and here for example -- all of which cite specific language from the bill). And yet, according to Smith: "The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality," Smith said in a statement to Roll Call. "Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts." We've done exactly what he's claimed we haven't -- as have numerous other parties, including famed Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who also cited specific language in the bill. Ditto with former DHS Assistant Secretary, Stewart Baker, who also cited language from the bill about how SOPA will cause significant security problems for the internet. It makes you wonder: just who does Lamar Smith think he's fooling? < -- snip ----> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120105/04462117287/rep-lamar-smith-decides-lying-about-insulting-dismissing-opposition-to-sopa-is-winning-strategy.shtml From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 15:32:04 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 16:32:04 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - TSA TWIC credential snafu Message-ID: <64F91478-E06B-4FD4-9311-D8B8D9747D19@infowarrior.org> TWIC: Safe & Sound ? or not? by Joseph Keefe Jan 04, 2012, 9:38AM EST The latest from inside the beltway is anything but comforting and shows far from good fiscal form. Is it the beginning of the end for the massive security program known simply as TWIC? http://maritimeprofessional.net/Blogs/The-Final-Word-with-Joseph-Keefe/January-2012/TWIC--Safe---Sound-%E2%80%93-or-not%E2%80%A6.aspx Within the past month, at least two tidbits of news have been released by policy wonks in Washington, neither of which got a whole lot of attention. The first involves the quiet, almost obscure posting (you?ll need to dig to find it ? apparently it isn?t that important) on the TSA site that as many as 26,000 Transportation Worker Identification Credentials (TWICs) may be rejected by TWIC reader machines because of defective encoding. Picked up by an alert Maritime Professional blogger ? John C.W. Bennett of Maritime Protective Services ? the news might be more disturbing were there a huge number of card readers in distribution to properly utilize this multi-million dollar ID card. But, most places don?t have the machines and their security guards probably wouldn?t know what a TWIC is for, in any event. More than ten years after the idea was hatched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and as the U.S. government woke up to the lurking vulnerabilities of U.S. ports, foreign trade zones and what that could all mean to the nation?s supply chain and economy, TWIC remains a largely unrealized dream. Back to our more immediate problem, the TSA says that they will replace the defective cards for free. I honestly don?t know what that means, however. My Dad used to tell me that if anyone said something was free, that was most likely not the case. 26,000 TWIC cards at (I think I remember it to be $132 each) equates to USD $3.43 million ? who?s ultimately paying the bill? Will it be the taxpayers or the contractors tasked by the government to issue the cards? As many as 1 million TWIC cards have reportedly been issued to port workers, truck drivers and credentialed U.S. mariners. No doubt the ultimate cost of this so-far ineffective means of providing port security has far exceeded the $132 million represented by this mountain of plastic-encased biometric data documents. I find little utility for mine, although I admit to regularly pulling it out at TSA airport security checkpoints for the entertainment value alone. These days, though, I rarely get the ?raised? eyebrow from the TSA representative or the call for a supervisor to find out exactly what I am presenting ? or, the question, ?What is this?? ? to which I would typically answer, ?You tell me, you issued it.? That?s progress, no? In a former life, I spent time as a cargo surveyor and ship vetter, traveling to countless marine terminals, here and abroad. A while back, I telephoned my old partner ? still in the business ? to ask him if his people had TWIC cards, whether they were required to have them and to what extent the cards were being demanded and/or utilized. He advised me that his folks were rarely asked for the card and if they presented it, they were more than likely asked to produce a driver?s license, as well, as a condition of entry. I?m told that the final rules regarding the card readers haven?t yet been finalized by the government (correct me if I?m wrong here); hence the mass deployment of card readers throughout the breadth of our nation?s 361 public ports is probably still a long way out from happening. Keep that driver?s license handy. The second bit of news involves a newly released U.S. Coast Guard policy letter which may provide for the processing of Merchant Mariner Credentials for mariners not requiring a Transportation Worker Identification Credential. The Coast Guard has interpreted the act to exempt Merchant Mariners who are not serving on vessels required to have a Vessel Security Plan (VSP) from the requirement to hold a valid TWIC. However, in order for the Coast Guard to process a credential application, they must have received the applicant?s biographical information from the Transportation Security Administration; must have completed the TWIC enrollment process at least one time. Additionally, in order for the Coast Guard to process a credential application for a mariner who is not in possession of a valid TWIC, the mariner must submit a statement indicating an understanding of the possible delays associated with processing the safety and suitability check and certifying that they do not require a TWIC in accordance with the Policy Letter. For the many mariners still in possession of valid Coast Guard licenses or credentials but not the accompanying STCW endorsements required to sail on board a merchant ship (and there a bunch of us out there), this might serve to save you (and the taxpayers, if it isn?t done right the first time) $132 the next time you decide to renew your credentials. As I inch closer to submitting my credentials to the U.S. Coast Guard for STCW compliance and take my license from ?continuation? status to active, this probably won?t impact me. Stay tuned. The $3.4 million represented by the latest snafu in the star crossed TWIC program is just one of many well-justified laments that transportation workers, mariners and industry itself has with the effort. That seemingly large amount of money is just a drop in the bucket in the greater fiscal mess roiling in Washington in the lead-up to the November elections. But, it all adds up. You have to wonder if and when they?ll pull the plug on this one, invoking the old rule of not throwing good money after bad. Your guess is as good mine. - MarPro Look here to see if your TWIC is defective. * * * Joseph Keefe is the lead commentator of MaritimeProfessional.com. Additionally, he is Editor of both Maritime Professional and MarineNews print magazines. He can be reached at jkeefe at maritimeprofessional.com or at Keefe at marinelink.com. MaritimeProfessional.com is the largest business networking site devoted to the marine industry. Each day thousands of industry professionals around the world log on to network, connect, and communicate. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 5 17:32:56 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 18:32:56 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Feds Want Judge to Force Suspect to Give Up Laptop Password Message-ID: <56DE44ED-668E-4BD5-B08A-B3C869747885@infowarrior.org> (c/o jh) Feds Want Judge to Force Suspect to Give Up Laptop Password ? By David Kravets http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/laptop-password-5th-amendment/ Federal prosecutors want a judge to order a Colorado woman to provide the password to decrypt her laptop, which the government seized with a search warrant. With backup from digital rights groups, the woman is fighting the feds, arguing that being forced to provide her password violates the Fifth Amendment?s protection against self-incrimination. Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn is expected to rule any day on whether to force defendant Ramona Fricosu to decrypt her Toshiba Satellite M305, which authorities seized from her in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating financial fraud. The case is being closely watched by digital rights groups, as the issue has never been squarely weighed in on by federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never addressed the issue. But a factually similar dispute involving child pornography ended with a Vermont federal judge ordering the defendant to decrypt the hard drive of his laptop. While that case never reached the Supreme Court, it differed from the Fricosu matter because U.S. border agents already knew there was child porn on the computer because they saw it while the computer was running during a 2006 routine stop along the Canadian border. The Electronic Frontier Foundation?s Marcia Hoffman said (.pdf) in a court filing that the very act of requiring Fricosu to input her password into the laptop would be incriminating ?because it might reveal she had control over the laptop and the data there.? Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Davies said(.pdf) said there is no Fifth Amendment breach, and that it might ?require significant resources and may harm the subject computer? if it tried to crack the encryption. Full disk encryption is an option built into the latest flavors of Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and well-designed encryption protocols used with a long passphrase can take decades to break, even with massive computing power. The authorities countered the EFF, telling Judge Blackburn that the ?government knows that the defendant had access to, and control over, the subject computer immediately prior to the search warrant execution because it was found in her bedroom, on top of the laptop case.? The feds also played the terror card. Davies said that, if the defendant is not compelled to unlock her computer, that would amount ?to a concession to her and potential criminals (be it in child exploitation, national security, terrorism, financial crimes or drug trafficking cases) that encrypting all inculpatory digital evidence will serve to defeat the efforts of law enforcement officers to obtain such evidence through judicially authorized search warrants, and thus make their prosecution impossible.? Despite government fears and arguments in the 1990s against unbreakable encryption (known as the Crypto war), the federal government rarely encounters encrypted communication and since 2002. According to statistics provided to Congress, the feds have never had a criminal case where the government couldn?t get the plain text of communications because of encryption. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 6 13:44:05 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2012 14:44:05 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - News Networks Ignore Controversial SOPA Legislation Message-ID: <5BEEE7B4-83A1-4885-BBFA-0774EB554FB4@infowarrior.org> REPORT: News Networks Ignore Controversial SOPA Legislation January 05, 2012 11:46 am ET by Ben Dimiero http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201050008 Controversial legislation that the co-founder of Google has warned "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world" has received virtually no coverage from major American television news outlets during their evening newscasts and opinion programming. The parent companies of most of these networks, as well as two of the networks themselves, are listed as official "supporters" of this legislation on the U.S. House of Representatives' website. As the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) makes its way through Congress, most major television news outlets -- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it. (The data on lack of coverage is based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database since October 1, 2011. The Nexis database does not include comprehensive daytime coverage, and also does not include Shep Smith's 7pm nightly Fox News program, so both are excluded from the study.) Over the past few months, debate over SOPA and its companion Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act (also known as PIPA) has boiled over online. Numerous tech writers, experts, and companies have spoken out against the bills, warning that while they ostensibly target online piracy and "rogue" foreign websites hosting pirated copyrighted content, the bills could severely limit internet freedom and innovation. NY Times media columnist David Carr, who described the legislation as "alarming in its reach," explained in a column earlier this week that "digitally oriented companies see SOPA as dangerous and potentially destructive to the open Web and a step toward the kind of intrusive Internet regulation that has made China a global villain to citizens of the Web." The legislation also has powerful supporters. As Carr laid out in his article, "Virtually every traditional media company in the United States loudly and enthusiastically supports SOPA." This includes the parent companies of the TV news outlets now ignoring the fury over the bill during their primetime broadcasts, as well as two of the channels themselves. ABC and CBS are listed as supporters of the bill on the House Judiciary Committee website, along with Comcast/NBCUniversal (which owns MSNBC and NBC News), Viacom (CBS), News Corporation (Fox News), and Time Warner (CNN). Disney Publishing Worldwide, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, is also listed as a supporter, as are other Disney properties such as ESPN and Hyperion publishing. To their credit, the online arms of most of these news outlets have posted regular articles about the fight over the legislation, but their primetime TV broadcasts remain mostly silent. Several major companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and eBay published a joint letter to Congress in November expressing serious concerns about the pending legislation and declaring that the measures to combat piracy in the bills "pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation's cybersecurity." In December, users of Reddit, the influential social news website, organized a boycott of major internet domain registrar GoDaddy after that company's support for SOPA was publicized. After customers -- including prominent organizations like Wikipedia -- pledged to start transferring domains to different companies, GoDaddy issued a statement claiming that the company now "opposes SOPA." Despite all of this, the response from American television news outlets has been to almost completely ignore the story during their evening programming. The lone exception was a segment on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer in December, during which CNN parent company Time Warner's support for the legislation was not disclosed. (Though Fox News Channel has apparently not touched the story during evening programming, conservative/libertarian host Andrew Napolitano has run several segments vocally opposing SOPA on his program, which runs on the separate Fox Business Network.) The fight over SOPA does not fit into the usual left vs. right narrative that occupies so much of the political horserace coverage with which TV news outlets fill their schedules. The cosponsors of SOPA come from both sides of the aisle. Likewise, the most vocal opponents of SOPA in Congress are an ideologically diverse bunch, including Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Ron Paul (R-TX) and Darrel Issa (R-CA). Online, opposition to SOPA has also come from a wide ideological spectrum. Conservative writer Erick Erickson penned a piece for Red State last month proposing a bipartisan effort to raise funds for candidates to challenge the incumbent cosponsors of the bill. Note about methodology: I reviewed Lexis-Nexis transcripts since October 1, 2011 for any references to the Stop Online Piracy Act, the PROTECT IP Act, and related terms. Since the Nexis database does not include comprehensive transcripts for daytime programming on news channels, the search focused on broadcasts at 5pm or later that are available in the database. Shep Smith's nightly 7pm Fox News program is not available in the Nexis database, so it is not included in this study. I used the following search: publications (ABC or NBC or CBS or MSNBC or Fox News or Fox or CNN) and (internet or web or website or webpage or rogue websites or rogue sites or pirated or intellectual property or online or piracy or Stop Online Piracy Act or Protect IP or SOPA or PIPA or Lamar Smith) --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 6 20:13:18 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2012 21:13:18 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPA Is a Symbol of the Movie Industry's Failure to Innovate Message-ID: SOPA Is a Symbol of the Movie Industry's Failure to Innovate By Steve Blank Jan 6 2012, 8:22 AM ET 14 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/sopa-is-a-symbol-of-the-movie-industrys-failure-to-innovate/250967/ This controversial anti-piracy legislation is all about studios and other corporations making excuses for their technological backwardness and looking out for their short-term profit This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads. The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market. ? 1920's - the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can't compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again. ? 1940's - movie studios had to divest their distribution channel - they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. "It's all over," complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today. ? 1950's - broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn't compete with paid. ? 1970's - Video Cassette Recorders (VCR's) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with "end of the world" hyperbole. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets. ? 1998 - the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased. ? 2000 - Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR's reignite interest in TV. ? 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers. ? Today it's the Internet that's going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar? Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology? A FAILURE OF INNOVATION AND REGULATION The movie industry was born with a single technical standard - 35mm film, and for decades had a single way to distribute its content - movie theaters (which until 1948 the studios owned.) It was 75 years until studios had to deal with technology changing their platform and distribution channel. And when it happened (cable, VCR's, DVD's, DVR's, the Internet,) it was a relentless onslaught. The studios responded by trying to shut down the new technology and/or distribution channels through legislation and the courts. But why does the movie business think their solution is in Washington and legislation? History and success. In the 1920's individual states were beginning to censor movies and the federal government was threatening to do so as well. The studios set up their own self censorship and rating system keeping most sex and politics off the screen for 40 years. Never again wanting to be at the losing side of a political battle they created the movie industry's lobbying arm, MPAA. By the 1960's, the MPPA achieved regulatory capture (where an industry co-opts the very people who are regulating it,) when they hired Jack Valenti, who ran the studios' lobbying efforts for the next 38-years. Ironically, it was Valenti's skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership. The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners whose sell through well-established distribution channels. The incumbents tend to have short-sighted goals and often fail to recognize that more money can be made on new platforms and new distribution channels. In an industry facing constant technology shifts the exec staff and boards of the studios have lawyers, MBAs and financial managers, but no management skill in dealing with disruption. So they rely on lobbying ($110 million a year,) lawsuits, campaign contributions (wonder why the President won't be vetoing SOPA?) and Public Relations. Ironically, the six major movie studios have a great technology lab in Silicon Valley with projects in streaming rights, Video On Demand, Ultraviolet, etc. But lacking the support from the studio CEOs or boards, the lab languishes in the backwaters of the studios' strategy. Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.) THE BIG LIE OF PIRACY One of the claims that studios make is that they need legislation to stop piracy. The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. Video games and software have been targets since their inception. Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. Credit card companies call it fraud. But none use regulation as often as the movie studios to solve a business problem. And none are so willing to do collateral damage to other innovative industries (VCRs, DVRs, cloud storage and now the Internet itself.) The studios don't even pretend that this legislation benefits consumers. It's all about protecting short-term profit. When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists are ex-Senators, understanding technology and innovation is not one of your core capabilities. The SOPA bill (and DNS blocking) is what happens when someone with the title of anti-piracy or copyright lawyer has greater clout than your head of new technology. SOPA gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the Internet. It's as if someone shoplifts in your store, SOPA allows the government to shut down your store. History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player or now the Net. It's prudent for courts and congress to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude. What the music and movie industry should be doing in Washington is promoting legislation to adapt copyright law to new technology -- and then leading the transition to the new platforms. The U.S. State Department has been championing the Internet Freedom initiative across the world. Secretary of State Clinton said, "...when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us." It's too bad the head of the MPAA - an ex Senator - made a mockery of her words when he wondered "why our online censorship can't be like China?" We wonder, "Why can't the film industry innovate like Silicon Valley?" --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 6 20:16:35 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2012 21:16:35 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - New IL Law Requires Photo ID To Buy Drain Cleaner Message-ID: New Law Requires Photo ID To Buy Drain Cleaner http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/01/05/new-law-requires-photo-id-to-buy-drain-cleaner/ January 5, 2012 6:34 PM CHICAGO (CBS) ? A new state law requires those who buy drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log. It?s getting a rough reception from customers and merchants alike although perhaps none more than a cashier at Schroeder?s True Value Hardware in Lombard. ?They?re not very happy about it at all,? said Don Schroeder, one of the store?s owners. ?One of the customers actually threatened the (cashier) and threatened to throw the acid on her.? Although the customer did not make good on the threat, and no one called police, other employees of Schroeder?s said they would call police immediately if any similar threat is made. The law, which took effect Sunday, requires those who seek to buy caustic or noxious substances, except for batteries, to provide government-issued photo identification that shows their name and date of birth. The cashier then must log the name and address, the date and time of the purchase, the type of product, the brand and even the net weight. State Rep. Jack Franks (D-Woodstock) obtained passage of the new law following attacks in which drain cleaner was poured on two Chicago women, badly scarring them. ?So that?s who I have to call,? Schroeder said. He said that when he called his local legislator, the legislator claimed not to know about the new law. Neither, he said, did other retailers in the area. He said he and other store personnel had to call to a number of stores before they could get details. Non-compliance results in fines: $150 for the first offense, $500 for the second and up to $1,500 for the third and subsequent violations. Schroeder estimated that there are ?easily? 30 or more products in the store that must be reported when sold. Jewel-Osco has removed the few items it carried from its shelves, but Schroeder said he does not have that option as a hardware store. He said he does not believe that the precautions written into the bill will prevent such crimes from occurring. ?How are they going to find out, by asking every customer, what kid might have done that? It?s not going to solve any problems,? Schroeder said. ?It?s not going to cure anything.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 6 20:22:38 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2012 21:22:38 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Grover Norquist (!) Backing Away From SOPA Message-ID: <6865E9E8-B719-4173-8758-DE3772A5AC2B@infowarrior.org> Huge Supporter Of Stronger Copyright Law, Grover Norquist, Backing Away From SOPA from the support-keeps-dwindling dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120106/04262017300/huge-supporter-stronger-copyright-law-grover-norquist-backing-away-sopa.shtml The supposed widespread support for SOPA keeps fading away, it seems. The latest supporter to jump ship is a big one on the political front. Grover Norquist, who runs Americans for Tax Reform, is a major force in US conservative/Republican politics -- and a massive supporter of stricter copyright laws. Where Norquist goes on certain issues, certain Republicans follow. In fact, Norquist and ATR even have their own "stronger copyright law" group called "The Property Rights Alliance." And, a few weeks ago, Norquist sent Lamar Smith a letter supporting SOPA entirely. But... now his group has changed its mind, and notes that they no longer "unequivocally support it," and are hoping that Smith "will allow the concerns many have with the remaining parts of the bill to be addressed." The group also acknowledges its concern about the need to protect "innovation and free speech online." I'm curious to see how the pro-SOPA folks who declare that everyone who has raised these concerns is just a "piracy apologist" will respond to this one. Norquist/ATR are about as far from "piracy apologists" as you can get. It's safe to say that I think his positions on intellectual property are ridiculous in most cases. But, when even someone like that is recognizing how many problems there are with SOPA, it's time for SOPA supporters to admit that the concerns of the bill are very real. And those complaining about the bill aren't "piracy apologists," but people with legitimate concerns about innovation, security and free speech online. As Declan McCullagh's article about this notes, it appears that many "pro-copyright" groups rushed to support these bills without bothering to understand what was really in them. Now that they're learning, they realize just how problematic they are... --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 7 09:46:16 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2012 10:46:16 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Alastair Smith on political tyranny Message-ID: (c/o dg) Quick study: Alastair Smith on political tyranny How to be a dictator Jan 1st 2012, 15:23 by A.B. | LONDON http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/01/quick-study-alastair-smith-political-tyranny ALASTAIR SMITH is professor of politics at New York University. The recipient of three grants from the National Science Foundation and author of three books, he was chosen as the 2005 Karl Deutsch Award winner, given biennially to the best international-relations scholar under the age of 40. He is co-author of ?The Dictator?s Handbook: How Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics? (2011). To whom do your guidelines apply? Everyone. It doesn?t matter whether you are a dictator, a democratic leader, head of a charity or a sports organisation, the same things go on. Firstly, you don?t rule by yourself?you need supporters to keep you there, and what determines how you best survive is how many supporters you have and how big a pool you can draw these supporters from. Do they actually have to support me, or can I just terrify them into supporting me by threatening them with death? No, they absolutely have to support you on some level. You can?t personally go around and terrorise everyone. Our poor old struggling Syrian president is not personally killing people on the streets. He needs the support of his family, senior generals who are willing to go out and kill people on his behalf. The common misconception is that you need support from the vast majority of the population, but that?s typically not true. There is all this protest on Wall Street, but CEOs are keeping the people they need to keep happy happy?the members of the board, senior management and a few key investors?because they are the people who can replace them. Protesters on Wall Street have no ability to remove the CEOs. So in a lot of countries the masses are terrified but the supporters are not. What about Stalin? Even his inner circle was terrified. Well, the brilliance of the Soviet regime was not just that you relied on few people, but that there were lots of replacements. In a tsarist system you have to rely only on aristocrats, but in a Soviet system everyone can be your supporter. This puts your core circle on notice that they are easily replaced. That, of course, made them horribly loyal. The Mob are very good at this. Suggested viewing: "On The Waterfront" (1954) This sounds typically mammalian to me?just groups of gorillas with a silverback? It is virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own self interest. If you are a democrat you want to gerrymander districts and have an electoral college. This vastly reduces the number of votes a president needs to win an election. Then tax very highly. It?s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren?t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can?t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas. This is always subject to the constraint that if you tax too highly people won?t work. This is the big debate in the US. The Republicans are saying that the Democrats have too many taxes and want to suppress workers. But when they were in power five years ago they had no problem with taxing and spending policies, but now it?s taxing their supporters to reward Democrats. Suggested reading: "Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policy" by Robert Bates (2005) Okay. So, I have a small group of rewarded cronies and a highly taxed population. Now what? Don?t pay your supporters too much! You don?t want them saving up and forming their own power base. Also, don?t be nice to the people at the expense of your coalition. A classic example is natural disasters. Than Shwe was the ruler of Burma when Cyclone Nargis hit in 2008, and he did nothing to help the people. The Generals didn?t warn anybody; though they knew it was coming, they provided virtually no emergency protection. He sent the army in to prevent the people from leaving the flooded Delta areas. He was the perfect example of a leader who never made the mistake of putting the people?s welfare above himself and his coalition. But what if you really are trying to work for the common good? Is there no way of doing that? None. If you?re working for the common good you didn?t come to power in the first place. If you?re not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don?t come to power. What if you?re Lech Walesa? I?m pretty certain he had his own political power base. He wanted to make society more inclusive. This is always the battle cry of revolutionary leaders. When they get into power they change their tune. The real question is what stops politicians from backsliding once they get in? Typically, it?s that the country is broke and the only way you can get people to work is by empowering them socially, but once you do that it becomes hard to take powers back from them. Broke countries are the ones that end up having the political reforms that make them nice places with good economic policy in the long run. Places where there is oil, like Libya, have a very low chance of having democracy. The leaders don?t really need the people to pay the bills of their cronies, because they have oil. Suggested reading: Anything by Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski, a Soviet Polish journalist Surely Google and Facebook aren?t run like this? Absolutely they are. All corporations are run like this. The bonuses are handed out to the people who determine the fate of the CEO. It?s a tiny number of people?ten to 20. There are very few shareholder revolts that work. Most leaders are deposed internally. This is why corporations pay huge bonuses. Don?t I need a cult of personality for my dictatorship? That?s window dressing. It?s useful in identifying whose side people are on. If you act crazy and the people tell you you?re crazy then they?re not as loyal as you might think. My co-author, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and I have a very cynical view, but we think cynicism doesn?t mean it?s not true. It?s not possible to reform a system by imploring people to do the right thing. You have to know how it works. Dictators already know how to be dictators?they are very good at it. We want to point out how they do it so that it?s possible to think about reforms that can actually have meaningful consequences. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 7 09:49:12 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2012 10:49:12 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Lawmakers seem intent on approving SOPA, PIPA Message-ID: <797EA14D-F22A-4C0A-B4C7-4255BB7990B8@infowarrior.org> Published on InfoWorld (http://www.infoworld.com) Lawmakers seem intent on approving SOPA, PIPA By Grant Gross Created 2012-01-06 05:15AM http://www.infoworld.com/print/183328 Early this year, the U.S. Congress appears likely to move forward with two controversial copyright enforcement bills, even with vocal and widespread opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the Internet community. The two bills, SOPA and PIPA for short, appear headed toward approval this year, unless opponents can change the minds of many lawmakers. Dozens of lawmakers have voiced support for the bills, despite reports from digital rights group Fight for the Future that more than 1 million people have sent email messages [1] to Congress in opposition. [ Get your websites up to speed with HTML5 today using the techniques in InfoWorld's HTML5 Deep Dive [2] PDF how-to report. | Learn how to secure your Web browsers in InfoWorld's "Web Browser Security Deep Dive [3]" PDF guide. ] The U.S. Senate is expected to begin floor debate [4] on PIPA shortly after senators return to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, and supporters appear to have the votes to override a threatened filibuster by Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and a handful of other lawmakers. Both bills have strong support in Congress and among some segments of U.S. industry. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America, two powerful trade and lobbying groups, are among the 400-plus organizations supporting the bills [5]. Other supporters include the National Football League, Time Warner, L'Oreal, and the Fraternal Order of Police. Several supporters of the two bills declined to make predictions, but it's hard to ignore the numbers in Congress so far. PIPA has 41 co-sponsors in the 100-member Senate. The votes of just 19 more senators would be needed to override a filibuster from Wyden and his allies. In the House of Representatives, the Judiciary Committee will continue a markup of SOPA when lawmakers return to Washington. During the first three days of the markup in December, lawmakers opposed to SOPA introduced about 20 amendments intended to water down the bill. All of them failed, by roughly two-to-one margins in the committee. "I'm not very encouraged, quite frankly," said Paul Ferguson, senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, a cybersecurity vendor with concerns about the bills. "There's a lack of technical knowledge here in the legislative process." Ferguson and other Web security experts have questioned provisions in both bills that would allow court orders forcing Internet service providers to block subscriber access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement and domain name registrars to stop resolving queries that direct traffic to those sites. The filtering provisions in both bills would set back the decade-long effort to roll out DNSSEC, a suite of security tools for the DNS, Ferguson said. "It seems like all the technical concerns are just being dismissed out of hand," he said. The bills would also allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders blocking payment processors and online advertising networks from doing business with foreign sites accused of infringing copyright. The DOJ-requested court orders could also bar search engines from linking to the allegedly infringing sites. Other opponents of SOPA and PIPA seem a bit more optimistic about derailing the bills. While some powerful entertainment and content groups support the bills, "on the other hand, you have everybody else, including millions of Americans," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association, a large trade group opposed to the bills. Opposition is growing because U.S. residents are hearing that the bills would hurt the Internet, Petricone added. "There are plenty of people in both the House and Senate that are doubting the wisdom of the bills," he said. The bills have hit a couple of speed bumps in recent weeks. Giant domain-name registrar Go.Daddy withdrew its support for SOPA [6] after threats of a customer boycott, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has defended tough copyright laws in the past, questioned several provisions in SOPA [7]. "The federal government needs to protect intellectual property rights," wrote James Gattuso, senior research fellow in regulatory policy at the foundation. "But it should do so in a way that does not disrupt the growth of technology, does not weaken Internet security, respects free speech rights, and solves the problem of rogue sites." In addition, since Dec. 18, more than 46,000 people have signed a WhiteHouse.gov petition [8] calling for President Barack Obama to veto SOPA. A second petition, calling for Obama to stop PIPA, has generated more than 51,000 signatures since Oct. 31. The Obama administration has promised to issue an official response to all petitions that generate more than 25,000 signatures within a month. Opponents of the bills are waiting for the White House's official position, said Heather Greenfield, spokeswoman for the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a tech trade group opposed to both bills. The White House "has responded to petitions about alien life on earth, so we imagine they'll respond to the ones about SOPA, too," she said. CCIA is also encouraged that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and main sponsor of SOPA, has promised to hold a hearing on the cybersecurity implications of the bill, Greenfield said. "We're optimistic that if members really understood the Internet architecture and cybersecurity measures, they would not support SOPA as written," she added. "Instead, members who are really committed to combatting online piracy would look for effective ways to do that without compromising cybersecurity or the open architecture of the Internet." Lammakers continue to hear from opponents of the bills, she said. "Members of Congress say their phones are ringing with calls from thousands of Internet users who are furious Congress plans to censor and regulate the Internet -- ahead of understanding what they're doing," she said. "So this could be the netroots issue, and it's hard to say yet how that's going to impact support." Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross at idg.com. ? The Industry Standard ? Internet ? Federal Regulations ? Intellectual Property Source URL (retrieved on 2012-01-07 07:43AM): http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/lawmakers-seem-intent-approving-sopa-pipa-183328 Links: [1] http://americancensorship.org/infographic2.html [2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/best-laptop-money-cant-buy-496?source=fssr [3] http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/the-infoworld-expert-guide-web-browser-security-892?isource=ifwelg_fssr [4] http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/pipa?s-january-24th-vote-and-how-filibuster-w [5] http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue Websites/List of SOPA Supporters.pdf [6] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222997/GoDaddy_pulls_its_support_from_SOPA [7] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/12/online-piracy-and-sopa-beware-of-unintended-consequences [8] https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/veto-sopa-bill-and-any-other-future-bills-threaten-diminish-free-flow-information/g3W1BscR --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 8 13:04:44 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2012 14:04:44 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - An AirSea Battle on the Potomac Message-ID: <7B4DEA16-969D-4D9E-8882-C5458EB6DE2E@infowarrior.org> Defense News January 9, 2012 An AirSea Battle on the Potomac It is clear from last month?s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor that this disaster continues to impact the U.S. psyche and national strategy. ?The next Pearl Harbor? has been a common theme in reports regarding 9/11. One can assume the recently developed and clas?ified AirSea Battle Concept has a similar vista. Addressing the ?anti?access/area denial? environment, it purportedly discusses the growing influence of China and the importance of Asia to America?s national interests. As the name states, air and sea power will be critical to the attainment of U.S. national interests. While analogies to Pearl Harbor are understandable, they may be misleading on the challenges of tomorrow. A more appropriate lesson might be found in the Battle of Midway. As the sun rose on June 4, 1942, the Imperial Navy of Japan was the most powerful navy ever to sail. By sunset, its eventual defeat was inevitable. Japan in 1942 possessed six world-class aircraft carriers and the finest naval aviators. Four carriers were lost on that day. Lacking a robust industrial base, Japan would produce only seven additional fleet carriers by the end of the war (the U.S. more than 20). Rational or not, Japan started a war with a limited force structure and little ability to replenish loses. Fast-forward to 2012. In a world of iPads, it is incredible, but the forces that will carry out the AirSea Battle construct reflect decisions made decades ago. Tomorrow?s U.S. Air Force will possess a nominal force of bombers and a handful of sophisticated F-22s and F-35s. While highly capable, these fifth-generation fighters lack the range and payload necessary for conflicts in Asia. Friendly bases are few. The airfields close enough for effective sortie generation rates with fifth-gen fighters will likewise be within range of Chinese ballistic and cruise missiles. This environment requires hardened facilities and a robust missile-defense system. The former do not exist and the latter only in limited numbers. While U.S. naval forces will benefit from their mobility, they too will face a Chinese anti?access threat projected to acquire and target surface combatants. With a deck of F/A-18s and F-35s, our carriers will be as range-challenged as our land-based fighters. Getting the carrier to the fight will require expensive escorts to defend against missile attacks. Combat operations would quickly become problematic once the defensive armaments are depleted. Complicating this bleak outlook is the acquisition death spiral of increased cost/reduced numbers. As weapon systems progress through the acquisition cycle, they invariably fall behind sched?ule from unforeseen production issues. This drives up the cost, reducing the number of systems that can be purchased. The spiral continues with the war fighter receiving fewer platforms, later than needed, and costing significantly more than planned. These two flaws could leave the U.S. in the same position that Japan found itself in 1943, weakened and unable to reconstitute a viable force. A small fighter force will generate few effective sorties (this assumes sufficient aerial tankers. Fighters in Asia are static displays without tankers). The loss of a Nimitz-class carrier would rival Pearl Harbor in loss of life and drive our surface naval forces out of harm?s way. Like Imperial Japan, a Midway debacle would cripple U.S. power projection. And like Japan of 1943, America of 2012 cannot quickly reconstitute our current weapon systems. With senior leaders stating there are no alternatives to weapon systems currently in development, it?s apparent their predecessors organized a Pickett?s Charge decades ago and left the charge to them. Resolving this mismatch between force structure and strategy will require a proper focus on the challenges of combat operations in the Pacific. Specifically, in the short term: ? Expand procurement of standoff missiles, such as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range. ? Regain our superiority in electronic warfare that was lost in our infatuation with stealth. ? Purchase low-end attack aircraft and remotely piloted vehi?cles for noncontested environments. ? Limit the F-35 buy to 200 to 400 aircraft. For the long term: ? Develop manned/unmanned long-range penetrating precision strike platforms (both land- and carrier-based). ? Research and develop 21st century battleships capable of firing ballistic and cruise missiles from long range. On June 3, 1942, the Imperial Navy of Japan was the uncontested master of the Pacific. On the following day, American ingenuity, guts and a degree of luck made Japan?s eventual defeat inevitable. The future naval and air forces of the U.S. could face a similar tragedy, one in which the finest air and naval forces are rendered incapable of effective combat operations due to a 20?year process where we purchased what we wanted instead of what we needed. Perhaps the most important contribution from an honest assessment of the AirSea Battle construct will be to own up to this unfortunate fact. ===== By Chris Choate , a retired U.S. Air Force colonel now performing operational test and evaluation work with the service as a civilian employee. These views reflect those of the author and not the Air Force, Defense Department or U.S. government. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 10:43:27 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 11:43:27 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The TSA Proves its Own Irrelevance Message-ID: <75EC0F23-4963-4FA3-988C-1275515EF18D@infowarrior.org> The TSA Proves its Own Irrelevance http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/the_tsa_proves.html Have you wondered what $1.2 billion in airport security gets you? The TSA has compiled its own "Top 10 Good Catches of 2011": 10) Snakes, turtles, and birds were found at Miami (MIA) and Los Angeles (LAX). I?m just happy there weren?t any lions, tigers, and bears? [...] 3) Over 1,200 firearms were discovered at TSA checkpoints across the nation in 2011. Many guns are found loaded with rounds in the chamber. Most passengers simply state they forgot they had a gun in their bag. 2) A loaded .380 pistol was found strapped to passenger?s ankle with the body scanner at Detroit (DTW). You guessed it, he forgot it was there? 1) Small chunks of C4 explosives were found in passenger?s checked luggage in Yuma (YUM). Believe it or not, he was brining it home to show his family. That's right; not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firearms and knives would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. And that the C4 -- their #1 "good catch" -- was on the return flight; they missed it the first time. So only 1 for 2 on that one. And the TSA decided not to mention its stupidest confiscations: "TSA confiscates a butter knife from an airline pilot. TSA confiscates a teenage girl's purse with an embroidered handgun design. TSA confiscates a 4-inch plastic rifle from a GI Joe action doll on the grounds that it?s a "replica weapon." TSA confiscates a liquid-filled baby rattle from airline pilot?s infant daughter. TSA confiscates a plastic "Star Wars" lightsaber from a toddler." In related news, here's a rebuttal of the the Vanity Fair article about the TSA and airline security that featured me. I agree with this two points at the end of the post; I just don't think it changes any of my analysis. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 14:38:10 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 15:38:10 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Vatican Lifts Bios From Wikipedia Message-ID: Vatican uses Wikipedia to compile cardinals' biographies ? guardian.co.uk, Sunday 8 January 2012 12.51 EST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/08/vatican-wikipedia-cardinals-biographies Its ancient library holds more than 180,000 manuscripts and 1.6m books, and it describes its Secret Archive, which packs priceless documents on to 85km of shelving, as "one of the most important research centres in the world". The Vatican's reputation as a font of knowledge was further boosted when Joseph Ratzinger, a former academic and prolific writer, was elected as Pope. That is why eyebrows were raised when the Vatican resorted to Wikipedia when it released potted biographies of 22 new cardinals who were appointed on 6 January. The biographies, sent to journalists, were cut and pasted from Wikipedia's Italian language site without attribution, but questions were asked when many of the archbishops in line for promotion were described as Catholic ? a statement recalling the frequently asked question: "Is the Pope a Catholic?" In a tone that does not exactly match the Vatican's style, Willem Jacobus Eijk, the archbishop of Utrecht, is described as having a "strong tendency to conservatism, specially regarding abortion and homosexuality, which has made him one of the most talked about religious men in the country". The Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi pointed out that the bios were carefully labelled as "unofficial" and said the decision to use Wikipedia was a temporary measure driven by haste. "Since then we have been putting up official bios on our site," he said. However, the use of Wikipedia seems in line with Benedict's approval of the internet. After he was criticised in 2009 for being in the dark over Bishop Richard Williamson's claim that the Nazis did not use gas chambers, he wrote: "In future at the Holy See, we must pay more attention to that source of news." From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 14:50:44 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 15:50:44 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DNA McSpray to foil thieves Message-ID: DNA McSpray to foil thieves - McDonalds to use new anti-theft spray Save this story to read later ? The Sunday Telegraph ? January 08, 2012 8:35AM http://www.news.com.au/business/dna-mcspray-to-foil-thieves/story-e6frfm1i-1226239112219 McDONALD'S restaurants are fighting back against thieves by blasting suspected robbers with an invisible DNA spray as they attempt to flee. The spray, which remains on the suspect's skin for two weeks and on clothes for up to six months, has been introduced in some of the chain's busiest NSW stores, including those at Parramatta, Granville, Auburn, Lidcome, Kingsford and Wollongong, reported The Daily Telegraph. If the SelectaDNA "forensic marking" spray proves successful in apprehending bandits, McDonald's will introduce the system across all its 780 Australian outlets. Developed in the United Kingdom by a police officer and a chemist, the spray has been used by McDonald's outlets in Britain and Europe. Each outlet keeps the details of its distribution a close secret, but one McDonald's restaurant in The Netherlands installed above the main door an orange device which was electronically linked to a panic alarm system. Staff could activate the device in an emergency. "Once there has been a security breach, the hi-tech spray unit will douse fleeing robbers with an invisible, synthetic DNA solution," McDonald's Australia's chief restaurant support officer, Jackie McArthur, said. "The solution is invisible to the naked eye and unique to each location. It stays on clothing for up to six months and on skin for up to two weeks." Using a UVA light, police can see the markings left by the system and link the offender back to the scene. The spray contains a synthetic DNA strand composed of 60 variable chromosomes, said SelectaDNA director David Morrissey. "SelectaDNA is non-toxic, non-allergenic and perfectly safe to deploy. It meets all Australian standards," he said. Theft is a serious problem for fast-food outlets such as McDonald's, which has high cash turnover, multiple entry and exit points and more than 85,000 staff who often work through the night at truck-stops and other remote places. In a single week in September, two hold-ups occurred at a McDonald's outlet at Merrylands in Sydney's west. "Crime can occur anywhere at any time, which is why our extensive safety and security protocols are in place at every restaurant throughout the entire day," Ms McArthur said. "These locations are some of our busiest, so it makes sense to try out the new technology here. "McDonald's already has a range of security measures, including CCTV, strict security protocols, intensive training, and consultative working relationships with local police." This is the first time the system will be used in Australia, and although its marketers claim an "85 per cent crime reduction" rate, the proof of its worth is not yet clear. SelectaDNA trades on a "DNA fear factor," claiming the system is more about prevention than arrests. Scores of law-enforcement agencies in the UK, including Surrey Police, have handed out the spray kits so residents can mark their property, and it has been widely used by schools and businesses. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 18:15:50 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 19:15:50 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Rep. Paul Ryan Comes Out Forcefully Against SOPA After Reddit Pumps Up Opposing Candidate Message-ID: (Of course, SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith still living inside his own Reality Distortion Field. -- rick) Rep. Paul Ryan Comes Out Forcefully Against SOPA After Reddit Pumps Up Opposing Candidate from the well,-look-at-that... dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120109/09111417345/rep-paul-ryan-comes-out-forcefully-against-sopa-after-reddit-pumps-up-opposing-candidate.shtml This is kind of interesting. You may recall that, last month, when Reddit was casting about for a pro-SOPA candidate to oppose (along with an opponent they could back), for a little while they picked Rep. Paul Ryan. The Reddit community was actually looking for a politician who had supported both the NDAA and SOPA, and originally chose Ryan. This actually turned out to be a mistake, because Ryan did not support SOPA and his campaign quickly pushed out a statement to that effect. However, some of the wheels were already in motion, and Ryan's main opponent for his seat, Rob Zerban, quickly embraced Reddit, and was able to raise $15,000 in just 48 hours for his anti-SOPA position. And while some had used this story to mock the potentially over-zealous crowd at Reddit... it looks like it did have an impact. Going further than his original statement, saying that Rep. Ryan was not a SOPA supporter, Ryan has now come out strongly against SOPA: "The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House." .... So, it looks like even if they got it wrong initially, the whole effort did certainly (1) make SOPA into a campaign issue for Ryan and (2) lead him to come out with a clear statement against the bill. And, yet, Lamar Smith still thinks there's no real opposition. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 18:17:21 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 19:17:21 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Finally! Geeks testify to Congress on SOPA Message-ID: <40B2861A-A91E-4041-A6F8-69BE5726350C@infowarrior.org> Issa Announces Oversight Hearing on DNS & Search Engine Blocking http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1553&Itemid=29 WASHINGTON, DC ? House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) today announced that the Full Committee will hold a hearing on January 18 to examine the potential impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on American cyber-security, jobs and the Internet community. In light of policy proposals affecting the way taxpayers access the Internet, the hearing will also explore federal government strategies to protect American intellectual property without adversely affecting economic growth. The Committee will hear testimony from top cyber-security experts and technology job creators. "An open Internet is crucial to American job creation, government operations, and the daily routines of Americans from all walks of life," said Issa. "The public deserves a full discussion about the consequences of changing the way Americans access information and communicate on the Internet today." Witnesses Mr. Stewart Baker: Partner, Steptoe & Johnson LLP Mr. Brad Burnham: Partner, Union Square Ventures Mr. Daniel Kaminsky: Security Researcher and Fortune 500 Advisor Mr. Michael Macleod-Ball: Chief of Staff/First Amendment Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union Mr. Lanham Napier: Chief Executive Officer, Rackspace Hosting Dr. Leonard Napolitano: Director, Center for Computer Sciences & Information Technology Sandia National Laboratories Mr. Alexis Ohanian: Co-Founder, Reddit.com, and Web Entrepreneur As the January 18th hearing approaches, more information will be made available at http://oversight.house.gov. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 19:10:09 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 20:10:09 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Co-chair of Cngress Cybersecurity Caucus against SOPA now Message-ID: <1A55A4B3-1DC0-4CF2-B58B-1FE9FEF398EE@infowarrior.org> Langevin opposes SOPA; ?incompatible? with cybersecurity January 9th, 2012 at 1:17 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes As predicted here on Nesi?s Notes, Congressman Jim Langevin has come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act. ?While I strongly support protecting our intellectual property, SOPA?s methods are incompatible with efforts to maintain the security and openness of the internet,? he said in a statement. Langevin is the first of Rhode Island?s four members of Congress to take a position on the legislation, as far as I know. More on Politico Morning Tech. http://blogs.wpri.com/2012/01/09/langevin-opposes-sopa-incompatible-with-cybersecurity/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 9 21:27:37 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 22:27:37 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Happy Birthday to Zero Hedge Message-ID: <1EC8FCBF-5BF3-4117-8FA4-914CAEB1C63B@infowarrior.org> Three Years Of Zero Hedge Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/09/2012 21:26 -0500 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/three-years-zero-hedge Today is the three year anniversary of Zero Hedge. Starting with humble beginnings and even humbler aspirations, and proceeding through over half a billion page views filled with breaking news, analyses, cynical ruminations, snarky sarcasm, grotesque hyperbole (two words best used to explain our current socio-economic catastrophe), and broadly - entertainment - this website has been lucky enough to grow into the world biggest fully independent financial blog (whatever that means), garnering between 1 and 2 million page views daily (usually VIX-dependent), and serving around 4 million unique readers per month from all around the world. While we enjoy cutting through the endless media bullshit and propaganda, exposing stupidity, learning from our mistakes, often with a much-needed dose of self-preserving humor that is so critical in this day and age, and hoping to satisfy a persistently unmet niche in the media space, the truth is that no matter the content, the site would not have succeeded or achieved anything without you, our reader. And while most come here to quietly read, learn, snicker, or just to pass the time between trade confirms and fake European bailout headlines, others prefer to engage in direct commentary, often times boisterous, frequently venting, and always uncensored and uncut. Because more than anything, this is a place for anyone and everyone who has an open mind, and more importantly, a sense of humor. It is to you, our readers, that we owe our sincerest gratitude for providing not only one of the most educated and intelligent, not to mention outspoken, readership bases one could hope for, but for constantly engaging us, and helping us grow and develop in ways we had never thought possible. It is this what "social media" is all about. As for everything else, it will happen... in due course. The transition from point A to point B will not be fast and it will not be easy, but it will take place. Because systems out of equilibrium always revert in due course. And we expect to be there covering, analyzing, and certainly mocking it, every step of the way. Yours Sincerely, the ZH crew --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 10 07:13:26 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:13:26 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Homeland Security monitors journalists Message-ID: <80E2B175-C676-46E8-86C7-8A43D3B8BC6F@infowarrior.org> (Admittedly the title/tone of the article is a bit misleading -- journalists do fall under the broad auspices of what DHS is trying to do here in the name of protecting the motherland. -- rick) Homeland Security monitors journalists Published: 07 January, 2012, 01:56 http://rt.com/usa/news/homeland-security-journalists-monitoring-321/ Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what. Under the National Operations Center (NOC)?s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms. Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use ?traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.? According to the Department of Homeland Security?s own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect ?that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.? Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC?s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency. Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and ?persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest,? which to itself opens up the possibilities even wider. The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn?t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses. The development out of the DHS comes at the same time that U.S. District Judge Liam O?Grady denied pleas from supporters of WikiLeaks who had tried to prevent account information pertaining to their Twitter accounts from being provided to federal prosecutors. Jacob Applebaum and others advocates of Julian Assange?s whistleblower site were fighting to keep the government from subpoenaing information on their personal accounts that were collected from Twitter. Last month the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk Massachusetts District Attorney subpoenaed Twitter over details pertaining to recent tweets involving the Occupy Boston protests. The website Fast Company reports that the intel collected by the Department of Homeland Security under the NOC Monitoring Initiative has been happening since as early as 2010 and the data is being shared with both private sector businesses and international third parties. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 10 07:22:40 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:22:40 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Eben Moglen: Social Networking "Creating Systems of Comprehensive Surveillance" Message-ID: <0B4EFE5F-AFA0-4BA1-BB31-0CD1DD6B5280@infowarrior.org> I've been saying this for years. -- rick, still preferring e-mail to 'social media' In Which Eben Moglen Like, Legit Yells at Me for Having Facebook http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/13/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 10 07:29:27 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:29:27 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Hacked memo leaked: Apple, Nokia, RIM supply backdoors for gov't intercept? Message-ID: <7659834A-1665-40A1-952B-F93068938AA8@infowarrior.org> January 8, 2012 - 1:20 P.M. Hacked memo leaked: Apple, Nokia, RIM supply backdoors for gov't intercept? http://blogs.computerworld.com/19531/hacked_memo_leaked_apple_nokia_rim_supply_backdoors_for_govt_intercept --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 10 14:14:57 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:14:57 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - NBC Universal's Own Preferred Researcher For 'Anti-Piracy' Stats Comes Out Against SOPA/PIPA Message-ID: <850D1317-2CEC-4910-99B9-585E6272AF16@infowarrior.org> NBC Universal's Own Preferred Researcher For 'Anti-Piracy' Stats Comes Out Against SOPA/PIPA from the well,-look-at-that dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120110/03502617362/nbc-universals-own-preferred-researcher-anti-piracy-stats-comes-out-against-sopapipa.shtml This is fascinating and unexpected. We've discussed the research firm Envisional a few times here at Techdirt. The company is NBC Universal's preferred research firm for coming up with stats that NBC Universal then uses to insist that it needs new laws like SOPA/PIPA. Some have certainly called into question Envisional's research as a paid vendor. However, a year ago, we noted that if you actually looked at the details of the research Envisional did for NBC Universal, it actually showed that piracy was Hollywood's own fault. NBC Universal and the MPAA twisted those results to say that piracy was a huge problem, but the data certainly suggested the real problem was Hollywood's failure to release what people wanted in formats that they wanted. Still, we never expected Envisional to come out and actually make that same point (even if that's what the data said). Yet, as this recent Ars Technica article notes, at CES, Envisional's "head of piracy intelligence," David Price, didn't mince words in saying that infringement was, in fact, Hollywood's own fault for not offering products in the way customers wanted and that SOPA/PIPA were the wrong approach to fixing its business model problems: "The content owners are really fighting the tide of the Internet," Price said. "They're trying to fight the flow of the Internet which is all about making content as widely available as possible, as easily as possible, as quickly as possible. They're trying to hold back the 1.4 billon users of the Internet from doing what the Internet wants them to do." In discussing SOPA/PIPA: Price does not like the way the bills are drafted, potentially causing major technical and free speech issues. "When I talk to content owners I try to tell them this is not the way to go," he remarked. "You don't want to hurt people. You want to try and go with a compete approach, put the content out there and hope people will come to you." Again, none of this is surprising. We've been saying the same thing for ages -- and we get dismissed as "piracy apologists." Yet this is the research firm that NBC Universal has relied on and regularly quotes in making its arguments about just how "big" a problem infringement is. That says something. And that something is that NBC Universal (yet again) is unwilling to face reality. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 10 20:52:36 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:52:36 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Reddit will go dark on January 18 in protest of SOPA and PIPA Message-ID: <6DD172C6-3AFE-4A1E-BFEC-64F963B1008B@infowarrior.org> Tuesday, January 10, 2012 Stopped they must be; on this all depends. http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/stopped-they-must-be-on-this-all.html The freedom, innovation, and economic opportunity that the Internet enables is in jeopardy. Congress is considering legislation that will dramatically change your Internet experience and put an end to reddit and many other sites you use everyday. Internet experts, organizations, companies, entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists, and individuals have repeatedly expressed how dangerous this bill is. If we do nothing, Congress will likely pass the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) or the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House), and then the President will probably sign it into law. There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet, and a few months ago many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there?s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation. We?ve seen some amazing activism organized by redditors at /r/sopa and across the reddit community at large. You have made a difference in this fight; and as we near the next stage, and after much thought, talking with experts, and hearing the overwhelming voices from the reddit community, we have decided that we will be blacking out reddit on January 18th from 8am?8pm EST (1300?0100 UTC). Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis ?kn0thing? Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meetups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics. We?re as addicted to reddit as the rest of you. Many of you stand with us against PIPA/SOPA, but we know support for a blackout isn?t unanimous. We're not taking this action lightly. We wouldn?t do this if we didn?t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community. As we have seen yet again in the fight against PIPA/SOPA, the best ideas come from our community. We all have just over a week to figure out exactly what to do with our extra cycles on January 18th. Please join us in the discussion in the comments here and in /r/SOPA. ? the reddit team --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 11 15:21:58 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:21:58 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Recursive SOPA Immunity Message-ID: If SOPA's Main Target Is The Pirate Bay, It's Worth Pointing Out That ThePirateBay.org Is Immune From SOPA from the just-saying... dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120109/04205617341/if-sopas-main-target-is-pirate-bay-its-worth-pointing-out-that-thepiratebayorg-is-immune-sopa.shtml In looking over Eric Goldman's excellent "linkwrap" of a bunch of recent SOPA/PIPA stories, it pointed me to a News.com article from last month, about how SOPA was really about going after one single site: The Pirate Bay. I've actually heard this repeatedly -- and from folks heavily involved with the bill itself. The whole point of the bill is to try to take down The Pirate Bay. Now, we can argue back and forth about how pointless that is... but there's something else that seems important: As written, nothing in SOPA can touch ThePirateBay's main website, ThePirateBay.org That's because the current version of the bill excludes any .com or .org. from being a target (though, they can be required to take action against other sites). This has caused some confusion, mainly because of the changes between the original version of SOPA and the "manager's amendment," which is the current version of the bill. The manager's amendment makes you jump through some hoops to understand this, but the key point is that a "U.S.-directed site" is defined to be a "foreign internet site" in the bill (in the original SOPA, a U.S.-directed site could be any site). Then, a foreign domain name is listed as not a "domestic domain" (keep hopping!), which itself is defined as "a domain name that is registered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain name registry or other domain name registration authority that is located within a judicial district of the United States." This means that all .com or .org domains air domestic, since they're assigned by a registry that is located within the US (for those confused, a domain registry is a company like VeriSign that runs the master database of all domains under a single top level domain). The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically). That means that thepiratebay.org -- the main website for The Pirate Bay... is actually immune from the two key parts of SOPA (sections 102 and 103, since both clearly state that they only cover "U.S.-directed sites"). So, based on the law as written... The Pirate Bay is immune from SOPA (though, potentially not from ICE just seizing the domain). It's worth noting the same is true of both RapidShare and Megaupload -- two other sites frequently cited by the MPAA and the US Chamber of Commerce as the types of awful, evil sites that these bills are targeted to take down. In fact, remember that "53 billion visits to rogue websites" claim that the US Chamber of Commerce loves to repeat? Nearly half of that is from RapidShare and Megavideo/Megaupload. And yet, those sites are clearly excluded from SOPA based on the definitions. So why would they still be trotting them out as examples? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 11 15:23:30 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:23:30 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - As SOPA/PIPA Becomes Toxic, Frantic Congress Test Runs Dropping DNS Blocking Provisions Message-ID: <16B319F4-AB8D-499F-8783-7DB9D0254CCB@infowarrior.org> As SOPA/PIPA Becomes Toxic, Frantic Congress Test Runs Dropping DNS Blocking Provisions from the scurry-scurry dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120111/09293817377/as-sopapipa-becomes-toxic-frantic-congress-test-runs-dropping-dns-blocking-provisions.shtml Well, well, well. It looks like some in DC are starting to get the message that there is real concern with SOPA/PIPA. The latest is that the fact that SOPA/PIPA support is becoming "toxic" is starting to make the press. In response to that, plus significant pressure from those within the government who are concerned about online security issues... the folks behind both SOPA/PIPA are doing some trial running of finding out how people would respond if they just completely dropped the DNS/site blocking aspects from the two bills. The goal is to get the tech industry to "stop opposing" the bills (if not actually support them). Clearly, the opposition is having a pretty big impact, and we're hearing that some of the "pressure" to "fix" these bills is coming from pretty high places. Separately, even with the House Oversight Committee hearings scheduled for next Wednesday, it sounds like Lamar Smith has decided he wants to restart the SOPA markup on the same day (perhaps with a new version of SOPA... sans DNS/site blocking). Of course, while taking out DNS blocking fixes one problem with these bills, it still leaves in place a ton of other problems. Of course, supporters of the bill will falsely claim that taking out DNS/site blocking "fixes all the complaints!" That ignores that this is exactly what they said about the last "manager's amendment" version as well. They figure if they just keep claiming that they responded to all the complaints, maybe people will believe them. But that's ridiculous. The bills still have the super broad immunity provisions that will encourage all sorts of content/site takedowns to avoid liability. On top of that, many of the definitions in both bills remain ridiculously vague and would likely lead to overblocking in other ways -- that is, things like "information location tools" having to block links to sites deemed rogue under the legislation would remain. Also, the anti-circumvention measures remain in the bill (and are not limited to just foreign sites), which is going to continue to create a huge headache for the State Department, which is funding the creation of many such circumvention tools for foreign regimes... even though offering them in the US would be a violation under the bill! On top of that, both bills still include the private right to action, which will lead to numerous unnecessary lawsuits. The takeaway here: the growing momentum against these bills is having a big, big impact in DC, and it's forced the bills' main backers to go back to the well to see if they can find at least something to compromise on. Taking out the DNS stuff will piss off Hollywood... no doubt, but it hardly solves many of the bigger problems in the bill. Don't be fooled. No one's fixing the bill (hell, it's not clear there's anything that will fix this bill, because no one's shown why this particular bill is needed!). They're simply taking out one provision that is especially bad... while leaving in a ton of other stuff. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 11 22:12:40 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:12:40 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Sad Death Of The Knob, Switch And Button Message-ID: <842F3951-7222-419C-8A76-A484FAB6209A@infowarrior.org> http://digg.com/newsbar/Technology/the_sad_death_of_the_knob_switch_and_button detroit auto show By Jason Torchinsky Jan 11, 2012 12:00 PM The Sad Death Of The Knob, Switch And Button I want to start by coming out and saying I'm not one of those car luddites who think everything should hover in some magical past; while I'm very fond of old-school cars, there's an amazing amount of amazing new tech in cars, and LCD dashboards in so many new cars here at the Detroit Auto Show are a genuinely great advance. Except for one big issue: Knobs, switches and buttons? They're now officially doomed. Knobs are still around, albeit in reduced numbers, but it's very clear they're considered vestigial holdouts and it's just a matter of time before they're done away with completely. Looking at forward-thinking cars like the Tesla Model S demonstrates this, as its dash is basically just two big iPads, one in landscape orientation and the other in portrait. A booth from Denso, a major supplier of auto parts and electronics, shows a prototype cockpit of the future ? and it's all touch screens. Touch screens are great on our phones and tablets; so why wouldn't they be great in a car, right? The problem has to do more with the "screen" part than the "touch" part, though both are factors. On your phone, you're looking at the screen, interacting with it very directly; the visual feedback is essential for operating the interface. When you're driving, ideally you're looking mostly out of the big window in front of you, and you operate most of the ancillary controls with no more than a quick glance. Touch screens don't work like that; little buttons on smooth glass surfaces have to be targeted with a pair of eyes. All you need to do to prove the point is to look up. Have you ever peeked in the cockpit of an airplane and seen the levers in between the seats? Those levers have funny-shaped knobs: Spool-shaped, crown-shaped, star-shaped ? it's the marshmallows from a Lucky Charms box. There is, of course, a great reason why they're like that: so pilots can know what lever is what just by touch. That's exactly what is being given up when controls move to the touch screen. Tactile feedback and the ability to feel what a control is has long been part of driving. Traditionally, we can feel and know what's a radio knob, what a climate control lever feels like, how the notches feel as we move them from one setting to another, and it's worked great. Even without any interior lights or dash lights I bet most of us could find and use the essential controls on our cars. Touch screens are awesome for many, many things. They look great, they can show an incredible amount of information, but they should never be the only components on a dash. Oh, but that's not the only problem. Some cars, like the Chevy Volt, the Cadillac ATS and everything from Lincoln are replacing standard buttons with sleek capacitive touch plates with big clusters of identically-shaped buttons. Capacitive technology refers to using electrodes to sense the conductive properties of objects, such as a finger. So, basically, rather than physically depressing a button you've fumbled for while your eyes remained on the road, you'll turn on and off four different things before finally looking down to find what function you want to change. Then you crash and die. So those suck in about the same way touch screens do, and they look like they came off a VCR. So knock that off, too. Automakers, I'm pleading with you, spare the life of just a few knobs, just some essential ones, even if they have redundant touch-screen controls. Leave me some knobs in the cars of the future. Nice, chunky, clicky knobs, and maybe a lever, switch and button or two. I'll even let you make them look cool and LED-lit or whatever you want. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 06:51:55 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:51:55 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - response: Stratfor relaunches site; CEO accuses attackers of censorship Message-ID: Some comments in response to the following article, posted to ISN this morning: Stratfor relaunches site; CEO accuses attackers of censorship http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223370/Stratfor_relaunches_site_CEO_accuses_attackers_of_censorship : "We are now in a world in which anonymous judges, jurors and executioners can : silence whom they want," Friedman said in the video. "This is a new censorship that : doesn't come openly from governments but from people hiding behind masks." Zut alors! Friedman's description of things could be applied to the Internet community's views on how SOPA or PIPA were drafted and how the blacklist provisions contained therein would, if enacted, create the very world Friedman writes of -- " a world in which anonymous judges, jurors and executioners can silence whom they want" The only difference is that with SOPA/PIPA, instead of hiding behind symbolic masks, those inflicting this damage upon various Internet entities are hiding behind well-heeled lobbyists funded by the Hollywood cartels....so I guess that's okay, because they're the "good guys", right? Talking like that, I wonder if Friedman's purposely baiting the attackers (Anonymous or whomever) to come at them again for one reason or other. I could almost hear the late gravelly-throated Don LaFontaine reading that line to me in a Stratfor preview video of their new research product on evil cyber haxors: "in a wooooorld in which.....only one man......one firm.....has the insights and analytical capability to help protect you from them." : He criticized the hackers for taking advantage of the Internet's anonymity to attack : companies and lamented the lack of accountability on the Net. "The attempt to silence us : has failed," a defiant Friedman said. "Our website is back, our email is working [and] we : are restoring our archives," he said. "We will continue to publish our analysis." Again, he's rather blatantly sticking this finger into the hornet's nest. For what reason, besides reactionary ego or a lack of forethought? As such, it will not surprise me to hear that Stratfor gets popped again at some point. I have nothing to do with Anonymous, and I'm neither condemning nor condoning the incident, but if he's smart, Friedman really should not taunt Happy Fun Ball. -- rick --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 06:54:05 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:54:05 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - If NYC is going to be a real innovation hub, we can't have our own senators supporting SOPA/PIPA Message-ID: If NYC is going to be a real innovation hub, we can't have our own senators supporting SOPA/PIPA Monday, January 9, 2012 at 08:11AM by Charlie O'Donnell http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2012/1/9/if-nyc-is-going-to-be-a-real-innovation-hub-we-cant-have-our.html? I haven?t spent much time talking about SOPA and PIPA, the two twin bills trying to make their way through Congress right now. When I saw folks like Fred Wilson, who has a much bigger reach than I do, and all the major internet companies lining up against it, it?s easy to think, ?Well, what more can I do to add to the volume? they?ve got it covered.? That was until I found out that New York?s own senators, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, appear to support these bills. Let?s take a step back from a moment. I understand why policymakers would think these bills are a good idea. It?s basically all in the marketing. ?Stopping Piracy? and ?Protecting IP? sound like good ideas in theory. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of destroying the conditions around which internet innovation has thrived. Since the DMCA, we?ve basically operated in an environment of ?ask forgiveness rather than permission? when it comes to copyright and IP online. I could make a video recreationally, include a digital copy of a song, and it was up to the rights holder to decide whether or not they wanted me to take it down. That allowed me the freedom to create and innovate, and to show the rights holder how cool it could be for me to use their stuff. Many rightsholders asked for their stuff to be taken down, as was their right, but many were fine with it. That?s the way it should be, because if you had to wait for many of the big media companies to innovate with their content, we?d still be in the media dark ages (in many ways, we still are). Now, there are bills on the table that would basically allow the government to shut down my website?my entire website?for putting up content that someone else has the rights to. It?s the equivalent of trying to perform delicate brain surgery with a meat cleaver?they?re trying to eliminate bad behavior by breaking the whole internet ecosystem. And let?s be clear about what this is about?it?s protectionism. Big media companies don?t want innovation. They don?t like the idea that they can?t charge us $16 for a CD with only one or two good songs anymore. That was a good business. They don?t like that people are unplugging their cable and just using Netflix and Hulu instead. The reason why people are turning to technology isn?t because they like to steal content. It?s because they pay $120 a month for cable and they really only watch two shows and some sports. Big media has been abusing consumers for years and they want to continue doing that over the medium of the internet?but they?re losing ground. Technology and the internet is inherently pro-consumer, because it empowers us and gives us more choices. iTunes, Spotify, Kindle, and Netflix have proven that if you give us better choices and more convenience, we?re more than happy to pay for media content. This is what movie studios and the rest of the SOPA supporters need to do. Instead, they?re kicking up a notch the kind of mentality that the record industry had when it was suing its own customers instead of coming up with innovative new business models. Back to Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. Senator Schumer spoke at Internet Week in 2011. It?s been a pretty popular move for New York area politicians to jump on the bandwagon of the emergence of New York tech growth?a phenomenon they largely had nothing to do with?and say they?re supportive of the community. He told an audience of technologists and entrepreneurs: ?What we need to do is figure out the right ways to nurture you, to encourage more people like to you come here, and to support you and those that join you, so that the businesses represented here today can thrive and grow." Well, Senator, a group of 83 prominent internet investors and engineers wrote an anti-SOPA letter to youand the rest of Congress in December. These were people like Vint Cerf, the guy who designed the way the internet works. The people you say you want to nurture are against this bill. Yet, you?re siding with big, protectionist media companies. It?s an embarrassment, frankly, to our tech community. If you support this bill, you are not supportive of us. All of our local politicians?our Senators, Mayor Bloomberg (his company, Bloomberg LP, is against it, but haven?t heard where he stands personally), and other policymakers need to be fighting this. Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand need to switch their positions immediately on these bills, which should really aptly be named the ?Stop Innovation on the Internet? bill. If NYC is going to fulfill its potential as an innovation hub, we can't have our senators supporting SOPA. They?re on the wrong side of history here, and they don?t understand enough about the internet and how it came to be to see why. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 07:04:10 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:04:10 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Secret Twitter subpoena not so secret anymore Message-ID: <801A4995-7EB7-473D-98F3-0913D863DC43@infowarrior.org> Secret subpoena aimed at Twitter user not so secret anymore by Josh Lowensohn December 29, 2011 10:10 AM PST http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57349732-83/secret-subpoena-aimed-at-twitter-user-not-so-secret-anymore/ Massachusetts authorities apparently thought that asking nicely would suffice to keep secret their subpoena for information on a Twitter user involved with Occupy Wall Street. They thought wrong. So when the Suffolk County District Attorney's office sent its request to Twitter, its subpoena ended up in the inbox of the DA's target, following a decision by Twitter to share it as part of its privacy policy. The user in question goes by the handle @p0isAn0N, who last week posted the document in full on Scribd. Dated December 14, the subpoena requests IP address information about the accounts of @p0isAn0N, @OccupyBoston, as well as "Guido Fawkes" and two Twitter hashtags: #BostonPD and #d0xcak3. At the bottom of the document, a Suffolk county assistant district attorney asked Twitter not to share the request with any of its users, since such an action could "impede the ongoing criminal investigation." Twitter has since said it did not follow that request due to its privacy policy. "We can't comment on any specific order or request," Twitter spokesperson Matt Graves told ReadWriteWeb in a statement about the matter. "However, to help users protect their rights, it is our policy to notify our users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so." In a statement issued alongside the posting of the subpoena, @p0isAn0N wrote: "subpoenas will not shake me. So do whatever you think you can to try and stop Anonymous, but you will learn fast. One of us is not nearly as harsh as all of us. You cannot arrest an idea. You cannot subpoena a hashtag." It remains unclear whether Twitter provided the Suffolk D.A.'s office with the IP addresses from the accounts. The company, however, has done that in the past, such as last month when it complied with a grand jury probe by the Department of Justice seeking information about account owners allegedly tied to the creation and distribution of documents shared on Wikileaks. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 07:25:16 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:25:16 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DHS to attend online dating conference in Miami Beach Message-ID: <9F4FE64A-B9BD-4D22-8731-FB17E05E7927@infowarrior.org> DHS to attend online dating conference in Miami Beach Wed, 2012-01-11 09:51 AM By: Mark Rockwell http://www.gsnmagazine.com/node/25415?c=cyber_security The Department of Homeland Security is set to participate in a discussion panel at an online dating industry conference in Miami in the coming days. Tom Millar, chief of communications for the Department of Homeland Security?s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is slated to discuss deceptive dating tactics in a January 24 panel at the iDate SuperConference event, said a statement from Ticondergoa Ventures, Inc., the sponsor of the conference. The event takes place on January 23-30, 2012 in Miami Beach. Millar?s session is designed, said Ticonderoga Ventures, to help dating operators prevent fraud within their respective sites. The appearance isn?t as unusual as it may seem. DHS and the CERT have been aggressively promoting online safety and security in the last few months through the agency?s ?Stop. Think. Connect? campaign. On Jan. 10, DHS? Web blog posted a series of tips on how the public and DHS employees can remain secure online. According to Ticonderoga, Millar?s Miami appearance is part of DHS outreach program called ?Cyber Week? in the city. Online dating service providers will get their money?s worth from Millar on Cyber security. He joined US-CERT in 2007 and helped develop the organization?s response to the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Estonia in 2007, the outbreak of the Conficker worm and the DDoS attacks on major US government and commercial websites in 2009. He is currently US-CERT?s chief of communications. The Department of Homeland Security is in the Miami area from January 23-26, 2012 for the ?Stop.Think.Connect.? campaign?s Miami Cyber Week Outreach Program, said Ticonderoga. Cyber Week will directly engage the greater Miami community in promoting awareness and dialogue about the dangers Americans face online, it said. Cyber Week is part of the larger DHS cyber mission to arm citizens with the resources and tools needed to protect themselves, their families, their communities, and the nation against growing cyber threats, it said. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 07:42:46 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:42:46 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?utf-8?q?George_Lucas_says_Hollywood_won=27t_sup?= =?utf-8?q?port_black_films=E2=80=8E?= Message-ID: The interesting thing is Hollywood's uninspiring response about "we don't know how to market a movie like this" as opposed to a more enterprising "let's see how we can market it." But then again, that's exactly the argument they made for not embracing the Internet. Hollywood couldn't innovate its way out of a paper bag, and has no desire to expend energy on new ideas or processes. -- rick 12 January 2012 Last updated at 06:06 ET George Lucas says Hollywood won't support black films? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16525977 Director George Lucas says it took 20 years to get his latest film made, "because it's an all-black movie". Speaking on The Daily Show, Lucas said he had to self-fund Red Tails, the true story of a group of African-American pilots who fought in World War II. He claimed major film studios would not back the movie because "there's no major white roles in it at all". "I showed it to all of them and they said, 'No. We don't know how to market a movie like this,'" he said. "They don't believe there's any foreign market for it, and that's 60% of their profit," he added. Lucas co-wrote and produced Red Tails, which which was directed by Anthony Hemingway. It features several well-known names - including Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr, Terence Howard and R&B star Ne-Yo - and shows how the pilots were segregated and kept on the ground for most of the war, until they were called up to fight for their country. The real-life airmen featured in the drama were given a Congressional Gold Medal by then-President George Bush in 2007. 'Invisible' audience Lucas put $58 million (37.8 million) of his own money into the movie. It will be released by his company Lucasfilm, and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. He is putting a further $35 million (?22.8 million) towards the distribution costs, said trade paper The Hollywood Reporter. "It's a reasonably expensive movie," Lucas told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. "Normally black movies, say Tyler Perry movies or something, they're very low budget. "Even then, the [Hollywood studios] won't really release his movies, it goes to one of the lower, not major distributors. "This [film] costs more than what those movies make," Lucas added. Director and actor Perry, whose movies include Why Did I Get Married and the Madea series, is one of the most profitable film-makers in the US. However, he retains the rights to all his work - which plays almost exclusively to black audiences - and has previously stated that his fans are "invisible" to the Hollywood mainstream. Lucas's comments echo those of Spike Lee, who criticised the lack of black faces in Hollywood war movies in 2008. Speaking about Clint Eastwood's movies Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, Lee said: "He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films". "I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know." Lucas insisted that Red Tails was nothing like those films - or 1989 war film Glory which, although it starred Denzel Washington, featured "a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fire". If his film does well at the box office, Lucas said he had a prequel and sequel planned. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 08:03:58 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:03:58 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - RFI: Sony BluRay issue Message-ID: I have a Sony BDV-E780W home theater system (connected to a Tivo and by HDMI to a Sony Bravia TV) that for some reason no longer remembers the last audio input setting used. Meaning, each time I turn on the TV via the Tivo remote (as I have done for the past 7 months since owning the unit) I now also have to grab the BluRay's remote and manually select the proper audio input function....until recently, when I turned the TV on, everything "worked" and the TV's sound was routed to the external (blu-ray) system speakers automatically. I tried Sony's support last night and it didn't help. Any ideas? TIA. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 14:17:52 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:17:52 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Insane Entitlement: EMI Sues Irish Gov't For Not Passing SOPA-Like Censorship Law Message-ID: Insane Entitlement: EMI Sues Irish Gov't For Not Passing SOPA-Like Censorship Law from the wowzers dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120112/09203917388/insane-entitlement-emi-sues-irish-govt-not-passing-sopa-like-censorship-law.shtml The sense of entitlement exhibited by the legacy players in the entertainment industry is now reaching positively insane levels -- highlighted by the news that major record label EMI (in the process of being acquired by Universal Music to make it the largest record label by far) is suing the Irish government because it feels the Irish government is taking too long to pass a SOPA-like law that would require ISPs to censor the internet and block access to sites it doesn't like. I'm not kidding. Apparently, because the legislative process is too slow, it feels the need to sue. In another article on the lawsuit, EMI Ireland's CEO complains that the length of time it's taking the government to craft such a censorship bill is "leading me to believe it?s unlikely to satisfy the music industry?s requirement for injunctive relief." Think about that for a second. The major record labels have such an insane sense of entitlement, they think that any bill they declare that they "require" must become law, or they can sue the government. More specifically, EMI is effectively confessing here that it's upset that the government isn't sharing the bill ahead of time with EMI or others in the industry. Again, the massive sense of entitlement of these guys is such that they expect that they get to write the laws, and when they're left out of the process, they get to sue over it. And yet, on every one of these laws, the people actually impacted by them -- the public -- get no real say or can't see them. Remember ACTA? The public was left totally in the dark, while RIAA/MPAA officials and others had pretty detailed access and the ability to help craft the bills. And yet, when EMI doesn't get to see a draft of a bill, and it makes them think that it won't go the way they want, they sue? Damn. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 14:19:36 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:19:36 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Congressman who wrote SOPA is a copyright violator Message-ID: <902CC460-45A5-44B0-9BC4-B4B12AF7338A@infowarrior.org> http://www.vice.com/read/lamar-smith-sopa-copyright-whoops US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here). I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and on the level. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to). So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site. < -- > "I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com." < -- > http://www.vice.com/read/lamar-smith-sopa-copyright-whoops --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 14:31:20 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:31:20 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?If_SOPA_passes=2C_we=92re_as_muc?= =?windows-1252?q?h_to_blame_as_Congress_and_Hollywood?= Message-ID: <69F11C94-37C2-4B62-98AD-F2D8BE23220A@infowarrior.org> If SOPA passes, we?re as much to blame as Congress and Hollywood January 12, 2012 | Rocky Agrawal http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/12/silicon-valley-shares-blame-for-sopa/ There?s been a lot of huffing and puffing in the tech community over the past few months about SOPA, the proposed legislation that many believe would cripple the Internet and thwart innovation. People have started online petitions, written countless blog posts, started boycotts against companies that support SOPA and campaigns to change Twitter avatars. (Check out the rest of VentureBeat?s SOPA coverage here.) Mike_FTW made this great observation: ?If SOPA passes after we all added those ribbons to our avatars it certainly won?t be our fault.? I changed my own avatar, but almost in an ironic way. I know full well that nearly everyone who follows me already agrees with me. Blogging amongst ourselves won?t change things. We need to do a much better job of educating Congress, the media and the people. Part of the problem is that Silicon Valley has a belief in meritocracy. We believe that if we are right, we will win. It?s a nice thought, but that?s not how Washington works. A common refrain in Silicon Valley is that Congress should be smart enough to know how the Internet works. It may sound reasonable, but it isn?t. There are 535 people in Congress who are responsible for passing laws that relate to the environment, pharmaceuticals, transportation, infrastructure, foreign policy, social services ? every topic under the sun. Although it?s a top-of-mind issue for us, neither California Senator Dianne Feinstein nor Senator Barbara Boxer list PIPA (the Senate equivalent of SOPA) on their top issues pages. It?s unreasonable to expect that members of Congress, many of whom are career politicians, study our business. Some make gut reactions in the name of privacy or fear of ?hacking.? A recent example is Senator Chuck Schumer of New York?s involvement in the cancellation of a mall operator?s plan to track users anonymously based on cell phones. The mall would have used the equivalent of a cookie to track shoppers as they went from store to store. In a letter to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar, Schumer urged the company to obtain the explicit consent of shoppers through an opt-in policy. He also called on Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz to examine how this new technology fits in with existing consumer privacy regulations. If you extrapolate Schumer?s position to the online world, cookies would be banned (or required to be opt-in). That would have a serious negative effect on online advertising and commerce. Schumer is in favor of PIPA. In an accident of geography, technology has to fight for advocacy in Congress with Hollywood because both are represented by senators from California. If you look at campaign contributions alone, Hollywood does a much better job at reaching out to Senators Feinstein and Boxer than the Internet industry does. According to OpenSecrets.org, Feinstein has received $168,000 from the TV/movie/music industry vs. $86,465 from the Internet industry in the 2012 campaign cycle. Boxer has received $898,568 from Hollywood vs. $431,489 from the Internet industry. Both of California?s senators are listed as co-sponsors of PIPA. When I called Senator Boxer?s office, a staffer took several minutes to look up her position on PIPA and then gave me the wrong answer. Clearly, not enough people have expressed their opinion if our senator?s Oakland office doesn?t know this answer immediately. The cynical thing to do is assume that members of Congress are acting purely in their own financial interests. That may be true for some, but just as many believe that they are doing the right thing. That?s because we suck at presenting our side. Getting the word out Educating the media is equally important. Although some have suggested that the corporate media (many of whom are owned by conglomerates that support SOPA, like TimeWarner and News Corp.) are deliberately avoiding coverage of SOPA out of corporate self interest, my view is that we just haven?t done a good enough job raising awareness. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley lost one of its best and smartest advocates in Washington when The Washington Post eliminated the technology columnist position held by Rob Pegoraro. In a move that still boggles my mind, the Post decided it needed more rewrites of tech blog stories and the latest iPhone rumors than substantive discussions of technology policy. (Disclosure: Rob is a friend.) Educating the media is an ongoing process. Much as Congress has a lot to worry about, so do many journalists. A mainstream journalist might be covering dozens of different topics. While many readers know my work from what I?ve written on VentureBeat and other technology blogs, I?ve also spent a substantial portion of the last year talking with other journalists about the economics of the deals space, mobile technologies and antitrust. We need to help journalists separate the real issues from the bogus privacy scares, like Google?s StreetView WiFi data collection. These are complex topics and we are the experts. We need to share that expertise, even if sometimes things seem really basic and obvious to us. (I once explained to a reporter for a major business publication who was doing a story about privatization of airports what a Jetway is.) Educating the public The Internet reaches hundreds of millions of people in the United States ? more than any single media outlet. But we?ve done a terrible job of using it to educate the public. SOPA is such a terrible piece of legislation that if the public knew its implications, it would never pass. Google and Facebook could stop SOPA in a matter of days if they used the power of their platforms. Think about how much buzz a Google doodle creates among ordinary people. We can use a similar tool to advocate against SOPA. Here?s one example of how: When you do a search on Google, you?d get only one result. Under that result would be a link that explains SOPA and provides contact information for your representatives in Congress. If you went to share a photo or a link on Facebook, you?d get a message that you can?t share the link. Again, there would be an explanation of SOPA. These campaigns could be frequency capped so that each user only experiences it once. This would be substantially more effective than relying on users to read op-eds or media coverage. This is essentially the same advice that VCs give to entrepreneurs: Instead of walking in with a pitch deck (a long story hypothesizing about the effect of SOPA), come in with a demo (a real-life illustration of what may happen if SOPA passes). Show, don?t tell. The campaigns could also be targeted. You would only see them if you live in a district or a state where your representatives support SOPA. This may sound extreme, but it?s not. Cable companies and TV networks do things like this during carriage disputes. Networks will run crawls across their programming with messages like ?Time Warner Cable is trying to take away your television. Call them and tell them you want to keep.? Cable operators will run ads saying things like ?Fox is trying to keep you from seeing the World Series.? As a product guy, I?m not a fan of breaking products and damaging the user experience. But something like this is better than the alternatives if SOPA passes. Individual action still matters Individual actions can still be meaningful, if you use the right channels. Online petitions and bulk email campaigns are pretty much noise because they?re too easy. (For a detailed look at this, see Dear Internet: It?s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works.) I still send out paper birthday cards; they often elicit a positive response because people recognize that it takes a lot more effort than the three seconds it takes to write on someone?s Facebook wall. The same is true with Congress. A phone call, written letter or a personal visit count disproportionately because they take more effort. While writing this piece, I called both of my senators and lodged my opposition to PIPA. If you?re a California resident, try calling Feinstein?s office at (415) 393-0707 and Boxer?s office at (510) 286-8537. If you?re not, find your own representatives online. Congress does listen when it knows what people want. It?s our job to tell them. More than just SOPA Our failure to advocate effectively for ourselves is about more than just SOPA. In intellectual property alone, consumers and the Internet industry have lost a lot of ground when it comes to issues like the first-sale doctrine, fair use and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. If it weren?t for the first-sale doctrine, Netflix wouldn?t have existed. Yet we?ve essentially given up first sale for digital media. If others view us as weak, they will keep pushing harder. Things that we think are obscene today will seem tame tomorrow. Although this has been framed as an us-against-them debate, it?s also important to recognize that Hollywood creates content that people value. And we create great technology that can help distribute that content to the right people more efficiently. It?s a relationship where both sides benefit. But we need to ensure that we?re on equal footing. Beyond Hollywood, there are more reasons to cozy up to Washington: patent reform, immigration, spectrum allocation and antitrust will become even more important to the future of Silicon Valley. Companies like Fitbit are facing the prospect of regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. As the reach of Silicon Valley expands into finance, medicine and other areas, we will face more entrenched players with strong lobbies. It?s tempting to say that ?Washington doesn?t get it? or ?the media don?t get it,? just like some say ?consumers don?t get it.? We need to educate Congress, the media and the public about our industry, not just when major legislation like SOPA is on the line, but year round. Ideally, we?d stop really bad legislation from getting to this point. We need to apply the same creativity that we use to create great consumer products to advocating for good technology policy. So far, we?ve been less creative than a Hollywood slasher film. Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 12 20:23:45 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:23:45 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Insight: SEC tightens leash on exchanges post "flash crash" Message-ID: Insight: SEC tightens leash on exchanges post "flash crash" By Jonathan Spicer, Herbert Lash and Sarah N. Lynch NEW YORK/WASHINGTON | Thu Jan 12, 2012 2:53pm EST http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/12/us-sec-exchanges-leash-idUSTRE80B1YA20120112 (Reuters) - The May 2010 "flash crash" was bad for almost everyone involved in the stock market, but for the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was a disaster. With $1 trillion in shareholder equity wiped out in a matter of minutes - however temporarily - alarmed investors demanded answers. Embarrassingly, the heads of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market got into a spat on television, blaming each other for the mess, and the SEC realized that it didn't have the information to explain what caused the scariest few minutes in recent Wall Street history. The regulators had to seek the data from the exchanges, delaying a much-anticipated report on the crash by nearly five months. The unwelcome lapse in oversight laid bare the SEC's limited ability to track the inner workings of the marketplace when it matters most. "The idea that the regulator of the largest capital markets in the world cannot easily reconstruct trading when there has been a problem, or when there is a suspicion of manipulation or misconduct, is not acceptable to me," said SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro in an interview. "We have to have this capacity." In response to the crash, Schapiro has ordered an SEC crackdown on the exchanges - the front-line for fighting structural flaws and abusive trading in equity markets - in order to oversee more actively a marketplace whose complexity masks serious risks for investors. The crackdown has come in the form of enforcement actions and gag orders against exchanges. Regulators are moving ahead with a plan to put together a record of all market activity to better oversee trading, a massive undertaking given the volume and rapid-fire pace. Some say the SEC is pushing hard for high-profile actions to burnish its image after the flash crash and its failure to spot Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. It all points to a bigger government role. Regulators are now seeking a better grasp of high-tech markets that were allowed to fragment and proliferate over the last decade in the name of competition and lower costs. The SEC's actions suggest, at a minimum, that regulators believe the exchanges have not always honored their commitment to maintain stable markets. Schapiro said the SEC's move to police the market more effectively was driven by the rise in computer-driven algorithmic trading as the dominant force in trading and the need to fully enlist the exchanges, which are self-regulatory organizations (SROs). "We need to have very careful, thorough and rigorous oversight of SROs if we are going to rely on them to do front-line surveillance," Schapiro told Reuters. Given the lack of resources at the SEC and the explosion in trading, the SROs need to be "truly vigilant," she said. The market absorbs hundreds of thousands of quotes every second in a frenzy that can befuddle investors and traders alike. While perhaps good for exchanges and high-frequency traders, the value of this explosive growth has been questioned. Shortly after the flash crash, regulators pushed NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX Group and other market operators to craft new trading rules to avoid future breakdowns. Reuters has learned the SEC took the unprecedented step of serving those exchanges with non-disclosure agreements, effectively muzzling them to prevent further public bickering and to get the fierce competitors to work together. The move puzzled some participants in those post-crash talks. Yet it heralded a new era in which the SEC is exerting its authority. In October, the regulator moved against exchange operator Direct Edge, sanctioning it for weak internal controls that led to millions of dollars in trading losses and a systems outage. Later that month, the SEC brought $1.2 million in fines against a dark pool called Pipeline and two of its executives for misleading investors on how it executed trades. Trading is anonymous in a dark pool - a platform that allows blocks of shares to be bought and sold without prices being revealed until after trades are completed. For details, see More cases involving stock exchanges are pending, according to a person familiar with the matter, suggesting the SEC's leash will grow tighter this year. "It's appropriate that the commission aggressively and robustly oversee the SROs," said SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar. For the most part, the exchanges have publicly backed the SEC's proposed structural changes. NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX, Direct Edge and BATS Global Markets, the top four U.S. exchange operators, declined to comment for this article. DEAL ME IN The exchanges of today are a far cry from their more utilitarian days. As publicly traded companies whose shareholders demand profits, they are viewed more skeptically by regulators. Schapiro oversees a marketplace with about 50 competing venues ranging from the Big Board to dark pools Liquidnet and Goldman Sachs Group Inc's Sigma X. Execution is mostly automated and blazing fast, making it hard to detect manipulation. The number of quotes that bombard the marketplace every second has spiked 125-fold in the past five years, according to the Financial Information Forum, a group of more than 75 firms that addresses industry-wide issues. When the flash crash occurred on May 6, 2010, it left the SEC shocked at how hard it was to understand what happened. To overcome this breach, the agency proposed building a "consolidated audit trail" that would, for the first time, track all orders, messages and trades in real time. There are questions over who will pay the SEC's estimated $4 billion price tag for the audit trail and whether to build it from scratch. Yet it is possible that an SEC-controlled system could sideline the exchanges from investigations into future malfunctions, and strip them of some oversight responsibility. "It is clear that they want to have a more active ability to manipulate the surveillance data for their own regulatory purposes," said Richard Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of brokerage watchdog Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), which is also an SRO. But Ketchum, formerly in charge of NYSE Regulation and a past president of the Nasdaq Stock Market, said the SEC wants to work within the established framework of the SROs. "There's nothing I've seen that suggests that the SEC wants to change or replace the role that Finra or the exchanges provide respective to monitoring the markets," he said. A consolidated audit trail would enhance regulators' ability to determine how an order or group of orders might disrupt the marketplace, and provide quicker answers to investors and regulators when the need arises. Schapiro said the audit trail was critical to the SEC's ability to oversee markets. Yet a comprehensive system could take years to set up given its complexity. "To provide the same access to information across the gamut of investment classes is daunting to almost insurmountable," said Joseph Cangemi, head of equity trading and sales at ConvergEx Group in New York, and a former chairman of the Security Traders Association. NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS The flash crash - when the Dow plunged 700 points in mere minutes before it sharply recouped most losses - shook the faith of Americans in one of the country's greatest institutions. A day later, senators Ted Kaufman and Mark Warner requested an amendment to the landmark Dodd-Frank act, which overhauled the way financial markets are governed. The senators wanted regulators to report to Congress on the need for an audit trail, order screening and the risks of high-frequency trading. One change they proposed - circuit breakers to halt volatile trading in stocks - was already at the top of the SEC's agenda. That discussion soon turned to a "limit up-limit down" plan to set ceilings and floors for movements of share prices, and the SEC then asked the exchanges to sign the non-disclosure agreements, sources said. People who knew of the agreements, and spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were intended to compel exchanges to leave their differences aside for the good of the public markets. Some said they were also meant to stop leaks to the media about the preliminary, and sometimes patchy, plans for new rules. The SEC "didn't want people taking shots at each other in the press," an official at one exchange said. "It's an odd way of doing things, but not a bad way of doing things." Addressing the televised discord between NYSE's Duncan Niederauer and Robert Greifeld of Nasdaq, Schapiro said differences between the exchanges were beside the point. "This is about confidence in the broader marketplace," Schapiro said, recalling what she later told both men. "We all have to be working on the same team and working in the interest of investors, not one competitive model over another." The circuit breakers were adopted in June 2010 and have since been expanded twice to cover more stocks. However, 20 months after the crash, limit up-limit down rules - which would slow but not stop trading - have yet to be adopted. The SEC in the fall completed exams of all U.S. equity and options markets, reviewing internal data on governance, operations, funding and risk management, Schapiro said. The pending matters with exchanges involve the SEC's enforcement division, a source familiar with the matter said. One SEC official added: "The markets have shown they can break down, badly." Given the number of detailed information requests, some industry officials say they expect the SEC to bring more cases on the heels of Direct Edge and Pipeline. The government regulator even publicly scolded Finra, where Schapiro was previously CEO, for allegedly doctoring documents that were to be examined by the SEC. This of course is not the first time the SEC's examiners and enforcement units have zeroed in on exchanges. But cases brought in 2006 and 2007 against the American Stock Exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the former head of the Boston Stock Exchange focused on failures to enforce rules or on deficiencies in surveillance. This time around, sources said, the SEC's focus has shifted to issues such as data feeds and whether certain market players may get an information advantage, as well as adequate investments by exchanges into technology and infrastructure. For some in the market, the SEC's actions are a relief. "Virtually every SRO has had some form of a lashing from the SEC," said Christopher Nagy, managing director of order strategy at TD Ameritrade Holding Corp, the largest U.S. online brokerage. "I think it's fantastic, long overdue." (Reporting By Jonathan Spicer, Herbert Lash and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Andrew Hay) --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 13 11:19:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:19:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Draft cyber bill gives DHS controversial authorities Message-ID: Draft cyber bill gives DHS controversial authorities Friday - 1/13/2012, 6:54am ET Jason Miller http://www.federalnewsradio.com/473/2704928/Draft-cyber-bill-gives- The draft version of the comprehensive cybersecurity bill could give the Homeland Security Department the ability to take "any lawful action" against contractors if their systems are under attack. Bob Dix, a former staff director for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and now vice president government affairs and critical infrastructure protection for Juniper Networks, said that could mean taking over a vendor's system that contains federal data. "There's some concern about what would be the criteria about that and how it would be the government has the ability under a provision of lawful action to take over a system used by an agency even if it's owned by a contractor," Dix said. "I am worried about the notion that suggests the government would have the authority under law to be able to take over systems of contractors if they view them as having vulnerabilities even if only a small percentage of that is government utilization." The provision Dix is talking about is in Section 3553 of the bill's Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Reform section. The draft bill, obtained by Federal News Radio, would give the secretary of DHS the ability to "direct officials of agencies that own, operate, lease or otherwise control an information system, including information systems used or operated by another entity, including contractors, on behalf of a federal agency, to take any lawful action with respect to the operation of such information system for the purpose of protecting that information system from or mitigating a cybersecurity threat." Dix said FISMA needs to be updated and several of the changes in the draft bill are good, but this provision goes too far. Different interpretation Not everyone reads the provision the same as Dix. James Lewis, the director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said Dix's interpretation is a bit extreme. "I think it's more they could direct the contractors to take action," he said. "I see this more of as an ability to direct action than actually assuming control." He said bills such as this one must include broad language to be implemented successfully. "You either can try and define prescriptively every single example and those tend to be unworkable, or you have to settle for phrases such as any lawful action," Lewis said. "That doesn't bother me as much. Over time should that authority ever be exercised, they would figure out what that meant. But I think it's the kind of language that actually points to not taking control of contractor systems. I'm still not sure that would be lawful." He added the language also fits in with the larger effort to reinforce DHS' authorities under FISMA. The Obama administration gave DHS more authority and responsibility under FISMA in July 2010. The Senate promised to take up the comprehensive cyber bill early on in the 2012 session. The House has not publicly committed to take up a comprehensive bill. Senate lawmakers have been trying to update FISMA for the last three years. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) introduced a bill to update the 2002 law in 2008 and held out hope each successive year, but couldn't get enough traction. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.) introduced a version of the FISMA update in 2010, but again, it got nowhere. Watson also tried to add a FISMA update to the 2010 Defense Authorization bill. But the provisions were not included in the final law. Similar to other FISMA reform efforts The FISMA reform in the latest bill looks similar to other efforts, Lewis said. It codifies the oversight authority for DHS to issue policies, set standards, training requirements, conduct risk assessments and receive reports on agency compliance. The reform bill also would update agency and chief information officer responsibilities, including ensuring cybersecurity is integrated with agency strategic and operational planning processes and developing and maintaining a risk management strategy. Alan Paller, the director of research at the SANS Institute, has been an outspoken critic of the paperwork part of FISMA. He said the continuous monitoring language is most important in the reform bill. "I think the key is the report language. There needs to be two or three examples in the report language that comes out with the bill so there is no question," Paller said. "The key people in this whole thing are the inspectors general. If they misinterpret it so the security people think they are suppose to do one thing and the inspectors general think they are suppose to write reports, which has been happening for the last 10 years, then you will get a lot of wasted reports. The key is the inspectors general understand exactly what was meant for continuous monitoring, meaning automated, online monitoring of every device on the network. If that is in the report language, that is good enough." While the provision that could give DHS the ability to take over contractor systems is one controversial piece, it's what's in the section about critical infrastructure that could stop the bill in its tracks. Juniper's Dix said his and others' concerns over the critical infrastructure section stem from the government getting too much oversight authority in specific areas. He said one provision would create additional regulatory regimes but not target the real cyber issues, which are the control systems of critical infrastructure providers. The other area concerns assessing the risk management of critical infrastructure vendors. "I don't think that is the role of the government," Dix said. "I don't think it's proper for the government to tell me and my company how best to manage the risk on behalf of my customers, my internal organization and my shareholders. I believe we do a pretty good job of that, and I think most people across the community do a pretty good job of that at this point in time." Dix said there absolutely is room for improvement and places industry can improve upon, but it must come through a collaborative process. He pointed to the current effort with DHS through the Critical Infrastructure Coordinating Councils. Dix said lawmakers in the House seem to understand this approach, but the Senate isn't getting it as quickly. Critical infrastructure in most need of cyber help CSIS' Lewis said if the critical infrastructure section of the bill doesn't pass, the rest of the bill isn't worth much because this is the one area that needs the most attention. Lewis said the bill does call for a collaborative process but there needs to be a way for DHS to make sure the standards are being met. "The problem with voluntary, it doesn't work. We don't have to prove that anymore," Lewis said. "And when anyone says we can rely on a voluntary approach, you may want to smell their breadth. That is the crux of the matter. Can we create standards and hold companies to them? We have to recognize this has to be a very light touch, it has to be collaborative and it has to differ from sector to sector. That is the crucial point for me." Along with FISMA and critical infrastructure, the bill includes two other sections, codifying DHS operational and oversight authorities and creating an Office of National Cyberspace Policy with a Senate-confirmed director. "There is a real desire to do something in both parties," Lewis said. "They want to show this is not a do-nothing Congress and this is an important bill and if they can pass it, it would be an achievement that they would be proud of. The other thing I've heard is there is a real push from opponents of the bill to neutralize it and to pass the easy parts and leave out anything meaningful and come back at some point in the future. The odds are good we will get something, but whether it is something useful it remains to be seen." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 13 11:24:37 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:24:37 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Pirate Bay to abandon .torrent files for magnet links Message-ID: <2E288A9A-6C0B-40B1-8777-3A8BA9E3EC5D@infowarrior.org> Pirate Bay to abandon .torrent files for magnet links By Duncan Geere, wired.co.uk | Published about an hour ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/pirate-bay-to-abandon-torrent-files-for-magnet-links.ars Filesharing titan the Pirate Bay has promised to remove all .torrent files from its site. But it's not to placate rights-holders?it's going to replace them with "magnet links" instead. Back in 2009, the Pirate Bay shut down its tracker?a server that helps people who want a file to find a person who has it. While a tracker doesn't actually host any files, operating one for the purposes of helping people share copyrighted content has generally been found to break the law in the countries where cases have gone to court. Trackers have largely been made redundant by magnet links?which allow for so-called "trackerless" torrents. Originally, BitTorrent users would download a .torrent file which, when opened in your BitTorrent software on your computer, calculates a "torrent hash" that identifies the files required. The software then sends that hash to a server, and connects to people who have the files that you want. They then download. Magnet links differ by making the torrent hash calculation on the server, sending that data within the link itself. In the same way that opening a link to a Spotify track sends that data to Spotify, a magnet link sends the relevant data to your BitTorrent client, so that the download can begin. The other function that a tracker provides is helping people find other people that are downloading the same files, so that they can share completed chunks of those files. That role has been superceded by technologies like DHT and Peer Exchange (PEX), which share information on who is downloading what over the network. Instead of asking a central server who has what file, you ask the people you're already downloading from, who ask the people they're downloading from, and so on. The downside is that it can take a little longer for downloads to "get going," but the network effect means that this information can generally be found very quickly, especially for popular files. If you're curious, TorrentFreak has a good explanation of exactly how it all works at a deep technical level. The development of these technologies means that .torrent files are pretty redundant now. As such, while the Pirate Bay has offered magnet links for some time, the site has now made them the default option for downloading. In a month's time, the .torrent links will be removed entirely. That has side benefits, too. It shrinks the size of the Pirate Bay massively?allowing copies of the site to be hosted with significantly less bandwidth, so that it's even harder to shut down. It's even feasible that you could carry a copy of the site on a USB stick. It's worth noting that .torrent files will never disappear entirely. One person needs to use a .torrent for each new file to inject crucial information about a download into the "swarm" of people downloading. For most practical purposes, though, and for most users, they'll soon become a thing of the past. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 13 17:40:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:40:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPA - Interesting Updates Message-ID: <3C05B78A-0DE1-484F-814C-72EB60AD48CF@infowarrior.org> January 13, 2012 | By Julie Samuels https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/signs-progress-internet-blacklist-bills-fight-continues Signs of Progress on the Internet Blacklist Bills, but the Fight Continues Looks like proponents of the Internet Blacklist Bills are finally beginning to realize that they won't be able to ram through massive, job-killing legislation without a fight. First, Sen. Patrick Leahy, sponsor of the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), announced on Thursday that he would recommend that the Senate further study the dangerous DNS blocking provisions in that bill before implementation. Then, a group of six influential senators wrote to Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, urging that the Senate slow down and postpone the upcoming vote on PIPA. Sen. Ben Cardin, a co-sponsor of PIPA, also took a measured stance against the bill, saying he "would not vote for final passage of PIPA, as currently written." Cardin cited consituent activism as the primary reason for the about-face. On the House side, Rep. Lamar Smith, sponsor of PIPA's dangerous counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), announced today that he would completely remove the DNS blocking provision from the House bill. It's heartening to see Congress take steps in the right direction, and it wouldn't have happened without the work and commitment of the many internet communities who have rallied to fight these dangerous bills. We should be proud of the progress we've made. But let's be clear ? we still have a long fight ahead and we face formidable foes. Both bills still contain fundamental flaws that threaten freedom of speech and the future of the Internet. We?ve written before, for example, about the threats to the human rights community, to students, to software development, and to the economy. These threats remain. What is worse (and we can't say this enough), is that this legislation, if made law, will do little to stop online infringement. These bills cannot be fixed ? they must --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 13 21:58:52 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:58:52 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free Message-ID: 10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free By Jonathan Turley, Friday, January 13, 5:34 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-united-states-still-the-land-of-the-free/2012/01/04/gIQAvcD1wP_print.html Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture. Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own, the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves? While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don?t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as the symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of ?free,? but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit. These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens ? precisely the problem with the new laws in this country. The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company. Assassination of U.S. citizens President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen whom he considers a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. Last year, he approved the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaqi and another citizen under this claimed inherent authority. Last month, administration officials affirmed that power, stating that the president can order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists. (Nations such as Nigeria, Iran and Syria have been routinely criticized for extrajudicial killings of enemies of the state.) Indefinite detention Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. The government continues to claim the right to declare citizens and non-citizens to be ?enemy combatants? and strip them of legal protections. (China recently codified a more limited detention law for its citizens, while counties such as Cambodia have been singled out by the United States for ?prolonged detention.?) Arbitrary justice The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. President George W. Bush claimed this authority in 2001, and Obama has continued the practice. (Egypt and China have been denounced for maintaining separate military justice systems for selected defendants, including civilians.) Warrantless searches The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens? finances, communications and associations. Bush acquired this sweeping power under the Patriot Act in 2001, and in 2011, Obama extended the power, including searches of everything from business documents to library records. The government can use ?national security letters? to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens ? and order them not to reveal the disclosure to the affected party. (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan operate under laws that allow the government to engage in widespread discretionary surveillance.) Secret evidence The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in both federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security ? a claim made in a variety of privacy lawsuits and largely accepted by federal judges without question. Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government?s actions under both the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence. In addition, some cases never make it to court at all. The federal courts routinely deny constitutional challenges to policies and programs under a narrow definition of standing to bring a case. War crimes The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. This gutted not just treaty obligations but the Nuremberg principles of international law. When courts in countries such as Spain moved to investigate Bush officials for war crimes, the Obama administration reportedly threatened foreign officials not to allow such cases to proceed, despite the fact that the United States has long claimed the same authority with regard to alleged war criminals in other countries. (Various nations have resisted investigations of officials accused of war crimes and torture. Some, such as Serbia and Chile, eventually relented to comply with international law; countries that have denied independent investigations include Iran, Syria and China.) Secret court The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. In 2011, Obama renewed these powers, including allowing secret searches of individuals who are not part of an identifiable terrorist group. The administration has asserted the right to ignore congressional limits on such surveillance. (Pakistan places national security surveillance under the unchecked powers of the military or intelligence services.) Immunity from judicial review Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. (Similarly, China has maintained sweeping immunity claims both inside and outside the country, and routinely blocks lawsuits against private companies.) Continual monitoring of citizens The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. (Saudi Arabia has installed massive public surveillance systems, while Cuba is notorious for active monitoring of selected citizens.) Extraordinary renditions The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers ? including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens. These new laws have come with an infusion of money into an expanded security system on the state and federal levels, including more public surveillance cameras, tens of thousands of security personnel and a massive expansion of a terrorist-chasing bureaucracy. Some politicians shrug and say these increased powers are merely a response to the times we live in. Thus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could declare in an interview last spring without objection that ?free speech is a great idea, but we?re in a war.? Of course, terrorism will never ?surrender? and end this particular ?war.? Other politicians rationalize that, while such powers may exist, it really comes down to how they are used. This is a common response by liberals who cannot bring themselves to denounce Obama as they did Bush. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), for instance, has insisted that Congress is not making any decision on indefinite detention: ?That is a decision which we leave where it belongs ? in the executive branch.? And in a signing statement with the defense authorization bill, Obama said he did not intend to use the latest power to indefinitely imprison citizens. Yet, he still accepted the power as a sort of regretful autocrat. However, an authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will. The framers lived under autocratic rule and understood this danger better than we do. James Madison famously warned that we needed a system that did not depend on the good intentions or motivations of our rulers: ?If men were angels, no government would be necessary.? Benjamin Franklin was more direct. In 1787, a Mrs. Powel confronted Franklin after the signing of the Constitution and asked, ?Well, Doctor, what have we got ? a republic or a monarchy?? His response was a bit chilling: ?A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.? Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely. The indefinite-detention provision in the defense authorization bill seemed to many civil libertarians like a betrayal by Obama. While the president had promised to veto the law over that provision, Levin, a sponsor of the bill, disclosed on the Senate floor that it was in fact the White House that approved the removal of any exception for citizens from indefinite detention. Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 14 10:36:24 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:36:24 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH Response Letter to SOPA petition Message-ID: <77F110AE-AB23-4A2D-9779-9824281C9ED2@infowarrior.org> (c/o JH) Nice to see. However, given this Administration (President)'s policy of talking tough up front and then caving in on things at the 11th hour after mild-if-no tweaks are made to controversial legislation (ie NDAA), while I respect some of the signatories here, I remain cautious in my reaction to this official WH note. -- rick http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/13/obama-administration-responds-we-people-petitions-sopa-and-online-piracy From: The White House Date: Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 8:11 AM Subject: Petition Response: Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet By Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt Thanks for taking the time to sign this petition. Both your words and actions illustrate the importance of maintaining an open and democratic Internet. Right now, Congress is debating a few pieces of legislation concerning the very real issue of online piracy, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act (OPEN). We want to take this opportunity to tell you what the Administration will support?and what we will not support. Any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet. While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet. Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing. We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk. Let us be clear?online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation's most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response. We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values. This is not just a matter for legislation. We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy. So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don?t limit your opinion to what?s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what?s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions. Details on that will follow in the coming days. Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge. Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation. Again, thank you for taking the time to participate in this important process. We hope you?ll continue to be part of it. Victoria Espinel is Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget Aneesh Chopra is the U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President and Associate Director for Technology at the Office of Science and Technology Policy Howard Schmidt is Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 14 10:40:18 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:40:18 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Herd On The Street: Company Analysts All In This Together Message-ID: <945F2E7E-B6D6-49A1-9D21-67FBFEE842DE@infowarrior.org> January 9, 2012, 2:20 PM ET Herd On The Street: Company Analysts All In This Together http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/01/09/herd-on-the-street-company-analysts-all-in-this-together/tab/print/ Is this what they mean by ?consensus estimates?? Company analysts aren?t generally known for sticking their necks out, but this is getting ridiculous. In the lead-up to fourth-quarter earnings reports, which begin in a couple of hours with Alcoa?s announcement, analysts are more clustered than ever in their profits estimates, says Savita Subramanian of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. According to her calculations, estimate dispersion for S&P 500 company earnings are now down below 10% ? the lowest that figure has been since at least Feb. 1986 (check the chart). In other words, it?s been at least 25 years since analysts were in such close agreement about where earnings are likely to land. This unusual state of affairs suggests one of two possibilities: (a) Wall Street analysts are so certain, and prescient, about where earnings are going to be that they?ve all naturally clustered around the correct figures; or (b) Wall Street analysts have no idea what?s going to happen, given the magnitude of macroeconomic uncertainties, that they?re all cribbing each other?s notes and/or going with the safest, most middle-of-the-pack estimates they can muster. For the record, Ms. Subramanian is betting on (b). --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 14 10:54:26 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:54:26 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Raging Grannies Come Out Against SOPA/PIPA Message-ID: <539C97B4-D4EC-415A-83D2-F3A7ABD8494F@infowarrior.org> http://raginggrannies.tumblr.com/post/15710808610 Make no bones about it, our beloved internet is in serious danger? and here is why. Last year legislative measures were introduced in the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, S. 968 (the ?PROTECT IP Act?) and H.R. 3261 (the ?Stop Online Piracy Act?). Their primary purpose, as we see it, is to help Hollywood keep rolling in the profits. Passage of these bills would mean that so-called ?rogue? websites could be censored when they infringe on copyright law. BUT?the language in both of these bills is written with a very broad paintbrush. Their passage would have a huge impact on the work of human rights advocates who speak out against injustice on sites that could easily be labelled ?rogue? websites. It?s a slippery slope when censorship reigns. The indymedia network that thrives on open publishing (and our favorite www.indybay.org here in the San Francisco Bay Area) would be subject to censorship, defeating the very purpose of its existence. Similar platforms created to provide anonymity to whistleblowers could become major casualties of these bills. All to save Hollywood?s bottom line? It?s not often that Raging Grannies align with the likes of Facebook and Google. We?ve protested at Facebook about their lack of privacy considerations, and at Google because of their flip-flop on internet neutrality. (After we demonstrated last time at Google we wound up on Jon Stewart?s ?The Daily Show? and in a New York Times photo). But this time we are on the same side with the two internet giants. They too have come out AGAINST these Hollywood generated bills. We are keeping track of who supports PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the house through this useful site. And we are taking action. Our Senator Dianne Feinstein has disappointed us before by not standing up for Social Security?she disappoints us again by being a co-sponsor of PIPA. We are sent her an open letter with the photo above. And we applaud our local Silicon Valley Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo who say NO to SOPA. US Senators from California Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein are listed as PIPA co-sponsors. You can contact Senator Boxer at (202) 224-3553 and Senator Feinstein at (202) 224-3841. In other states, reach out to your own US senator. Tell them the PIPA is dangerous?it could be used as a tool for online censorship. Tell them what websites YOU use that could become toast, and why you think it is important that we have a free internet. Please tell your Congressperson to vote NO on SOPA. Our friends at the Electric Frontier Foundation and Save the Internet help us stay up to date on what can be done to keep the internet free of censorship. We proudly stand together with them for internet freedom. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 14 10:55:35 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:55:35 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Cantor Promises SOPA Won't Be Brought To The Floor Until 'Issues Are Addressed' Message-ID: <8CEB24E5-2BC8-444F-A5F0-4140879A79EE@infowarrior.org> SOPA Delayed; Cantor Promises It Won't Be Brought To The Floor Until 'Issues Are Addressed' from the holding-fire dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120113/23560217407/sopa-delayed-cantor-promises-it-wont-be-brought-to-floor-until-issues-are-addressed.shtml Some late breaking news here: following Lamar Smith's announcement that the new manager's amendment for SOPA will remove DNS blocking (to be added back at a later date after it's been "studied"), Rep. Issa has announced that he will now postpone the "nerd" hearing that he was holding in the House Oversight Committee, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday. The key reason? Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised him that he will not bring the bill to the floor unless there's real consensus on the bill. That's big news -- though, as Issa notes in his statement, it's worrisome that Senator Reid still seems to want to move forward with PIPA: "While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,? said Chairman Issa. ?The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.? "Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks." .... Indeed. It is still important that Congress hears from "the nerds" and plenty of other experts concerning the implications of these attempts to regulate the internet, but if SOPA is not going to be rushed to the floor, such hearings and education can (and should) happen in due time, rather than rushing to get them in, just as Congress comes back into session. There are more important things for Congress to focus on. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 14 15:36:43 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:36:43 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Anonymous targets media execs in SOPA protest Message-ID: <858F13AF-B827-46F7-AA1F-501134553352@infowarrior.org> January 13, 2012, 5:49 pm Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts Personal Information of Media Executives By AMY CHOZICK http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/activist-group-opposing-antipiracy-bill-posts-information-on-media-executives/?hpw The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives. In protest of antipiracy legislation currently being considered by Congress, the group has posted online documents that reveal personal information about Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. Those companies, like almost every major company in the media and entertainment industry, have championed the Stop Online Piracy Act, the House of Representatives bill, known as SOPA, and its related Senate bill, called Protect I.P. The documents, culled from various databases, included Mr. Bewkes?s home addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged users to bombard the company and its executives with e-mails, faxes and phone calls. Mr. Bewkes has received intimidating phone calls and a barrage of e-mails, according to supporters of the legislation who have knowledge about the matter but are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The documents also included the corporate contact information for a range of companies including NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company. A Disney spokeswoman said neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, had received threats. Time Warner declined to comment. The file that was posted regarding Mr. Redstone has details about his family, home and career but does not include private contact information. A Viacom spokeswoman declined to comment. Anonymous, a loosely organized collective of so-called hacktivists, has called its effort ?Operation Hiroshima.? It began on Jan. 1, when the group dropped a trove of documents on Web sites that facilitate anonymous publishing, like Pastebin.com and Scribd.com. The documents included information about media executives and government figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and data on corporations and government entities that the group opposes. ?They should feel threatened,? said Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, referring to backers of the antipiracy legislation. ?The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.? The online effort underscores how heated the arguments have become over legislation that may seem like arcane government regulation. Media companies say the legislation, which has bipartisan support, will crack down on illicit downloads of movies, music and television, especially from overseas Web sites. SOPA would expand the ability of the government and private companies to hold Web sites responsible for content the companies believe infringes on their copyrights, allowing greater use of court orders and lawsuits that could ultimately shut down the sites. The technology industry, including giants like Google and Yahoo, and advocates for Internet freedom say the bills would censor the Internet, stifle free speech and give the government too much power to regulate and shut down Web sites in the United States. Both sides have spent millions on lobbying in Washington. But at the grass-roots level, the issue has galvanized Internet activists, who lack lobbying power but have promoted the cause among the online community. ?You take our speech, you take our Internet, you take our Bill of Rights, you take our Constitution, we fight back,? said a monotone voice on a YouTube video posted by Anonymous before the Operation Hiroshima document drop. Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. ?Why can?t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?? this aide said. The vast majority of SOPA opponents convey their views through legitimate means. Hundreds of Web sites have encouraged blackouts and boycotts to protest the legislation. According to BlackoutSOPA.org, nearly 12,000 users have changed their Twitter profile pictures to a ?Stop SOPA? badge. ?The more outrage expressed on the Internet in the coming days, the better,? said Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Twitter. He said he did not condone threats or ?any kind of intimidation? by hackers. Last month Scribd.com introduced a function that made the words on documents gradually fade away. As they did, a pop-up prompted users to contact their representatives. ?Don?t let the Internet vanish before your eyes,? it read. The tactics have succeeded in some cases. Initially a supporter, the Web hosting company Go Daddy reversed its position on SOPA after Wikipedia and thousands of other Web sites said they would withdraw their domains from the service. ?Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,? Warren Adelman, Go Daddy?s chief executive, said in a statement. Companies like Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers studio, and Viacom, which owns MTV and the Paramount studio, have experienced security teams, but they are not necessarily trained to handle anonymous online threats, said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software. ?It?s easy to get something taken off a Web site, but it?s impossible to erase things off the Internet,? he said. Less than a week after the Operation Hiroshima documents were posted, a Twitter message linking to Mr. Bewkes?s home phone numbers and addresses, his annual income and his wife?s name and age had spread across the Internet. The message included #OpHiroshima, the shortened Twitter code for the effort. The global activists in the nebulous collection known as Anonymous often use computer skills to support political causes. For example, Anonymous demanded a full Christmas dinner for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is in prison facing charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. Last month, hackers associated with Anonymous published a trove of e-mail addresses and the personal information of subscribers of Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex. Last year, a splinter group affiliated with Anonymous attacked the Sony Corporation, shutting down its PlayStation online network. The attack cost the company around $171 million, according to industry estimates. Movements like Anonymous often squabble among themselves, but SOPA is a uniquely unifying cause, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacking. To these activists, she said, ?Internet freedom is not controversial.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 14 15:40:20 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:40:20 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Rise of the New Groupthink Message-ID: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html January 13, 2012 The Rise of the New Groupthink By SUSAN CAIN SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there?s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They?re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They?re not joiners by nature. One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone ? and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by ?concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.? In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world?s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as ?A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.?) Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. ?Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,? Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker ? Moses, Jesus, Buddha ? who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community. Culturally, we?re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs?s death, we?ve seen a profusion of myths about the company?s success. Most focus on Mr. Jobs?s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple?s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer. Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes the world would be a better place if everyone had a user-friendly computer. This seems a distant dream ? most computers are still the size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr. Wozniak meets a simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called the Altair 8800. Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work on his own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he unveils his amazing creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak wants to give his invention away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to co-found Apple Computer. The story of Apple?s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr. Wozniak wouldn?t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred spirits of Homebrew. And he?d never have started Apple without Mr. Jobs. But it?s also a story of solo spirit. If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done ? the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing ? he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself. Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: ?Most inventors and engineers I?ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They?re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I?m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.? And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I?m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has ?a room of one?s own.? During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010. Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question. The New Groupthink also shapes some of our most influential religious institutions. Many mega-churches feature extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable activity, from parenting to skateboarding to real estate, and expect worshipers to join in. They also emphasize a theatrical style of worship ? loving Jesus out loud, for all the congregation to see. ?Often the role of a pastor seems closer to that of church cruise director than to the traditional roles of spiritual friend and counselor,? said Adam McHugh, an evangelical pastor and author of ?Introverts in the Church.? SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust. But it?s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it?s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They?re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it. Many introverts seem to know this instinctively, and resist being herded together. Backbone Entertainment, a video game development company in Emeryville, Calif., initially used an open-plan office, but found that its game developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. ?It was one big warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could see each other,? recalled Mike Mika, the former creative director. ?We switched over to cubicles and were worried about it ? you?d think in a creative environment that people would hate that. But it turns out they prefer having nooks and crannies they can hide away in and just be away from everybody.? Privacy also makes us productive. In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level ? but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn?t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly. Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that?s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you ?go directly to the part that?s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class ? you?re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.? Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. ?The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question,? Mr. Osborn wrote. ?One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more blankets.? But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The ?evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,? wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. ?If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.? The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others? opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group?s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this ?the pain of independence.? The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a ?miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,? and that?s what the Internet is, too. It?s a place where we can be alone together ? and this is precisely what gives it power. MY point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust and friendship. And I?m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we?ll need to stand on one another?s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them. But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy. To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work. Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues ? who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done. Susan Cain is the author of the forthcoming book ?Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can?t Stop Talking.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 15 21:33:43 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:33:43 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Why the video pros are moving away from Apple Message-ID: How sad......but I join those who feel that "Apple cares more about I-Crap than anything else these days." :( -- rick Why the video pros are moving away from Apple http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/video-pros-apple-needs-to-acknowledge-the-pro-industry-and-fast.ars By Jacqui Cheng | Published about 2 hours ago Six months after the launch of Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), Apple's major overhaul to its professional video editing software Final Cut Pro, video pros find themselves increasingly looking at other software options. The new version of Final Cut Pro was controversial?there were significant changes to the Final Cut interface, a plethora of editing features were taken away, and worst of all, Final Cut Pro X was rendered unable to import projects from previous versions of the software. For video editors and producers with years of work using Final Cut Pro, the launch of Final Cut Pro X made it seem like Apple no longer cared for its market of creative professionals. Is that still the case now, half a year later? TV production company Bunim/Murray recently brought the issue back into the public consciousness by announcing that it was switching from Final Cut Pro to Avid, noting that the company needed "a partner who would understand our long-term needs." As it turns out, the reaction to Bunim/Murray's announcement from creative pros was, "took them long enough." We spoke to a handful of professionals who work in the video production industry to see how they're feeling now that the dust has settled, and the general consensus appears to be "not good." Chicken versus the egg Which came first: Apple's creative pro market shrinking, which might have led to dramatic changes in Final Cut Pro; or Apple's cavalier attitude toward legacy features, which might have frightened video editors? According to the professionals we spoke to, there was already signs of an industry shift to Avid before FCPX came along, but Apple still had a very loyal and dedicated user base that it's now turning away from. "The perception here is that Apple is more concerned with selling iPads and iPhones than they are with the people who have stuck with them since the 90's, the professional editors and VFX people," said Jude Mull, who works at a post-production facility in Hollywood that processes and digitizes some of your favorite TV shows. Mull explained that this perception was already there when FCPX was announced, but has only increased since then due to Apple's aggressive attempt to cut and switch up its features. For example, when editing video for TV shows, editors will put together a final Edit Decision List (EDL) with data that essentially tells the post production facility which scenes to keep or cut. "Why Apple decided to do away with EDLs is beyond me. This makes me think they aren't targeting the professional market," Mull told Ars. "When I read Final Cut Pro X didn't have the ability to generate an EDL I figured Apple is targeting a different audience, the Tweeners, people with a little $, time and creativity, the Indie crowd. This looks stupid to even read, so again, kind of baffled." Mull also pointed out another sore spot among professionals: FCPX no longer allows output to tape. "While ideally the industry is trending towards tapeless, we still live in a world where the Video Assembled Masters and Color Corrected Masters are played out to HD tape formats, generally HDSR and D5. This is a basic function and removing this, while possibly forward thinking with regards to tapeless workflow, is totally counterproductive within the reality of today, that most everybody still goes to tape," he said. This, combined with the aforementioned inability to import legacy projects, are complete dealbreakers for those who work in the video production industry. Noted production systems and workflow consultant Jon Alper compared Apple's decisions to cut things like tape support and legacy products to the launch of the iMac?that is, the company wanted older formats to be dead (like the floppy drive that never made it into the iMac) and therefore simply got rid of them, demanding the rest of the industry to catch up. "Not supporting tape-based workflow is forward looking but they 'iMac-ed' it.'" They wanted it to be dead," Alper told Ars. "This was fine for the old Bondi Blue iMac when the buyers of those tools didn't generally have massive investments in Serial, ADB and SCSI peripherals. It's not fine when production houses own and rely on hundreds of thousands (or many millions) [of dollars] in decks, cameras and other gear." Another filmmaker in Los Angeles, Seth Hancock, agreed that even if FCPX had more of the features that video editors want, the fact that it's so different from previous versions of Final Cut Pro would still push the industry towards the competition. "If we are taking the time to retrain people for a brand new software?which is what FCPX is?then we might as well use tools that are more industry standards here in L.A. like Avid and, now, Premiere Pro," Hancock told Ars. "There are too many choices and options for better, more professional options that keep us working and employable here in L.A. What's sad is that Apple was destroying Avid and really cutting into their revenue and market share. Now Avid, by default, is going to revert back the to industry standard." The Mac Pro plays a part, too The release of FCPX may be the catalyst for driving away industry professionals, but it's not the only contributor to the problem. The fact that the Mac Pro seems to be on Apple's back burner is making professional users nervous and forcing them to begin looking at other?non-Mac?hardware solutions to ensure their future employability. "This comes at a bad time. Mac Pro is long in the tooth and pundits speculate and seemingly seem to relish encouraging its demise because they can write and function entirely on a MacBook Air and do the FCP tutorials too," Alper said. "Pundits, I might add, who have never dealt with managing seven [years] worth of Antiques Roadshow being repackaged and encoded for the Web. Pundits who have never had 3.5TB single projects." And it's not just Hollywood feeling that way. Ryan Poirier, who works in the video production department of one of the largest public school districts in the US, agreed that regular updates to the Mac Pro are key in maintaining confidence among the professional crowd. "Many folks in the industry have the perspective that Apple is willing to cut out the legs from under professionals without warning. And that can make project leads weary of putting full faith into a entire workflow, which goes well beyond the actual editing software," Poirier told Ars. "The simple question of the survival of the features a Mac Pro provides can push workflow managers to migrate over to Windows, where Avid and Adobe can be installed. Professionals must be able count on lasting support for a few years at a time. If there are any doubts, about where the roadmap leads, it's simply not worth the risk of taking that leap of faith. Post-production houses simply can't afford to be caught off guard." With the current iteration of the Mac Pro about to turn 18 months old?and even at the time of that update, the previous version was nearly two years old?these users are becoming increasingly jaded about Apple's commitment to the pro market. And because Apple's Final Cut products only work on the Mac, the Mac Pro is a big part of the equation when it comes to production houses choosing which software to use. FCPX ain't all bad Despite the amount of hatorade being dumped on FCPX by the professional crowd, not everything about it is sour. "My personal view on FCP X is that it's a brilliant program, provided the user can essentially forget everything they've learned from using the previous Final Cut Pro/ Studio applications and go into it with an open mind. Don't be quick to judge a book by it's cover, or give in to all the negative hype," Poirier told Ars. "I may be more optimistic then others by nature, but after learning FCPX in it's current state, I'm more excited about future potential of the application then I am concerned with it's current shortfalls. " Alper agreed. "There's a lot more 'right' about it than Apple gets credit for," Alper said. "Realtime processing, of course, but I actually think the "metadata" model for media management is, long term, the much better model." In a blog post he wrote after FCPX's release, he went into more detail as to why he believes these elements will help videographers create better products, adding, "These changes will revolutionize video editing." Alper also took special exception to repeated complaints that the new version of Final Cut Pro looks too much like iMovie, noting that he believes there's a certain level of "pro tools machismo" in the industry that opposes any kind of change that might make it seem easier to do their jobs. "It is a completely valid concern that a tool would be ?dumbed down? to make integration into pro workflows a problem or professional level functionality either removed or so deeply hidden as to be useless," he wrote on his blog. "It?s utterly laughable to be worried that a tool you learned with difficulty will now be easier for others to master." Everyone we spoke to agreed that Apple would have a much better standing among professional users if the company would just acknowledge them a little more and act like their concerns are being listened to. "Apple needs to be a little more open with third parties about how they plan to improve FCP over time. They need to enable those third parties to feel that when FCP improves, they can make more money selling their products," Alper said. "What Apple could do would be to make it known that they intend to keep the pro market viable is let the pros know you still care!" Mull added. "As it is, everything seems lukewarm." Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 16 08:14:31 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:14:31 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science Message-ID: <786A2A10-5743-49E0-AAC3-561F77DB4690@infowarrior.org> Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science Dutch lab that created deadly bird flu virus attacks America for redacting its research. Steve Connor Monday 16 January 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/killer-flu-doctors-us-censorship-is-a-danger-to-science-6290227.html America should not be allowed to dominate the debate over who controls sensitive scientific information that could be misused in biowarfare terrorism, say the scientists who created a highly dangerous form of bird-flu virus in a study that has been partially censored by the US government. Ron Fouchier and Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam accept recommendations by the US government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which said key details of their US-funded research should not be published because bioterrorists may use the information to cause a bird-flu pandemic. "But we do question whether it is appropriate to have one country dominate a discussion that has an impact on scientists and public-health officials worldwide," Fouchier and Osterhaus write in the journal Nature. "It is not clear whether an international discussion would lead to different recommendations ... We don't know the worldwide opinion until a group of experts from all parts of the globe is formed. An issue this big should not be decided by one country, but all of us," they say. As The Independent reported in December, Dr Fouchier and colleagues created a strain of H5N1 bird-flu virus that can be spread by airborne transmission between laboratory ferrets, the standard animal "model" for human influenza. They did it to see how easy it would be for the virus to mutate into a form that could cause a pandemic. Details of the genetic mutations could prove vital for scientists engaged in the early-warning surveillance of new strains of flu virus, as well as researchers involved in creating new vaccines and anti-viral drugs. But the details could be misused by rogue states or by biowarfare terrorists with access to rudimentary scientific knowledge and fairly standard laboratory equipment. Previously, it was thought the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which appeared in birds in 1996, could only be transmitted to people by close contact with infected poultry, rather than by airborne transmission from one person to another. If the H5N1 bird-flu strain mutated into an airborne form, it could result in one of the deadliest pandemics in history, where more than half of those infected die ? a mortality rate that would dwarf other flu outbreaks. So far, most of the 600 or so deaths from H5N1 have resulted from close contact between people and poultry and have occurred almost exclusively in Asia and the Middle East where keeping domestic poultry is common. Dr Fouchier and Professor Osterhaus were among experts asked by Nature to give opinions on recommendations of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which wants key details of their study, such as the precise genetic sequence of the mutated virus, to be withheld from publication. Lynn Klotz of the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington and Ed Sylvester of Arizona State University say the chances of a laboratory strain of H5N1 escaping into the wild remain high if it is stored in conventional flu-virus labs. "Regulators should not be sitting idly by, while the threat of a man-made pandemic looms," the scientists say. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 16 08:25:30 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:25:30 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation Message-ID: A good overview of some of the issues raised by SOPA/PIPA. I remain hesitant to fully praise the WH on their Saturday note, but it's a good start anyway. --rick January 16, 2012 | By Trevor Timm How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech#overlay-context=user --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 16 08:46:08 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:46:08 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Company hoarding license-plate data on US drivers Message-ID: <8E1639C4-0C95-4696-B978-E792F3D20D58@infowarrior.org> Company hoarding license-plate data on US drivers Thursday, January 12, 2012 by G.W. Schulz for California Watch http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/state&id=8503013 Capitalizing on one of the fastest-growing trends in law enforcement, a private California-based company has compiled a database bulging with more than 550 million license-plate records on both innocent and criminal drivers that can be searched by police. The technology has raised alarms among civil libertarians, who say it threatens the privacy of drivers. It's also evidence that 21st-century technology may be evolving too quickly for the courts and public opinion to keep up. The U.S. Supreme Court is only now addressing whether investigators can secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to cars without a warrant. A ruling in that case has yet to be handed down, but a telling exchange occurred during oral arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts asked lawyers for the government if even he and other members of the court could feasibly be tracked by GPS without a warrant. Yes, came the answer. Related Content link: More stories from California Watch Meanwhile, police around the country have been affixing high-tech scanners to the exterior of their patrol cars, snapping a picture of every passing license plate and automatically comparing them to databases of outstanding warrants, stolen cars and wanted bank robbers. The units work by sounding an in-car alert if the scanner comes across a license plate of interest to police, whereas before, patrol officers generally needed some reason to take an interest in the vehicle, like a traffic violation. But when a license plate is scanned, the driver's geographic location is also recorded and saved, along with the date and time, each of which amounts to a record or data point. Such data collection occurs regardless of whether the driver is a wanted criminal, and the vast majority are not. While privacy rules restrict what police can do with their own databases, Vigilant Video, headquartered in Livermore, Calif., offers a loophole. It's a private business not required to operate by those same rules. The company sells its own brand of license-plate readers and has customers around the nation, including in Springfield, Ill.; Kings Point, N.Y.; and Orange, Conn. But Vigilant distinguished itself from competitors by going one step further and collecting hundreds of millions of scans to create what's known as the National Vehicle Location Service. A West Coast sales manager for the company, Randy Robinson, said the scanners -- as well as data from them compiled in the location system -- do far more than simply help identify stolen vehicles. Stories abound of the technology also being used by police to stop wanted killers, bank robbers and drug suspects. Kidnappers could be intercepted, too. "I just sit back and think, 'Who would want to thwart officers from doing their jobs more effectively, faster, more efficiently?' If it was your son or daughter (missing), what would you say?" Robinson isn't troubled by the thought of his own data being compiled, and he said others shouldn't worry either if they haven't violated the law. After all, he said, police could even track him down if necessary. He also pointed out that there's nothing wrong with Vigilant taking what amounts to public photographs. While some technology makes it safer for police to perform their jobs or enables them to more easily share information, license-plate recognition has the potential to both transform public safety for the better and undermine rules designed to protect law-abiding Americans from police overreach. "It's no different than if you have an officer that manually enters tags," argued Capt. Johnny Jennings of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina. "They've automated this ability to where (the scanner) actually runs the tag for you and compares it to a variety of databases. ... We were able to come through with some significant reductions in stolen vehicles." Just one patrol officer can log information for thousands of cars in a single shift. Multiply that by an ever-growing number of police departments adopting the technology -- often with help from homeland security grants and funds from President Barack Obama's 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- and the result is an extraordinary volume of data on motorists. With enough scans, a portrait of your habits begins to emerge, making it a valuable intelligence tool police can use to determine where and when cars were scanned. "We think once those snapshots become sufficiently dense, it rises to the level of the equivalent of GPS tracking," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Each snapshot of a license plate is a pixel. How many pixels do you need before you have a photograph?" Lee Tien agrees. He's a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and said the ability of police to identify perpetrators in real time is less worrisome than the stockpiling of historic driver data. "Any time you're talking about movements in public which you can archive, or any data you can archive over time, then it's like a way-back machine. 'Gee, we'll be able to reconstruct the movements of your car or your cell phone,' " Tien said. " ... It's incredibly revealing, so I think it's pretty clear this is a big issue." The potential value of this new law enforcement tool is undeniable, however Auto thefts at Sacramento's Arden Fair mall have dropped from 77 in 2006, before private security deployed license-plate scanners there, to just eight in 2011. Steve Reed, a retired police officer now serving as the mall's security chief, used $50,000 in federal homeland security grants to purchase four scanners. Through a unique partnership with the Sacramento Police Department, Reed said, 68 stolen vehicles were recovered at the mall, and 46 arrests have been made since early 2009. "If a child was abducted here -- which hasn't happened -- and they only had a partial plate and knew it was a yellow car, (police) have the capability to go in there and put in the partial plate and go through all the pictures of cars we've seen and then actually find the car," Reed said. One man now sits in an Arkansas federal correctional facility after he was linked to a stolen car at the mall -- also found in his possession were multiple credit cards, ATM cards, Social Security cards and altered checks belonging to victims of mail theft. In another case, authorities broke up a retail theft ring after an in-car alert at the mall led them to a group of people shoplifting inside. A later search of the trunk revealed thousands more in stolen goods. Arden Fair officials get rid of the records they generate after 30 days, simply because Reed can't store them all. His guards also do not search across historical data -- the watchers can merely wait to be alerted if they've happened upon a license plate of interest. Jennings of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said four of his cruisers today have scanners deployed, and the department began using them about five years ago during a surge in stolen vehicles. One of his detectives managed to collar an auto-burglary suspect with just a partial plate. But the technology isn't a catch-all. The department simultaneously launched a public information campaign teaching drivers how to prevent auto theft from occurring in the first place, Jennings said. His department also destroys irrelevant records after 180 days and does not have the ability to search data nationwide through the National Vehicle Location Service. Roughly 1,200 new users working in law enforcement are signed up to search the location system every month, and agencies don't have to be a customer of Vigilant, nor do they have to contribute their own data, company sales manager Robinson said. It's free to the law enforcement community and amounts to a spectacular form of advertising for Vigilant. Police aren't the only ones contributing to the database's size. Additional records are flowing in from private auto repossession companies that specialize in tracking down debtors no longer making payments on their cars. Imagine tow trucks armed with scanners cruising through apartment complexes and along residential streets, simultaneously searching for delinquent borrowers and generating new leads if a motorist in the future stops paying his or her note. Some could argue it's not unlike Google's Street View, except that far fewer people have ever heard of Vigilant Video and its participating fleet of 2,000 so-called "scout" cars. Robinson is quick to emphasize that only authorized law enforcement agencies can search data generated by both private scout cars and patrol vehicles. "What's extraordinary to me are the types of cases that are being solved," Robinson said. "(Police) can go back and say, 'Who was in the area? Who was in the neighborhood?' They can call that person up and question them and say, 'Look, I've got a rape victim. You're a known serial rapist or a rapist who just got out on parole. Why were you two blocks away on that night?' " Story courtesy of our media partners at California Watch (A Project of the Center for Investigative Reporting) --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 16 17:23:15 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:23:15 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man Message-ID: <1F8D9A4D-15B9-45EF-8EC0-E956B91279F4@infowarrior.org> The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man January 16, 2012 64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 46 Essays by Stephen L. Carter William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale Law School http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/iraq-war-next-war When the last American combat troops departed Iraq in December, they left behind a disordered democracy that may not survive, along with a great deal of ethical confusion. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 represented the apotheosis of ?anticipatory? self-defense?the theory that the use of armed force can be justified to prevent an attack that ?is neither occurring nor imminent, but nevertheless likely to occur in the foreseeable future.?[1] According to the war?s critics, the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction illustrates the poverty of the theory and its heavy reliance on accurate intelligence. If this is so, then we are in for trouble, because the Obama Administration?s emphasis on targeted killing of terror suspects?what President Obama has called eliminating our enemies[2]?is also a form of anticipatory self-defense. Indeed, as the administration continues to ratchet up its use of remote drone attacks, we really would seem to have entered what one observer has called the new age of preventive war.[3] Preemptive warfare is a form of self-defense that occurs when your adversary has the tanks massed on your border, ready to attack. Preventive warfare is aimed at keeping your adversary from gaining the means to attack you. Both the law and the ethics of self-defense have tended to frown on preventive warfare, not least because it has no logical stopping point. But America?s recent wars have all been, in one way or another, preventive?aimed less at foiling current plans than at stopping future ones. Iraq was aimed at disrupting Saddam Hussein?s supposed efforts to create and deploy weapons of mass destruction that might eventually have been used against America or its allies. Afghanistan was aimed at dismantling the al-Qaeda network, rendering it unable to perpetrate whatever attacks it might next be plotting. True, the evidence of intention in Iraq was significantly more attenuated than the evidence of intention in Afghanistan. What nevertheless links the two, along with the various fronts of the Terror War, is a shared belief in the military aspect of the Bush Doctrine?that is, the determination to fight America?s enemies overseas rather than at home. Iraq was war under the beta version of the Bush Doctrine. The newer model is represented by the slaying of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen deemed a terror threat. The Obama Administration has ratcheted the use of remote drone attacks to unprecedented levels?the Bush Doctrine honed to rapier sharpness. The interesting question about the new model is one of ethics more than legality. Let us assume the principal ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare?to wit, that the reduction in civilian casualties and destruction of property means that the drone attack comports better than most other methods with the principle of discrimination. If this is so, then we might conclude that a just cause alone is sufficient to justify the attacks. The most straightforward way of understanding the attacks on the leaders of terror groups is an effort to reduce the demand for terrorists. The supply side of terror is relatively stable: there are always people willing to die for a cause. But they need missions. By affecting the incentives of the leaders who plan the missions?and who must now factor in the not insignificant possibility of being blown to bits?the drone strategy seeks to affect the demand side.[4] If the demand side is indeed the one that matters more, then the targeting of the leadership is entirely rational. But is what we are doing truly self-defense? Consider one of the most famous hypotheticals on the subject of self-defense: the Fat Man puzzle. In Fat Man, you find yourself in a small boat at the bottom of a chasm. Although there are many versions,[5] what they have in common is that an enormously fat individual is hurtling down from the cliff. You have no idea why he is falling?whether, say, he jumped or was pushed. All you know for sure is that if he hits you, you die. You have no space to maneuver, and no time to escape. Fortunately, you are armed with your trusty Fat Man gun. You can pull the trigger and vaporize him, thereby saving yourself.[6] Theorists of self-defense usually posit that killing another to protect the self must be based either on the status of the attacker (e.g., enemy soldier in war) or what the attacker is doing (e.g., actively shooting at you). The Fat Man problem usefully divorces the justification for violent self-defense from the motive of the assailant. Robert Nozick?s original version of the problem stipulated that Fat Man has been pushed, and is therefore morally innocent; thus theories of self-defense that depend on what the attacker is doing (e.g., is he engaged in aggression?) cannot justify the use of the vaporizer.[7] And yet the Fat Man problem is in other ways too easy. Augustine, to take an example, would surely have rejected the use of the vaporizer gun, on the ground that your life is not intrinsically more valuable than the Fat Man?s. Liberalism?s refusal to weigh lives against each other also makes calculation difficult. Yet I find that my students have little difficulty with the problem, answering as Nozick intended: they are by and large perfectly willing to blow Fat Man to smithereens to save themselves. The problem my students find harder is what I like to call Thin Man. Thin Man is too skinny to do us harm unless he chooses to, but he comes hurtling down off the cliff nevertheless. If he hits us, we die. But he is so thin that the odds are he will land nowhere near. We know that Thin Man means us ill. He fully intends to do us harm. We just don?t know when. It might be now?that might be why he is falling?or it might be next year. Or he might change his mind. If we do nothing, chances are he will miss us (he is thin), fall into the water, and be washed away by the current. Later, he will fetch up on shore and can go back to plotting. We could try to pull him from the water, but we would probably fall in. Thus the present opportunity to vaporize him with our Thin Man gun might be our only shot at him. On the other hand, I believe I mentioned that we do not know his current intention. He might just be going for a swim. Iraq was Thin Man on a massive scale: a precautionary invasion, a war just in case. The drone war is not on the same scale, but, fought by remote control, does raise similar concerns. Presumed terror leaders are blown up wherever they appear. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, has decided to use its vaporizer gun any time Thin Man shows his face. With the two political parties in agreement, one assumes that we will be pursuing the assassination strategy for some years to come. But the Thin Man problem helps illustrate the moral complexity of this form of warfare. We fire the missile because intelligence tells us that there is probability p that the man we are targeting is the man we are looking for; and other intelligence tells us that there is probability q that the man we are looking for does indeed hold the suspected position in the terror network; and other intelligence tells us that there is probability r that the network is indeed planning a particular operation that will cause some expected level of harm. Note that whatever the harm we are trying to prevent, the product of p * q * r still likely represents a significant discounting of the expected value of our own anticipatory attack. When all is said and done, choosing to vaporize Thin Man places enormous reliance on accurate intelligence, and, as public attention fades, we are placing enormous trust in our leaders. But as the war in Iraq demonstrated, the fact that political leaders act in good faith reliance on a particular interpretation of intelligence does not make the intelligence accurate. * * * The Obama Administration has chosen a different route to justify its attacks on terror leaders. In time of war, the administration points out, the enemy?s leaders are legitimate targets. The attacks, then, may be justified as part of the larger war?much as the United States was justified, during World War II, in shooting down the aircraft carrying Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor. But even putting aside the remarkable breadth of the claim to be fighting a defensive war in a theater effectively worldwide, there is a more important distinction between what happened to Admiral Yamamoto and what is happening to the accused leaders of the terror network. Yamamoto was killed as part of a single operation that was part of a far wider war. The operation may have targeted Yamamoto alone, but the war was of the traditional sort, one country against another?and the United States was fully mobilized. This matters because, whether or not the public was aware of the plan to assassinate Yamamoto, it was keenly aware of the larger war, and of its course. The war itself was front-page news. Susan Neiman counts it as a significant advance in human consciousness that we can scarcely bear to read about things that our ancestors brought their children to witness.[8] Maybe so. But the reflexive turn from horror that characterizes our time has a significant cost. The policy of using remote attacks to eliminate our enemies is one to which the public pays less and less attention. It is one thing to rely on remote drone attacks to meet a present emergency. It is something else altogether to turn them into the principal means of making war. My colleague Bruce Ackerman reminds us that the American Constitution ?expresses a profound opposition to the normalization of emergency powers.?[9] Similarly, a reasonable public ethic would not allow the normalization of targeted killing. What is normal becomes the background of everyday life?no longer worth paying attention to. I am not suggesting that America has no enemies in the post-Iraq world, or that killing enemy leaders can never be justified. My ethical worry is more practical: if the drone war slips from our consciousness, we will never get around to deciding whether to oppose it. ? This definition is from Nils Melzer, Targeted Killings in International Law 53 (2008). ? See Stephen L. Carter, The Violence of Peace: America?s Wars in the Age of Obama 1 (2011). ? See, for example, Thomas M. Nichols, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War (2008). In fairness, Nichols only proposes that preventive wars will be more frequent, both in the battle against terror and in the effort to keep governments from slaughtering their own citizens. The Libya War might meet the second description, at least if we take at face value the Obama Administration?s justification of the Libya War as protecting the people of that nation from a government assault that had not yet occurred. ? This analysis proceeds from an influential paper by Laurence R. Iannacone. See Laurence R. Iannacone, The Market for Martyrs, 2 Interdisc. J. Res. on Religion, no. 4, 2006. ? Still the most detailed and thoughtful analysis of the Fat Man problem is by Judith Thomson. See Judith Thomson, Self-Defense, 20 Phil. & Pub. Aff., no. 4, 1991, at 283-310. ? Another version of Fat Man is Innocent Baby: now your attacker is approaching you, meaning to shoot you dead, and is using a baby as a shield. The only way to stop him is to shoot him through the baby. ? Note that, for similar reasons, theories that rest on moral culpability would not justify shooting down an airliner carrying 100 innocent passengers and 3 hijackers, when the hijackers intend to fly into a building, killing everyone on board, and hundreds or thousands more on the ground. This is not to say that shooting the airline down cannot be justified; the calculus relies on a combination of consequentialist body-counting and double effect. ? See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton Univ. Press 2002). ? Bruce Ackerman, Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism 141 (2006). --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 08:45:33 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:45:33 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPAStrike Message-ID: <01F9B78A-BA7D-4ACF-8452-12D2BBC71615@infowarrior.org> January 18th is going to be amazing. Sites are striking in all different ways, but they are united by this: do the biggest thing you possibly can, and drive contacts to Congress. Put this on your site or automate it by putting this JS into your header, which will start the blackout at 8AM EST and end at 8PM EST. http://sopastrike.com/ Confirmed Participants: ? Reddit ? Mozilla ? Wikipedia ? Wordpress ? little-apps.org ? MoveOn ? Tucows ? cheezburger, Fail blog, Dailywh.at and more ? Good Old Games ? Good.is ? Twitpic ? Free Software Foundation ? Rage Maker ? Destructoid ? Red 5 ? Minecraft ? Good Old Games ? The Leaky Wiki ? Doxie Lovers Club ? TwitPic ? Free Press ? Mojang ? XDA-Developers ? A Softer World ? This Is Why I'm Broke ? Cake Wrecks ? vanillaforums.org ? stfuconservatives.net ? dotSUB --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 09:23:21 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:23:21 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DoD: transcript of *public* Guantanamo hearing 'top secret' Message-ID: <5E95F795-E26F-43E7-B728-2A057C4678B3@infowarrior.org> Alice-in-Wonderland? More like classification-by-convenience. -- rick DoD: Transcript of public Guantanamo hearing 'top secret' By JOSH GERSTEIN | 1/16/12 6:06 PM EST http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2012/01/dod-transcript-of-public-guantanamo-hearing-top-secret-110978.html Military officials have determined that official transcripts of military commissions held for key terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay must be treated as "top secret," even when members of the public, the press and victims' families have witnessed the entire proceeding, according to a recent legal filing. The military's stance on the issue has drawn a protest from defense lawyers, who contend the government is taking an Alice-in-Wonderland approach to classification, where information is simultaneously classified and unclassified. "The government is treating the entire proceeding as classified, while at the same time treating it as unclassified. It either is or is not classified, the government cannot have it both ways," defense lawyers for alleged U.S.S. Cole bombing conspirator Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri wrote in a motion seeking "a consistent, coherent policy concerning classification of court proceedings." The motion, posted here, was filed on Dec. 28 and recently released on the military commissions' website after a delay to permit, naturally, classification review. The dispute stems from a Nov. 9 hearing for Al-Nashiri, held at Guantanamo. Reporters and observers from non-governmental organizations watched the session from a sealed-off compartment near the back of the coutroom; they could see the proceedings through glass but heard audio on a 30-second delay. Other observers watched a similarly delayed closed-circuit audio and video feed sent to viewing sites at Ft. Meade, Md. and Norfolk, Va. The delay allows a "security officer" in the courtroom to cut off the feed if classified information is mentioned. However, no use of that feature was made during the Nov. 9 session. Nevertheless, the Office of Military Commissions told defense lawyers the official transcript must be considered not only "top secret," but "top secret/secure compartmented information" part of a highly-restricted "special access program" or "SAP"?all this for a transcript believed to be identical to one posted on the commissions' public website within a day or two after the hearing. When defense attorneys protested this arrangement, they received this e-mail reply from an official at the military commissions (the author's name was deleted from the copy made public): < - > Unfortunately for all HVD [high-value detainee] cases regardless if the 'button' was pushed, the audio and transcript are to be treated as SAP until the agencies have reviewed and approved the downgrading it. Recognizing the hardship in which is places [sic] on your office as well as all the teams on these cases we have attempted to find a way around it and have the audio treated as the appropriate level it was during court. That is not going to be an option. The agencies have stood firm on their decision that all HVD audio and transcripts will remain at the SAP level until they have reviewed the entire authenticated transcript. < - > With that being said, it must be reviewed in an approved SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] for SAP. The government's formal response to the defense motion was filed last week but has not yet been made public. The defense lawyers say that holding the hearing in public and then deeming the transcript classified suggests that "classification is a malleable concept waived by the prosecution at its whim when it wants pseudo-transparency." The defense motion indicates that the unofficial transcript was removed from the military commissions' public website at www.mc.mil, but, as of this writing, the document still appears to be there. It is different in one respect from virtually all other types of documents posted on the site: it bears no marking as classified or unclassified, perhaps to make it less awkward to declare some of the information classified after it has been disclosed. One tricky aspect of the current arrangement: the military commissions, which use the slogan "fairness, transparency, justice," have publicly pledged to make unofficial transcripts available within a day or two of open hearings. However, every word uttered by a high-value detainee is considered presumptively classified at a level more stringent than "top secret." As defense lawyers pointed out in their motion, Al-Nashiri spoke on a few occasions at the November hearing, but no effort was made to cut the audio feed of his comments (which seemed benign). The military judge overseeing Al-Nashiri's case, Army Col. James Pohl, is expected to take up the transcript issue during another hearing set to open on Tuesday at Guantanamo. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 09:31:31 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:31:31 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Cracking Open the Scientific Process Message-ID: <03774CDE-7326-4B2F-8AC5-7072E844CE07@infowarrior.org> Cracking Open the Scientific Process By THOMAS LIN http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/science/open-science-challenges-journal-tradition-with-web-collaboration.html The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others. For centuries, this is how science has operated ? through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only ?if you?re stuck with 17th-century technology.? Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for ?open science? say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction. Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers. On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower?s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks. And a social networking site called ResearchGate ? where scientists can answer one another?s questions, share papers and find collaborators ? is rapidly gaining popularity. Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, ?the scientific community itself is quite conservative,? said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as ?a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.? Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write ?Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,? agreed that scientists have been ?very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.? But he added that open science was coalescing into ?a bit of a movement.? On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, ?because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.? Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. ?Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,? he continued. ?We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.? Facebook for Scientists? ?I want to make science more open. I want to change this,? said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists. Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook. A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company. The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and ?like? and ?follow? buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions ? a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love. Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications ? data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a ?reputation score? to reward members for online contributions. ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its ?self-archiving repository.? Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases. In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site. Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate?s first investors, called it ?a great site for serious research and research collaboration,? adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated ?with pop culture and chit-chat.? Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the ?quintessential networking guy ? if there?s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.? The Paper Trade Dr. S?nke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on ?Science 2.0,? wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently ?a highly integrated and controlled process,? a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, ?if one does not get reputation and money from them?? Changing the status quo ? opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone ? is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap. ?I would love for it to be free,? said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but ?we have to cover the costs.? Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.) Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish ?startling and new? papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data ?to make sure they haven?t been manipulated.? Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees ? $5,000 and $1,350, respectively ? to defray their more modest expenses. The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers? rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data. In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, ?taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.? In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that ?professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.? And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen?s blog, ?Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry?s ability to recoup these investments.? Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals? plight. ?They have shareholders,? he said. ?They have to move the ship slowly.? Still, he added: ?Nature is not digging in. They know it?s happening. They?re preparing for it.? Science 2.0 Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. ?I got tired of giving free labor,? he said, to ?these very rich for-profit companies.? Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others? posts. ?We?re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,? he said. ?Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.? Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. ?Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,? he said. ?I believe in evolution. ?When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That?s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.? Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate?s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science. ?It?s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn?t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,? he said, adding that ?trillions? are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie. Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs. ?If you said years ago, ?One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,? they wouldn?t believe you,? he said. ?We?re just at the beginning. The change is coming.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 11:03:08 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:03:08 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CRS: NDAA creates ambiguity over detentions Message-ID: <7E5DDD2B-C894-4932-9FC2-857184DFC8F8@infowarrior.org> http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/01/detainee_policy.html Recent legislative action on military detention of suspected enemy combatants perpetuates an ambiguity in the law as to whether U.S. citizens may be so detained, a new report from the Congressional Research Service says. ?The circumstances in which a U.S. citizen or other person captured or arrested in the United States may be detained under the authority conferred by the AUMF [the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force] remains unsettled,? wrote CRS analyst Jennifer Elsea. ?The 2012 NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] does not disturb the state of the law in this regard.? ?Section 1021 [of the NDAA] does not attempt to clarify the circumstances in which a U.S. citizen, resident alien, or other person captured within the United States may be held as an enemy belligerent in the conflict with Al Qaeda. Consequently, if the executive branch decides to hold such a person under the detention authority affirmed in Section 1021, it is left to the courts to decide whether Congress meant to authorize such detention when it enacted the AUMF in 2001,? the CRS report said. See The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2012: Detainee Matters, January 11, 2012. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 11:41:21 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:41:21 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Heritage Foundation, Then and Now Message-ID: <61F8D897-CE98-402D-8108-71E09D9CA230@infowarrior.org> The Heritage Foundation, Then and Now By Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney and Winslow Wheeler http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/01/10/the-heritage-foundation-then-and-now/ (Disclosure: I know and/or am friends with the authors of this article) --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 15:20:56 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:20:56 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPA is baaack Message-ID: <02CE753F-5AF3-47D0-A4DD-617D919FED8C@infowarrior.org> First I got this: SOPA - House Oversight "Internet Expert" hearing postponed http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=1&extmode=view&extid=363 .... and then ten minutes later, someone else sends me this: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith just announced that the SOPA markup is expected to continue next month. http://torrentfreak.com/sopa-is-baaack-120117/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter One hopes the Internet experts indeed get their time to publicly testify in Issa's Committee before Lame-r Smith ignores them and does his own thing anyway in his own Committee. -- rick --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 17 16:45:27 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:45:27 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - MPAA: Internet Blackout is a PR Stunt, Users Are Corporate Pawns Message-ID: MPAA: Internet Blackout is a PR Stunt, Users Are Corporate Pawns ? Ernesto ? January 18, 2012 http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-internet-blackout-is-a-pr-stunt-users-are-corporate-pawns-120117/ It?s official. The MPAA went off the deep end. MPAA CEO Chris Dodd just called out Wikipedia, Reddit and all the other sites that plan to go dark tomorrow for misleading, abusing and punishing their users. Or should we say ?corporate pawns.? The MPAA would of course never put their business before the movie goers. Here?s the kettle calling? Full statement below (emphasis added.) ?- ?Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.? ?It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It?s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.? ?A so-called ?blackout? is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this ?blackout? to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 06:59:55 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:59:55 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - TSA apologizes to elderly women for strip search at JFK Message-ID: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/tsa-apologizes-elderly-women-strip-search-kennedy-airport-article-1.1007725?localLinksEnabled=false TSA apologizes to elderly women for strip search at Kennedy Airport By Rich Schapiro / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Published: Wednesday, January 18 2012, 4:00 AM In an about-face, the feds have admitted wrongdoing in the cases of two elderly women who say they were strip-searched at Kennedy Airport by overzealous screeners. Federal officials had initially insisted that all ?screening procedures were followed? after Ruth Sherman, 89, and Lenore Zimmerman, 85, went public with separate accounts of humiliating strip searches. But in a letter obtained by the Daily News, the Homeland Security Department acknowledges that screeners violated standard practice in their treatment of the ailing octogenarians last November. Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Betsy Markey concedes to state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) that Sherman was forced to show security agents her colostomy bag ? a violation of policy. ?It is not standard operating procedure for colostomy devices to be visually inspected, and [the Transportation Security Administration\] apologizes for this employee?s action,? Markey wrote. The letter says that Sherman, who uses a wheelchair, was escorted into a private area after she voluntarily lowered her pants to show screeners the device. In the private room, she was patted down and told to show agents the colostomy bag, the letter says. Markey still maintained that the Florida-based Sherman was never asked to remove her clothing. ?They asked me to pull my sweatpants down, and now they?re not telling you the truth,? Sherman fumed Monday. Markey also denied that Zimmerman had been strip-searched, but did apologize for the conduct of a TSA agent who violated policy by scanning the Long Island granny?s back brace. Zimmerman had told The News two female agents removed her clothes ? instead of just patting her down ? after she revealed that she was wearing a defibrillator. ?They?re lying,? said Zimmerman. ?I don?t have a problem with [screeners checking\] the back brace. I have a problem with being strip-searched.? Gianaris, who wrote to the TSA requesting a full investigation, said the feds? account is still full of holes. ?It?s obvious that something went wrong, so its nice to see the TSA admit that their procedures were violated,? Gianaris said, ?but they?re still falling short of admitting that these women?s dignity was violated by asking them to remove their clothes.? rschapiro at nydailynews.com --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 07:01:58 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:01:58 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPA protests shut down Web sites Message-ID: <456E03E9-90AD-4398-A61C-AD2E60259523@infowarrior.org> (Disclosure: My personal site is participating in this protest. -- rick) SOPA protests shut down Web sites By David A. Fahrenthold, Published: January 17 | Updated: Wednesday, January 18, 12:05 AM http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sopa-protests-to-shut-down-web-sites/2012/01/17/gIQA4WYl6P_print.html This is what happens when you make the Internet mad. On Wednesday, a group of technology companies is planning to stage an unusual form of protest: The firms are shutting down their own popular Web sites for a day to show their unhappiness with two Internet-regulation bills grinding through Congress. They argue that the bills would impose huge regulatory costs and stifle innovation on the Web. Around the country, Americans would wake up without some of the oddball essentials of online life. No Wikipedia. No Reddit, a compendium of links to stories and funny pictures that draws millions a day. And no I Can Has Cheezburger?, the world?s best-known collection of funny cat pictures. In Washington, however, the day has another significance. It culminates a surprising lobbying effort in which technology companies such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Google have used their massive reach into Americans? daily lives as a political weapon, to whip up support from online users. In this fight, they were pitted against traditional Washington heavyweights, such as Hollywood and the recording industry. And even before the LOLcats went on strike, it seemed as though the tech companies were winning. This fight is over two similar bills: the House?s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate?s Protect IP (intellectual property) Act. Both are meant to attack the problem of foreign Web sites that sell pirated or counterfeit goods. They would impose restrictions forcing U.S. companies to stop selling online ads to suspected pirates, processing payments for illegal online sales and refusing to list Web sites suspected of piracy in search-engine results. The idea is to cut off the channels that deliver American customers, and their money, to potential pirates. But tech companies see the laws as a dangerous overreach, objecting because, they say, the laws would add burdensome costs and new rules that would destroy the freewheeling soul of the Internet. ?The voice of the Internet community has been heard,? Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who sided with the tech companies, said in a statement. Issa said he had already been told of a victory: GOP leaders told him that the House would not vote on a version of the bill that those companies oppose. ?Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential.? The biggest impact of Wednesday?s blackout may be in the shutdown of the English-language version of Wikipedia, which gets 2.7 billion U.S. visitors per month. ?It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web,? said a statement signed by three of the free encyclopedia?s administrators, with the handles ?NuclearWarfare,? ?Risker? and ?Billinghurst.? They said the decision to shut down the English-language portion of the site, starting at midnight Eastern time, had been made after a virtual discussion that involved 1,800 users. But already, the momentum of the two controversial bills has been largely halted. Just weeks ago, they seemed on their way to passage, having cleared a Senate committee and garnered bipartisan support in the House. Now, there is a bipartisan retreat. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who co-sponsored an earlier version of the bill, has announced his opposition. Six Republicans on the same Senate committee ? all of whom voted for the bill before ? have written Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to ask that he slow the bill down, so it can be modified and considered later. ?We have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation,? the six wrote. They included Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the back offices of the Senate, many longtime aides were amazed at how quickly a new lobbying force had managed to outmaneuver experienced heavyweights. Sites such as Wikipedia and Tumblr had encouraged users to contact legislators, resulting in a flood of unhappy calls. One Republican aide said that ?SOPA? had already become ?a dirty word beyond anything you can imagine.? Both of the bills would allow the Justice Department to seek an injunction in court, barring U.S. sites from processing payments for a rogue Web site, selling it ads or listing its link among search-engine results. ?There?s no fundamental First Amendment right to engage in thievery. Nor to advertise thievery,? said Howard Gantman, at the Motion Picture Association of America. He said that the Internet?s free-for-all nature should not allow U.S. companies impunity to deal with crooks. ?Do we want to have laws?? Gantman said. ?Or do we want to just say it?s a free-for-all Wild West?? In addition to the costs, however, the tech companies say they would have to police vast sites full of user-generated content. They also objected to a provision that would have stripped the rogue sites out of the Internet?s virtual phone book. If a U.S. user entered the Web address, it would appear the site didn?t exist. That provision ?says that we?re no longer committed to the idea that there?s one Web. We?re no longer committed to the idea that any one person, anywhere in the world, can reach any one site anywhere else in the world,? said Sherwin Siy, of the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge. Over the weekend, the tech companies won a major victory. White House officials signaled concerns about the phone-book provision. The bill?s sponsors had already said they would remove it. But several companies say they still have significant problems with the bill. They say the bill spreads culpability too widely and could leave Web sites facing expensive legal fights for a single link to a site deemed to be ?rogue.? Instead, many companies have proposed an approach in which the Web sites could police themselves, overseen by an international nonprofit that tracks bad actors. ?This is an industry where you can start with a laptop and a good idea and make a billion-dollar company,? said Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit.com. Ohanian said that if the new bill adds potential legal liabilities, the result could be less innovation on the Web. Staff writers Paul Kane, Cecilia Kang, David Nakamura and Hayley Tsukayama contributed to this report. ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 07:14:30 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:14:30 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - A SOPA/PIPA Blackout Explainer Message-ID: <5E8558F9-1199-4C9C-9B2E-35EA58E90E70@infowarrior.org> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/websites-dark-in-revolt/ A SOPA/PIPA Blackout Explainer ? By David Kravets ? Email Author ? January 18, 2012 | ? 6:30 am | A message Tuesday on Wikipedia giving notice of its self-imposed censorship Wednesday Hundreds, if not thousands, of websites are expected to go dark or alter themselves Wednesday to protest proposed U.S. anti-piracy legislation that many believe goes too far fighting online copyright and trademark infringement. Josh Levy, campaign manager for Free Press, said in a Tuesday conference call supporting the protest that ?This is the biggest revolt we?ve seen online? against U.S. legislation. The websites are expected to participate in the protest against the Senate?s Protect IP Act and the House?s Stop Online Piracy Act. They include brand names like Wikipedia, Wired, BoingBoing and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to little-known sites likes political action committee DemocracyForAmerica. But what?s all the fuss about? Here?s an explainer of the basics of the bills, the protests and how you make your voice heard. What prompted the protest? *The expected protest comes despite the White House announcing Saturday it would not support the bills if they mandate changes to internet infrastructure, which was the most egregious provision in the measures that prompted the protests. Leaders in the House and Senate also buckled to widespread pressure and announced they would at least temporarily remove those DNS-redirecting requirements. That provision would have required ISPs to prevent Americans from visiting blacklisted sites by altering the system known as DNS that turns site names like Google.com into IP addresses such as 174.35.23.56. Instead, for the blacklisted sites, ISPs would have to lie to their customers and tell their browsers that the site doesn?t exist. Unfortunately, that has serious security implications and undermines government-led efforts to prevent hackers from hijacking the net?s naming system in order to scam users. Those sites would disappear in a process that security experts said would damage internet security. The SOPA and PIPA measures are now being reworked behind closed doors and are expected to exclude the DNS language. If DNS blacklisting is off the table, why the protest? While DNS blacklisting was the most egregious portion of the bill and a clear indicator that Congress didn?t know what it was doing, what?s left in the bills continue to have serious implications on the First Amendment and online freedom. The bills give the Justice Department the power to seek court orders requiring search engines like Google not to render search results for infringing websites. (The proposals are vague and broad when it comes to defining an infringing site.) The bills also allow the Justice Department to order internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T to block their users from visiting blacklisted sites. That would be unprecedented in the United States, though it?s a common tactic used in countries like Syria, Iran and China to clamp down on political dissent and adult content. The SOPA proposal bars the distribution of tools and services designed to get around such blacklists. The ban could arguably cover tools such as VPNs and Tor used by human rights groups, government officials and businesses to protect their communications and evade online spying and filtering. The proposals grant rights holders the ability to demand that judges order ad networks and financial institutions to refrain from doing business with sites right holders say are infringing. The measures also give out legal immunity to ad networks and financial institutions that choose, without a court order, to stop placing ads or processing transactions for websites they deem are dedicated to infringing activity. Copyright holders would face little penalty for filing takedown claims without doing due diligence or considering ?fair use,? encouraging even more abuse of copyright takedown lawsuits. Why are these bills on the table? They are in response to Big Content?s (.pdf) arguments that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every year due to pirate websites. These numbers are largely unsubstantiated and rest on the assumption that if a person had not gotten a copy of a movie online, they would have paid full price for a DVD or CD. On the other side, much of the tech world maintains that the open nature of the internet has created millions of jobs, that millions of people pay for content online and that copyright and trademark holders already have the legal tools to fight infringement. Does the government or Big Content have a history of abusing the takedown process? Unfortunately, copyright holders don?t always play fair. Universal Music already believes it does not have to consider fair use when sending YouTube a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The U.S. government has kept a website for a year before giving it back to a New York music blogger falsely accused of facilitating copyright infringement. What sites are targeted? The legislation for the most part is directed at foreign websites dedicated to infringing activities. Think the Pirate Bay, for one, which supports itself with advertising. Sites ending in .com, .org or .net generally are not targeted, but the government says it already has the power to seize and shut down sites on those top-level domains in a program known as ?Operation in Our Sites.? However, the orders to block infringing sites will go to U.S.-based search engines, ad networks, payment processors and ISPs. What?s the status of the bills? The House bill is expected to return next month to the Judiciary Committee for a vote or possibly more testimony. The Senate bill could either go back to committee or it could just be replaced and voted on by the full Senate. No announcement has been made. Who has sponsored these measures and who is against them? These measures are not a partisan issue. SOPA?s chief sponsor is Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the House Judiciary Committee chairman and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure?s biggest critics include Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-California) and Zoe Lofgren (D-California). David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 10:20:14 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:20:14 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - ProPublica: Where Do Your Members of Congress Stand on SOPA and PIPA? Message-ID: http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/ SOPA Opera Where Do Your Members of Congress Stand on SOPA and PIPA? By Dan Nguyen, ProPublica. Updated Jan. 18, 2012 Well-funded interests on either side of SOPA and PIPA are lining up support among members of Congress. This database keeps track of where members of Congress stand. Findings are based on two factors: whether a member is a sponsor of the proposed bills, and each member's voting record on the current bills' precursors and alternatives. Click the links on the left to filter the supporters list. http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 16:35:24 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:35:24 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - More Senators abandoning SOPA/PIPA Message-ID: January 18, 2012 Web Protests Piracy Bills, and Senators Change Course By JONATHAN WEISMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/web-protests-piracy-bill-and-2-key-senators-change-course.html WASHINGTON ? Online protests on Wednesday quickly cut into Congressional support for online antipiracy measures as lawmakers abandoned and rethought their backing for legislation that pitted new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests in Washington. A freshman senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, was first out of the starting gate Wednesday morning with his announcement that he would no longer back antipiracy legislation he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who heads the campaign operation for his party, quickly followed suit and urged Congress take more time to study the measure, which had been set for a test vote next week. By Wednesday afternoon, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah and one of the Senate bill?s original co-sponsors, called it ?simply not ready for prime time? and withdrew his support. Their decisions came after some Web pages were shut down Wednesday to protest two separate bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, written by Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, drafted by Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Protests organized in the real world drew far less attention. A rally convened in Midtown Manhattan outside the offices of Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who co-sponsored some of the proposed legislation, drew a few hundred protesters. Members of Congress, many of whom are grappling with the issues posed by the explosion in new media and social Web sites, appeared caught off guard by the enmity toward what had been a relatively obscure piece of legislation to many of them. The Internet sensibility of the Senate was represented a few years ago in remarks by the late Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, who called the Internet ?not a big truck? but a ?series of tubes? ? an observation enshrined in the Net Hall of Shame. In reaction to the pending legislation, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia went dark. Google?s home page had a black banner across its home page that led to pointed information blasting the bills. Such new-media lobbying was having an impact. ?As a senator from Florida, a state with a large presence of artists, creators and businesses connected to the creation of intellectual property, I have a strong interest in stopping online piracy that costs Florida jobs,? Mr. Rubio wrote on his Facebook page. ?However, we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.? Mr. Rubio has outsize influence for a junior senator entering his second year in Congress. He is considered a top contender for the vice presidential ticket of his party?s White House nominee this year, and is being groomed by the Republican leadership to be the face of his party with Hispanics and beyond. Mr. Cornyn posted on his Facebook page that it was ?better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong. Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the Internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time.? The moves on Capitol Hill came after the White House over the weekend also backed off the legislative effort. ?While we believe that online piracy by foreign Web sites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,? a White House official said. With the growing reservations, a bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy may be in serious trouble. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader and Democrat of Nevada, has scheduled a procedural vote on the Leahy version for early next week, but unless negotiators can alter it to satisfy the outraged online world, no one expects it to get 60 votes. ?I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor,? Mr. Rubio wrote. ?Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.? Indeed, a senior Senate Republican leadership aide said the Senate version of the bill was dead in its current form, and bipartisan negotiations had begun to revise it considerably. Senators from both parties want to address the Internet piracy issue, but they acknowledged that issues raised by Google and its online partners would have to be addressed. At issue is how the bills deal with ?DNS filtering.? Web site addresses are converted by the Internet?s domain name server system from typed words into computer language to bring a user to a specific Web site. The Congressional bills would allow the Justice Department to seek injunctions to prevent domestic Internet service providers from translating the names of suspected pirate sites; the legislation would also require search engines such as Google not to display suspected sites on search results. In effect, the bills would make search engines the enforcers of a law they oppose. Congressional negotiators are looking at radical revisions to the DNS provisions, but lawmakers may decide the resulting legislation is too neutered to pursue, aides from both parties say. Support for the legislation on Capitol Hill eroded throughout the day. Another Republican co-sponsor of the Senate bill, Roy Blunt of Missouri, withdrew his support in the early afternoon. Other senators who issued concerns about the legislation as written included Republican Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, had said on Tuesday that he would vote against the measure. Mr. DeMint called the proposed legislation ?misguided bills that will cause more harm than good.? ?In seeking to protect intellectual property rights, we must ensure that we do not undermine free speech, threaten economic growth, or impose burdensome regulations,? he said in a statement. The media industry has been pushing for a legislative response to online piracy for some time. Groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, as well as giants like News Corporation, are practiced at old-time lobbying ? hiring big-name Washington personalities like the former senator Christopher J. Dodd and salting campaign funds with contributions. Mr. Dodd, who is now chairman and chief executive of the motion picture association, forcefully denounced the shutdowns in a statement issued on Tuesday. ?Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging,? he said. In the Tea Party era of grass-roots muscle, though, the old school was taken to school, Congressional aides and media lobbyists agree. ?The problem for the content industry is they just don?t know how to mobilize people,? said John P. Feehery, a former Republican leadership aide and executive at the motion picture lobby. ?They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, has a tremendous reach. They can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before. ?This has been a real learning experience for the content world,? Mr. Feehery added. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 16:37:45 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:37:45 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SCOTUS Gives A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain Message-ID: Supreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain from the ridiculous dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120118/09090217454/supreme-court-chooses-sopapipa-protest-day-to-give-giant-middle-finger-to-public-domain.shtml We've been talking about the Golan case, and its possible impact on culture, for years. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's the third in a line of cases, starting with the Eldred case, to challenge aspects of copyright law as violating the First Amendment. The key point in the case was questioning whether or not the US could take works out of the public domain and put them under copyright. The US had argued it needed to do this under a trade agreement to make other countries respect our copyrights. Of course, for those who were making use of those public domain works, it sure seemed like a way to unfairly lock up works that belonged to the public. It was difficult to see how retroactively taking works out of the public domain could fit into the traditional contours of copyright law... but today, on the day of the big SOPA/PIPA protests... that's exactly what happened (pdf). < - > That the Supreme Court released this on the same day of widespread protests against overreaching copyright law is a bit of unfortunate irony. The truth is that Congress is the one who could fix this by actually fixing copyright law and making it clear that the Court's interpretation was wrong. But, instead, because Hollywood pays the bills, they only make copyright law worse. While it's easy to blame this ruling on the Supreme Court, it really implicates Congress. And, thus, it's actually depressingly fitting that this ruling came out today. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 16:39:36 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:39:36 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - A history of IP violence Message-ID: A history of IP violence: how SOPA's and PIPA's sponsors have waged war on the Internet By Sean Gallagher | Published about 4 hours ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/a-history-of-ip-violence-how-sopas-and-pipas-sponsors-have-waged-war-on-the-internet.ars Three members of Congress have played an outsized role in the advancement of copyright protection legislation over the past few years: Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI). And while the tech industry has certainly attempted to sway them with campaign support, the media industry has been even more generous in response to their efforts on behalf of big content. The two chief sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act, Smith and John Conyers Jr., are long-time fixtures on the House Judiciary Committee. Smith is chairman of that committee, and Conyers (the committee's ranking Democrat) held the chairmanship from 2006 until Smith assumed it in 2011. Leahy, the author of the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011" (PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA) serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is the second-most senior member of the Senate. Among them, the three have played a role in every piece of major intellectual property legislation for the past decade. While they've hardly been alone in their efforts on behalf of content creators, they've certainly been on point for them. Conyers has the longest track record, and was one of the 9 cosponsors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1997. In 2008, then-chairman Conyers was the House sponsor behind the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008, a bill that raised the penalties for sharing files of copyrighted materials?and was cosponsored by Smith. That bill was passed during the RIAA's civil suit campaign against file-sharers, and was introduced just after the trial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota mother who was fined $220,000?and in a later trial, that fine was raised to $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song. PRO-IP created the Intellectual Property Enforcement Division at the Department of Justice, and established coordination between agencies, including Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on crackdown efforts. Smith was a cosponsor of the failed 2010 Internet Investment, Innovation, and Competition Preservation Act, an effort to block the FCC from enacting any "net neutrality" regulations. Leahy has sponsored or cosponsored a number of efforts over the past five years to create greater intellectual property enforcement. The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Act of 2007, introduced in the House by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and by Leahy in the Senate, would have created an Intellectual Property Enforcement Network to coordinate US and overseas intellectual property enforcement task forces. There's good reason for their interest in protecting the interests of big content companies?big campaign donations. Leahy has received $371,806 in individual and political action committee contributions from the television, motion picture, and recording industries since 2007?Time Warner has written him $62,150 in checks alone, according to Open Secrets. Smith is a favorite contribution target of the television and cable industry, his top source of campaign contributions over the last two years, accounting for nearly 10 percent of his campaign warchest donations?$133,050 from 2009 to 2011. That's two times what computer and Internet companies contributed over that term. In the run-up to his reelection campaign this year, TV, music, and film companies have contributed another $88,800 to Smith through individual and political action committee contributions, with Clear Channel (Smith's biggest benefactor) leading the way at $23,000 total so far this election cycle. Conyers is also a darling of the media industry, with $84,000 in contributions from 2009 to 2010, and $21,000 so far toward his pending re-election campaign. The recording industry especially likes Conyers, having given him $135,000 over the course of his career in direct campaign contributions through individual and PAC donations. Right after the PRO-IP Act of 2008 passed, Disney, Time Warner, Sony, and Viacom wrote him checks (as did Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and Google), according to MapLight. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 16:40:56 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:40:56 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - MPAA is in stunning denial over SOPA blackout Message-ID: Denial: MPAA Pretends That No Big Sites Have Joined SOPA/PIPA Protests from the living-in-denial dept Living in what can only be described as pure denial, the MPAA announced today that the SOPA/PIPA protests "failed to enlist big sites." Honestly, there's really not much more to say about that. Google. Wikipedia. Facebook. Amazon. Craigslist. All participating. Let's just stare in wonder at the MPAA's hubris and ability to deny reality. (MPAA Tweet @ https://twitter.com/#!/MPAA/status/159498692963991552) http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120118/11484617455/denial-mpaa-pretends-that-no-big-sites-have-joined-sopapipa-protests.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 17:40:58 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:40:58 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Berkman Community Responds to SOPA/PIPA Message-ID: <43ADA1CC-E207-40B8-9A42-A9DDD2D00AD1@infowarrior.org> The Berkman Community Responds to SOPA/PIPA January 18, 2012 Today, many U.S. websites are participating in a blackout in order to express their opposition to pending U.S. legislation?House Bill 3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The Berkman Center for Internet & Society does not take an institutional position on matters of policy. However, it encourages its faculty, fellows, staff, and community members to express their viewpoints, and invites in-depth conversations on controversial issues. Our goals are to stimulate informed analysis and to catalyze the expression of diverse opinions. Consistent with this policy, the Berkman Center?s website is not dark today. Also consistent with that policy, many members of our community are contributing to the call for action, and others have written on this subject. You can find links to their public comments below. As well, the Berkman Center and our community aim to track the protest and enable others to participate in the dialogue. Blogs at law offers a facility for engagement by Harvard community members at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ and has a blackout plug-in available: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/blog/2012/01/18/site-blackout-plugin/. Berkman?s Herdict project is tracking today?s protests at: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/herdict/2012/01/17/herdict-tracks-jan-18-sopa-protests. --- Berkman Center co-founder and faculty director Jonathan Zittrain: Jonathan Zittrain, along with research assistants Kendra Albert and Alicia Solow-Niederman, wrote an analysis of SOPA that ?represents our notes as we sought to understand exactly what it does and how it does it ? along with our corresponding sense for why its principal mechanisms make for poor law.?: http://futureoftheinternet.org/reading-sopa Jonathan also visited the Colbert Report to speak on the issue: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/403466/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act---danny-goldberg---jonathan-zittrain Berkman Center faculty director John Palfrey: In December, John Palfrey published a blog post opposing the argument that research performed by Palfrey and collaborators supports the domain name system filtering mechanism mandated by SOPA: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2011/12/22/sopa-and-our-2010-circumvention-study/ Fellows Advisory Board Member Wendy Seltzer: http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2012/01/18/keep-copyright-balance-stop-sopa-and-pipa.html Fellows Advisory Board Member David Weinberger: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ Fellows Advisory Board Member Ethan Zuckerman, with Berkman affiliate Joichi Ito: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/01/15/mit-media-lab-opposes-sopa-pipa/ Faculty Fellow Sasha Costanza-Chock, with Chris Schweidler: http://t.co/U1tVS3LO and http://t.co/jckx9sgH Faculty Fellow danah boyd: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2012/01/17/stop-sopa.html Fellow Erin McKeown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da-XkA6746U Fellow Justin Reich: http://www.edtechresearcher.com/2012/01/my-anti-sopa-letter/ Fellow Andy Sellars: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1835604 Faculty Fellow Peter Suber: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L#109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L Faculty Associate Dan Gillmor: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/17/stop-sopa-or-web-will-go-dark Berkman Affiliate SJ Klein: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2012/01/18/preserving-internet-freedom-protesting-sopa-and-the-wikipedia-blackout/ Berkman Alum Rebecca MacKinnon: http://consentofthenetworked.com/2011/11/16/great-firewall-of-america/ Berkman Alum Doc Searls: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2012/01/18/no-2-sopa/ metaLAB (at) Harvard: http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/01/going-dark-sopa-wikipedia-and-expressive-absence/ Digital Public Library of America: http://dp.la/ Colleagues at Global Voices Online: http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2012/01/18/u-s-bills-could-threaten-the-global-internet/ Colleagues at the MIT Media Lab: http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/01/media-lab-is-against-sopa-and-pipa.html Colleagues at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 17:46:19 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:46:19 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Questioning online piracy 'statistics' Message-ID: Best evidence showing we need SOPA based on 'govt studies' that never existed Content pirates not nearly the profit-gutting force of nature lobbyists describe By Kevin Fogarty http://www.itworld.com/security/242587/best-evidence-showing-we-need-sopa-based-govt-studies-never-existed January 18, 2012, 5:21 PM ? No one disputes very seriously that there is a lot of content piracy going on, especially online. The hip-but-surprisingly hidebound music industry lost it's booty during the late '90s and early 00s after Napster, KaZaa, LimeWire, Morpheus and half a dozen other fixed and P2P ad hoc file-sharing networks turned music appreciation into an all-you-can eat buffet rather than the budget-busting one-course tapas restaurant it had been when music publishers controlled both price and distribution. The movie business didn't take quite as big a hit, mainly because its distribution people spent more time looking for new sources of revenue and venues for their products, rather than trying to hunt down every potential customer who'd ever used the product for free, as the music business' RIAA copyright-enforcement thugs did. The movie business never got in as much trouble as the music business, largely because it was able to find lots of other outlets through which to sell movies ? cable TV, Netflix and other online services, ISPs, hotel-TV-movie services, Blockbuster, Red Box, yada, yada. Still, the numbers quoted by both music and movie companies and their lobbyists are not only unrealistic, they're almost impossible, completely indefensible and based on three major government studies that may never have existed in the first place, according to Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the conservative Cato Institute, who has analyzed and written about the loss-estimates several times. For years the entertainment industry has cried poor mouth on the whole piracy issue by citing government studies estimating pirated content costs the U.S. between $200 billion and $250 billion per year in revenue and kills 750,000 jobs. Except, Sanchez found while trying to verify the numbers, the studies from which those numbers came can't be found even by the government agencies that first cited them and may never have existed at all. < -- > http://www.itworld.com/security/242587/best-evidence-showing-we-need-sopa-based-govt-studies-never-existed --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 18 19:15:11 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:15:11 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Very_OT=3A_Star_Wars_Characters_?= =?windows-1252?q?React_to_the_News_of_George_Lucas=92_Retirement?= Message-ID: <8A558D12-72CB-4BB0-9C47-465556BA5B9C@infowarrior.org> Star Wars Characters React to the News of George Lucas? Retirement Posted on January 19, 2012 by DeathstarPR http://deathstarpr.com/2012/01/star-wars-characters-react-to-the-news-of-george-lucas-retirement/ Sad news today, Sithizens. The great Maker himself, George Lucas, announced in an interview with the New York Times that he is retiring from blockbuster filmmaking and ?moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff?. Once he?s finished working on Red Tails and a possible fifth Indiana Jones film (yay?), Lucas will concentrate on making small, arthouse films. Whilst the news of Mr. Lucas? retirement will be treated with a myriad of reactions from tears to naked dancing around burning effigies, the PR team decided to ask the people whose opinions matter the most: George Lucas? creations, the characters of Star Wars. ?What do you think about the news that George Lucas is retiring?? Han Solo: I retired first. Darth Vader (Special Edition): NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Princess Leia: George Lucas. Years ago you made some great movies called Star Wars. Now I beg you to help me in the struggle against the bad taste left in people?s mouths by the prequel movies. I regret that I am unable to convey my request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack, and I?m afraid my mission to bring you to our galaxy has failed. I have placed information vital to the survival of the Star Wars legacy into the memory systems of this R2 unit. They?re scripts for Episodes VII-IX, starring me. This is our most desperate hour. Help me, George Lucas. You?re my only hope. Luke Skywalker: But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters! DSPR: Yes, we get that and it sounds incredibly important, but how do you feel about George Lucas? retirement? Luke Skywalker: But I was going into Tosche? DSPR: Just forget it. Obi-Wan Kenobi: I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of fans suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. Darth Maul: ? Lando Calrissian: Why, that slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler. He?s got a lot of guts retirin?, after what he pulled with those Blu-Ray changes. [feints, laughs] But seriously. C-3PO: Oh, dear! The possibility of Master Lucas actually retiring for good is approximately 3,720 to 1. R2-D2: Bleep bleep bloop boo doo bee bleep boop! Qui-Gon Jinn: Don?t centre on your anxieties, oh bearded one. Keep your concentration here and now, where it belongs. Be mindful of the living Force. Darth Vader: I find your lack of desire to make more blockbuster films disturbing. Jar Jar Binks: Mesa stepped in doo-doo! DSPR: How?d you get in here? Jar Jar Binks: Ex-squeeze me! Mesa tink dere be bombad trouble if? DSPR: For Force sake, somebody shoot him, please! [Laser fire] Emperor Palpatine: Good. Goooooooood. The hate towards your critics is swelling in you now. Take your enormous personal fortune. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with pointless new additions to the original trilogy. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant. Porkins: I?ll have five large Big Mac meals, 20 McNuggets? DSPR: No, this isn?t? Porkins: Four cheeseburgers, an entire roast lamb? DSPR: That?s not what? Porkins: Two four-litre tubs of chocolate ice cream with chocolate fudge? DSPR: Seriously, how did you ever even get into that X-Wing in the first place? Yoda: This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away? to the future, to the horizon. To special editions. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. CGI. Hmph. A Director craves not these things. Boba Fett: He?s no good to be retired. Admiral Ackbar: It?s a trap! DSPR: In what conceivable way could this possibly be a trap? Admiral Ackbar: It?s a trap! DSPR: You must have some pretty crippling anxiety issues, huh? Chewbacca: RRRRrrraaaAAARRrrrRRRlllLLLLggghhhhhh!!!! Haha. You said it, Chewbacca. ?RRRRrrraaaAAARRrrrRRRlllLLLLggghhhhhh!!!!? indeed. Whether you agree with the changes that George Lucas has made over the years to the original trilogy, or enjoyed the prequel trilogy or not, one thing is undeniable: we would not have had this world without George Lucas. So thank you, Mr. Lucas. ? DeathstarPR Copyright Robbie Boland 2011 From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 07:42:19 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:42:19 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Dodd's SOPA 'publicity stunt' comment disproved Message-ID: <546B9EB7-AEA6-4AAA-BB28-DD018EED343E@infowarrior.org> .... at least that's one way to look at this. -- rick 8 Million People Looked Up Their Elected Officials' Contact Info During Wikipedia Blackout from the 4.5-million-signed-google-petition dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120118/21231917462/8-million-people-looked-up-their-elected-officials-contact-info-during-wikipedia-blackout.shtml Think the blackouts were just a "publicity stunt" that didn't wake up the American people to a serious problem with the legislative process? Wikipedia has now revealed that an astounding eight million people used its tool to look up their elected officials' contact info. It's not yet clear how many actually called, but some information on calls is starting to come out, and it sure sounds like a lot of people called. We heard from multiple Senate staffers that the phones -- both in DC and back home in the district offices -- were ringing non-stop with complaints about the bill. Our own calling widget, care of Engine Advocacy, got a tremendous amount of usage -- including over 2,000 phone calls per minute at peak calling times. Meanwhile, Google's online petition scored 4.5 million signatures... and that's the number that was reported earlier in the day. I'm sure it was higher by the end of the day. Anyone think this isn't a mainstream issue yet? More importantly, can anyone explain why various Senators still want to move forward with this bill? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 12:44:24 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:44:24 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - From the "Didn't see that one coming" Dept.... Message-ID: <9B6C4657-4D40-4428-89B6-875F748633E6@infowarrior.org> (c/o TM) Pirate Bay put out a press release on SOPA/PIPA, pointing out that Hollywood was founded on piracy and, ironicly, are now the ones claiming that pirates are what's killing them. https://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 15:16:42 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:16:42 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - MegaUpload shut down by FBI Message-ID: <58C82D70-F83A-470D-87FF-D42D76BAB733@infowarrior.org> ? TECHNOLOGY ? JANUARY 19, 2012, 4:05 P.M. ET http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204616504577171060611948408.html#printMode FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy By DEVLIN BARRETT WASHINGTON?The Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down Thursday one of the world's most popular file-sharing websites, MegaUpload.com, and announced the arrest of four of the people behind it in a global crackdown against the suspected online pirates. The move came a day after Washington lawmakers were besieged by complaints about legislation designed to crack down on the online sharing of pirated copies of music, movies and other material, people familiar with the matter said. Investigators said there was no connection between arrests in their two-year investigation and the political firestorm that erupted this week over a pending vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act. MegaUpload Ltd., which is based in Hong Kong, is one of several popular online storage services. It lets individuals upload files?anything from a document to a digital movie?and provide Internet links that other individuals can use to download a copy. The site claims it has 50 million daily users. Lawyers for MegaUpload couldn't immediately be reached. Seven people have been charged with online piracy crimes in an indictment unsealed in northern Virginia. Four of those suspects are already in custody, authorities said. The MegaUpload.com website, which was available earlier Thursday, appeared to no longer be online later in the day. The four were arrested in New Zealand. Federal agents and other law enforcement agencies simultaneously moved to search bank records and server farms in multiple locations around the globe, authorities said. The charges include conspiracy to commit racketeering and criminal copyright infringement. MegaUpload.com is already engaged in a legal fight with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group over a promotional video featuring some UMG artists, including Kayne West, Mary J. Blige, Kim Kardashian and others. The site's chief executive has been reported to be music producer Swizz Beatz, whose real name is Kaseem Dean and who is the spouse of Alicia Keys. Mr. Dean wasn't named in the indictment. Rich Spears, an agent for Swizz Beatz, said he wasn't sure whether the musician is a MegaUpload executive and declined to comment further. On a "frequently asked questions'' section of the website, MegaUpload acknowledges that some have criticized its practices, but insists it is an above-board business. "The fact is that the vast majority of mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue,'' the website reads in part. The Justice Department paints a different picture. According to the indictment, MegaUpload is responsible for at least $500 million in losses for the owners of the copyrights in question. The indictment calls the company "a worldwide criminal organization whose members engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale.'' Investigators estimate that MegaUpload's piracy business has earned them more than $175 million, according to the indictment. Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett at wsj.com --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 15:19:51 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:19:51 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - A snapshot of our times Message-ID: <340DBD86-AD2F-402F-9C4C-4A7880AB9C28@infowarrior.org> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/police-overreach-in-the-name-of-fighting-terrorism/2012/01/17/gIQADluG9P_print.html . A snapshot of our times By George F. Will, Published: January 18 LOS ANGELES Shawn Nee, 35, works in television but hopes to publish a book of photographs. Shane Quentin, 31, repairs bicycles but enjoys photographing industrial scenes at night. The Los Angeles County Sheriff?s Department probably wishes that both would find other hobbies. Herewith a story of today?s inevitable friction between people exercising, and others protecting, freedom. When the Los Angeles Police Department developed a Suspicious Activity Report program, the federal government encouraged local law enforcement agencies to adopt its guidelines for gathering information ?that could indicate activity or intentions related to? terrorism. From the fact that terrorists might take pictures of potential infrastructure targets (?pre-operational surveillance?), it is a short slide down a slippery slope to the judgment that photography is a potential indicator of terrorism and hence photographers are suspect when taking pictures ?with no apparent aesthetic value? (words from the suspicious-activity guidelines). One reason law enforcement is such a demanding, and admirable, profession is that it requires constant exercises of good judgment in the application of general rules to ambiguous situations. Such judgment is not evenly distributed among America?s 800,000 law enforcement officials and was lacking among the sheriff?s deputies who saw Nee photographing controversial new subway turnstiles. (Subway officials, sadder but wiser about our fallen world, installed turnstiles after operating largely on an honor system regarding ticket purchases.) Deputies detained and searched Nee, asking if he was planning to sell the photos to al-Qaeda. Nee was wearing, in plain view, a device police sometimes use to make video and audio records of interactions with people, and when he told a deputy he was going to exercise his right to remain silent, the deputy said: ?You know, I?ll just submit your name to TLO (the Terrorism Liaison Officer program). Every time your driver?s license gets scanned, every time you take a plane, any time you go on any type of public transit system where they look at your identification, you?re going to be stopped. You will be detained. You?ll be searched. You will be on the FBI?s hit list.? Nee is not easily discouraged ? the first day he took photographs of street life, one of his subjects punched him ? and has a bantam rooster?s combativeness when it comes to exercising his rights. He exercised them again, successfully, when police told him to stop photographing during an incident while he was standing next to Shania Twain?s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Quentin, who finds aesthetic ? and occasional monetary ? value in photographs of industrial scenery at night, was equally persistent when deputies ordered him to stop taking pictures, lest they put his name on a troublesome FBI list. He was on a public sidewalk, using a large camera on a tripod, photographing an oil refinery at 1 a.m. He has a master?s degree in fine arts from the University of California at Irvine, so there. Quentin ? who in another incident was detained for 45 minutes in the back of a squad car ? and Nee are not the only photographers who have collided with law enforcement. In conjunction with a Long Beach Post story on distracted drivers, a photographer went to a busy intersection to take pictures of people texting and talking on hand-held phones while driving. A courthouse was in the background; deputies called it a ?critical facility,? so his picture-taking was ?suspicious activity.? He was given a pat-down search, and deputies demanded to see the pictures he had taken. On behalf of such photographers, Peter Bibring of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has filed a complaint alleging violations of the First Amendment (photography as an expressive activity; freedom of the press is constitutionally guaranteed) and Fourth Amendment (unreasonable searches of persons and their cameras). Bibring, not a stereotypical ACLU fire-breather, is sympathetic about the difficult decisions law enforcement officers must make concerning the shadowy threat of terrorism. ?Points of friction,? he says equably, ?are inevitable.? As are instances of government overreaching in the name of security. Most seasoned law enforcement professionals, however, have sufficient judgment to accommodate the fact that online opportunities for the dissemination of photographs mean lots of people can plausibly claim to be photojournalists. Furthermore, digital cameras ? your cellphone probably has one ? are so inexpensive and ubiquitous that photography has become a form of fidgeting: Facebook users upload 7.5 billion photos every month. This raises reasonable suspicions not of terrorism but of narcissism, which is a national problem but not for law enforcement. georgewill at washpost.com --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 20:02:52 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:02:52 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Anonymous downs MPAA, RIAA, FBI, DOJ, Universal sites Message-ID: <61736457-7C44-434C-82F1-D9EEE1D3528D@infowarrior.org> Anonymous downs government, music industry sites in largest attack ever Published: 20 January, 2012, 01:48 Edited: 20 January, 2012, 05:13 http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-doj-universal-sopa-235/ Hacktivists with the collective Anonymous are waging an attack on the website for the White House after successfully breaking the sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America. In response to today?s federal raid on the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers with the online collective Anonymous have broken the websites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America and Warner Music Group. ?It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org,? Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday afternoon. Only hours before the DoJ and Universal sites went down, news broke that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe. The latest of sites to fall is FBI.gov, which finally broke at around 7:40 pm EST Thursday evening. Less than an hour after the DoJ and Universal sites came down, the website for the RIAA, or Recording Industry Association of America, went offline as well. Shortly before 6 p.m EST, the government's Copyright.gov site went down as well. Thirty minutes later came the site for BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc, the licensing organization that represents some of the biggest names in music. Also on Thursday, MPAA.org returned an error as Anonymous hacktivists managed to bring down the website for the Motion Picture Association of America. The group, headed by former senator Chris Dodd, is an adamant supporter of both PIPA and SOPA legislation. Universal Music Group, or UMG, is the largest record company in the United States and under its umbrella are the labels Interscope-Geffen-A&M, the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group and Mercury Records. Brown adds that ?more is coming? and Anonymous-aligned hacktivists are pursuing a joint effort with others to ?damage campaign raising abilities of remaining Democrats who support SOPA.? Although many members of Congress have just this week changed their stance on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, the raid on Megaupload Thursday proved that the feds don?t need SOPA or its sister legislation, PIPA, in order to pose a blow to the Web. Brown adds that operatives involved in the project will use an ?experimental campaign? and search engine optimization techniques ?whereby to forever saddle some of these congressmen with their record on this issue.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 20:06:17 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:06:17 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - McConnell Calls for Senate Dems to Shelve PIPA Message-ID: <60CA11AE-FAA8-49F8-A8B4-ECF5B1E11377@infowarrior.org> Funny, if folks had just listened to the critics BEFORE the protest this week, it never would have come to this. Now almost everyone in DC is falling over themselves trying to distance themselves from SOPA/PIPA. Sen Pat Lame-Hy and Rep Lame-r Smith notwithstanding, of course. -- rick Jan 19 2012 http://mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=395c3114-a1a5-4550-9080-ed412caf547d&ContentType_id=c19bc7a5-2bb9-4a73-b2ab-3c1b5191a72b&Group_id=0fd6ddca-6a05-4b26-8710-a0b7b59a8f1f McConnell Calls for Senate Dems to Shelve PIPA, Study and Resolve ?Serious Issues? With the Bill Washington, D.C.? U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell issued the following statement Thursday encouraging the Democrat majority to set aside the PIPA legislation pending resolution of ?the serious issues? with the legislation: ?While we must combat the on-line theft of intellectual property, current proposals in Congress raise serious legal, policy and operational concerns. Rather than prematurely bringing the Protect IP Act to the Senate floor, we should first study and resolve the serious issues with this legislation. Considering this bill without first doing so could be counterproductive to achieving the shared goal of enacting appropriate and additional tools to combat the theft of intellectual property. I encourage the Senate Majority to reconsider its decision to proceed to this bill.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 19 20:13:55 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:13:55 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPA Getting a Face-Lift: How Evil Will It Be? Message-ID: <4A062155-5F78-48FD-8630-73DE18B18A92@infowarrior.org> Next post SOPA Getting a Face-Lift: How Evil Will It Be? ? By David Kravets ? Email Author ? January 19, 2012 | ? 7:12 pm | http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/sopa-watering-down/ The House version of the Stop Online Piracy Act, the proposed anti-piracy legislation that drew a planned and widespread internet revolt Wednesday, is likely to undergo a radical overhaul to muster passage. The measure, along with the Senate?s proposed Protect IP Act, faces an uncertain future given newfound widespread legislative opposition to the proposals in their current form. On Wednesday, as thousands of websites blacked themselves out or altered their appearance in protest, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the Senate and House began distancing themselves from the non-partisan bills they had once supported. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the House Judiciary Committee, which is headed by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chief SOPA sponsor. Committee spokesman Brett Bettesworth said in a telephone interview Thursday that, when Smith brings SOPA up for a vote next month, he will have removed the most controversial provision that prompted the backlash. And Smith will be open for even more amendments, he said. ?He realizes there is going to have to be a lot of changes because of the opposition there has been to it,? Bettesworth said. But it?s too soon to say what else might be amended in either SOPA or PIPA, given that the Senate and House must send the president the same versions. Yet the chorus of lawmakers who now say they oppose the measures have not publicly itemized their objections. Meanwhile, Senate Major Leader Harry Reid?s office did not respond to inquiries Thursday on whether the Nevada lawmaker next week would bring PIPA to a procedural floor vote, the first step toward breaking a rarely used hold on the measure imposed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). That would require 60 votes. Given the rapid backpedaling in D.C. in the last week, Reid ? a big supporter of the bill and a big recipient of donations from Hollywood, may no longer have the votes needed to overcome Wyden?s hold. Here are some of the remaining controversial provisions in both bills that could be up for amendment: *The bills give the Justice Department the power to seek court orders requiring search engines like Google not to render search results for infringing websites. Politco reports that removing that provision in PIPA is being discussed privately. *The bills also allow the Justice Department to order internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T to block their users from visiting blacklisted sites. That would be unprecedented in the United States, though it?s a common tactic used in countries like Syria, Iran and China to clamp down on political dissent and adult content. *The SOPA proposal bars the distribution of tools and services designed to get around such blacklists. The ban could arguably cover tools such as VPNs and Tor used by human rights groups, government officials and businesses to protect their communications and evade online spying and filtering. *The proposals grant rights holders the ability to demand that judges order ad networks and financial institutions to refrain from doing business with sites right holders say are infringing. *The measures also give out legal immunity to ad networks and financial institutions that choose, without a court order, to stop placing ads or processing transactions for websites they deem are dedicated to infringing activity. The key provision Smith is removing is one that had mandated DNS redirecting of websites deemed dedicated to infringing activity. That provision would have required ISPs to prevent Americans from visiting blacklisted sites by altering the system known as DNS that turns site names like Google.com into IP addresses such as 174.35.23.56. Instead, for the blacklisted sites, ISPs would have to lie to their customers and tell their browsers that the site doesn?t exist. Smith had already said he planned on dropping that part of the bill in response to security experts? concerns. The same provision in PIPA on the Senate side is also being removed, a promise the chief PIPA sponsor and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), made last week. However, Leahy has not said that the bill will go back to committee for further amendments and discussion, which leaves him the option of just amending it himself (a so-called manager?s amendment) and offering it up as the bill to be voted on. Complicating matters further, the Justice Department on Thursday seized the domains and bank accounts of Megaupload, a Hong Kong-based file sharing site, shutting down the site and arresting four of its executives overseas. T he men are accused of criminal conspiracy and copyright violations. The indictment of foreigners for violations of U.S. copyright law promptly led many SOPA critics to wonder why the government needs to mandate internet censorship, if criminal laws can already be used to go after alleged offenders. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 06:01:02 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:01:02 +0000 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Fw: Crack TSA staff, ever-vigilant, allow woman with loaded handgun to board plane Message-ID: <1985050740-1327060863-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-423011642-@b11.c17.bise6.blackberry> ------Original Message------ From: Rich Kulawiec To: Richard Forno Subject: Crack TSA staff, ever-vigilant, allow woman with loaded handgun to board plane Sent: Jan 19, 2012 22:21 http://www.wltz.com/story/16555301/woman-boards-plane-with-gun Good thing she wasn't armed with a cupcake. ---rsk Sent from my mobile. Please pardon typos and brevity. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 07:34:46 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:34:46 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - MPAA Uses Anon Attacks To Make Nonsensical Comments About Free Speech Message-ID: <1F73B222-391A-4949-BEC7-3A5BE784D43C@infowarrior.org> (I see MPAA and RIAA sites are back up this morning. Too bad. -- rick) MPAA Uses Anon Attacks To Make Nonsensical Comments About Free Speech from the a-protest-isn't-gov't-shut-down dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120119/17203417480/mpaa-uses-anon-attacks-to-make-nonsensical-comments-about-free-speech.shtml I'm really beginning to wonder about the MPAA's PR people and their near total inability to think through how their statements will be perceived. It's put out a response to the DDoS attacks from Anonymous by trying to "take back" the moral high ground on the free speech issue. Yes, they're claiming that the DDoS is a free speech violation and then wrap themselves in the First Amendment: --- Unfortunately, some groups believe that speech or ideas that they disagree with should be silenced. This could not be more wrong. No matter the point of view, everyone has a right to be heard. The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech. We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals. The Internet is home to creativity, innovation and free speech. We want to keep it that way. Protecting copyrights and protecting free speech go hand in hand." --- Ok. So then you condemn SOPA and PIPA, right? Since those are attempts to silence people. But here's the thing: "free speech" issues are about government censorship. Such as passing a bad law that allows the government to take down websites. Having some people protest you may be annoying, but it's not a free speech issue (other than, perhaps, in arguing the protesters' rights to free speech. Trying to regain the high ground on this issue is pretty transparently ridiculous by the MPAA -- and simply calls much more attention to who's actually trying to stifle free speech by passing bad laws that allow for censorship. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 07:45:54 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:45:54 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - AT&T Data Price Hike Makes Wi-Fi Look Rosy Message-ID: <0D0A03C6-AB52-4711-A3D6-FA4F376497ED@infowarrior.org> Jan 19, 2012 2:06pm AT&T Data Price Hike Makes Wi-Fi Look Rosy http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/att-data-price-hike-makes-wi-fi-look-rosy/ Data hogs who are considering purchasing a smartphone or tablet with an AT&T plan may want to act quickly, or find the nearest wireless spots. AT&T is raising the price of its wireless data plans and changing the data limits for new customers starting Sunday. The changes could add up to an extra $60 a year. AT&T announced that new smartphone customers would have a choice of three new monthly data plans: $20 for 300 megabytes,or $30 for 3 gigabytes. For $50, smartphone customers get 5 GB of data for tethering, or for sharing the Internet connection of another mobile device. While the company described the new plans as a ?great value,? Mike Gikas, Consumer Reports? electronics senior editor, said, ?giving you more data that you?re probably not going to use and charging you more is just a price hike.? New smartphone customers who want additional data will have to pay $10 per additional gigabyte on the 3 GB and 5 GB plans. New customers with the 300 MB plan can get an extra 300 MB for $20. Because data usage over Wi-Fi does not count against a customer?s monthly data usage, AT&T said it encouraged customers to keep their device?s Wi-Fi turned on. However, smartphone users who enable Wi-Fi on their phone may burn through battery power. Existing smartphone and tablet customers can choose to keep their current plans, which are $15 for 200 MB, $25 for 2GB and $45 for 4 GB, and also include tethering, according to Consumer Reports. Under the old $25 plan, AT&T charged an overage fee of $10 per GB, so the new $30 plan could save data hogs $5 per month, according to Time. The new tablet plans are $30 for 3 GB and $50 for 5 GB. ?Customers are using more data than ever before,? David Christopher, the chief marketing officer at AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said in a statement. ?Our new plans are driven by this increasing demand in a highly competitive environment, and continue to deliver a great value to customers, especially as we continue our 4G LTE deployment.? Most people do not come close to using 2 GB of data unless they constantly stream media, for example, by watching movies on their phones through Netflix or iTunes. When AT&T introduced its tiered pricing system in June 2010, it said that 2 GB satisfied 97 percent of its customers, Gizmodo reported. ?The magic number is usually 1 GB, which is probably why most people went for the 2 GB plan,? Gikas said. Those with unlimited data plans might still feel stifled if they?d been downloading and streaming an extremely large amount of data. AT&T announced in July that the top 5 percent of data users experienced slower speeds starting this past October. In July, competitor Verizon Wireless eliminated unlimited data plans for new smartphone customers and introduced plans of $30 for 2 GB, $50 for 5 GB or $80 for 10 gigabytes of monthly data usage. Verizon customers are charged $10 more for each additional GB. While AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have introduced tiered pricing for data plans, Sprint Nextel Corp., the country?s third-largest carrier, is the only one to still offer unlimited plans. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 07:51:17 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:51:17 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OpEd: Who Owns My Ticket? Message-ID: Who Owns My Ticket? By ALBERT A. FOER Washington http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/opinion/who-owns-my-ticket.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print AT this moment, all over the United States, consumers are buying tickets to games, concerts and other live events under the impression that they have the right to give away, donate or resell the tickets they purchase. They assume that they can do so whenever and with whomever they wish and (as long as they don?t violate the few remaining laws against scalping) at whatever price they choose. But those consumers may be mistaken. In recent years ticket sellers, along with promoters, producers, artists and sports teams, have increasingly taken a new approach to selling tickets. This approach, marketed in the name of innovation, convenience and protecting purchasers, restricts those fundamental freedoms long rightly taken for granted. The practice is so-called paperless ticketing: tickets are purchased by credit card, and to gain entry to an event, the buyer must present the same credit card and a photo ID. You cannot readily give your paperless concert ticket to a friend or sell it to a colleague or buy one for your grandchild to use. In no other format ? traditional paper ticket, printable e-ticket or digital ticket delivered on a smartphone ? are live-event tickets subject to such transfer restraints, and no product other than airline tickets (for which there is a security rationale) involves such restrictions. Ticketmaster, the dominant seller of live-event tickets, and to a lesser extent its much smaller competitor Veritix, both engage in this practice. Ticketmaster says its restrictions on the resale and ?gifting? of its paperless tickets act as safeguards against various practices: scalping; the bulk purchasing of tickets by automated software bots; and the use of counterfeit, stolen or lost tickets. But in reality, the restrictions represent an effort to control the secondary-ticketing market and stifle competition from independent resellers and resale marketplaces like StubHub, where tickets are often sold for less than face value. (The American Antitrust Institute, of which I am president, received a modest contribution, in the form of sponsorship of a conference last year, from an advocacy group financed in part by StubHub.) Paperless tickets bought through Ticketmaster may be resold, for example, only through its own resale Web site, which often prohibits sales below face value, sets maximum sale prices and charges a fee for transfers. The scope of the problem ? how many fans are affected, how much money is involved ? is difficult to quantify. Paperless tickets are estimated to represent only about 1 percent of the well over 100 million live-event tickets sold each year. But in the absence of strong consumer resistance, they are likely to become increasingly common. This week, the American Antitrust Institute is releasing a report on the paperless-ticket market by James D. Hurwitz, an institute fellow and former policy analyst at the Federal Trade Commission. The conclusion: restrictive paperless-ticket practices depart from bedrock market principles by unjustifiably limiting consumer choice and suppressing free competition. They also might violate federal and state antitrust and consumer-protection laws. And they may warrant legislation to protect the market and consumers. As it happens, a number of states are weighing ticket reforms. In 2010, New York became the first state to pass legislation to protect the right of consumers to transfer tickets to others as they see fit. Similar legislation has been introduced in Minnesota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, North Carolina, Florida and New Jersey. We urge reform of these ticketing practices. Specifically, we call on the Federal Trade Commission, along with state attorneys general, consumer-protection agencies and legislators, to investigate the growing threat of restrictive paperless-ticketing practices for live events. Perhaps the threat of an investigation will spur the industry to reform itself. These practices undermine a free, fair, informed and competitive market. Consumers should be enabled to transact with others. Albert A. Foer, a lawyer formerly with the Federal Trade Commission, is president of the American Antitrust Institute. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 07:53:59 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:53:59 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Dodd Calls for Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Meet Message-ID: January 19, 2012 Dodd Calls for Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Meet By MICHAEL CIEPLY and EDWARD WYATT http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/dodd-calls-for-hollywood-and-silicon-valley-to-meet.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print WASHINGTON ? When Jack Valenti walked the halls of Congress, friends by the dozen gripped, grinned and took note of what was worrying the movie industry?s dapper chief lobbyist. Christopher J. Dodd now fills Mr. Valenti?s shoes. But he stays out of those halls, thanks to restrictions on his ability to lobby Congress until 2013. It just cost him a big one. A major push by copyright holders ? including those in the Motion Picture Association of America, of which Mr. Dodd is chairman ? for a tough federal law to control foreign online piracy collapsed this week under stiff resistance from technology companies and their allies. On Wednesday, as Web sites expressed opposition to the legislation, important lawmakers withdrew their support, leaving Mr. Dodd and his associates scrambling to find what could be salvaged. In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise. Looming next Tuesday is a cloture vote scheduled in the Senate, which appears to promise the death of the legislation in its current form. ?The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,? said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington?s savviest players ? not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America ? signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd?s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism. ?This is altogether a new effect,? Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing ?an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically? in the last four decades, he added. That shift was exposed this week partly because Mr. Dodd found himself in a political knife fight while being forced to sheathe his most powerful weapon: 36 years of personal relationships with a Congress in which he had served as a representative and then senator since 1975, before joining the motion picture association last March. Under legislation passed in 2007, Mr. Dodd is barred from personally lobbying Congress for two years after leaving office. Hired as the consummate Washington insider to carry the film industry?s banner on crucial issues like piracy, Mr. Dodd ended up being more coach than player. He helped devise a strategy that called for his coalition to line up a strong array of legislative sponsors and supporters behind two similar laws ? the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and the Protect I.P. Act in the Senate ? and then to move them through the Congress quickly before possible opposition from tech companies could coalesce. But slow pacing gave the Internet and free speech advocates time to wake up and mobilize, turning what might have been a relatively simple exercise for Mr. Dodd and his allies into a bitter struggle. The delays violated a cardinal rule among professional lobbyists, who generally believe the worst enemy of a proposed law is the legislative clock. Mr. Dodd said that the entire industry was surprised by the intensity of the objections that arose in the last couple of weeks. ?This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,? he said. ?This thing was considered by many to be a slam dunk.? Data shows that copyright holders and supporters of the bills outspent opponents substantially in the early stages of the debate. But by many accounts the tech industry has stepped up its lobbying efforts in recent weeks. New spending reports expected shortly indicate whether the balance has shifted. The Senate vote on Tuesday will show whether opponents like Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, have succeeded in derailing that chamber?s version of the law. On Thursday, however, Mr. Dodd appeared to have all but thrown in the towel on the bills in their current form, and was talking about lessons learned. He acknowledged his side had committed a misstep by allowing Hollywood to become the face of laws that were intended to protect not just movies, but also more mundane products ? for instance, home smoke alarms ? that are frequently counterfeited abroad, sometimes with disastrous effects. ?In terms of public perception, I?m Exhibit A,? said Mr. Dodd, who spent last weekend hobnobbing with stars at the Golden Globes. ?This is seen as a red carpet business.? It was a further problem, he said, that Hollywood?s writers, directors, producers and blue-collar workers ? whose unions squarely backed the new law ? never personally campaigned in a way that might have helped to counter the Web assault. ?There?s a disconnect between the business interests and the politics of Hollywood,? Mr. Dodd said, meaning that the film industry and its denizens provided money for many campaigns, including those of Mr. Obama, without pushing its issues to the fore. Mr. Wyden said the public resistance confirmed his longstanding belief that the measures would become wildly unpopular once people saw their potential for censoring Web sites and unleashing litigation against entrepreneurs, both large and small. ?I will use every ounce of my strength to fight? to stop PIPA in next week?s procedural vote, said Mr. Wyden, who has been pushing what he said was a less intrusive alternative. The fight has been a challenge for Mr. Dodd in other ways as well. A silver-haired 67-year-old, Mr. Dodd risks looking like a scold in public appearances that find him lecturing opponents about damage to the economy, including some $58 billion in estimated annual losses to copyright thieves. In his office on Thursday, he pointed his finger while recalling how he had recently admonished high school-age students on a Massachusetts film set. The next time they are tempted to steal a film, he told them, think about the makeup artists and grips whose jobs are at stake. ?I think Chris Dodd has done a spectacular job,? said Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, who spoke by telephone on Thursday. ?He?s been unable to do direct lobbying, but as a strategist, he?s been superb,? said Mr. Gianopulos. Misinformation about the antipiracy bills had complicated a campaign that is not yet over, he said. While Mr. Dodd is barred from Congressional contact, he has had a free hand in lobbying the White House and federal agencies. On Saturday, however, the Obama administration dealt his efforts a blow by announcing publicly, in response to online petitions, that it had reservations about a provision in the proposed laws that called for blocking user access to offending sites. Mr. Dodd spoke with barely concealed anger at what he called a ?really gratuitous? statement delivered by what he had presumed was a sympathetic administration, which came after the blocking provisions had effectively been killed in Congress. The real message, said Mr. Dodd, may be that further change is in order for the motion picture association, which represents Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers. The group, he said, lost focus and energy after Mr. Valenti?s retirement in 2004. The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ?rethinking everything,? not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ?has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 15:05:32 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:05:32 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Reid postpones vote on anti-piracy bill Message-ID: Reid postpones vote on anti-piracy bill By JIM ABRAMS | Associated Press ? 4 hrs ago http://news.yahoo.com/reid-postpones-vote-anti-piracy-bill-144213479.html WASHINGTON (AP) ? Yielding to strong opposition from the high tech community, Senate and House leaders said Friday they will put off further action on legislation to combat online piracy. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a test vote set for Tuesday "in light of recent events." Those events included a petition drive by Google that attracted more than 7 million participants and a one-day blackout by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, quickly followed suit, saying consideration of a similar House bill would be postponed "until there is wider agreement on a solution." The Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act and the House's Stop Online Piracy Act have strong support from the entertainment industry and other businesses that lose billions of dollars annually to intellectual property theft and online sales of counterfeit products. But they also have strong opposition from Internet-related companies that argue the bill would lead to over-regulation and censorship of the Internet. Reid has also seen at least a half-dozen senators who sponsored the bill announce they now oppose it. Reid said counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars every year and "there is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved." He said he was optimistic about reaching a compromise in the coming weeks. The main Senate sponsor, Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he respected Reid's decision to postpone the vote but lamented the Senate's unwillingness to debate the bill. "The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem," he said. Criminals in China, Russia and other countries "who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided" it was not worth debating the bill. The two bills would allow the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. They would bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as credit card companies from doing business with an alleged violator. They also would forbid search engines from linking to such sites. The Tuesday vote was on whether to move the legislation to the Senate floor for debate. With the recent desertions and a statement Thursday by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that it is too early to consider the bill, it appeared supporters lacked the 60 votes needed to advance the measure. McConnell on Friday applauded Reid's decision, saying it would "prevent a counterproductive rush toward flawed legislation." In the House, Smith said he had "heard from the critics" and resolved that it was "clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products." Smith had planned on holding further committee votes on his bill next month. The bill's opponents were relieved it was put on hold. Markham Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, commended Congress for "recognizing the serious collateral damage this bill could inflict on the Internet." The group represents Internet and technology companies including Google, Yahoo! and Amazon.com. Erickson said they would work with Congress "to address the problem of piracy without compromising innovation and free expression." Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has joined Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in proposing an alternative anti-piracy bill, credited opponents with forcing lawmakers "to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation." But the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, warned that, "as a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves." The MPAA, which represents such companies as Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., is a leading advocate for the anti-piracy legislation. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 19:15:58 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:15:58 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut Message-ID: <4D13D1DF-DFCB-4B1D-9F2B-7A2F09AACC79@infowarrior.org> The crowd-sourced redo of Star Wars Episode is posted. Some very clever stuff, some fun stuff, some idiotic stuff, and worth a few minutes to surf through. A few "easter eggs" as well if you look carefully enough.....definitely a fun crowdsourced creation....was refreshing to see a lot of old-school make-believepretend used by folks in taking on their particular segments of the movie as well as some nifty high-tech stuff. Notable moments: the intro and first battle, approach/landing @ the Death Star, and the last battle that destroyed the Death Star. And yes, whomever produced the last scene in the Mos Eisely cantina got it right. :) Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut http://tamaleaver.posterous.com/star-wars-uncut-directors-cut --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 20:59:33 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:59:33 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Megaupload shutdown raises new Internet-sharing fears Message-ID: <8F00ED20-16B6-455A-82DA-02B3B952CED1@infowarrior.org> Megaupload shutdown raises new Internet-sharing fears By Cecilia Kang, Friday, January 20, 8:27 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/megaupload-shutdown-raises-new-internet-sharing-fears/2012/01/20/gIQATHRtEQ_print.html The Justice Department?s shutdown of the popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com reverberated across the Internet Friday, sparking fresh questions for major Web companies while rattling millions of users of sites like it. Although federal authorities said Megaupload.com was part of an international criminal ring, the practice of providing digital ?lockers? so people can store and share their photos, movies, songs and the rest of their digital lives is very common. Sites such as Facebook, Dropbox, YouTube and YouSendIt can be used to swap both legitimate and pirated content. Megaupload allegedly took the practice to a new level of criminality. Federal prosecutors said the firm paid users to upload illegal movies and music and tried to hide the practice. The investigators said its executives used their ill-gotten gain for a lavish lifestyle, adding that they confiscated dozens of luxury autos including a Rolls Royce with the plate ?GOD? owned by site founder who goes by the name Kim Dotcom. The indictment charged Megaupload?s executives of making $175 million from charging users subscription fees and advertisements, while robbing movie producers, authors, musicians and other copyright holders of about a half-billion dollars. A lawyer for Megaupload.com has denied that the company did anything wrong. But on Twitter, an account apparently run by the firm?s executives sent out a farewell tweet: ?Sorry guys, it was good while it lasted!? For other Web companies, the controversy may only be beginning. The FBI?s action raises a bevy of questions about who oversees copyright on the Web and how far the government can go. Web organizations questioned whether the government has the right to shut sites down for hosting pirated content, as it did in the case of Megaupload, without allowing companies to defend themselves in court first. ?They will wonder if they have done anything different from Megaupload, and does that mean the Feds will come through their door,? said Eric Goldman, a professor of intellectual property law at Santa Clara University. ?Keep in mind the DOJ?s indictment is actually a sales document; it is their interpretation of things and they are throwing spaghetti on the wall with their claims and seeing what will stick,? Goldman said. Many Web firms such as YouTube have pledged to respect copyright laws, but users still post pirated material on their sites, triggering legal battles between media companies and Silicon Valley. Even before it was shut down, Megaupload had its legal troubles. It was in a fight with Universal Music because celebrity artists such as Jamie Smith, Kanye West, P.Diddy and Will.i.am endorsed the Web site. Some of those musicians had close connections to a leader of Megaupload, Swizz Beatz, and his wife, Alicia Keys. Web companies are also tangling with powerful lobbyists who represent Hollywood and other traditional media companies. On Friday, lawmakers delayed action on legislation that would have given law enforcement more power to shut Web sites down, after leading Internet firms used their most prominent sites to protest the bills. But advocates for measures signaled that they were far from giving up on the fight. Former Connecticut senator Christopher J. Dodd, now head of the Motion Picture Association of America, made a candid rebuke of the lawmakers that his industry financially supports. ?Those who count on Hollywood for support need to understand this industry is watching very carefully,? Dodd said in a Fox News interview Friday. ?Don?t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don?t pay attention to me when my job is at risk.? While acknowledging the problem of pirated content, companies say that the ability to freely share ideas and content over the Web is critical for the future of the Internet. Some said that legitimate uses of locker sites and social networks will be disrupted as Washington clamps down on piracy. A question for ordinary users is what happens to their content if the authorities shut a site down. Charles Alexander, a digital music consultant in Nashville, said he regularly relies on similar storage services such as DropBox and YouSendIt to transfer music files between clients and customers. Last month, he sent a high-resolution music clip to a music director to use in an online soap-opera series. Too big to send via e-mail, Alexander has relied on cloud-based services ? sites that let users store information on the Web and access that content while on the go. He also regularly sends videos of his 8-year-old daughter to his mother in Malaysia through the locker services. ?The Web provides so many opportunities for discovery and sharing of music,? Alexander said. ?If the FBI can seize Megaupload they can seize any foreign-based service, and we have to be careful what kinds of information we are giving up.? ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 21:37:12 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:37:12 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SOPA Outcry: Patrick Leahy Still Doesn't Get It Message-ID: Patrick Leahy Still Doesn't Get It; Says Stopping PIPA Is A Victory For Thieves from the time-to-educate-yourself dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/12282417491/patrick-leahy-still-doesnt-get-it-says-that-protecting-free-speech-us-is-victory-china-russia.shtml In a petulant, angry and totally uninformed rant, Senator Patrick Leahy whines about the vast majority of the public speaking out against his terrible Hollywood protectionism bill that attacked free speech, the internet and online security. He does so by, yet again. making things up. Let's detail the problems with Leahy's statement: < -- > What's really troubling is that Leahy has yet to acknowledge the public speaking out. He has yet to acknowledge that there were very real concerns about free speech, about internet security and about collateral damage. He still wants to frame this as a Mom and Apple Pie discussion about American values... while ignoring what the American public actually has said. Now that's something to be frightened about. Either way, be clear on one thing: Leahy is not giving up, and it's very likely he'll be back with a new PIPA before long. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 21:39:01 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:39:01 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Dodd threatens politicians who don't support MPAA goals Message-ID: <0164A144-A5D0-4C02-9115-982E572B801E@infowarrior.org> MPAA Directly & Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren't Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought from the sickening dept Reinforcing the fact that Chris Dodd really does not get what's happening, and showing just how disgustingly corrupt the MPAA relationship is with politicians, Chris Dodd went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they'd better pass Hollywood's favorite legislation... or else: "Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake," This certainly follows what many people assumed was happening, and fits with the anonymous comments from studio execs that they will stop contributing to Obama, but to be so blatant about this kind of corruption and money-for-laws politics in the face of an extremely angry public is a really, really, really tone deaf response from Dodd. < - > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/14472117492/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 20 21:55:30 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:55:30 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Downloads of LOIC DoS Attack Tool Spike as Anonymous Inspires Online Protests Message-ID: Downloads of LOIC DoS Attack Tool Spike as Anonymous Inspires Online Protests By Mike Lennon on January 20, 2012 http://www.securityweek.com/downloads-loic-dos-attack-tool-spike-anonymous-inspires-online-protests As Anonymous initiated what it said will be the ?largest attack ever on government and music industry sites? in response to actions taken by the Justice Department against operators of file sharing site Megaupload.com, downloads of a popular DoS attack tool have spiked. While the Denial of Service tool known as the ?Low Orbit Ion Cannon? (LOIC) was developed by the ?good guys? to stress test websites, it has been a favorite tool of Anonymous to take its targets offline by sending a flood of TCP/UDP packets in an attempt to overwhelm a system and make it inaccessible. Interactions seen on Twitter and IRC, made it clear that the action against MegaUpload has sparked many more individuals to get involved in the online protests and download the LOIC to take part in the attacks. The chart below shows the number of LOIC downloads from Sourceforge so far for the monthly of January 2012. These figures do not include downloads from other sites and sharing, which increases the number even more. More background on the takedown of Megaupload.Com and the attacks can be found in our previous coverage here. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 21 10:39:21 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:39:21 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: CIA's "Facebook" Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs Message-ID: <8EC60480-E121-4D3E-842C-3E686AE01118@infowarrior.org> (c/o several folks) Couldn't resist ... CIA's "Facebook" Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ380SHZvYU --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 21 23:58:27 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:58:27 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files Message-ID: <86309840-0B29-4966-A708-B37065F451EB@infowarrior.org> http://www.truth-out.org/revealed-fbis-secretive-practice-blackballing-files/1326811421 Revealed: The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files Tuesday 17 January 2012 by: Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request? If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and "blackballed" the file, crucial information the FBI withholds from a requester when it issues a "no records" response. The FBI's practice of "blackballing" files has never been publicly disclosed before. With the exception of one open government expert, a half-dozen others contacted by Truthout said they were unfamiliar with the process of "blackballing" and had never heard of the term. Trevor Griffey learned about "blackballing" last year when he filed a FOIA/Privacy Act request with the FBI to determine whether Manning Marable, a Columbia University professor who founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, sought the FBI's files on Malcolm X under FOIA. At the time of his death last April, Marable had just finished writing an exhaustive biography on the late civil rights activist. Griffey filed the FOIA hoping he would receive records to assist him with research related to a long-term civil rights project he has been working on. In a letter the agency sent in response to his FOIA, the FBI told Griffey that it could not locate "main file records" on Marable responsive to his request. Last November, in response to a FOIA request Truthout filed with the FBI for a wide-range of documents on the Occupy Wall Street, the agency also said it was unable to "identify main file records responsive to [our] FOIA," despite the fact that internal FBI documents related to the protest movement had already been posted on the Internet. The FBI has been criticized in the past for responding to more than half of the FOIA requests the agency had received by claiming it could not locate responsive files. Griffey, who also teaches US history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is co-editor of the book, "Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action and the Construction Industry," was baffled. He found it difficult to believe that Marable would not have filed a FOIA for Malcolm X's FBI file. So, he sent an email to an FBI FOIA analyst asking for clarification. The FBI FOIA analyst responded to Griffey in an email, asking him to supply additional "keywords" to assist in a search of the agency's main file records for documents on Marable responsive to his FOIA request. The analyst then disclosed to Griffey, perhaps mistakenly, that a search for previous requests for records on Marable turned up a single file that was "blackballed" per the agency's "standard operating procedure." So last May, Griffey again turned to FOIA, this time to try and gain insight into the blackballing process. He filed a FOIA request with the FBI seeking a copy of the agency's standard operating procedure for "blackballing" files. Two months later, he received five pages from an untitled and undated PowerPoint presentation that outlined procedures for blackballing files from FOIA requests. The FBI cited three exemptions under the law to justify withholding a complete and unredacted copy of the PowerPoint: (b)(6) Personnel and medical files and similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. (b)(7) Records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information: C. Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy; E. Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law ... Griffey appealed the FBI's decision to withhold information contained in the PowerPoint under the (b)(7)(E) exemption, but it was denied. Still, the PowerPoint pages the FBI did turn over to Griffey provide insight into the "blackballing" process. On a page titled, "Blackball Files," it says files identified as 190 and 197 "main files," which are FBI classifications pertaining to FOIA/Privacy Act requests for files on people and civil litigation, are blackballed unless "specifically ask[ed] for" by the requester when an initial FOIA request is made. Moreover, the agency deems certain "control files," "separate files which relate to a specific matter and is used as an administrative means of managing, or 'controlling' a certain program or investigative matter," that pop up and are unresponsive to a FOIA to be ripe for blackballing. However, a FOIA analyst must first get permission from a supervisor before a "control file" can be blackballed. Finally, according to the PowerPoint, some files are automatically blackballed by an FBI FOIA analyst, but the public is not permitted to know the classification of files that fall into that category because the FBI redacted that part of the PowerPoint, claiming disclosure would reveal "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations and procedures." "Not only are we not told when the FBI withholds material from FOIA requests, but we are not even allowed to know all of the kinds of material it withholds," Griffey told Truthout. "The law itself and not just its enforcement, is now effectively secret." But Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, told Truthout in an interview that "blackballing" is not about secrecy nor is the process used in any way to conceal responsive records, which the Justice Department revealed it has been doing for more than two decades in certain cases. "Blackball is a term of art used by the [FBI's] FOIA section people in the records management division," he said. "It's an unfortunate term. It applies to people and events. It means that we pulled a file that initially looked responsive but after a review it turned out it wasn't because the file didn't match the requesters' specific request" for records. Carter sent Truthout an email that contained an explanation of the blackballing process as provided to him by Dennis Argall, the assistant section chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section, FBI's Records Management Division: "[B]lackball" is a term we typically use to describe a file (not a request) that initially looked responsive but upon review we find it's for a different guy or event. It can also be used to describe a file that we won't process because, i.e., a guy makes a request for his "FBI file" in 2005 and [we] process it for him. When he makes another request for his "FBI file" in 2011, we will only process his "records" but will not process the file that was created to respond to the 2005 FOIA request, which is 190 file series [the classification the FBI uses for files requested on people]. That's exactly how the FBI described the blackballing process to attorney Kel McClanahan, executive director of Arlington, Virginia-based National Security Counselors, a public interest law firm. McClanahan told Truthout in an email interview that he first learned about blackballing when the term was used in a set of FBI "processing notes" he requested from the agency to determine how FBI FOIA analysts had handled one of his FOIA requests. Although McClanahan believes there is "definitely a place for blackballing in the FOIA process" he said the way the FBI "does blackballing leaves a lot to be desired." "First of all, even though [the FBI] may blackball 50 records and release 3, they never tell the requester about the 50," McClanahan said, hitting on Griffey's main complaint about blackballing. "They never mention word one about 'and we found other records that we deemed non-responsive.' The requester is left to wonder why the FBI only found 3 records about the subject in question and he will never know that they found 50 others that they ultimately deemed non-responsive unless he has the foresight to FOIA the FBI's processing notes for his request. Knowledge like that is very important when a requester is trying to decide whether or not to tie up [the Justice Department's's Office of Information Policy] with an administrative appeal, let alone litigation." McClanahan said his concerns would largely be addressed if the FBI "only blackballed records for good reasons." "If I could trust the FBI only to blackball things that were clearly non-responsive, I don't need to know that they found completely unrelated records," he added. "However, that's not what the FBI does. I have seen it blackball records because they 'weren't FBI records,' even though they were in FBI files (they were FBI copies of other agencies' records, which any FOIA person worth his salt knows are still responsive to a FOIA request made to FBI). I've seen it blackball records because the request asked for 'internal FBI records' and the records in question were sent outside of the FBI, based on a strained interpretation of the word 'internal.'" The FBI will be forced to make a choice "if it wants to apply FOIA correctly," McClanahan said. "The agency can either limit its blackballing to records that nobody would think are responsive (e.g. different people with the same name, records outside a set time frame); or it can tell requesters in the administrative stage that it determined that certain records were non-responsive and why," he said. "Failing to do either, however, is bad FOIA." This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 22 00:00:36 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:00:36 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Sen. Ron Wyden explains opposition to pair of online piracy bills Message-ID: <4662EB91-0C52-48AB-9A3B-8B218D82586F@infowarrior.org> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sen-ron-wyden-explains-opposition-to-pair-of-online-piracy-bills/2012/01/17/gIQAG7sKHQ_print.html Sen. Ron Wyden explains opposition to pair of online piracy bills By Ezra Klein, Published: January 21 | Updated: Tuesday, January 17, 9:34 PM For much of past year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has fought a one-man battle to keep the Senate versions of the aggressive online-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA from moving through on a unanimous vote. Last week, as a major online mobilization loomed against the legislation, I spoke with Wyden about why he opposes the bills, where the process stands and his alternative. A lightly edited transcript follows: The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act are well known at this point, but your involvement began earlier, with the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The COICA bill, which was the predecessor in the Senate to the Protect IP Act, came out in September. It was by Chairman Pat Leahy, just as Protect IP is. We?re up against one of the most powerful, savvy and active of the traditional Washington lobbies. Their bill has cleared the committee unanimously twice. We said from the beginning there?s a lot on the Senate calender, these are complicated issues, and when this is front-and-center, there will be a tidal wave of opposition. And we?ve been proven right. And how did you slow the bill? I put a public hold on it. And I said from the beginning that first, there?s a problem here. There?s no question that people who sell fake Rolexes or tainted Viagra or movies they don?t own are bad actors. Second, there?s a straightforward solution, which is to cut off the money that gets people into piracy. But third, to solve this problem by doing damage to the Internet ? which has been a juggernaut for job growth and innovation and free speech ? is a mistake. So that was our argument: There?s a problem, there?s a remedy, but you don?t need a cluster bomb to solve it. What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs? PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the Internet. I recognize that you don?t have discussions about the domain name system at every coffee shop in America. But it?s essentially the directory to the net. If you didn?t have a universal naming system ? for my Senate site, wyden.senate.gov ? it would just be gibberish. What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can?t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address. Let?s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens? When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called ?DNS remedy? in the bill does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ?When people want to find EzraTube.com, don?t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.? People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast?s network. That?s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we?ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard. All of the important work on the net is built around the DNS system. As I understand it, these bills would move the burden of policing content to the Web sites themselves. Right now, YouTube, if alerted to pirated content, needs to get it down. Under SOPA and PIPA, YouTube would be responsible for making sure it never goes up in the first place, and liable if they missed a video. You are describing what I call the ?turn Web sites into Web cops? provision. It has raised concern about what this is going to mean for innovation. That?s one reason venture capital folks are speaking out. This also seems to favor the big rather than the small. YouTube has a legal department now, and Google?s resources are backing them. They could maybe survive this. A start-up competitor to YouTube couldn?t. You got it. That site won?t be funded. And it gets to the question of capitalistic approaches. Two people in a garage will have to become two people in a garage with a fleet of lawyers upstairs. The other side of this is private right of action, which will allow the big players you?re talking about to swamp Web sites with lawsuits. And where are these bills now? Chairman Leahy and the leading advocates of these bills have essentially accepted that these bills ? specifically PIPA, which has a vote scheduled for Jan. 24 ? contain essential flaws. My view is that we don?t know the details of these changes, so I believe the bill remains a clear threat to job growth, innovation and speech. So the position I?m taking is that for the Senate to vote on PIPA next week is premature and could do great damage to the prospect of reaching a real and enduring agreement that would combat copyright infringement without doing permanent harm to the Internet. Our alternative bill, OPEN, hasn?t even had a hearing. Tell me about your alternative. The heart of this is to move this out of the narrow, legalistic confines of the judicial system, where you have scores of judges issuing different opinions, and moving it to where it belongs, which is the International Trade Commission. These rogue, foreign Web sites are engaged in international commerce and essentially perpetrating an unfair trade practice. The ITC is set up to deal with these goods, and they have great expertise on intellectual property. And how does your bill handle things like the DNS systems and the search engines? They?re not in there! We make it possible to cut off the money to those who infringe on the rights of copyright holders, but we don?t use the Internet as the focus of enforcement in the bill. What I hope people see is that while this bill applies to foreign rogue Web sites, the enforcement machinery in PIPA is American companies, American Web sites. We don?t use that. We use the narrowly defined trade laws and laser in on the bad actors. ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 22 08:17:20 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:17:20 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH Petitioned to Investigate MPAA Bribery Message-ID: <659CF78C-91DC-4FCD-ADAC-49ADE46938F2@infowarrior.org> While House Petitioned to Investigate MPAA Bribery ? Ernesto ? January 22, 2012 http://torrentfreak.com/while-house-petitioned-to-investigate-mpaa-bribery-120122 The public has started a petition asking the White House to investigate comments made by MPAA CEO Chris Dodd a few days ago on Fox News. Closing a tumultuous week of wide protest against PIPA and SOPA ? two MPAA backed anti-piracy bills ? Dodd threatened to stop the cash-flow to politicians who dare to take a stand against pro-Hollywood legislation. Clear bribery, the petition claims, and already thousands agree. Responding to the mass protests against the PIPA and SOPA bills on Wednesday, the MPAA has revealed its true nature. First, MPAA CEO Chris Dodd described the blackouts of Wikipedia, Reddit and others as corporate PR stunts which manipulated and exploited the sites? users. ?Some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns,? Dodd said. Then, a few days later when many lawmakers had already dropped their support for the anti-piracy bills, the MPAA?s comments turned even more grim. Talking to Fox News, the MPAA?s boss threatened to stop contributing to politicians who don?t back legislation designed to protect Hollywood. ?Those who count on quote ?Hollywood? for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who?s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don?t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don?t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,? Dodd said. Although it?s no secret that the movie industry has a powerful lobby in Washington, explicitly admitting that bribery is one of the tactics the MPAA uses to have their way wasn?t well received by the public. A few hours ago a White house petition was started to investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for alleged bribery. ?This is an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the ?above the law? status people of Dodd?s position and wealth enjoy,? the petition reads. ?We demand justice. Investigate this blatant bribery and indict every person, especially government officials and lawmakers, who is involved.? In just a few hours the petition amassed more than 5,000 votes and this number is increasing rapidly. As a former Senator, Chris Dodd has many friends in Washington so it?s unclear whether the petition will accomplish anything, but if the numbers grow big enough the White House won?t be able to ignore it either. The MPAA?s response to the PIPA and SOPA opposition this week is a sign that they might be losing control in Washington. At the very least, they are starting to lose their patience and become frustrated, which may not help their cause at this point. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 22 08:33:59 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:33:59 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Megaupload Takedown: The Real Meaning Message-ID: <86D1DA54-3E39-4D8B-9D08-6BA6EC73BCE1@infowarrior.org> Megaupload Takedown: The Real Meaning Submitted by George Washington on 01/21/2012 14:28 -0500 http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/megaupload-takedown-real-meaning\ The Feds? takedown of Megaupload shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that SOPA, PIPA or any similar legislation is wholly unnecessary. As the Atlantic?s Dashiell Bennett correctly notes: The shutdown inadvertently proved that the U.S. government already has all the power it needs to take down its copyright villains, even those that aren?t based in the United States. No SOPA or PIPA required. Indeed, that might be why SOPA?s chief sponsor ? who said he?d still push SOPA even after Wednesday?s web blackout ? backed down right right after megaupload was taken down. (Granted, it could have also been because Anonymous? hacking spree showed that draconian legislation won?t stop techies, or because of increased political pressure from other areas.) WHY THE TAKE DOWN OF MEGAUPLOAD WAS WRONG.... < -- > --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 22 14:00:07 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:00:07 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Why_doesn=92t_Washington_underst?= =?windows-1252?q?and_the_Internet=3F?= Message-ID: <8BDE995B-AC66-4612-9C7E-B18A98699724@infowarrior.org> Why doesn?t Washington understand the Internet? By Rebecca MacKinnon, Published: January 20 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-doesnt-washington-understand-the-internet/2012/01/17/gIQAGPzWEQ_print.html In late 2010, on the eve of the Arab Spring uprisings, a Tunisian blogger asked Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah what democratic nations should do to help cyber?activists in the Middle East. Abdel Fattah, who had spent time in jail under Hosni Mubarak?s regime, argued that if Western democracies wanted to support the region?s Internet activists, they should put their own houses in order. He called on the world?s democracies to ?fight the troubling trends emerging in your own backyards? that ?give our own regimes great excuses for their own actions.? The ominous developments that Abdel Fattah warned about are on display in Washington today in the battle over two anti-piracy bills. This fight is just the latest example of how difficult it is for even an established democracy to protect both intellectual property and intellectual freedom on the Internet ? all while keeping people safe, too. It is a challenge that Congress has historically failed to meet. But Washington is waking up to the new reality: Politics as usual is not compatible with the Internet age, especially when it comes to laws and regulations governing the Web. And the Internet?s key players ? along with millions of passionate users who have tended to view Washington as disconnected from their lives ? are realizing that they can?t ignore what happens on Capitol Hill. Both sides must now face the long-simmering culture clash between Washington and the Internet, with implications that go far beyond a temporary Wikipedia blackout. Washington targets isolated, static problems. On the Web, everything is connected and changing quickly. Politicians started fighting over Internet policy in earnest in the mid-1990s, when the Web emerged as a serious platform for commerce as well as activities from pornography and crime to artistic expression and political activism. The first battles illustrated the perpetual problem with Internet laws: In seeking to protect people, they tend to be shortsighted and overly broad. To most critics, those were the main problems with the Senate anti-piracy bill known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which has been delayed pending changes, and the House measure, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which has been put on indefinite hold in the wake of a massive public outcry. Similar problems of scope and consequences trace back to the early days of Internet regulation. Take the bruising political battles over online pornography and indecency. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, making it a crime to ?transmit? indecent material to minors over the Internet. In 1997, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. According to Justice John Paul Stevens, the law threatened to ?torch a large segment of the Internet community? because its language was too vague and would infringe on the free speech rights of adults. In 1998, Congress tried again with the Child Online Protection Act, requiring all operators of commercial Internet services to restrict access by minors if their sites contained ?material harmful to minors? as defined by ?contemporary community standards.? The authors of the bill argued that the same legal logic that works in the physical world should work in the digital world and that protecting minors wouldn?t limit adults? free expression. A decade-long legal battle ensued. The law was never enforced because the Supreme Court found that its definitions and remedies were too broad to avoid stifling protected speech among adults on the Internet. The cost of getting the law wrong and failing to keep up with technological change is high. In 1986, at the dawn of the e-mail era and several years before the World Wide Web as we know it was invented, Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which allows law enforcement authorities to request the contents of anybody?s e-mail without any court order or warrant if the data is stored on the servers of a commercial third-party service for longer than 180 days. Why? Because back in 1986, long before the advent of Gmail, Hotmail and other Web-based services, let alone cloud computing, nobody imagined that people would want or need to store confidential information on remote servers for longer than that. Thus anything older than 180 days was considered abandoned. In an effort to update the law, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T and a number of other companies have teamed up with civil liberties groups to lobby Congress. They have been stymied by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about the political consequences of appearing soft on crime. Lobbyists exert huge influence in Washington. Major Internet players were late to the game. The fight this past week is a prime example of lobbying in action. According to the campaign finance research company MapLight, during the 2010 election cycle the 32 congressional sponsors of SOPA received nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the movie, music and TV entertainment industries, which support the bill, compared with slightly more than $500,000 in donations from the software and Internet industries, which oppose it. The Internet industry ? with its large percentage of start-ups and young businesses ? has been slow to lobby, but the big players, led by Google, are scrambling to catch up. Google spent nearly $6 million on lobbying in 2011, according to Opensecrets.org. It threw a lavish holiday party for congressional staffers in December. Facebook has beefed up its Washington office from next to nothing in 2010. And Twitter hired a former congressional staffer to set up the company?s office here this past year. But as Alexis Ohanian of Reddit said this past week: ?We spend our money innovating, not lobbying.? That hands-off attitude is partly responsible for SOPA and PIPA. For years, members of Congress have heard from constituents who want them to protect the nation from crime, terrorism and intellectual property violation. They have not faced equally robust demands that online rights and freedoms be preserved. Congress may not get the Internet, but the Internet doesn?t get Congress, either. More than a decade ago, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig wrote a book about how computer code acts as a kind of law, in that it shapes what people can and cannot do in their digital lives. And, as our digital lives become increasingly intertwined with the physical, it shapes our freedoms as well. The faith that brilliant and fast-moving feats of engineering and computer code will ultimately triumph over Washington?s legal code is one of many reasons most people in Silicon Valley have been inclined to focus on technical solutions to problems, rather than spending their time and money on politics. Internet companies created the social-media tools that fueled the tea party and Occupy Wall Street insurgencies, and that have helped political candidates rally grass-roots support. Yet before this past week, those companies had not really tapped the power of their own tools to lobby against legislation that runs counter to their interests. Wednesday?s Internet ?strike? changed that, allowing Web firms to show political muscle in ways that the entertainment industry cannot easily duplicate. To stay safe in real life, we give up some liberty. Online, we?re not ready to sacrifice freedoms. In 1996, Grateful Dead lyricist and Internet activist John Perry Barlow wrote ?A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.? ?Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace,? he wrote. ?On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.? In the 16 years since, the government has certainly not left cyberspace alone ? because many of ?us? have sought its protection from the criminals, pedophiles, bullies, industrial spies, racists, terrorists and others who have invaded the Internet. Most of us do want the government, which shapes legal code, and the companies, which shape computer code, to defend us against attack and theft: We pay them to do so by giving up a little of our freedom and giving them our taxes, subscription dollars and mouse clicks. However, the lawmaking norm leans more toward eliminating rather than managing threats online, be they cyber-attacks or intellectual property theft. It has somehow become acceptable to pass laws that presume Internet users are guilty until proven innocent. The Patriot Act and other legislation enable government agents to access a vast range of U.S. citizens? private digital communications without a warrant ? or even a suspicion that a specific individual may be involved in a crime, as the law requires for most physical searches. SOPA also erred on the side of eliminating threats. To protect intellectual property, the law sought to make Web sites liable for their users? activities. This would mean sites would have to monitor all users and block any transmissions or postings that could possibly result in a copyright violation charge. Washington is driven by geography. The Internet is global. Cyberspace, as Justice Stevens pointed out in his 1997 opinion striking down the Communications Decency Act, is a ?unique medium .?.?. located in no particular geographical location but available to anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to the Internet.? Thus a congressman from Iowa can vote ?yea? on a bill that ends up affecting Internet users in Bahrain, who have no way of holding him accountable. That is in part because many globally popular online platforms are headquartered in the United States. Moreover, Web services based outside the country that want to be accessible to American users must also comply with U.S. legislation, affecting their users everywhere else. In addition, governments around the world tend to copy regulations and laws enacted in North America and Europe, particularly when they provide an opportunity to exercise government power through the Internet. In Tunisia, where a new democracy is striving to take root after toppling a dictator one year ago, Islamists and other conservatives point to laws recently passed or proposed in Western democratic countries as evidence that they are in the global mainstream as they seek to reinstate censorship. For these reasons, activists around the world had good reason to worry that an anti-piracy bill such as SOPA would force overseas Web sites, if they want American audiences, to set up monitoring and censorship mechanisms. Once in place, these would give governments a new set of excuses to demand user information and removal of content. For neither the first time nor the last time, Washington is trying to wield power over the Internet in a manner that many Americans believe lacks the consent of the governed, let alone the consent of the networked. After Wednesday?s protests, the anti-piracy bills are effectively dead or indefinitely delayed. But that doesn?t mean the revolution has succeeded. The computer coding pros ? and the millions who depend on their products ? have said ?no? to legal code they hate. But killing a bad bill is only the first step. The next and more vital step is political innovation. Without a major upgrade, this political system will keep on producing legal code that is Internet-incompatible. consentofthenetworked at gmail.com Rebecca MacKinnon is the author of the forthcoming ?Consent of the Networked:The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom? and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Follow her on Twitter @rmack. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 22 19:23:35 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:23:35 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests Message-ID: <7B24D794-9967-4298-A31D-D3A8E6ACC627@infowarrior.org> Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests ? enigmax ? January 23, 2012 http://torrentfreak.com/filesonic-kills-file-sharing-after-megaupload-arrests-120122/ Filesonic, one of the Internet?s leading cyberlocker services, has taken some drastic measures following the Megaupload shutdown and arrests last week. In addition to discontinuing its affiliates rewards program and not yet paying accrued money to members, the site has disabled all sharing functionality, leaving users only with access to their own files. To users of systems like BitTorrent, file-sharing means just that ? the sharing of files with others. But this weekend users of Filesonic, one of the Internet?s leading cyberlocker services, sharing files is currently a thing of the past. According to a shock announcement by the site, all file-sharing functionality has now been disabled, leaving current users only with access to files that they have personally uploaded. Many hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of links all around the web have now been rendered useless, at least temporarily. But the bad news for the site?s users doesn?t end there. In the last few hours, before file-sharing was disabled, Filesonic also ended its rewards program, meaning that uploaders to the site no longer earn money when people download their files. A moot point perhaps, since no-one will be downloading files anyway. However, there is the matter of what will happen to the reward money that was sitting in uploader?s accounts before the rewards program was discontinued. Will it be paid out, or will it simply disappear? Many users fear the latter. This combination of news all adds up to a pretty big deal. Filesonic isn?t just some also-ran in the world of cyberlockers. The site is among the top 10 file-sharing sites on the Internet, with a quarter billion page views a month. While there has been no official explanation from the site as to why the above actions were taken, all eyes are turned towards events of the last week ? the closure of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team. Like Megaupload, Filesonic appears to based in Hong Kong and it?s clear that the authorities there already worked with the US government to shut down Kim Dotcom?s operations and seize his assets there. Filesonic is also believed to have some US-based servers. In December, Filesonic announced it had partnered with Vobile, a provider of content identification services. All uploads to the service were said to be being checked for copyright infringement before users were able to share them publicly, although it is unclear if this system was ever implemented by the site. The events of the last week have turned the cyberlocker world upside down and there is quite literally panic among users and site operators. Stay tuned for our detailed report tomorrow ? the Megaupload takedown appears to be a game-changer. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Jan 22 20:38:15 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:38:15 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Do Drones Undermine Democracy? Message-ID: <4E4E9A87-DD05-40E1-BE0C-1988CC95ED8B@infowarrior.org> January 21, 2012 Do Drones Undermine Democracy? By PETER W. SINGER http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/sunday/do-drones-undermine-democracy.html IN democracies like ours, there have always been deep bonds between the public and its wars. Citizens have historically participated in decisions to take military action, through their elected representatives, helping to ensure broad support for wars and a willingness to share the costs, both human and economic, of enduring them. In America, our Constitution explicitly divided the president?s role as commander in chief in war from Congress?s role in declaring war. Yet these links and this division of labor are now under siege as a result of a technology that our founding fathers never could have imagined. Just 10 years ago, the idea of using armed robots in war was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. Today, the United States military has more than 7,000 unmanned aerial systems, popularly called drones. There are 12,000 more on the ground. Last year, they carried out hundreds of strikes ? both covert and overt ? in six countries, transforming the way our democracy deliberates and engages in what we used to think of as war. We don?t have a draft anymore; less than 0.5 percent of Americans over 18 serve in the active-duty military. We do not declare war anymore; the last time Congress actually did so was in 1942 ? against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. We don?t buy war bonds or pay war taxes anymore. During World War II, 85 million Americans purchased war bonds that brought the government $185 billion; in the last decade, we bought none and instead gave the richest 5 percent of Americans a tax break. And now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don?t have to send someone?s son or daughter into harm?s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter ? and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media ? they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way. For the first 200 years of American democracy, engaging in combat and bearing risk ? both personal and political ? went hand in hand. In the age of drones, that is no longer the case. Today?s unmanned systems are only the beginning. The original Predator, which went into service in 1995, lacked even GPS and was initially unarmed; newer models can take off and land on their own, and carry smart sensors that can detect a disruption in the dirt a mile below the plane and trace footprints back to an enemy hide-out. There is not a single new manned combat aircraft under research and development at any major Western aerospace company, and the Air Force is training more operators of unmanned aerial systems than fighter and bomber pilots combined. In 2011, unmanned systems carried out strikes from Afghanistan to Yemen. The most notable of these continuing operations is the not-so-covert war in Pakistan, where the United States has carried out more than 300 drone strikes since 2004. Yet this operation has never been debated in Congress; more than seven years after it began, there has not even been a single vote for or against it. This campaign is not carried out by the Air Force; it is being conducted by the C.I.A. This shift affects everything from the strategy that guides it to the individuals who oversee it (civilian political appointees) and the lawyers who advise them (civilians rather than military officers). It also affects how we and our politicians view such operations. President Obama?s decision to send a small, brave Navy Seal team into Pakistan for 40 minutes was described by one of his advisers as ?the gutsiest call of any president in recent history.? Yet few even talk about the decision to carry out more than 300 drone strikes in the very same country. I do not condemn these strikes; I support most of them. What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war. THE change is not limited to covert action. Last spring, America launched airstrikes on Libya as part of a NATO operation to prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi?s government from massacring civilians. In late March, the White House announced that the American military was handing over combat operations to its European partners and would thereafter play only a supporting role. The distinction was crucial. The operation?s goals quickly evolved from a limited humanitarian intervention into an air war supporting local insurgents? efforts at regime change. But it had limited public support and no Congressional approval. When the administration was asked to explain why continuing military action would not be a violation of the War Powers Resolution ? a Vietnam-era law that requires notifying Congress of military operations within 48 hours and getting its authorization after 60 days ? the White House argued that American operations did not ?involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof.? But they did involve something we used to think of as war: blowing up stuff, lots of it. Starting on April 23, American unmanned systems were deployed over Libya. For the next six months, they carried out at least 146 strikes on their own. They also identified and pinpointed the targets for most of NATO?s manned strike jets. This unmanned operation lasted well past the 60-day deadline of the War Powers Resolution, extending to the very last airstrike that hit Colonel Qaddafi?s convoy on Oct. 20 and led to his death. Choosing to make the operation unmanned proved critical to initiating it without Congressional authorization and continuing it with minimal public support. On June 21, when NATO?s air war was lagging, an American Navy helicopter was shot down by pro-Qaddafi forces. This previously would have been a disaster, with the risk of an American aircrew being captured or even killed. But the downed helicopter was an unmanned Fire Scout, and the story didn?t even make the newspapers the next day. Congress has not disappeared from all decisions about war, just the ones that matter. The same week that American drones were carrying out their 145th unauthorized airstrike in Libya, the president notified Congress that he had deployed 100 Special Operations troops to a different part of Africa. This small unit was sent to train and advise Ugandan forces battling the cultish Lord?s Resistance Army and was explicitly ordered not to engage in combat. Congress applauded the president for notifying it about this small noncombat mission but did nothing about having its laws ignored in the much larger combat operation in Libya. We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war. And like it or not, the new standard we?ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm?s way ? not for those that involve waging war by other means. WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution?s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House. Unmanned operations are not ?costless,? as they are too often described in the news media and government deliberations. Even worthy actions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was drawn into terrorism by the very Predator strikes in Pakistan meant to stop terrorism. Similarly, C.I.A. drone strikes outside of declared war zones are setting a troubling precedent that we might not want to see followed by the close to 50 other nations that now possess the same unmanned technology ? including China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran. A deep deliberation on war was something the framers of the Constitution sought to build into our system. Yet on Tuesday, when President Obama talks about his wartime accomplishments during the State of the Union address, Congress will have to admit that its role has been reduced to the same part it plays during the president?s big speech. These days, when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home. Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, ?So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?? America?s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone. In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us. Peter W. Singer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and author of ?Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 08:50:39 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:50:39 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - If the feds can shut down Megaupload, why do we need SOPA? Message-ID: If the feds can shut down Megaupload, why do we need SOPA? By Timothy B. Lee | Published about 3 hours ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/if-the-feds-can-shut-down-megaupload-why-do-they-need-sopa.ars For more than a year, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have argued that existing laws were insufficient to deal with the problem of "rogue sites" hosted overseas. They've been pushing bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act as essential weapons in the fight. But evidently, American law enforcement didn't get the memo that they were powerless against overseas file-sharing services. The day after the Internet's historic protest of SOPA and PIPA last week, the United States government unsealed an indictment against the people behind Megaupload, one of the largest sites on the Internet. Four senior Megaupload officials were arrested in New Zealand on Thursday, and officials seized millions of dollars in assets. As we reported Thursday, the FBI worked with authorities from New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, the UK, and the Phillipines to catch the defendants and seize their assets. Law enforcement officials froze accounts at banks based in Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Phillipines, and Germany. The feds also seized numerous servers, cars, pieces of artwork, televisions, and other assets. The list of seized assets in the indictment was six pages long. So if the US government already has the power to arrest people and seize assets in places as far away as Germany, New Zealand, and the Philippines, are the new enforcement powers sought by content companies even necessary? We posed that question to two people on opposite sides of the SOPA debate. Cara Duckworth is a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America. And Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an occasional contributor to Ars Technica. Beyond domain seizures Duckworth told Ars that "under the 2008 PRO IP law, the federal government has the authority to shut down US-registered sites that are overwhelmingly dedicated to piracy?sites with a .com or .org domain. So Megaupload.com falls within US jurisdiction." She argued that new laws are needed to deal with sites at domain names not under US control, such as .hk or .ru. But Sanchez argued that the seizure of the megaupload.com domain was a fairly minor part of the government's offensive against Megaupload. "If you're really interested in shutting down an illegal enterprise that is located overseas, shutting down one domain or another is a lot less effective than getting your hands on the people and subjecting them to penalties or jail," he said. By itself, seizing megaupload.com would have simply caused the site to move to megaupload.tv or megaupload.ru, he said. It was the government's ability to lock up Kim Dotcom and his lieutenants, and to take their servers and freeze their bank accounts, that took the site down for good. We pressed Duckworth on this point, and she suggested that the Megaupload operation may not work as a good model for counter-piracy operations in general. "Law enforcement cooperation for US criminal investigations may not go as far in certain countries such as Russia and China where they have lax copyright laws and a huge piracy problem," she said. In addition, countries like Russia will also not extradite their citizens. It's true that many countries won't help the US with such investigations (note that the countries involved in investigating Megaupload are all traditional US allies), but sticking your rogue site in such a country comes with its own set of problems. Sanchez pointed out that Megaupload's business model depends on hosting large volumes of user-submitted material without scrutinizing their contents. That business model is unlikely to work well in repressive regimes. For example, he said, it's true that the Iranian government would be unlikely to help the FBI take down an Iranian version of Megaupload. However, he said, "I hear there was quite a lot of pornography on Megaupload." A similar point applies to China. "If you try to create Megaupload in China, SOPA would be the least of your worries," Sanchez said. China requires websites based inside its Great Firewall to comply with a comprehensive censorship regime. It would be difficult to comply with those rules while maintaining Megaupload's anything-goes philosophy to file hosting. For rogue site operators, the trick is to find a country with great Internet infrastructure, weak IP enforcement, and little censorship. But finding all three is tricky, as shown by the fact that Megaupload actually leased hundreds of servers within the US to provide a good experience to US residents despite the obvious risks this posed. Diplomatic pressure Moreover, while relations between the US and countries like China and Russia can be frosty, Sanchez said it's not true that the US government has no leverage there. For example, in 2007, the Russian government shut down AllOfMP3, a notorious source of unauthorized copies of major-label music. Sanchez pointed out that the Chinese government does conduct periodic crackdowns on traditional, physical piracy, often under pressure from the US. Shutting down a website like Megaupload would be a much easier job than clearing Chinese markets of merchants hawking bootleg DVDs. "This is a familiar story," he told Ars. "The whole international intellectual property system has basically been operating on treaties, on diplomatic pressure. This is how we've been working internationally to have a stable IP system for decades. So I don't know why that suddenly doesn't work" for rogue sites. Disclosure: I'm an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, an unpaid position. Photograph by Erwyn van der Meer --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 08:52:03 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:52:03 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement Message-ID: Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 09:59:11 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:59:11 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SCOTUS: GPS Tracking Requires Warrant Message-ID: <079DB87B-2BDB-443E-86ED-F304B2C2024F@infowarrior.org> Police Use of GPS Devices to Track Suspects? Cars Limited by Supreme Court By Greg Stohr - Jan 23, 2012 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-01-23/police-use-of-gps-devices-to-track-suspects-cars-limited-by-supreme-court.html The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police generally need a warrant before attaching a GPS device to track a criminal suspect?s car. Ruling for the first time on the legal implications of global positioning systems, the justices today were unanimous in overturning the drug conviction of Antoine Jones, though divided in their reasoning. The decision comes as technology is giving police unprecedented power to peer into Americans? day-to-day activities. Jones, now 51, owned a nightclub in Washington, where prosecutors say he ran a narcotics trafficking organization. The GPS device, placed in the car while it was in a Maryland parking lot, was one facet of an investigation by local and federal authorities that also included visual surveillance and a wiretap on Jones?s mobile phone. Investigators eventually were able to tie Jones to a suspected drug stash house. Jones was arrested and convicted in federal court of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. He was serving a life sentence. The case is United States v. Jones, 10-1259. To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr at bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at skomarow1 at bloomberg.net --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 15:50:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:50:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Who Should Have Access to Student Records? Message-ID: <426EDA91-0607-4E91-9E8A-9861B2F153E1@infowarrior.org> Who Should Have Access to Student Records? Education data can be useful, but privacy experts are concerned about data misuse. By Jason Koebler January 19, 2012 RSS Feed Print http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/01/19/who-should-have-access-to-student-records Since ?No Child Left Behind? was passed 10 years ago, states have been required to ramp up the amount of data they collect about individual students, teachers, and schools. Personal information, including test scores, economic status, grades, and even disciplinary problems and student pregnancies, are tracked and stored in a kind of virtual ?permanent record? for each student. But parents and students have very little access to that data, according to a report released Wednesday by the Data Quality Campaign, an organization that advocates for expanded data use. All 50 states and Washington, D.C. collect long term, individualized data on students performance, but just eight states allow parents to access their child?s permanent record. Forty allow principals to access the data and 28 provide student-level info to teachers. Education experts, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, argue that education officials can use student data to assess teachers?if many students? test scores are jumping in a specific teacher?s class, odds are that teacher is doing a good job. Likewise, teachers can use the data to see where a student may have struggled in the past and can tailor instruction to suit his needs. At an event discussing the Data Quality Campaign report Wednesday, Rhee said students also used the information to try to out-achieve each other. ?The data can be an absolute game changer,? she says. ?If you have the data, and you can invest and engage children and their families in this data, it can change a culture quickly.? Privacy experts say the problem is that states collect far more information than parents expect, and it can be shared with more than just a student?s teacher or principal.?When you have a system that?s secret [from parents] and you can put whatever you want into it, you can have things going in that?ll be very damaging,? says Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. ?When you put something into digital form, you can?t control where that?ll end up.? According to a 2009 report by the Fordham University Center on Law and Information Policy, some states store student?s social security numbers, family financial information, and student pregnancy data. Nearly half of states track students? mental health issues, illnesses, and jail sentences.Without access to their child?s data, parents have no way of knowing what teachers and others are learning about them. The federal government is taking steps to make the data more secure, however. In December, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was revised to give parents more control over their children?s records. According to a parent information sheet released by the government, the revisions give parents ?certain rights with regard to their children?s education records, such as the right to inspect and review [their] child?s education records.? But it also allows student information to be shared without parental consent. ?Your child?s information may be disclosed to another school in which your child is enrolling, or to local emergency responders in connection with a health or safety emergency,? it says. Regardless of privacy concerns, education data is not going away. ?The best thing we can do is continue to fund states that are taking this on in a holistic way,? Ed Secretary Duncan says. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 15:53:23 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:53:23 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - New rules on airline fees take effect this week Message-ID: New rules on airline fees take effect this week By Ashley Halsey III, Monday, January 23, 3:23 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/new-rules-on-airline-fees-take-effect-this-week/2012/01/23/gIQA7CzbLQ_print.html The ticket price touted in airline advertising should be the price you pay under new federal airline regulations intended to save passengers from hidden taxes and fees. The new rules that take effect Thursday should make it easier for passengers to determine the full price they will be paying when they book airline tickets. ?Airline passengers have rights, and they should be able to expect fair and reasonable treatment when booking a trip and when they fly,? U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. ?The new passenger protections taking effect this week are a continuation of our effort to help air travelers receive the respect they deserve.? The rules require that airlines include all mandatory taxes and fees in published airfares and that they disclose baggage fees to consumers buying tickets. Under another rule, passengers now will be able to hold a reservation without payment for 24 hours, or cancel a reservation during that period without penalty. Airlines also will be required to notify passengers of delays of more than 30 minutes, as well as flight cancellations and diversions. In most cases they will be prohibited from increasing the price of passengers? tickets after purchase. Until now, airlines have been allowed to list government-imposed taxes and fees separately from the advertised fare. In addition, airlines must disclose baggage fees when passengers book a flight online. Information on baggage fees is required on all e-ticket confirmations. The new rules tighten existing federal regulation of airline advertising. AirTran Airways was fined $60,000 this month for advertising last fall that trumpeted online $59 one-way fares. There were a couple of asterisks but not enough elaboration. Though the ads said that additional taxes, fees and exclusions would apply, the U.S. Department of Transportation said there was no explanation of what those taxes or fees amounted to until a would-be passenger clicked on the ad and then scrolled to the bottom of the page, where the information appeared in fine print. ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 15:59:15 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:59:15 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Major Media Owning SOPA/PIPA Supporters Whine That They Had No Way To Have Their Message Heard Message-ID: Major Media Owning SOPA/PIPA Supporters Whine That They Had No Way To Have Their Message Heard http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120123/04014617509/major-media-owning-sopapipa-supporters-whine-that-they-had-no-way-to-have-their-message-heard.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 23 20:52:16 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:52:16 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops Message-ID: <2F954724-C7C7-4B19-BF18-B2A179804F4D@infowarrior.org> (As the wise George Carlin said, "they're not Constitutional 'rights' they're 'privileges' that can be revoked at any time." --- rick) Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops by Declan McCullagh January 23, 2012 3:35 PM PST American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case. Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21--or face the consequences including contempt of court. Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself," which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination. "I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer," Blackburn wrote in a 10-page opinion today. He said the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to require telephone companies to aid in surveillance, could be invoked in forcing decryption of hard drives as well. Ramona Fricosu, who is accused of being involved in a mortgage scam, has declined to decrypt a laptop encrypted with Symantec's PGP Desktop that the FBI found in her bedroom during a raid of a home she shared with her mother and children (and whether she's even able to do so is not yet clear). Colorado Springs attorney Phil Dubois, who once represented PGP creator Phil Zimmermann, now finds himself fighting the feds over encryption a second time. "I hope to get a stay of execution of this order so we can file an appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals," Fricosu's attorney, Phil Dubois, said this afternoon. "I think it's a matter of national importance. It should not be treated as though it's just another day in Fourth Amendment litigation." (See CNET's interview last year with Dubois, who once represented PGP creator Phil Zimmermann.) Dubois said that, in addition, his client may not be able to decrypt the laptop for any number of reasons. "If that's the case, then we'll report that fact to the court, and the law is fairly clear that people cannot be punished for failure to do things they are unable to do," he said. Today's ruling from Blackburn sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, which argued, as CNET reported last summer, that Americans' Fifth Amendment right to remain silent doesn't apply to their encryption passphrases. Federal prosecutors, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment this afternoon, claimed in a brief that: < -- > http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57364330-281/judge-americans-can-be-forced-to-decrypt-their-laptops/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 24 10:58:24 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:58:24 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Rick Commentary on SOPA/PIPA now posted Message-ID: <367C8E4B-F18E-4AC0-A019-C90DABECF906@infowarrior.org> .January 24, 2012 Credibility Lost: How Hollywood?s Own Reality Undermines Its Position on Internet Policy by RICHARD FORNO http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/24/how-hollywoods-own-reality-undermines-its-position-on-internet-policy/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 24 16:20:12 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:20:12 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Google_announces_privacy_changes?= =?windows-1252?q?_across_products=3B_users_can=92t_opt_out?= Message-ID: Google announces privacy changes across products; users can?t opt out By Cecilia Kang, Tuesday, January 24, 4:33 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-tracks-consumers-across-products-users-cant-opt-out/2012/01/24/gIQArgJHOQ_print.html Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices. The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes. The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones. FAQ: What kind of data can Google collect and integrate? How will this affect me? The changes comes as Google is facing stiff competition and recently disappointed investors for the first time in several quarters, failing last week to meet earnings expectations. Apple, perhaps its primary rival, is expected to announce strong earnings Tuesday. Google?s changes are appeared squarely aimed at Apple and Facebook, which have been successful in keeping people in their ecosystem of products. Google, which makes money by selling ads tailored to its users, is hoping to do the same by offering a Web experience tailored to personal tastes. ?If you?re signed in, we may combine information you?ve provided from one service with information from other services,? Alma Whitten, Google?s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post. ?In short, we?ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,? she said. After March 1, a user who has recently watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts. That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+. Privacy advocates say Google?s changes betray users who are not accustomed to having their information shared across different Web sites. A user of Gmail, for instance, may send messages about a private meeting with a colleague and may not want the location of that meeting to be thrown into Google?s massive cauldron of data or used for Google?s maps application. Google recently settled a privacy complaint by the Federal Trade Commission after it allowed users of its now defunct social network Google Buzz to see contacts lists from its e-mail program. Privacy advocates in recent weeks filed a separate complaint that Google deceived consumers by using information from its new social network Google+ in general search results. Some worry about security. Gmail users, including some White House staff, last year were targeted by hackers who were able to breach the company?s e-mail accounts. Google on Tuesday described its new business plan as changes in its privacy policy and terms of service for all its services except for Google Wallet, its Chrome browser and Google Books. Google has also faced greater scrutiny that it is using its dominance in online search to favor its other applications. Google?s decision to blend Google+ data into search results has been included into a broad FTC antitrust investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is private. Engineers from Twitter, Facebook and MySpace responded by launching a Web tool that they say shows Google is moving away from its stated mission to be a neutral Web directory. On the Web site for the plug-in, the engineers wrote that searches for generic terms such as ?movies? or ?music? prioritize Google+ results over more relevant content. ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 24 17:34:04 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:34:04 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Citibank deems frequent-flier miles taxable, but does the IRS? Message-ID: <3DE4779F-5B85-44B1-A1D8-D1B3E09E83D4@infowarrior.org> Citibank deems frequent-flier miles taxable, but does the IRS? http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20120124,0,1228880.column Citibank is sending tax forms to customers who received thousands of airline miles as a reward for opening a checking or savings account. Those forms value each mile at about 2.5 cents and list the total dollar amount as miscellaneous income. (Timothy A. Clary, AFP/Getty Images / January 23, 2012) By David Lazarus January 24, 2012 Frequent-flier miles clearly have value ? why else would people want them? But do they also represent taxable income? Citibank seems to think so. It's sending tax forms to people who received thousands of miles as a reward for opening a checking or savings account. Those forms value each mile at about 2.5 cents and list the total dollar amount as miscellaneous income. ? David Lazarus ? ? E-mail | Recent columns This is news to tax pros. "I've been practicing for 25 years and I've never had an instance where miles have been treated as taxable," said Gregg Wind, a West Los Angeles certified public accountant. But he said that because Citi is reporting this as people's income to the Internal Revenue Service, customers may be on the hook for paying the taxes. "Otherwise," Wind said, "your chances of being audited could go up." As tax time rolls around, the question of whether airline miles are a form of income is something that potentially affects millions of people. Miles are one of the most common rewards doled out by credit card issuers. Larry Fechter, 66, of Palm Springs was among numerous Citi customers who received a Form 1099 in recent days. He opened a checking and a savings account with the bank last summer after being promised 25,000 American Airlines miles. "The mileage was a very strong inducement," Fechter told me. He said there was nothing in the original sales pitch that warned of the tax consequences of accepting the miles. As such, Fechter said it was a big surprise to get the form in the mail informing him that he has to pay taxes on $645 worth of miles. If he were in the 28% tax bracket, that would mean a payment of $180.60 owed to Uncle Sam. Adding insult to injury, Fechter said, his new Citi accounts paid less than $4 in interest on the cash he'd deposited. "I'm shocked that they want me to pay taxes for mileage points," he said. "I've never had to do that before with any company I've done business with." And there's a good reason for that. In 2002, the IRS issued a policy brief noting that because there are "numerous technical and administrative issues" relating to miles, such as how they're valued and used, the agency "has not pursued a tax enforcement program with respect to promotional benefits such as frequent-flier miles." "Consistent with prior practice," it said, "the IRS will not assert that any taxpayer has understated his federal tax liability by reason of the receipt or personal use of frequent-flier miles or other in-kind promotional benefits attributable to the taxpayer's business or official travel." In other words, the tax man won't come after you for undeclared miles. Or will he? Catherine Pulley, a Citi spokeswoman, cited the 2012 instructions for Form 1099-MISC, which state that income tax must be paid if at least $600 in "prizes and awards" is received. "The Internal Revenue Code recognizes rewards as taxable income," she said. "This recognition by the Internal Revenue Code is disclosed to customers prior to their election to participate in the promotion." Not so much, actually. Buried in the fine print of Citi's letter offering the frequent-flier miles, it says only that "customer is responsible for taxes, if any." That's not quite the same as saying Citi will be ratting you out to the IRS for receiving hundreds of dollars in miscellaneous income. So where does the IRS stand on all this? I found the tax agency surprisingly reticent on the matter of miles. An IRS spokeswoman told me only that the 2002 policy brief "still stands." She declined to comment on how this squares with the prizes-and-awards provision of Form 1099, or what taxpayers should do in light of Citi's reporting their airline miles as income. Wind, the accountant, was stunned by Citi's defense of reporting miles as taxable income. He said he couldn't think of any instance in which miles would be given out except as a prize or award. "This opens up the notion that all miles are taxable," Wind said. It does. And it's insufficient for the IRS to avoid taking a stand and to say only that it won't go after people for failing to declare their frequent-flier miles. At the very least, the tax agency needs to clarify what happens when, as in this case, a business declares your miles as income paid to you. What happens if you don't do likewise? As I say, this potentially affects millions of people ? virtually anyone with airline miles. It'd be nice to know where we all stand. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 25 17:05:20 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:05:20 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Benkler: Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload Message-ID: <6E2FA469-8536-48E4-833A-7C85BFE1D6EA@infowarrior.org> Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here BY Yochai Benkler | Wednesday, January 25 2012 http://techpresident.com/news/21680/seven-lessons-sopapipamegauplaod-and-four-proposals-where-we-go-here We are pleased to publish this guest post on the lessons of the SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload fight by Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and author of The Wealth of Networks and The Penguin and the Leviathan. Lesson 1: The Networked Public Sphere comes to Washington. On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, a new model of politics succeeded in bringing to a halt legislation that had been pushed by some of the most powerful industry lobbies in Washington, which began its life with broad bi-partisan support in both chambers of Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) were to be the most significant changes in intellectual property law since 1998, when a slew of laws, most importantly the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, first set the terms of engagement between the twentieth century incumbent cultural industries?mostly Hollywood and the recording industry?and the new forms of culture and creativity in the networked environment. By Friday January 20th, as Harry Reid announced that PIPA was not going to the floor of the Senate, Chris Dodd was raising a flag of truce on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); suddenly, in the face of overwhelming political power the likes of which he told the New York Times he had not seen in forty years, the MPAA was ready to talk. But he wanted to talk to the tech industry; ignoring the fact that while the industry played a critical role in the opposition, it was the coalition combining for-profit and nonprofit; organized and decentralized; social-networked and blog/twitter-based action that successfully blocked the power of concentrated money on K Street. It's not up to the tech industry to negotiate on behalf of the millions of people who came to care. Sure, Silicon Valley upped its lobbying game, and that was an important part of the story. But the turning point came when people who cared harnessed the network to concentrate human action. Whether it was the consumer boycott that put pressure on GoDaddy to abandon its support for the legislation, which caused other technology firms to shy away from supporting it; the constituents writing letters to their senators and representatives; or the remarkable democratic debate among hundreds of committed editors that preceded Wikipedia's decision to shut down for a day, what we saw was that even in this day, when money is so powerful in American politics, people acting in concert can have a real impact. For almost twenty years, the copyright industries have pushed hard against weak opposition, and extended the scope, reach, and aggressive enforcement of copyright to contain networked technology and resist networked culture. The political calculus seems to have changed drastically this week, and we need to understand how to exploit and harness the changing winds to expand and lock in this initial victory. Lesson 2: Hollywood and the recording industry don't like traditional copyright law, balanced by courts under due process constraints. Copyright seems to be too balanced for the industry's taste. Traditional copyright law has too many balances; too many reasons judges might prevent Hollywood from just shutting the whole thing down so people can be made to sit quietly on their couches and pay up. The bills were designed to try to create new pressure points that would allow either copyright owners or their associated functionaries at the Justice Department to kill threatening sites, without having to go to the trouble of identifying specific infringements or proving anything to a court. From the very beginning, in September of 2010, the first Senate bill, the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA), each successive version of the Act tried to avoid the inconvenience of actually having to prove that the site being targeted violated copyright law before inflicting mortal damage on that site. In that earliest version, the Justice Department was supposed to create a blacklist of ?bad actors? by mere allegation; no proof necessary before these sites would start to be blocked. By the time SOPA was introduced, that power was directly granted to copyright owners for blocking payment systems and advertising, and again to the Justice Department, with slightly higher constraints, for blocking DNS service to the sites. Fundamentally, the aim of these laws was to replace the balance of copyright with a unilateral power to hobble or shut down whole sites suspected of helping piracy before a final determination of actual copyright liability, subject to all the balances that copyright has traditionally required between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the public and later creators to use and build on the culture in which they are immersed. Lesson 3: As the networked environment resists control, more of the flow of networked economy has to be sucked in to the enforcement vortex. The Net is proving much harder to control than the industries anticipated when they got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA passed in 1998. In order to actually control materials on the Net, SOPA and PIPA tried to harness a range of technical, economic, and bureaucratic platforms, aimed to impede the functions of an ever-more-vaguely defined set of targets. Technical platforms included most prominently the DNS service and registrars and the search engines. Business platforms included payment systems and advertising systems. In order to achieve effective enforcement in a global digitally networked environment, Hollywood seems destined to try to draw an ever-larger set of platforms and actors into the risk of potential copyright and near-copyright liability. Lesson 4: Freedom of speech is bound with freedom in the network. It is impossible to achieve the kind of control Hollywood wants without severely undermining the freedom the Internet makes possible. Because control is hard and IP enforcement pulls in more of the platform providers and technologies into its enforcement effort, it necessarily makes the Net more controllable. We saw this most clearly in the DNS filtering provisions that were perhaps the most frightening of the provisions, and those that raised the most aggressive opposition. Freedom to develop and use new, control-resistant, decentralized technologies is absolutely central to what made the Internet the platform of freedom that it has become. As long as the copyright industries insist on trying to reshape the Internet to make it controllable in order to serve their interests, there effort will be fundamentally in conflict with Internet Freedom. To understand this, we need but quote Larry Lessig's decade-old ?code is law,? or Eben Moglen's memorable ?Freedom of the press, freedom of information, freedom of thought itself are now 'implemented' rather than 'declared', 'protected' or 'guaranteed'.? Lesson 5: Criminalization has become a Golem/Frankenstein, hunting technological innovation through its own internal bureaucratic logic. One of the most brilliant moves the industry made over the course of the past decade has been to lobby for, and obtain, the creation and funding of various positions within the Government whose career success depends on harnessing the resources of the federal government to carry out critical parts of the industry's assault on threatening technologies and the more aggressive users. This began in 1998 with the DMCA and the NET Act, which fundamentally shifted criminal copyright from being law aimed at commercial enterprises that actually stamp out thousands of illegal copies, to something that could sweep any teenager who swapped files too enthusiastically. We first saw the effects of this strategy when the Justice Department dramatically increased the number of criminal copyright infringement actions it brought in tandem with the recording industries surge of civil suits against individual file sharers, from 2004 to 2008. Criminalization got a major push from the PRO-IP Act in 2008, with the expansion of funding for more criminal enforcement and coordination, the creation of an IP czar in the White House, and the importation of forfeiture law from drug enforcement to IP enforcement. We saw the result of this in the crackdown in Megaupload on the day after the major Internet anti-SOPA protests. There is a large number of functionaries throughout the federal government, most importantly the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, a White House IP czar, and an IPR Center housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose professional success, irrespective of the policy position of any given administration, are measured by (a) how threatening we think Piracy is, and (b) how many large prosecutions they are able to bring. The creation of these bureaucratic incentives means that even if Congress now passes no more expansive laws; even if the industry shifts away from business models that are actually sensitive to copying, as the recording industry already has and movies are well on their way to doing, prosecutions against companies too small and too new to be ?too big to fail? will continue apace. How else will the bureaucrats justify their existence? As the GAO found in its 2010 study of the costs of piracy, these agencies do not really create credible numbers of their own on the size of the real threat; they rely unquestioningly on industry studies. As for these studies, the GAO politely said that they were bunk. The truth is we simply do not know whether ?piracy? is a significant problem at all, and the growth and success of the industries it supposedly harms belays that claim more effectively than any theoretical or methodological critique of the argument that piracy is important. In between January 18?s protest and January 20th?s surrender by Dodd, on Thursday, the Justice Department showed that it didn't need any new powers to shut down and seize the assets of Megaupload in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Putting together an indictment made of what lawyers called a parade of horribles, including extensive insinuations of illegality attached to quite plausible and legitimate design decisions of cloud-based backup and file-transfer sites alongside descriptions of the less-than-savory characters actually behind Megaupload, the Justice Department seized assets and obtained detention of the company and its principals. Lesson 6: The Supreme Court's alteration of the Sony standard in Grokster, coupled with the new seizure powers passed after it, create genuine risks to technological innovation. While Megaupload may be run by unsavory characters, the prosecution of the site, and even more so, the seizure of its assets before any of the prosecutors' allegations have been proven, is a warning call that the logic of the Criminalization Golem is already on the move. Let's be clear. It is almost certain that under the traditional law of contributory copyright infringement as the Supreme Court laid it out in the Sony Betamax case, Megaupload would not be liable for even civil copyright infringement, much less criminal. There, the Supreme Court refused to succumb to Hollywood's panic of this new technological threat, the VCR, and held that as long as the technology has substantial non-infringing uses, its creator would not be held liable for the fact that users were also using it for infringement. Seized in the post-Napster panic, the Supreme Court revised that holding in its Grokster case in 2005, adding a subjective ?inducement? arm to the test: if there was evidence that the site was inducing infringement, it could be held liable. It was apparently in an effort to fit this arm that the prosecutors in the Megaupload indictment used various technical features of the site, which have perfectly legitimate uses?such as allowing publication of a public link to a file; avoiding duplication of storage by generating separate links, for separate users, to files; the absence of a search function; or the development of an anti-child pornography filter but not one for (the less deterministic fact of) copyright infringement as evidence of nefarious intent to induce copyright infringement. The result has been that at least some legitimate online storage sites have begun to look at their legitimate features to see what could be interpreted by a court reading a one-sided indictment as it issues a temporary seizure order as evidence of ?inducement.? Given that the Supreme Court's own opinion in Grosker suggested that simply using the suffix ?-ster? was useful evidence of intent to induce infringement, and that, following suit, several the elements included in the Megaupload indictment have innocent uses, the chilling effect on new, small sites of the risk of having everything taken away on the basis of an indictment (and remember, Grand Juries provide no meaningful protection; they merely offer a veneer of legitimacy to what are, at root, unproven accusations). By the time they have had their day in court, their business is destroyed; their user-base moved on to the next site. Where do we go from here? SOPA/PIPA/OPEN are not the proper baseline for the new settlement. We are already hearing strong appeals to develop a compromise that is somewhere between SOPA/PIPA and the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN) introduced by Representative Darrel Issa and Senator Ron Wyden. While Sen. Wyden and Rep. Issa did a fantastic service to the Internet in holding the line and presenting an alternative when Hollywood's Juggernaut was still making the sound of inevitability, the political sands have shifted. In the veto-rich system of the American legislative arena, SOPA and PIPA are dead and can be kept dead indefinitely after the lesson the people taught Congress and the lobbyists last Wednesday. Hollywood needs no more power to control the network, and the damage that will be done to freedom from any further extensions is too great to justify, given the uncertain and unproven scope of the ?piracy? problem. The OPEN Act avoids the very worst of SOPA/PIPA: it creates a process whereby an administrative inquiry and adjudication would precede any shutdown; it tightens the definition of the targets of actions, and it limits the range of actors drawn into enforcement proceedings to payment providers and advertising providers, critically leaving the DNS service alone. But OPEN still buys in to the basic assumption that the interests of Hollywood justify drawing an ever-growing universe of complementary systems, like payment and advertising, into their enforcement dance against the piracy menace, without evidence that that menace is significant enough to justify the expansion. It cannot prevent the International Trade Commission from becoming just another captured agency doing the bidding of the people they perceive as their clients; and it retains the model of creating immunity for the critical services, in this case payment and advertising, for ?voluntarily? cutting off services on suspicion of infringing activities, setting up the conditions for the creation of a private blacklist. Given our long experience under the DMCA and NET Act with how aggressive the copyright industries have been in their enforcement efforts, and how uncertain interpretation of legislation can be after it is passed; given the strong signals SOPA/PIPA sent that the industry is continuously seeking new ways of short-circuiting the balances of traditional copyright law to gain ever-more control over networked creativity so as to prevent any possible spillage, there is no reason to give Hollywood yet a new platform with which to challenge innovation and networked creativity. At a minimum, if international piracy and these new means of enforcing against it are indeed so important to the industry, then adding these kinds of provisions should only come as part of a renegotiation of the whole of the system, to roll back some of its worst excesses. The starting point for negotiation cannot be that everything the industry got while networked citizenry was weak and dispersed is sacrosanct, and the only things on the negotiating table are Hollywood's shiny new regulatory toys. The politics have changed. Everything should be up for renegotiation, or we should use the blocking power of the network in conjunction with the veto-rich environment that is the American legislative system to prevent any additional creep from today's baseline. There is an opportunity to harness the new political energy to reverse core institutional elements of Hollywood's decade-and-a-half-long land grab. The newfound political power needs to be directed not only at these most recent excesses of the persistent efforts by the twentieth century incumbents to set the terms of cultural exchange in the twenty-first century; it needs to be directed more fundamentally at preserving the freedom of expression and a freedom to operate in the networked information economy and society. As a practical matter, as Hollywood beats a disorderly retreat from law week's battlefield, we need to be thinking not about what compromises to make around SOPA/PIPA and the OPEN Act, but about what the architecture of freedom in the networked environment requires of copyright law more generally. We need to develop an actionable legislative agenda. Here are four core targets that I think should be part of such an agenda. Others obviously will have different ideas; but at least I hope we can focus the conversation of where to go from here on the basic strategic interventions we need to make to de-regulate innovation on the Net and reverse the dynamics whereby securing the business model of twentieth century content industries threatens freedom, creativity, and innovation in the twenty-first. ? Legislatively re-instate the Sony doctrine and reverse Grokster. Technology developers should only be liable for copyright infringements by users if there are no substantial non-infringing uses of the technology. ? Decriminalize copyright to per-1998 levels: put the Golem to sleep. Return the definition of criminal copyright to require large scale copying for commercial gain; reduce the funding to criminal enforcement and reduce the presence of federal functionaries whose role is to hype and then combating the piracy threat. In particular, as calls to shrink the federal government abound, it is critical to include in every legislation downsizing the federal budget provisions that would defund and eliminate most of the burgeoning apparatus of multi-agency criminal enforcement of copyright. The most direct pathway to this will be in appropriation bills, to defund implementation of PRO-IP until a more balanced substantive approach can be worked out. ? Create a fair use defense to the anticircumvention and antidevice provisions of the DMCA. Users should be exempt from DMCA liability if they propose, in good faith, to make a fair use of the encrypted materials. Decryption and circumvention providers should be exempt from liability on the model of the Sony doctrine, if there are ?substantial non-infringing uses? for the circumvention technology or device they offer. This would fix a much older overreach by the industry, from 1998, that has been very slowly and imperfectly loosened by the Librarian of Congress under powers to exempt certain uses from liability. ? Rein in the international trade pathway for copyright extension. Another pathway, similar to criminalization in the sense that it harnesses federal functionaries to help the industry, distinct in the set of functionaries it harnesses, has been international trade. Through a set of trade agreements, both bilateral and multilateral, the U.S. government has pursued the passage of requirements more stringent than it could itself pass in the U.S. The recent adoption of SOPA-like laws in Spain is one example, as is the notorious Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). We need a law that would prohibit secret negotiation of IP-related provisions in international agreements, and a law that prohibits the U.S. from entering agreements that require of ourselves or our trading partners more restrictions on the public domain than then-current U.S. law permits. The American political system has strong ratchet effects. It takes a lot less power to resist legislation than to pass it. This time, the mobilization was powerful enough to stop the ever-expanding IP ratchet from moving one more notch up. Future battles, whether precisely along the lines I propose here or along other lines, need to take advantage of the ratchet effect for positive, as opposed to merely blocking, purposes. We need to develop a distinct agenda, and focus mobilization efforts around ratchet points?institutional, organizational, or substantive law?so that the mobilization can lead to ratcheting back controls, no less than it was used over the past two decades for ratcheting up these control in the name of securing the copyright industries past business models. Lesson 7: The moral authority of the networked citizenry vs. the power of money. The victory of last week was an exhilarating example of citizens coming together and pushing back on the interests of a well-funded industry lobbying campaign. It's too soon to tell yet whether what happened was that elites in the tech industry used their platform power to harness the population to their sectoral interest, or whether the citizens of the Net harnessed major players in the technology industry to gain greater freedom. Probably what happened was a little bit of both. But coalitions are always a bit messy, and it is often hard to tell whose agenda is really gaining the upper hand. For now, at least, it seems that the interests of the core of the technology industry and the interests of individuals and communities that have come to rely on the Internet as their primary platform for freedom and creativity are sufficiently aligned that the coalition can hold for a while, on a range of issues, including all those I raise as targets for common action. But networked citizens cannot and should not be sanguine that the alliance will always be so smooth. Nor should the industry take support for granted, or assume that it can rely on its own power and lobbying. The power we saw in the hands of networked people is a fundamentally more legitimate source of power than corporate money. Democracies are by and for the people. We believe in one-person, one-vote; and while corporate organizations are enormously useful, and can make us more effective in the pursuit of our life plans and dreams, at root it is us, human beings, flesh and blood, who are the foundational constituents of a democracy. That is why Wikipedia played such a critical role: unlike all the other major sites that shut down. Wikipedia is not a company; Wikipedia, for this purpose, functioned as a mini-democracy within a democracy, where people who continuously volunteer for the public good came together to do something new for the public. Wikipedia represents a moral force that no commercial site can ever hope to replicate. Some sites, like Reddit, are sufficiently based on users that they can structure their future protest actions as democratic debates, letting users decide. Extending the debate and collective decision-making feature of the Wikipedia decision to other platforms should play an important role in the future, and will also help to solidify the alliance between networked citizenry and the companies that provide the infrastructure of networked discourse. If the technology industry wants to continue its battle with Hollywood as a battle among paid lobbyists, it may do so, likely at its own peril. But if the industry wants to be able to speak with the moral authority of the networked public sphere, it will have to listen to what the networked public is saying and understand the political alliance as a coalition. The greatest hope from the events of the past two weeks is that we are beginning to see a re-emergence of the possibility of a truly engaged citizenry after decades of the rise of lobbying and money. I suspect that it is too soon to go after legislative changes that target that ambitious goal directly, as Micah discussed yesterday ("After SOPA/PIPA Victory, Tech is Thinking of Tackling Political Reform.") But if we can use the enthusiasm and focus to make significant inroads in this narrow and specifically actionable item, perhaps we will also begin to hone a more general a new model of democratic participation for a new generation. A model of citizen participation that is as far from the couch potato's passivity as the Internet is from broadcast. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Jan 25 17:21:43 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:21:43 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research Message-ID: <992EF42C-6B90-4000-B592-0E970FFCED0A@infowarrior.org> Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research Laura McKenna | Jan 20, 2012 Universities have to pay thousands of dollars every year to read their own research online. Blame the broken economics of academic publishing. http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/locked-in-the-ivory-tower-why-jstor-imprisons-academic-research/251649/ This morning, I searched for an article about autism on JSTOR, the online database of academic journals. I have a child on the autistic spectrum, and I like to be aware of the latest research on the topic. I could not access any of the first 200 articles that contained the word "autism." That's because, for the most part, only individuals with a college ID card can read academic journal articles. Everyone else, including journalists, non-affiliated scholars, think tanks and curious individuals, must pay a substantial fee per article, if the articles are available at all. I later found one article that was available for $38. I'm not sure why one twelve page article costs $38. It takes me about eight minutes to scan a twelve page article. The researcher receives no royalties. Why does it cost so much to read one article? The answer lies in the antiquated system of academic publishing. FROM IVORY TOWER TO GATED DATABASE When an academic conducts research on, say, autism, the research often takes several years. That research is funded by national grants and subsidized through the university. The professor is given travel money and "release time" to conduct the research. Then the academic submits the paper to an academic journal. Academic journals are housed at universities and are subsidized by the university, because it brings the university prestige. Academic journals are edited by faculty members. The faculty are given course release time to edit the journal and a small stipend. The university provides offices and work-study students to help with the secretarial work. The editor reviews the manuscripts. If the paper isn't total rubbish, then it is sent to up to a handful of other faculty at other universities, who are experts on this topic. The reviewers provide content and writing commentary on the research. Their universities support their activities, because it increases the prestige of their institutions. After the reviewers provide commentary, the journal editor forwards this feedback to the professor, who makes corrections. It is sent back to the journal editor who packages it up with other papers, writes an introduction, and then sends it to a for-profit publisher. The publisher is key, because he needs money to print and distribute the journal for its tiny community of readers. To make that money, the publisher sells the rights to an academic search engine company, like JSTOR. For the publisher, this venture is highly profitable because, unlike traditional publishing, the publisher does not have to pay the writer or editor. It only has to cover the costs of typesetting, printing, and distribution. Having bought the rights to the academic research, JSTOR digitizes the material and sells the content back to the university libraries. To recoup their costs of leasing the information from the publishers, the academic search engines use a subscription model to restrict the content to those who can pay the hefty price tag. A substantial part of the university library budget is devoted towards subscriptions to those databases. The UC San Diego Libraries report that 65% of their total budget goes towards getting access to JSTOR and other databases. To get access to the Arts and Sciences collection at JSTOR -- only one of the many databases and collections of information -- university libraries must pay a one time charge of $45,000 and then $8,500 every year after that. Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public -- which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system -- has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription costs. Newspapers and think tanks, which could help extend research into the public sphere, are denied free access to the material. Faculty members are rightly bitter that their years of work reaches an audience of a handful, while every year, 150 million attempts to read JSTOR content are denied every year. FREE THE RESEARCH! How could we make this academic research more accessible to the public? The challenge is finding a way to get research on the web by bypassing the publisher/JSTOR nexus. If academic journals skipped that needless step of providing a print version of their journals, they could stop this cycle. They could simply upload the papers to a website and take the publishers out of the process. In the age of Google Scholar, there is no need for independent academic search engines. Faculty could receive broader readership for their research. An online environment would provide more collaboration and faster publication times. University libraries would save vast sums of money. Curious individuals who want to know more about autism research would be able to have direct access to information. Stubborn tradition keeps this cycle in motion. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 26 08:30:13 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:30:13 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Maybe_it=92s_time_for_Google_to_?= =?windows-1252?q?rethink_its_=91Don=92t_be_evil=92_motto?= Message-ID: <2690C8F3-F727-44AF-AB8C-AA56486D971D@infowarrior.org> Maybe it?s time for Google to rethink its ?Don?t be evil? motto By Joshua Topolsky, Published: January 25 http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/maybe-its-time-for-google-to-rethink-its-dont-be-evil-motto/2012/01/25/gIQAAS0XRQ_print.html ?Don?t be evil.? That?s Google?s unofficial motto, in case you didn?t know. In 2004, when the company went public, its founders even based the company code of conduct on the phrase, which has since become known as the ?Don?t Be Evil?? manifesto. For a long time, it was easy to believe that Google was walking the walk. The company regularly spoke out in defense of openness and against censorship on the Internet, choosing its values over potential profit by leaving China and becoming a force in Washington by acting to oppose the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. But was all that just an act? FAQ: Google?s new privacy policy and what kind of data it?s collecting and integrating about you The first signs that Google was brewing plans that were not-exactly-not-evil might have actually come in 2009, when it signed a partnership agreement with Verizon Wireless. Google had previously battled the monolithic carrier, which it claimed was working to undermine user choice by attempting to enforce restrictive rules on the radio frequencies that now power 4G devices. But when Google capitulated on disagreements over the bandwidth and dived head-first into a big partnership with Verizon to launch the Droid mobile phone, something started to feel off. It seemed like Google was favoring money and market share over what was best for users. In some ways, this wasn?t the company?s fault. As our devices and experiences have become more about ecosystems than single points of entry, a kind of regrouping has been happening. Google has come to this party later than others, but just as Facebook would like you to remain within its pages and never leave, and Apple would like you to exclusively use its network of applications, music and videos, so too does Google. But the flip-flop on Verizon without a good explanation seemed just a little bit evil. A few years ago, Google?s position as search leader was practically unassailable. To find what you were looking for on the Web, there was really only one portal. Google built its business on the number of potential consumers it could introduce to advertisers and the search-targeted advertising it had honed. The company didn?t need to own or control content; it owned and controlled how you got to the content. It?s clear that Google has had to evolve as its position has slipped. It has had to become more than agile ? it has had to become wildly aggressive. Slowly but surely, we?ve watched Google try to find a way into spaces where its search is increasingly less relevant. That?s where Google+ comes in. Google+, unveiled in June, is the company?s first real answer to Twitter and Facebook. A few weeks ago, Google made one of the biggest changes to its search product. If you happened to be signed in to your Gmail account, Google search began including ? no, not just including, but promoting ? Google+ links inside of your search results. Sure, you can turn off this personalized search feature, but many users might not know how. So if you had searched for Ryan Gosling, it might have also displayed information about other people named Ryan that you?re friends with or showed you images that your friends have shared at the top of image results. In short, it started seriously messing with ?true? search, the search that had been largely untainted; the search based on algorithms, not allegiances; the search we expect from Google. I think most users would argue that this makes finding what you want harder, less diverse and more insulated. The experience feels suffocating to me, like I have to fight through Google+ results to see the ?real? stuff. Google search has, until now, represented the Internet giant?s biggest gift and most valuable contribution to the Web ? a place to find things untouched (or at least mostly untouched) by greedy hands. This week, Google announced another radical change to Google search ? but this time on the back end. It said that beginning March 1, Google would begin integrating information about searches you run while signed into a Google account, including your Android phone, with data from 59 other Google products such as Gmail and YouTube. Google says there?s a way to turn off your search history ? but you have to do it in at least three places. The only absolute way to prevent giving Google enough information to build a digital dossier of your life is to close your account. I don?t think anyone in our industry would knock Google for continuing to build its business and make money. And yes, we could all benefit from acknowledging that our concepts of ?good? and ?evil? aren?t always clear. But explaining away Google?s changes as simply a matter of differing perspectives wouldn?t address the real problem. The real problem is that Google?s search policy shift and the change in its privacy policies suggest a shift in core values at the company ? values you didn?t need a road map to figure out a few years ago. Those were values that placed the user first and stood in stark contrast to monopolistic practices of companies like Microsoft in the 1990s. They were Google Values, and they felt right. They felt good. If Google can?t see how perverse some of its decisions look today by comparison, maybe it?s time to rethink the company motto. Joshua Topolsky is the founding editor in chief of the Verge, a technology news Web site. ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 26 13:50:10 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:50:10 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - US has already flexed cyberwar muscle, says former NSA director Message-ID: <8C84BDDE-5738-4E98-9351-71FEB433BB20@infowarrior.org> (c/o MM) US has already flexed cyberwar muscle, says former NSA director By Sean Gallagher | Published January 25, 2012 3:17 PM http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/us-has-already-flexed-cyberwar-muscle-says-former-nsa-director.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss In an interview with Reuters, former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell claimed that the US has already used cyber attacks against an adversary successfully. And it's just a matter of time before someone unleashes cyber attacks on US critical infrastructure, he warned. McConnell didn't spell out who exactly the US had attacked with its offensive capabilities. However, RT.com reports that security experts have "all but confirmed" that the US was at least partially behind the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran's efforts to enrich uranium, working in concert with Israel. Now a vice-chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton and leading the firm's cyber work, McConnell is on a campaign to raise awareness of the threat of such attacks being used against the US. "There will be a thousand voices on what is the right thing to do," he told Reuters. And, he added, it will likely take a crisis to achieve consensus?a consensus that would arrive too late. Booz Allen has a major footprint in the Defense Department, and recently launched a "Cyber Solutions Network" service targeted at helping commercial and government clients build defenses against the sorts of network penetration, exploitation and espionage that McConnell says US intelligence and military are capable of conducting. According to McConnell, the US, Britain, and Russia all have well-developed capabilities when it comes to gaining access to electronic communications such as e-mail without being detected. But he added that the NSA and other agencies conducting surveillance of emerging threats on the Internet are currently "powerless to do a thing" to assist private companies outside of the defense industrial base when they discover threats, "other than to issue a report." A bill approved by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 3523), would give intelligence agencies permission to share classified information on cyber threats with "approved American companies." It doesn't, however, authorize intelligence and defense agencies to provide protection against those attacks. A broad cyber-security bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate later this year. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 26 14:15:15 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:15:15 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - FBI wants to use social networks to prevent future crime Message-ID: <672767E4-FCF9-42D2-87C6-B485A3C427C0@infowarrior.org> Minority Report is real: FBI wants to use social networks to prevent future crime January 26, 2012 By Andrew Couts http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/minority-report-is-real-fbi-wants-to-use-social-networks-to-prevent-future-crime/ The FBI is looking into the creation of a new application that would allow them to not only monitor on-going threats, but also predict potential terrorist attacks and other crimes before they even happen. Here's everything you need to know, and why you should be concerned. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the creation of an application that would allow it to better mine social media content, in an attempt to more accurately identify, target and fight ?emerging threats? in real-time. The application could also be used to predict potential threats before they even happen. According to a Request for Information (RFI) posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the FBI says it hopes to ?determine the capability of industry to provide an Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application solution.? This tool would allow the FBI to ?quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats? using ?publicly available? information posted to social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, as well as local and national news publications. Big Brother 2.0 Of course, monitoring social media is nothing new for the law enforcement community. At present, however, it?s simply too ineffectual and inefficient for the FBI?s needs. ?Social media is a valued source of information to the [FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC)] intelligence analyst in routinely monitoring events,? says the RFI. ?Analysts have standing intelligence issues that they monitor as a matter of daily course around the globe. It is also seminal in their effort to provide initial information about single events of significance to law enforcement. Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations.? The application the FBI hopes to have built would simply make this process easier and more thorough. Here?s how the FBI envisions the app working: The information gathered from news and social media outlets would be overlaid onto a digital map, pinpointing the location of the ?breaking events,? along with all other relevant contextual data. Additional information, including US domestic terror data, worldwide terror data, the location of all US embassies, consulates and military installations, weather conditions and forecasts, and traffic video feeds, would also be overlaid on the map. A robust search feature would also be incorporated into the app, which would allow the ability to ?instantly search and monitor key words and strings in ?publicly available? tweets across the Twitter Site and any other ?publicly available social networking sites/forums,? according to the RFI. The FBI wants the search function to allow for simultaneous key word searches ?that can look at 10 or 20 separate incidents/threats at the same time within the same ?window.?? The ability to monitor tweets and other social media data in a minimum of 12 foreign languages, and to ?immediately translate? those posts into English, is also outlined as a required feature of the application. The future is now All of that seems fairly straight forward. In fact, we are surprised the FBI doesn?t already have such an application at their disposal, since all of the features it outlines are well within the capabilities of a skilled software development team. Not to mention the fact that much of what the FBI hopes to use already exists in different parts. Websites like OpenStatusSearch.com, YourOpenBook.org, TweetScan.com and Tweepz.com make it possible to quickly and easily search for key words being posted publicly to Twitter and Facebook. All the FBI?s dreamed-up app would do is combine these features into a single product, and expand them with additional governmental and law enforcement data, and mapping tools. However, the FBI doesn?t just want to know about what?s happening now; it also wants to predict events that are about to happen ? to predict the future. If that sounds suspiciously like Minority Report, you?re not alone. ?Social media will be critical to meeting the intelligence objectives stated above because it provides unique access to communications about the special event [i.e. political conventions, national holidays, or sporting events] in advance of its occurrence,? reads the RFI. As with the ability to search tweets and updates, using social media to predict the future is nothing new. In March 2011, the Journal of Computational Science showed that tweets could be used to predict upcoming fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to an accuracy of 86.7 percent. And just this month, the Rand Corporation analyzed tweets from 2009 that used the hashtag #IranElection, and found that an increase in swear words in tweets could be used to predict where and when protests and other forms of public discontent would occur. Using predictive technology isn?t limited to academics, governments, or corporations, either. The website RecordTheFuture.com allows anyone with an account to access troves of information about potential upcoming events, including product releases, stock fluctuations, and even upcoming vacation plans of private individuals. Is everyone a target? In other words, the worlds of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have already arrived. The FBI simply wants to create a custom application that combines already-available technology, and streamlines it, in an attempt to do their job better. That?s all good and well when if it?s used to stop truly ?bad guys,? like terrorists who want to blow up a football stadium. The problem is, who do they consider ?bad guys? nowadays? Hackers like Anonymous? Wikileaks supporters? Occupy Wall Street protesters? Everyone? The most cautious (and possibly wisest) among us would say all of the above. And it?s increasingly hard to refute their warnings. Late last year, President Obama signed the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that comes up for annual renewal. The problem with this year?s version, say critics, is that it includes provisions that would allow the US military to detain anyone ? including US citizens ? anywhere in the world, without trial or due process, if they are suspected of terrorist activities. Moreover, NDAA provides such an ambiguous definition of ?terrorist activity? that groups like Occupy Wall Street or Anonymous could fall under this perilous category. It must be pointed out that President Obama included a signing statement with NDAA that guaranteed that his administration would not use the law to indefinitely detain US citizens. Needless to say, that has done little to quell the cognizant public?s outrage. So, what to make of all this? Most obviously, it is now painfully clear that everything we post online is being watched. And if the FBI gets its new application ? which seems to us an inevitability ? the eyes with which it sees our tweets and updates will have bionic vision, and even the ability to peer into the future. What is less obvious is how the government?s quest to protect the public good will be abused to trample legitimate free speech and lawful public dissent. In short: Big Brother is real. He is watching. So be careful what you say online today ? it could be used against you tomorrow. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Jan 26 14:26:06 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:26:06 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 'Remote fix' gets a whole new meaning Message-ID: <1CA368A6-5ED9-41A5-A9AE-E6F23965427C@infowarrior.org> Venerable Voyager 2 Spacecraft Gets a Tune-up 14 billion Kilometers From Earth by Nancy Atkinson on November 16, 2011 Every mechanic loves to tinker with a machine to give it optimum operating efficiency. But this latest engineering feat involving the Voyager 2 spacecraft wins the prize for longest distance tune-up. Akin to servicing an old car to increase gas mileage, engineers at JPL sent commands across 14 billion kilometers (9 billion miles) out to Voyager 2, enabling it to switch to the backup set of thrusters that controls the roll of the spacecraft. This will reduce the amount of power that the 34-year-old probe needs to operate, giving it better ?gas mileage? and ? hopefully ? the power to operate for at least another decade. The move was a little risky, as these backup roll thrusters were previously unused. It meant trusting equipment which has been idle and out in the harsh environment of space for 32 years to work ? and keep working for the remainder of the mission. ?The switchover is pretty permanent ? the thrusters are not rated to be reused after being unheated,? said the @NASAVoyager2 Twitter feed. Voyager 2 will save about 11.8 watts of electric power by turning off the heater that kept the hydrazine fuel to the primary thrusters warm. Voyager 1 and 2 are each equipped with six sets, or pairs, of thrusters to control the pitch, yaw and roll motions of the spacecraft. With this latest command, both spacecraft are now using all three sets of their backup thrusters. The primary roll thrusters now turned off fired more than 318,000 times. Voyager 1 changed to the backup for this same component after 353,000 pulses in 2004. < -- > http://www.universetoday.com/91044/venerable-voyager-2-spacecraft-gets-a-tune-up-14-billion-kilometers-from-earth/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 07:04:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:04:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - EU signs ACTA Message-ID: <6576D179-1850-4CAD-9640-74D420CB2307@infowarrior.org> This story was printed from ZDNet UK, located at http://www.zdnet.co.uk/ Story URL: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2012/01/26/uk-signs-acta-as-activists-urge-resistance-40094914/ UK signs ACTA as activists urge resistance By David Meyer, 26 January 2012 15:51 The UK and 21 other European Union member states have signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, better known as ACTA. The countries signed the treaty, which aims to harmonise copyright enforcement across much of the world, in Tokyo on Thursday. However, the signatures of the EU member states and the EU itself will count for nothing unless the European Parliament gives its approval to ACTA in June, and digital activists have urged citizens to lobby their MEPs against voting yes. Only five EU countries did not sign ACTA, which aims to harmonise copyright enforcement. Poland, which was one of the signatories, saw thousands demonstrate in the streets on Wednesday, protesting against the signing. An EU diplomat also added his signature. However, five EU countries did not sign, namely Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia. Many other countries, such as the US, Japan and Australia, signed the document in September. Although ACTA is primarily concerned with the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR), its designation as a trade treaty meant it could be negotiated behind closed doors. This lengthy process, led by the US and Japan, was exposed in a series of leaks ? some via Wikileaks ? that revealed what was going on. The final version of ACTA is very different to earlier drafts, which would have forced countries to disconnect internet users if they were found to be repeatedly sharing copyrighted content. The EU rejected this proposal, and other ideas, such as criminalising the use of a mobile phone camera in a cinema, also fell by the wayside. The European Commission maintains that ACTA will not require any legal changes in the Union. It argues that the treaty will align IPR enforcement standards in other countries with those already enshrined in EU legislation. "It simply does not change EU law," trade commission spokesman John Clancy told ZDNet UK. "The freedom of the internet that existed before ? people's access and the way they use the internet ? will not change because of ACTA." "The ACTA agreement is about trying to bring other key partners' standards of intellectual property protection up to the level of the EU and other leading players in IPR," he said. Threat to freedom of speech? Others say the toned-down treaty still poses a threat. La Quadrature du Net, for example, has complained that ACTA will lead to harsher copyright infringement laws in non-EU countries lacking the freedom-of-speech safeguards of the EU. The French digital rights organisation has also argued that the agreement will make it harder to make and distribute generic medicines. "In the last few days, we have seen encouraging protests by Polish and other EU citizens, who are rightly concerned with the effect of ACTA on freedom of expression, access to medicines, but also access to culture and knowledge," La Quad spokesman J?r?mie Zimmermann said in a statement. "This important movement will further build up," Zimmermann added, noting the defeat in the US of the SOPA and PIPA copyright enforcement bills. "European citizens must reclaim democracy, against the harmful influence of corporate interests over global policy-making." European Parliament vote Regardless of the signatures that took place on Thursday, ACTA will not become EU law if the European Parliament votes against it in June. Should this happen, the signatures of the 22 EU member states and the EU itself would effectively be worthless. The treaty will first have to be discussed by the EU International Trade Committee (INTA) at the end of February or in early March, then voted on by INTA in April or May. The key final plenary vote is scheduled to take place in the European Parliament between 11 and 14 June. Until then, according to MEP and INTA member Marietje Schaake, the "confidence boost" following the defeat of SOPA and PIPA may provide a chance to head the new treaty off. Read this Web takedowns come under EU scrutiny Read more "If you are concerned about ACTA, you can convince the EP to vote against ACTA," Schaake noted on Wednesday in a Reddit post. "In November 2010 we proposed an alternative resolution on ACTA, which intended to take away the main concerns. It was voted down by a very slight majority [... ] the difference is only 16 votes, out of 736 (or 754 as it stands now)." "I believe internet offers tremendous opportunities to bring makers of music, film and other cultural content closer to audiences at lower prices," Schaake wrote. "However, while Europe offers the most attractive and diverse content in the world, much of it is locked behind fragmented copyright laws. Instead of focusing on enforcement, we must focus on reform, while keeping in mind that it is not the government's job to preserve certain business models against the forces of the free market." Commission spokesman Clancy also pointed to the importance of the creative industries to the EU economy, referring to intellectual property as "Europe's raw material". However, while Clancy said the Commission urged MEPs to back ACTA, he conceded that "if they say no, it's entirely rejected ? it's back to the drawing board". "The signature ceremony in Tokyo was just another step in the procedure that allows ACTA to now be taken to the European Parliament for a free, open and vigorous debate that we fully support," he said. Copyright ? 1998-2012 CBS Interactive Limited. All rights reserved --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 07:05:36 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:05:36 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - EU ACTA chief steps down Message-ID: <685B1B7B-A334-43F2-9B29-C18704F6DFFB@infowarrior.org> (c/o MC) https://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/ACTA_rapporteur_denounces_ACTA_mascarade ACTA rapporteur denounces ACTA masquerade (Redirected from ACTA rapporteur denounces ACTA mascarade) Source: ACTA : une mascarade ? laquelle je ne participerai pas - Kader Arif blog http://www.kader-arif.fr/actualites.php?actualite_id=147 Kader Arif, rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament quit his role as rapporteur saying: ?I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.? ?As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens' legitimate demands.? ?Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is problematic, whether it is its impact on civil liberties, the way it makes Internet access providers liable, its consequences on generic drugs manufacturing, or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications.? ?This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 14:45:56 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:45:56 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Twitter uncloaks a year's worth of DMCA takedown notices, 4, 410 in all Message-ID: <02FDB153-89A5-4E3B-BA93-7630983D95DA@infowarrior.org> (co JH) Twitter uncloaks a year's worth of DMCA takedown notices, 4,410 in all By Jon Brodkin | Published about an hour ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/twitter-uncloaks-a-years-worth-of-dmca-takedown-notices-4410-in-all.ars On almost any given day, Twitter receives a handful of requests to delete tweets that link to pirated versions of copyrighted content?and quickly complies by erasing the offending tweets from its site. That fact itself is probably unsurprising to people familiar with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown process, which gives sites like Twitter a "safe harbor" against lawsuits related to user behavior and uploads?so long as the sites don't knowingly tolerate pirated material or links to such material. But Twitter has taken the unusual step of making DMCA takedown notices public, in partnership with Chilling Effects, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several universities. The site shows 4,410 cease and desist notices dating back to November 2010. While most of 2011 shows daily or near-daily activity, there is just one notice in January 2012, suggesting either that Twitter is suddenly receiving fewer DMCA takedown notices or that the database is not quite up to date. (If we find out from Twitter or Chilling Effects, we'll update the story.) Scrolling through recent takedown notices, you'll see names like Magnolia Pictures, Simon and Schuster, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, among those of many other media companies. A typical takedown notice contains links to tweets that in turn link to websites where pirated versions of copyrighted material is distributed. Attempting to locate the actual tweet from the notice invariably leads to a Twitter.com error page saying "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" Movies, music, footage of cricket matches and stolen photographs of an actress in states of undress have all inspired DMCA notices. Twitter's censorship process accompanied by greater transparency Twitter's history of deleting tweets to gain safe harbor under the DMCA illustrates that it's not strictly an anything-goes platform, but Twitter says it at least wants to make the deletion process transparent. "One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user?s voice," Twitter said. "We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't. The Tweets must continue to flow." The Chilling Effects database was announced along with Twitter's new program to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. "As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," Twitter said yesterday. "Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries? limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country?while keeping it available in the rest of the world." Twitter hasn't yet used this new ability, but said "when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld." Deleting tweets is nothing new. What is new is Twitter's ability to prevent people in only one country from seeing specific tweets. Chilling Effects is designed to inform people about their online rights and help them navigate a legal process that the groups behind the site believe has a "chilling effect" on legitimate Internet activity. "Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to 'chill' legitimate activity," the group says on its website. (One porn site and copyright holder, by the way, made the interesting argument in 2010 that publishing certain takedown notices on Chilling Effects was itself a copyright violation, because the notices contained copyrighted images.) It is clear that many of the Twitter takedown notices are aimed at bot-like accounts that continue to link to pirated material even after specific takedown requests are granted. Others are just casual Twitter users, including one who complained about the DMCA after one of her tweets was deleted because of a link she posted to the Pirate Bay. The tweet in question linked to a piece of sheet music that costs $105, and the takedown notice sent to Twitter reads: "We ask that the Twitter public not be encouraged to visit infringing sites. Kindly remove this tweet. We have contacted piratebay.com as well." Twitter has a page for reporting copyright infringement available for copyright owners and authorized representatives of copyright owners. It also contacts Twitter users after complaints are filed. "If we remove or restrict access to user content in response to a notice of alleged infringement, Twitter will make a good faith effort to contact the affected account holder with information concerning the removal or restriction of access, along with instructions for filing a counter-notification," Twitter says in its copyright and DMCA policy. Twitter users targeted by DMCA takedowns can file counter-notices by responding to Twitter's e-mail notification. Counter-notices are forwarded to the copyright holder who issued the takedown request. If the copyright holder does not respond within 10 days, Twitter may re-publish the deleted tweet. But within the 10-day period, the rights-holder can seek "a court order to prevent further infringement of the material at issue," Twitter says. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 14:50:14 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:50:14 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - We Have Met the Evil and It Is Not Google or Apple: It Is Us Message-ID: <82DD62C6-F517-4544-9A29-DF99FD822138@infowarrior.org> I agree completely. -- rick 1/26/2012 @ 5:16PM |6,450 views We Have Met the Evil and It Is Not Google or Apple: It Is Us Robert Hof, Contributor http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/01/26/we-have-met-the-evil-and-it-is-not-google-or-apple-it-is-us/ So much talk about evil these days. Google is evil for promoting results from its Google+ social network on search results pages, and even for changing its privacy policy to make clear its services share data. Apple is evil for not coming down hard enough on harsh working conditions at its Chinese suppliers? factories. Well, maybe. But if they?re going to be honest, the many pundits piling on to today?s titans of tech need to look up from the screen and into the mirror. Google?s and even Apple?s businesses, warts and all, don?t exist without our explicit participation. As Pogo famously said, albeit in a different context: ?We have met the enemy and he is us.? Now, I?m still not so sure Google?s actions on either score rise to the level of evil by any reasonable meaning of the term. (In fact, the furor over Search plus Your World makes me think of Pogo creator Walt Kelly?s second most famous line: ?Don?t take life so serious, son. It ain?t nohow permanent.?) But it sure looks like Google?s at least edging closer to the evil line than its hifalutin ideals ever seemed to suggest. For its part, Apple has taken considerable effort (as CEO Tim Cook took pains to point out today) t0 improve the factories that produce the gleaming iPhones and iPads we love. But if today?s New York Times story is correct, it?s clearly culpable in its seeming ambivalence about coming down hard on its suppliers exploiting workers. Fact is, though, these companies get away with things we don?t like only because we let them. As powerful as Apple and Google seem, they both answer to customers and users. That would be us. And unlike politicians, they must answer to us every day?if we insist they do. But we can?t do that just by bitching about them on blogs. You want Google to back off on personalized search and data-sharing? Opt for the plain results (click the Hide Personal Search button up there on the right), sign out of your Google account, or even delete it entirely. Or try Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Easier than blogging about it! And if enough of you do it, rest assured that Google?s data crunchers will notice, and if they?re as smart as they like to think, they?ll figure out how to change things. You want Apple to fix its factory conditions? Don?t buy that next iPhone or iPad, and tell Apple why. If enough of you just say no, Apple will notice, and maybe start to use some of those unbelievable profits to change things. Everything else is just talk. And there?s been quite enough of that already. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 15:21:43 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:21:43 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Infographic: Why the movie industry is so wrong about SOPA Message-ID: <5C0FD39E-6715-47FC-8B18-53D0084D3964@infowarrior.org> Infographic: Why the movie industry is so wrong about SOPA http://matadornetwork.com/change/infographic-why-the-movie-industry-is-so-wrong-about-sopa/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 18:06:22 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:06:22 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Navy_wants_commando_=91mothershi?= =?windows-1252?q?p=92_in_Middle_East?= Message-ID: <48C16EC3-F30D-4731-BD0D-4FBD66D8A44B@infowarrior.org> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_print.html Navy wants commando ?mothership? in Middle East By Craig Whitlock, Friday, January 27, 5:57 PM The Pentagon is rushing to send a large floating base for commando teams to the Middle East as tensions rise with Iran, al-Qaeda in Yemen and Somali pirates, among other threats. In response to requests from the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, the Navy is converting an aging warship it had planned to decommission into a makeshift staging base for the commandos. Unofficially dubbed a ?mothership,? the floating base could accommodate smaller high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEALs, procurement documents show. Special Operations Forces are a key part of the Obama administration's strategy to make the military leaner and more agile as the Pentagon confronts at least $487 billion in spending cuts over the next decade. Lt. Cmdr. Mike Kafka, a spokesman for the Navy?s Fleet Forces Command, declined to elaborate on the floating base?s purpose or to say where, exactly, it will be deployed in the Middle East. Other Navy officials acknowledged that they were moving with unusual haste to complete the conversion and send the mothership to the region by early summer. Navy documents indicate that it could be headed to the Persian Gulf, where Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for much of the world?s oil supply. A market survey proposal from the Military Sealift Command, dated Dec. 22 and posted online, states that the floating base needed to be delivered to the Persian Gulf. Other contract documents do not specify a location but say the mothership would be used to ?support mine countermeasure? missions. Defense officials have said that if Iran did attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz, it would rely on mines to obstruct the waterway. With a large naval base in Bahrain, and one or two aircraft carrier groups usually assigned to the region, the Navy already has a substantial presence in the Persian Gulf and surrounding waters. Adding the mothership ship would do relatively little to bolster U.S. maritime power overall, but it could play an instrumental role in secretive commando missions offshore. The deployment of the floating base could also mark a return to maritime missions for SEAL teams, which for the last decade have spent most of their time on land in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other details of the project became public Tuesday when the Military Sealift Command posted a bid request to retrofit the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport docking ship, on a rush-order basis. Until December, the Navy had planned to retire the Ponce and decommission it in March after 41 years of service. Among other missions, it was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea last year in support of NATO?s air war over Libya. Instead, the ship will be modified into what the military terms an Afloat Forward Staging Base. Kafka, the Fleet Forces command spokesman, said it would be used to support mine-clearance ships, smaller patrol ships and aircraft. The documents posted by the Military Sealift Command in December, however, specify that the mothership will be rebuilt so that it can also serve as a docking station for several small high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEAL teams. Among the vessels listed are Mark 5 Zodiacs, an inflatable boat that can carry up to 15 passengers but roll up into a bag, and 7-meter-long Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats, which can carry an entire SEAL squad. SEAL teams also deploy from regular warships, but most vessels in the Navy?s fleet must patrol or move around on a regular basis. A mothership can stay in one spot for weeks or months, effectively serving as a floating base for commandos as they monitor coastal areas or prepare for amphibious operations. The U.S. Special Operations Command has sought a transportable floating base for several years, saying that a mothership would expand the range of commando squads operating from small speedboats, particularly in remote coastal areas. Defense officials said the Ponce will serve as a stopgap measure until the Navy can build a new Afloat Forward Staging Base from scratch. In budget documents released Thursday, the Pentagon said it would fund that project starting next year. The floating base also could be suited to the coast of Somalia, a failed state that is home to an al-Qaeda affiliate and gangs of pirates. A mothership there would give SEALs or other commandos more flexibility in missions such as Wednesday?s rescue a pair of American and Danish hostages who had been held for months by Somali pirates. Ironically, the term ?mothership? is also commonly used to describe a vessel used by Somali pirates. After hijacking a large container or cargo vessel, pirate crews often turn it into a floating base to extend the range of their skiffs or speedboats far into the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden and Arabian Gulf. U.S. military officials declined to say what prompted them to give the Ponce a sudden new lease on life. But contract and bidding documents underscore the urgency of the project. One no-bid contract for engineering work states that the military was waiving normal procurement rules because any delay presented a ?national security risk.? Other contract bids are due Feb. 3. The Navy wants the conversion work to begin 10 days later on the Ponce, which is docked in Virginia Beach. ? The Washington Post Company --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Jan 27 19:57:03 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:57:03 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Twitter's new censorship plan rouses global furor Message-ID: <5E43811F-C185-4BF3-A40B-D856172FA792@infowarrior.org> Jan 27, 8:04 PM EST Twitter's new censorship plan rouses global furor By DAVID CRARY AP National Writer http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TWITTER_CENSORSHIP?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-01-27-20-04-36 NEW YORK (AP) -- Twitter, a tool of choice for dissidents and activists around the world, found itself the target of global outrage Friday after unveiling plans to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws. It was a stunning role reversal for a youthful company that prides itself in promoting unfettered expression, 140 characters at a time. Twitter insisted its commitment to free speech remains firm, and sought to explain the nuances of its policy, while critics - in a barrage of tweets - proposed a Twitter boycott and demanded that the censorship initiative be scrapped. "This is very bad news," tweeted Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, who operates under the name Sandmonkey. Later, he wrote, "Is it safe to say that (hash)Twitter is selling us out?" In China, where activists have embraced Twitter even though it's blocked inside the country, artist and activist Ai Weiwei tweeted in response to the news: "If Twitter censors, I'll stop tweeting." One often-relayed tweet bore the headline of a Forbes magazine technology blog item: "Twitter Commits Social Suicide" San Francisco-based Twitter, founded in 2006, depicted the new system as a step forward. Previously, when Twitter erased a tweet, it vanished throughout the world. Under the new policy, a tweet breaking a law in one country can be taken down there and still be seen elsewhere. Twitter said it will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed and will post the removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals at the website chillingeffects.org. The critics are jumping to the wrong conclusions, said Alexander Macgilliviray, Twitter's general counsel. "This is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency and accountability," he said. "This launch is about us keeping content up whenever we can and to be extremely transparent with the world when we don't. I would hope people realize our philosophy hasn't changed." Some defenders of Internet free expression came to Twitter's defense. "Twitter is being pilloried for being honest about something that all Internet platforms have to wrestle with," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "As long as this censorship happens in a secret way, we're all losers." State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland credited Twitter with being upfront about the potential for censorship and said some other companies are not as forthright. As for whether the new policy would be harmful, Nuland said that wouldn't be known until after it's implemented. Reporters Without Borders, which advocates globally for press freedom, sent a letter to Twitter's executive chairman, Jack Dorsey, urging that the censorship policy be ditched immediately. "By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization," the letter said. "Twitter's position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is unacceptable." Reporters Without Borders noted that Twitter was earning praise from free-speech advocates a year ago for enabling Egyptian dissidents to continue tweeting after the Internet was disconnected. "We are very disappointed by this U-turn now," it said. Twitter said it has no plans to remove tweets unless it receives a request from government officials, companies or another outside party that believes the message is illegal. No message will be removed until an internal review determines there is a legal problem, according to Macgilliviray. "It's a thing of last resort," he said. "The first thing we do is we try to make sure content doesn't get withheld anywhere. But if we feel like we have to withhold it, then we are transparent and we will withhold it narrowly." Macgilliviray said the new policy has nothing to do with a recent $300 million investment by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Mac or any other financial contribution. In its brief existence, Twitter has established itself as one of the world's most powerful megaphones. Streams of tweets have played pivotal roles in political protests throughout the world, including the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia and Syria. Indeed, many of the tweets calling for a boycott of Twitter on Saturday - using the hashtag (hash)TwitterBlackout - came from the Middle East. "This decision is really worrying," said Larbi Hilali, a pro-democracy blogger and tweeter from Morocco. "If it is applied, there will be a Twitter for democratic countries and a Twitter for the others." In Cuba, opposition blogger Yoani Sanchez said she would protest Saturday with a one-day personal boycott of Twitter. "Twitter will remove messages at the request of governments," she tweeted. "It is we citizens who will end up losing with these new rules ... ." In the wake of the announcement, cyberspace was abuzz with suggestions for how any future country-specific censorship could be circumvented. Some Twitter users said this could be done by employing tips from Twitter's own help center to alter one's "Country" setting. Other Twitter users were skeptical that this would work. While Twitter has embraced its role as a catalyst for free speech, it also wants to expand its audience from about 100 million active users now to more than 1 billion. Doing so may require it to engage with more governments and possibly to face more pressure to censor tweets; if it defies a law in a country where it has employees, those people could be arrested. Theoretically, such arrests could occur even in democracies - for example, if a tweet violated Britain's strict libel laws or the prohibitions in France and Germany against certain pro-Nazi expressions. "It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there," said Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers and citizen journalists. "We'll have to see how it plays out - how it is and isn't used." MacKinnon said some other major social networks already employ geo-filtering along the lines of Twitter's new policy - blocking content in a specific jurisdiction for legal reasons while making it available elsewhere. Many of the critics assailing the new policy suggested that it was devised as part of a long-term plan for Twitter to enter China, where its service is currently blocked. China's Communist Party remains highly sensitive to any organized challenge to its rule and responded sharply to the Arab Spring, cracking down last year after calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China. Many Chinese nonetheless find ways around the so-called Great Firewall that has blocked social networking sites such as Facebook. Google for several years agreed to censor its search results in China to gain better access to the country's vast population, but stopped that practice two years after engaging in a high-profile showdown with Chain's government. Google now routes its Chinese search results through Hong Kong, where the censorship rules are less restrictive. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt declined to comment on Twitter's action and instead limited his comments to his own company. "I can assure you we will apply our universally tough principles against censorship on all Google products," he told reporters in Davos, Switzerland. Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said it was a matter of trying to adhere to different local laws. "I think what they (Twitter officials) are wrestling with is what all of us wrestle with - and everyone wants to focus on China, but it is actually a global issue - which is laws in these different countries vary," Drummond said. "Americans tend to think copyright is a real bad problem, so we have to regulate that on the Internet. In France and Germany, they care about Nazis' issues and so forth," he added. "In China, there are other issues that we call censorship. And so how you respect all the laws or follow all the laws to the extent you think they should be followed while still allowing people to get the content elsewhere?" Craig Newman, a New York lawyer and former journalist who has advised Internet companies on censorship issues, said Twitter's new policy and the subsequent backlash are both understandable, given the difficult ethical issues at stake. On one hand, he said, Twitter could put its employees in peril if it was deemed to be breaking local laws. "On the other hand, Twitter has become this huge social force and people view it as some sort of digital town square, where people can say whatever they want," he said. "Twitter could have taken a stand and refused to enter any countries with the most restrictive laws against free speech." --- Associated Press writers Paul Schemm in Rabat, Morocco, Michael Liedtke in San Francisco, Peter Orsi in Havana, Cuba, Cara Anna in New York and Ben Hubbard in Cairo contributed to this story. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Jan 28 20:45:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:45:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Canadian teenagers send Lego man into space Message-ID: <272CD472-7939-4F25-9C21-46B023E7B792@infowarrior.org> Canadian teenagers send Lego man into space Using home-stitched parachute and equipment found on Craigslist, two 17-year-olds send Lego-naut 80,000ft into the air ? Shiv Malik http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/26/canadian-teenagers-lego-man-space?newsfeed=true Two Canadian teenagers have sent a Lego man into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a home-stitched parachute and equipment found on Craigslist. Two weeks ago, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, attached the plastic figurine replete with maple leaf flag to a helium balloon, which they sent 80,000 feet into the air. The pair managed to capture the entire journey into the blackness of space, including the descent, which lasted 97 minutes, using four cameras, at an entire cost of just ?254. Spending four months of Saturdays on the project, the teenagers launched the professionally made weather balloon from a football pitch. It then soared to more than double the height of a commercial jet's cruising altitude ? some 24km into the upper atmosphere from where the Earth's curvature can be seen. Having attached a GPS receiver to the styrofoam box carrying the cameras and Lego-naut, the two managed to recover the bundle attached to a hand-stitched parachute from a field 122km from the launch site. According to the Toronto star, which broke the story, the two met in middle school after Muhammad's family had just emigrated from Pakistan. Muhammad, who spoke no English, was soon befriended by Ho and they began working on the project at Ho's house last September. "People would walk into the house and see us building this fantastical thing with a parachute from scratch, and they would be like, 'What are you doing?'" says Ho. "We'd be like, 'We're sending cameras to space.' They'd be like, 'Oh, okayyyyy ?'" he said. Astrophysics professor Dr Michael Reid, from the University of Toronto, praised the boys, saying: "It shows a tremendous degree of resourcefulness. For two 17-year-olds to accomplish this on their own is pretty impressive." Lego sent a note of congratulations. "We are always amazed by the creative ways in which Lego fans use our products, and humbled by how many unsuspecting places we appear, like attached to a helium balloon in ? space," said the company's brand relations director, Michael McNally. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 30 07:17:09 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:17:09 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DHS and Twitter - 2 Brits denied US entry for jokes Message-ID: <939C1AC9-2BE4-465E-BDB5-547F76F65244@infowarrior.org> Reminds me of the reported false alarm a few years ago when the WH reportedly went bonkers over word spreading about some alleged criminal mastermind getting ready to release havoc on the country --- as I recall, it turned out to be the final boss from the then-just-released GTA video game that folks were talking about. Go team go! But it does raise the spectre of chilling effects in online speech, doesn't it? -- rick British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter jokes By Richard Hartley-parkinson Last updated at 11:19 AM on 30th January 2012 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/British-tourists-arrested-America-terror-charges-Twitter-jokes.html Two British tourists were barred from entering America after joking on Twitter that they were going to 'destroy America' and 'dig up Marilyn Monroe'. Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: 'Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America'. After making their way through passport control at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) last Monday afternoon the pair were detained by armed guards. Despite telling officials the term 'destroy' was British slang for 'party', they were held on suspicion of planning to 'commit crimes' and had their passports confiscated. Leigh was also quizzed about another tweet which quoted hit US comedy Family Guy which read: '3 weeks today, we're totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin' Marilyn Monroe up! Federal agents even searched his suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming Emily was planning to act as Leigh's 'look out' while he raided Marilyn's tomb. Bar manager Leigh, from Coventry, and Emily, 24, from Birmingham, were then quizzed for five hours at LAX before they were handcuffed and put into a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight. As a result of this message, the pair's luggage was searched for spades They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells before being driven back to the airport where they were put on a plane home via Paris. Leigh, an Irish national, and Emily arrived at Birmingham Airport last Wednesday afternoon. Emily said: 'The officials told us we were not allowed in to the country because of Leigh's tweet. They wanted to know what we were going to do. 'They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. 'I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh's lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe. 'I couldn't believe it because it was a quote from the comedy Family Guy which is an American show. 'It got even more ridiculous because the officials searched our suitcases and said they were looking for spades and shovels. They did a full body search on me too. Paperwork handed to Mr Van Bryan confirms that he was questioned by the Department for Homeland Security before entry to the U.S. was denied 'We just wanted to have a good time on holiday. That was all Leigh meant in his tweet. He would not hurt anyone. He is gay.' Leigh posted the tweet on January 16 before the pair flew to LA last Monday. Leigh said: 'It's just so ridiculous it's almost funny but at the time it was really scary. 'The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. 'I kept saying to them they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me "you've really f***** up with that tweet boy". 'When I was in the van I was handcuffed and put in a cage. I had a panic attack but the worse was yet to come. 'When we arrived at the prison I was shoved in a cell on my own but after an hour two huge Mexican men covered in tattoos came in and started asking me who I was. 'They told me they'd been arrested for taking cocaine over the border. 'When the food arrived on the tray they took it all and just left me with a carton of apple juice.' After 12 hours in custody they returned to the airport where they were handed documents which stated they had been refused entry to the US. Emily's charge sheet stated: 'It is believed that you are travelling with Leigh-Van Bryan who possibly has the intentions of coming to the United States to commit crimes.' Leigh's charge sheet, alongside a police mug shot and finger print, added: 'He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. 'Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.' Leigh and Emily have now been told they must apply for visas from the US Embassy in London before flying to the US again. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Jan 30 12:01:17 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:01:17 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - MegaUpload User Data Soon to be Destroyed Message-ID: <24764ACC-53FB-4DA8-B75D-9230BE93B7A9@infowarrior.org> MegaUpload User Data Soon to be Destroyed ? Ernesto ? January 30, 2012 https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-user-data-soon-to-be-destroyed-120130/ MegaUpload has received a letter from the US Attorney informing the company that data uploaded by its users may be destroyed before the end of the week. The looming wipe-out is the result of MegaUpload?s lack of funds to pay for the servers. Behind the scenes, MegaUpload is hoping to convince the US Government that it?s in the best interest of everyone involved to allow users to access their data, at least temporarily. In the wake of the MegaUpload shutdown many of the site?s users have complained about the personal files that were lost as collateral damage. From work-related data to personal photos, the raid disabled access to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of files that are clearly not infringing. A recent announcement by the US Attorney now suggests that these files may soon be lost forever. ?We received a letter very late Friday from the US Attorney that declared there could be an imminent destruction of Megaupload consumer data files on this coming Thursday,? MegaUpload lawyer Ira Rothken told TorrentFreak. Rothken explains that MegaUpload is determined to protect the interests of its users, but that its hands are tied without help from the authorities. The looming data loss is linked to unpaid bills at Cogent Communications and Carpathia Hosting where MegaUpload leased some of its servers. ?We of course would like to think the United States and Megaupload would both be united in trying to avoid such a consumer protection calamity whereby innocent consumers could permanently lose access to everything from word processing files to family photos and many other things that could never practically be considered infringing,? the lawyer told TorrentFreak. ?Megaupload?s assets were frozen by the United States. Mega needs funds unfrozen to pay for bandwidth, hosting, and systems administration in order to allow consumers to get access to their data stored in the Mega cloud and to back up the same for safekeeping.? MegaUpload has contacted the US Attorney?s office with a request to unfreeze assets including money and domains so users can get access to their personal data. If this doesn?t happen, the consequences for many MegaUpload users and the future of other cloud hosting services will be disastrous. ?If the United States fails at helping protect and restore Megaupload consumer data in an expedient fashion, it will have a chilling effect on cloud computing in the United States and worldwide. It is one thing to bring a claim for copyright infringement it is another thing to take down an entire cloud storage service in Megaupload that has substantial non infringing uses as a matter of law,? Rothken told us. Meanwhile, MegaUpload users are also taking action themselves. Last week Pirate parties worldwide began making a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file a complaint against authorities in the US. The EFF has also taken an interest in the issue, and is sharing data with the international Pirate parties. For now, however, the more urgent matter is to ensure that the data doesn?t get destroyed. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 06:59:48 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:59:48 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Trendfear: Do you ever feel you're being left behind? Message-ID: <801BC0BE-4B97-4E5C-8CCB-139FF9575307@infowarrior.org> Trendfear: Do you ever feel you're being left behind? By Tom de Castella BBC News Magazine http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16789155 January is a cornucopia of technological tipping and frantic futurology, but do you ever get a nagging fear that trends are passing you by? < -- > --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 07:09:03 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:09:03 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?SOPA=2C_PIPA=2C_ACTA_=85_What=92?= =?windows-1252?q?s_Next=3F?= Message-ID: SOPA, PIPA, ACTA ? What?s Next? Date: January 31, 2012 Author: Barry Ritholtz ACTA: ?Would Usurp Congressional Authority?, ?Threatens Numerous Public Interests?, a ?Backroom Special Interest Deal?, a ?Masquerade? We just beat back SOPA and PIPA with the web blackout. Now everyone is talking about ACTA. But ? because ACTA is complicated, and is just starting to receive coverage ? most are not sure exactly what ACTA really is, or why we should be concerned about it. We?ll give you an executive summary of what you need to know. Instead of giving you the specifics about what?s actually in the bill (we provide links at the end for those who want to know), we?ll explain why the procedure used is a recipe for disaster. Why are we stressing procedure over substance? Because, as awful as ACTA is, there are other horrible bills such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement waiting in the wings ? which may be even worse than ACTA. Unless we understand the rotten, anti-democratic process which is causing these bad bills to be introduced, we will be caught off-guard by the introduction of one draconian bill after another ? and we will lose the fight for Internet freedom. (The problem is that powerful men are making laws in secret to protect their interests.) < -- > http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/01/sopa-pipa-acta-%E2%80%A6-what%E2%80%99s-next/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 07:10:51 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:10:51 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - New Mobile-Phone Privacy Law Proposed Message-ID: <010441AD-69D8-49CC-BF7F-0E7C66FBDD19@infowarrior.org> c/o MM New Mobile-Phone Privacy Law Proposed ? By David Kravets ? January 30, 2012 | ? 7:00 pm | ? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/new-mobile-phone-privacy-law-proposed/ Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) unveiled draft legislation Monday requiring mobile-phone carriers to reveal if they are employing tracking software such as Carrier IQ. ?Consumers have the right to know and to say ?no? to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,? Markey said in The Hill. Under the Mobile Device Privacy Act (.pdf), consumers would have to consent that data from their phones would be sent to third parties, like Carrier IQ in Mountain View, California. Carrier IQ has said that its software was secretly installed on some 150 million phones. It conceded that it has the capacity to log web usage, and to chronicle where and when and to what numbers calls and text messages were sent and received. Carrier IQ said that the data it vacuums to its servers from handsets is vast ? as the software also monitors app deployment, battery life, phone CPU output and data and cell-site connectivity, among other things. But, Carrier IQ said, it is not logging every keystroke, as a prominent critic suggested. The data, which gets downloaded from consumers? phones roughly once a day, is encrypted during transit and also provided to carriers to enhance the ?user experience,? Carrier IQ said. Carrier IQ came under intense scrutiny last month after a Connecticut-based Android developer posted a YouTube video showing the software has enormous access to usage information, and claiming that it logs a user?s every keystroke. Sprint recently announced that it is dropping Carrier IQ, as did Apple. T-Mobile and AT&T also employ it. Verizon does not. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 07:13:25 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:13:25 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - LightSquared asks regulator to exempt GPS receivers from protection Message-ID: <9DCCCEE3-6519-4C93-BEDA-056AF6F55A69@infowarrior.org> (c/o MM) LightSquared asks regulator to exempt GPS receivers from protection By Bob Brewin 01/30/12 http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20120130_9701.php?oref=rss?zone=NGtoday Last Friday, one year and a day after the Federal Communications Commission told startup broadband wireless carrier LightSquared it could not begin operations until it demonstrated its network did not cause interference with Global Positioning System receivers, the agency kicked off a review process requested by the company to determine whether GPS receivers are entitled to such protection. On Dec. 20, 2011, LightSquared filed a petition with FCC seeking a ruling that commercial GPS receivers fit the commission's description of unlicensed Earth stations or unlicensed wireless systems such as Wi-Fi networks and hence "are not entitled to interference protection from LightSquared operations." FCC on Friday initiated a public comment period on the petition, with replies due March 15. The agency said LightSquared "in essence" seeks a declaratory ruling that if its terrestrial network operates "in accordance with the commission's technical parameters, commercially available GPS devices are not protected against harmful interference" caused by those operations. This move comes after LightSquared flunked two rounds of GPS interference tests managed by the Air Force Space Command and conducted by the company, the GPS industry and federal agencies, and the company's battle for a go-ahead has turned into a high-stakes political drama. On Jan. 13, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Deputy Transportation Secretary John Porcari said the tests last fall at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., showed "there appears to be no practical solutions or mitigations that would permit the LightSquared broadband service, as proposed, to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS. As a result, no additional testing is required at this time." LightSquared blasted the Space Command tests "as rigged by manufacturers of GPS receivers and government end users to produce bogus results" in a Jan. 18 press release. In September 2011, Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, and the six other Republican members of House Science, Space and Technology Committee charged that the Obama administration tried to soften the testimony of Gen. William Shelton, commander of Space Command, who was critical of LightSquared and its potential for interfering with military GPS receivers. Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, accused LightSquared's backers, including Philip Falcone, chief executive officer of Harbinger Capital, which has invested more than $3 billion in the wireless network, of pressuring him into giving up an investigation into the company. Despite all this political maneuvering, FCC said Friday that it still has not resolved the key issue regarding LightSquared: whether or not its planned network of 40,000 cellular transmitters interfere with GPS. In addition, FCC said it is hamstrung by language in the 2012 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which prohibits it from using any funds made available by that act for operation of the LightSquared network until the company has resolved "concerns of potential widespread harmful interference by such commercial terrestrial operations to commercially available Global Positioning System devices." FCC said the petition is related to the 2012 appropriations law and the ongoing interference resolution process, and it has incorporated the company's pleading into its LightSquareddocket, which has 3,600 filings to date. LightSquared based its petition on a 1979 FCC order, which said receive-only satellite Earth stations did not have to be licensed. The company maintains that order made it clear "deployment of unlicensed satellite receivers must occur only on a nonprotected basis . . . without recourse against the licensed operator who is purportedly causing the interference." Although the 1979 order dealt with large satellite dishes, LightSquared in its pleading interpreted the order to include small commercial GPS receivers. According to LightSquared: "Manufacturers and users of unlicensed receivers lack standing to file complaints or other pleading seeking 'protection' from allegedly incompatible operations" in adjacent bands. Jim Kirkland, vice president and general counsel of Trimble Navigation, a member of the GPS industry group Coalition to Save Our GPS, said in an emailed statement that "LightSquared's petition for a declaratory ruling offered nothing beyond the revisionist history and gross mischaracterization of prior FCC decisions that has been the crux of its case all along, and the fact that LightSquared and its predecessors have never been allowed to interfere with GPS, as the[FCC] International Bureau reconfirmed in its January 2011 waiver order, will again be highlighted in this proceeding." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 08:01:57 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:01:57 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - It's that time of year..... Message-ID: <2143D874-6E3F-4EB1-BA99-30F89A0C1751@infowarrior.org> .... with RSA coming up in a few weeks, stand by for the latest round of cyber-mongering news articles, reports, analyses, and commentaries about Digital Pearl Harbors, cyber-terror, and related stuff. Regardless of how true/balanced/false/sensational such items may be, you can almost set your watch by this annual phenomenon. Welcome to February! -- rick Cybersecurity Disaster Seen in U.S. Survey By Eric Engleman and Chris Strohm - Jan 31, 2012 12:00 AM ET Companies including utilities, banks and phone carriers would have to spend almost nine times more on cybersecurity to prevent a digital Pearl Harbor from plunging millions into darkness, paralyzing the financial system or cutting communications, a Bloomberg Government study found. < -- > http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/cybersecurity-disaster-seen-in-u-s-survey-citing-spending-gaps.html --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 15:59:56 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:59:56 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Google Will Start Country-Specific Censorship for Blogs Message-ID: Google Will Start Country-Specific Censorship for Blogs 1 hour ago by Zoe Fox 1 http://mashable.com/2012/01/31/google-twitter-country-censorship/ Google figured out Twitter?s trick for avoiding universally censoring content weeks ago, but it managed to go unnoticed ? for a while. That is, until TechDows wrote about Blogger?s plan for country-specific URLs Tuesday. At some point ?over the coming weeks,? Google?s Blogger will begin redirecting users to country-specific domain names ? think Google.fr in France rather than Google.com ? to avoid universally removing content that would not be tolerated in specific jurisdictions. A Blogger support post, ?Why does my blog redirect to a country-specific URL?,? last updated Jan. 9, explains that Google is using the method to limit the impact of censored content. Readers will be redirected to sites with their own country?s domain name when they try to visit blogs recognized as foreign, as determined by their IP addresses. ?Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you?re reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or ?ccTLD.? For example, if you?re in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader?s current location.? SEE ALSO: Relax: Twitter?s New Censorship Policy Is Actually Good for Activists If you would like to see a non-affected page, you can direct to google.com/ncr (NCR stands for ?no country redirect?), which places a short term cookie that temporarily prevents geographical redirection. Google says migrating users to local domains will help promote the freedom of expression while allowing the flexibility to abide by local law. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 17:28:37 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:28:37 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - New tactic in mass file-sharing lawsuit: just insult the EFF Message-ID: <9F603BD8-DA7A-4235-A4C5-FE75D4438608@infowarrior.org> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/new-file-sharing-lawsuit-tactic-just-insult-eff-when-it-tries-to-intervene.ars New tactic in mass file-sharing lawsuit: just insult the EFF By Nate Anderson | Published about 2 hours ago "The EFF is a great group of quasi-anarchists... for me to poop on!" An old legal aphorism says, "If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." After reading the latest salvo in the P2P porn copyright wars, it's clear that some poor table has been abused horrifically. The craziness comes from the most recent filing in a Hard Drive Productions case against nearly 1,500 "Doe" defendants accused of sharing one of the company's films online. The case, filed in DC, follows the familiar pattern: sue anonymous Internet users in some random federal court, use the case to obtain subpoenas, unearth the identity of the Internet users, and send them "settlement letters" offering to save them from litigation if they would just pay a few thousand dollars. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has contributed to many of these cases, arguing?sometimes successfully, sometimes, not?that such cases are an abuse of the judicial process. Yesterday, the EFF filed a brief in the Hard Drive case; by the end of the same day, the Chicago-based lawyer handling the case had responded in amazing fashion. Rather than address any substantive arguments made by the EFF, lawyer Paul Duffy decided simply to attack the group itself. "The EFF is opposed to any effective enforcement and litigation of intellectual property law," says the filing before going on to brand it "a radical interest group" with a mission that is "radical, quasi-anarchist, and intrinsically opposed to any effective enforcement of intellectual property rights." EFF has a history of "advocating lawlessness on the Internet," and its purpose is to "hinder and obstruct" the legal process. Giving the EFF liberty to speak to the court would be "wholly fatuous." Not only does the EFF apparently hate IP law in general; it also has a "deep disdain" for "the law generally, in any sphere in which the law might touch the Internet." The "argument," such as it is, is bizarre on its face. EFF has submitted amicus briefs in many cases across the country, and is a widely known digital rights organization. In one notable example from Texas, a judge facing similar mass P2P lawsuits actually invited EFF counsel to participate until "Doe" defendants could be named and then represented by their own counsel. (In that case, the judge ended by sanctioning the lawyer who brought the case, fining him $10,000 and ordering him to pay another $22,000 to the lawyers from EFF and Public Citizen.) The blog "Fight Copyright Trolls," which covers this sort of litigation, called the new filing "so amusingly detached from reality that I had to drink a couple of shots just to gain some kind of consciousness after reading this crap." It's certainly a novel attempt to keep the EFF away from a case, even digging up EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow's deliciously over-the-top 1996 manifesto to paint the group as extremist. In response, Barlow tweeted, "This is cool. Porn copyright troll John Steele [assumed to be behind the case] files a brief that consists solely of insults to EFF." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Jan 31 17:30:12 2012 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:30:12 -0500 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Warner Bros. Just Keeps Pushing People To Piracy; New Deal Also Delays Queuing Message-ID: <0BECA174-6751-4D35-8D60-60E7DCA01910@infowarrior.org> Warner Bros. Just Keeps Pushing People To Piracy; New Deal Also Delays Queuing from the are-they-that-clueless? dept Sometimes you really have to wonder about some legacy entertainment industry execs and their thought process. Warner Bros. is the most aggressively stupid when it comes to willfully going against what consumers want and pushing them to pirate instead. It, among the big Hollywood studios has been the leader in trying to hold back rentals in the bizarre belief that if people can't rent a video legally, they're suddenly more likely to pony up many times the amount to buy the full DVD. This is what we call denial. And economically clueless. The latest detail, which came out last week, is that one of WB's new conditions with its deal with Netflix isn't just that the rentals are delayed by 56 days (up from the previous 28), but that they won't even be able to put the delayed movie in their "wanted" queue until 28 days before it's actually available. < -- > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120131/00110017595/warner-bros-just-keeps-pushing-people-to-piracy-new-deal-also-delays-queuing.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.