Skip to main content

Home/ Indie Nation/ Group items tagged information

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
John Lemke

Bad Police Info Led Spies To Monitor Dotcom, Govt. Suppressed Information | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-suppressed-information-120926

2012 police information Kim Dotcom Dotcom MegaUpload FileSharing p2p newmediaorder govt

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • On Monday, Prime Minister John Key announced that he had requested an inquiry by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security after it was revealed that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GSCB) illegally intercepted the communications of individuals in the Megaupload case.
  • GCSB is an intelligence agency of the New Zealand government responsible for spying on external entities. It is forbidden by law from conducting surveillance on its own citizens or permanent residents in the country. Now it has been revealed that incorrect information supplied by the police’s Organized and Financial Crime Agency (OFCANZ) led the GCSB to spy on Kim Dotcom and Bram van der Kolk.
  • During an earlier hearing, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald of OFCANZ said that apart from surveillance carried out by the police, no other surveillance had been carried out against Dotcom. But with the revelation that GCSB had indeed been monitoring the Megaupload founder at the behest of OFCANZ, questions are now being raised about this apparent inconsistency, not least since Wormald previously acknowledged that a secret government unit had been involved in a pre-raid planning meeting in January.
John Lemke

Bad Police Info Led Spies To Monitor Dotcom, Govt. Suppressed Information | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/-suppressed-information-120926

2012 police Kim Dotcom Dotcom MegaUpload FileSharing p2p yourrights dueprocess

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Court documents have revealed how information supplied by New Zealand’s Organised and Financial Crime Agency led to Kim Dotcom and his associates being illegally monitored by GCSB, the Kiwi spy agency comparable to the United States’ CIA. Today a High Court judge expressed concern at the situation, with Dotcom’ legal team calling for an independent inquiry into the fiasco. Meanwhile, pressure continues to mount on Prime Minister John Key as it’s revealed the government issued an information suppression order.
  • According to court documents, GCSB checked with OFCANZ that both Dotcom and der Kolk were indeed foreign nationals. OFCANZ said they were, but in fact neither should have been spied on by GCSB. The monitoring went ahead anyway. In the High Court today, Justice Helen Winkelmann asked lawyers how it could be possible that GCSB hadn’t known about Dotcom’s New Zealand residency.
  • During an earlier hearing, Detective Inspector Grant Wormald of OFCANZ said that apart from surveillance carried out by the police, no other surveillance had been carried out against Dotcom. But with the revelation that GCSB had indeed been monitoring the Megaupload founder at the behest of OFCANZ, questions are now being raised about this apparent inconsistency, not least since Wormald previously acknowledged that a secret government unit had been involved in a pre-raid planning meeting in January.
John Lemke

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputatio... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...jtrig-manipulation

NSA GCHQ 2014 misinformation psyops surveillance spying espinoge yourrights indienationnews law

shared by John Lemke on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
  • Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. 
  • Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends. The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 25 Feb 14
       
      Wow, how is not changing pictures and creating false victims not identity theft and conspiracy?  
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 25 Feb 14
       
      Not only are you now guilty until proven innocent but, if you are guilty enough, we shall create a situation so that you are.
  • Government plans to monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information, have long been the source of speculation. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups. Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was recently named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that – while disputing key NSA claims – proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency’s powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 25 Feb 14
       
      So one of the guys who advocates this and approves of it, gets to be on the NSA review committee?  Isn't that like Ted Kennedy on the Ethics Review Committee or the Warren Commission?
  • Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.
John Lemke

US Court Secretly Lets Government Share Megaupload Evidence With Copyright Industry | T... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...-with-copyright-industry.shtml

2013 law legal tech megaupload evidence court due+process yourrights exparte litigation MPAA filesharing copyright

shared by John Lemke on 07 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Apparently part of the issue for the original filing to reveal this information was that some copyright holders are getting antsy that as the case drags on, they won't also be able to file civil cases against Megaupload before the three-year statute of limitations expires. However, as Megaupload's lawyers point out, there is no urgency here since the government itself made no move to share this information over the past two years. If it really wanted to share the information it had ample time to make the request and allow Megaupload's lawyers to review and take part in the process, rather than trying to route around them entirely. I'm guessing the recent successes against IsoHunt and Hotfile may have contributed to the timing as well. The MPAA pretty clearly thinks it can use those two cases to go after Megaupload as well, outside of the criminal case which will continue.
John Lemke

Rent-to-own PCs surreptitiously captured users' most intimate moments | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...ed-users-most-intimate-moments

2012 security malware spyware fraud USA Canada Australia

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • The software, known as PC Rental Agent, was developed by Pennsylvania-based DesignerWare. It was licensed by more than 1,617 rent-to-own stores in the US, Canada, and Australia to report the physical location of rented PCs. A feature known as Detective Mode also allowed licensees to surreptitiously monitor the activities of computer users. Managers of rent-to-own stores could use the feature to turn on webcams so anyone in front of the machine would secretly be recorded. Managers could also use the software to log keystrokes and take screen captures.
  • In some cases, webcam activations captured images of children, individuals not fully clothed, and people engaged in sexual activities, the complaint alleged. Rental agreements never disclosed the information that was collected, FTC lawyers said.
  • PC Rental Agent also had the capability to display fake registration pages for Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and Yahoo Messenger. When customers entered their names, addresses, and other personal information in the forms, the data was sent to DesignerWare servers and then e-mailed to the rent-to-own licensees.
John Lemke

Snowden hints at new revelations of industrial espionage by the NSA | The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...ndustrial-espionage-by-the-nsa

law legal 2014 espionage nsa indienationnews spying yourrights IN-Pub

shared by John Lemke on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • "I don't want to pre-empt the work of journalists," he said, "but there's no question the US is engaged in economic spying. If there's information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests (not the national security) of the United States, they'll go after that information."
  • While evidence shows the NSA has spied on Brazil's Petrobras oil company, the US government has never been conclusively linked to the surveillance or theft of trade secrets on an international stage. If true, the revelations would have a grave diplomatic impact, particularly the government attempts to regain the trust of allied nations.
  • John Lemke on 27 Jan 14
     
    Honestly, should we be shocked?
John Lemke

Snowden Keeps Outwitting U.S. Spies - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...till-outwitting-u-s-spies.html

2014 indienationnews legal law security Snowden Spying

shared by John Lemke on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • First, it assumes that Snowden’s master file includes data from every network he ever scanned. Second, it assumes that this file is already in or will end up in the hands of America’s adversaries. If these assumptions turn out to be true, then the alarm raised in the last week will be warranted. The key word here is “if.”
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 11 Feb 14
       
      The two asumptions
  • One U.S. intelligence official briefed on the report said the DIA concluded that Snowden visited classified facilities outside the NSA station where he worked in Hawaii while he was downloading the documents he would eventually leak to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman. On Tuesday, Clapper himself estimated that less than 10 percent of the documents Snowden took were from the NSA.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 11 Feb 14
       
      Seems not many of the documents were actually NSA documents.
  • assume
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • DIA director Gen. Michael Flynn put it this way on Tuesday in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: “We
  • that Snowden, everything that he touched, we assume that he took, stole.”
  • The U.S. intelligence official briefed on the report said the DIA was able to retrace the steps Snowden took inside the military’s classified systems to find every site where he rummaged around. “Snowden had a very limited amount of time before he would be detected when he did this, so we
  • assume
  • he zipped up the files and left,” this official said.
  • Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert and cryptographer who Greenwald has consulted on the Snowden archive, said it was prudent to
  • assume
  • that lest some of Snowden’s documents could wind up in the hands of a foreign government.
  • In June, Greenwald told the Daily Beast that he did not know whether or not Snowden had additional documents beyond the ones he gave him. “I believe he does. He was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published.”
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 11 Feb 14
       
      He is not willing to release stuff he felt that journalist should not publish...
  • Snowden, however, has implied that he does not have control over the files he took. “No intelligence service—not even our own—has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect,” he wrote in July in a letter to former New Hampshire Republican senator Gordon Humphrey. “While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China). You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.”
John Lemke

Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ | World news | theguardi... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-webcam-images-internet-yahoo

2014 spying yahoo cam images indienationnews law legal technology

shared by John Lemke on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
  • between 2008 and 2010
  • Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.
John Lemke

NSA collects nearly 5 billion cellphone location records per day | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...phone-location-records-per-day

2013 nsa cellphone location records security tech legal law 4thAmendment spying ars yourrights

shared by John Lemke on 05 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The Washington Post added another noteworthy finding to the growing pile of information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden: the NSA is collecting nearly five billion cellphone location records per day from across the world.
  • This gigantic data collection feeds a database that stores information on "hundreds of millions of devices," according to the documents obtained by
  • 27 terabytes
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The paper spoke with an intelligence lawyer who continued to emphasize that this program focuses beyond the US, which seems to prevent the data from falling under the Fourth Amendment (unreasonable search and seizures).
John Lemke

Hackers charged with stealing Xbox, 'Call of Duty,' and US Army secrets worth over $100... - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...er-xbox-one-us-army-data-theft

2014 indienationnews tech news call of duty xbox hackers theft hacking hack law legal technology

shared by John Lemke on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Four hackers have been jointly charged with conspiracies to commit computer fraud, copyright infringement, wire fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, and theft of trade secrets. Individually, they have been charged with counts of aggravated identity theft, unauthorized computer access, copyright infringement, and wire fraud.
  • The defendants, aged between 18 and 28, are believed to have stolen more than $100 million in intellectual property and other proprietary data from the likes of Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve, and even the US Army. This includes pre-release versions of Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Apache helicopter simulation software developed for the US army, and information about the Xbox One console. Two of the suspects have pleaded guilty, one of which is 22-year old David Pokora. His plea represents what may be the first conviction of a foreign-based individual for hacking into US businesses to steal trade secret information.
  • 18-count superseding indictment
John Lemke

The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...ta-report-good-bad-and-missing

2014 EFF mass data indienationnews law technology legal White House report review privacy yourrights notice and consent

shared by John Lemke on 05 May 14 - No Cached
  • the report recognized that email privacy is critical
  • one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
  • the algorithm is only as fair as the data fed into it.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • the danger of discrimination remains due to the very digital nature of big data
  • especially the elderly, minorities, and the poor
  • an example of this in Boston, which had a pilot program to allow residents to report potholes through a mobile app but soon recognized that the program was inherently flawed because “wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.”
  • The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.
  • metadata (the details associated with your communications, content, or actions, like who you called, or what a file you uploaded file is named, or where you were when you visited a particular website) can expose just as much information about you as the “regular” data it is associated with, so it deserves the same sort of privacy protections as “regular” data.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      What is Metadate... then discuss
  • The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      Did the report give a strong enough recommendation? "looking into" and doing are much different
  • several other government reports have taken a much stronger stance and explicitly stated that metadata deserves the same level of privacy protections as “regular” data.
  • We think the report should have followed the lead of the PCAST report and acknowledged that the distinction between data and metadata is an artificial one, and recommended the appropriate reforms.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      I very strongly agree.  The report failed in this area.
  • the White House suggested advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which includes the idea that “consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it,” as well as “a right to access and correct personal data.”
  • Consumers have a right to know when their data is exposed, whether through corporate misconduct, malicious hackers, or under other circumstances. Recognizing this important consumer safeguard, the report recommends that Congress “should pass legislation that provides a single national data breach standard along the lines of the Administration's May 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.”
  • While at first blush this may seem like a powerful consumer protection, we don’t think that proposal is as strong as existing California law. The proposed federal data breach notification scheme would preempt state notification laws, removing the strong California standard and replacing it with a weaker standard.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      In other words, it failed at what can be done and it would actually lower standards when compared to what California has in place currently.
  • We were particularly disconcerted
  • the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      WTF? how did he get in this group?
  • two big concerns
  • First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers
  • Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.
  • Over 1.4 million people hold top-secret security clearances. In 2012, the government classified 95 million documents. And by some estimates, the government controls more classified information than there is in the entire Library of Congress.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      Don't leave this stat out.  More classified documents than LOC documents.  WTF? A "democracy" with more secret documents than public?
  • The report argues that in today’s connected world it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with all the data streams they generate (intentionally or not), so the existing “notice and consent” framework (in which companies must notify and get a user’s consent before collecting data) is obsolete. Instead, they suggest that more attention should be paid to how data is used, rather than how it is collected.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      This is the most troubling part perhaps,  isn't the collection without consent where the breech of privacy begins?
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      "notice and consent"
  • An unfortunate premise of this argument is that automatic collection of data is a given
  • While we agree that putting more emphasis on responsible use of big data is important, doing so should not completely replace the notice and consent framework.
  • Despite being a fairly thorough analysis of the privacy implications of big data, there is one topic that it glaringly omits: the NSA’s use of big data to spy on innocent Americans.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      If we ignore it, it will go away?  Did they not just mostly ignore it and accept it as a given for corporations and completely ignore it regarding the government? Pretty gangster move isn't it?
  • Even though the review that led to this report was announced during President Obama’s speech on NSA reform, and even though respondents to the White House’s Big Data Survey “were most wary of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies are collecting and using data about them,” the report itself is surprisingly silent on the issue.2 This is especially confusing given how much the report talks about the need for more transparency in the private sector when it comes to big data. Given that this same logic could well be applied to intelligence big data programs, we don’t understand why the report did not address this vital issue.
John Lemke

Report: NSA among worst offenders of mass surveillance, Snowden says - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

2013 Snowden spying surveillance nsa cnn com indienationnews leaks transparency yourrights

shared by John Lemke on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "The world has learned a lot in a short amount of time about irresponsibly operated security agencies and, at times, criminal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies try to avoid controls," Snowden wrote, according to the news magazine. "While the NSA and GCHQ (the British national security agency) appear to be the worst offenders -- at least according to the documents that are currently public -- we cannot forget that mass surveillance is a global problem and needs a global solution."
  • A recent report by Der Spiegel, citing documents provided by Snowden, alleged the NSA monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone. Some reports also suggest the United States carried out surveillance on French and Spanish citizens.
  • "If he wants to come back and open up to the responsibility of the fact that he took and stole information, he violated his oath, he disclosed classified information -- that by the way has allowed three different terrorist organizations, affiliates of al Qaeda to change the way they communicate -- I'd be happy to have that discussion with him," Rogers said on "Face the Nation."
John Lemke

A Social Networking Site For Criminals Lands Two Teens In Jail « The Blade by... - 0 views

www.lockergnome.com/...minals-lands-two-teens-in-jail

writeabout 2011 SAC002 crime stupid stupid-crooks dumb dumbcriminals CrimeBook

shared by John Lemke on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 08 Mar 11
     
    Most of us are familiar with Facebook, but has anyone heard of 'Crimebook'? The novel social networking site was set up by two British teens to entertain the criminal element of society. These teens were raking in the money to the tune of some $26M with some 8,000 crooks using the social site to exchange stolen credit card information. The teens also shared the bank accounts of some 65,000 customers who had their accounts hacked by the thieves.
John Lemke

Recording Industry Rep Suggests Parents Should Slap Their Children To Stop Piracy | Tec... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...-children-to-stop-piracy.shtml

parents 2012 piracy court decision litigation music p2p newmediaorder techdirt monitoring filesharing

shared by John Lemke on 18 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • A ruling handed down yesterday by Germany's highest court represents a blow to rightsholders in their quest to clamp down on illicit file-sharing. The court ruled that the parents of a teenager who had made available more than 1,100 songs on file-sharing networks can not be held responsible for their son's infringements, nor be required to monitor or hinder his online activities.
  • The Court ruled that the parents had met their parental obligations when they informed their child of "basic do's and don'ts" including that file-sharing copyrighted content online is illegal. Furthermore, the Court ruled that the parents were not required to monitor their child's online activities nor install special software to restrict his online behavior. This would only be required should the parents have "reasonable grounds" to presume that their child would engage in infringing activities online.
John Lemke

Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans' text messages | Politics and Law - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...ogs-of-americans-text-messages

2012 security freespeech freedom legal law privacy Police SMS

shared by John Lemke on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • CNET has learned a constellation of law enforcement groups has asked the U.S. Senate to require that wireless companies retain that information, warning that the lack of a current federal requirement "can hinder law enforcement investigations." They want an SMS retention requirement to be "considered" during congressional discussions over updating a 1986 privacy law for the cloud computing era -- a move that could complicate debate over the measure and erode support for it among civil libertarians. As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years, so has their use in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. They have been introduced as evidence in armed robbery, cocaine distribution, and wire fraud prosecutions. In one 2009 case in Michigan, wireless provider SkyTel turned over the contents of 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as "staggering."
John Lemke

Little red lawsuit: Prince sues 22 people for pirating his songs | The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...-people-for-pirating-his-songs

prince lawsuit 2014 legal law YouTube Blogger litigation intellectualproperty indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The case, filed as Prince v. Chodera in the Northern District of California, reads, "The Defendants in this case engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince's material." Only two defendants are named in the suit, however — the rest are listed as John Does, though eight do have the distinction of being regarded by their online handles. Nevertheless, Prince, based on "information and belief," alleges that each of the individuals worked together on Facebook and Blogger to conduct infringing activity, and lists extensively the mirror sites and blogs each used to distribute copies of his work. He has thus demanded $1 million with interest in damages from each of the defendants, along with a permanent injunction to prevent all of them from doing further harm.
John Lemke

Surprise: ASCAP and Music Labels Colluded To Screw Pandora | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...-labels-to-screw-pandora.shtml

2014 ASCAP music infringement copywrong copyright law legal litigation scam labels

shared by John Lemke on 13 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • A key part of this was that the major labels, key members of ASCAP, suddenly started "dropping out" of ASCAP in order to do licensing directly. At first we thought this was a sign of how the labels might be realizing that ASCAP was obsolete and out of touch, but it has since become clear that these "removals" were all something of a scam to force Pandora into higher rates.
  • What happened was that ASCAP and Pandora had first negotiated a higher rate than Pandora had agreed to in the past -- reaching a handshake agreement. However, before that agreement could be finalized, these labels started "withdrawing" from ASCAP in order to negotiate directly. As part of that, both ASCAP and the labels refused to tell Pandora which songs had been withdrawn, meaning that if Pandora accidentally played one of the withdrawn songs (again, without knowing which songs were withdrawn),
  • Your Honor, by the time Pandora asked for this information on November 1st, both ASCAP and Mr. Brodsky [Sony Executive VP] had in their possession this very list. The deposition testimony from ASCAP was that this list as is could have been delivered to Pandora within 24 hours were it only to get the go-ahead from Sony to do so. ASCAP never received the go-ahead. We cited much of the internal back-and-forth on this in our briefs... My favorite is the following exchange between Mr. DeFilippis and Mr. Reimer of ASCAP on December 19th, 2013, PX 193. You see the question being asked by Mr. DeFilippis: why didn't Sony provide the list to Pandora? Mr. Reimer's response: Ask me tomorrow. Mr. DeFilippis: Right. With drink in hand. And the inference here is just incredible. This data was sitting there, your Honor, and nobody was willing to give it to Pandora.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • There's a lot more in there, but it seems abundantly clear that these labels "withdrawing" from ASCAP had nothing to do with competition or market rates. It appears that it had little to do with even withdrawing from ASCAP. Instead, it seems to have been designed from the start to basically screw over Pandora, in what certainly smells an awful lot like collusion, by forcing Pandora to pay exorbitant rates or suddenly face a massive copyright liability because no one would tell them what songs were being "withdrawn" from an existing licensing agreement.
John Lemke

NSA moves from bugging German Chancellor to bugging German ministers | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...or-to-bugging-german-ministers

2014 nsa indienationnews law legal chancellor german

shared by John Lemke on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Still, that moratorium on spying didn't extend beyond those world leaders, and Reuters, translating from the BamS source, writes that the source said, “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly.” Specifically, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel's confidants, was called out as being a target of the NSA's increased spying efforts.
John Lemke

Rep. Goodlatte Slips Secret Change Into Phone Unlocking Bill That Opens The DMCA Up For... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...t-new-copyright-problems.shtml

2014 unlocking cell phone DMCA copyright Section 1201 technology law legal yourrights writeabout wroteatindienation indienationnews IN-Pub

shared by John Lemke on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Because of section 1201 of the DMCA, the "anti-circumvention" provision, companies have been abusing copyright law to block all sorts of actions that are totally unrelated to copyright. That's because 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent basically any "technological protection measures." The intent of the copyright maximalists was to use this section to stop people from breaking DRM. However, other companies soon distorted the language to argue that it could be used to block certain actions totally unrelated to copyright law -- such as unlocking garage doors, ink jet cartridges, gaming accessories... and phones
  • Separately, every three years, the Librarian of Congress gets to announce "exemptions" to section 1201 where it feels that things are being locked up that shouldn't be. Back in 2006, one of these exemptions involved mobile phone unlocking.
  • Every three years this exemption was modified a bit, but in 2012, for unexplained reasons, the Librarian of Congress dropped that exemption entirely, meaning that starting in late January of 2013, it was possible to interpret the DMCA to mean that phone unlocking was illegal. In response to this there was a major White House petition -- which got over 100,000 signatures, leading the White House to announce (just weeks later) that it thought unlocking should be legal -- though, oddly, it seemed to place the issue with the FCC to fix, rather than recognizing the problem was with current copyright law.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While this gives Goodlatte and other maximalists some sort of plausible deniability that this bill is making no statement one way or the other on bulk unlocking, it certainly very strongly implies that Congress believes bulk unlocking is, in fact, still illegal. And that's massively problematic on any number of levels, in part suggesting that the unlocker's motives in unlocking has an impact on the determination under Section 1201 as to whether or not it's legal. And that's an entirely subjective distinction when a bill seems to assume motives, which makes an already problematic Section 1201 much more problematic. Without that clause, this seemed like a bill that was making it clear that you can't use the DMCA to interfere with an issue that is clearly unrelated to copyright, such as phone unlocking. But with this clause, it suggests that perhaps the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause can be used for entirely non-copyright issues if someone doesn't like the "motive" behind the unlocker.
  • Unfortunately, the bill was deemed so uncontroversial that it's been listed on the suspension calendar of the House, which is where non-controversial bills are put to ensure quick passage. That means that, not only did Goodlatte slip in a significant change to this bill that impacts the entire meaning and intent of the bill long after it went through the committee process (and without informing anyone about it), but he also got it put on the list of non-controversial bills to try to have it slip through without anyone even noticing.
John Lemke

Uroburos Rootkit: Most sophisticated 3-year-old Russian Cyber Espionage Campaign - The ... - 0 views

thehackernews.com/...tkit-most-sophisticated-3.html

rootkit russian espionage 2014 indienationnews hacker technology tech security malware

shared by John Lemke on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The researchers claimed that the malware may have been active for as long as three years before being discovered and appears to have been created by Russian developers.
  • The two main components of Uroburos are - a driver and an encrypted virtual file system, used to disguise its nasty activities and to try to avoid detection. Its driver part is extremely complex and is designed to be very discrete and very difficult to identify.
  • The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • we assume that the group behind Uroburos is the same group that performed a cyberattack against the United States of America in 2008 with a malware called Agent.BTZ
  • The attacks carried out with Uroburos are targeting government institutions, research institutions, intelligence agencies, nation states, research institutions or companies dealing with sensitive information as well as similar high-profile targets. The oldest drivers identified by the researchers was compiled in 2011 is the evidence that the malware was created around three years ago and was undetected.
1 - 20 of 30 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page