From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 06:34:11 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 07:34:11 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Way We Live Now: United Airlines and 'Disruptive' Passengers Message-ID: <2A0B6E85-A9D8-493C-9462-1650B4DC26AD@infowarrior.org> The Way We Live Now: United Airlines and 'Disruptive' Passengers James Fallows Apr 2 2013, 7:01 AM ET http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-way-we-live-now-united-airlines-and-disruptive-passengers/274512/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 06:34:22 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 07:34:22 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Real Reason Janet Napolitano Doesn't Like Email -- Accountability Message-ID: The Real Reason Janet Napolitano Doesn't Like Email -- Accountability from the don't-make-me-back-up-my-statements dept We've already detailed the cognitive dissonance created by DHS head Janet Napolitano's statements on email usage. Last September, she blithely pointed out that she doesn't use email "at all," and in fact, "avoids many online services." She went on to say that some would call her a "Luddite" and seemed to present the incongruous situation as comical. Hilarity ensued. Powerful government official says, "What, me internet?" LOLS at 11. So, we all had a good, if disbelieving laugh at her our own expense (we're still paying her salary), and Janet Napolitano went back to not checking the email account she doesn't have and not internetting with any regularity -- the sort of thing that might be considering endearing if it weren't for the fact that so many politicians openly brag about their lack of computer skills, while simultaneously crafting, amending, voting on a variety of computer-related laws < -- > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130328/16152022502/real-reason-janet-napolitano-doesnt-like-email-accountability.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 06:34:58 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 07:34:58 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - History Repeats: The Subprime Auto Loan Bubble Message-ID: Special Report: How the Fed fueled an explosion in subprime auto loans 7:05am EDT By Carrick Mollenkamp JASPER, Alabama (Reuters) - Thanks largely to the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jeffrey Nelson was able to put up a shotgun as down payment on a car. Money was tight last year for the school-bus driver and neighborhood constable in Jasper, Alabama, a beaten-down town of 14,000 people. One car had already been repossessed. Medical bills were piling up. And still, though Nelson's credit history was an unhappy one, local car dealer Maloy Chrysler Dodge Jeep had no problem arranging a $10,294 loan from Wall Street-backed subprime lender Exeter Finance Corp so Nelson and his wife could buy a charcoal gray 2007 Suzuki Grand Vitara. All the Nelsons had to do was cover the $1,000 down payment. For most of that amount, Maloy accepted Jeffrey's 12-gauge Mossberg & Sons shotgun, valued at about $700 online. In the ensuing months, Nelson and his wife divorced, he moved into a mobile home, and, unable to cover mounting debts, he filed for personal bankruptcy. His ex-wife, who assumed responsibility for the $324-a-month car payment, said she will probably file for bankruptcy in a couple of months. When they got the Exeter loan, Jeffrey, 44 years old, was happy "someone took a chance on us." Now, he sees it as a contributor to his financial downfall. "Was it feasible? No," he said. The Maloy dealership wouldn't discuss the loan. "I got nothing to say to you," an employee said. At car dealers across the United States, loans to subprime borrowers like Nelson are surging - up 18 percent in 2012 from a year earlier, to 6.6 million borrowers, according to credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. And as a Reuters review of court records shows, subprime auto lenders are showing up in a lot of personal bankruptcy filings, too...... < - BIG SNIP - > http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE9320ES20130403 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 07:34:13 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 08:34:13 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 'Robo-reporter' computer program raises questions about future of journalists Message-ID: 'Robo-reporter' computer program raises questions about future of journalists By Jesse M. Kelly, Postmedia News March 26, 2013 http://www.vancouversun.com/news/story.html?id=8156059 Journalist Ken Schwencke has occasionally awakened in the morning to find his byline atop a news story he didn?t write. No, it?s not that his employer, The Los Angeles Times, is accidentally putting his name atop other writers? articles. Instead, it?s a reflection that Schwencke, digital editor at the respected U.S. newspaper, wrote an algorithm ? that then wrote the story for him. Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data ? this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California ? compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication. His fingers never have to touch a keyboard; he doesn?t have to look at a computer screen. He can be sleeping soundly when the story writes itself. Just call him robo-reporter. ?I doubt that people who read our (web) posts ? unless they religiously read the earthquake posts and realize they almost universally follow the same pattern ? would notice,? Schwencke said. ?I don?t think most people are thinking that robots are writing the news.? But in this case, they are. And that has raised questions about the future of flesh-and-blood journalists, and about journalism ethics. Algorithms are fairly versatile, and have been doing a great number of things we sometimes don?t even think about, from beating us at computerized chess, to auto-correcting our text messages. Jamie Dwyer holds a bachelor of science in computing science from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and provides IT support for Environment Canada. Dwyer said algorithms can be highly complex computer codes or relatively simple mathematical formulas. They can even sometimes function as a recipe of sorts, or a set of repeatable steps, designed to perform a specific function. In this case, the algorithm functions to derive and compose coherent news stories from a stream of data. Schwencke says the use of algorithms on routine news tasks frees up professional reporters to make phone calls, do actual interviews, or dig through sophisticated reports and complex data, instead of compiling basic information such as dates, times and locations. ?It lightens the load for everybody involved,? he said. Yet there are ethical questions ? such as putting someone?s name atop a written article he or she didn?t in fact write or research. Alfred Hermida, associate professor at the University of British Columbia, and a former journalist, teaches a course in social media, in which he takes time to examine how algorithms affect our understanding of information. He says that algorithms, like human beings, need to decide what is worth including, and make judgments on newsworthiness. ?If the journalist has essentially built that algorithm with those values, then it is their work,? Hermida said. ?All the editorial decisions were made by the reporter, but they were made by the reporter in an algorithm.? The greater issue, he says, is demystifying the technology for the reader. Hermida says that many of the algorithms we encounter everyday exist in a black box of sorts, in which we see the results, but do not understand the process. ?Understanding how the algorithms work is really important to how we understand the information,? Hermida said. Algorithms like Schwencke?s are relatively simple, for now. They?re best suited to small-scale streams of data that are being regularly updated with consistently formatted information. For instance, baseball may be a good avenue for news algorithms, because the game is heavy with statistics, says Paul Knox, associate professor for the School of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. But even if an algorithm can analyze and manipulate data fairly well, journalism is still based on not only filtering, but also finding other available information, Knox notes, and a mathematical construct lacks the ability to dig up new facts or add context. On the other hand, ?People are already reading automated data reports that come to them, and they don?t think anything of it,? said Ben Welsh, a colleague of Schwencke?s at the Times. One example is any smartphone app that displays personalized weather information based on the owner?s location. ?That?s a case where I don?t think anyone really blinks,? Welsh said. ?It?s just a kind of natural computerization and personalization of a data report that had been done in a pretty standard way by newspapers for probably a century.? And Welsh says that responsibility for accuracy falls where it always has: with publications, and with individual journalists. ?The key thing is just to be honest and transparent with your readers, like always,? he said. ?I think that whether you write the code that writes the news or you write it yourself, the rules are still the same.? ?You need to respect your reader. You need to be transparent with them, you need to be as truthful as you can? all the fundamentals of journalism just remain the same.? Although algorithms in news are paired with simple data sets for now, as they get more complicated, more questions will be raised about how to effectively code ethics into the process. Lisa Taylor is a lawyer and a journalist who teaches an ethics class to undergraduate students in the School of Journalism at Ryerson University. ?Ultimately, it?s not about the tool,? said Lisa Taylor, a lawyer and journalist who teaches ethics at Ryerson. ?At (the algorithms?) very genesis, we have human judgment.? Taylor said that using algorithms ethically and reasonably shouldn?t be difficult; the onus is on the reporter to decide which tools to use and how to use them properly. ?The complicating factor here is a deep suspicion journalists and news readers have that any technological advancement is going to be harnessed purely for its cost-cutting abilities,? said Taylor. According to Taylor, journalists will have to start discussing algorithms, just as they talk about Twitter. ?How can we use this effectively, reasonably, and in a way that honours the (tenets) of journalism?? Taylor asked. ? Copyright (c) Postmedia News Read more: http://www.canada.com/Robo+reporter+raises+questions+about+future+journalists/8154672/story.html#ixzz2PP3TLGyN --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 07:34:57 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 08:34:57 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Fusion_center_director=3A_We_don?= =?windows-1252?q?=92t_spy_on_Americans=2C_just_anti-government_Americans?= Message-ID: Fusion center director: We don?t spy on Americans, just anti-government Americans Published time: March 29, 2013 20:35 Edited time: March 31, 2013 07:40 http://rt.com/usa/fusion-center-director-spying-070/ Law enforcement intelligence-processing fusion centers have long come under attack for spying on Americans. The Arkansas director wanted to clarify the truth: centers only spies on some Americans ? those who appear to be a threat to the government. In trying to clear up the ?misconceptions? about the conduct of fusion centers, Arkansas State Fusion Center Director Richard Davis simply confirmed Americans? fears: the center does in fact spy on Americans ? but only on those who are suspected to be ?anti-government?. ?The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not a fact. That is absolutely not what we do,? he told the NWA Homepage, which supports KNWA-TV and Fox 24. After claiming that his office ?absolutely? does not spy on Americans, he proceeded to explain that this does not apply to those who could be interpreted as a ?threat? to national security. Davis said his office places its focus on international plots, ?domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government. We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information.? But the First Amendment allows for the freedom of speech and opinion, making it lawfully acceptable for Americans to express their grievances against the US government. The number of anti-government groups even hit a record high in 2012, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many of these groups are ?hate groups? that express disdain for minorities. But unless they become violent, these groups are legally allowed to exist. ?We are seeing the fourth straight year of really explosive growth on the part of anti-government patriot groups and militias,? Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC, told Mother Jones. ?That?s 913 percent in growth. We?ve never seen that kind of growth in any group we cover.? And with a record-high number of anti-government groups, fusion centers may be spying on more Americans than ever before ? or at least, have the self-proclaimed right to do so. ?I do what I do because of what happened on 9/11,? Davis said. ?There?s this urge and this feeling inside that you want to do something, and this is a perfect opportunity for me.? But Davis? argument is flawed: in order to determine whether or not someone is considered a threat to national security, fusion centers would first have to spy on Americans to weed out the suspected individuals, and then proceed to spy on the ?anti-government? individuals further. Across the US, fusion centers have reported on individuals who conducted ?crimes? like putting political stickers in public bathrooms or participating in movements against the death penalty. In October, the bipartisan Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations finished a two-year investigation on fusion centers, only to find that the centers had directly violated constitutionally protected civil liberties. ?In reality, the Subcommittee investigation found that the fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever,? the report stated. And the privacy violations could soon become worse: RT previously reported that the FBI?s proposed facial recognition project could provide fusion centers with more personal data to work with. With at least 72 fusion centers across the US and technology that could further infringe upon privacy rights, government agencies will be able to more efficiently collect data on Americans solely for exercising their freedom of speech. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 07:44:29 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 08:44:29 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Not Even 6-Second Vine Videos Are Safe From The Copyright Police Message-ID: (As if we needed another reason to think of 'Prince' as egotistically and arrogantly out-of-touch, right? --rick) Not Even 6-Second Vine Videos Are Safe From The Copyright Police John Paul Titlow yesterday http://readwrite.com/2013/04/02/not-even-6-second-vine-videos-are-safe-from-the-copyright-police Well, that didn't take long. Two months after its launch, the social video-sharing app Vine has received its first copyright takedown notices. The complaints were sent by NPG, the record label owned by Prince, whose music appeared in a few six-second videos on Vine. This is absurd. Uploading an entire Prince album to YouTube is one thing. But six disjointed seconds in smartphone camera quality? Something tells me four clips of that nature aren't going to eat into Prince's album sales. Prince, who three years ago declared the Internet to be "completely over," is known as a stalwart, sometimes overzealous defender of his intellectual property online. In fact, it was the use of a Prince song in a YouTube video that led to Lenz v. Universal, an often-cited 2008 court decision dealing with copyright and fair use. In that case, the court ruled in favor of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her baby dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy" was the target of a copyright infringement claim by Universal Music. Lenz argued that video constituted fair use and the court agreed that Universal didn't adequately weigh the fair use principle when issuing takedown notices, something it has a reputation for doing rather aggressively. Let's (Not) Go Crazy Whether or not six seconds of a Prince song in a user-generated video constitutes fair use is something for a court to decide. If it's not, though ? if uploading a crappy, six-second video that contains someone's song turns out to be illegal ? we have to ask ourselves some pretty fundamental questions about copyright and what it's for. Of course, that there's a need to rethink copyright in the 21st century is hardly breaking news. The original framework doesn't work that well for anybody, as has been evident for at least a decade. Last month, the U.S. Copyright Office itself called for a dramatic overhaul of copyright law, with Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante saying "it is time for a new law." Whatever replaces the current copyright framework will need to balance the rights and financial interests of creators with the fact that we have a completely new way of creating and sharing culture and media than we did a few decades ago. That will mean changes in how creative works are distributed and monetized, sure, but it also opens up a whole universe of new cultural possibilities, which shouldn't be squashed without a very good justification. To say that things have changed since Prince recorded "Let's Go Crazy" in 1984 is an understatement. When you consider how dramatically (and mostly for the better) the Internet has changed how we live, work and yes, create and experience culture, the idea of waging an all-out war against tiny pieces of content like this seems, well, kind of crazy. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 16:12:30 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 17:12:30 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Cost of Dementia Tops $157 Billion Annually in the United States Message-ID: <7E91E263-15FA-4397-906F-030CECD6DE6C@infowarrior.org> Cost of Dementia Tops $157 Billion Annually in the United States http://www.rand.org/news/press/2013/04/03.html RAND Office of Media Relations (703) 414-4795 (310) 451-6913 media at rand.org FOR RELEASE Wednesday April 3, 2013 The monetary cost of dementia in the United States ranges from $157 billion to $215 billion annually, making the disease more costly to the nation than either heart disease or cancer, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The greatest economic cost of dementia is associated with providing institutional and home-based long-term care rather than medical services, according to the findings published in the April 4 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, is the most-detailed examination done in recent decades on the costs of dementia. The prevalence of dementia increases strongly with age and the analysis suggests that the costs of dementia could more than double by 2040 if the age-specific prevalence rate of the disease remains constant as the nation's population continues to grow older. ?The economic burden of caring for people in the United States with dementia is large and growing larger,? said Michael Hurd, the study's lead author and a senior economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. ?Our findings underscore the urgency of recent federal efforts to develop a coordinated plan to address the growing impact of dementia on American society.? The new cost estimates are lower than ones reported previously by the Alzheimer's Association. Researchers say the new study provides a clearer picture of the economic burden caused by the disease because it eliminates costs related to other illnesses suffered by dementia patients, accounts for variations in the severity of dementia and uses a better estimate of the incidence of the illness. Dementia is a chronic disease of aging characterized by progressive cognitive decline that interferes with independent functioning. The illness includes Alzheimer's disease and other disorders. In 2011, President Obama signed the National Alzheimer's Project Act, which calls for increased efforts to find new treatments and to provide improved care for those with dementia. The law also requires that the financial costs of dementia be tracked. The new study is based on findings from the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing survey of individuals in the United States age 51 and older that began in 1992, and is supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration. A subset of that study group received a detailed in-home clinical assessment for dementia as part of the Aging, Demographics and Memory Study, a nationally representative examination of dementia in the United States. The survey included an assessment of whether people could perform daily activities such as dressing themselves and preparing their own meals. Participants also were asked about their out-of-pocket health care expenses for services such as nursing home stays, home health care and other medical services. Other questions asked whether they received help from others for their daily living activities. Medicare spending information was linked to medical claims for most participants. The study estimates that 14.7 percent of Americans aged 71 or older suffered from dementia in 2010, a number somewhat lower than what has been found in other, smaller studies. The total economic cost of dementia in 2010 was estimated to be $109 billion for care purchased, and $159 billion to $215 billion when the monetary value of informal care is included. The range of estimates reflects two different methods researchers used to place a value on unpaid care. The per-person cost of dementia was $56,290 or $41,689. Medicare paid about $11 billion of dementia-related costs. Researchers say the main component of the dementia costs is for institutional and home-based long-term care rather than medical services. The cost of nursing home care, and formal and informal home care comprise 75 percent to 84 percent of dementia costs. ?People with dementia do not get much more additional health care services than other people,? Hurd said. ?The real drivers of the cost are for non-medical care.? The cost of dementia care purchases ($109 billion) was similar to the estimated of the direct health care costs for heart disease ($102 billion) and significantly higher than the direct health costs for cancer ($77 billion). However, the costs for cancer and health disease do not include the cost of informal care, which is likely to be larger for dementia. ?There are no signs that the costs of dementia will decrease given that the nation will have a larger number of 85-year-olds in the future than we do today,? Hurd said. ?Unless there is some sort of medical breakthrough, these costs will continue to rise.? Other authors of the study are Francisco Martorell, Adeline Delavande and Kathleen J. Mullen of RAND and Kenneth M. Langa of the University of Michigan. RAND Labor and Population examines issues involving U.S. labor markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 16:22:11 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 17:22:11 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Breaking Free of the Cellphone Carrier Conspiracy Message-ID: (I switched to t-mob prepaid last summer w/my unlocked GNex and havent' looked back. ---rick) April 3, 2013 Breaking Free of the Cellphone Carrier Conspiracy By DAVID POGUE http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/technology/personaltech/t-mobile-breaks-free-of-cellphone-contracts-and-penalties.html Where, exactly, is your threshold for outrage? Would you speak up if you were overbilled for a meal? Would you complain if you paid for a book from Amazon.com that never arrived? Or what if you had to keep making monthly mortgage payments even after your loan was fully repaid? Well, guess what? If you?re like most people, you?re participating in exactly that kind of ripoff right now. It?s the Great Cellphone Subsidy Con. When you buy a cellphone ? an iPhone or Android phone, let?s say ? you pay $200. Now, the real price for that sophisticated piece of electronics is around $600. But Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are very thoughtful. They subsidize the phone. Your $200 is a down payment. You pay off the remaining $400 over the course of your two-year contract. It?s just like buying a house or a car: you put some cash down and pay the rest in installments. Right? Wrong. Here?s the difference: Once you?ve finished paying off your handset, your monthly bill doesn?t go down. You keep reimbursing the cellphone company as though you still owed it. Forever. And speaking of the two-year contract, why aren?t you outraged about that? What other service in modern life locks you in for two years? Home phone service? Cable TV service? Internet? Magazine subscriptions? Baby sitter? Lawn maintenance? In any other industry, you can switch to a rival if you ever become unhappy. Companies have to work for your loyalty. But not in the cellphone industry. If you try to leave your cellphone carrier before two years are up, you?re slapped with a penalty of hundreds of dollars. If you?re not outraged by those ripoffs, maybe it?s because you think you?re helpless. All of the Big Four carriers follow the same rules, so, you know ? what are you gonna do? Last week, the landscape changed. T-Mobile violated the unwritten conspiracy code of cellphone carriers. It admitted that the emperors have no clothes. John J. Legere, T-Mobile?s chief executive, took to the stage not only to expose the usurious schemes, but to announce that it wouldn?t be playing those games anymore. It was a Steve Jobs moment: when somebody got so fed up with the shoddy way some business is being run (say, phone design or selling music) that he reinvented it, disruptively. At the new T-Mobile, the Great Cellphone Subsidy Con is over. You can buy your phone outright, if you like ? an iPhone 5 is $580, a Samsung Galaxy S III is $550. Or you can treat it like a car or a house: pay $100 for the phone now, and pay off the rest over time, $20 a month. That may sound like the existing phone subsidy con, but it?s different in a few big ways. You pay only what the phone really costs. You don?t pay interest, and you stop paying when you?ve paid for the phone; in other words, your monthly bill will drop by $20 a month, just as it should. (You can also pay it off sooner, if you like. If you have a good month and want to put, say, $70 toward your phone payoff, that?s fine.) T-Mobile doesn?t care what phone you use, either; if it works on T-Mobile?s network, you can use it. And why not? Why shouldn?t you buy one phone you really love, and use it freely as you hop from carrier to carrier? Would you buy a car that uses only one brand of gas? Yet another radical change: There are no more yearly contracts at T-Mobile. You can leave at any time. ?If we suck this month, drop us,? said Mr. Legere. ?Go somewhere else.? In the new T-Mobile world, there are only three plans. All come with unlimited phone calls, unlimited texts, free tethering (which allows your laptop to get online via your phone) and unlimited Internet. The only difference among the plans is how much high-speed wireless Internet you get each month: 500 megabytes ($50 a month), 2 gigabytes ($60) or unlimited ($70). After you?ve burned through that much data, your Internet speed drops to 2G speeds for the rest of the month ? suitable for e-mail or pulling up a Web page, but much too slow for video. You can upgrade your plan for a given month, if you like, but the point is, you?ll never be penalized. In other words, T-Mobile?s new program has also eliminated the overage charge. Over time, these plans can save you a huge amount of money compared with T-Mobile?s larger rivals. For a plan that matches T-Mobile?s $60 plan, Verizon would charge you $100 a month. Over two years, you?d pay $960 more. For a plan that matches T-Mobile?s $70 plan, Sprint would charge you $110 a month. Over two years, once again, you?d pay $960 more. AT&T doesn?t have any plans that match T-Mobile?s exactly, but you get the idea. AT&T?s $85 plan gives you 1 gigabyte of data a month ? half what you get with T-Mobile?s $60 plan. Furthermore, Verizon and AT&T don?t offer the ?unlimited slower Internet? option after you?ve eaten up your monthly data allotment. Instead, they just slap you with a steep per-gigabyte overage fee ($15 a gigabyte). Weirdly, T-Mobile?s press announcement left out what may be the biggest, best news of all: T-Mobile is the first major carrier to eliminate the ridiculous, unnecessary, airtime-eating, 15 seconds of prerecorded instructions that you hear when you want to leave a message. (?To page this person, press 5 ... When you have finished recording, you may hang up.?) When you call a T-Mobile customer, you go right to the beep. Someone should organize a parade. This all sounds wonderful. But sooner or later, we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: T-Mobile can afford to be the disrupter because it?s in last place. It has the fewest customers and the smallest network coverage of any of the Big Four in the United States. It can take risks because it has nothing to lose. Part of T-Mobile?s problem is that it?s famous for not offering the iPhone and not offering the fastest kind of Internet network, known as 4G LTE. Fortunately, the company is tackling both of those drawbacks. On April 12, it will offer the iPhone 5 ? with a feature nobody else has, in fact, called HD Voice. It offers supersharp voice quality when you?re calling another phone that has HD Voice. The company has also managed to buy, merge and lobby its way into ownership of more spectrum ? expensive, very limited cellular frequencies ? that will allow it to install LTE networks at last. The company says that it will have 100 million Americans covered by LTE signal by summer, and 200 million covered by year?s end. As long as T-Mobile had a sad little network running no-name phones, it wouldn?t matter what its policies were. But once T-Mobile?s network and phones become contenders, its much more fair, transparent, logical policies will suddenly matter. Those practices will have teeth. The other carriers will have to start paying attention. And they should. The Great Cellphone Subsidy Con is indefensible no matter how you slice it ? why should you keep paying the carrier for the price of a phone you?ve fully repaid? ? and the two-year contract is an anticompetitive, anti-innovation greed machine. Those practices should stomp right across your outrage threshold. If T-Mobile?s crazy, way-out plan succeeds, those practices may just go away. And that?s why, even if you have no intention of becoming a T-Mobile customer ? maybe there?s no coverage where you live, or maybe you?re already locked into a two-year contract ? you should pay attention. One of the four emperors has now put on real clothes. The question is, will the others follow suit? E-mail: pogue at nytimes.com --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 3 18:01:54 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2013 19:01:54 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - S.E.C. Sets Rules for Disclosures Using Social Media Message-ID: April 2, 2013, 4:54 pm S.E.C. Sets Rules for Disclosures Using Social Media By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/s-e-c-clears-social-media-for-corporate-announcements/ 8:34 p.m. | Updated Chief executives can now feel free to post, blog or tweet ? as long as they inform investors about their social media strategy first. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday outlined new disclosure rules that clarify how companies can use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to disseminate information provided they meet certain requirements. Still, the new move may reduce spontaneity because companies may limit their communications to official corporate accounts and file the information with the agency at the same time. With the decision, the S.E.C is playing catch-up to the new era of social media. In December, the regulator warned Netflix that it could take action against the company for a 43-word message that the company?s chief executive, Reed Hastings, posted in his personal Facebook feed. In the note, Mr. Hastings congratulated his team for exceeding one billion hours of video watched in a single month. But the federal agency raised concerns that the post violated Regulation Fair Disclosure, commonly known as Reg FD, which requires a company to publish material information to all investors at the same time. While Mr. Hastings?s announcement was made on his publicly available Facebook page, which had over 200,000 followers, the information was not subsequently disclosed in a securities filing or news release. At the time, Mr. Hastings and Netflix said that his message was both immaterial and readily available to investors, having been picked up by a number of blogs and news media outlets. ?We use blogging and social media, including Facebook, to communicate effectively with the public and our members,? Mr. Hastings wrote ? on his Facebook page, naturally ? after disclosing the investigation last year. Now, the S.E.C. seems to be relaxing its stance. After an investigation of several months, regulators said that companies could treat social media as legitimate outlets for communication, much like corporate Web sites or the agency?s own public filing system called Edgar. The catch is that corporations have to make clear which Twitter feeds or Facebook pages will serve as potential outlets for announcements. ?They did a really good job of splitting the baby,? said Thomas A. Sporkin, a former S.E.C. enforcement official and now a partner at Buckley Sandler. In developing its rules, the agency also let Mr. Hastings avoid sanctions for his Facebook post. Neither the chief executive nor Netflix incurred any penalties after receiving a Wells notice from the agency in December. Instead, the regulator issued what is known as a report of investigation, used on the rare occasion when it wants to issue broad guidance from a specific investigation. As part of its release, the agency reiterated its goal for Reg FD was making sure investors received information at the same time. ?One set of shareholders should not be able to get a jump on other shareholders just because the company is selectively disclosing important information,? George S. Canellos, the agency?s acting enforcement chief, said Tuesday in a statement. ?Most social media are perfectly suitable methods for communicating with investors, but not if the access is restricted or if investors don?t know that?s where they need to turn to get the latest news.? Mr. Hastings is not the only corporate executive to face trouble over his social media habits. Last year, the fashion retailer Francesca?s Holdings fired its chief financial officer, Gene Morphis, for his frequent use of Facebook and Twitter. Among his posts, from March 7: ?Board meeting. Good numbers=Happy Board.? In a news release last May, Francesca?s cited ?improper? communications of company information through social media as the reason for letting Mr. Morphis go. As in the past, the S.E.C. is treading carefully in its corporate disclosure policies. In 2008, the regulator clarified that corporate Web sites alone could qualify as wide disclosure if investors already knew that those pages could be sources of material information. The Netflix inquiry raised concerns that the commission felt could be addressed more broadly, according to a person briefed on the matter. ?The S.E.C. had to ask itself, How do we adopt a 2000 regulation to 2013 when social media is commonplace?? Mr. Sporkin said, referring to the year Reg FD was enacted. ?That obviously wasn?t even a thought back when this was written.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 4 08:45:52 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 09:45:52 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - ICANN announces emergency back-up registry operators Message-ID: <92D0D4D4-613B-4676-87A3-FAF16ADAC80B@infowarrior.org> In wake of gTLD security criticism, ICANN announces emergency back-up registry operators The back-up registries were announced shortly after gTLD rollout security concerns were raised by Verisign and others Loek Essers April 3, 2013 (IDG News Service) http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9238089/In_wake_of_gTLD_security_criticism_ICANN_announces_emergency_back_up_registry_operators The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has selected three emergency back-end registry operators to guarantee domain names within a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) will resolve in the event of a failure at a new TLD operator, it said on Tuesday. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), U.S. based Neustar and the U.K. based Nominet were selected, the ICANN said in a news release. Emergency back-end registry operators, or EBEROs, are activated if a registry operator fails to provide or is unable to sustain five critical registry functions temporarily, or in the case of transition from one registry operator to another, ICANN said. "Having them in different regions of the world reduces the chance that a natural disaster would affect all three at any one time," it added. ICANN's announcement closely follows criticism of its gTLD rollout plans. The pace of the rollout is too fast and could cause risks to the security and stability of the DNS (Domain Name System) and affect the working of the whole Internet, Verisign has warned in a report outlining new gTLD security and stability issues, sent to ICANN and filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. Concerns were also raised by PayPal and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a trade group. The Verisign report included criticism on the slow selection process of EBERO providers. "ICANN's original plan was to select EBERO providers in June 2012 with simulations and drills in January and February 2013 and providers prepared to be live in March," Verisign noted in its report. At the time the report was filed, there were no signed and tested EBERO providers, it said. "With no EBERO providers, the continuity risk of any registry failure is significantly increased," Verisign said. Allotted EBERO providers need six months from selection to preparation for testing. "Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that from the date EBERO providers are selected that ICANN should expect that they will require six months to prepare for testing with another two months of testing prior to being prepared for a registry failure," Verisign said. If any registry should launch before the EBERO provider is ready to function as a back-up for gTLD domains, the continuity of operations risk could be measured in days, weeks, or even months, rather than the hours specified in the EBERO service level requirements in case of a registry failure or outage, Verisign said. Verisign raised this and many other concerns ahead of the ICANN's push to launch the first new gTLDs on April 23. The EBERO providers will be ready for emergency response in the third quarter, according to ICANN's website. "ICANN has a plan in place to address issues before this date in the unlikely event an EBERO emergency happens in the early months of the new gTLD registries' launch in the market place," it said. ICANN did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Last week it said it takes the security issues raised by Verisign very seriously, and that the issues are addressed. Every issue raised by Verisign has been discussed and ICANN does not anticipate any delays, it said. Loek is Amsterdam Correspondent and covers online privacy, intellectual property, open-source and online payment issues for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to loek_essers at idg.com --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 4 08:45:47 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 09:45:47 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Can Commercial VPNs Really Protect Your Privacy? Message-ID: Can Commercial VPNs Really Protect Your Privacy? from the it-depends dept Nick Pearson is the founder of IVPN - a privacy-focused VPN service, and Electronic Frontier Foundation member. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130402/02421422545/can-commercial-vpns-really-protect-your-privacy.shtml As Techdirt readers are no-doubt well aware, online surveillance laws are undergoing a major revamp across the western world. From Australia to the UK, law enforcement agencies are taking the opportunity to gain unprecedented powers over the data they can monitor, and are blaming the crackdown on everything from illegal file-sharing to terrorists. With western nations becoming increasingly hostile toward the concept of online anonymity, it's not unreasonable to suggest the use of commercial VPNs will likely gain more traction (indeed, there's already some evidence supporting this). But can VPNs really safeguard your privacy today and, in the future, what kind of protection can you expect with the legal landscape changing so rapidly? VPNs under fire VPNs have come under serious scrutiny since mid-2011 after one of the leading services on the market played a pivotal role in the arrest and prosecution of a member of hacker group Lulzsec. This kicked off the debate amongst filesharers and privacy groups over whether VPNs offered any real protection to their users at all. As TorrentFreak pointed out, many are no more effective than a regular ISP due to self-imposed data retention policies. It's certainly true all VPNs have the ability to track users and log their data. Many do so because they don't consider themselves privacy services and logging helps identify repeat DMCA infringers and quickly troubleshoot network issues. Others do so seemingly because of a poor grasp of their country's laws. Of course, anyone concerned about privacy should not sign-up to a service that's retaining data. Most privacy-orientated VPNs approach this issue by using a non-persistent log (stored in memory) on gateway servers that only stores a few minutes of activity (FIFO). That time window gives the ability to troubleshoot any connection problems that may appear, but after a few minutes no trace of activity is stored. As you may know the EU's Data Retention Directive came into effect in 2006, requiring ?public communications services? to hold web logs and email logs, amongst other data. IVPN, along with a number of other EU based VPNs, believe our services are excluded from this requirement and we do not abide by it. So far there's been no cases we're aware of compelling VPNs to retain this information. Indeed, from a user perspective, the presence or absence of retention laws seem rather arbitrary, given how many US-based VPNs willingly retain data, despite no government-mandated policy being in place (at least not yet). When law enforcement and VPNs collide... So what happens if a law enforcement agency approaches a VPN, serves a a subpoena, and demands a the company trace an individual, based on the timestamp and the IP address of one of their servers? VPN services, like all businesses, are compelled to abide by the law. However, there is no way of complying with the authorities if the data they require does not exist. One of the few ways law enforcement could identify an individual using a privacy service, without logs, is if they served the owners a gag order and demanded they start logging the traffic on a particular server they know their suspect is using. We would shut down our business before co-operating with such an order and any VPN serious about privacy would do the same. So unless law enforcement were to arrest the VPN owners on the spot, and recover their keys and password before they could react, your privacy would be protected. A changing landscape... But the biggest threat to VPN usage is the changing legal landscape. The waters around the issues presented by VPNs are still being tested and laws may indeed be amended in the future to prevent such services operating in certain jurisdictions. So how do you navigate all this? In all honesty, there are no easy answers. Picking a host country based on their current laws isn't going to help much in the long term. By far the best measure you can take is to choose a VPN that demonstrates a commitment to user privacy. Examine the company's small print, or, better yet, contact the owners and ask them upfront how far they go to protect your personal data. Ensure the company is committed to keeping users informed of any emerging threats to its service and ? before buying any lengthy subscription ? make sure the VPN is willing to re-domicile should its host country change any relevant laws. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 4 15:23:40 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 16:23:40 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer Message-ID: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer BY NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg at suntimes.com Last Modified: Apr 4, 2013 03:17PM http://www.suntimes.com/17320958-761/roger-ebert-dies-at-70-after-battle-with-cancer.html?print=true Roger Ebert loved movies. Except for those he hated. For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers. ?No good film is too long,? he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. ?No bad movie is short enough.? Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation?s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland. He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. ?No point in denying it,? he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity. On Tuesday, Mr. Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December, and would be taking ?a leave of presence.? In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote ?I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.? Always technically savvy ? he was an early investor in Google ? Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 ?Person of the Year? from the Webby Awards, which noted that ?his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.? His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers. Mr.Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize ? the first film critic to do so ? but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide. The same year Mr. Ebert won the Pulitzer ? 1975 ? he also launched a new kind of television program: ?Coming Soon to a Theater Near You? with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel on WTTW-Channel 11. At first it ran monthly. The combination worked. The trim, balding Siskel, perfectly balanced the bespectacled, portly Ebert. In 1978, the show, retitled ?Sneak Previews,? moved to PBS for national distribution, and the duo was on their way to becoming a fixture in American culture. ?Tall and thin, short and fat. Laurel and Hardy,? Ebert once wrote. ?We were parodied on ?SNL? and by Bob Hope and Danny Thomas and, the ultimate honor, in the pages of Mad magazine.? His colleagues admired him as a workhorse. Ebert reviewed as many as 285 movies a year, after he grew ill scheduling his cancer surgeries around the release of important pictures. He eagerly contributed to other sections of the papers ? interviews with and obituaries of movie stars, even political columns on issues he cared strongly about on the editorial pages. In 1997, unsatisfied with spending his critical powers ?locked in the present,? he began a running feature revisiting classic movies, and eventually published three books on ?The Great Movies? (and two books on movies he hated). A second column, his ?Movie Answer Man? allowed readers to learn about intriguing little details of cinema that only a Roger Ebert knew or could ferret out. That, too, became a book. Mr.Ebert wrote more books than any TV personality since Steve Allen ? 17 in all. Not only collections of reviews, both good and bad, and critiques of great movies, but humorous film term glossaries and even a novel, ?Behind the Phantom?s Mask,? that was serialized in the Sun-Times. He even wrote a book about rice cookers, The Pot and How to Use It, despite the fact that he could no longer eat. In 2011 his autobiography, ?Life Itself? won rave reviews. ?This is the best thing Mr. Ebert has ever written,? Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. It is, fittingly enough, being made into a movie, produced by his longtime friend, Martin Scorsese. Roger Joseph Ebert was born in Urbana on June 18, 1942, the son of Walter and Annabel Ebert. His father was an electrician at the University of Illinois, his mother, a bookkeeper. It was a liberal household ? Ebert remembers his parents praying for the success of Harry Truman in the election of 1948. As a child, he published a mimeographed neighborhood newspaper, and a stamp collectors? newspaper in elementary school. In high school, he was, as he later wrote, ?demented in [his] zeal for school activities,? joining the swim team, acting in plays, founding the Science Fiction Club, co-hosting Urbana High School?s Saturday morning radio program, co-editing the newspaper, being elected senior class president. He began his profesional writing career at 15, as a sportswriter covering the high school beat for the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana. Ebert went on to the University of Illinois, where he published a weekly journal of politics and opinion as a freshman and served as editor of the Daily Illini his senior year. He graduated in 1964, and studied in South Africa on a Rotary Scholarship. While still in Urbana, he began free-lancing for the Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. He was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he planned to earn his doctorate in English (an avid reader, Ebert later used literary authors to help explain films ? for example, quoting e.e. cummings several times in his review of Stanley Kubrick?s groundbreaking ?2001: A Space Odyssey.?) But Mr. Ebert had also written to Herman Kogan, for whom he freelanced at the Daily News, asking for a job, and ended up at the Sun-Times in September of 1966, working part-time. The following April, he was asked to become the newspaper?s film critic when the previous critic, Eleanor Keen, retired. ?I didn?t know the job was open until the day I was given it,? Mr. Ebert later said. ?I had no idea. Bob Zonka, the features editor, called me into the conference room and said, ?We?re gonna make you the movie critic.? It fell out of the sky.? Mr. Ebert?s goal up to that point had been to be ?a columnist like Royko,? but he accepted this new stroke of luck, which came at exactly the right time. Movie criticism had been a backwater of journalism, barely more than recounting the plots and stars of movies ? the Tribune ran its reviews under a jokey generic byline, ?Mae Tinee.? But American cinema was about to enter a period of unprecedented creativity, and criticism would follow along. Restrictive film standards were finally easing up, in part thanks to his efforts. When Ebert began reviewing movies, Chicago still had an official film board that often banned daring movies here -- Lynn Redgrave?s ?Georgy Girl? was kept off Chicago screens in 1966 ? and Ebert immediately began lobbying for elimination of the censorship board. He had a good eye. His Sept. 25, 1967 review of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in ?Bonnie and Clyde? called it ?a milestone? and ?a landmark.? ?Years from now it is quite possible that ?Bonnie and Clyde? will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s,? he wrote, ?showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to.? It was. Though of course Ebert was not infallible -- while giving Mike Nichols? ?The Graduate? four stars in the same year, he added that the movie?s ?only flaw, I believe, is the introduction of limp, wordy Simon and Garfunkel songs.?? Ebert plunged into what turned out to be a mini-golden age of Chicago journalism. He found himself befriended by Mike Royko ? with whom he wrote a unproduced screenplay. He drank with Royko, and with Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel. He wrote a trashy Hollywood movie ? ?Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?? for Russ Meyer, having met the king of the buxom B-movie after writing an appreciation of his work. In later years, Ebert was alternatingly sheepish and proud of the movie. It was the first ?sexploitation? film by a major studio ? 20th Century Fox, though Time magazine?s Richard Corliss did call it one of the 10 best films of the 1970s. Nor was not Ebert?s only foray into film writing -- he was also hired to write a movie for the Sex Pistols, the seminal British punk band in the late 1970s. Eventually, Sun-Times editor James Hoge demanded that Ebert -- who took a leave of absence and went to Hollywood to write ?Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? -- decide between making films and reviewing them. He chose newspapering, which increasingly became known because of his TV fame, which grew around his complex partnership with Gene Siskel. ?At first the relationship on TV was edgy and uncomfortable,? he wrote in 1999, after Siskel?s untimely death, at 53. ?Our newspaper rivalry was always in the air between us. Gene liked to tell about the time he was taking a nap under a conference table at the television station, overheard a telephone conversation I was having with an editor, and scooped me on the story.? In 1981, the program was renamed ?At the Movies? and moved to Tribune Broadcasting. In 1986, it became ?Siskel & Ebert & The Movies? and moved to Buena Vista Television, and the duo began the signature ?thumbs up, thumbs down? rating system that Ebert came up with. ?When we left to go with Disney . . . we had to change some things because we were afraid of [violating] intellectual property rights,?? he said. ?And I came up with the idea of giving thumbs up and thumbs down. And the reason that Siskel and I were able to trademark that is that the phrase ?two thumbs up? in connection with movies had never been used. And in fact, the phrase ?two thumbs up? was not in the vernacular. And now, of course, it?s part of the language.? ?Two thumbs up? became their registered trademark and a highly coveted endorsement that inevitably ran at the top of movie advertisements. Ebert?s cancer forced him off the air in 2006. After auditioning a number of temporary co-hosts, Ebert settled on Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper in 2000. At its height, ?Ebert & Roeper,? was seen on 200 stations, All that need be mentioned of Ebert?s social life was that in the early 1980s he briefly went out with the hostess of a modest local TV show called ?AM Chicago.? Taking her to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner, Ebert suggested that she syndicate her show, using his success with Siskel as an example of the kind of riches that awaited. While she didn?t return his romantic interest, Oprah Winfrey did follow his business advice. In his memoirs, Ebert writes of a controlling, alcoholic, faith-obsessed mother whom he was frightened of displeasing. ?I would never marry before my mother died,? he wrote. She passed away in 1987, and in 1992 he married, for the first time, at age 40, to attorney Chaz Hammel-Smith (later Chaz Hammelsmith), who was the great romance of his life and his rock in sickness, instrumental in helping Ebert continue his workload as his health declined. ?She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she is the love of my life, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone,? he wrote. In addition to his TV and newspaper work, Ebert was a fixture at film festivals around the world ? Toronto, Cannes, Telluride ? and even created a festival of his own, The Overlooked Film Festival, or just ?EbertFest,? which he began in Champaign in 1999 and dedicated to highlighting neglected classics. Between 1970 and 2010, Ebert made yearly visits to the University of Colorado?s springtime Conference on World Affairs, where he has presented frame-by-frame critiques of classic movies to enraptured audiences. He has also used the conference to speak on a variety of subjects, from his romantic life to his recovery from alcoholism ? he stopped drinking in 1979 ? to the problem of Spam e-mail. In 1996 Ebert coined the ?Boulder Pledge,? considered a cornerstone in the battle against spam. ?Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message,? Ebert wrote. ?Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.? Not only was Ebert eager to correspond with and encourage skilled movie bloggers, but he also put his money where his mouth is, investing early in the Google search engine and making several million dollars doing so. Ebert received honorary degrees from the American Film Institute, the University of Colorado and the School of the Art Institute, He is a member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, and was honored with a sidewalk medallion under the Chicago Theatre marquee. He first had surgery to remove a malignant tumor on this thyroid in 2002, and three subsequent surgeries on his salivary gland, all the while refusing to cut back on his TV show or his lifelong pride and joy, his job at the Sun-Times. ?My newspaper job,? he said in 2005, ?is my identity.? But as always with Roger Ebert, that was being too modest. He was a rennaissance man whose genius was based on film but by no means limited to it, a great soul who had extraordinary impact on his profession and the world around him. ??Kindness? covers all of my political beliefs,? he wrote, at the end of his memoirs. ?No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhapy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn?t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.? Survivors, in addition to his wife, include a step-daughter and two step-grandchildren. Copyright ? 2013 ? Sun-Times Media, LLC --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 4 15:26:33 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 16:26:33 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request Message-ID: Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Request ? Ernesto ? April 4, 2013 http://torrentfreak.com/fox-wants-google-to-take-down-its-own-takedown-request-130404/ In a comical display of meta-censorship several copyright holders including 20th Century Fox and NBC Universal have sent Google takedown requests asking the search engine to take down links to takedown request they themselves sent. Google refused to comply with the movie studios requests and the ?infringing? DMCA notices remain online. Meanwhile, the number of takedown notices received by Google is nearing 20 million per month. There?s a dark side to Google?s transparency efforts, especially when it comes to publishing DMCA requests it receives from copyright holders. With more than 100 million links to pirated files Google is steadily building the largest database of copyrighted material. This is rather ironic as it would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available. Indeed, the DMCA notices are meant to make content harder to find on the Internet, but in the process they create a semi-organized index of links to infringing material. This problem is illustrated by several takedown requests that were sent on behalf of movie studio 20th Century Fox recently. Usually these notices ask Google to remove links to pirate sites, but Fox also wants Google to remove the DMCA notices they sent earlier. Below is an example, with Fox stating that this DMCA takedown request is ?infringing? itself. Meta-censorship The movie studio is not the only copyright holder going after their own takedown notices. Other Hollywood studios including NBC Universal and Lionsgate have done the same, and Microsoft too. We expect that the notices are just another byproduct of the automated tools that are used to find infringing URLs. However, it?s a ?mistake? that signals one of the key problems of automated censorship, and one that can lead to an endless loop of DMCA notices. Thus far the infringing takedown notices remain accessible through Google search. Apparently Google has white-listed the Chillingeffects domain because it doesn?t see these indirect links as infringing. While this may seem logical, Google is no stranger to removing non-direct links to links. If we take a look at the text pasting service Pastebin we see that Google removed 82,937 URLs from its index. These indirect links are all non-clickable and no different from the DMCA notices. The standards are shifting in other ways too. No longer is Google merely asked to remove direct links to copyrighted material as the DMCA prescribes, but also links to links to links to copyrighted material. The above shows the growing mess the current DMCA procedures are creating and for now there is no end in sight. Both Google and the copyright holders agree that something has to change, but understandably the solution they envision is quite different. In the meantime, copyright holders continue to push the search engine to its takedown limits at a rate of 20 million URLs a month. To be continued. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 4 15:56:55 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 16:56:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DOJ Trying To Hide Secret Interpretations Of The Law Because You'd All DIE!!!! Message-ID: <7E70DD05-8F28-46D8-A4A9-E2D0AC029939@infowarrior.org> DOJ Trying To Hide Secret Interpretations Of The Law Because You'd All DIE!!!! from the secret-laws dept It's kind of sad that anyone could possibly think that it's okay for the government to have secret interpretations of the law in a free and open society. "The law" is more than just the legislation itself, but the collection of caselaw and interpretations, combined with the legislation, that make up the overall "law." If some of those interpretations are kept secret, then how can the public obey the law? The answer is that they can't -- which is why secret interpretations shouldn't be allowed. The Justice Department, however, prefers to keep some things secret, and it's asking the court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the EFF seeking to find out how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is interpreting parts of the FISA Amendments Act, after it was revealed (late on a Friday) that the court found at least one situation in which the feds collected info in violation of the 4th Amendment. < -- > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130403/18094922565/doj-trying-to-hide-secret-interpretations-law.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 4 22:08:38 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 23:08:38 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Why Rackspace Is Suing The Most Notorious Patent Troll In America Message-ID: Why Rackspace Is Suing The Most Notorious Patent Troll In America on April 4th, 2013 by Alan Schoenbaum http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-sued-the-most-notorious-patent-troll-in-america/ Today we drove a stake into the ground in our dogged fight against patent trolls ? we sued one of the most notorious patent trolls in America. Last week, a patent assertion entity (PAE) called Parallel Iron sued Rackspace and 11 other defendants in Delaware for allegedly infringing on a trio of patents that Parallel Iron says cover the use of the open source Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). This is the newest in a series of 23 similar suits Parallel Iron has filed in Delaware since last June, which is when Parallel Iron was forced to dismiss an earlier set of lawsuits on another patent it could not enforce. Parallel Iron is the latest in a string of shell companies created to do nothing more than assert patent-infringement claims as part of a typical patent troll scheme of pressuring companies to pay up or else face crippling litigation costs . At least that is what it looks like on the surface. In actuality, it is a bit more complicated. Our dealings with this particular troll reach back to December 2010 when IP Navigation Group (IP Nav), as agent for a supposedly secret patent owner, now known as Parallel Iron, accused Rackspace of patent infringement. IP Nav told us that they could not divulge the details of their infringement claims ? not even the patent numbers or the patent owner ? unless we entered into a ?forbearance agreement? ? basically, an agreement that we would not sue them. IP Nav was worried that as soon as we found out what their patents and claims actually were, Rackspace would sue to invalidate their patents or for a declaration that Rackspace does not infringe. We were unwilling to enter into such a one-sided agreement, so we negotiated a mutual forbearance agreement that required either party to give 30 days? notice before bringing suit. IP Nav has used this trick before. Sending a letter like the one IP Nav sent Rackspace ? and trying to pressure the target into a forbearance agreement ? got IP Nav into hot water with a Wisconsin federal court in late 2011. The court decision, as reported by Techdirt, describes the tactics that IP Nav deploys, and uses literary references to Shakespeare and Chekov to excoriate IP Nav. It even cited the ?Duck Test? ? if it quacks like a troll, it probably is a troll. Search online for ?IP Navigation Group.? You will find that this group?s only business is acquiring patents and suing companies. Once again, the Duck Test holds true: walking, swimming, quacking, everything. True to form, Parallel Iron sued Rackspace in Delaware without providing any notice, breaking the agreement they insisted upon. We aren?t going to take it. We have sued IP Nav and Parallel Iron in federal court in San Antonio, Texas, where our headquarters is located (see the complaint here). We are asking the court to award Rackspace damages for breach of contract, and to enter a declaratory judgment that Rackspace does not infringe Parallel Iron?s patents. Meanwhile, IP Nav wears its designation as a patent assertion entity, or patent troll, as a badge of honor. It makes the laughable claim to be a ?white hat? patent troll created to ?give the little guy a chance.? This is tragic comedy at best. There are few trolls more notorious than IP Nav, and there is no such thing as a patent troll that has the best interests of small businesses in mind. Instead, IP Nav and Parallel Iron are acting in their own selfish interests and suffocating innovation, while stripping capital away from businesses both large and small. Everybody knows they are a duck ? or should we say, a troll. Patent trolls like IP Nav are a serious threat to business and to innovation. Patent trolls brazenly use questionable tactics to force settlements from legitimate businesses that are merely using computers and software as they are intended. These defendants, including most of America?s most innovative companies, are not copying patents or stealing from the patent holders. They often have no knowledge of these patents until they are served with a lawsuit. This is unjust. At Rackspace, we have seen a 500 percent spike since 2010 in our legal spend combating patent trolls ? we recently fought one and emerged victorious. To put the scope of the problem into perspective, a Boston University study of patent trolls, conducted last year, found that they cost the U.S. economy about $29 billion in 2011, up from $7 billion in 2005. Until Congress reforms the patent laws, companies of all sizes and industries could ? and likely will ? find themselves in the crosshairs of a greedy patent troll looking for a quick cash-grab. No company is immune, and, sadly, small companies can?t afford to fight. If they don?t succumb to the troll?s demands by settling, they face certain ruin. Our goal with this lawsuit is to highlight the tactics that IP Nav uses to divert hard-earned profits and precious capital from American businesses. This time, the patent troll should pay us. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 5 13:52:03 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 14:52:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Google Fights U.S. National Security Probe Data Demand Message-ID: <615B06CB-8894-4759-BC3E-3B7794DF504B@infowarrior.org> Google Fights U.S. National Security Probe Data Demand By Karen Gullo - Apr 4, 2013 12:01 AM ET http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-04/google-fights-u-s-national-security-probe-data-demand.html Google Inc (GOOG)., operator of the world?s largest search engine, is challenging a demand by the U.S. government for private user information in a national security probe, according to a court filing. It ?appears? to be the first time a major communications company is pushing back after getting a so-called National Security Letter, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group. The challenge comes three weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that NSLs, which are issued without a warrant, are unconstitutional. ?The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google,? said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman, who represented an unidentified service provider that won the March 14 ruling. ?So far no one has really stood up for their users? among large Internet service providers. The government has issued 300,000 NSLs since 2000, and only four or five recipients have challenged the letters, Zimmerman said. Civil-rights groups say NSLs give federal agents unchecked powers to spy on people while the government says they?re a crucial tool in the fight against terrorism and threats to national security. Google, in its first public disclosure about national security letters, said in a March 5 report that it received in the range of zero to 999 NSLs annually starting in 2009 affecting more than 1,000 accounts. In a company blog post, Richard Salgado, Google?s legal director for law enforcement and information security, thanked U.S. government officials ?for working with us to provide greater insight into the use of NSLs.? ?Legal Process? Google filed a petition to set aside a ?legal process? pursuant ?to 18 U.S.C. Section 3511 (a) and (b),? according to a March 29 filing in federal court in San Francisco seeking a court order to seal its request. Petitions ?filed under Section 3511 of Title 18 to set aside legal process issued under Section 2709 of Title 18 must be filed under seal because Section 2709 prohibits disclosure of the legal process,? Kevan Fornasero, Google?s lawyer, said in the filing. The petition itself was lodged under seal with the court. No details of the government?s demand for records were disclosed in the filing. Section 2709 is a federal law authorizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to issue NSLs requiring wire and electronic communication service providers to turn over subscriber information and other records that the agency certifies are relevant to an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. The law prohibits NSL recipients from disclosing they?ve received one. ?Unreasonable, Oppressive? Section 3511 (a) allows recipients of NSLs to petition a federal judge to set aside the request and allows judges to modify or set aside the request if complying with it would be ?unreasonable, oppressive or otherwise unlawful.? Section 3511 (b) allows NSL recipients to ask a court to lift the gag order. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston yesterday granted Google?s request to seal documents in the case. Illston ruled March 14 that the gag order section of the NSL law was unconstitutional and rendered the entire statute illegal. Illston said the NSL statutes violated free speech and separation of power principles because the government failed to show that, to protect national security, it needs to always bar people from disclosing the mere fact they?ve received an NSL and the law impermissibly restricted courts from reviewing the need for nondisclosure. She ordered the FBI to stop issuing NSLs and put her ruling on hold for 90 days to allow the government time to appeal. ?We are in this interesting in-between moment in which the government is still able to enforce its authority,? said Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Washington- based Electronic Privacy Information Center. ?I suspect that this filing is an effort to push the issue further.? Chris Gaither, a spokesman for Mountain View, California- based Google, declined to comment on the filing. Chris Allen, an FBI spokesman in Washington, also declined to comment. The case is In Re Google Inc. (GOOG)?s Petition to Set Aside Legal Process, 13-80063, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). To contact the reporter on this story: Karen Gullo in San Francisco at kgullo at bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 5 13:52:09 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 14:52:09 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - It's a Crime for 12-Year-Olds to Read The New York Times Online Message-ID: <76E97807-0647-419D-BD0A-67895061075F@infowarrior.org> It's a Crime for 12-Year-Olds to Read The New York Times Online http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/04/its-crime-12-year-olds-read-new-york-times-online/63839/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 5 13:52:14 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 14:52:14 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - House to amend CISPA in secret Message-ID: House to amend CISPA in secret by Zack Whittaker April 5, 2013 10:57 AM PDT http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57578176-38/house-to-amend-cispa-in-secret/ Another day, another House Intelligence Committee session held in secret, under the rather convenient excuse that "classified information" might be revealed. As was the case last year when members of the committee amended the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) the first time around -- the bill, dubbed a "privacy killer" by online activists and privacy groups, will once again be amended in a veil of secrecy. According to the committee's spokesperson, Susan Phalen, (via The Hill), these secret hearings are not uncommon and "sometimes they'll need to bounce into classified information and go closed for a period of time to talk." She said that in order to keep the flow of the mark-up -- where rewrites to proposed legislation are made -- the committee cannot suddenly stop, order every person and member of the media out of the chamber, only to be brought back in later once the discussions are back on unclassified territory. Actually, they could, and probably should. Especially considering how much controversy has been stirred over this bill, transparency in this instance might appease at least some of the significant opposition to this highly privacy-infringing bill. It comes as more than two-dozen civil liberties groups said in a joint letter to committee members (PDF) earlier this week that: "The public has a right to know how Congress is conducting the people's business, particularly when such important wide-ranging policies are at stake." For those who aren't in the loop, the bill is designed to remove legal barriers preventing companies from sharing information -- including personal data from social-networking sites and other Web services -- with the U.S. government, under the principle that it may help prevent cyberattacks. This means a company like Facebook, Twitter, Google, or any other Web or technology giant, such as your cell service provider, would be legally able to hand over vast amounts of data to the U.S. government and law enforcement -- for whatever purpose they deem necessary -- and face no legal reprisals. Naturally, many in the industry welcomed and applauded the move. It would, after all, give them both civil and criminal legal protection. Thankfully, many took the polar opposite approach and saw the massive threat to civil liberties and online privacy. Facebook, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Verizon, and AT&T -- among others -- supported the bill, but Mozilla, Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and just about every civil liberties and privacy group opposed it. Though the bill passed in in the U.S. House of Representatives the first time around, it fell flat on its face when it stalled in the Senate. Even the Obama administration threatened to veto the bill if it came across the president's desk, following an official response by the White House to a petition that crossed the 100,000 mark. The commander in chief's officials said in a note, quite bluntly: "The Obama administration opposes CISPA." While Obama himself called for "comprehensive cybersecurity legislation," his administration said that "part of what has been communicated to congressional committees is that we want legislation to come with necessary protections for individuals." A few months later at the 2013 State of the Union address, Obama signed (yet another) executive order -- bypassing Congress, which is at such loggerheads that it probably couldn't decide on the color of the hallway carpets -- introducing a similar set of rules, but with privacy protection fully in mind, to help protect critical national infrastructure from domestic and foreign cyberattacks. Now that the bill has been reincarnated from the dark depths of the legal hellfire, it's likely that Obama will remain staunch in his anti-CISPA views, with the White House no doubt ready to threaten a veto again. While there has been no word on when the secret session of the House Intelligence Committee will be, it's expected to be later this month. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 5 13:52:17 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 14:52:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Recording Industry Lobbyists Accuse Pandora Of Deliberately Not Selling Ads To Plead Poverty To Congress Message-ID: <54D70D99-CBF5-4999-A226-31234EBA3A33@infowarrior.org> Recording Industry Lobbyists Accuse Pandora Of Deliberately Not Selling Ads To Plead Poverty To Congress http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130404/02362022572/recording-industry-lobbyists-accuse-pandora-deliberately-not-selling-ads-to-plead-poverty-to-congress.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 5 13:59:03 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 14:59:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Maiffret: Closing the Door on Hackers Message-ID: Op-Ed Contributor Closing the Door on Hackers By MARC MAIFFRET Published: April 4, 2013 IRVINE, Calif. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/closing-the-door-on-hackers.html FOR most of my teenage years, I made a hobby of hacking into some of the world?s largest government and corporate computer systems. I was ?lucky? enough to be raided by the F.B.I. when I was 17 years old. After that wake-up call, I eventually started a software security company and now find myself helping to plug security holes, not exploit them. The nature of hacking has changed, too, since I left it in the late 1990s ? from a game of curiosity and occasional activism into a central tool in cybercrime and nation-state attacks. Alongside that shift has come a loud and often misguided conversation about what to do to stop this new breed of hacking. Too much of the debate begins and ends with the perpetrators and the victims of cyberattacks, and not enough is focused on the real problem: the insecure software or technology that allows such attacks to succeed. Instead of focusing solely on employees who accidentally open e-mails, we should also be pressuring software makers to make significant investments in their products? security. When you read headlines about the latest cyberattack, you typically do not hear about how attackers were able to put a virus or other malware on a system in the first place. In many cases, it begins with attackers exploiting a software vulnerability or weakness in order to install their malware. The unspoken truth is that for the most part, large software companies are not motivated to make software secure. It?s a question of investment priorities: they care more about staying competitive with their products, and that means developing the latest features and functions that consumers and businesses are looking to buy. Security issues are often treated more as a marketing challenge than an engineering one. A result is an open door to hackers inside some of the world?s most popular software systems. Perhaps most famously, during the early to middle parts of the last decade, hackers discovered a significant number of glaring security weaknesses in Microsoft products (some of which were discovered by my company). Several of these weaknesses were exploited in high-profile computer virus and worm attacks. To be fair, securing software is not a trivial task. Often it means building in multiple barriers to entry and keeping those defenses current with the latest developments in hacker techniques. Security has to be a central and significant investment in any software development project. Still, given the heightened impact of recent attacks on both corporate and government operations, we must begin to hold software companies accountable for such vulnerabilities. Fortunately, there is a lot a company can do to secure its code, should it choose to. After Microsoft?s software vulnerabilities drew significant negative attention ? one of the few times the public has correctly affixed blame to a software company ? Bill Gates himself addressed the issue in 2002 in his now famous ?Trustworthy Computing? memo. In that memo, sent to all Microsoft employees, Mr. Gates made it clear that the company?s future depended on building software and a platform that could be reliably secure. It was more than talk: in the decade or so since, Microsoft fundamentally changed its software development process to make security a core part of the program. Too many other companies, though, seem to have missed the memo. Take Oracle, and specifically the security challenges surrounding its Java software, which the company inherited through its 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Java, one of the most ubiquitous pieces of software in the world, is so full of security holes ? including multiple avenues for hackers to take control of a computer remotely ? that the Department of Homeland Security recommends that its users completely disable the software in their browsers. Oracle is not alone. Adobe, which makes the popular Adobe Reader and Flash applications, has seen a significant number of security weaknesses over the years and also a sharp increase in its software?s being a gateway for cyberattacks. The risks associated with Flash were one reason Apple decided not to allow it on iPhones. Like Microsoft, Adobe has made strides to increase the security of its technology over the last couple of years, and more recently some of those security improvements seem to be paying off. But it still has work to do. In his 2002 memo, Mr. Gates cast the security challenge as not just a Microsoft problem, but one for the overall industry. A computer or a network is only as secure as its weakest link ? no matter how secure one program might be, a poorly protected bit of software could compromise everything. That means that on top of investing in their own security, companies have to make efforts to coordinate with other developers to present a united front. Adobe and Microsoft have worked together in recent years to identify and close off mutual vulnerabilities, and other companies should follow suit. A lot of the talk around cybersecurity has centered on the role of government. But investing in software security and cooperating across the software industry shouldn?t take an act of Congress. It will, however, take a new mind-set on the part of developers. They should no longer see security as an add-on feature, nor should they regard holes in their competitors? security efforts as merely a competitive advantage. As the world comes to depend more and more on their products, it should demand nothing less. Marc Maiffret is the chief technology officer of BeyondTrust, an enterprise security management company. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 5 16:40:18 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 17:40:18 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Hill staff rages as LegiStorm gets personal Message-ID: Hill staff rages as LegiStorm gets personal By: Katie Glueck April 4, 2013 05:22 PM EDT http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=93F695CC-5215-483C-8501-C2D9B346DE79 The Congress-focused research organization LegiStorm set off a firestorm on Capitol Hill this week as some staffers learned that their personal Twitter accounts would appear on the site. LegiStorm on Wednesday publicized the tool StormFeed, a ?real-time, full-text searchable access to every official press release and official tweet from Capitol Hill plus the tweets of thousands of congressional staffers,? according to a release. It?s a page available for members of the subscription service LegiStorm Pro. As staffers learned about StormFeed, some discovered other detailed, personal information listed on the site. ?Many are finding inaccurate information in their profiles, despite [Legistorm?s] promise that info provided is ?confirmed,?? one House Republican staffer told POLITICO in an email on Friday. ?I was pretty surprised to show that they even listed who I married, when I married him and where. Why in the world does that need to be in there?? (PHOTOS: 13 things more popular than Congress) A Democratic staffer said the new feature brings an unwelcome level of scrutiny to a group of people who haven?t sought the spotlight. ?Working on the Hill is an enormous privilege, and for that staffers ? are willing to make lot of sacrifices, including long hours, job uncertainty every two years and an understanding of the public disclosure regarding salary information. But unlike members, staffers have not signed up for the public eye in their own personal lives off hours,? the House Democratic chief of staff said. ?This action by LegiStorm does nothing to provide greater transparency on Congress. Instead, it is another action ? like the sequester cuts ? that causes good staffers to wonder if all the sacrifices are worth it.? (POLITICO podcast: Immigration progress, Sanford vs. Busch-Colbert) Another House Republican staffer also thought the newest tool went too far. ?I think there?s an expectation as an employee of a public official your actions are watched. That?s true online and offline,? the GOP aide told POLITICO. ?But I think the new feature raises a larger question within personal privacy. Staffers aren?t elected officials. Where is that line with regard to personal privacy?? LegiStorm President and founder Jock Friedly said that while LegiStorm has heard from ?quite a few staffers? since the launch of StormFeed, there aren?t plans to alter the information provided on the subscriber site. ?Of course they?re private citizens,? he said of the Hill aides. ?But with that being said, forever, as long as information has been published, people want to know ? in the airline industry, people want to know who?s making executive decisions in airline companies?it?s true that congressional staffers, I think, have an underappreciated role in making public policy, and therefore deserve extra scrutiny, but this really has nothing ? [there?s a] general business about providing information about who is who in a particular industry, it?s not unique to Congress.? He said the company has so far received only three complaints that the site linked to the wrong Twitter account, and one of those complaints was inaccurate. ?It?s possible more might emerge but there?s been PLENTY of water cooler gossip about this on the Hill and I think we would have heard more specific responses if lots of people had legitimate grievances,? he told POLITICO in a Friday e-mail. LegiStorm editor Garrett Snedeker said on Thursday that the service has long compiled all kinds of data, including travel and finances, about staffers and members of Congress. ?Probably the biggest thing I?d like to stress is LegiStorm publishes no type of biographical information that hasn?t been part of the standard biographical profile for many decades,? Snedeker told POLITICO. ?We gather that, integrate that, try to make sense of it just because the proliferation of so much information, so much data really necessitates a website like LegiStorm to make sense of it all.? One of the GOP aides who emailed on Friday pushed back on the notion that all of that information should be available in the first place. ?I was also surprised to see that my personal Twitter account and avatar is what?s being used at the top of their screen captured image of what [LegiStorm] looks like,? the staffer continued. ?Seems pretty invasive to me. I understand why our salaries are public. They should be. But I don?t understand why the rest of this info needs to be displayed like this. Where I got married isn?t just anyone?s business.? Snedeker said the Twitter change caused some Hill staffers to realize that additional social media information about them already had been on the site for some time, including links to their personal Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest accounts where available. ?It?s pretty awful that this information is not completely accurate,? said another Republican staffer, who has notified LegiStorm that the individual?s profile page has inaccurate social media links, and is waiting for a response. ?I?d hate for myself to be interviewed for a job right now ? what if they had linked my account to someone with the same name as me that had completely differing views, or their Twitter account?had links to political stories on the opposite end of the spectrum? I?m not saying it?s an end to a career. I?m just saying it could potentially affect how people who use LegiStorm view you. I?m sure they?ll correct it.? The staffer also noted that sometimes, profiles list children who are still minors ? something Friedly acknowledged happens but said LegiStorm is quick to correct. Snedeker said the ?biggest thing? he wants users to know about StormFeed is LegiStorm?s commitment to privacy. ?We a hundred percent respect privacy concerns,? he said. ?That?s why if your Twitter account goes dormant or you protect your tweets, you?re not [going to be] on StormFeed anymore.? He also sought to downplay the Facebook element. ?We respect people?s privacy in the sense that we?re not going to come banging down the door to find out what your Facebook is,? Snedeker said. ?We, frankly, have plenty of other things to do. But if it?s readily available, and the information listed on Facebook is verifiable, and we can confirm that, we?re going to add it.? One Republican Senate aide challenged the overall level of data LegiStorm provides about staffers, saying including religion on some profiles is too much. ?Transparency is one thing; listing sensitive and private information is entirely different,? the staffer told POLITICO. ?Our salaries are a matter of public record ? but why should anyone need to know our religion? That?s over the line.? Alex Byers contributed to this report. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 07:06:18 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 08:06:18 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - How To Stop A Nuclear War Message-ID: <0B156D78-06EB-4510-A9EE-8EF4FA99961B@infowarrior.org> ForeignPolicy.com April 5, 2013 How To Stop A Nuclear War What the Cuban missile crisis teaches us about facing down North Korea. By Michael Dobbs As he ponders how to respond to the military bluster of North Korea, President Obama is learning a lesson that was driven home to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis: When it comes to a possible nuclear confrontation, pre-delegating authority to the generals can be a big mistake. According to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal, the White House has abandoned a pre-approved "playbook" calling for a show of force against North Korea in response to its nuclear saber-rattling. Instead of a series of well-orchestrated, and well-publicized, moves designed to increase the pressure on Pyongyang, the Obama administration is now reported to be looking for ways to de-escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula. White House officials are said to be upset with the Navy for publicizing the deployment of two missile-guided destroyers off South Korea -- a step that could provoke an unpredictable response from North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong Un. The hints of civilian-military disagreement are reminiscent of a celebrated confrontation at the height of the Cuban missile crisis between the secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara, and the chief of naval operations, Admiral George Anderson. After the president announced a naval blockade of Cuba, Anderson felt he had all the authority he needed to stop Soviet ships from crossing the "quarantine line," by force if necessary. "We know how to do this," he told McNamara, waving his well-thumbed copy of the Laws of Military Warfare. "We've been doing it ever since the days of John Paul Jones." The confrontation climaxed with an apoplectic defense secretary telling a red-faced CNO that there would be "no shots fired without my express permission." A few months later, Anderson was dispatched into exile as U.S. ambassador to Portugal. The episode marked a significant turning point in civilian-military relations. During the Second World War, military commanders enjoyed a huge amount of autonomy. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was ordered to "liberate Europe" -- but he did not have politicians breathing down his neck, supervising every aspect of his operations. He took history-making decisions -- such as his refusal to race the Soviet army to Berlin -- all by himself. The nuclear era spelled an end to the traditional military ethos of "Tell us what to do, but don't tell us how to do it." Mistakes are inevitable in war -- but there is no margin for error when it comes to handling nuclear weapons. Worried that a single misstep could lead to a chain of cataclysmic consequences, Kennedy and McNamara insisted on centralizing military decision-making. The symbol of this shift was the creation of the White House "Situation Room," which permitted the president and his advisors to acquire close-to-real-time information from the battlefront, and therefore exercise a much greater degree of command and control. With sufficient material for just half a dozen nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Un can hardly be compared to Kennedy's nemesis, Nikita Khrushchev. (As a second-tier bad guy, Kim is more reminiscent of the fiercely nationalistic Fidel Castro, who excelled at playing the "madman card.") In 1962, the Soviet Union had 300 nuclear weapons capable of reaching U.S. territory, including 32 in Cuba, 90 miles from the Florida Keys. Nevertheless, there are unsettling parallels with the Cuban missile crisis. While it will likely be several years before Kim can reach the American mainland with a missile, he could turn the South Korean capital Seoul into a pile of ashes tomorrow. With his Mao-like suits and Doctor Evil persona, Kim may be fodder for the late night TV comedians, but he controls a growing nuclear arsenal that poses a threat to key U.S. allies. Like Kennedy before him, Obama must be concerned about the possibility of miscalculation that could result in what McNamara termed "a spasm response" by the other side. Four decades have passed since the world came to the brink of nuclear annihilation in October 1962, but the reverberations from that near-miss remain relevant today. The following is a run-down of the most important lessons of the Cuban missile crisis, as they apply to North Korea (or Iran): 1. A single nuclear weapon changes everything. Confident that the United States enjoyed a 10-1 nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union, the advocates of war, led by General Curtis LeMay, urged the president to settle matters with the "Commie bastards" once and for all. But overwhelming nuclear superiority meant little to Kennedy, who later acknowledged that the possibility of a single Soviet nuclear warhead landing on an American city constituted "a substantial deterrent to me." 2. Avoid blind escalation. When a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba on October 27 at the height of the crisis, Kennedy was informed that existing war plans called for immediate retaliation against the offending Soviet SAM site. Worried that this could provoke a chain of unforeseeable consequences, he ordered the Pentagon to delay a response, to allow more time for diplomacy. 3. Pay attention to the "unknown unknowns." However confident your intelligence chiefs may sound, there is much they are unable to tell you. During the missile crisis, Kennedy was unaware that Soviet troops on Cuba possessed nearly 100 tactical nuclear weapons, capable of wiping out a U.S. invading force. The president was like a blind man stumbling through the semi-darkness, only dimly aware of what was happening around him. Like JFK, Obama is discovering that he must operate on instinct, as much as reliable, real-time intelligence. 4. Understand the limits of "crisis management." In the aftermath of the missile crisis, Kennedy acolytes such as Arthur Schlesinger fed the myth of a resolute president using "calibrated" military power and skillful diplomacy to face down his opposite number in the Kremlin. Believing their own propaganda, the "best and the brightest" felt that they could use a similar strategy during the Vietnam War. But they over-estimated their ability to control events. Unfamiliar with the principles of game theory as taught by the RAND Corporation, the North Vietnamese Communists matched the Americans escalation for escalation. 5. Avoid drawing lines in the sand that you might later regret. Prior to the missile crisis, Kennedy found himself under increasing pressure from Republican politicians who accused him of ignoring the Soviet military buildup on Cuba. He responded by issuing a public statement saying that the "gravest issues would arise" if the Soviets developed a "significant offensive capability" on the island. After it turned out that Khrushchev had in fact sent nuclear missiles to Cuba, Kennedy wished he could take back his earlier statement. He was compelled to take action, not because Soviet missiles on Cuba appreciably changed the balance of military power, but because he feared looking weak. He had boxed himself in. 6. Talk to your enemies. After seriously considering an air strike against the missile sites, Kennedy opted for the intermediate step of a partial blockade of Cuba, limited to "offensive military equipment." The blockade bought time for everyone to come to their senses. Khrushchev later praised Kennedy for his "reasonable" approach. Had Kennedy followed his initial instincts, and the advice of people like LeMay, Khrushchev would likely have been obliged to authorize some kind of military response, triggering an unpredictable chain of events. 7. Containment worked. Communism was not defeated militarily: it was defeated economically, culturally, and ideologically. Exhausted by the military competition with the United States, Khrushchev's successors were unable to provide their own people with a basic level of material prosperity. By acquiring nuclear weapons, the North Korean communists have warded off the threat of foreign intervention. But they have failed to resolve any of their underlying economic problems and may even have deepened them. Communism will eventually defeat itself in North Korea -- just as it did in the Soviet Union. We just have to be patient. Michael Dobbs is the author of a Cold War trilogy, including One Minute to Midnight, a study of the Cuban missile crisis from American, Russian, and Cuban perspectives. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 07:06:22 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 08:06:22 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime Message-ID: April 6, 2013 Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/us/taping-of-farm-cruelty-is-becoming-the-crime.html On one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee walking horses with chemicals. Another captures workers in Wyoming punching and kicking pigs and flinging piglets into the air. And at one of the country?s largest egg suppliers, a video shows hens caged alongside rotting bird corpses, while workers burn and snap off the beaks of young chicks. Each video ? all shot in the last two years by undercover animal rights activists ? drew a swift response: Federal prosecutors in Tennessee charged the horse trainer and other workers, who have pleaded guilty, with violating the Horse Protection Act. Local authorities in Wyoming charged nine farm employees with cruelty to animals. And the egg supplier, which operates in Iowa and other states, lost one of its biggest customers, McDonald?s, which said the video played a part in its decision. But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms. Critics call them ?Ag-Gag? bills. Some of the legislation appears inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business advocacy group with hundreds of state representatives from farm states as members. The group creates model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that in the past have included such things as ?stand your ground? gun laws and tighter voter identification rules. One of the group?s model bills, ?The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,? prohibits filming or taking pictures on livestock farms to ?defame the facility or its owner.? Violators would be placed on a ?terrorist registry.? Officials from the group did not respond to a request for comment. Animal rights activists say they have not seen legislation that would require them to register as terrorists, but they say other measures ? including laws passed last year in Iowa, Utah and Missouri ? make it nearly impossible to produce similar undercover expos?s. Some groups say that they have curtailed activism in those states. ?It definitely has had a chilling effect on our ability to conduct undercover investigations,? said Vandhana Bala, general counsel for Mercy for Animals, which has shot many videos, including the egg-farm investigation in 2011. (McDonald?s said that video showed ?disturbing and completely unacceptable? behavior, but that none of the online clips were from the Iowa farm that supplied its eggs. Ms. Bala, though, said that some video showing bird carcasses in cages did come from that facility.) The American Farm Bureau Federation, which lobbies for the agricultural and meat industries, criticized the mistreatment seen on some videos. But the group cautions that some methods represent best practices endorsed by animal-care experts. The videos may seem troubling to someone unfamiliar with farming, said Kelli Ludlum, the group?s director of Congressional relations, but they can be like seeing open-heart surgery for the first time. ?They could be performing a perfect procedure, but you would consider it abhorrent that they were cutting a person open,? she said. In coming weeks, Indiana and Tennessee are expected to vote on similar measures, while states from California to Pennsylvania continue to debate them. Opponents have scored some recent victories, as a handful of bills have died, including those in New Mexico and New Hampshire. In Wyoming, the legislation stalled after loud opposition from animal rights advocates, including Bob Barker, former host of ?The Price is Right.? In Indiana, an expansive bill became one of the most controversial of the state legislative session, drawing heated opposition from labor groups and the state press association, which said the measure violated the First Amendment. After numerous constitutional objections, the bill was redrafted and will be unveiled Monday, said Greg Steuerwald, a Republican state representative and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The new bill would require job applicants to disclose material information or face criminal penalties, a provision that opponents say would prevent undercover operatives from obtaining employment. And employees who do something beyond the scope of their jobs could be charged with criminal trespass. An employee who took a video on a livestock farm with his phone and gave it to someone else would ?probably? run afoul of the proposed law, Mr. Steuerwald said. The bill will apply not just to farms, but to all employers, he added. Nancy J. Guyott, the president of the Indiana chapter of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said she feared that the legislation would punish whistle-blowers. Nationally, animal rights advocates fear that they will lose a valuable tool that fills the void of what they say is weak or nonexistent regulation. Livestock companies say that their businesses have suffered financially from unfair videos that are less about protecting animals than persuading consumers to stop eating meat. Don Lehe, a Republican state representative from a rural district in Indiana, said online videos can cast farmers in a false light and give them little opportunity to correct the record. ?That property owner is essentially guilty before they had the chance to address the issue,? Mr. Lehe said. As for whistle-blowers, advocates for the meat industry say that they are protected from prosecution by provisions in some bills that give them 24 to 48 hours to turn over videos to legal authorities. ?If an abuse has occurred and they have evidence of it, why are they holding on to it?? said Dale Moore, executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation. But animal rights groups say investigations take months to complete. Undercover workers cannot document a pattern of abuse, gather enough evidence to force a government investigation and determine whether managers condone the abuse within one to two days, said Matt Dominguez, who works on farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States. ?Instead of working to prevent future abuses, the factory farms want to silence them,? he said. ?What they really want is for the whistle to be blown on the whistle-blower.? The Humane Society was responsible for a number of undercover investigations, including the videos of the Wyoming pig farm and the Tennessee walking horses. Video shot in 2011 showed workers dripping caustic chemicals onto the horses? ankles and clasping metal chains onto the injured tissue. This illegal and excruciating technique, known as ?soring,? forces the horse to thrust its front legs forward after every painful step to exaggerate the distinctive high-stepping gait favored by breeders. The video also showed a worker hitting a horse in the head with a large piece of wood. The Humane Society first voluntarily turned over the video to law enforcement. By the time the video was publicly disclosed, federal prosecutors had filed charges. A week later, they announced guilty pleas from the horse trainer and other workers. Prosecutors later credited the Humane Society with prompting the federal investigation and establishing ?evidence instrumental to the case.? That aid to prosecutors shows the importance of lengthy undercover investigations that would be prevented by laws requiring video to be turned over within one or two days, Mr. Dominguez said. ?At the first sign of animal cruelty, we?d have to pull our investigator out, and we wouldn?t be able to build a case that leads to charges.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 07:06:27 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 08:06:27 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 50 Cognitive Distortions Message-ID: Understanding Cognition Quite simply, cognition refers to thinking. There are the obvious applications of conscious reasoning?doing taxes, playing chess, deconstructing Macbeth?but thought takes many subtler forms, such as interpreting sensory input, guiding physical actions, and empathizing with others. The old metaphor for human cognition was the computer?a logical information-processing machine. (You can?t spell cognition without ?cog.?) But while some of our thoughts may be binary, there's a lot more to our 'wetware' than 0's and 1's...... < - > http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/cognition --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 07:50:43 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 08:50:43 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Beware Root66 web ad injection Message-ID: <7CAD203B-4134-42D6-A317-7C2C05C57F22@infowarrior.org> < - > ISP-sanctioned ad injection directly into webpages?if that's what this is?has a long history, but it has been fairly rare to find it happening on pay connections in the US. < - > http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-a-banner-ad-for-hs-ok/#image-4 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 07:52:52 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 08:52:52 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - If Hackers Didn't Exist, Governments Would Have to Invent Them Message-ID: <9F4C118D-4B71-4A2C-8261-AC97FFFB839B@infowarrior.org> If Hackers Didn't Exist, Governments Would Have to Invent Them Molly Sauter Jul 5 2012, 4:29 PM ET http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/07/if-hackers-didnt-exist-governments-would-have-to-invent-them/259463/ The myth of malicious adolescents out to wreak havoc on our technology spurs Internet regulations that are far more stringent than is reasonable. The hackers who dominate news coverage and popular culture -- malicious, adolescent techno-wizards, willing and able to do great harm to innocent civilians and society at large -- don't exist The perceived threat landscape is a warped one, which directs attention and resources to battling phantoms, rather than toward preventing much more common data-security problems. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the loss or improper disposal of paper records, portable devices like laptops or memory sticks, and desktop computers have accounted for more than 1,400 data-breach incidents since 2005 -- almost half of all the incidents reported. More than 180,000,000 individual records were compromised in these breaches, which included individuals' names, Social Security numbers, addresses, credit-card information and more. This is compared to the 631 incidents from the same period that the Clearinghouse assigns generically to "hacking or malware." Your private data is more likely to be put at risk by a factotum leaving a laptop on a train than by a wired teen with too much time on his hands. Insider threats, otherwise known as frustrated grown-ups with real jobs, also constitute a significant challenge for information security. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a survey which showed that 71 percent of IT managers and executives believe insider threats present the greatest risk to their companies. And the recent high-profile security breach at LinkedIn shows that one of the greatest risks to our personal security is ourselves: more than two-thirds of the leaked LinkedIn passwords were eight characters or fewer in length, and only one percent used the mix of upper- and lower-case characters, numbers, and symbols that makes passwords difficult to crack. But these more serious threats don't seem to loom as large as hackers in the minds of those who make the laws and regulations that shape the Internet. It is the hacker -- a sort of modern folk devil who personifies our anxieties about technology -- who gets all the attention. The result is a set of increasingly paranoid and restrictive laws and regulations affecting our abilities to communicate freely and privately online, to use and control our own technology, and which puts users at risk for overzealous prosecutions and invasive electronic search and seizure practices. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the cornerstone of domestic computer-crime legislation, is overly broad and poorly defined. Since its passage in 1986, it has created a pile of confused caselaw and overzealous prosecutions. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security manipulate fears of techno-disasters to garner funding and support for laws and initiatives, such as the recently proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, that could have horrific implications for user rights. In order to protect our rights to free speech and privacy on the internet, we need to seriously reconsider those laws and the shadowy figure used to rationalize them. * * * The hacker character in mainstream culture has evolved as our relationship with the technology has changed. When Matthew Broderick starred in War Games in 1983, the hacker character was childish, driven by curiosity and benign self-interest, and sowed his mayhem largely by accident. Subsequent incarnations, like those in Hackers, Sneakers, GoldenEye, and Live Free or Die Hard became more dangerous and more intentional in their actions, gleefully breaking into protected networks and machines and causing casual destruction incomprehensible to techno have-nots. The hacker in American film, almost always white, middle class, and male, is immature, socially alienated, vindictive, and motivated by selfish goals or personality problems. The plots of such films are built on apocalyptic techno-paranoia, reflecting a belief that hackers have supreme control over the technologies that make the world run. News coverage parallels the pop culture frame. Basement-dwelling hackers remain a primary villain on the evening news and the front page, even at the cost of an accurate and rational portrayal of current events. "Hacking" is used as a catch-all term to describe almost any computer-related crime or "bad" action, no matter the skills or techniques involved. Coverage often confuses what could happen with what is actually happening, reporting on theoretical exploits of the type often presented at security conferences as if they were a clear and present danger. Recent media and government fixation on the prankster-protesters of Anonymous has stoked the fires of techno-paranoia and, as Yochai Benkler pointed out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, has conflated modes of electronic civil disobedience with outright cybercriminality in ways that damage the cause of political speech online. The hacker lurks in the network, a decentralized threat, able to cause harm far from his actual location. His relationship with technology is pathological, he is compulsive in his hacking activities, and therefore cannot be reformed. Because he is socially alienated, he lacks the normal social checks on his behavior, and is instead stuck in a feedback loop with other hackers, each trying to outdo the other in juvenile mayhem on the public internet. Add to all this the hacker's superhuman ability to manipulate anything running code, and you have a terrifying modern boogeyman that society must be protected from at all costs. * * * In the effort to protect society and the state from the ravages of this imagined hacker, the US government has adopted overbroad, vaguely worded laws and regulations which severely undermine internet freedom and threaten the Internet's role as a place of political and creative expression. In an effort to stay ahead of the wily hacker, laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) focus on electronic conduct or actions, rather than the intent of or actual harm caused by those actions. This leads to a wide range of seemingly innocuous digital activities potentially being treated as criminal acts. Distrust for the hacker politics of Internet freedom, privacy, and access abets the development of ever-stricter copyright regimes, or laws like the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which if passed would have disastrous implications for personal privacy online. The hacker folk devil as depicted in popular culture and news coverage is the target of and the justification for these laws and regulations. But rather than catching that phantom, these laws invite guilt by association, confusing skill with computers with intent to harm. They snag individuals involved with non-criminal activities online, as happened in the case of Bret McDanel, who served 16 months in prison for sending a few emails, and leave the rest of us with legally crippled technology and a confused picture of our rights online. Crafting governmental and corporate policy in reaction to a stereotyped social ghoul lurking in the tubes is ineffective at best, and actively malignant at worst. There are real threats in the online space, from the banal reality of leaving a laptop on the bus and sloppy personal security habits to the growing reality of inter-state cyberwar. However, focusing on the boys-in-the-basement hacker threat model drains attention and resources from discovering what and where the actual threats are. Taking down file lockers, criminalizing jail breaking, modding, and terms-of-service violations, and casting legal aspersions on anonymous and pseudonymous speech online is distracting fear mongering and wastes governmental and corporate resources. Recent court decisions, like the opinion handed down by the Ninth Circuit in US v. Nosal, work to narrow the scope of the CFAA, which gives hope to the idea that it is possible to regulate the Internet in a more reality-driven way. In order to achieve that regulation, though, we must discard the hacker stereotype as a central social villain and legal driver. The past few years have seen the internet emerge as a central haven for political speech, domestically and internationally. The internet has been used to exchange ideas, organize protests, and overthrow dictators. We hold the right to free political speech dearly in this country, and, for better or for worse, the laws we pass regarding the regulation of the internet have a disproportionally large impact on the way this international resource operates. The question that we must ask ourselves is, do we want the next Arab Spring regulated out of existence by our fear of hackers who don't even exist? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 12:17:10 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 13:17:10 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Doctorow: Obama's regressive record makes Nixon look like Che Message-ID: <9884EC97-D67E-47CD-885C-D633DF0AEEF0@infowarrior.org> Obama's regressive record makes Nixon look like Che Cory Doctorow at 9:06 am Mon, Apr 8 Redditor Federal Reservations has made a handy post enumerating all the regressive, authoritarian, corporatist policies enacted by the Obama administration in its one-and-a-bit terms. You know, for someone the right wing press likes to call a socialist, Obama sure makes Richard Nixon look like Che Guevara. And what's more, this is only a partial list, and excludes the parade of copyright horrors and bad Internet policy emanating from the White House, via Joe Biden's push for Six Strikes, the US Trade Rep's push for secret Internet censorship and surveillance treaties like TPP and ACTA and TAFTA; the DoJ's push to criminalize every Internet user by expanding the CFAA, and much, much more. < - > http://boingboing.net/2013/04/08/obamas-regressive-record-mak.html --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 12:22:33 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 13:22:33 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too) Message-ID: <233DC84A-3521-4070-9AAD-9B6879F5B683@infowarrior.org> Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too) By GINA KOLATA http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html Published: April 7, 2013 The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a r?sum?. ?I think we were duped,? one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society. Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon ?the dark side of open access,? the movement to make scholarly publications freely available. The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them. Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality. But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. ?Most people don?t know the journal universe,? Dr. Goodman said. ?They will not know from a journal?s title if it is for real or not.? Researchers also say that universities are facing new challenges in assessing the r?sum?s of academics. Are the publications they list in highly competitive journals or ones masquerading as such? And some academics themselves say they have found it difficult to disentangle themselves from these journals once they mistakenly agree to serve on their editorial boards. The phenomenon has caught the attention of Nature, one of the most competitive and well-regarded scientific journals. In a news report published recently, the journal noted ?the rise of questionable operators? and explored whether it was better to blacklist them or to create a ?white list? of those open-access journals that meet certain standards. Nature included a checklist on ?how to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or a publisher.? Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, has developed his own blacklist of what he calls ?predatory open-access journals.? There were 20 publishers on his list in 2010, and now there are more than 300. He estimates that there are as many as 4,000 predatory journals today, at least 25 percent of the total number of open-access journals. ?It?s almost like the word is out,? he said. ?This is easy money, very little work, a low barrier start-up.? Journals on what has become known as ?Beall?s list? generally do not post the fees they charge on their Web sites and may not even inform authors of them until after an article is submitted. They barrage academics with e-mail invitations to submit articles and to be on editorial boards. One publisher on Beall?s list, Avens Publishing Group, even sweetened the pot for those who agreed to be on the editorial board of The Journal of Clinical Trails & Patenting, offering 20 percent of its revenues to each editor. One of the most prolific publishers on Beall?s list, Srinubabu Gedela, the director of the Omics Group, has about 250 journals and charges authors as much as $2,700 per paper. Dr. Gedela, who lists a Ph.D. from Andhra University in India, says on his Web site that he ?learnt to devise wonders in biotechnology.? Another Beall?s list publisher, Dove Press, says on its Web site, ?There are no limits on the number or size of the papers we can publish.? Open-access publishers say that the papers they publish are reviewed and that their businesses are legitimate and ethical. ?There is no compromise on quality review policy,? Dr. Gedela wrote in an e-mail. ?Our team?s hard work and dedicated services to the scientific community will answer all the baseless and defamatory comments that have been made about Omics.? But some academics say many of these journals? methods are little different from spam e-mails offering business deals that are too good to be true. Paulino Mart?nez, a doctor in Celaya, Mexico, said he was gullible enough to send two articles in response to an e-mail invitation he received last year from The Journal of Clinical Case Reports. They were accepted. Then came a bill saying he owed $2,900. He was shocked, having had no idea there was a fee for publishing. He asked to withdraw the papers, but they were published anyway. ?I am a doctor in a hospital in the province of Mexico, and I don?t have the amount they requested,? Dr. Mart?nez said. The journal offered to reduce his bill to $2,600. Finally, after a year and many e-mails and a phone call, the journal forgave the money it claimed he owed. Some professors listed on the Web sites of journals on Beall?s list, and the associated conferences, say they made a big mistake getting involved with the journals and cannot seem to escape them. Thomas Price, an associate professor of reproductive endocrinology and fertility at the Duke University School of Medicine, agreed to be on the editorial board of The Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics because he saw the name of a well-respected academic expert on its Web site and wanted to support open-access journals. He was surprised, though, when the journal repeatedly asked him to recruit authors and submit his own papers. Mainstream journals do not do this because researchers ordinarily want to publish their papers in the best journal that will accept them. Dr. Price, appalled by the request, refused and asked repeatedly over three years to be removed from the journal?s editorial board. But his name was still there. ?They just don?t pay any attention,? Dr. Price said. About two years ago, James White, a plant pathologist at Rutgers, accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of a new journal, Plant Pathology & Microbiology, not realizing the nature of the journal. Meanwhile, his name, photograph and r?sum? were on the journal?s Web site. Then he learned that he was listed as an organizer and speaker on a Web site advertising Entomology-2013. ?I am not even an entomologist,? he said. He thinks the publisher of the plant journal, which also sponsored the entomology conference, ? just pasted his name, photograph and r?sum? onto the conference Web site. At this point, he said, outraged that the conference and journal were ?using a person?s credentials to rip off other unaware scientists,? Dr. White asked that his name be removed from the journal and the conference. Weeks went by and nothing happened, he said. Last Monday, in response to this reporter?s e-mail to the conference organizers, Jessica Lincy, who said only that she was a conference member, wrote to explain that the conference had ?technical problems? removing Dr. White?s name. On Tuesday, his name was gone. But it remained on the Web site of the journal. Dr. Gedela, the publisher of the journals and sponsor of the conference, said in an e-mail on Thursday that Dr. Price and Dr. White?s names remained on the Web sites ?because of communication gap between the EB member and the editorial assistant,? referring to editorial board members. That day, their names were gone from the journals? Web sites. ?I really should have known better,? Dr. White said of his editorial board membership, adding that he did not fully realize how the publishing world had changed. ?It seems like the Wild West now.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 8 21:41:45 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 22:41:45 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Unlocking the Motorola Bootloader Message-ID: Unlocking the Motorola Bootloader http://blog.azimuthsecurity.com/2013/04/unlocking-motorola-bootloader.html --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 9 06:18:46 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 07:18:46 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Speak Up And Fix The CFAA Message-ID: <4E66998D-52B6-4083-B4AE-763A5ED6EACE@infowarrior.org> Speak Up And Fix The CFAA from the don't-make-it-worse dept A bunch of internet activists, including Fight for the Future and Demand Progress, among others, have launched a new site: FixTheCFAA.com, asking people to contact their lawmakers and demand that they fix the CFAA law, rather than make it worse. < - > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130406/22060922616/speak-up-fix-cfaa.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 9 06:32:19 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 07:32:19 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Global music sales have risen but 'piracy' is still evil Message-ID: <7F20A86F-935F-4B38-AFEE-065507912427@infowarrior.org> Global music sales have risen but 'piracy' is still evil IFPI wants action from search engines By Dave Neal Tue Apr 09 2013, 10:46 http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2260061/global-music-sales-have-risen-but-piracy-is-still-evil SALES OF DIGITAL MUSIC now account for over a third of trade revenues, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), but search engines like Google are keeping more profit out of industry hands. The IFPI, which represents the interests of the recording industry, said that digital music revenues have increased so that they now account for 35 percent of trade revenues. Physical music accounts for 57 percent. According to its latest annual report downloads were the biggest source of digital revenues, and their combined track and album sales were up by 11 percent from 2011. iTunes is named as the sales leader here, and Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all credited with having impacts on sales. Music streaming services like Spotify and Deezer have enjoyed "rapid growth", and the IFPI said that subscription or advertising supported music accounted for 20 percent of global digital revenues. In 2011 it accounted for 14 percent. The music streaming services appeared to be most popular in Europe, where they pulled in 31 percent of all digital music revenues. Trade was up across the board, from licensing for advertising through to vinyl album sales, and the price of vinyl, everything is on the rise. Globally the value of all recorded music last year, both physical and digital, was $16.5bn. In her introduction to the report IFPI CEO Frances Moore said that this is an industry in recovery, and one that desperately needs help to overcome "huge barriers to further growth", namely privacy. She said that now - and we must remember that this is the year after the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) were defeated - more than ever, the industry needs official help from industry and from government. "Despite all this success, the industry still faces huge barriers to further growth. One-third of internet users globally still regularly access unlicensed services. What other industry has to cope with a third of its potential customers being able to get copies of its own products from illegal sources? "I believe that it is at this point, when our industry is on the path to recovery, that the role of governments in securing a fair market environment is more critical than ever," she said. "We seek cooperation from a range of intermediaries to help control piracy - advertisers, ISPs, payment providers and search engines. Some of these are doing encouraging things; some are not doing nearly enough. Moving the needle on intermediary cooperation in fighting piracy is a top priority for IFPI in 2013. As the figures in this book show, if we can address these challenges, the potential for further industry growth in the years ahead is very exciting." Deeper in the report under a section titled Tackling Digital Piracy the IFPI said that it is waiting for the outside help that it needs. It called out Google for being slow to delist unlicensed content websites from its rankings. "In August 2012, Google announced it could alter its algorithm to downgrade unlicensed services in its search results. Rights holders welcomed this commitment, but are still yet to see its effective implementation," it said. "The industry believes search engines can also do more to ensure they do not generate advertising income for unlicensed services and can increase the amount of infringing links they remove in response to rights holders' requests." Where government and industry have struck, it said, the impact has been immediate. The shutdown of Megaupload created a ripple across that industry that saw many other websites shut up shop, while the IFPI said that in places where there is strict legislation, so-called 'piracy' has fallen. However. It wants more. "The industry recognises there is still more to do and calls on governments worldwide to help it uphold copyright law in the digital space," it added. "Making sure existing copyright rules are properly enforced can help create a more positive environment for creative industries to invest in new talent and bring it to the market, resulting in more opportunities for artists and greater choice for consumers." ? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 9 06:35:36 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 07:35:36 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight Message-ID: Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight ? By Kim Zetter ? 04.09.13 ? 6:30 AM http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-aircard/all/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 9 06:48:55 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 07:48:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Teacher_Knows_if_You=92ve_Done_t?= =?windows-1252?q?he_E-Reading?= Message-ID: When do we let students (regardless of age) learn about 'consequences' for decisions that they make? You don't do the readings, you fail the exam, you fail the course. Do that a few times and hopefully the student will realise what they need to do in order to pass it. The idea of college e-books monitoring and tracking student 'engagement' seems like a money-grabbing idea being pitched to university administrators in their quest to develop ever-more 'metrics' about stuff. Not to mention, IMHO it further conditions people to either live in a panopticon or try to game the panopticon they're forced into while constantly second-guessing their own performance, efforts, and routes to success as individuals and how they're perceived by external monitors. --rick Teacher Knows if You?ve Done the E-Reading By DAVID STREITFELD Published: April 8, 2013 SAN ANTONIO ? Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks. They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes ? or simply not opening the book at all. ?It?s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,? said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business. The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students? progress with digital textbooks. < -- > http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 07:17:47 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:17:47 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Law Should Never Be Secret, So Why Will CISPA Debate Be Secret? Message-ID: The Law Should Never Be Secret, So Why Will CISPA Debate Be Secret? from the ridiculous dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130409/14053622647/law-should-never-be-secret-so-why-will-cispa-debate-be-secret.shtml As we mentioned last week, CISPA is scheduled for markup tomorrow, and the markup will be done behind closed doors without any public scrutiny allowed. This makes no sense. They are not debating the reason for the law, but rather the text of the law itself. The law will be public, and any debate about the language and amendments included should be public as well. As Julian Sanchez points out, it makes perfect sense for intelligence briefings to be held in secret, but it never makes sense to hold debates about what the law should be in secret. So why is Congress doing so? In the meantime, it appears that the main backers of the bill will be supporting some amendments (and may release a manager's amendment), which marginally limits how the information it gets from companies can be used. However, this does little to deal with the real problems of the bill: the immunity companies get for sharing pretty much any private info with any government agency. At the very least, there's no reason that CISPA shouldn't require that companies strip personally identifiable information from any data they share with the government. But, really, this deserves to go much further. At no point -- in the many years that cybersecurity legislation has been discussed -- has anyone in Congress explained why we need this. Yes, they've given FUD-like horror stories about planes falling from the sky, or they've pointed to Chinese hackers. But what they have not done is show how (a) current law gets in the way of the necessary information sharing to help combat any threats or (b) how CISPA will help stop such attacks. You'd think that both of these points would be at the top of the list of the things that Congress would be explaining to get support for this bill. Instead, we hear scare stories about evil hackers out to destroy us, and an awful lot of "trust us." It's tough to trust the government, though, when they won't even let you know what they're debating. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 07:27:59 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:27:59 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?What_Happens_When_Facebook_Doesn?= =?windows-1252?q?=92t_Like_You_=5BFeature=5D?= Message-ID: <7DF2DFBD-303F-42DB-8A6F-BD17581175BD@infowarrior.org> Banned: What Happens When Facebook Doesn?t Like You [Feature] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-travails-of-banned-users/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 07:30:20 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:30:20 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Sale to Elsevier Casts Doubt on Mendeley's Openness Message-ID: <047C9AFF-7720-40C9-97B1-DA66DCAB0FA7@infowarrior.org> (I wasn't a Mendeley user, but sure won't be one now. I still prefer desktop-based reference managers that are 'owned' and resilient, not crowdsourced and network-connected-to-share-all. --rick) April 9, 2013 Sale to Elsevier Casts Doubt on Mendeley's Openness By Jennifer Howard http://chronicle.com/article/Sale-to-Elsevier-Casts-Doubt/138449/ For months rumors have been circulating that the publishing giant Elsevier was going to acquire Mendeley, the popular reference-management and PDF-organizer platform. Now both companies have confirmed that the rumors are true: Elsevier has bought Mendeley for an undisclosed sum. The Financial Times reported that the purchase price was ?45-million (about $69-million), but neither company would confirm that. Both companies said combining forces and integrating platforms would allow them to serve scholarly users better. "Good things are about to happen!" was the headline on the Mendeley blog post announcing the move. (The publisher went with a more muted headline for its announcement: "Elsevier Welcomes Mendeley.") But the news triggered dismay among some researchers concerned about what the acquisition would mean for Mendeley's commitment to openness. Some of its 2.3 million users said on Twitter that they were going to delete their Mendeley accounts (many used the hashtag #mendelete) or that they were considering alternative services, such as Zotero, run by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Victor Henning, chief executive and co-founder of Mendeley, said in an interview that joining forces with Elsevier would make it possible for Mendeley to do several things it has wanted to do. First is to make it easier for users to actually view content. One big item on the agenda is to integrate Mendeley with Elsevier's Scopus bibliographic database and the ScienceDirect repository of more than 11 million journal articles. "The goal is to make it completely seamless," Mr. Henning said. Elsevier's authentication software will make it easier to identify whether users already have access to those services through institutional subscriptions, he said. Second, merging into Elsevier will put more resources at Mendeley's disposal. What that means is "we can take the long perspective again," without having to figure out how to pay for each new iteration or feature, Mr. Henning said. For instance, Mendeley will be hiring a team of developers immediately to come up with a mobile version for Android phones. "Third is the new stuff we can do now," Mr. Henning said. Mendeley can use Elsevier's "amazing, structured database" to clean up and complete its perhaps messier but uniquely rich crowd-sourced data. Skeptical About Intentions Olivier Dumon, Elsevier's managing director of academic and government markets, said in the same interview that Elsevier wanted not just Mendeley's data but its talent and workflow. Mendeley's employees can stay on, and Mr. Henning will become part of Elsevier's strategic team. Both Mr. Dumon and Mr. Henning said that a shared vision had ultimately brought the two companies together. After collaborating with Elsevier on several projects, the Mendeley team realized that "they were as obsessed as we are with plugging gaps in users' workflow," he said. In his Elsevier-welcomes-Mendeley blog post, Mr. Dumon explained that vision: "We can make this combined platform the central workflow and collaboration site for authors," he wrote. "In addition, we will be able to provide greater access to a growing repository of user-generated content while building tools that will enable researchers to search this growing body of research more precisely." Mr. Henning acknowledged that many researchers are skeptical about Elsevier and its intentions. The Cost of Knowledge boycott last year, for instance, made that skepticism very public. "Certainly Elsevier has gotten criticism for their actions in the past, but my feeling is they've taken those criticism to heart," he said. According to Mr. Henning, Mendeley intends to keep offering a free version as well as premium services to both users and institutions. (The Mendeley Institutional Edition went live last year.) "The API remains free," he said. "I'm hoping that the people who are very skeptical today will give us a few weeks and months" to make good on those promises and demonstrate the benefits of the arrangement with Elsevier. In discussing the implications of the Elsevier acquisition, Mr. Henning emphasized both openness and business concerns. "Does it mean we will stop being a provider of open data through our API? We can tell people that Mendeley will remain free," he said. But Mendeley has "from the start been a business model," he added. "All the data that's there now will remain under an open license, but if we introduce new data, we might charge for that. That's always been the case, independent of Elsevier." No Longer an Open-Access Darling? One high-profile skeptic is Jason Hoyt, co-founder of the new open-access publishing platform PeerJ. Mr. Hoyt worked for Mendeley from 2009 to 2011. In a blog post on Tuesday, he called the news "a win for the Mendeley team." As an early employee, he still holds shares in Mendeley, he said. But he expressed doubts about what joining forces with Elsevier would mean for the company's long-term values. "In terms of mission success, however, I am uncertain if this was a win," Mr. Hoyt wrote. "Mendeley had become known as the darling of openness, which in my view was already closing off when I left. Selling to Elsevier sets up a new challenge to maintain that open ethos, and unfortunately we can't immediately gauge what the outcome will look like." In his post, Mr. Hoyt detailed three projects he'd been involved in at Mendeley that he said ran into resistance from Elsevier. For instance, with PDF Previews, a feature that allowed users to get a taste of a few pages of an article, "Elsevier came out hard to limit what we could do," he wrote. "I think that Mendeley, as it stands today, will continue to be useful even at Elsevier," Mr. Hoyt concluded. "That said, I think it will be challenging for Mendeley to become a truly transformative tool in science." Sean Takats, a professor of history at George Mason, is director of research at the university's Center for History and New Media. He oversees Zotero as part of that job. Elsevier's acquisition of Mendeley is a big deal for its employees and investors, Mr. Takats said, but he thinks it could diminish Mendeley's influence in the research-management space. "If anything, it's taking Mendeley out of the game as the new shiny thing and the darling of open access," he said. Correction (4/9/2013, 5:17 p.m.): This article originally misidentified a former Mendeley employee. He is Jason Hoyt, not Jason Boyd. The article has been updated to reflect this correction. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 07:52:18 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:52:18 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - McClatchy's analysis on drone strikes Message-ID: <6CC3576A-CAE4-44D1-AD21-95999734657C@infowarrior.org> Posted on Tue, Apr. 09, 2013 Obama?s drone war kills ?others,? not just al Qaida leaders By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers last updated: April 10, 2013 05:09:02 AM WASHINGTON -- ] Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified ?other? militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan?s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show. The administration has said that strikes by the CIA?s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against ?specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces? involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting ?imminent? violent attacks on Americans. ?It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,? President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. ?It has to be a situation in which we can?t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.? Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn?t adhere to those standards. The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn?t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn?t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as ?other militants? and ?foreign fighters.? In a response to questions from McClatchy, the White House defended its targeting policies, pointing to previous public statements by senior administration officials that the missile strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces. Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy?s findings indicate that the administration is ?misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.? The documents also show that drone operators weren?t always certain who they were killing despite the administration?s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA?s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been ?exceedingly rare.? McClatchy?s review is the first independent evaluation of internal U.S. intelligence accounting of drone attacks since the Bush administration launched America?s secret aerial warfare on Oct. 7, 2001, the day a missile-carrying Predator took off for Afghanistan from an airfield in Pakistan on the first operational flight of an armed U.S. drone. The analysis takes on additional significance because of the domestic and international debate over the legality of drone strikes in Pakistan amid reports that the administration is planning to broaden its use of targeted killings in Afghanistan and North Africa. The U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy covered most ? although not all ? of the drone strikes in 2006-2008 and 2010-2011. In that later period, Obama oversaw a surge in drone operations against suspected Islamist sanctuaries on Pakistan?s side of the border that coincided with his buildup of 33,000 additional U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan. Several documents listed casualty estimates as well as the identities of targeted groups. McClatchy?s review found that: ? At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were ?assessed? as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists. Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts. Forty-three of 95 drone strikes reviewed for that period hit groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the unidentified individuals described only as ?foreign fighters? and ?other militants.? During the same period, the reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militant groups in Pakistan?s tribal areas. ? At other times, the CIA killed people who only were suspected, associated with, or who probably belonged to militant groups. To date, the Obama administration has not disclosed the secret legal opinions and the detailed procedures buttressing drone killings, and it has never acknowledged the use of so-called ?signature strikes,? in which unidentified individuals are killed after surveillance shows behavior the U.S. government associates with terrorists, such as visiting compounds linked to al Qaida leaders or carrying weapons. Nor has it disclosed an explicit list of al Qaida?s ?associated forces? beyond the Afghan Taliban. The little that is known about the opinions comes from a leaked Justice Department white paper, a half-dozen or so speeches, some public comments by Obama and several top lieutenants, and limited open testimony before Congress. ?The United States has gone far beyond what the U.S. public ? and perhaps even Congress ? understands the government has been doing and claiming they have a legal right to do,? said Mary Ellen O?Connell, a Notre Dame Law School professor who contends that CIA drone operations in Pakistan violate international law. < -- BIG SNIP - > http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/v-print/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 08:07:47 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:07:47 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Comment: FOMC follies Message-ID: <7BA288D0-5E2B-4C25-A95C-B627BAF35DEB@infowarrior.org> Unbelievable. The Federal Reserve "inadvertently" releases minutes of its last meeting the middle of yesterday afternoon to Congressional staffers and trade associations. Yet they waited until this morning before releasing it officially at 9AM to everyone. How many people got to 'front-run' the report and either trade it or prepare for things before the news 'broke' publicly this morning to everyone else? Unbelievable, irresponsible, and more. In other words, the nature of the modern global financial system. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 17:02:22 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:02:22 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA's Sponsor Can't Even Keep His Story Straight About NSA Having Access To Your Data Message-ID: CISPA's Sponsor Can't Even Keep His Story Straight About NSA Having Access To Your Data from the also,-wtf-politico? dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130410/11570822664/cispas-sponsor-cant-even-keep-his-story-straight-about-nsa-having-access-to-your-data.shtml CISPA's sponsors are doing the same thing they did last year when confronted with serious opposition to a terrible bill: they start lying about it. First, they released a "fact vs. myth" sheet about the bill that was so ridiculously misleading that the EFF had to pick apart nearly every dubious claim. A big part of this is trying to hide the fact that the bill has very broad definitions that will make it much easier for the NSA to get access to private data. No one has claimed that this automatically allows the NSA to do full "surveillance" via CISPA, but that's what CISPA's supporters pretend critics have said, so they can fight back against the strawman. What's incredible is that the statements from CISPA's supporters are, themselves, quite contradictory. Take, for example, the hilarious statements from CISPA sponsor Mike Rogers to Politico, in which he seeks to "fire back" at critics who worry about CISPA being used by the NSA. Read his comments carefully, and you'll see that he goes from saying that the NSA won't have anything to do with it, to saying that the definitions are broad (so that maybe the NSA will have something to do with it) to then saying that the NSA is the best at this, so it should be able to use CISPA to get access to private information. All within a matter of a few sentences. .....Here's the full bit from Rogers: "I don't know where they get that. It doesn't say that in the bill. NSA is not authorized to monitor; this is not a surveillance bill. If you read the bill ? I encourage those privacy groups to actually read the bill ? you won't find that in the bill. ... We're agnostic on how the government would form [an info-sharing regime]; some want DHS, some want others. We thought, let's be agnostic on that portion so you get the right regime. But if you don't have the capability of the NSA, taking that information from the Iranians and the North Koreans and others, and allowing that to get back into the system, it's worthless. And if you want the gold-standard protection from cyberattacks, the NSA has to be at least somewhere. They don't have to get it, they don't have to be the lead in it, but they're the ones that have the capability for overseas collection." So, basically, it's all an overstatement that the NSA might get access to your data... er... I mean, we don't actually specify, so we'll let the federal government make its own decisions later when its outside of public scrutiny and... oh yeah, of course we want the NSA to have access to the data, because they're "the gold-standard." That's not going to put the privacy concerns to rest, now, is it? Rogers' problem is that he's pretending that privacy critics are saying this is an ongoing "surveillance" bill, rather than one where the NSA can get access to private data. As far as I know, none of the privacy groups protesting CISPA have made that claim of it being a surveillance bill. They're just worried about how CISPA destroys (literally, wipes out) any privacy protections for companies handing private info over to the government. Basically, the end of his statement exactly confirms the concerns raised by privacy advocates, even as he pretends that it disproves them. Incredible. Meanwhile, aren't reporters supposed to push back on bogus claims from politicians, rather than just restating them as fact? *Sigh* Separately, Rogers' own statements contradict that "fact vs. myth" statement that his staff put out. In that statement, the House Intelligence Committee argue that there aren't any problems with "broad" definitions in the bill. And yet, here he clearly talks about how they're "agnostic" on how the program plays out. That's exactly the kind of "broad" issues that people are concerned about. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 17:02:26 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:02:26 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - As Congress Debates CISPA, Companies Admit No Real Damage From Cyberattacks Message-ID: <6460A58B-A5CB-452B-AC1A-AAD38EB521C9@infowarrior.org> As Congress Debates CISPA, Companies Admit No Real Damage From Cyberattacks from the the-truth-is-so-inconvenient dept Since the beginning of the cybersecurity FUDgasm from Congress, we've been asking for proof of the actual problem. All we get are stories about how airplanes might fall from the sky, but not a single, actual example of any serious problem. Recently, some of the rhetoric shifted to how it wasn't necessarily planes falling from the sky but Chinese hackers eating away at our livelihoods by hacking into computers to get our secrets and destroy our economy. Today, Congress is debating CISPA (in secret) based on this assumption. There's just one problem: it's still not true. The 27 largest companies have now admitted to the SEC that cyberattacks are basically meaningless and have done little to no damage.... < - > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130409/15372222650/as-congress-debates-cispa-companies-admit-no-real-damage-cyberattacks.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 17:08:18 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:08:18 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant Message-ID: IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant The ACLU has obtained internal IRS documents that say Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail messages, Facebook chats, and other electronic communications. < - > http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57578839-38/irs-claims-it-can-read-your-e-mail-without-a-warrant/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 10 18:31:01 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:31:01 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Acxiom steps out of the shadows Message-ID: All you need to know ? about yourself By Emily Steel in New York http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e1c48f9a-a1c2-11e2-ad0c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Q6e7PBUQ Acxiom is preparing to step out of the shadows. The consumer data broker, which tracks everything from a person?s estimated income to his political leanings, shopping patterns and exercise habits, is readying a service that will reveal to people what it knows about them. New York-listed Acxiom, which has a market capitalisation of $1.4bn, collects details about more than 700m consumers across the globe and sells them to more than 7,000 clients. The move to add a new level of transparency to its business practice comes amid mounting regulatory and governmental scrutiny of its multibillion-dollar industry, which include an investigation launched in December by the US Federal Trade Commission. ?We live in an era when transparency is important,? Tim Suther, Acxiom?s chief marketing and strategy officer, told the Financial Times. ?We?re listening to that and trying to be even more transparent with people who are interested in understanding what companies like Acxiom do with information.? Intimate details about people?s lives that are collected and analysed by companies like Acxiom are a gold mine in the digital age. Companies are mining those robust dossiers to predict everything from what credit card offers to show prospective customers to whether a woman is pregnant and even when a person is likely to die. Marketers tap the data to tailor their advertising messages to individuals. Politicians use the data to calculate how they can most strongly influence people. For years, the industry has operated behind a veil of secrecy and released few details about the exact information it tracked and how those details were used. Consumer privacy advocates long have demanded that data brokers such as Acxiom, Experian and Datalogix allow individuals to see what information is collected, correct those details and delete their profiles. No current laws in the US require that data brokers maintain the privacy of individual?s data unless they are used for credit, employment, insurance, housing or other similar purposes. ?Consumers are often unaware of the existence of data brokers as well as the purposes for which they collect and use consumers? data,? the FTC said in December. ?This lack of transparency also means that even when data brokers offer consumers the ability to access their data, or provide other tools, many consumers do not know how to exercise this right.? Acxiom sells three type of information products: marketing information, directory products based on contact information in published telephone directories and a fraud detection and prevention service. US consumers can access information about themselves in the fraud detection product for a fee of $5. For its marketing information business, consumers now can visit Acxiom?s website to opt out of targeted ads based on Acxiom data but have no way to access the data collected. Acxiom says the new service could be available sometime this year, but some technical and logistical hurdles remain. The company is attempting to secure the service so that individuals will not fall victim to identity theft from others accessing their data. It also is sorting out a way to sort information so that it is available about individuals rather than the bulk data sets most companies seek. Acxiom also is figuring out how it can prevent people from deliberately falsifying information about themselves in the guise of ?correcting? the information. Mr Suther said it is ?not on the radar now? for consumers to be able to delete their profiles. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 11 06:46:56 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:46:56 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DHS buying bagpipes? Message-ID: <7E180FD3-A906-4122-830D-C73368DE2FA8@infowarrior.org> Ummm, WTFO? 77--Bagpipe and Drum Supplies Solicitation Number: PR20074261 Agency: Department of Homeland Security Office: Customs and Border Protection Location: Procurement Directorate - DC <- > Classification Code: 77 -- Musical instruments, phonographs & home-type radios https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3012c0963d464c55bf849cc346cd0fc7&tab=core&_cview=0 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 11 07:10:05 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:10:05 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: Fr. Emil Kapaun to receive CMH for Korean service Message-ID: <07B2ADE5-5054-4E6B-BEBA-3F136062B65D@infowarrior.org> Emil Kapaun, who ministered to Korean War POWs, to receive posthumous medal By Krissah Thompson http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/emil-kapaun-who-ministered-to-korean-war-pows-to-receive-posthumous-medal/2013/04/10/09913232-a121-11e2-be47-b44febada3a8_print.html They are all in their 80s now ? these former POWs during the Korean War. One recalls in rapid-fire bursts how Father Emil Kapaun sneaked out of the barracks at night, risking his life to bring back morsels of food for his fellow prisoners. Another remembers seeing the young American priest use a rock and a piece of metal to form a pan and then collect water to wash the hands and faces of the wounded. A third chokes up when he tells of being injured and having an enemy soldier standing over him, rifle pointed; Kapaun walked up, pushed aside the muzzle and carried off the wounded man. The military chaplain did not carry a gun or grenades. He did not storm hills or take beaches. He picked lice off of men too weak to do it themselves and stole grain from the Korean and Chinese guards who took the American soldiers as prisoners of war in late 1950. Kapaun did not survive the prisoner camps, dying in Pyoktong in 1951. The man originally from tiny Pilsen, Kan., has been declared a ?servant of God? ? often a precursor to sainthood in the Catholic Church. And on Thursday, President Obama will posthumously award Kapaun a Medal of Honor. On hand will be Mike Dowe, 85; Robert Wood, 86; and Herbert Miller, 86. ?People had lost a great deal of their civility,? Wood says of life in the POW compound. ?We were stacking the bodies outside where they were frozen like cordwood and here is this one man ? in all of this chaos ? who has kept .?.?. principles.? Kapaun (pronounced Ka-PAWN) was so beloved that U.S. prisoners of war who knew him began calling for him to receive the military?s highest honor on the day they were released from their North Korean POW camp 60 years ago. ?The first prisoners out of that camp are carrying a wooden crucifix, and they tell the story at length,? says Roy Wenzel, a reporter at the Wichita Eagle who wrote an eight-part series and a book about Kapaun. ?He was internationally famous and made the front page of newspapers.? But Kapaun?s story soon faded from all but the memories of the men whom he served and the small church in rural Kansas that he had pastored. ?POWs come and tell stories of him,? said Father John Hotze, who serves in Wichita, an hour south of Kapaun?s home town. ?They talked about how they would never have been able to survive had it not been for Father Kapaun, who gave them hope and the courage to live.? In the heart of the battle In the memories of his comrades, the chaplain is stuck in time, 34 years old and slight, with an angular chin that jutted out from the helmet he wore pushed down over his ears. At the sound of gunfire, GIs saw Kapaun heading in the direction of front-line troops in the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, on an old bicycle, his only form of transportation after his Jeep was lost. He spoke with a Midwestern lilt and shared the lessons he learned on the 80-acre central Kansas farm where he was raised in a community of Czech immigrants. Family members recall a story Kapaun?s mother loved to tell involving her son, an old bonnet and a cow. It was usually her chore to milk the family?s only cow ? but on this day it fell to young Emil. The cow kicked and fidgeted and wouldn?t let him get near. That is, until Emil went back into the farmhouse and put on one of his mother?s bonnets and a dress. He walked back to the barn, mimicking his mother?s walk. The cow obliged, and the chore got done. Kapaun grew up to be a quiet man and was ordained a priest when he was 24. Soon after the news broke in the summer of 1950 that North Korea had invaded the Republic of Korea, Kapaun was among the 300,000 U.S. servicemen called to war. He was initially sent to the fighting on the Pusan perimeter and marched north with the troops, celebrating Mass from the hood of his Jeep. Two months after the war began, Kapaun was awarded a Bronze Star for running through enemy fire to drag wounded soldiers to safety. It was a brutal conflict with little information getting through to troops on the ground, some of whom did not know that the Chinese military had entered the war alongside North Korea. ?The Army was in terrible shape,? Wood said. ?Our weapons didn?t work. Our men weren?t physically conditioned. We had malaria and dysentery. Father Kapaun was a constant example.? On the front lines, the priest would ?drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole,? Dowe recalled. On Nov. 2, 1950, the 8th Cavalry was encircled by Chinese and North Korean troops at Unsan. The men had thought they would be home by Christmas. They did not have winter clothes, Wood said. Now they were prisoners. On that day, Kapaun performed an act of heroism commemorated in a bronze sculpture that stands in front of the church in Pilsen. The other man in the statue, which depicts Kapaun helping a wounded soldier, is Herbert Miller. Miller, a platoon leader, found himself standing under a small bridge in a dry creek encircled by enemy troops on a dark night. ?You could reach right out and touch them. The bullets was flying,? Miller recalled in an interview. ?I moved 30 feet and I got hit with a hand grenade.? The blast broke Miller?s ankle; he lay in the ditch until daylight, unable to escape. When he saw enemy troops coming up the nearby mountain, he tried to hide by pulling the body of a Korean soldier on top of him. But he was spotted and soon found himself being held at gunpoint. ?About that time, I saw this soldier coming across the road. He pushed that man?s rifle aside and he picked me up,? Miller said. For a time, Kapaun carried Miller on his back. That was the first time he met Kapaun. Both men began what would become known as the Tiger Death March, a trek of more than 80 miles to the North Korean POW camp. ?The good thief? Entering the camp in winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing, was brutal, Dowe, Miller and Wood recall. Each day, the men were fed a few grams of cracked grain that looked like birdseed. The soldiers were packed into such small quarters that they had to sleep on their sides so that everyone could lie down. There was more room by spring because so many did not survive the winter. ?We were at the point where if you decided you weren?t going to hack it anymore, the guys would say, ?Don?t bother me in the morning.? And you?d go to wake them up in the morning and they were dead,? Wood said. ?You get your body reduced to a certain level and it doesn?t take much to snuff out the spark.? Kapaun pressed on, trading his watch for a blanket, which he cut up to make socks for men whose feet were freezing. He told jokes and said prayers and gave his food away. He earned the wartime nickname ?the good thief? because of his ability to steal food for atrophic soldiers after he and others were captured. ?It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly starve. .?.?. So, standing before us all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who was crucified at the right hand of Jesus, asking for his aid,? Dowe wrote in the Saturday Evening Post 59 years ago. ?I?ll never doubt the power of prayer again. Father, it seemed, could not fail.? Kapaun took ill himself, recovering from bouts of sickness before getting weak again. The camp guards noticed and ordered the chaplain to an isolated room they called ?the hospital.? The U.S. servicemen called it the dying room. ?They said in no uncertain terms he was going,? Wood said, recalling the protests from the POWs. ?They wanted volunteers to carry him up there. I was one of those who carried him up there.? Unable to walk, Kapaun reassured the soldiers that he was going to a better place. Wood remembers that the priest then turned to the guards and said, ?Forgive them, oh Lord, for they know not what they do.? Kapaun died days later, on May 23, 1951, at age 35, one of the more than 40,000 U.S. servicemen who died or were declared missing in what some came to call ?the Forgotten War.? Delayed recognition Emil Kapaun?s nephew Ray Kapaun, 56, will accept the Medal of Honor on his uncle?s behalf. Ray has heard about the push to have his uncle awarded the medal since he was a child. It was in the past few years that the military?s leadership investigated the stories told by surviving POWs. Typically, medals must be awarded within two years of the acts of valor, but lawmakers from Kansas shepherded legislation that waived that requirement. ?It has taken a long time, but the flame of the Korean War just can?t be extinguished, and this is an outstanding example of that,? said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), one of the lawmakers involved in the decades-long effort. Obama, who has relatives from Kansas, signed the legislation this year. Ray Kapaun has watched aged men?s eyes fill with tears as they spoke of his uncle?s role in their lives. Ray?s middle name is Emil, and he sometimes wonders whether he?s worthy of it. ?I look at my life and then you look and see what Father Emil did by just being who he was,? Kapaun said. ?The reality of it is so hard to put your hands around, just hard to describe.? ? 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 Apr 11 07:47:41 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:47:41 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Privacy protections booted from CISPA data-sharing bill Message-ID: <45A3D8C8-27F8-4D67-88AE-EF841812A805@infowarrior.org> Privacy protections booted from CISPA data-sharing bill Committee overwhelmingly votes down privacy amendments that would have curbed National Security Agency's access to private sector data. Now the bill heads to the House floor for a vote. by Declan McCullagh April 10, 2013 11:39 PM PDT A controversial data-sharing bill won the approval of a key congressional committee today without privacy amendments, raising concerns that the National Security Agency and other spy agencies will gain broad access to Americans' personal information. The House Intelligence committee, by a vote of 18 to 2, adopted the so-called CISPA bill after an unusual session closed to the public where panel members debated and voted on the proposed law in secret. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who proposed three unsuccessful privacy amendments, said afterward she was disappointed her colleagues did not limit the NSA and other intelligence agencies from collecting sensitive data on Americans. (See CNET's CISPA FAQ.) Her privacy amendments would have "required that companies report cyber threat information directly to civilian agencies, and maintained the long-standing tradition that the military doesn't operate on U.S. soil against American citizens," Schakowsky said. Schakowsky had attempted to fix one of the most contested parts of CISPA: language overruling every state and federal privacy law by allowing companies to "share" some types of confidential customer information with the NSA and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. While no portion of CISPA requires companies to share data with the feds, major telecommunications providers have illegally shared customer data with the NSA before, leading to a congressional grant of retroactive immunity in 2008. Today's committee decision advances CISPA to the House floor, with a vote expected as soon as next week. It's a difficult vote to handicap: it could be a reprise of last year, when members approved the legislation by a vote of 248 to 168. On the other hand, if only 40 members switch their votes from yea to nay, CISPA is defeated. Last time around, a formal veto threat by President Obama a day before the House vote helped galvanize Democratic opposition -- Democrats preferred their own legislation, which had a different set of privacy problems. But the White House has not responded to an anti-CISPA petition that topped 100,000 signatures a month ago, and the president's recent signature on a cybersecurity executive order may mean the administration's position on legislation has shifted. CISPA's advocates say it's needed to encourage companies to share more cybersecurity-related information with the federal government, and to a lesser extent among themselves. A "Myth v. Fact" paper (PDF) prepared by the House Intelligence committee says any claim that "this legislation creates a wide-ranging government surveillance program" is a myth. "Cyber-hackers from nation-states like China, Russia, and Iran are infiltrating American cyber networks, stealing billions of dollars a year in intellectual property, and undermining the technological innovation at the heart of America's economy," House Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), sponsor of CISPA, said after the vote. "This bill takes a solid step toward helping American businesses protect their networks from these cyber looters." The four privacy amendments that were rejected included: ? Limiting the sharing of private sector data to civilian agencies, and specifically excluding the NSA and the Defense Department. (Failed by a 4-14 vote.) (PDF) ? Directing the president to create a high-level privacy post that would oversee "the retention, use, and disclosure of communications, records, system traffic, or other information" acquired by the federal government. It would also include "requirements to safeguard communications" with personal information about Americans. (Failed by a 3-16 vote.) (PDF) ? Eliminating vague language that grants complete civil and criminal liability to companies that "obtain" information about vulnerabilities or security flaws and make "decisions" based on that information. (Failed by a 4-16 vote.) (PDF) ? Requiring that companies sharing confidential data "make reasonable efforts" to delete "information that can be used to identify" individual Americans. (Failed by a 4-16 vote.) (PDF) < - BIG SNIP - > http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57579012-38/privacy-protections-booted-from-cispa-data-sharing-bill/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 11 07:50:17 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:50:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Hacker targets flight deck computer systems Message-ID: <98C3BE1A-ACD1-4F5D-B014-B29F865030E9@infowarrior.org> 11 April 2013 Last updated at 07:52 ET Hacker targets flight deck computer systems By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22107433?print=true Aviation agencies in Europe and the US are keen to quiz a hacker who targeted flight deck computers. Security researcher Hugo Teso was able to "hijack" the systems to feed false navigation information to a simulated jet that made it change course. Mr Teso built his simulator using spare parts from real jets for sale on the eBay auction site. Authorities say actual flight computers are not compromised by his work but want to find out more. Security issues The loopholes in the flight management system were detailed by Mr Teso during a presentation to the Hack In The Box conference in Amsterdam. Mr Teso, who is also a qualified commercial pilot, said he had spent the past four years investigating the many different computer and data systems found on aircraft which help them fly and navigate safely. "I expected them to have security issues but I did not expect them to be so easy to spot," he said. "I thought I would have to fight hard to get into them but it was not that difficult." Mr Teso set out to find a way to subvert the flight management systems (FMS) found on many different aircraft. He planned to feed them fake or booby-trapped data via well-known radio communication systems. Old aviation equipment was bought via eBay to help Mr Teso interrogate the code these systems ran. This hardware was used to build a simulated aircraft that ran many of the systems found on commercial aircraft and could swap data via radio with the air traffic and navigation systems used in the real world. The lab work produced an attack toolkit that could influence the FMS of the simulated aircraft as it was "in flight". "I can influence the guidance and navigation of the aircraft," he told the BBC, adding that the system had "limitations". "It requires some careful planning and timing to achieve results," he said. Despite this, he said, publicity about the talk had led the European Aviation and Safety Agency (EASA) and the US Federal Aviation Administration to get in touch seeking more details. Now, he said, Mr Teso and 48Bits, the security company he works for, are setting up meetings to pass on his findings. In a statement, EASA said it was aware of Mr Teso's work and presentation. "This presentation was based on a PC training simulator and did not reveal potential vulnerabilities on actual flying systems," it said. "There are major differences between a PC-based training FMS software and an embedded FMS software." The version used on flight desks was hardened to avoid many of the loopholes found in the training systems, it added. Mr Teso said there was little risk that malicious hackers would be able to use what he found. "You would have to have solid knowledge of aviation and its protocols and that's not easy to get," he said, adding that he planned to keep on with the research. He said there were lots of other "approach vectors" for hacking aircraft systems. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 11 13:56:33 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:56:33 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH: CISPA bill must do more to protect privacy Message-ID: (c/o ferg) Obama administration: CISPA bill must do more to protect privacy By Chris O'Brien April 11, 2013, 11:39 a.m. http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-obama-administration-cispa-bill-must-do-more-to-protect-privacy-20130411,0,6238701.story The Obama administration issued a statement Thursday that indicated it's not likely to support a cybersecurity bill approved by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee this week. While stopping short of an outright veto threat that many privacy activists may have wanted, the statement made clear that the administration does not believe the bill in its current form does enough to safeguard personal information. "We continue to believe that information sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the roles of civilian and intelligence agencies, and include targeted liability protections," Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said in a statement. "We believe the adopted committee amendments reflect a good-faith effort to incorporate some of the Administration's important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities." The statement comes one day after the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence met behind closed doors Wednesday to consider the legislation that was sponsored by its chair, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), and the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger (D-Md.). The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013, or CISPA, was approved by the committee on a vote of 18 to 2, with two Democrats voting against. It now will move to the full U.S. House of Representatives for a vote that could be held as early as next week. Here's the full text of the statement from Hayden: "We continue to believe that information sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the roles of civilian and intelligence agencies, and include targeted liability protections. The Administration seeks to build upon the productive dialogue with Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger over the last several months, and the Administration looks forward to continuing to work with them to ensure that any cybersecurity legislation reflects these principles. Further, we believe the adopted committee amendments reflect a good faith-effort to incorporate some of the Administration's important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 11 14:23:19 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:23:19 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Putting a Price Tag on Film Piracy Message-ID: April 5, 2013, 11:42 PM Putting a Price Tag on Film Piracy By Carl Bialik http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/putting-a-price-tag-on-film-piracy-1228/ My print column examines dramatic changes in research into the economic effects of movie piracy ? and how those changes have been reflected in the numbers used to quantify the impact of illegal downloads, bootleg DVDs and the like. From their publication in 2006 through the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act that ended early last year, the film industry frequently has cited the findings of a study by the Institute for Policy Innovation, a Lewisville, Texas-based think tank that found film piracy was costing the U.S. economy $20.5 billion annually. That IPI study and a subsequent one in turn built on a study funded by the studios? trade association, the Motion Picture Association of America, and conducted by L.E.K. Consulting, which was based on over 20,000 surveys of consumers conducted in 22 countries. L.E.K. found that piracy was costing studios $6.1 billion a year. The MPAA shared some details of the study, but not the questionnaire, how respondents were selected and details of how the dollar figures were calculated. Bill Frack, a Los Angeles-based L.E.K. vice president who has studied piracy for the past decade, said one challenge the study faced was, ?How do you actually talk to a pirate?? ?The study undertaken by the MPAA was a relatively comprehensive effort against a very hard topic,? Frack said. He added, ?There?s not a lot of certainty in the space.? IPI President Tom Giovanetti said that the IPI study was an early attempt to answer a tough question, and an improvement on the status quo, in which economic-impact statistics ? such as that 5% to 7% of all goods were pirated ? were cited without any basis other than vague industry estimates. ?There were so many numbers being bandied about, and any time we looked into it, people were quoting each other,? Giovanetti said. ?When you do something like this, you?re not going to come out and say, this is the accurate number,? Giovanetti added. ?We know there is more art than science.? Some writers and economists criticized the IPI study?s use of multipliers to estimate the effect of piracy on the broader economy. ?It says that a dollar less in film spending actually has a larger impact since it impacts other parts of the economy,? said Koleman Strumpf, an economist at the University of Kansas School of Business. ?But if file-sharing leads to less spending on films, consumers have more money to spend which will completely offset these effects. There is no multiplier effect at all.? Giovanetti rejected the argument that theft, of intellectual property or anything else, freed up money for the thieves to spend elsewhere. ?You could use that argument about any act of theft,? such as of automobiles, Giovanetti said. He added that piracy is ?skewing the economy? by reducing investment in products people want but some aren?t paying for. The IPI receives some funding from copyright holders. ?The people who like the work you do, want you to do more of it,? Giovanetti said. He added that the group also receives funding from other industries that ?arguably benefit from piracy.? He?d like to see a reprise of the study. ?We do think it?s long past time the work has been refreshed and updated,? Giovanetti said. ?Because of changes in the marketplace. There are many legal options now. It wouldn?t surprise us if some of these lines haven?t now crossed where the industry is now making enough money from digital models to compensate for piracy.? But the MPAA is focusing elsewhere, and no longer citing the earlier studies, after an internal review that followed the SOPA debate, MPAA spokesman Howard Gantman said. ?At the current time we do not actively cite the figures directly relating to movie piracy, as the landscape has changed significantly since these studies were conducted both regarding the growth of broadband and the development of streaming technology, as well as the introduction of hundreds of new sites world-wide for viewing legal online content,? Gantman said. Gantman added, ?One can reasonably ask whether any one study got it right down to the dollar, but the bottom line underlying all of the studies is that piracy is a serious economic problem that needs to be addressed.? The MPAA?s focus now is on collaborating with academic researchers, who are taking a new approach to evaluating the effects of piracy. ?We?ve seen some increased willingness on the part of industry to partner with academics to produce these studies,? said Michael D. Smith, professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. All piracy economic-impact studies face a common set of challenges: They are studying an illegal activity, tough both to measure and to get people to disclose accurately in surveys. ?It?s difficult to come up with numbers, whether it?s illegal drugs or any other prohibited activity,? said Loren Yager, managing director of international affairs and the trade team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office and author of a 2010 GAO report on the effects of piracy. ?Policy makers certainly like to get numbers on the scale of the problem, and I can understand how it can be valuable, but it?s unfortunately difficult to get reliable numbers.? The studies also require answering a hypothetical question: What would sales be if piracy didn?t exist? The digitization of both legal and illegal consumption of film has helped bypass the challenges on illegal activity: Sales and piracy activity both are easier to track now that digital consumption creates a digital trail. ?The fact that sales are turning more to digital channels makes collection of data a lot easier,? said Wellesley College economist Brett Danaher, co-author with Smith of a paper last month on the effect on digital sales of the 2012 closure of the film-sharing site Megaupload. ?Researchers have gotten more and more interested in this. We?re looking for natural experiments that allow us to tease out the causal impact of piracy on sales,? Danaher said. ?If Megaupload shuts down, that?s a random negative shock to piracy.? The Megaupload study found that digital sales from two major studios rose 6% to 10% after the shutdown of Megaupload. Smith?s review of other natural experiments, co-authored by his Carnegie Mellon colleague, Rahul Telang, indicates that some studies found bigger effects from movie piracy, while others found no effect. The MPAA-funded review generally criticized the findings of no effect from movie or music piracy. Strumpf, a co-author of one of these studies, called the review a ?counting exercise? and said his and other papers finding little negative impact from piracy generally were stronger studies. ?I think the jury is still out on this,? he said. ?The aggregate data is conflicting? ? box-office and digital revenues are rising while DVD sales have been falling. On the other end of the spectrum, Stan Liebowitz, an economist at the University of Texas at Dallas, said ?It is likely that digital piracy, in the U.S., is having a large effect on sales.? He said the upper bound on the effect is a loss in sales of $18.5 billion per year, mostly in prerecorded films ? or far more than the L.E.K. estimate, produced in an era that preceded the rise in online piracy. ?This is probably higher than best my point estimate, if I needed to give one, but it is plausible and might not be too far off,? Liebowitz said. ?The vast majority of studies say file sharing is hurting sales,? Danaher said. ?There can be some quibbling over the actual number.? ?There is a real effect but perhaps not the catastrophic effect the industry likes to claim when asking the government to pick up the tab for being the piracy police,? said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. There are some commonalities between research into piracy on music and movies, but also some important differences, researchers say. Most notably, music piracy was widespread long before movie piracy was, in large part because movie files are bigger and require more bandwidth, Smith said ? about 30 times more per minute, according to a back-of-envelope calculation he made using two files in his iTunes library. Therefore music piracy increased alongside broadband penetration, whereas film piracy proliferated later, after broadband was already widespread ? so the two trends couldn?t be correlated. While researchers continue to probe piracy?s effect on sales, they find also are exploring other, related research questions. Among them: ?What potential economic benefits can piracy have? These could include boosting other industries, such as broadband; or even, more controversially, increasing buzz and box office, at least for certain films. ?How effective have various strategies been at mitigating piracy? These include legal efforts and offering attractive alternative services. ?How piracy has affected the supply of creative work. ?There is a legitimate discussion to be had here about the impact of the declining revenues on production, but that has not occurred as yet,? Liebowitz said. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 11 14:25:22 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:25:22 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Obama boosts military, 'black' and spook cyber forces Message-ID: Obama boosts military, 'black' and spook cyber forces Tanks? Feds? Pah! I want NERDS By Brid-Aine Parnell ? Get more from this author Posted in Government, 11th April 2013 17:34 GMT http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/11/obama_budget_cybersecurity_increase/ US President Barack Obama wants to increase spending on cyber security in his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2014, which starts in October. Obama said that he wanted to increase the military cyber forces led by the US Cyber Command and bump up funding for cyber security information sharing in the Department of Defense (DoD) allocation. "We must confront new dangers, like cyber attacks, that threaten our nation?s infrastructure, businesses, and people," said POTUS. "The budget supports the expansion of government-wide efforts to counter the full scope of cyber threats, and strengthens our ability to collaborate with state and local governments, our partners overseas, and the private sector to improve our overall cybersecurity." The president pointed out in the budget that recent attacks on banks in the States and on the government showed that no network was immune to attack. To combat these attacks, Obama wants to expand the government's cyber expertise and link up different cybersecurity centres and analytics "in real time". "This system will also develop and publish machine-readable interoperable technical standards that will allow for automated information sharing. The goal is for relevant pieces of information to make their way to authorised users throughout the government, to help connect the dots in identifying cybersecurity threats," the proposal reads. Cyber security is one of the few areas where the US government seems eager to spend money rather than make cuts. Obama wants to increase DoD spending on cybersecurity by $800m to $4.7bn, at the same time as aiming for a $3.9bn cut in the Pentagon's overall budget. The Department of Homeland Security is also getting a slice of the cyber cash, with an extra $44m to spend on helping government departments to share their information. However, its total budget drops by $615m. DHS will also have $810m to spend on cybersecurity research and on helping business and local government to strengthen their defences. There will be more cyber dosh stashed in the black budgets - classified spending that's not reported - making it difficult to figure out exactly how many extra dollars the government reckons cybersecurity is worth, although it has upped the ante. "The budget includes increases and improvements to a full range of cyberspace activities," the proposal notes under the "National Intelligence Program" section. ? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 12 14:01:41 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:01:41 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Charles Carreon Has To Pay $46K In Legal Fees Message-ID: Charles Carreon Has To Pay $46K In Legal Fees from the boom dept Charles Carreon may not be having a very good day. As you may recall, Carreon "represented" an internet site, Funnyjunk, that threatened Matthew Inman over an Oatmeal cartoon that made fun of that client. When Inman hit back with a (very successful) IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for charity, Carreon, ridiculously, sued Inman, IndieGoGo and the charities. After realizing the case had almost no chance of succeeding, Carreon dropped the lawsuit. However he (along with his wife) have since had an ongoing campaign attacking anyone (including us) who has mocked or criticized the Carreons over the whole Inman/Oatmeal fiasco. In one case, Carreon threatened a satirical, mocking blogger, even promising to wait until the public interest was gone to sue at a later date. In response, the blogger filed for declaratory judgment that his actions were legit. Carreon responded by literally hiding from being served while also trying to intimidate the blogger, even contacting and threatening to sue his employer. After finally getting served, Carreon basically caved on every point, effectively settling the case. Except, Charles Carreon, brilliant legal mind, apparently didn't realize that he was still subject to having to pay legal fees. Over the past few months Carreon has done everything possible to avoid having to pay those legal fees, lashing out at the lawyers involved, demanding they submit to discovery and depositions, and even claiming that Paul Levy and Cathy Gellis, the lawyers representing the blogger, were involved in some sort of conspiracy against him, while simultaneously arguing (no joke) that he has a First Amendment right to make vexatious legal threats. Despite all that impressive tap-dancing, it appears the court was not moved. Carreon has been told to pay $46,100.25. The court is not at all impressed by Carreon's legal "theories." Here's a sample snippet, trashing Carreon's reasoning...... < - > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130412/11090722691/charles-carreon-has-to-pay-46k-legal-fees.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 12 15:03:03 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:03:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Happy Yuri's Night! Message-ID: Cosmic Bash: Parties on Earth and Mars Celebrate Human Spaceflight by Miriam Kramer, SPACE.com Staff Writer Date: 12 April 2013 Time: 06:00 AM ET http://www.space.com/20634-yuris-night-spaceflight-anniversaries-party.html Space enthusiasts unite! Tonight (April 12), a 1-ton rover on Mars will celebrate 52 years of human spaceflight from the Red Planet while space groupies on Earth party the night away. "Yuri's Night" honors more than five decades of human spaceflight with parties and special events commemorating a very special day in the history of human voyages into orbit. NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is getting in on the celebratory action this year as well with a festive message scheduled to beam down via social media at 4:00 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) today. On April 12, 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space when he launched off planet Earth in a Vostok space capsule. On the same day in 1981, NASA launched its first shuttle mission, kicking off a 30-year spaceflight program that led to the International Space Station. [Photos: Yuri Gagarin, First Man in Space] "We're honored to be working with the Curiosity team to take the celebration of space to new heights," Ryan Kobrick, the executive director of Yuri's Night said. "As we continue to reach for the stars and inspire others to do the same, we're looking forward to this being the first of many Yuri's Night parties to be held on other planets." More than 320 parties in 50 different countries on Earth have been registered through the Yuri's Night's website, including at least one in Antarctica, said Yuri's Night spokesman Brice Russ. The special night is also being celebrated by astronauts living far above the Earth's surface. "I'm really glad to be with you on Yuri's Night, the day ? no matter where we are ? where we come together to celebrate the past, the present and the future and the future of human space exploration," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the space station's current commander, said in a video message to mark the occasion. Gagarin's first flight was 108 minutes ? much less than the six months astronauts like Hadfield spend on board the space station ? but it catapulted him into the history books. Gagarin's Vostok 1 spacecraft orbited once around the planet before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. The capsule had no way to slow itself down, so Gagarin ejected and floated to the planet's surface using a parachute instead. Exactly 20 years later, NASA launched its first space shuttle mission. The space shuttle Columbia's first trip to space (dubbed STS-1) took two astronauts ? commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen ? into orbit for two days. During the 54.5-hour mission, the shuttle orbited the Earth 37 times before touching down on April 14. NASA's space shuttles launched on 135 missions to pursue science and space station-building missions. There were two devastating failures: the 1986 Challenger shuttle accident that killed seven astronauts just after launch; and the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts returning home from orbit after a 16-day mission. . The Columbia shuttle disaster led NASA to eventually retire its space shuttle fleet in 2011 after completing the shuttle fleet's obligations to space station construction. The space agency's remaining shuttles ? Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour and the test shuttle Enterprise ? now in museums for public display across the United States. NASA now is developing a new spacecraft and rocket, the Orion capsule and giant Space Launch System mega-rocket aimed at launching astronauts on deep-space missions to an asteroid and Mars, beginning in 2021. In the meantime, the agency plans to rely on new private spaceships to ferry Americans to and from the International Space Station. To find a "Yuri's Night" party near you, you can use the "Find a Party" page through the Yuri's Night website. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 12 17:25:45 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:25:45 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Exxon Hates Your Free Speech, Tries to Censor Satirical Ad Message-ID: <342290AB-AB5B-47CE-A054-FF73CD8C56DC@infowarrior.org> April 11, 2013 | By Corynne McSherry Exxon Hates Your Free Speech, Tries to Censor Satirical Ad https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/exxon-hates-your-criticism-tries-censor-satirical-ad Who would have thought a major oil corporation would have such thin skin? In the wake of a major pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, Exxon has launched a dirty tricks campaign to prevent Little Rock television stations from running a political ad titled, ?Exxon Hates Your Children.? The ad, which can be viewed at exxonhatesyourchildren.com, makes an obviously over-the-top assertion about the company?s views about children, in order to call attention to the creators' serious concerns about the company?s policies. To try to keep it off the air, Exxon is circulating a memo to television stations claiming that the commercial is ?defamatory toward each of ExxonMobil?s 80,000 employees and their families.? Exxon goes on to describe good things the company does for children and the environment. The ads, which were paid for through crowdfunding, were scheduled to run on local ABC, NBC, and Fox stations this week, but were taken off the schedule when the stations got the memo. In February, Exxon pulled the same stunt when Comcast was set to air the ad during the president's State of the Union address. With help from EFF, the activists behind the ad, Oil Change International, are fighting back. As we explain in our response, Exxon's humorless memo misses the point entirely. The activists are simply using parody and satire to comment on an issue of public concern. This type of political speech fits well within the protections of the First Amendment. After all, as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in a 1944 free-speech case, "One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures." As we also explain, the right way to respond to speech you don't like is to engage in open debate, not censorship, and media outlets should be especially sensitive to that principle. Judge Learned Hand said it best seventy years ago: "[T]he First Amendment . . . presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked upon it our all." What Exxon should not do?and what the television stations should not help them do?is use ill-defined and improper legal threats to silence legitimate political speech. The stations should let the ad run and, if Exxon chooses to create its own ad, run that too. The good news is that Exxon is already experiencing the Streisand Effect. Word to Exxon: these days, trying to silence your critics is not only wrong, it inevitably backfires. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 12 17:25:49 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:25:49 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Congress_votes_to_shield_top_off?= =?windows-1252?q?icials=92_financial_disclosures?= Message-ID: <20603532-C738-47A4-AE86-D501C9190885@infowarrior.org> Congress votes to shield top officials? financial disclosures By Stephen Dinan The Washington Times Friday, April 12, 2013 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/12/senate-votes-shield-top-officials-financial-disclo/print/ Congress this week approved a bill to free thousands of federal government employees from having to disclose their financial dealings online, rushing the bill through the Senate late Thursday and through the House on Friday. But the push to undo the online reporting requirement is proving to be controversial. The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) said that posting all of that information online posed a national security risk. But the Sunlight Foundation, an open government group, said releasing staffers from online disclosure eviscerates part of last year's Stock Act, designed to stop insider trading by federal officials. "Rather than craft narrow exemptions, or even delay implementation until proper protections could be created, the Senate decided instead to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements," Lisa Rosenberg, government affairs consultant for the Sunlight Foundation, wrote in a blog posting. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, introduced the bill on Thursday and had the chamber vote on it late that evening. The House took the bill up on Friday afternoon and passed it by unanimous consent, with no members objecting. Republican leaders did not give lawmakers the traditional three days to read the bill before holding a vote. One GOP aide told The Washington Times the three-day rule did not apply to Friday's action because the bill came from the Senate, while another said the House moved quickly because of a Monday deadline for the new disclosure mandates to take effect. "In December when we extended the Stock Act deadline of public disclosure for financial disclosure, we required a study by the nonpartisan and independent National Academy of Public Administration," said Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican. "This was their recommendation and the House and Senate agreed it was the best course of action for the time being." The legislation now goes to President Obama for his signature. Last year, after CBS's "60 Minutes" did a report suggesting that some government officials were financially benefiting from insider knowledge of federal actions, Congress quickly passed the Stock Act, which was designed to crack down on insider trading. Part of the law required that senior government officials' financial disclosure reports ? which they are already required to submit in paper ? be made available online in a searchable, sortable format. The belief was that publishing them online would make it easier for reporters and the public to try to spot illicit dealings. The online disclosure provisions had not yet taken effect, and Congress asked NAPA to review the law. In a report release last month a five-member NAPA panel said online posting would mean more sensitive information about high-level government employees would be easily available, which would make identify theft easier. "An open, online, searchable and exploitable database of personal financial information about senior federal employees will provide easy access to 'high quality' personal information on 'high value' targets," NAPA officials said in their report. The Defense Department told NAPA that online disclosure would mean hostile nations would have easy access to sensitive personal information about top national security officials. The revelations raised questions about Congress's rush to pass the Stock Act in the first place last year. It passed 96-3 in the Senate and 417-2 in the House, amid intense pressure from Mr. Obama, who called for its passage in his 2012 State of the Union address, and from outside public interest groups. At the time, the few dissenters warned that the law over-promised and under-delivered. Some members of Congress, meanwhile, want to go further and ban the use of "political intelligence" ? a catch-all term for those with non-public knowledge about things brewing in government that could affect the markets. In a report this week the Government Accountability said it was impossible to quantify how much political intelligence was being used in financial dealings. ? Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 07:30:57 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:30:57 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - My News Consumption Secret Message-ID: My News Consumption Secret ? Joshua M Brown ? April 14th, 2013 http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2013/04/14/my-news-consumption-secret/ Everyone talks about going on a Media Diet and consuming less (or zero) news but most people don't actually follow through and do it. Probably because it is impossible to function in the professional world without having at least a conversational knowledge of the latest goings-on, distant and irrelevant as they may be. Keeping out "the news" is a great idea until you actually do it. You will quickly find yourself unable to function in your career and your social circle, unless you are a hermit by vocation living in amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch. But there's something I've stumbled upon - my trick, if you will - that's allowed me to have the best of both worlds: being fully informed and yet serenely unaffected all at once. What's the trick? I'm always consuming the news. That's my secret. I'm living inside of it, swimming in it. And I know how it gets made, who makes it and what the motivation is behind all of the stories and breaking blasts and so on. I know how and why one thing becomes a news story while another thing is overlooked and forgotten about. And as a result of this bombardment, I am almost totally immune to it. I consume it and discard it. I take what I want from it and move on. I never get scared and I never get euphoric and I almost never react or make big decisions based on it. Because I know too much about the process. I'm too familiar with the assembly of the product to ever feel compelled to action by it. Prolonged exposure to anything will render you immune to it or it will eventually kill you. And I'm still alive, so.... When I see people buying or selling or cheering or worrying or making big changes in their lives because of an article or a newswire headline or a TV segment, I laugh inwardly or, during moments of weakness, scoff outwardly. It's taken me awhile to develop this trick - and then a bit longer to have become aware that I could do it - live amongst the Tribe of News and yet remain aloof. At first, the "noise" used to piss me off. Now I am terribly amused by it all. I love the news, I am fascinated by each day's stories and storylines like everyone else is. But the key is that I drive the bus, no matter what the man in the suit or the woman in pearls or the cover of the Times tells me. I decide what to do and usually the decision is to do naught. I didn't realize it until I saw Marvel's The Avengers a while back, but my trick is the same trick Bruce Banner uses to keep the monster inside and off the streets. During their first encounter, Tony Stark (Iron Man) gently teases Dr. Bruce Banner, telling him he admires his work - "I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.? He goes on to pry a bit, curious as to how the scientist is able to keep it under wraps. "You've really got a lid on it. What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums?" We don't find out until later what the secret is - when Captain America, in the midst of a full-blown alien invasion of New York City, mentions to Banner that now might be a good time for him to start getting angry. Bruce smirks and responds before hulking out: "That's my secret Cap, I'm always angry." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 07:31:17 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:31:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?News_is_bad_for_you_=96_and_givi?= =?windows-1252?q?ng_up_reading_it_will_make_you_happier?= Message-ID: News is bad for you ? and giving up reading it will make you happier News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether ? Rolf Dobelli ? The Guardian, Friday 12 April 2013 15.00 EDT http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli Out of the ?10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life, asks Rolf Dobelli. Photograph: Guardian/Graphic In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be. News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists ? who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards ? have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely. News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that ? because you consumed it ? allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have. News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case. News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation. News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that "make sense" ? even if they don't correspond to reality. Any journalist who writes, "The market moved because of X" or "the company went bankrupt because of Y" is an idiot. I am fed up with this cheap way of "explaining" the world. News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. Online news has an even worse impact. In a 2001 study two scholars in Canada showed that comprehension declines as the number of hyperlinks in a document increases. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which in itself is distracting. News is an intentional interruption system. News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers ? even if they used to be avid book readers ? have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It's not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It's because the physical structure of their brains has changed. News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind? News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression. News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie ? not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don't. Society needs journalism ? but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too. I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it. This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, ?9.99. Buy it for ?7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 07:34:11 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:34:11 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - TurboTax Goes Down Ahead of Tax Filing Deadline Message-ID: (I think it was North Korean hackers..... *g* --rick) TurboTax Goes Down Ahead of Tax Filing Deadline http://www.kmbz.com/TurboTax-Goes-Down-Ahead-of-Tax-Filing-Deadline/16050511 (NEW YORK) -- Last-minute tax filers were delayed even further Sunday night when they tried to input their data on TurboTax.com. The popular tax software experienced what it called "intermittent issues," preventing customers from accessing the site a day before the tax filing deadline. "We're having problems with TurboTax online. We're in process bringing back the experience u expect. Updates 2 follow," @turbotax tweeted Sunday night. But eight minutes later, TurboTax said the glitch had been resolved. "Good news - http://TurboTax.com is back online and functional," the company tweeted. Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 14:34:48 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:34:48 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Comcast to encrypt basic cable channels, require set-top box for all content Message-ID: <6818FE95-C394-451E-8ECB-110BD420A6DC@infowarrior.org> Comcast to encrypt basic cable channels, require set-top box for all content By Zach Honig posted Apr 15th, 2013 at 1:54 PM 114 http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/15/comcast-encrypt-basic-cable/ Well, this is quite a blow to basic cable viewers. Up until recently, Comcast has allowed subscribers to access certain channels without adding a set-top box for every TV -- instead, you'd simply connect your TV directly via coax (how quaint!). Now, certain customers have received word that their free ride will soon be coming to an end. The media giant will begin is expanding the area where it encrypts basic cable channels, requiring a single STB for each and every television that you plan to use. A Comcast Q&A document only addresses home users, so it's unclear whether enterprise subscribers would also be affected -- though that wouldn't be out of the question. We think the move could mean a more complicated (and pricey) installation at hospitals, university dorms and even neighborhood gyms, where TVs installed in cardio equipment often plug directly into wall jacks, not to mention the inconvenience you'll be facing at home. This latest setback, of course, follows an FCC decision to allow companies to encrypt their basic cable channels -- the authorization was reportedly granted to cut back on service theft, among other concerns. Comcast will be issuing up to two adapters to each subscriber at no charge for up to two years, assuming you request your equipment within four months of the date of encryption. That's the good news, but encrypted content is quite a bummer, nonetheless. Update: Comcast has already implemented encryption in certain areas -- this latest move simply represents a wider rollout. Additionally, Comcast-issued set-top boxes are not required when a CableCard solution is in use. Boxee TV owners can receive a new E-DTA that turns Comcast's encrypted cable channels into IP streams, as specified in an earlier agreement. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 14:57:38 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:57:38 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Hagel cancels creation of new drone, cyber medal Message-ID: <76C49061-6ABE-45E5-A812-0545A0778BD2@infowarrior.org> Hagel cancels creation of new drone, cyber medal Published April 15, 2013 Associated Press http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/15/hagel-cancels-creation-new-drone-cyber-medal/ Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is canceling the creation of a new military medal for drone and cyber warriors, and instead wants military leaders to develop a special pin or device that would be attached to already existing medals or ribbons. The Distinguished Warfare Medal was created by Hagel's predecessor, Leon Panetta, and it immediately triggered bitter complaints from veterans and lawmakers who said it should not be ranked higher than traditional combat medals such as the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Senior military leaders reviewed the issue and recommended the creation of a device, similar to the "V" for valor that can be attached to the Bronze Star and other medals to reward an act of heroism. They have 90 days to finalize details and criteria for the award. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 15:20:02 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:20:02 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Eric Schmidt complains that drones violate his privacy Message-ID: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/15/google_schmidt_civilian_drones_nimby/ Ban drones taking snaps of homes, rages Google boss... That's HIS job, right? Damn it, we're gonna need a new irony detector By John Leyden 15th April 2013 10:31 GMT Google supremo Eric Schmidt has demanded tough rules on civilians flying surveillance drones, branding the tech a threat to privacy.The executive chairman of the internet advertising giant that snaps photos of millions of front doors worldwide is upset that cheap camera-toting aircraft can be used by anyone from terrorists to quarrelling neighbours: folks could use the flying gear to snoop on people next-door or, say, buzz a reviled neighbour's summer BBQ. "How would you feel if your neighbour went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their backyard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?" asked Schmidt, whose company buys aerial photographs of the planet's surface and publishes them online for free. The Google boss made the comments during an interview with The Guardian that was printed on Saturday. Small remote-control drones, which can be fitted with cameras and other surprises, are readily available for hobbyists, businesses and governments. The kit can be deployed to track poachers, and cops have used the flying machines to locate marijuana farms and find fugitives, the Daily Mail adds. The US Federal Aviation Administration is investigating how commercial drones may be safely introduced into US airspace. The tech is already used by military spooks to hunt and kill targets. Schmidt wants tight controls if not an outright ban on the technology in private hands. "It's one thing for governments, who have some legitimacy in what they're doing, but have other people doing it ... it's not going to happen," he said. The Google chief exec, who advises the Obama administration on technology issues, once famously said "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" regarding the US government requesting access to citizens' search histories. He also blacklisted CNet for a year after its journalists published personal information about him hoovered up from, er, Google search results. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 15 17:08:09 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:08:09 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SCOTUS Seeks Compromise in Gene-Patent Case Message-ID: <6FD2DE65-90E5-4C61-AF65-CADCE34578E5@infowarrior.org> High Court Justices Seek Compromise in Gene-Patent Case By Greg Stohr and Susan Decker - Apr 15, 2013 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2013-04-15/u-s-supreme-court-justices-seek-compromise-in-gene-patent-case.html Several U.S. Supreme Court justices sought a compromise on the decades-old practice of granting patents on human genes, debating a case that could redefine rights throughout the biotechnology and agricultural industries. Hearing arguments today in Washington, the justices discussed chocolate-chip cookie recipes, baseball bats and Amazonian plants as they grappled with a challenge to Myriad Genetics Inc. (MYGN)?s patents on genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. A group of doctors, patients and scientists say the patents are stifling clinical testing and research. Several justices asked whether barring gene patents would deter innovation by stripping companies of legal protection for their research. Without a patent, ?what does Myriad get out of this deal?? Justice Elena Kagan asked. ?Why shouldn?t we worry that Myriad or companies like it will just say, ?Well, you know, we?re not going to do this work any more??? The case has implications for the growing field of personalized medicine as well as efforts to map the human brain and discover new uses for embryonic stem cells. It could also ripple well beyond medicine. Agricultural companies, including Monsanto Co. (MON), inject genes into seeds, and industrial microbiology businesses use microorganism DNA to improve biofuel manufacturing. Salt Lake City-based Myriad rose $1.42, or 5.4 percent, to $27.52 at 1:46 p.m. in New York trading. Middle Ground Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy all asked about a middle ground suggested by the Obama administration. The government says the court should void parts of Myriad?s patents while leaving open the possibility that other aspects will be upheld. The administration says Myriad isn?t entitled to a patent on ?isolated DNA,? which the government says is merely a snippet of the genetic sequence as it appears in the body. The administration says Myriad might be entitled to a patent on so- called complementary DNA, which involves a greater level of human manipulation. Kennedy asked Myriad?s lawyer whether that approach would ?give the industry sufficient protection for innovation and research.? Complementary DNA, also known as cDNA, is a stripped-down version of the genetic sequence within the body, separating out the portion of the gene that can encode proteins. Complementary DNA ?is not a product of nature,? Sotomayor said. ?It?s a product of human innovation.? Cookie Dough At the same time, Sotomayor signaled skepticism about patents on isolated DNA. She likened genetic sequences to the ingredients for chocolate-chip cookies. ?I can?t imagine getting a patent simply on the basic items of salt, flour and eggs, simply because I?ve created a new use or a new product from those ingredients,? Sotomayor said. Myriad?s lawyer, Gregory Castanias, said isolated DNA was more akin to a baseball bat carved from a tree. He said isolated DNA and the bat both are patentable because they require humans to make important decisions about exactly where to cut. ?A baseball bat doesn?t exist until it?s isolated from a tree,? he said. ?But that?s still the product of human invention to decide where to begin the bat and where to end the bat.? Baseball Bat Chief Justice John Roberts said the isolation of DNA was less innovative than the creation of a baseball bat. ?Here you?re just snipping, and you don?t have anything new,? said Roberts, who once said judging was like being a baseball umpire. ?You have something that is a part of something that has existed previous to your intervention.? The administration?s stance marks a rejection of the longstanding policy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which has been awarding human gene patents since 1982. The case, which the court will decide by the end of June, is splitting the medical community. Trade groups for the biotechnology, agriculture and drug industries are siding with Myriad. They say gene patents have led to valuable treatments, including Amgen Inc. (AMGN)?s Epogen anemia drug and synthetic insulin developed by Genentech Inc., now part of Roche Holding AG. (ROG) The challengers include the Association for Molecular Pathology, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists back the challenge. Cancer Patients The dispute comes to the court in an emotionally charged package, with patient advocates accusing Myriad of standing in the way of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. The company at one point demanded that the University of Pennsylvania stop clinical testing of cancer patients. Critics say Myriad?s patents effectively give the company ownership rights over a part of the human body. Myriad says its patents haven?t prevented researchers from publishing thousands of papers on the genes. The case has rekindled a debate over the longstanding concept that patents can?t cover ?laws of nature.? The Myriad case tests the meaning of that principle against the backdrop of cutting-edge medical and scientific research. In 1994, the company won a race among five research groups to pinpoint the genetic sequences associated with DNA mutations that indicate hereditary risk for breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad then developed tests for the mutations. Nobel Prizes The ACLU lawyer challenging the Myriad patents, Christopher Hansen, argued that researchers would continue to search for new natural phenomena, even without the prospect of patent protection. Scientists who make important discoveries will get ?enormous recognition,? he said. ?We know that that?s sufficient. We know it?s sufficient with respect to these two genes. We also know it?s sufficient with respect to the human genome.? That line of argument drew skepticism from Kagan. ?We?re supposed to leave it to scientists who want Nobel prizes?? she asked. Justice Anthony Kennedy likewise signaled disagreement. ?I don?t think we can decide the case on the ground, ?Oh, don?t worry about investment. It?ll come,?? he said. Through the hour-long session, the justices wrestled with the line that separates nature from invention. Much of the session revolved around a hypothetical plant that has medicinal uses and is found only in the Amazon. Justice Stephen Breyer said the longstanding understanding is that someone could patent the process of extracting sap from the plant or the use of it to treat a disease. ?But what you can?t patent is the sap itself,? he said. The case is Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, 12-398. To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr at bloomberg.net; Susan Decker in Washington at sdecker1 at bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Steven Komarow at skomarow1 at bloomberg.net; Bernard Kohn at bkohn2 at bloomberg.net --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 16 06:35:05 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:35:05 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - In Boston attack, a reminder of the difficulty in foiling terrorist plots Message-ID: In Boston attack, a reminder of the difficulty in foiling terrorist plots By Scott Wilson and Peter Finn http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-boston-attack-a-reminder-of-the-difficulty-in-foiling-terrorist-plots/2013/04/15/a1d80d14-a616-11e2-a8e2-5b98cb59187f_story.html After nearly a dozen years of foiled plots, the United States on Monday suffered the first large-scale bombing since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, opened an era of heightened security affecting nearly every aspect of American life. The disruption of those plots underscores the enormous strides that the American national security apparatus has taken, including the adoption of policies that remain the subject of intense concern among human rights and civil liberties groups. But the success of the strike on the Boston Marathon, an international symbol of a city?s pride, highlights the enduring difficulty that U.S. officials face in impeding a determined attacker. In remarks Monday evening, President Obama did not label the bombings as terrorism. But a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the incident was an ?act of terror,? the same term that the president used in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in September. A former counterterrorism official said the Boston attack didn?t appear to have the signature of a coordinated al-Qaeda bombing, in which a sophisticated explosive device packed with shrapnel is detonated in an enclosed space to maximize casualties. The evidence could point to a domestic group, but White House officials and investigators cautioned that it was too soon to link the attack to any particular kind of perpetrator. ?At this stage, it?s perplexing,? said the former official, who would discuss an ongoing investigation only on the condition of anonymity. ?It?s not a military or particularly iconic target like Times Square or the New York subway. This could be someone with limited or no foreign connections.? From the FBI to local police departments, law enforcement agencies have dramatically shifted their emphasis to counterterrorism over the past decade, gathering intelligence on both domestic and foreign extremist groups. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations have created an enormous global apparatus designed to track and target terrorists. But officials have always warned that the United States cannot prevent every attempted strike on U.S. soil. In some recent plots, authorities have benefited as much from luck as investigative skill. The last mass terrorist killing on U.S. soil was carried out by Maj. Nidal M. Hassan, an Army psychiatrist, who fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009. Hassan had connections to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was later killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. But there has been a series of failed or foiled bomb plots since the Sept. 11 attacks. Less than three months after airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Richard Reid tried to detonate a shoe filled with explosives on a flight from Miami to Paris. Eight years later, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to set off explosives in his underwear on a commercial flight near Detroit. The bombs failed to detonate correctly in both cases. In two other incidents, authorities were able to prevent bombings. A September 2009 attempt to set off bombs in the New York City subway system by an al-Qaeda associate was thwarted. And in May of the following year, Times Square in New York was evacuated after the discovery of a car bomb left by Faisal Shahzad, a dual citizen of Pakistan and the United States. Since Obama?s election, there has also been huge growth in the number of anti-government ?Patriot? groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported last month that because of the prospect of federal gun-control legislation, ?the threat of violence appears to be looming.? The center, which monitors hate groups, said that the number of Patriot groups reached record levels in 2012 and had grown by 813 percent over the past four years. The movement is marked by a loathing of what adherents believe is a tyrannical federal government and a fear that the United States will be absorbed by some kind of global government. In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center warned that ?as in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we are now seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns.? The April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people and was the largest terrorist attack in the United States before the Sept. 11 attacks. When Timothy Mc?Veigh carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, the Patriot movement had been galvanized by the 1993 Brady Bill, the 1994 ban on assault weapons and the deadly conclusion of the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Tex., among other events. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described the recent growth in Patriot groups as a second wave. Because of the size of the crowd and because it was at a sporting event, the Boston attack also evoked memories of the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Two people were killed and more than 100 injured in an attack carried out by Eric Rudolph, who investigators described as an antiabortion and anti-gay extremist. A report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point this year said that ?there has been a dramatic rise in the number of attacks and violent plots originating from individuals and groups who self-identify with the far-right of American politics.? But the report by the center?s director of terrorism studies, Arie Perliger, argued that there has been limited systematic documentation and analysis of incidents of American domestic violence. Regardless of who carried out the Boston attack, it evoked for many the wrenching scenes of Sept. 11, especially among those who witnessed the midafternoon explosions. Charlotte Holler, 24, was working seven stories above the scene in Boston?s Prudential Tower overlooking Boylston Street. She heard two thuds and felt the explosions rock the floor under her feet. For an instant, she thought that her building or something nearby was collapsing. When Holler dashed to the window to look down on the smoke-streaked street, she saw frightened marathon runners changing course to run away from the nearby finish line. Holler said the building intercom system advised workers to stay inside. She did for a few hours ? fearful, but also feeling lucky because she could reach her parents and friends on her land line and work computer to inform them she was safe. ?Everyone is harkening back to 9/11,? she said. ?The priorities are: Where is my family? Where are my friends?? Alice Crites, Carol D. Leonnig and Julie Tate contributed to this report. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 16 06:41:05 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:41:05 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Number of Security Cleared Personnel Grew in 2012 Message-ID: Number of Security Cleared Personnel Grew in 2012 Categories: Secrecy http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/04/2012_clearances/ The number of people who are cleared for access to classified information continued to rise in 2012 to more than 4.9 million, according to a new annual report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This is only the third official tally of government-wide security clearance activity ever prepared, and it is the largest reported to date. The total number of cleared personnel as of October 1, 2012 was 4,917,751. Although the number of contractors who held a clearance declined in 2012, the number of eligible government employees grew at a faster rate, yielding a net increase of 54,199 clearances, or 1.1 percent, from the year before. It is possible that there were more security-cleared Americans at some points during the Cold War, when there was a larger standing military with more cleared military personnel than there are today. But until 2010, no comprehensive account of the size of the security clearance system had ever been produced. So the new 4.9 million figure is the largest official figure ever published. A 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office had estimated that 2.4 million people held clearances, excluding some intelligence agency employees. But even allowing for one or two hundred thousand cleared intelligence personnel, this turned out to underestimate the case by nearly 50%. A 1995 GAO report presented an estimate of 3.2 million persons as of 1993. (Strictly speaking, the new ODNI report does not present data on the number of clearances but rather on the number of people who have been investigated and deemed ?eligible? for a clearance, regardless of whether or not they have been granted access to classified information in fact. In addition to a security clearance, an individual is also supposed to have a ?need to know? particular classified information in order to gain access to it.) During 2012, the CIA denied 4.9% of the clearance applications that it reviewed, the report indicated, while NRO denied 5.9% and NSA denied 5.7%. Several of the intelligence agencies reported that they had individual security clearance investigations that had remained open in excess of one year. ?The IC faces challenges in clearing individuals with unique or critical skills ? such as highly desirable language abilities ? who often have significant foreign associations that may take additional time to investigate and adjudicate,? the new report said. The report notes that it was prepared in fulfillment of a requirement in the 2010 intelligence authorization act. It does not mention the fact that the DNI asked Congress to cancel that requirement last year. The DNI?s request to eliminate the report was initially approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee (as first noted by Marcy Wheeler of the Emptywheel blog). But then several public interest groups wrote to ask the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to preserve the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it provided unique public insight into the size and operation of the security clearance system. The Committees concurred, and the reporting requirement was retained. In the absence of similar public attention and intervention, another intelligence community report to Congress on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was discontinued at the DNI?s request, to the dismay of students of arms control. A pending change to the security clearance process is intended to encourage mental health counseling, but some say it may generate new confusion, reported Josh Gerstein in Politico today. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 16 13:55:31 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:55:31 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Schneier: Keep Calm and Carry On Message-ID: The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On It is easy to feel scared and powerless in the wake of attacks like those at the Boston Marathon. But it also plays into the perpetrators' hands. Bruce Schneier Apr 15 2013, 10:15 PM ET http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-marathon-bombing-keep-calm-and-carry-on/275014/ As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe. It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized. It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact. But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That's the very definition of news: something that is unusual -- in this case, something that almost never happens. Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we'd see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn't because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It's hard to find willing terrorists, it's hard to put a plot together, it's hard to get materials, and it's hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books. Even the 9/11 terrorists got lucky. If it's hard for us to keep this in perspective, it will be even harder for our leaders. They'll be afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism -- or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity -- they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they'll be afraid that Americans might vote them out of office. Perhaps they're right, but where are the leaders who aren't afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"? Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an "existential threat" against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn't do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way. There are things we can do to make us safer, mostly around investigation, intelligence, and emergency response, but we will never be 100-percent safe from terrorism; we need to accept that. How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn't primarily a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed. Don't glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a "war on terror." Wars involve two legitimate sides. There's only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we're scared. Empathize, but refuse to be terrorized. Instead, be indomitable -- and support leaders who are as well. That's how to defeat terrorists. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 16 14:58:04 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:58:04 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH threatens CISPA 2.0 veto Message-ID: <3C59E4DC-691B-4761-A77C-C4BFA619F95B@infowarrior.org> https://eff.org/r.3bP4 EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET WASHINGTON, D.C. 20503 April 16, 2013 (House Rules) STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY H.R. 624 ? Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Rep. Rogers, R-MI, and Rep. Ruppersberger, D-MD) Both government and private companies need cyber threat information to allow them to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious activity that can disrupt networks and could potentially damage critical infrastructure. The Administration believes that carefully updating laws to facilitate cybersecurity information sharing is one of several legislative changes essential to protect individuals' privacy and improve the Nation's cybersecurity. While there is bipartisan consensus on the need for such legislation, it should adhere to the following priorities: (1) carefully safeguard privacy and civil liberties; (2) preserve the long-standing, respective roles and missions of civilian and intelligence agencies; and (3) provide for appropriate sharing with targeted liability protections. The Administration recognizes and appreciates that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) adopted several amendments to H.R. 624 in an effort to incorporate the Administration's important substantive concerns. However, the Administration still seeks additional improvements and if the bill, as currently crafted, were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill. The Administration seeks to build upon the continuing dialogue with the HPSCI and stands ready to work with members of Congress to incorporate our core priorities to produce cybersecurity information sharing legislation that addresses these critical issues. H.R. 624 appropriately requires the Federal Government to protect privacy when handling cybersecurity information. Importantly, the Committee removed the broad national security exemption, which significantly weakened the restrictions on how this information could be used by the government. The Administration, however, remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities. Citizens have a right to know that corporations will be held accountable ? and not granted immunity ? for failing to safeguard personal information adequately. The Administration is committed to working with all stakeholders to find a workable solution to this challenge. Moreover, the Administration is confident that such measures can be crafted in a way that is not overly onerous or cost prohibitive on the businesses sending the information. Further, the legislation should also explicitly ensure that cyber crime victims continue to report such crimes directly to Federal law enforcement agencies, and continue to receive the same protections that they do today. The Administration supports the longstanding tradition to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres, while recognizing that the Nation's cybersecurity requires shared responsibility from individual users, private sector network owners and operators, and the appropriate collaboration of civilian, law enforcement, and national security entities in government. H.R. 624 appropriately seeks to make clear that existing public-private relationships ? whether voluntary, contractual, or regulatory ? should be preserved and uninterrupted by this newly authorized information sharing. However, newly authorized information sharing for cybersecurity purposes from the private sector to the government should enter the government through a civilian agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Recognizing that the government will continue to receive cybersecurity information through a range of civilian, law enforcement, and national security agencies, legislation must promote appropriate sharing within the government. As stated above, this sharing must be consistent with cybersecurity use restrictions, the cybersecurity responsibilities of the agencies involved, as well as privacy and civil liberties protections and transparent oversight. Such intra-governmental sharing and use should not be subject to undue restrictions by the private sector companies that originally share the information. To be successful in addressing the range of cyber threats the Nation faces, it is vital that intra-governmental sharing be accomplished in as near real-time as possible. The Administration agrees with the need to clarify the application of existing laws to remove legal barriers to the private sector sharing appropriate, well-defined, cybersecurity information. Further, the Administration supports incentivizing industry to share appropriate cybersecurity information by providing the private sector with targeted liability protections. However, the Administration is concerned about the broad scope of liability limitations in H.R. 624. Specifically, even if there is no clear intent to do harm, the law should not immunize a failure to take reasonable measures, such as the sharing of information, to prevent harm when and if the entity knows that such inaction will cause damage or otherwise injure or endanger other entities or individuals. Information sharing is one piece of a larger set of legislative requirements to provide the private sector, the Federal Government, and law enforcement with the necessary tools to combat the current and emerging cyber threats facing the Nation. In addition to updating information sharing statutes, the Congress should incorporate privacy and civil liberties safeguards into all aspects of cybersecurity and enact legislation that: (1) strengthens the Nation's critical infrastructure's cybersecurity by promoting the establishment and adoption of standards for critical infrastructure; (2) updates laws guiding Federal agency network security; (3) gives law enforcement the tools to fight crime in the digital age; and (4) creates a National Data Breach Reporting requirement. ****** * --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: page1image23104.png Type: image/png Size: 2742 bytes Desc: not available URL: From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 17 07:52:06 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:52:06 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Google Apps & Gmail Down For Many Message-ID: Google Apps & Gmail Down For Many Apr 17, 2013 ? 8:44 am | (0) by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Other Google Topics http://www.seroundtable.com/google-apps-down-16658.html Since about 8am EDT, Wednesday, April 17th, Google Apps and many of the products within it, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chat and so forth are down for many - including me. There are tons of complaints on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. I posted a message on Google+ asking if Google Apps is down for others and everyone said yes. It seems to be coming up for some now but for the past 45 minutes, it was completely down for most Google Apps users. It also seems to be up and down for most right now. The Google Apps Status Dashboard says everything is fine - but you and I know it is not. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 17 07:52:28 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:52:28 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA 2.0 'support' hearkens back to SOPA Message-ID: <5F3041BB-29E1-45A0-B618-3BADEFDA149C@infowarrior.org> TechNet, Microsoft, CISPA: Oh my! The current cybersecurity muddle hearkens to the early days of SOPA http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/17/technet-microsoft-cispa-oh-my-the-current-cybersecurity-muddle-is-sopa-all-over-again/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 17 09:42:54 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:42:54 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Everything I Ever Needed to Know About the News I Learned in the TOC Message-ID: <39125C08-C1AD-402A-A898-679B4A61539F@infowarrior.org> Everything I Ever Needed to Know About the News I Learned in the TOC By Robert BatemanApril 17, 20131 Comment The tactical operations center is, as most ground-pounders like me know, the brains of a battalion or a brigade. Information flows in from a million sources, and decisions resulting in actions flow outward. As a young lieutenant you think of the TOC ? pronounced ?tock? ? as alien territory, host to unfamiliar creatures with arcane motivations. Eventually you learn better, and you figure out that the most critical elements inside that headquarters are patience and wisdom. I should note that it is the latter element that leads to the former. This is a basic statement which applies to infantrymen like me, but any grunt, jarhead, wingnut or squid, of any rank, should grok these basic precepts. The bottom line is that if the collective personality of the TOC has those two attributes, you win. If it does not, you lose. It does not get much simpler than this binary statement. But there is more to this than meets the eye, because you really can learn something about living as a thinking citizen in a representative democracy which has a free press?just by learning this lesson from the TOC.... < -- > Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/04/17/everything-i-ever-needed-to-know-about-the-news-i-learned-in-the-toc/#ixzz2QjRD96Cl --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 17 09:45:31 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:45:31 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Gov-FUD: Convincing The Public The 'Hacker Threat' Exists Message-ID: The Greatest Trick The Government Ever Pulled Was Convincing The Public The 'Hacker Threat' Exists from the the-2nd-was-continuing-taxation-long-after-representation-ceased-to-exist dept The US government is already fighting wars on several fronts, including the perpetual War on Terror. "War is the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne stated, and the state has never been healthier, using this variety of opponents as excuses to increase surveillance, curtail rights and expand power. < -- > The endgame is more control, and the "hacker" provides an ominous, omnipresent threat that, because of the hacker's naturally secretive nature, can neither be confirmed or denied with any veracity. Much like the War on Terror, this War on Hacking takes rights from the American public, carves out huge chunks and sends the gutted remains back to citizens in a package marked "Safety." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 17 12:35:09 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:35:09 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA sponsor compares opponents to 14-year-olds Message-ID: <45F94F3C-2260-4E57-9F9C-4A461499B45A@infowarrior.org> CISPA sponsor compares opponents to 14-year-olds Grant Gross, IDG News Service Apr 17, 2013 10:13 AM http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035405/cispa-sponsor-compares-opponents-to-14yearolds.html The chief sponsor of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) in the U.S. Congress has ignited a Twitter storm by suggesting many opponents of the proposed cyberthreat sharing bill are 14-year-olds in basements. The Twitter account for Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, has received thousands of tweets from opponents of the bill since late Tuesday after he said that ?if you?re a 14-year-old tweeter in the basement? you don?t understand why Congress needs to pass CISPA. The full U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to begin debate on the controversial bill Wednesday. Privacy and digital rights groups have objected to the bill, saying it would allow ISPs, email service providers and other businesses to share a wide range of customer information they believe is related to cyberthreats with the U.S. National Security Agency and other government agencies. CISPA would protect businesses sharing cyberthreat information from being sued by customers. Several websites, including tech policy blog Techdirt picked up on Rogers? comments, made during debate Tuesday in the House Rules Committee over what amendments should be allowed on the House floor. The comments are included in a short YouTube clip posted by digital rights activist Sina Khanifar. Twitter users reacted swiftly to Rogers? comments, some using colorful language. ?Mid 30?s software dev here, mostly voted republican since I turned 18,? Twitter user Luke Matthews wrote Wednesday morning. ?People like YOU are what?s wrong with this country!? ?I am NOT a 14 yr old in a basement, I am a 26 yr old mother, wife, student and I oppose CISPA!? wrote Twitter user Tht1grl. ?I have constitutional rights!? ?This whole [Rogers] thing is pretty funny considering most 14 year olds know more about the internet than he does,? added Eric Fadden. ?I?m 70-year old retired computer/networking professional, in my home office, & have been against CISPA since first proposed,? wrote Rich Zellich. A spokeswoman for Rogers didn?t immediately respond to a request for comments on the Twitter responses. Some opponents of CISPA accused Rogers of saying that the only opponents of the bill were 14-year-olds. That?s not quite what he said, but many critics read his comments as implying that most opposition came from teenagers. ?It seems pretty clear from the clip that that?s what he?s saying,? digital rights activist Khanifar said in an email. ?He drops the 14-year-old in basement comment, then follows by saying that people are convinced as soon as they understand what the bill does.? Rogers said he had to work hard to convince his teenage nephew about the merits of the bill. ?Once you understand the threat, and you understand the mechanics of how it works, and you understand that people are not monitoring your content of your emails, most people go, ?Got it,?? he said. Rogers also said the U.S. tech industry supports CISPA. ?The Silicon Valley CEOs support this bill,? he said during the Rules Committee debate. ?The people who are in the business of prosperity on the Internet think this is the right approach.? Some tech trade groups, including the BSA and the Software and Information Industry Association, are strong supporters of CISPA. But several digital rights groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, are opposed, as are some Silicon Valley-area lawmakers. President Barack Obama?s administration has also threatened a veto. Representative Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, questioned whether support in the tech industry was as strong as Rogers suggested. Many tech executives he?s talked to are ?fairly ambivalent? about CISPA, Polis said during the House Rules Committee hearing. ?Many of them feel it?s fairly irrelevant because they feel they?re better equipped to deal with threats to cybersecurity than our government,? he said. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 06:54:18 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:54:18 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA Amendment Won't Stop Data Going to National Security Agency Message-ID: <4CCEEDDB-C4F1-4BB6-BD62-AD7DABA1F985@infowarrior.org> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/amendment-wont-stop-data-going-nationa-security-agency April 17, 2013 | By Rainey Reitman Amendment Won't Stop Data Going to National Security Agency Update: Note that the Hill article referenced below was working with an earlier draft of the amendment. The version introduced today was different from the version made available to the Hill. An amendment to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was just adopted on the House Floor. See the text attached. Recent reporting of this amendment characterized it as a major privacy improvement, stating that this amendment "would ensure that the Homeland Security Department (DHS), a civilian agency, would be the first recipient of cyber threat data from companies." This is false. The amendment in question does not strike or amend the part of CISPA that actually deals with data flowing from companies to other entities, including the federal government. The bill still says that: ?Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a self-protected entity may, for cybersecurity purposes...share such cyber threat information with any other entity, including the Federal Government." The liability immunity provisions also remain. While this amendment does change a few things about how that information is treated within the government, it does not amend the primary sharing section of the bill and thus would not prevent companies from sharing data directly with military intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency if they so choose. The bill may be voted on at any time. This means there?s little time left to speak out. Please tell your Representative to vote no on the bill: --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 07:06:33 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:06:33 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Reason #14343913 to avoid stock 'analyst' calls Message-ID: <168A0B1C-0899-4917-89E7-58C3A9F1DBB2@infowarrior.org> Just flip a coin and do better than them. Amazing that the 'herd' (large and small) still puts so much faith in their alleged insights. And of course the MSM loves it since a 'call' can be used to generate idiotic explanations about why a stock moves. 49% of Sell-Side Recommendations Underperform [STUDY] http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/04/most-sell-side-analyst-recommendations-are-wrong/ I've seen firsthand the idiocy of these people. The best thing to do? Tune 'em out. All of 'em. -- rick --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 10:31:45 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:31:45 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA, the Fourth Amendment and you Message-ID: <336428DB-335F-4833-87FE-9C6E090A71BB@infowarrior.org> CISPA, the Fourth Amendment and you By Scott Bomboy | National Constitution Center ? 9 mins ago http://news.yahoo.com/cispa-fourth-amendment-143420272.html Overshadowed by congressional action on guns and immigration is an Internet privacy bill that could affect most Americans, without them knowing it on a daily basis. Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA) is making its way through Congress and it?s up for a key House vote on Thursday. And like gun control, it?s far from a done deal if the House passes CISPA. It would need Senate approval and President Barack Obama has indicted he?ll possibly veto CISPA if it comes to his desk. Both sides of Congress would need to muster a two-thirds majority vote to override the president?s veto, which would seem unlikely in the current political atmosphere of Washington. At the heart of CISPA is a Fourth Amendment issue. ?The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,? reads the amendment. CISPA is designed to let the federal government work with private companies to fight hackers and cybercriminals here and from areas outside the United States. Private companies could voluntarily share Internet data related to their customers with the government, as part of the effort to detect cyber threats. The sharing could be done in ?real time? as the cybercops try to defeat and track down the evildoers. Companies could also share data amongst themselves as part of the effort. There are major drawbacks, say CISPA?s critics, about the legislation. The privacy provisions for consumers, they claim, are vague or nonexistent. The government and companies can?t look at your personal data, such as medical records and tax returns, if they are part of the ?data dump? that is shared in real time. But the law doesn?t require that companies excise, or edit out, that information in the transfer process. Another criticism is that a warrant isn?t needed for the government to obtain that information. And companies that share your information won?t be held legally liable for sharing that information, a practice that seemingly conflicts with privacy policies on existing websites. CISPA?s biggest critic in Congress is a representative from Colorado, Jared Polis. The Democrat told the House on Wednesday that, ?This is the biggest government takeover of personal information that I?ve seen during my time here in Congress.? Mike Rogers, a Republican representative from Michigan and the House Intelligence Chairman, is leading the CISPA effort, along with Dutch Ruppersberger, a Democrat from Maryland. Rogers believes the measure is long needed. ?People were stealing their identities, their accounts, their intellectual property, and subsequent to that, their jobs,? he recently said. ?[Web users] began to question the value of getting on Internet and using [it] for commercial purposes. Their trust in the free and open Internet ? was at risk.? He?s also stressed the participation in CISPA is voluntary for companies. The Intelligence Committee also released a five-page document to counter what it calls ?myths? about CISPA, including how much personal data would be shared with the government?which it says would be a rare occurrence. The American Civil Liberties Union, however, calls CISPA ?fatally flawed.? ?The core problem is that CISPA allows too much sensitive information to be shared with too many people in the first place, including the National Security Agency,? it says. Unlike SOPA, failed attempt last year to halt online piracy, large tech companies are supporting the efforts to get CISPA passed. At one time, Facebook and Microsoft had signed on to support CISPA, but now they are reportedly backing away. Google appears to be on the fence about the issue. Major communications and utilities companies support CISPA, according to a list released by the House. Last year, the House passed a similar CISPA bill, only to see it die in the Senate. Last August, a successful filibuster blocked CISPA from getting to the floor for a vote. Both libertarians and liberals had issues with the bill, and there were disagreements about which government agencies would be involved with CISPA. The Tea Party aligned group FreedomWorks is on record, again, as opposing CISPA on Fourth Amendment grounds. ?There are grave Fourth Amendment concerns with CISPA. The bill would override existing privacy laws to allow companies to share ?cyber threat information? with the federal government without making any reasonable effort to strip out any personal information from the file,? the group said in a statement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has Fourth Amendment concerns. ?As it stands, CISPA is dangerously vague, and should not allow for any expansion of government powers through a series of poorly worded definitions. If the drafters intend to give new powers to the government?s already extensive capacity to examine your private information, they should propose clear and specific language so we can have a real debate,? the EFF said on its website. Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of the National Constitution Center. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 10:32:58 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:32:58 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Mike Rogers Wife Stands To Benefit Greatly From CISPA Passing... Message-ID: <7025BB82-DDD5-49D3-89BC-BA3D288E78F8@infowarrior.org> Oh Look, Rep. Mike Rogers Wife Stands To Benefit Greatly From CISPA Passing... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130417/16253022748/oh-look-rep-mike-rogers-wife-stands-to-benefit-greatly-cispa-passing.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 10:37:13 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:37:13 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Social Media: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do Message-ID: <14F8AF29-FEDE-4AC9-BCAC-9F4A8D502FFF@infowarrior.org> April 17, 2013 Breaking Up Is Hard to Do By AZADEH ENSHA http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/technology/personaltech/how-to-sever-ties-to-social-networks-and-other-web-sites.html Ah, those online relationships. First you?re smitten by a social network or Web service and can?t stop spending time on it. Then it starts asking how you?re feeling, what you like, where you are, with whom, and why you don?t share as much anymore. Pretty soon, you?re ready to call it quits. But trying to end your relationship with some prominent online services can be like breaking up with an overly attached romantic partner ? they make it pretty hard to say goodbye. And with good reason ? more users are beneficial to a company?s bottom line, which often depends on generating revenue by selling you targeted advertisements. Possibly no social network understands this better than Facebook, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, proudly announced last October that his site had surpassed one billion active users. ?Their business model is about getting users to create content,? said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst with the Altimeter Group. ?It?s users who are creating content, liking things, and, ultimately, a brand sees this and comes to deploy advertising dollars. The product is us.? Still, not every site takes the ?Never Gonna Give You Up? approach. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of the social news site Reddit, said that if users wanted to delete an account, ?they should be able to do that as easily as they signed up.? ?It puts the onus on us to keep delivering a great product, and not retaining users simply because they can?t find the exit,? he said. And remember, even if you say goodbye, like Rick and Ilsa in ?Casablanca,? you?ll always have Paris. FACEBOOK Given Facebook?s history of privacy controversies ? and its general tendency to occupy vast amounts of time ? some people may eventually feel the need to leave, or at least take a break from the service. To quit entirely, log on to your account and go to https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account. After hitting the Delete My Account box, you?ll be asked to enter your password. If you want to download a copy of your photos, posts and messages before leaving the service, you can do that from the account settings page, which can be quickly reached by clicking on that little round gear icon at the top right of the Facebook home page. Unlike many sites, Facebook gives you 14 days to change your mind before your account is permanently deleted. The company knows it has hooked hundreds of millions of users, many of whom won?t be able to stay away and will come crawling back. The site will also let you take a temporary break from the relationship by letting you deactivate your account. Unlike deleting, deactivating it will merely disable your profile, although some features, including sent messages, may remain visible to others. You can return at any time, with your information intact. But Facebook makes it harder to put the relationship on hiatus than to leave permanently. Before you can deactivate your account, Facebook asks you to provide a reason for quitting. Choices range from ?I spend too much time using Facebook? to ?I don?t understand how to use Facebook.? For nearly all selections, the company pleads with you to stay. Don?t find Facebook useful? It responds by advising you to connect with more friends. According to a Facebook spokeswoman, this is less about being clingy, and more about being consumer-driven by giving users ?the power to decide what action is right for them.? After selecting your reason for leaving, hit Confirm. You?ll have to re-enter your password, then hit the Deactivate Now box. Not surprisingly, Facebook ends things by saying, ?We hope you come back soon.? Which, let?s face it, you probably will. GOOGLE PLUS Google tries to entangle you in multiple, distinct services like Google Plus, Gmail and YouTube ? all connected. And it can track your activity across all of them and show you ads. But the company doesn?t hassle you before letting you leave. To delete your Google Plus social network profile, log in and hit the gear icon, which is directly to the right of the View Profile As tab. From there, choose Settings and scroll all the way down the page, where you should see a Disable Google+ tab that gives you the option to delete just Google Plus content or your entire Google profile. It?s important to note what does and does not get deleted if you drop Google Plus alone. Circles, Plus 1?s, posts, comments and third-party app activity will all be gone. Photos won?t be deleted; you have to remove them through Picasa Web Albums if you want them gone. Your chat buddies and communities are also kept intact. Alternatively, you can hide elements of your profile. Go to the About tab on your profile, and hit the blue Edit link to change what others can see. AMAZON Amazon has created one of the most difficult opt-out procedures of the major sites. Under the Your Account section are countless blue links, continuing as you scroll down. There is no sign of a ?close account? option anywhere. Turns out, there isn?t one. To close shop, you have to go to www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/account-assistance.html. Then you have to select Something Else in Section 1, and Account Settings then Close My Account from the drop-down choices in Section 2. In Section 3, you?ll see e-mail, phone and chat contact options. Before going through all that rigmarole, it?s best to first remove your credit card information to guard your privacy. Go to the Your Account Page, click Manage Payment Options located under Payment Methods, and delete the information on file. LINKEDIN Though LinkedIn makes it easy to close your account, the company reserves the right to use your data for marketing and other purposes ? closed account or not. To terminate, log in to the home page, select the Settings tab located in the drop-down menu under your name in the upper right of the screen. Next hit Account, followed by the Close Your Account link. For privacy reasons, it?s a good idea to remove all third-party applications first. To do that, click on Groups, Companies & Applications located above the Account box, hit the View Your Applications link, check the apps you want removed and hit Remove. MYSPACE Like many people, you may have had a youthful dalliance with this once-popular social network. But even if you moved on long ago, Myspace didn?t. It never forgot you. To cut ties once and for all, it?s easiest if you remember your password and have access to the e-mail address that you used when signing up. If so, head over to the My Stuff tab, choose Account Settings from the dropdown menu, and select Cancel Account under Account Settings & Privacy. You will receive an e-mail from Myspace asking you to confirm your request. If you can?t log in to that old e-mail account, don?t worry: Myspace will let you close the account after you prove your identity by completing a declaration form at http://myspace.desk.com/customer/widget/emails/new. When filling it out, move on if you can?t remember a detail because the company may well be able to process the form anyway. But be patient ? the company says it is dealing with a backlog of requests. TWITTER Twitter likes to communicate. A lot. By default, it will e-mail you constantly. To cut those back, hit the gear button on the home page, scroll down to Settings, then hit the Email Notifications tab and choose which of the 16 or more types of e-mail from Twitter that you no longer want to receive. If you want to leave the social network altogether, go back to the Settings page, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and click on the tiny Deactivate My Account link on the bottom. Twitter gets a tad emotional at this juncture: ?Is this goodbye? Are you sure you don?t want to reconsider? Was it something we said?? Assuming that you really want to quit, hit the blue Deactivate box and enter your password. If you want to hang onto the memories ? like those tweets from the top of the Eiffel Tower ? before deleting your account, you can Request Your Archive from the same Settings page, just above the link to deactivate. OTHER SITES The Web sites Delete Your Account (www.deleteyouraccount.com) and AccountKiller (www.accountkiller.com) have compiled extensive deletion information for many sites. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 10:38:38 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:38:38 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - NSA data center front and center in debate over liberty, security and privacy Message-ID: NSA data center front and center in debate over liberty, security and privacy By Catherine Herridge Published April 12, 2013 FoxNews.com http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/12/nsa-data-center-front-and-center-in-debate-over-liberty-security-and-privacy/ Twenty-five miles due south of Salt Lake City, a massive construction project is nearing completion. The heavily secured site belongs to the National Security Agency. "The spy center" -- that's what some of the locals like Jasmine Widmer, who works at Bluffdale's sandwich shop, told our Fox News team as part of an eight month investigation into data collection and privacy rights that will be broadcast Sunday at 9 p.m. ET called "Fox News Reporting: Your Secrets Out.? The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5's-- that stretches past the moon. One man we hoped would answer our questions, the current director of the NSA General Keith Alexander, declined Fox News's requests to sit down for an interview, so we stopped by the offices of a Washington think tank, where Alexander was speaking at a cyber security event last year. Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens, Alexander said, "No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens," adding that the NSA staff "take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation." But critics, including former NSA employees, say the data center is front and center in the debate over liberty, security and privacy. "[It] raises the most serious questions about the vast amount of data that could be kept in one place for many, many different sources," Thomas Drake told Fox News. Drake -- who worked at the NSA from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2008 and was unsuccessfully prosecuted on espionage charges -- says Americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the name of security. "It's in secret so you don't really know," Drake explained. "It's benign, right. If I haven't -- and if I haven't done anything wrong it doesn't matter. The only way you can have perfect security is have a perfect surveillance state. That's George Orwell. That's 1984. That's what that would look like." Fellow NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, who worked at the NSA for nearly four decades, says it's about the possibility that the government's stunning new capacity to collect, store and analyze data could be abused. "It's really a-- turnkey situation, where it could be turned quickly and become a totalitarian state pretty quickly," he said. "The capacities to do that is being set up. Now it's a question of if we get the wrong person in office, or if certain people set up their network internally in government, they could make that happen quickly." According to NSA's chief compliance officer John Delong, whose job is to make sure the laws and policies designed to protect the privacy of U.S. persons is being enforced, part of the frustration is that the rules are specific and secret. "I think that's sort of the collision, is you have classified rules," DeLong explained during an hour long meeting with Fox News at the NSA. "You now have a somewhat more public data center," "These aren't just, like, general policy pronouncements of 'You shall protect privacy.'" he said. DeLong added that another misconception is that there is only internal oversight, when he says there is "a tremendous amount of external oversight" from the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and others. In an email, Vanee' Vines, a public information officer for the NSA, said that the Utah Data Center will be "a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the Intelligence Community?s efforts to further strengthen and protect the nation. NSA is the executive agent for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and will be the lead agency at the center.? Because the Utah Data Center is a "secure facility" and you cannot go inside without the needed security clearances, Fox News rented a helicopter and took to the skies, where the depth and breadth of the Utah Center were stunning. The aerial video footage is exclusive to the Fox News investigation and posted here. Two weeks after our filming, the helicopter pilot reported to our Fox News team that he had been visited by the FBI on a "national security matter." The pilot said, according to the FBI agents, that the NSA had taken photos of the helicopter once it made several flyovers. These photos allowed the NSA to identify the make and manufacturer of the helicopter in California who, in turn, told the NSA who operates it in the Salt Lake City area. The FBI wanted to know if we had the proper air space clearances to flyover the site, which the Fox News team did. Satisfied that the pilot was not flying "terrorists" over the site, the questioning concluded. While the pilot passed along the Fox News contact information, there was no further inquiries. Binney said the helicopter incident "showed the capability of the U.S. government to use information to trace people, their relationship to others and to raise suspicions about their activities and intentions." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/12/nsa-data-center-front-and-center-in-debate-over-liberty-security-and-privacy/#ixzz2QpVpIESs --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 12:08:08 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:08:08 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - House passes CISPA Message-ID: US House of Representatives passes CISPA cybersecurity bill Published time: April 18, 2013 16:17 Edited time: April 18, 2013 17:00 http://rt.com/usa/congress-house-bill-cispa-031/ Reuters / Jason Reed The US House of Representatives has passed the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protect Act (CISPA). Lawmakers in the House voted 288-to-127 Thursday afternoon to accept the bill. Next it will move to the Senate and could then end up on the desk of US President Barack Obama for him to potentially sign the bill into law. Earlier this week, though, senior White House advisers said they would recommend the president veto the bill. Should CISPA earn the president?s autograph, private businesses will be encouraged to voluntarily share cyberthreat information with the US government. The authors of the bill say this is an effort to better combat the reportedly increasing attempts to harm America?s critical computer networks and pilfer the systems of private companies for intellectual property and other sensitive trade secrets. One of the bill?s creators, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland), said during a round of debate on Wednesday that $400 billion worth of American trade secrets are being stolen by US companies every year. Passing CISPA, he said, would be a common sense solution to a threat that?s growing at an alarming rate. ?If your house is being robbed, you call 911 and the police department comes. That?s the same scenario we are looking at here,? he said. That same day, CISPA co-author Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) stressed that his bill doesn?t extend any extra surveillance powers to the federal government, despite condemnation from critics that say exactly that. ?It does something very simple: it allows the government to share zeroes and ones with the private sector,? he said. ?We have yet to find a single United States company that opposes this bill,? said Rep. Rogers. But companies do in fact oppose CISPA, including a number of entities that carry a good deal of clout around both Silicon Valley and inside the beltway. Just last month Facebook rescinded their support of the act, according to Cnet?s Declan McCullagh, because a spokesperson for the social media site says they prefer a legislative "balance" that ensures "the privacy of our users.? After CISPA was unsuccessfully introduced to Congress last year ? only to stall in the Senate ? Microsoft endorsed the act only to eventually do an about-face. ?Microsoft believes that any proposed legislation should facilitate the voluntary sharing of cyber threat information in a manner that allows us to honor the privacy and security promises we make to our customers,? the company?s Scott Charney told McCullagh at the time. But just last week, TechNet President Rey Ramsey sent a letter to Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger saying his group thinks CISPA "recognizes the need for effective cybersecurity legislation that encourages voluntary, bi-directional, real time sharing of actionable cyberthreat information to protect networks," but that further work may be needed. TechNet?s Executive Council includes Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, Google's Eric Schmidt and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith. Web browser makers Mozilla oppose the bill, as does the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union, and last year?s attempt to pass CISPA after it was unveiled for a first time prompted the White House to issue a veto warning then. In the months since the bill stalled in the Senate, though, the president has on his own part urged Congress to adopt a new cybersecurity bill. In February, Pres. Obama signed an executive order that urges his administration to begin working towards improving cybersecurity protections until Congress can craft a bill. Hours later, he said during his annual State of the Union address how imperative legislation action is. ?Earlier today, I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs and our privacy. Now, Congress must act as well, by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks,? the president said. But in the veto threat extended by his office earlier this week, the White House writes, ?the Administration still seeks additional improvements and if the bill, as currently crafted, were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.? During Thursday morning?s debate, one elected lawmaker cited this week?s deadly terrorist attack in Boston as a reason to pass a cybersecurity bill, despite lacing evidence that the pair of bombs detonated Monday at the Boston Marathon were acts of cyberterror. ?Recent events in Boston demonstrate that we have to come together as Republicans and Democrats? in order to pass a bill that will strengthen national security, Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) said Thursday morning. ?In the case of Boston,? said McCaul, ?there were real bombs.? ?In this case, they are digital bombs ? and these digital bombs are on their way.? The House is slated to vote on remaining amendments being considered for CISPA on Thursday and will vote on the act as a whole shortly thereafter. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 18 12:18:52 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:18:52 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA permits police to do warrantless database searches Message-ID: CISPA permits police to do warrantless database searches Amendment was shot down that would have required warrants before police could peruse shared information for any evidence of hundreds of different crimes. by Declan McCullagh April 18, 2013 9:57 AM PDT http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57580268-38/cispa-permits-police-to-do-warrantless-database-searches/ A controversial data-sharing bill being debated today in the U.S. House of Representatives authorizes federal agencies to conduct warrantless searches of information they obtain from e-mail and Internet providers. Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, proposed a one-sentence amendment (PDF) that would have required the National Security Agency, the FBI, Homeland Security, and other agencies to secure a "warrant obtained in accordance with the Fourth Amendment" before searching a database for evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Grayson complained this morning on Twitter that House Republicans "wouldn't even allow debate on requiring a warrant before a search." That's a reference to a vote this week by the House Rules committee that rejected a series of privacy-protective amendments, meaning they could not be proposed and debated during today's floor proceedings. Another amendment (PDF) that was rejected would have ensured that companies' privacy promises -- including their terms of use and privacy policies -- remained valid and legally enforceable in the future. CISPA is controversial because it overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying "notwithstanding any other provision of law," including privacy policies and wiretap laws, companies may share cybersecurity-related information "with any other entity, including the federal government." It would not, however, require them to do so. That language has alarmed dozens of advocacy groups, including the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Reporters Without Borders, which sent a letter (PDF) to Congress last month opposing CISPA. It says: "CISPA's information-sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of e-mails, to any agency in the government." President Obama this week threatened to veto CISPA. CISPA's advocates say it's needed to encourage companies to share more information with the federal government, and to a lesser extent among themselves, especially in the wake of an increasing number of successful and attempted intrusions. A "Myth v. Fact" paper (PDF) prepared by the House Intelligence committee says any claim that "this legislation creates a wide-ranging government surveillance program" is a myth. Unlike last year's Stop Online Piracy Act outcry, in which Internet users and civil liberties groups allied with technology companies against Hollywood, no broad alliance exists this time. Companies including AT&T, Comcast, EMC, IBM, Intel, McAfee, Oracle, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon have instead signed on as CISPA supporters. Because Grayson's amendment was not permitted, CISPA will allow the federal government to compile a database of information shared by private companies and search that information for possible violations of hundreds, if not thousands, of criminal laws. Those include searching the database for "cybersecurity purposes," for the "investigation and prosecution of cybersecurity crimes," for "child pornography" offenses, for "kidnapping," for "serious threats to the physical safety of minors," and any other crime related to protecting anyone from "serious bodily harm." Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and former Internet entrepreneur, said the "serious bodily harm" language was vague enough to allow federal police agencies to go on fishing expeditions for electronic evidence. "The government could use this information to investigate gun shows" and football games because of the threat of serious bodily harm if accidents occurred, Polis said. "What do these things even have to do with cybersecurity?... From football to gun show organizing, you're really far afield." That's why the ACLU continues to oppose this bill, says Michelle Richardson, the group's legislative counsel. Thanks to the amendments that were not permitted, Richardson says, "there's a disconnect here between what they say is going to happen and what the legislation says." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 19 10:52:46 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:52:46 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OpEd: CISPA 2.0 Clears The House: Outcome Hazy Message-ID: CISPA 2.0 Clears The House: Outcome Hazy By Richard Forno on April 18, 2013 at 2:10 pm http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/04/cispa-20-clears-house-outcome-hazy --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 19 10:52:51 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:52:51 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Former DHS Official Says Boston Bombing Proves ACLU & EFF Are Wrong About Surveillance And CISPA Message-ID: <2AF81FB3-5318-41B7-B825-7209C3F14F0A@infowarrior.org> Former DHS Official Says Boston Bombing Proves ACLU & EFF Are Wrong About Surveillance And CISPA http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130418/19421722759/former-policy-secretary-dhs-uses-boston-bombing-to-point-out-how-eff-aclu-are-wrong-about-surveillance-cispa.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 19 10:55:32 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:55:32 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Apple Finally Reveals How Long Siri Keeps Your Data Message-ID: Apple Finally Reveals How Long Siri Keeps Your Data ? By Robert McMillan ? 04.19.13 ? 6:30 AM http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/siri-two-years/ All of those questions, messages, and stern commands that people have been whispering to Siri are stored on Apple servers for up to two years, Wired can now report. Yesterday, we raised concerns about some fuzzy disclosures in Siri?s privacy policy. After our story ran, Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller called to explain Apple?s policy, something privacy advocates have asking for. This is the first time that Apple has said how long it?s keeping Siri data, but according to Nicole Ozer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who first brought these Siri privacy questions to our attention, there?s still more that Apple could do. According to Apple?s Muller, the company takes steps to ensure that the data is anonymized and only collects the Siri voice clips in order to improve Siri itself. ?Our customers? privacy is very important to us,? she says. Here?s what happens. Whenever you speak into Apple?s voice activated personal digital assistant, it ships it off to Apple?s data farm for analysis. Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number ? not your Apple user ID or email address ? represents you as far as Siri?s back-end voice analysis system is concerned. Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple ?disassociates? your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes. ?Apple may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years,? Muller says ?If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.? But Nicole Ozer says Apple should go further. She?d like to see Apple link to its Siri Privacy policy on its Siri FAQ so that consumers can figure out what?s going on before they buy an Apple product. Right now, you can only find it within the Siri Settings section of your iPad or mobile phone. ?There is no good reason for Apple to not include information about privacy practices on their Siri FAQ page,? Ozer said in an email message. Also, even if the Siri data is not linked directly to users, people should be careful about what they say to their personal digital assistant. Transcripts ?of what you say to Siri could reveal sensitive things about you, your family, or business,? she added. ?Siri works for Apple, so make a note to yourself to really think before you speak.? Correction: This story originally misidentified Apple?s spokeswoman. Her name is Trudy Muller. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 19 22:53:08 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:53:08 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 5 of the Worst Reactions to the Boston Manhunt Message-ID: 5 of the Worst Reactions to the Boston Manhunt ?By Adam Serwer | Fri Apr. 19, 2013 3:12 PM PDT http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/five-worst-reactions-boston-manhunt From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 20 10:01:00 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - MPAA Tells US Government To Screw Over The Blind, Reject Fair Use Message-ID: MPAA Tells US Government To Screw Over The Blind, Reject Fair Use from the well-there-they-go-again dept Just this morning we were pointing out the MPAA's long history of attacking fair use. We noted that this often happened in international fora, where the MPAA and others would seek to block fair use in treaties and push rules that would limit or reject the possibility of fair use. And, just like clockwork, up pops an example. Apparently the "fair use defenders" at the MPAA are working overtime to get the White House to back down on promises concerning the decades-long negotiations for a treaty to help blind people not get screwed over by copyright law. The US has flip flopped on this issue over the past few years, but apparently had finally made some concessions that were allowing the process to move forward. The MPAA wants to kill all of that..... < - > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130419/12234522768/mpaa-tells-us-government-to-screw-over-blind-reject-fair-use.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 20 10:01:03 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:01:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Fox_Censors_Cory_Doctorow=92s_?= =?windows-1252?q?=93Homeland=94_Novel_From_Google?= Message-ID: Fox Censors Cory Doctorow?s ?Homeland? Novel From Google ? Ernesto ? April 20, 2013 http://torrentfreak.com/fox-censors-cory-doctorows-homeland-novel-from-google-130420/ Copyfighter, journalist, sci-fi writer and Boing-Boing editor Cory Doctorow has fallen victim to the almighty content empire of Rupert Murdoch. In an attempt to remove access to infringing copies of the TV-show Homeland, Fox has ordered Google to take down links to Doctorow?s latest novel of the same title. Adding to the controversy, Doctorow?s own publisher has also sent DMCA notices for the Creative Commons licensed book. Cory Doctorow?s latest novel Homeland tells the story of an infowar, the suppression of information and the fight against censorship. The setting of the fictional book is a realistic scenario according to activists, and on a small scale the book itself has now become the center of a censorship row. Published by Tor Books, Homeland is available for sale in most book stores, but because of its Creative Commons license people are also free to share the book online. After all, obscurity is a much bigger problem than piracy for most authors. As a result copies of the novel are shared for free on hundreds of sites, and this attracted the attention of a Hollywood studio. For a few weeks none other than 20th Century Fox has been sending DMCA takedown requests to Google for Doctorow?s novel. Fox?s idea is to make pirated copies of the TV-series Homeland harder to find, but as collateral damage they?re also taking down the novel. Shown below is an example of a typical notice 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 being sent out, and here?s an even bigger list. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 20 17:24:36 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:24:36 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - security theater, martial law, and a tale Message-ID: <9EE18875-ECF4-4403-8D26-DC7891538F95@infowarrior.org> security theater, martial law, and a tale that trumps every cop-and-donut joke you've ever heard http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/20/security-theater-martial-law-and-a-tale-that-trumps-every-cop-and-donut-joke-youve-ever-heard/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 20 17:25:02 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:25:02 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Informative blunders this week Message-ID: <45B5B158-FBEA-43CD-B752-A29C4A7CFE8E@infowarrior.org> We all know about CNN's fiascos in 'reporting' this week. Then Fox News ID'ed celebrity Zooey Deschanel as a Boston Bombing suspect -- http://www.wetpaint.com/network/articles/new-girls-zooey-deschanel-mistakenly-idd-as-boston-bombing-suspect) ..... and now this .... Czech Republic is not Chechnya, diplomat points out By Jonathan Allen Sat Apr 20, 2013 1:16pm EDT http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/20/us-usa-explosions-boston-czech-idUSBRE93J0DP20130420 (Reuters) - Make no mistake: the Czech Republic is not Chechnya. That's a distinction the Czech ambassador to the United States wants to make crystal clear after news emerged that the two suspects in Boston Marathon bombing had Chechen origins. "The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation," Petr Gandalovi?, the Czech ambassador, wrote on the embassy's website on Friday. The unusual statement followed a series of Twitter messages from people who apparently struggled to distinguish the two places with similar names. "Both the guys from the bombing are from the Czech Republic," wrote a geographically challenged user called Courtney Abbott, erroneously placing their origins about 1,500 miles to the west of Chechnya. "Wow," she added. "As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect," the ambassador said. Gandalovi?, who said he was shocked by the attack, stressed that "the Czech Republic is an active and reliable partner of the United States in the fight against terrorism." Chechnya is part of southern Russia's restive Caucasus, which also includes Dagestan, Ingushetia and other predominately Muslim regions that have seen two decades of unrest since the fall of the Soviet Union. Two ethnic Chechen brothers were suspected in the bombings at the world-famous Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured 167 on Monday. (Editing by Doina Chiacu) --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 20 17:44:46 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:44:46 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - more on....Informative blunders this week In-Reply-To: <5173192D.3020705@inetassoc.com> References: <45B5B158-FBEA-43CD-B752-A29C4A7CFE8E@infowarrior.org> <5173192D.3020705@inetassoc.com> Message-ID: Duly noted! --rick On Apr 20, 2013, at 6:39 PM, XXXXXXXXX wrote: > You need to send out a retraction/correction/apology. That is NOT Fox News but a local affiliate. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Apr 21 08:25:51 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:25:51 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Speak out now on full-body scanners Message-ID: <2FCEBA3A-AD24-4BD8-BD5F-B3A756E8E271@infowarrior.org> http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/the-navigator-speak-out-now-on-full-body-scanners/2013/04/18/bf52c568-a5ea-11e2-8302-3c7e0ea97057_print.html The Navigator: Speak out now on full-body scanners By Christopher Elliott, It?s been almost five years since the Transportation Security Administration quietly began installing its so-called Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) ? better known as full-body scanners ? at airports nationwide. And now the government wants to know what you think of the machines. In 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the TSA to engage in what?s known as notice-and-comment rulemaking on its use of the technology. You can share your opinion on the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at the Federal Register Web site (www.federalregister.gov) until June 24. In other words, air travelers can finally give the government a piece of their mind about the controversial scanners and the way they?re used at airports. Depending on how the public responds, the TSA could either double down on its multibillion-dollar scanner program, or it could decommission the machines and impose alternate standards, including using metal detectors and explosive-trace detection screening. The TSA hopes that passengers will approve of its current screening practices. ?AIT is the best technology available to detect both metallic and non-metallic objects hidden on a passenger, and is an important part of TSA?s multi-layered security efforts,? says agency spokesman David Castelveter. Still, the agency assigned to protect America?s transportation systems promises to listen and respond to the public comments. ?TSA will review and analyze the public comments to develop a final rule related to the screening process using AIT,? says Castelveter. But critics question both the agency?s claims and its sincerity. ?This technology raises significant privacy problems,? says Khaliah Barnes, an attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). ?When TSA deployed the body scanners, it initiated one of the most sweeping, most invasive and most unaccountable suspicion-less searches of American travelers in history.? EPIC has repeatedly challenged the use of body scanners in court, arguing that the technology is ineffective and violates a passenger?s individual privacy rights. The court-ordered public comment period is a direct result of EPIC?s suit against the Department of Homeland Security. Other activists have raised concerns about the health effects of the machines, claiming that AIT technology hasn?t been adequately tested. TSA insists that the scanners are safe for all passengers and meet national health and safety standards. But mostly, a coalition of privacy advocates is opposed to the way the scanners are used at the airport, with passengers forced to choose between walking through the machine or facing what?s called an ?enhanced? pat-down. Many travelers complain that these manual exams by TSA agents are abusive and punitive. The TSA says that the ?vast? majority of passengers do not receive pat-downs and that those who do have ?important? rights that are respected by its screeners. The rulemaking asks the public to comment on four possible changes in the way passengers are screened. First, TSA could turn the clock back to before 2008 and use metal detectors as the primary passenger screening technology. Any alarms would be resolved with a pat-down. This is an option already being offered without incident to a sizable group of passengers, including those who qualify for TSA?s expedited Pre-Check screening, airline crew members and military personnel on duty. A second option would see the TSA return to using metal detectors as the primary screening method but supplement its screening by conducting a pat-down on a randomly selected portion of passengers. Another possibility: going back to metal detectors as a primary screening technology and conducting explosive trace detection tests on random passengers. This is the option favored by most passenger-rights advocates, since it ends both the invasive scans and eliminates the problematic pat-downs. The final option is to leave the current system in place: using full-body scanners as a primary screening method and resolving alarms through a pat-down. This method is favored by the TSA, which says that it?s the most effective way to screen passengers and prevent another terrorist attack. ?The public has a unique opportunity to affect the TSA?s future actions,? says EPIC?s Barnes. ?It is absolutely imperative that they comment on the TSA?s proposal.? Some passengers believe that the current system works. The TSA says that roughly 99 percent of air travelers choose the full-body scanners instead of ?opting out? and receiving a pat-down, and it cites a CBS poll that shows four out of five Americans support the use of Advanced Imaging Technology at airports nationwide. ?I choose body scans whenever available,? says Michael Menaker, a retired advertising executive from Louisville, Colo. ?It?s much quicker and easier than the pat-down I always get. I have an artificial hip, and the scanners speed me through security with less hassle.? Larry Edward, one of several hundred commenters on the rulemaking site, disagreed. ?No more scanners,? he said in a brief statement. ?I will do anything to avoid flying because of them and the invasive pat-downs that are occurring at the airports.? A recent review of the comments suggested an overwhelming number in favor of abandoning AIT technology and stopping the TSA?s policy of giving a prison-style pat-down to passengers who set off an alarm or who voluntarily opt out. The TSA is trying to keep these comments to a minimum, say observers. They point to the TSA?s own blog post on the subject, published almost two weeks after the release of the rulemaking but deleted within minutes of being posted. After receiving questions from many travelers, as well as this reporter, about the missing post, the TSA republished the notice a week later ? minus the links to the site where readers could leave a comment. One reason the agency seems uncomfortable with a rulemaking is that it?s the first time the TSA has ever defined or offered an opportunity for passengers to comment on any aspect of the screening process, according to privacy activist Edward Hasbrouck. ?In this light, it?s likely that one reason the TSA has been so resistant to a public rulemaking process on AIT is the likelihood that it would open the door to renewed demands from consumer, privacy and civil liberties groups for a similar rulemaking on other aspects of the screening process,? he says. The agency?s coyness, combined with what critics say is a lack of transparency, has left many doubting that the TSA will do anything meaningful in response to the public comments. For some air travelers, no matter what happens, it will be too little, too late. They say that the agency has spent the better part of the past five years subjecting them to unconstitutional searches, violating their civil rights and assaulting their dignity when they fly. Nancy Nally, a Web site publisher from Palm Coast, Fla., says that regardless of how the TSA responds, she?s most disappointed by its lateness. This rulemaking should have happened in 2006, not 2013, she says. ?Why close the barn door after the horse is gone?? she asks. E-mail Christopher Elliott at chris at elliott.org. More from Travel: The Navigator: TSA body scanners? apparent flaw raises airport security concerns A reporter faces the naked truth about full-body airport scanners Travel Guide ? 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 Apr 21 08:25:57 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:25:57 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Link: Public RFC on TSA scanners Message-ID: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is proposing to revise its civil aviation security regulations to clarify that TSA may use advanced imaging technology (AIT) to screen individuals at security screening checkpoints. This proposed rule is issued to comply with a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ordered TSA to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking on the use of AIT for screening. The Court decided that TSA should provide notice and invite comments on the use of AIT technology for primary screening. https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/03/26/2013-07023/passenger-screening-using-advanced-imaging-technology --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Apr 21 08:26:00 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:26:00 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Film 'War for Web' warns of CISPA, SOPA, future threats Message-ID: Film 'War for Web' warns of CISPA, SOPA, future threats by Declan McCullagh April 20, 2013 10:06 AM PDT The late Aaron Swartz said in an interview for the documentary film, set to be completed late this year, that he was more worried about the U.S. government than about teenage hackers in basements. < - > http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57580583-38/film-war-for-web-warns-of-cispa-sopa-future-threats/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Apr 21 08:26:32 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:26:32 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Pavlovian Politics: Leaders Line Up To Call For Increased Surveillance In Aftermath of Boston Bombing Message-ID: <789731E4-E7C2-4C19-B72C-4EDAA8556A4F@infowarrior.org> Pavlovian Politics: Leaders Line Up To Call For Increased Surveillance In Aftermath of Boston Bombing JONATHAN TURLEY April 19, 2013 http://jonathanturley.org/2013/04/19/pavlovian-politics-leaders-line-up-to-call-for-increased-surveillance-in-aftermath-of-boston-bombing/ Below is my column today in USA Today on the Boston bombing and the call for new security laws and expanded surveillance. I have been doing interviews trying to caution against these calls for immediate action ? a mantra that we hear after every attack no matter the cause. I am in Chicago today and was struck by how quickly Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel called for more surveillance cameras in a city with one of the largest surveillance systems in the United States. For civil libertarians, all terrorist attacks come in two equally predictable parts. First, there is the terrorist attack itself ? a sad reality of our modern life. Second, comes the inevitable explosion of politicians calling for new security measures and surveillance. We brace ourselves for this secondary blow, which generally comes before we even fully know what occurred in an attack or how it was allowed to occur. Politicians need to be seen as actively protecting public safety and the easiest way is to add surveillance, reduce privacy and expand the security state. What they are not willing to discuss is the impossibility of detecting and deterring all attacks. The suggestion is that more security measures translate to more public safety. The fact is that even the most repressive nations with the most abusive security services, places such as China and Iran, have not been able to stop terrorist acts. While police were still combing through the wreckage from the Boston Marathon, politicians ran to cameras to pledge more security measures and surveillance. Indeed, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel demanded more cameras in response to the Boston attack. Chicago already is one of the most surveilled cities in the United States. Emanuel?s solution: add some more. It is a perfectly Pavlovian response of politicians eager to appear as champions of public safety. We need to resist the calls for a greater security state and put this attack into perspective. These two brothers built homemade bombs with over-the-counter pressure cookers. They placed the devices in one of the most surveilled areas of Boston with an abundance of police and cameras. There is only so much that a free nation can do to avoid such an attack. Two men walked in a crowd and put two bags down on the ground shortly before detonation. No one is seriously questioning the value of having increased surveillance and police at major events. That was already the case with the Boston Marathon. However, privacy is dying in the United States by a thousand papercuts from countless new laws and surveillance systems. Before we plunge ahead in creating a fishbowl society of surveillance, we might want to ask whether such new measures or devices will actually make us safer or just make us appear safer. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY?s board of contributors. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 22 06:40:54 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:40:54 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Breaking News Is Broken Message-ID: (I wrote the same thing back in 2003. Nice to see others in the MSM catching up. --rick) Breaking News Is Broken Don?t watch cable news. Shut off Twitter. You?d be better off cleaning your gutters. By Farhad Manjoo|Posted Friday, April 19, 2013, at 2:24 PM http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/boston_bombing_breaking_news_don_t_watch_cable_shut_off_twitter_you_d_be.html Inspired by the events of the past week, here?s a handy guide for anyone looking to figure out what exactly is going on during a breaking news event. When you first hear about a big story in progress, run to your television. Make sure it?s securely turned off. Next, pull out your phone, delete your Twitter app, shut off your email, and perhaps cancel your service plan. Unplug your PC. Now go outside and take a walk for an hour or two. Maybe find a park and sit on a bench, reading an old novel. Winter is just half a year away?have you started cleaning out your rain gutters? This might be a good time to start. Whatever you do, remember to stay hydrated. Have a sensible dinner. Get a good night?s rest. In the morning, don?t rush out of bed. Take in the birdsong. Brew a pot of coffee. Finally, load up your favorite newspaper?s home page. Spend about 10 minutes reading a couple of in-depth news stories about the events of the day. And that?s it: You?ve now caught up with all your friends who spent the past day and a half going out of their minds following cable and Twitter. In fact, you?re now better informed than they are, because during your self-imposed exile from the news, you didn?t stumble into the many cul-de-sacs and dark alleys of misinformation that consumed their lives. You?re less frazzled, better rested, and your rain gutters are clear. Breaking news is broken. That?s the clearest lesson you can draw about the media from the last week, when both old- and new-media outlets fell down on the job. By now you?ve likely heard the lowlights. CNN and the AP incorrectly reported on Wednesday that a Boston Marathon suspect had been arrested. People on Reddit and editors at the New York Post wrongly fingered innocent kids as bombing suspects. Redditors also pushed the theory that a Brown University student who has been missing for more than a month was one of the bombers?a story that gained steam on Twitter Thursday when people listening to police scanners heard the cops repeat the student?s name. Though everyone should have been careful to dismiss chatter heard over the scanner, few did. Caught up in the excitement of breaking news, I was one of many journalists who retweeted news that the Brown student was one of the suspects?a fact which, in the morning, I feel absolutely terrible about. People on Reddit feel terrible about it too, though now the damage to his reputation has been done. (Although I?m choosing not to mention his name here, that?s not going to accomplish very much?it?s already been stained.) Twitter?s comeuppance could not have come soon enough. Earlier in the week, many social-media tough guys were calling CNN?s failing a sign of the times?proof that cable news couldn?t keep up with the Web. CNN was criticized for not taking the time to check its sources? claims that the cops had arrested a ?dark-skinned? suspect. The failure seemed in keeping with cable news? inherent weaknesses. News takes time to develop, but because cable anchors have to fill up airtime and want to scoop their rivals, they?re eager to speculate and grab at any halfway credible sounding story they hear from their sources. Twitter, everyone on Twitter agreed, was better than that. Then, a day later, people on Twitter made exactly the same mistakes. Besides the mistaken identification of the Brown student, Thursday night?s tweeters?including many local reporters covering the manhunt?couldn?t get straight whether one or two suspects had been arrested, whether the suspects were dead or alive, and whether they were light- or dark-skinned. Even more weirdly, many on Twitter were now making fun of CNN for being behind?for not following the news in the same slipshod manner as Twitter. By staying behind, though, CNN avoided the Web?s embarrassment. For all its mistakes, the network at least didn?t falsely identify anyone. The useful distinction here isn?t by medium. It?s silly to say that Twitter is a better way to follow breaking news than CNN, or vice versa. The real problem is that both Twitter and CNN now depend on technologies that make it possible to follow breaking news too closely. We get stories much faster than we can make sense of them, informed by cellphone pictures and eyewitnesses found on social networks and dubious official sources like police scanner streams. Real life moves much slower than these technologies. There?s a gap between facts and comprehension, between finding some pictures online and making sense of how they fit into a story. What ends up filling that gap is speculation. On both Twitter and cable, people are mostly just collecting little factoids and thinking aloud about various possibilities. They?re just shooting the shit, and the excrement ends up flying everywhere and hitting innocent targets. For a lot of people, it?s exciting to get caught up in a fast-breaking story. I?d like to tell you that the next time something big breaks, I?ll stay away from Twitter. I hope that I do. But I worry that?s just my news hangover talking. For all the blind alleys, I do have a lot of fun following the news in real time, and I find it hard to stay away. Maybe you do, too. If you?re that sort of person, feel free to stay glued to Twitter and cable. Just be sure to exercise caution about what you tweet and retweet?after last night, I know I?ll be able to do at least that much. And just remember, for all the time you spend online, you won?t be any better informed than a guy who spent all day cleaning his gutters. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 22 06:40:59 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:40:59 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Air Force and Army Disclose Budget for Hacking Operations Message-ID: <7164AF17-300D-456C-AEF7-249C5B6BC41E@infowarrior.org> (Note this is what is 'revealed' -- unknown how much $$ is allocated for cyber offense via other programs that are not disclosed. --rick) Air Force and Army Disclose Budget for Hacking Operations By Aliya Sternstein April 19, 2013 1 Comment http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2013/04/air-force-and-army-disclose-budget-hacking-operations/62664/ The Pentagon has for the first time detailed $30 million in spending on Air Force cyberattack operations and significant new Army funding and staff needs for exploiting opponent computers. Since 2011, top military brass have acknowledged the United States has the capability to hack back if threatened by adversaries in cyberspace. Now, the Defense Department is providing lawmakers and taxpayers with evidence of network assault programs to sustain funding, budget analysts say. The Air Force in fiscal 2014 expects to spend $19.7 million on "offensive cyber operations," including research and development, operations, and training, according to budget documents circulated this week. The service estimates needing $9.8 million for new tools to run those offensive cyber operations, including memory storage, local and long-haul communications, and "unique intelligence and analysis equipment," a spending justification stated. The Air Force money also would cover products for certain defense operations, described as "counter information? capabilities that protect systems and content against deliberate or inadvertent intrusions, corruption and destruction. In addition, the account would fund infrastructure for training, exercises and rehearsals "to support real-world contingency missions." Air Force officials told Nextgov they chose to divulge this information because cyber offense will be a standard line item from now on and the public needs to understand what it is paying for. "We know the Air Force's capabilities in cyber are going to continue to be touchstones for the whole joint team, the whole of government and for the private sector," Air Force spokesman Maj. Eric Badger said. Cyber Command, for instance, is on track to install by fall a full mission force to deflect incoming assaults on networks powering energy, banking and other critical U.S. businesses. The Air Force must explain why this additional money is necessary, at a time when the Pentagon is cutting back on other personnel and weapons. "We are committed to maintaining the right balance of integrated cyber capabilities and forces that are organized, equipped and trained to successfully conduct operations in cyberspace. We're equally as committed to doing so in a way that's respectful of the taxpayers' dollar," Badger said. Elsewhere in the Pentagon budget, the Army proposes hiring 65 new employees and spending more money -- $4.9 million more -- for "computer network exploitation" and "computer network attack" capabilities. Some military spending analysts wonder whether the services are wasting money by duplicating hacking investments. "Do we really want each service going off and developing their own capabilities for these threats?" questioned Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "How much redundancy are we building across the services in the areas of cyber? What is unique to the Army?? It could be more economical for a single component to manage all cyberattack spending, he added. "Maybe it's time to give Cyber Command more budget authority," Harrison said. Other military experts said the services might be giving away these details to ward off potential foes on the Internet. "For some time now, U.S. Cyber Command has advertised it is prepared to conduct full spectrum cyber operations," which include attacking adversary networks, said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, a former deputy judge advocate general. Dunlap, now executive director of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, added, "It is pretty clear that the U.S. intends to convey the message that it is prepared to fight in cyberspace with cyber weapons." As for signaling the Air Force?s cyber might with money, Badger said, "Operating with assurance in the cyber domain is a national security imperative,? but ?rest assured, the cyber activities of the Department of Defense are always undertaken in accordance with existing policy and law and executed under specific authority." Harrison quipped, "It?s probably more of a signaling to Congress." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 22 06:56:15 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:56:15 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - US (TSA) state secrets showdown looms Message-ID: Proposal: the USG can keep some of this stuff secret if it publicly discloses the classified way it interprets some of the "Patriot" Act. Deal? Of course not. --rick State secrets showdown looms By JOSH GERSTEIN | 4/21/13 1:37 PM EDT http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/04/state-secrets-showdown-looms-162193.html The Obama Administration and a federal judge in San Francisco appear to be headed for a showdown over the controversial state secrets privilege in a case about the U.S. government's 'no-fly' list for air travel. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is also bucking the federal government's longstanding assertion that only the executive branch can authorize access to classified information. The disputes arose in a lawsuit Malaysian citizen and former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim filed seven years ago after she was denied travel and briefly detained at the San Francisco airport in 2005, apparently due to being on the no-fly list. In an order issued earlier this month and made public Friday, Alsup instructed lawyers for the government to "show cause" why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers. Alsup said he'd examined the documents and concluded that portions of some of them and the entirety of others could be shown to Ibrahim's attorneys without implicating national security. "After a careful review of the classified materials by the Court, this order concludes that a few documents could potentially be produced with little or no modifications to them," Alsup wrote in an April 2 order (posted here). "This order independently determines that in addition to correspondence between the parties, the two internal training documents are eligible for production to plaintiff?s counsel without implicating national security." If the judge persists in his ruling, it would be highly unusual since most judges are loath to override the executive branch's conclusions that certain information needs to be classified on national security grounds. It has happened on a few occasions (see here, here, and here), but such decisions are very rare. In a separate order Friday (posted here), Alsup ordered the disclosure of about 60 other unclassified documents to Ibrahim's lawyers, largely rejecting the government's arguments that the records were protected from disclosure by a statute or covered by legal privileges that apply to government decisionmaking and to information about sensitive law-enforcement techniques. "There is some risk that disclosure of these documents would hinder frank and ongoing discussion regarding contemplated visa decisions. Nevertheless, these documents are highly relevant to plaintiff?s claims and are not available from any other source," Alsup wrote. "The other factors that outweigh the government?s assertion of the [eliberative process privilege] likewise play a substantial role here. Plaintiff has properly pled constitutional claims challenging alleged government misconduct. This creates a strong interest in accurate fact-finding for plaintiff and for society, and a strong interest in the enforcement of the constitutional protections asserted in plaintiff?s complaint." Alsup said most of the records from around the time when Ibrahim was denied air travel in 2005 were "stale" and therefore unlikely to disclose current law enforcement techniques. He did allow the government to withhold a few documents that pertain to "terrorist screening and watchlist procedures" from 2009 to now. "Because of their more recent vintage, they present a greater risk of harmful disclosure, and the government?s interests are magnified," he wrote Alsup also said the government was deeming some correspondence between Ibrahim and the government classified, which he said could not be the case. Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have filed declarations in the case, apparently in a bid to support the state secrets claims. Those and other supporting filings are off limits to the public, but at a hearing on Thursday Alsup ordered the Holder and Clapper declarations turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers, according to the court's docket. Lawyers for the government asked that Thursday's hearing be closed, but Alsup denied that request, the docket indicates. During the 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama and supporters like Holder decried President George W. Bush's Administration's use of the state secrets privilege to defeat lawsuits over national-security related issues. After taking office, Holder instituted a process that he said would limit use of the privilege, but the Obama administration has continued to deployed it to block litigation over the so-called warrantless wiretapping program, renditions of terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and other matters. The Justice Department's handling of the state secrets privilege in Ibrahim's case could be seen as a product of the reforms Holder announced. Government lawyers have not asked that the case be dismissed outright on those grounds, but have instead asked that certain evidence they deem to be state secrets be kept from her attorneys. The impact, if any, of Holder's order is a bit hard to ascertain since the lawsuit was in litigation for three years under Bush. Alsup, a Clinton appointee, is riding the government pretty hard in recent rulings. However, it's hard to argue that he's exhibiting an anti-government bias. He twice dismissed Ibrahim's claims against federal agencies, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed his decisions . Now, Alsup seems determined to move the case forward. A trial is currently scheduled for November. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 22 07:45:29 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:45:29 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - DOJ's Decision To Not Read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights Is A Terrible Idea Message-ID: <4DD3378D-7974-4074-9BEF-1B8BB6DC57C5@infowarrior.org> DOJ's Decision To Not Read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights Is A Terrible Idea from the this-is-just-stupid dept http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130420/00321822776/why-dojs-decision-to-not-read-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-his-miranda-rights-is-terrible-idea.shtml On Friday, while he hunt for Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was still going on (and after his bother, the other main suspect, had already been killed), Senator Lindsey Graham took to Twitter to argue that the US government, if it captures him while he's still alive, shouldn't read Dzokhar his Miranda rights. As you hopefully already know, the Miranda rights are the famous "you have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in court, and you have a right to an attorney" etc. The requirement for a statement along those lines (and the name of the "Miranda rights") came from a 1960s case, Miranda v. Arizona, and has since been considered a core part of American due process for those being arrested. And this is a good thing. When Graham made his statement, many got up in arms, and argued that Graham was unfamiliar with the Constitution. While I more or less agree with the basics of that, much of that anger probably should have been directed at the Obama administration, which officially created an exception to the Miranda rules (unilaterally, without court approval) a few years back (apparently in October of 2010, though news about it only came out in March 2011). And, indeed, after Dzhokhar was apprehended, the DOJ said that it was not reading him his Miranda Rights because it was invoking a "public safety exception" with the argument being that they needed to get him to talk to make sure the public wasn't in danger. As others have pointed out, this is a horrifically short sighted decision that can only backfire. ? Suspending basic rights and due process out of fear is exactly the kind of thing that people attacking the US want to see. Showing that we can't live up to our most basic rights and principles in the face of a terrorist attack gives those who hate us that much more incentive to keep going. It's not just a sign of weakness, but an encouragement for those who seek to undermine our society. In fact, it takes a step in that very direction by showing that the government is willing to throw out the rules and principles when it gets a little scared by a teenager. ? The slippery slope here is steep and extremely slick. There are no rules on when the DOJ can suddenly ignore Miranda. It gets to decide by itself. This is an organization with a long history of abusing its power, now allowed to wipe out one of the key protections for those they're arresting, whenever it sees fit. The whole point of the ruling in Miranda is that it should not be up to law enforcement. A person's rights are their rights. ? The part that really gets me: if anything, this opens up a really, really stupid line of defense for Dzokhar Tsarnaev if he ever faces a criminal trial. His lawyers will undoubtedly claim that the arrest and interrogation was unconstitutional due to the lack of (or delay in) Miranda rights. Why even open up that possibility of a defense for him? ? The guy has lived in the US for many years -- chances are he actually knows the fact that he has the right to refuse to speak. So, we're violating our principles, basic Constitutional due process, and opening up a massive opening for a defense, to avoid telling him something he likely already knows. It's been said before and it'll be said again, but turning ourselves into a paranoid police state without basic rights means that those who attack us are winning. We should be better than that, and it's a shame that our leaders have no problem confirming for the rest of the world that we're not. What a shame. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 22 08:32:17 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:32:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - PJE: The Boston Marathon Bombings and the News Media Message-ID: The Boston Marathon Bombings and the News Media http://www.journalism.org/dailybriefings --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 23 12:21:03 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:21:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - AP Twitter hacked Message-ID: FYI - the official @AP account has been hacked. There were no explosions at the White House, Barack Obama not injured, etc, etc, etc. Markets went insane when that tweet broke, but recovered everything it gave up almost *precisely* ... gotta love those heedline-parsing algos, right? *bangs head* Move along, nothing to see here.... False Rumor of Explosion at White House Causes Stocks to Briefly Plunge; AP Confirms Its Twitter Feed Was Hacked http://www.cnbc.com/id/100646197 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 23 12:42:22 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:42:22 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - False Rumor of Explosion at White House Causes Stocks to Briefly Plunge; AP Confirms Its Twitter Feed Was Hacked Message-ID: <7405FE5D-75AA-4BEA-ADE7-0BCA30557D89@infowarrior.org> False Rumor of Explosion at White House Causes Stocks to Briefly Plunge; AP Confirms Its Twitter Feed Was Hacked Published: Tuesday, 23 Apr 2013 | 1:38 PM ET http://www.cnbc.com/id/100646197 A fake news agency tweet about explosions at the White House injuring President Obama sent markets into a tailspin which was quickly reversed when it was proven false. @AP, the official twitter handle of the respected Associated Press news agency, sent out a message at about 1:07 p.m. ET, saying "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is Injured." The AP quickly said it was hacked. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, "the President is fine" despite what the hacked Twitter feed said. However, the market impact was already intense. On the floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, traders quickly traded on the tweet, selling S&P futures and buying Treasury 10-year futures. For several minutes, the floor was a flurry of activity, as it was in trading rooms across Wall Street, until the Associated Press tweeted that its account had been hacked. The Dow plunged more than 140 points and bond yields snapped lower. Within six minutes, the Dow recovered its losses in a roller coaster ride. "You wonder who did it and whether it was done on purpose. It certainly was an instant implosion," said Art Cashin, of UBS, who watched the minutes of bedlam on the floor of the NYSE. Cashin said the reaction was especially dramatic because it said the president was injured. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 23 20:04:35 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:04:35 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Fake Tweet Erasing $136 Billion Shows Markets Need Humans Message-ID: <369B21B2-F062-448C-B9A0-0911BFDE2C6F@infowarrior.org> Fake Tweet Erasing $136 Billion Shows Markets Need Humans By Lu Wang, Whitney Kisling & Eric Lam - Apr 23, 2013 4:23 PM ET http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-23/fake-report-erasing-136-billion-shows-market-s-fragility.html A false report of explosions at the White House that wiped out $136 billion from the Standard & Poor?s 500 Index in about two minutes highlighted the risks of the computerized trading that dominates the $18 trillion market. The S&P 500 was up about 1 percent at about 1,578 at 1:07 p.m. New York time today when a posting on the Associated Press Twitter account said there had been explosions at the White House and President Barack Obama had been injured. The benchmark gauge for American stocks erased almost the entire gain, falling as low as 1,563.03 by 1:10 p.m. The index recovered from the plunge within three minutes as the news service said its Twitter account had been hacked and there were no explosions. The S&P 500 ended the session up 1 percent at 1,578.78. ?Trades should not be busted,? Rick Fier, director of equity trading at Conifer Securities LLC in New York, said in a interview. His firm oversees $8 billion in assets. ?No human believed the story. Only the computers react to something that serious disseminated in such a way. I bought some stock well and did not sell into it. Humans win.? Exxon Mobil Corp., Apple Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft Corp. briefly lost about 1 percent in two minutes before rebounding. The plunge didn?t trigger circuit breakers for individual stocks. Shares for most companies pause for five minutes if they lose 10 percent in five minutes. Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. doesn?t comment on market moves, Robert Madden, a spokesman for the exchange operator, said by phone. Richard Adamonis, a spokesman for NYSE Euronext, declined to comment. Molly McGregor, a spokeswoman for New York-based International Securities Exchange LLC, and CME Group Inc. spokesman Michael Shore declined to comment. Chicago-based CME is the world?s largest futures exchange. Dow?s Loss The Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDU) lost about 145 points before recovering and ending the session 152.29 points higher at 14,719.46. Other markets briefly retreated and then recovered losses. Canada?s S&P/TSX Composite Index slid 0.3 percent and Brazil?s Bovespa lost 0.5 percent in the minutes after the Twitter post. ?It?s one thing for an illiquid stock to do that but how does a multitrillion-dollar market do that?? Walter Todd, who oversees about $940 million as chief investment officer of Greenwood Capital Associates LLC in Greenwood, South Carolina, said in a telephone interview. ?That?s very disturbing to me. It?s unnerving.? Traders said the selloff may have been exacerbated by so- called stop-loss orders, which are placed by investors to automatically sell stocks when declines of a specified threshold are reached. ?Quite Scary? ?The whole lesson is never do stop-losses,? said Barry Schwartz, fund manager with Baskin Financial Services Inc. in Toronto. He helps manage about C$500 million ($487 million). ?That?s what I took from this. Same with the flash crash. Second is I don?t know how markets can react to that news so quickly. It must be programmed computer trading, which is also quite scary,? he said. ?Don?t let computers rule your investments,? Schwartz said. On the floor of the NYSE on Wall Street in Manhattan, Jonathan Corpina said he immediately called a client who works two blocks away from the White House to confirm the story. ?He did not know what I was talking about,? Corpina, senior managing partner with Meridian Equity Partners Inc., told Bloomberg Radio. ?He said I?m staring at the White House and there?s nothing going on here right now,? he said. ?Snowball Effect? Algorithmic trading programs that read news headlines may have started the selling, he said. ?And then other algos jump in to play the snowball effect, and little by little you have the computer trading systems that have canceled all their orders on the buy side and the sell algos hit all these bids, and that?s the big dip we saw,? he said. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, or VIX, surged more than 9 percent from 13.6 at 1:08 p.m. to as high as 14.87 at 1:10 p.m. before reversing the gain in the following three minutes. The VIX, which moves in the opposite direction to the S&P 500 about 80 percent of the time, ended the session 6.3 percent lower at 13.48 and is down 25 percent for the year. Flash Crash Flashback Today?s plunge reminded many traders of the May 2010 flash crash that briefly erased $862 billion in market value in less than 20 minutes. Regulators and exchanges are altering the speed bumps adopted after that incident in an effort to boost confidence in a market that has become faster and more complex over the last decade. Under the limit-up/limit-down system, which is going into effect gradually for stocks, trades aren?t allowed to occur at more-than specified percentages above or below a stock?s rolling five-minute average price. The changes are intended to prevent a repeat of the flash crash, which was caused partly by one firm?s trade in stock- index futures, according to a study released Oct. 1 that year by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The trading algorithm employed by the firm, identified by two people with knowledge of the findings as Waddell & Reed Financial Inc. (WDR), sparked the rapid selling of stock futures because it took into account volume but not price or time, the report said. Today?s plunge ?is different than some market mechanism breaking down or some problem with a broker,? John Carey, a fund manager at Boston-based Pioneer Investment Management Inc., said by telephone. His firm oversees about $208 billion. ?This was just a rumor and there have been lots of rumors over the years that moved prices until people get some confirmation that it was or wasn?t true,? he said. ?I would guess that would have just been the beginning of some market drop if it had been a true story. But thankfully it wasn?t.? To contact the reporters on this story: Lu Wang in New York at lwang8 at bloomberg.net; Whitney Kisling in New York at wkisling at bloomberg.net; Eric Lam in Toronto at elam87 at bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lynn Thomasson at lthomasson at bloomberg.net --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 24 07:45:25 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:45:25 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - OT: What would the Koch brothers do to the Los Angeles Times? Message-ID: <296956A2-2C9F-439F-AB73-9CAB2167C737@infowarrior.org> What would the Koch brothers do to the Los Angeles Times? By Harold Meyerson, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-what-would-the-koch-brothers-do-to-the-los-angeles-times/2013/04/23/469baa94-ac44-11e2-a8b9-2a63d75b5459_story.html On May 21, Los Angeles voters will go to the polls to select a new mayor. Who will govern Los Angeles, however, is only the second-most important local question in the city today. The most important, by far, is who will buy the Los Angeles Times. The Times is one of the eight daily newspapers now owned by the creditors who took control of the Tribune Co. after real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell drove it into bankruptcy. Others include the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant. The Tribune board members whom the creditors selected want to unload the papers in favor of more money-making ventures. Fans of newspapers are a jumpy lot these days. And in the past couple of weeks, their apprehension has gone through the roof with word that right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch are looking to buy all eight papers. The Koch boys, whose oil-and-gas-based fortune places them just behind Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison as the wealthiest Americans, have been among the chief donors to the tea party wing of the Republican Party. Their political funding vehicle, Americans for Prosperity, ranked with casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson among the largest funders of right-wing causes and candidates in 2012. Their purchase offer won?t be buttressed by a record of involvement in or commitment to journalism on their part. But it will come complete with a commitment to journalism as a branch of right-wing ideology. As the New York Times reported Sunday, the Koch brothers told a group of like-minded money men at a closed-door conclave in Aspen three years ago that the right needed to invest more in grass-roots activism, politics and media. Given the nature of the Kochs? investment in grass-roots activism and politics, that doesn?t bode well for the kind of fact-based journalism that most American newspapers strive to practice. One indication of the Kochs? goals was their effort last year to take control of the board of the Washington-based Cato Institute, the nation?s leading libertarian think tank. Widely respected for their scholarly advocacy on behalf of economic, social and foreign-policy libertarian perspectives, Cato?s staff and leaders were alarmed when the Kochs sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to turn the institute, in the words of its chairman, Robert Levy, into ?a source of intellectual ammunition for Americans for Prosperity.? Being human beings, all newspaper owners have politics of their own. Since the 19th century, however, most haven?t gone into business primarily to advance a political perspective. Profit, professional and civic pride, and recognition have largely motivated them. It?s hard to see how any of these factored into the Koch brothers? calculations. In their very-brief no-comment on the sale rumors, the Kochs took care to note, ?We respect the independence of the journalist institutions? owned by Tribune, but the staffs at those papers fear that, once Kochified, the papers would quickly turn into print versions of Fox News. A recent informal poll that one L.A. Times writer conducted of his colleagues showed that almost all planned to exit if the Kochs took control (and that included sportswriters and arts writers). Those who stayed would have to grapple with how to cover politics and elections in which their paper?s owners played a leading role. It?s also unclear who in Los Angeles, one of the nation?s most liberal cities, would actually want to read such a paper, but then the Kochs don?t appear to view this as a money-making venture. Though slimmed down from its glory days, the L.A. Times remains a great newspaper, as its recent stories on increasing employer surveillance of blue-collar workers illustrate. But the paper that, under the reign of publisher-owner Otis Chandler in the 1960s and ?70s, moved to the apex of American journalism has suffered a string of indifferent-to-godawful owners, ranging from Chandler?s cousins to Zell ?? that rare journalism mogul who actively hated journalism and journalists ? to, now, the representatives of banks and investment houses looking for the sweetest deal. A (bipartisan) team of Los Angeles investors, led by Eli Broad, who has funded close to half of the new university and museum construction in L.A. in recent years, is also bidding for the paper, and thousands of Times readers have signed petitions preemptively protesting a sale to the Kochs. The bankers? men on the Tribune board likely view the sale of the papers as a financial transaction, pure and simple. But Times readers (and the Koch brothers themselves) would view a sale to the Kochs as a political transaction first and foremost, turning L.A.?s metropolitan daily into a right-wing mouthpiece whose commitment to empirical journalism would be unproven at best. A newspaper isn?t just a business; it?s also a civic trust. The money men who have been plunked down on the Tribune board should remember that as they sell off the civic chronicles of some of America?s great cities. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 24 07:56:39 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:56:39 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?I_Survived_the_Flash_Crash_of_?= =?windows-1252?q?=9213?= Message-ID: <8C135AFB-4466-4DB9-A897-CF35D7BF1331@infowarrior.org> I Survived the Flash Crash of ?13 ? Joshua M Brown ? April 23rd, 2013 http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2013/04/23/i-survived-the-flash-crash-of-13/ It lasted three minutes and shaved about 150 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the blink of an eye. Near as we can tell, it all began when the Associated Press had its Twitter account hacked. An erroneous message went out that the White House was bombed. This was quickly debunked by members of the President's staff and several reporters for the AP and markets got back to normal sort of. But what was seen cannot be unseen and we got a quick reminder about how close we always are to a market panic or meltdown - whether thanks to false news, real news or no news. Market structure is a joke at this point, the amount of volume accounted for by bots that shut themselves down automatically at the hint of turbulence is just absurd. We did it to ourselves. We made it unprofitable for humans to make markets, which reduced the interest in small cap research and the IPO process. We further exacerbated things by allowing the exchanges to go for-profit - the only revenue stream they could find was selling access and data and capabilities to parasitic tech firms. They took the money - now it's the only money they actually make other than renting out the trading floor for cocktail parties and the Westminster Dog Show. So now we have this atmosphere where a tweet from a hacked account can temporarily wipe out half a trillion dollars of wealth in minutes. Hope you're enjoying this! Some other thoughts: * Check out the chart below, this thing stopped dead right at the bottom of the opening gap (last night's closing level) on the S&P! Chart courtesy of my friend Stefan Scheplick: * People with stops in got screwed, supposedly those sales are being honored. * Gold didn't rally when we thought the White House was bombed. The Yen and the Treasury complex did. What did you learn? * I have no idea how Wall Street's rank-and-file can function without access to social media, it's getting embarrassing that they have to pretend they're not using it. On the twitters, we noticed the commotion, the market's reaction to it and the debunking of it before the news anchors could even be rushed into makeup. Maybe they'll read about it in the newspaper tomorrow. * The fact that the bots shut themselves down is another reminder that the liquidity they provide is bullshit liquidity than no one really needs. As it's been phrased before, they provide a glass of water in a monsoon, but when you really need them to absorb sell orders, they're on the sideline, buffering. It's a joke. Anyway, I'll add relevant links here as I come across them. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Wed Apr 24 21:29:37 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:29:37 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - U.S. gives big, secret push to Internet surveillance Message-ID: <6AF618FF-37D2-4BEC-9BF5-B461600A9D6F@infowarrior.org> U.S. gives big, secret push to Internet surveillance Justice Department agreed to issue "2511 letters" immunizing AT&T and other companies participating in a cybersecurity program from criminal prosecution under the Wiretap Act, according to new documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. by Declan McCullagh April 24, 2013 8:59 AM PDT Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws. The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors' Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12. "The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained over 1,000 pages of internal government documents and provided them to CNET this week. "Alarm bells should be going off." Those documents show the National Security Agency and the Defense Department were deeply involved in pressing for the secret legal authorization, with NSA director Keith Alexander participating in some of the discussions personally. Despite initial reservations, including from industry participants, Justice Department attorneys eventually signed off on the project. The Justice Department agreed to grant legal immunity to the participating network providers in the form of what participants in the confidential discussions refer to as "2511 letters," a reference to the Wiretap Act codified at 18 USC 2511 in the federal statute books. The Wiretap Act limits the ability of Internet providers to eavesdrop on network traffic except when monitoring is a "necessary incident" to providing the service or it takes place with a user's "lawful consent." An industry representative told CNET the 2511 letters provided legal immunity to the providers by agreeing not to prosecute for criminal violations of the Wiretap Act. It's not clear how many 2511 letters were issued by the Justice Department. In 2011, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn publicly disclosed the existence of the original project, called the DIB Cyber Pilot, which used login banners to inform network users that monitoring was taking place. In May 2012, the pilot was turned into an ongoing program -- broader but still voluntary -- by the name of Joint Cybersecurity Services Pilot, with the Department of Homeland Security becoming involved for the first time. It was renamed again to Enhanced Cybersecurity Services program in January, and is currently being expanded to all types of companies operating critical infrastructure. The NSA and DOJ declined to comment. Homeland Security spokesman Sy Lee sent CNET a statement saying: < - big snip > http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57581161-38/u.s-gives-big-secret-push-to-internet-surveillance/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 25 07:59:42 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:59:42 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - US ambassador Jeffrey Bleich pleads: Australia, stop pirating Game of Thrones Message-ID: US ambassador Jeffrey Bleich pleads: Australia, stop pirating Game of Thrones ? By Daniel Piotrowski ? news.com.au ? April 25, 2013 12:19PM http://www.news.com.au/technology/us-ambassador-jeffrey-bleich-pleads-australia-stop-pirating-game-of-thrones/story-e6frfro0-1226629324212#ixzz2RTDrVcig THE top US official in Australia has taken the extraordinary step of pleading with us to stop pirating Game of Thrones. Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich - who confesses to being a fan of the 'great epic' - says he is troubled with news we're one of the world's biggest pirates of the HBO fantasy series. "Unfortunately, nearly as epic and devious as the drama, is its unprecedented theft by online viewers around the world," Mr Bleich wrote in a Facebook post. "As the Ambassador here in Australia, it was especially troubling to find out that Australian fans were some of the worst offenders with among the highest piracy rates of Game of Thrones in the world." He added that Australians can no longer use the excuse of the time delay between the series broadcast in the US and Australia to steal episodes. "While some people here used to claim that they used pirate sites only because of a delay in getting new episodes here, the show is now available from legitimate sources within hours of its broadcast in the United States," Mr Bleich wrote. Parents of young fans who refuse to pay for a subscription, or issues with copyright law are not valid excuses either, he said. "None of those reasons is an excuse - stealing is stealing." Downloading content illegally is not a victimless crime, he said, as artists like the Game of Thrones crew can only do their work if they can be paid for it. If the four million people who watch Game of Thrones legally had been illegal downloaders, Mr Bleich writes, the latest hit season would never have been made. "Buying a book in store costs more and takes longer than stealing it from your neighbour's house, but we all know it is the right thing to do and allows authors to make a living and write more books," Mr Bleich argued. The series is understood to be one of the most expensive currently broadcast on television, with E! reporting the series costs around $6 million per episode. One episode was illegally downloaded over four million times in 2012 according to BitTorrent trackers. That's the same number as the amount of people who watched it on TV. Episodes are filmed on location in countries such as Malta, Iceland, Croatia and Morocco. More than one million viewers illegally downloaded the debut episode of the third season, which went to air in the US on March 31 this year. Ambassador Bleich was appointed US Ambassador to Australia by President Obama in November 2009. Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/us-ambassador-jeffrey-bleich-pleads-australia-stop-pirating-game-of-thrones/story-e6frfro0-1226629324212#ixzz2RTnO82cc --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 25 10:23:03 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:23:03 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Nick_Clegg_=91Kills_Off_Snooper?= =?windows-1252?q?=92s_Charter=92?= Message-ID: Nick Clegg ?Kills Off Snooper?s Charter? http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/nick-clegg-kills-off-snoopers-charter-114390 Over the Liberal Democrats? dead body, says Clegg Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has promised to stop the Communications Data Bill, which would give the police greater access to personal communications data. Clegg pledged that the so-called ?Snooper?s Charter? will not reach Parliament as long as the Liberal Democrats are in government. Clegg made the comments during an interview on LBC radio this morning, saying: ?What people dub the Snooper?s Charter, that?s not going to happen ? certainly with Lib Dems in government.? The bill, which is currently in draft form but was expected to appear in the Queen?s Speech on 8 May, would have let the government order communications providers, including the likes of Facebook and Skype, to store information on all citizens so law enforcement could easily access it. It would provide a filter to police, allowing them to easily search through comms data, which does not include the content of messages, but the who, when and from where. The aim was to modernise policing laws to bring them in line with the current quality of comms technology. Is Snooper?s Charter dead? The Bill has faced massive opposition from some within government, privacy advocacy spheres and in the tech industry. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was a particularly vocal opponent, pointing out that the cost of the bill, estimated to reach at least ?1.8 billion, was considerably more than the government had spent on fostering an exciting start-up community around London?s Tech City. Some said that Britain?s start-ups would have their growth stunted if businesses were asked to store vast records of communications. Others criticsed the Bill on practical grounds, pointing out how easy it is to maintain anonymity on the Internet. Privacy advocates and Liberal Democrat MPs are hailing Clegg?s comments as a victory, even though the Home Office is yet to comment on the matter. But being deputy prime minister, Clegg sees all bills before they become official and has vetoing power. Theresa May said earlier this month the Home Office had taken the recommendations of the committee scrutinising the bill on board. She said it was in the process of redrafting the proposals, but that may now be to no avail. ?These Labour and Conservative efforts to have all of our web records stored and monitored by the government was an affront to basic liberty. The plans were based on patchy evidence, ignorance of modern technology and a complete disregard for our basic rights,? wrote Julian Huppert MP, who was on the committee scrutinising the draft bill. ?Put simply, they were anathema to our Party: the only British political party which is dedicated to protecting the rights of every citizen. ?This is truly an immense moment for any liberal, and every Liberal Democrat.? Earlier this week, privacy groups wrote to ISPs, accusing them of colluding with the government in a ?conspiracy of silence?over the Snooper?s Charter. Big Brother Watch, Privacy International and the Open Rights Group claimed customers were being betrayed, as they had not been asked whether they agreed to have their communications data collected. ?Recording the websites we look at and who we email would not have made us safer, as some of the country?s leading cyber security academics argued this week,? Big Brother Watch wrote. ?It would have made Britain a less attractive place to start a company and put British companies in the position of being paid by the government to spy on their customers, something that oppressive regimes around the world would have quickly copied.? The Home Office told TechWeek it would not comment on the matter as the bill was still being worked on. If the bill is dead, questions will likely be asked why the government has already spent ?400 million in laying the groundwork for the law, which may now never make it to the Queen?s Speech. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 25 10:42:02 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:42:02 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Senate committee passes ECPA bill to increase email privacy, full floor vote next Message-ID: <712888A4-8487-4041-B84B-2C6E09263565@infowarrior.org> Senate committee passes ECPA bill to increase email privacy, full floor vote next By Carl Franzen on April 25, 2013 11:00 am http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/25/4265102/senate-judiciary-passes-privacy-bill-ecpa-2013 A bipartisan Senate committee just voted unanimously to advance a privacy reform bill that would tighten the restrictions on how the government and law enforcement can access user email and other electronic messages in investigations. Called the ECPA Amendments Act, the bill would modify the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require government and law enforcement agencies to get a warrant for all types of electronic communications regardless of whether or not they had been read by the user, and no matter how old they are. Requires a warrant for all electronic communications, regardless of age or read status Previously, ECPA allowed access of user communications without a warrant if they had been marked "read," or opened, or if they were older than 180 days (about six months), at which point the government considered them abandoned. In both of those cases, only a less-strict subpoena was required to read user email as part of an investigation. Cloud-based companies including Google and web user advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have long called for the law to be changed given that many people now store most of their communication online, including older communication, saying that it made little sense to treat this information differently based on date or "read" status. The bill still has a long way to go toward passage: the full 100-member Senate needs to vote in favor of it first, then the House needs to introduce their own identical or similar bill and pass that. Then, the final bill must go to the President's desk for signing. Still, today's move is big victory for ECPA backers and supporters, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who first introduced the bill a year ago only to see it get advanced by the committee, then left behind as the Senate moved on with more pressing topics ? like amending video privacy laws to allow Netflix to legally launch full social integration earlier this year. We'll see if the ECA Amendments Act gets further this year, now that the calls from advocates and companies to reform email privacy law are intensifying. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 25 10:42:24 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:42:24 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Very OT: More Congressional hypocracy in the works Message-ID: <80E7AA26-BB86-4320-99BC-C2909C50FD14@infowarrior.org> Lawmakers, aides may get Obamacare exemption By: John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman April 24, 2013 09:49 PM EDT Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama?s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said. The talks ? which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers ? are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said. A source close to the talks says: ?Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.? Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.... < - big snip - > http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=E5B9A6D9-C3EF-4213-82B4-A8399626A148 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Thu Apr 25 15:37:46 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:37:46 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - CISPA Is Dead (For Now) Message-ID: CISPA Is Dead (For Now) The Senate will not take up the controversial cybersecurity bill, is drafting separate legislation By Jason Koebler April 25, 2013 http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/25/aclu-cispa-is-dead-for-now?page=2 CISPA is all but dead, again. The controversial cybersecurity bill known as the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives last week, will almost certainly be shelved by the Senate, according to a representative of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The bill would have allowed the federal government to share classified "cyber threat" information with companies, but it also provided provisions that would have allowed companies to share information about specific users with the government. Privacy advocates also worried that the National Security Administration would have gotten involved. "We're not taking [CISPA] up," the committee representative says. "Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we're going to strengthen cybersecurity. They'll be drafting separate bills." Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., chairman of the committee, said the passage of CISPA was "important," but said the bill's "privacy protections are insufficient." That, coupled with the fact that President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill, has even CISPA's staunchest opponents, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, ready to bury CISPA and focus on future legislation. "I think it's dead for now," says Michelle Richardson, legislative council with the ACLU. "CISPA is too controversial, it's too expansive, it's just not the same sort of program contemplated by the Senate last year. We're pleased to hear the Senate will probably pick up where it left off last year." That's not to say Congress won't pass any cybersecurity legislation this year. Both Rockefeller and President Obama want to give American companies additional tools to fight back against cyberattacks from domestic and foreign hackers. But cybersecurity legislation in the Senate, such as the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act of 2013, has greater privacy protections than CISPA does. Richardson says that bill makes it clear that companies would have to "pull out sensitive data [about citizens]" before companies send it to the government and also puts the program under "unequivocal civilian control," something CISPA author Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., was unwilling to do. Even if the Senate gets something done, Rogers and other CISPA supporters will likely have to compromise more than they've been willing to over the past year as Obama has made it clear he will veto legislation that doesn't have more privacy protections. "The way [Rogers] talks, [the House] has gone as far as they possibly can on privacy," Richardson says. "I don't know if that's true and I'm not sure how they'll respond when the Senate puts something back to them. But if they don't figure out a compromise, they might not get any legislation at all." The commerce representative says that the Senate committee is "working toward separate bills" to improve cybersecurity, which are currently being drafted. But don't expect these bills soon, as the Senate considers immigration, an Internet sales tax, the aftermath of the Boston bombing and the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control crisis in the wake of sequestration. Richardson says she thinks it'll be at least three months before the Senate takes a vote on any cybersecurity legislation. "We need to be vigilant as the year moves on to make sure that whatever the next product is, it's not CISPA-lite," she says. "I think this is probably going to take the rest of the year." --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 26 07:43:05 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:43:05 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Classy Defense Contractors Are Already Looking to Cash In on Boston Message-ID: <26417420-8607-4A8C-B8A3-2601F7639D61@infowarrior.org> These Classy Defense Contractors Are Already Looking to Cash In on Boston ? By Noah Shachtman ? 04.26.13 http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/classy-contractors-boston-cash/ A memorial for the Boston Marathon victims. Photo: Vjeran Pavic/Flickr The newly-limbless victims from the Boston Marathon attack are still being treated, and the alleged bomber has only been in custody for a few days. But for a handful of defense and intelligence contractors, it?s never too early to start pimping their products as the solution to the next terrorist strike. ?The Boston Marathon bombing has proven the need for real time video and data analysis from all types of cameras, including user mobile devices, surveillance cameras, and network footage,? Chris Carmichael, CEO of Ubiquity Broadcasting Corporation, says in a press release. As it happens, his company offers an intelligent video system that does just that. Piggybacking on big events a long-standing trick of the PR trade. It?s a way to garner attention for products that might ordinarily get ignored. So dress-makers jump on the Oscars. Social media monitors issue ?analysis? of Twitter?s reaction to the Presidential debates. And the night after the Boston bombings, an explosive detection outfit called Implant Sciences emailed reporters to say that its ?quantum sniffer? was the kind of ?technology needed to prevent attacks like this? It is the most sensitive detection system ever created and it can save lives.? Not to be outdone, a publicist from a facial recognition firm, FaceFirst, boasted to reporters a few days later that ?this technology can identify individuals with prior arrests, terrorists and persons of interest in a matter of seconds.? He also sighed that ?the last few month [sic] have been pretty hectic for due to the use of face recognition in the finding of the Boston Marathon Bombers and other high profile cases.? One small problem: facial recognition wasn?t used to catch Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the accused attackers. Thankfully, some of the companies boasting of their roles in the bombing response actually did help in that response. During its quarterly earnings call this week, iRobot CEO Colin Angle was happy to let reporters know that, yes, one of the firm?s PackBot machines certainly was used to investigate a car driven by one of the bombing suspects. ?The company?s response to the Boston Marathon bombings continues a long tradition of iRobot?s responsiveness in a time of crisis and speaks to our values and commitment as an organization,? he crowed. The Emergency Communications Network firm not-so-humble bragged in a statement that ?on Monday alone, more than 228,000 calls, tens of thousands of texts and emails, in addition to 700 CodeRED Mobile Alert app notifications kept citizens informed of critical public safety messages specific to their areas? On Tuesday, ECN client Massachusetts Institute of Technology used the CodeRED system to notify students, faculty and staff of a suspicious package on campus. More than 20,000 calls were launched in 11 minutes and 18,000 text messages were sent in three minutes, allowing MIT to proactively communicate with their campus community during a time of heightened awareness and vigilance.? Others trying to ride the attack?s media wave had, at best, tangential connections to the tragedy. A front group set up by outdoor advertising companies to promote billboards in Los Angeles decided that the bombing was a perfect excuse to renew its call for digital signs alongside L.A.?s freeways. An anti-Islam outfit pounced on the attack to demand that Muslims be stripped of their Constitutional rights. And when the news broke that bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev purchased hundreds of dollars? worth of fireworks, the American Pyrotechnics Association quickly issued a statement defending its industry. ?Could these consumer fireworks devices be used to produce a pipe bomb or pressure cooker bomb like the bombs involved at the Boston marathon? Perhaps; however, it would take a significant volume of these small aerial shells to extract the volume of chemicals necessary to create a significant blast,? reads the press release. ?Contrary to media reports, consumer fireworks have rarely been used in such destructive activities.? Book publishers were also quick turn the awful attack that left three people dead into a marketing opportunity. ?This terrorist event left millions of citizens concerned about their family?s personal safety and wondering what they should do to plan and protect themselves,? notes one press release. ?Those answers are at your fingertips,? said Rob Stern, principal of Defense Research LLC, developer of the ?Citizens? Emergency Response Guide.? ?Can the reasons for the Boston Marathon bombing be understood by reading a 39 page book?? asks another press release, this one from a publisher hawking a novel from some guy named Morris Matthews.? Revered by America?s traveling carnival community, he brings a blend of ancient Ayurvedic wisdom and ?Middle American? horse sense to his writings. If only he had used that horse sense to stop this press release before it was issued. ? with Spencer Ackerman --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 26 08:15:36 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:15:36 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Military Grooms New Officers For War In Cyberspace Message-ID: <6A1F290B-CCFB-42C1-9C39-9A9C523B1C3A@infowarrior.org> Military Grooms New Officers For War In Cyberspace By Dan Elliott and Brian Witte, Associated Press http://news.yahoo.com/military-grooms-officers-war-cyberspace-083354456.html AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo.--The U.S. service academies are ramping up efforts to groom a new breed of cyberspace warriors to confront increasing threats to the nation's military and civilian computer networks that control everything from electrical power grids to the banking system. Students at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies are taking more courses and participating in elaborate cyberwarfare exercises as the military educates a generation of future commanders in the theory and practice of computer warfare. The academies have been training cadets in cyber for more than a decade. But the effort has taken on new urgency amid warnings that hostile nations or organizations might be capable of crippling attacks on critical networks. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, called cyberattack the top threat to national security when he presented the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment to Congress this month. "Threats are more diverse, interconnected, and viral than at any time in history," his report stated. "Destruction can be invisible, latent, and progressive." China-based hackers have long been accused of cyber intrusions, and earlier this year the cybersecurity firm Mandiant released a report with new details allegedly linking a secret Chinese military unit to years of cyberattacks against U.S. companies. This year, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post all reported breaches in their computer systems and said they suspected Chinese hackers. China denies carrying out cyberattacks. On Tuesday, hackers compromised Associated Press Twitter accounts and sent out a false tweet. AP quickly put out word that the report was false and that its accounts had been hacked. AP's accounts were shut down until the problem was corrected. Once viewed as an obscure and even nerdy pursuit, cyber is now seen as one of the hottest fields in warfare ? "a great career field in the future," said Ryan Zacher, a junior at the Air Force Academy outside Colorado Springs, Colo., who switched from aeronautical engineering to computer science. Last year the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., began requiring freshmen to take a semester on cybersecurity, and it is adding a second required cyber course for juniors next year. The school offered a major in cyber operations for the first time this year to the freshman class, and 33 midshipmen, or about 3 percent of the freshmen, signed up for it. Another 79 are majoring in computer engineering, information technology or computer science, bringing majors with a computer emphasis to about 10 percent of the class. "There's a great deal of interest, much more than we could possibly, initially, entertain," said the academy's superintendent, Vice Adm. Michael Miller. Since 2004, the Air Force Academy has offered a degree in computer science-cyberwarfare ? initially called computer science-information assurance ? that requires cadets to take courses in cryptology, information warfare and network security in addition to standard computer science. The academy is retooling a freshman computing course so that more than half its content is about cyberspace, and is looking into adding another cyber course. "All of these cadets know that they are going to be on the front lines defending the nation in cyber," said Martin Carlisle, a computer science professor at the Air Force Academy and director of the school's Center for Cyberspace Research. About 25 Air Force cadets will graduate this year with the computer science-cyberwarfare degree, and many will go on to advanced studies and work in their service's cyber headquarters or for U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Md., the Defense Department command responsible for defensive and offensive cyberwarfare. Almost every Army cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., takes two technology courses related to such topics as computer security and privacy. West Point also offers other cyber courses, and a computer security group meets weekly. One of the biggest cybersecurity challenges is keeping up with the head-spinning pace of change in the field. "You know American history is pretty much the same" every year, said Lt. Col. David Raymond, who teaches a cybersecurity course. "In this domain, it's really tough to keep up with how this thing evolves." In his congressional report, Clapper noted that the chance of a major attack by Russia, China or another nation with advanced cyber skills is remote outside a military conflict ? but that other nations or groups could launch less sophisticated cyberattacks in hopes of provoking the United States or in retaliation for U.S. actions or policies overseas. South Korea accused North Korea of mounting a cyberattack in March that shut down thousands of computers at banks and television broadcasters. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command, told Congress in March the command is creating teams to carry out both offensive and defensive operations. A spokesman said the command is drawing cyber officers from the service academies, officer schools and Reserve Officer Training Corps programs. Teams from the three academies compete in events such as last week's National Security Agency Cyber Defense Exercise, in which they try to keep simulated computer networks running as an NSA "aggressor team" attacks. Teams from the U.S. Coast Guard and Merchant Marine academies also took part, along with graduate students from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and Canada's Royal Military College. Air Force won among undergraduate schools. The Royal Military College won among graduate schools. That hands-on experience is invaluable, said 2nd Lt. Jordan Keefer, a 2012 Air Force Academy graduate now pursuing a master's degree in cyberoperations at the Air Force Institute of Technology. "You can't just go out there and start hacking. That's against the law," he said. The competitions, he said, "gave me actual experience defending a network, attacking a network." Counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, noting that really high-level computer skills are rare, suggested the military might have to re-examine some of its recruiting standards to attract the most adept cyberwarriors. "Hackers are the 1 percent, the elite and the creators," said Clarke, who served as White House cybersecurity adviser during the Clinton administration. "I wouldn't worry a whole heck of a lot (about whether they) can they run fast or lift weights." Cyber's appeal was enough to get Keefer to put aside his dream of becoming a fighter pilot, a job with undeniable swagger. "It's a challenge, and for people who like a challenge, it's the only place to be," Keefer said. Witte reported from Annapolis, Md. Associated Press Writer Michael Hill in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 26 12:33:54 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:33:54 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - NYPD Commissioner, a threat to freedom Message-ID: Saying Privacy Is 'Off the Table,' NYC Police Commissioner Demands More Surveillance Cameras J.D. Tuccille|Apr. 25, 2013 7:55 pm From the Department of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste comes word that New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly thinks that now is a great time to install even more surveillance cameras hither and yon around the Big Apple. After the Boston Marathon bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers were famously captured on security camera footage and thereby identified. That just may soften up Americans to the idea of the all-seeing glass eye. "I think the privacy issue has really been taken off the table," Kelly gloats. < - > http://reason.com/blog/2013/04/25/saying-privacy-is-off-the-table-nyc-poli --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 26 13:31:07 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:31:07 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - WH backs off mandatory cybersecurity standards for companies Message-ID: White House backs off mandatory cybersecurity standards for companies By Ellen Nakashima http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-shift-white-house-favors-incentives-for-optional-cybersecurity-measures-for-companies/2013/04/26/05193194-adad-11e2-98ef-d1072ed3cc27_print.html The White House has backed away from its push for mandatory cybersecurity standards in favor of an approach that would combine voluntary measures with incentives for companies to comply with them. That approach reflects recognition of the political reality of a divided Congress that makes mandated standards difficult to push through, and a belief that an executive order President Obama signed in February could improve companies? cybersecurity. ?This is a huge focus for my office right now ? driving forward and staying on track with the executive order,? White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel said in an interview this week. Obama issued the order after a failed effort to pass legislation to ensure that critical private sector computer systems met security standards. The bill died last year in the face of stiff opposition from industry, in particular the Chamber of Commerce. The order directed the Commerce Department?s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to lead a process in which critical industry sectors and the government jointly develop a set of standards to enhance the companies? cybersecurity. ?The most important thing right now is making that framework truly industry-led, truly a collaborative product, and truly something that is useful to companies,? Daniel said. A preliminary framework is due in October, and a final version next February. The White House?s focus now ?is more about having discussions with Congress about the right incentives we could put in place to encourage the adoption of the framework,? a senior administration official said. A range of possibilities exist, including tax breaks and immunity from lawsuits for failing to protect systems. The administration still wants cyber legislation, the official said, but that means creating incentives to meet voluntary standards, revised procedures for government cybersecurity, and the removal of barriers to the sharing of cyberthreat data between industry and government. The sharing of cyberthreat data is controversial because of concerns that doing so with noncivilian government agencies would risk a violation of privacy rights. The White House has threatened to veto a House data-sharing bill if its privacy protections are not strengthened. But the official said that threat does not mean the administration is averse to information sharing or working with the GOP-led House. ?That?s a misinterpretation of the veto threat,? he said. The official said he believes the Congress can pass a bill that Obama will sign. ?I do actually see an opportunity here to get acceptable legislation,? he said. Backing off the mandate, said Eric Chapman, associate director of the University of Maryland?s Cybersecurity Center, is a recognition of the ?political realities that mandatory standards face on Capitol Hill: unlikely and unrealistic. Voluntary is politically more feasible, period.? Jacob Olcott, a cyber policy expert at Good Harbor Consulting, said he still believes there will be advocates for mandating standards by particular sector, such as energy or telecommunications. But he concedes that the White House-backed legislative proposal that envisioned the Department of Homeland Security ?as uber regulator? is dead. ? 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 Apr 26 13:37:09 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:37:09 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - NatSec Archive on Cyberwarfare Released Message-ID: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 424 Posted ? April 26, 2013 Edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Fri Apr 26 13:38:27 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:38:27 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - SCO's Motion To Reopen the Case Is Denied with a Bonk on the Head ~pj Updated Message-ID: <828423BD-1D34-4E9B-9FD8-659C8F664D57@infowarrior.org> (c/o dg) SCO's Motion To Reopen the Case Is Denied with a Bonk on the Head ~pj Updated http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130425204940852 --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 27 08:38:07 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:38:07 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - If Everything Is A Threat, Then Nothing Is Message-ID: <74C2D88E-D132-48C1-A9F3-5E700B02A195@infowarrior.org> If Everything Is A Threat, Then Nothing Is http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130416/16513122731/if-everything-is-threat-then-nothing-is.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 27 08:38:15 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:38:15 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Here=92s_a_Good_Reason_to_Encryp?= =?windows-1252?q?t_Your_Data?= Message-ID: Here?s a Good Reason to Encrypt Your Data ? By David Kravets ? 04.23.13 ? 6:29 PM There?s many reasons to password-protect ? or encrypt ? one?s digital data. Foremost among them is to protect it during a security breach. Another top reason is to keep the government out of your hard drive. The issue is front and center as a federal magistrate is refusing to order a Wisconsin computer scientist to decrypt his data that the authorities seized from kiddie-porn suspect Jeffrey Feldman. The reason is simple: The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination protects even those suspected of unsavory crimes, according to U.S. Magistrate William Callahan Jr. of Wisconsin, who wrote: "This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman?s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with ?reasonably particularity??namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices. Accordingly, in my opinion, Fifth Amendment protection is available to Feldman. Stated another way, ordering Feldman to decrypt the storage devices would be in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. (.pdf)" < - > http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/encrypt-your-data/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sat Apr 27 08:38:21 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:38:21 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - 'Homeland' spending: Bigger than TARP and the New Deal Message-ID: <8C6EF350-1BE0-4BED-A45A-99B0491F0196@infowarrior.org> The great surveillance boom April 26, 2013: 4:56 PM ET By Keith Proctor http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/26/video-surveillance-boston-bombings/ FORTUNE -- Video surveillance is big business. Expect it to get bigger. After law enforcement used closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras to help identify last week's Boston bombing suspects, lawmakers and surveillance advocates renewed calls for increased numbers of cameras nationwide. "We need more cameras, and we need them now," ran a Slate headline. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) agrees. In an interview the day after the bombings with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, he called for more video surveillance so that we can "stay ahead of the terrorists." "So yes, I do favor more cameras," said King, who sits on the U.S. House Homeland Security and Intelligence committees and has also called for increased monitoring of Muslim Americans. "They're a great law enforcement method and device. And again, it keeps us ahead of the terrorists, who are constantly trying to kill us." Law enforcement officials in New York are almost certain to oblige. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly wants to "increase significantly" the amount of surveillance equipment in Manhattan, which already has one of the country's most robust systems. The argument for greater surveillance is straightforward. Horrible events in places like Boston remind us that we're vulnerable. The best way to limit events like last week's bombings, the argument goes, is to accept 24-hour surveillance in public spaces. And when you see someone maimed by bomb shrapnel, privacy concerns sound coldly abstract. No amount of security can completely eliminate risk, so it's difficult to know where to draw the line. Are 10,000 cameras really twice as good as 5,000? In tragedy's aftermath, it can be tough to have a serious conversation about how much to invest. But when the goal is to push risk as close to zero as possible, spending can asymptotically stretch into infinity. Bigger than TARP and the New Deal The U.S. is no stranger to this dilemma. In response to security concerns after 9/11, Americans witnessed the growth of a massive domestic security apparatus, fueled by federal largesse. According to Tomdispatch's Mattea Kramer and Chris Heilman, post-9/11 federal spending on homeland security exceeds $790 billion. That's larger than TARP and, when adjusted for inflation, the New Deal. Exactly how much the U.S. has spent on domestic surveillance is murky. Municipalities aren't particularly keen on sharing how many cameras they've installed. And homeland security grant funding, in many cases, does not require a line-item accounting of how cities have used federal funds. Nevertheless, U.S. investment has helped fuel the growth of a global video surveillance industry. According to a 2011 report by Electronics.ca Publications, a market research firm, the video surveillance market was slated to grow from $11.5 billion in 2008 to $37.5 billion in 2015. The post-9/11 investment legacy is apparent in the near-ubiquitous presence of law enforcement CCTV cameras. For instance, New York City has more than 4,000 cameras in Manhattan alone, according to the ACLU. Chicago's linked public and private security cameras number around 10,000. But based on international comparisons, there's still a lot of room for U.S. surveillance to grow. In London -- the Xanadu of winking, digital eyes -- surveillance cameras total an estimated half-million. In recent years, however, the spigot of U.S. federal funding for state and local security has tightened. Homeland security grants earmarked for states dropped from $2 billion in 2003 to $294 million last year. With federal budget sequestration coming into effect, those funds may be further squeezed. Rep. King fretted at the lack of federal commitment. The war against terror is not over, he told MSNBC. "And it's foolhardy to be making cuts in Homeland Security...." Critics say too much of the money has been directed to small states and that grant programs lack suitable oversight. Too much money, they say, has been frittered away. Indeed, in the years after 9/11, some expenditures were spectacularly brainless. An Indiana county used its $300,000 Electronic Emergency Message Boards -- to be used solely to alert the community of, you know, emergencies -- to advertise the volunteer fire department's fish fry. Western Michigan counties used homeland security dollars to purchase 13 $900 Sno-Cone machines. Plenty of eyes. What about brains? Waste aside, the question is whether surveillance investment can actually make Americans safer. When the Boston bombing suspects appeared on CCTV footage, some commentators saw it as evidence of the value of dense surveillance. Except Boston is not a heavily surveiled city. Compared to New York or Chicago, it's a fly-weight, and lacks the centralized, government-coordinated surveillance systems of other urban areas. As detailed in a December 2011 report released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts, there are at least 55 law-enforcement cameras in Boston, 92 in surrounding cities, and approximately 600 in the metro system. Last year, Massachusetts received only $4 million in state homeland security grants. In per capita terms, it ranked 34th in the country in homeland security grant spending. Yet in the aftermath of the Marathon bombings, residents and law enforcement responded valiantly. A range of surveillance methods were used: public and private CCTV cameras, cell phone cameras, eye witnesses. The suspects were quickly identified, and killed or apprehended. If Boston had twice as many cameras, or 10 times as many, would the suspects have been identified more quickly? Would a larger, more centralized surveillance system have deterred them? Perhaps most importantly, would law enforcement have been able to prevent the bombs from going off in the first place? According to critics of surveillance, cameras aid investigation and apprehension in the aftermath, not the prevention, of acts of terrorism. In London, which Rudy Giuliani called the "Hollywood studio" of surveillance, cameras played an instrumental role in quickly identifying the 7/7 bombers. Sadly, it was only after the fact. "What we saw in Boston largely confirmed what we already knew," said Ben Wizner, Director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. "Cameras are ineffective at the prevention and deterrence of serious crime. They can be very effective at solving crime." 'Minority Report,' here we come Advocates of surveillance point to advancements in technology as proof that cameras will, in the future, enhance response and assist prevention. Leaders of video surveillance -- companies like Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Northrop Grumman (NOC) -- are shifting the industry from analog to digital, and into the uncanny, science-fiction realm of smart cameras. The future of surveillance is "video analytics," where computers will automatically analyze camera feeds to count people, register temperature changes, and, via statistical algorithms, identify suspicious behavior. No technicians required. Up to this point, surveillance has been limited by personnel: for surveillance to be useful in real-time, someone has to keep an eye on all those CCTV feeds. And there's growing demand. A ReportsNReports analysis estimated the size of the smart surveillance and video analytics global market at $13.5 billion in 2012; it's expected to reach $39 billion by 2020. The promise of video analytics has been oversold in the past. And yet the move toward increasingly elaborate -- and concentrated -- urban surveillance seems inevitable. Don't expect much public opposition, either. While American aversion to the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) blunted efforts to employ surveillance drones domestically, Americans seem less bothered by security cameras. They haven't been used as high-profile tools to kill foreigners on the other side of the world. Domestic drone use feels like the government is pointing its weapons at us. Cameras are permissible because they're banal. And, in fact, they're already here. By the thousands. There will be thousands more. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Sun Apr 28 13:13:39 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:13:39 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Cyber vulnerabilities found in Navy's newest warship: official Message-ID: <850E0EA1-BFBB-4963-98B1-2A007CC45A75@infowarrior.org> (Excuse me while I flash back to the USS Yorktown circa 1998. --rick) Cyber vulnerabilities found in Navy's newest warship: official By Andrea Shalal-Esa WASHINGTON | Tue Apr 23, 2013 11:10pm EDT http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/24/us-usa-cybersecurity-ship-idUSBRE93N02X20130424 (Reuters) - The computer network on the U.S. Navy's newest class of coastal warships showed vulnerabilities in Navy cybersecurity tests, but the issues were not severe enough to prevent an eight-month deployment to Singapore, a Navy official said on Tuesday. A Navy team of computer hacking experts found some deficiencies when assigned to try to penetrate the network of the USS Freedom, the lead vessel in the $37 billion Littoral Combat Ship program, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Freedom arrived in Singapore last week for an eight-month stay, which its builder, Lockheed Martin Corp., hopes will stimulate Asian demand for the fast, agile and stealthy ships. "We do these types of inspections across the fleet to find individual vulnerabilities, as well as fleet-wide trends," said the official. Cybersecurity is a major priority for the Navy, which relies heavily on communications and satellite networks for its weapons systems and situational awareness. Defense Department spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said the Pentagon's chief weapons test agency addressed "information assurance vulnerabilities" for the Littoral Combat Ship in an assessment provided to the Navy. "The details of that assessment are classified," Elzea said. Lockheed spokesman Keith Little said the company was working with the Navy to ensure that USS Freedom's networks were secure during the deployment. The Navy plans to buy 52 of the new LCS warships in coming years, including some of Lockheed's steel monohull design and some of an aluminum-hulled LCS trimaran design built by Australia's Austal. The ships are designed for combat and other missions in shallower waters close to shore. Freedom's first operational deployment was in the Caribbean Sea in 2010, where the ship participated in four drug transport busts and captured a total of five tons of cocaine. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Additional reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Eric Beech and Stephen Coates) --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 29 17:11:55 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:11:55 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - =?windows-1252?q?Congress_tries_to_reset_science_?= =?windows-1252?q?grants=2C_wants_every_one_to_be_=93groundbreaking=94?= Message-ID: <062E8DAA-04DC-46D6-949D-A3BA0E20B656@infowarrior.org> Congress tries to reset science grants, wants every one to be ?groundbreaking? If lawmakers get their way, research like recent Higgs findings could disappear. by John Timmer - Apr 29 2013, 4:45pm EDT http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/congress-tries-to-reset-science-grants-wants-every-one-to-be-groundbreaking/ Due to Congressional rules, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology had to choose new leadership this year. At the time, we opined that almost any choice would be a bad one. The Democrats had been neglecting the committee, leaving three seats unfilled, while the Republicans filled their seats with people who were openly hostile to a number of fields of science such as evolution and climate research. Late last year, the House leadership made its intentions clear, attempting to crowdsource a search for federal research grants that people considered wasteful spending. Now, Congress is following through on that effort. Earlier this month, the House committee held hearings that featured the National Science Foundation (NSF) director and the chair of the board that oversees the science agency. Again, grants made to social scientists were held up as examples of wasteful spending. The committee's new chair, Lamar Smith (R-TX), used these to suggest that "[w]e might be able to improve the process by which NSF makes its funding decisions." Rather than targeting only grants in the social sciences, Smith is reportedly preparing a bill that would revise the criteria for all grants funded by the agency. According to ScienceInsider, the bill would require the NSF director to certify that every grant met the following conditions: ? The grant must "advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and... secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science" ? It must also be "the finest quality, groundbreaking, and answer questions or solve problems that are of utmost importance to society at large" ? The grant should not be "duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies" The last of these is a reasonable requirement, but it already exists. Both the NSF and National Institutes of Health have rules that are intended to block new grants that have previously received funding. Mistakes may sometimes get made?it's hard to keep track of who's being paid to do what across multiple federal agencies?but there's already an effort to limit this. The other two requirements, however, completely misunderstand both basic research and the role of the National Science Foundation. Basic research is largely about exploring the unknown; by definition, it's almost impossible to tell which areas of research will end up being groundbreaking or have commercial applications. And the NSF is specifically tasked with funding basic research and science education. It's informative to contrast these rules with a current example of NSF funding. Prior to last year, the NSF had no idea whether the Higgs boson really existed or whether it would behave like the one predicted by the Standard Model. Yet the foundation put millions of dollars into the Large Hadron Collider and the support infrastructure behind it. So far, the Higgs is looking rather mundane, and it may never have commercial applications or implications for society at large. The bill, as structured, would appear to mean the end of funding for that kind of work. This isn't the only recent example of Congress altering the rules for research, either. Last month, Tom Coburn (R-OK) sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation, in which he listed a series of grants funded by the agency were a waste of taxpayer money. Shortly thereafter, Coburn added an amendment to a funding bill that would block the ability of the NSF to fund political science unless the grant can be certified as "promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." That amendment was passed as part of the budget. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has also come under fire from Congress. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating the large public communication budget given to the National Cancer Institute, and while they had him on the Hill, House members grilled NIH director Francis Collins about a paper by researcher Stanton Glantz. Glantz studies public health and tobacco regulations, often using documents obtained from cigarette makers during lawsuits. In this paper, he concludes that the political infrastructure that helped organize the Tea Party movement was developed originally to oppose tobacco legislation. Needless to say, that did not go over well with the members of that organization within Congress. With the possible exception of the budget allocated to PR and public awareness at the National Cancer Institute, most of these issues come back to an uneasiness about the research itself. People either don't like it or don't understand why peer reviewers rated it so highly, so they assume it is either an error or a waste of money. In this case, their response seems to be to try to intervene in the process of grant approval, something that's normally left to expert peer reviewers. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 29 18:01:27 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:01:27 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Game Dev Tycoon fights piracy with piracy Message-ID: <9F2AA9FD-8613-4354-B3F4-1B7FC1DAE7B2@infowarrior.org> Game Dev Tycoon fights piracy with piracy April 29, 2013 | By Kris Ligman http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/191434/Game_Dev_Tycoon_fights_piracy_with_piracy.php Counter-piracy measures can be a bone of contention among developers and publishers big and small. But indie studio Greenheart Games has come up with an inspired solution to bite back at pirates. When Greenheart Games discovered that more than 90% of its players for its game development sim, Game Dev Tycoon, came by the title illegally, Greenheart responded by seeding its own cracked copy, with a not-so-subtle modification to its code. "Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy," Greenheart's Patrick Klug says. "But instead we didn?t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers." This version of Game Dev Tycoon operates normally for the first few hours of use before undercutting the player's in-game profits. The effect, Greenheart says, is to illustrate the real effect piracy has on a developer's overhead. "If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror." Note: Greenheart Games' website is currently experiencing periodic server outages due to the widespread coverage of this story. The original post can be found here. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 29 18:02:25 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:02:25 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Algorithms Replacing Wall Street Analysts, Investors Message-ID: <6622364F-DEEF-474B-A20D-34EA8FD14B48@infowarrior.org> Algorithms Replacing Wall Street Analysts, Investors Published: Monday, 29 Apr 2013 | 4:29 PM ET By: John Melloy http://www.cnbc.com/id/100685958 Computerized algorithms are quickly replacing single-stock analysts and investors, leading to big changes in the way the stock market will value companies and increasing the chance that software glitches or hack attacks will jeopardize market stability. Technological forces?including high-frequency trading, an explosion in exchange-traded funds and the proliferation of free information via social media?are behind this seismic shift, according to Nicholas Colas of ConvergEx Group. "The changes that started with high-frequency and algorithmic trading are just the first step to an entirely different process of determining stock prices," Colas wrote in a sweeping note to clients Monday. "Will an equity market running on algorithmic autopilot serve to tie the managers of capital (senior executives) to the ultimate owners (shareholders) as robustly as one dominated by flesh-and-blood money managers? It seems a stretch to think so." In other words, we've come a long way from the days of the Buttonwood tree and Benjamin Graham. Get HFT Genie Back In the Bottle: Cuban Computers and decimalization have chipped away at the ranks of human traders in the past decade. Now, smarter machines are taking aim at the very people who analyze a company's merits and who make buying and selling decisions based on that analysis. "I spoke with a high-ranking member of the trading community this weekend," said Michael Murphy of Rosecliff Capital, a fundamentally geared hedge fund. "His large firm sees an end of stock-picking. They see passive, ETF-style investing as the new normal." Exchange-traded funds, which blindly buy whole groups of securities or futures as easy as single stock, have garnered $65 billion of inflows this year alone, while traditional equity mutual funds haven't seen a three-month period of inflows "in years," Colas said. On top of that, layer algorithms executing trades in milliseconds based on complicated fundamental and technical models, and simply front-running people before the human eye can read company or government news releases. This kind of trading accounts for up to 70 percent of volume on some days with the full support of exchanges, which allow the purveyors of this trading to have their servers to be located right next to theirs so the high speed action can take place. "It depends on your time horizon for investment," said Tony Wible, a media stock analyst for research firm Janney Montgomery Scott. "I think the number of permutations gets harder for machines the longer out one goes." Some investors are already throwing up their hands at what they see as a market that is so detached from fundamentals and simply based on computers owned by hedge funds pinging each other back and forth. "There's just no new names, no new energy, no new opportunities, and that's a problem," said Mark Cuban, an avid trader, entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. "That's a reflection of the lack of trust, the fact that we don't know what business the markets are in, and there's so much algorithmic trading and technology-driven trading it's created downstream problems." Earlier this month, The Associated Press' Twitter account was hacked. The anonymous group sent a message styled like a headline that there had been two explosions at the White House. It sent markets reeling for four minutes as some traders say algorithms picked up on the tweet first, or at the very least they started to instantly sell when the market ticked lower. This follows the so-called flash crash in May 2010 that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1,000 points in a matter of moments. The cause of that event is still not totally known, but high-frequency trading certainly played a part, most say. It isn't just machines killing the analyst star. Social media has made keeping information behind a paywall for investment banks virtually impossible. It's also created a community of analysts on Twitter and other social networks (many of them former professionals) giving away their analysis for free. "People that want to be tapped in now follow the right people on Twitter and obviously other networks like Stocktwits which offer communication, context and community," wrote Howard Lindzon, the founder of StockTwits.com, in a blog post. "Everyone is connected, not just the people 'in the know.' Of course with everyone 'holding hands' in this new world, the reactions like the AP hacking will be more volatile and the recoveries that we saw after, just as fast." That could be the happy ending to this story. After a rough transition period, social media eventually reinvigorates fundamental analysis amongst the people, allowing anyone with a computer to capture big followings and become the Peter Lynch of tomorrow. Under this scenario, capital will be guided to its most efficient place through the ultimate free marketplace where the information playing field is level between participants. But this assumes there will be enough homegrown analysts and retail traders to outweigh the incredible boom in electronic trading on Wall Street. This could be an optimistic view. "Can anything change this glide path to an ever more technology-based system of stock analysis?" Colas asked in his note. "I can only think of one: a very large system failure that causes a recession in the U.S." For the best market insight, catch "Fast Money" at 5 p.m. ET, and the "Halftime Report" at 12 noon ET each weekday on CNBC. Follow @CNBCMelloy on Twitter. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 29 18:03:28 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:03:28 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Matt Taibbi on a burgeoning newest and biggest TBTF corruption scandal Message-ID: <55F60197-7AAB-4A0F-9DEC-6A1B7267560D@infowarrior.org> > From: xxxxxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Matt Taibbi on a burgeoning newest and biggest TBTF corruption scandal > Date: April 29, 2013 6:31:34 PM EDT > > http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425 > > I must say that I have no confidence that the government will investigate this and shut it down. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Mon Apr 29 18:47:28 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:47:28 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - USG Overreach on cybercrime actions Message-ID: <800B40F7-6DA4-4DAF-BCC8-AF70B104940A@infowarrior.org> As cyberthreats mount, hacker?s conviction underscores criticism of government overreach By Jerry Markon http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-cyberthreats-mount-hackers-conviction-fuels-critics-claims-of-government-overreach/2013/04/29/d9430e3c-a1f4-11e2-9c03-6952ff305f35_print.html Their guns drawn, a dozen federal agents, police and forensics experts kicked in the door of a run-down two-story home in Arkansas shortly after dawn, barged inside and ordered the occupants to put their hands on their heads. The target of the raid was neither terrorist nor bank robber. He was a 24-year-old computer hacker suspected of handing off stolen e-mail addresses to the media. With that, the Justice Department began a case that has come to symbolize what some lawyers and civil libertarians see as overreach in the government?s campaign against cybercrime. The hacker, Andrew Auernheimer, was convicted and sentenced last month to more than three years in prison for obtaining about 120,000 e-mail addresses of iPad users from AT&T?s Web site ? including New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein and other prominent figures ? and giving them to the Web site Gawker. When it happened three years ago, the data breach jolted federal officials because it affected one of the nation?s most prominent companies and triggered fears about the security of increasingly popular mobile devices. Yet only a few, heavily redacted e-mail addresses were published, court documents show. No one?s account was broken into. AT&T fixed the problem in about an hour, and a company official testified that there probably was not enough evidence to sue the hackers. The case highlights a growing debate over how to define right and wrong in the digital age, what is public and proprietary online, and how far law enforcement should go in pursuing cybercrime. The Obama administration is confronting what it calls a vast cybersecurity threat, and the Justice Department is waging aggressive efforts, including against national security threats such as cyberterrorism and cyber-espionage. But a series of recent cases involving other types of online activity has prompted criticism that the crackdown may also be scooping up minor hackers who may see themselves as political or anti-corporate activists. Among the most prominent is former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys, who was indicted last month on charges of conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to alter an article on the Web site of the Los Angeles Times. Federal authorities have said they suspect that Keys was acting in response to his firing by a Sacramento television station, which like the Los Angeles Times is owned by Tribune Co. Another highly publicized case involved Internet-freedom advocate Aaron Swartz, who campaigned for academic and other information to be freely available online. Swartz killed himself in January while under indictment for allegedly accessing MIT?s computer network to steal more than 4 million scholarly articles. His family accused federal prosecutors of ?prosecutorial overreach? that contributed to his death. Prosecutors initially emphasized that he could face up to 35 years in prison but later disclosed that he was offered a plea deal with a recommended six-month sentence. Justice Department officials said in interviews that their efforts? which involve more than 300 prosecutors nationwide dedicated to cybercrime ? are vital for protecting Americans. They emphasized that deterrence is crucial because some hackers seek to target key infrastructure or steal large volumes of personal information. Orin S. Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor, said the Auernheimer case has vast implications for the emerging frontier of cybersecurity law. ?I don?t think the conduct was criminal,? said Kerr, a George Washington University law professor who is working on Auernheimer?s appeal pro bono. ?At bottom, it was visiting a Web site. If the courts say it can be a crime just to visit a Web site, we?re all in trouble.? In the Auernheimer case, federal prosecutors in New Jersey chose to elevate a misdemeanor computer crime into a more serious felony, though their evidence showed that Auernheimer?s co-conspirator wrote and ran the computer program that obtained the e-mail addresses.Then, prosecutors argued for a much stiffer sentence based in large part on AT&T?s estimated financial loss, though the company did not declare any loss in court filings. Prosecutors said their approach was justified because Auernheimer violated the privacy of thousands of people. They pointed to his extended hacking career, fiery denunciations of the government and lack of remorse. ?You have to ask the question, what would he have done next?? said a Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is under appeal. ?Where would we be if we let this guy go and the next thing he did was take down a network?? ?I make people afraid? The man at the center of the debate is a self-proclaimed Internet ?troll? known by his online handle ?Weev? who has been on the FBI?s radar since he was 15. In words that prosecutors would use against him, Auernheimer told the New York Times in 2008: ?I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money. I make people afraid for their lives.? In a recent telephone interview and in e-mail exchanges through a prison Web site, Auernheimer told The Washington Post that he is a ?political and economic activist? whose motive in the iPad breach was to embarrass AT&T. He called federal agents and prosecutors ?despicable parasites.? Auernheimer had headed an organization called Goatse Security. He described it as a nine-member information security firm; prosecutors called it a hacker group. It was another Goatse member, Daniel Spitler, who was instrumental in the events that led to the federal probe. Apple?s iPad tablet had recently come out, and AT&T was providing Internet access for iPad users. Spitler wanted AT&T?s data plan but did not have an iPad, so he used his computer skills to trick the AT&T servers into believing he was operating one and got himself an iPad identifying number. When he logged on to the AT&T site, he discovered that a window would pop up with his e-mail address already filled in, Spitler testified at Auernheimer?s trial. AT&T, in an effort to be user-friendly, had linked each iPadnumber with the user?s e-mail address so that users did not have to type in their address when they logged in. The addresses were automatically displayed. Spitler altered his identifying number by one digit and typed it in. Someone else?s e-mail address popped up, he testified. Spitler typed in more iPad numbers. More e-mail addresses popped up. Then he wrote a computer program to automate the process. It landed about 120,000 addresses. The government?s evidence ? chat logs from an FBI informant secretly monitoring Auernheimer?s computer group ? showed that Spitler ran the program and did not tell Auernheimer until it was underway. (Spitler pleaded guilty in the scheme and is awaiting sentencing.) ?HILARIOUS oh man now this is big media news,? Auernheimer wrote back to Spitler. Auernheimer gave him advice about how to improve the computer program and encouraged him to compile as many e-mail addresses as possible, the evidence showed. Auernheimer also pushed to disclose the e-mail addresses to the media and, he has acknowledged, gave them to Gawker. A Gawker article on June 9, 2010, described the incident in detail and attributed it to Goatse Security. The piece went viral and caught the attention of the FBI?s Newark division. ?This is .?.?. very important to us,? the division said in an internal communication, according to court documents. The investigation was straightforward; Auernheimer had said online that Goatse was responsible for the breach. The prosecution proved more controversial. Auernheimer and Spitler were charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1984 law at the center of the recent criticism of the government?s anti-cybercrime campaign. Passed before Internet use became widespread ? when the movie ?WarGames? had triggered concern that hackers could start World War III ? the law was narrowly drawn. It only covered hacking into U.S. government computers or using computers to obtain national security secrets or financial records. As computer use has exploded, however, the measure has been amended five times by Congress and dramatically expanded. Today, legal scholars say, its provisions cover what is known as ?unauthorized access? to virtually any computer in the United States and many abroad. Critics contend the law has become dangerously overbroad and might criminalize activity as innocuous as touching a mouse and peeking at someone?s screen in a coffee shop. ?It?s too vague, and its punishments are too severe,?? said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group working on Auernheimer?s appeal. Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, said prosecutors have been guilty of ?overreach? in their handling of computer cases such as those of Auernheimer and Swartz. ?Neither the prosecutors nor the [computer crimes] statute have a good idea of what the line is between ordinary online activity and dangerous criminal conduct,? Granick said. She added: ?The Justice Department is reading into the person?s motives based on what their politics are or whether they are a thorn in the government?s side. People who are edgy, either politically or otherwise, are in danger.? The Justice Department argues that the computer fraud law is not tough enough to combat the heightened cybersecurity threat. Officials are supporting proposals to cover computer crimes under federal racketeering laws and stiffen sentences for some offenses. Auernheimer was charged with two felony counts ? committing fraud by giving personal information ? the e-mail addresses ? to Gawker, and conspiring to access the AT&T computer servers without authorization. The latter is a misdemeanor under federal law. But under a 1996 amendment to the computer crimes statute, it becomes a felony if the offense was committed ?in furtherance? of any criminal act that violates federal or state law. Federal prosecutors invoked New Jersey?s computer crimes law to charge Auernheimer under that provision. His attorneys objected, saying that essentially accused him of the same crime twice. Justice Department officials disputed that contention, and the judge agreed with them. ?Where?s the harm?? At the trial, prosecutors painted Auernheimer as an incorrigible hacker out to promote himself and his computer security firm. ?His motive was publicity and greed,? Assistant U.S. Attorney Zach Intrater said in closing arguments. ?He arrogantly thought that because he and his cohorts were skilled computer hackers that they could violate people?s privacy and get famous doing it.? Auernheimer?s attorneys called the case much ado about nothing. ?Where?s the harm?? defense lawyer Tor Ekeland asked the jury. ?No one?s bank account was hacked. No credit card was hacked. .?.?. AT&T?s iPad servers blabbered the e-mail addresses of every one of their subscribers to anybody who just said hi to the server.? An AT&T official testified that the company?s servers had inadvertently published the e-mail addresses. While initially discussing a potential FBI investigation of the breach, R. David Hulsey, an AT&T assistant vice president, wrote in an e-mail later introduced as evidence: ?I don?t believe there is a case here. No security was circumvented. A poorly crafted design feature was available and exploited.? When cross-examined by prosecutors, Hulsey said he was referring to a potential AT&T lawsuit against the hackers. The jury convicted Auernheimer on both counts. At a sentencing hearing attended by several dozen supporters, Auernheimer was unrepentant. He said the court should compensate him ?for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life,? adding, ?The Internet is becoming bigger than the law can contain.? Prosecutors, however, argued for a tough sentence to deter him from further hacking and accused him in court papers of a ?smear campaign? against the government and corporate America. The prosecution put AT&T?s financial loss at $73,000, based on the cost of sending letters to iPad users telling them about the breach. The company did not submit an estimated loss when given the chance to do so by the court. Since loss is a key factor in federal sentencing guidelines, the figure was used by prosecutors to argue for a sentence of 33 to 41 months in prison, up from 10 to 16 months had there been no loss. Judge Susan D. Wigenton sentenced Auernheimer to 41 months, citing his defiant Internet postings and interviews. ?You have shown no contrition whatsoever,? she said. ?And there is just this sort of pervasive disrespect that is shown in many of the postings.? Michael Sussmann, a former senior computer crimes prosecutor at the Justice Department, said in an interview that he considered it ?borderline? whether Auernheimer had committed a crime under the computer crimes law. AT&T?s system, he said, had made the e-mail addresses ?publicly available.?? Sussmann, who practices computer privacy law at Perkins Coie, said the case was ?not endemic of an overreaction to cybercrime or overaggressive prosecutions in general.? But he added, ?Forty one months in prison seems like an awfully long time when nothing bad happened.? --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 30 06:19:42 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:19:42 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - GAO Now Investigating DHS Ammo Purchases Message-ID: <14CDA961-26D1-4BAC-BF38-7AF8EC60CC39@infowarrior.org> GAO Now Investigating DHS Ammo Purchases By Elizabeth Flock April 29, 2013 http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/04/29/gao-now-investigating-dhs-ammo-purchases The Government Accountability Office tells Whispers it is now investigating large ammunition purchases made by the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Young, a spokesman for GAO, says the investigation of the purchases is "just getting underway." The congressional investigative agency is jumping into the fray just as legislation was introduced in both the Senate and the House to restrict the purchase of ammo by some government agencies (except the Department of Defense). The AMMO Act, introduced Friday, would prevent agencies from buying more ammunition if "stockpiles" are greater than what they were in previous administrations. Donelle Harder, a spokeswoman for Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who introduced the legislation in the Senate, tells Whispers the bill would also require GAO to share the findings of its report on DHS purchases with Congress. Officials at DHS have denied to both Whispers and lawmakers that it is stockpiling ammunition. The Associated Press reported in February that DHS wanted to buy more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, but DHS officials testified last week it was only planning to buy up to 750 million. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 30 06:21:19 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:21:19 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - USG Seeks to Fine Companies for Not Complying With Wiretap Orders Message-ID: <9044B854-C5C2-4F95-A14E-8A16C7EFBC1D@infowarrior.org> (Note to USG: you can't expect to tap everything. You may WANT to, though. --rick) Government Seeks to Fine Companies for Not Complying With Wiretap Orders ? By Kim Zetter ? 04.29.13 ? 3:29 PM http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/fines-wiretap-noncompliance/ It isn?t often that communications companies push back against government requests to monitor customers and hand over information about them, but a government task force is seeking to make it even harder for companies to say no. The task force is pushing for legislation that would penalize companies like Google, Facebook and Skype that fail to comply with court orders for wiretapping, according to the Washington Post. The cost of non-complying would be an escalating series of fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars. Fines that remained unpaid after 90 days would double daily. Unlike telecommunications companies that are required under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to have systems that are wiretap-enabled, some internet communication methods ? such as social networking sites and online gaming sites ? aren?t easily wiretapped and are not required to enable the capability under CALEA. Companies that argue that they don?t have the means to enable wiretapping have avoided complying with court orders seeking real-time surveillance, the paper notes. The legislation is intended to force these companies into finding technology solutions that would enable real-time surveillance. Microsoft reportedly applied for a patent in 2009 for a technology called Legal Intercept that would have the ability to secretly monitor, intercept and record Skype calls. Microsoft filed for the patent before it bought Skype in 2011. The push for legislation to compel these companies to cooperate with wiretapping orders began in 2010 after Google initiated end-to-end encryption for Gmail and text messages, which made it more difficult for the FBI to intercept e-mail under a court order, the Post notes. But critics like Matt Blaze, professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, have argued that the intercept capabilities introduce vulnerabilities (.pdf) that make it possible for foreign intelligence agencies and others to hijack the surveillance systems on communication networks and do their own spying. The move to wiretap the internet isn?t new. The New York Times reported in 2010 that federal officials were seeking new regulations to wiretap the internet. The piece noted that officials wanted legislation that would require all communications providers ? including encrypted e-mail providers, like Google, social networking sites like Facebook, and messaging and voice services like Skype ? to install the technical capability for wiretapping. Officials wanted these services to provide the ability not only to intercept and record communications but to and decrypt encrypted communications. Officials argue that they?re not seeking new powers; they just want to extend the monitoring authority they currently have for telecommunications to other communication methods on the internet. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 30 06:25:01 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:25:01 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - The Web Turns 20 Message-ID: <9B7E4170-4E00-4046-B45C-28A3D1AD21E7@infowarrior.org> http://info.cern.ch/ On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish < -- > http://info.cern.ch/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 30 07:55:30 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:55:30 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Control Of Cyberwarfare Message-ID: <89A06104-78B8-42D6-980A-1EFAE086344D@infowarrior.org> Stars and Stripes April 30, 2013 Control Of Cyberwarfare http://www.stripes.com/should-cyber-warfare-be-elevated-to-highest-command-structure-1.218776 Move to Make CYBERCOM Its Own Command Under Review By Chris Carroll, Stars and Stripes WASHINGTON ? To former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the threat of cyberattack was a potential Pearl Harbor and 9/11 rolled into one, an event terrorists or foreign adversaries could create, he said, to ?paralyze the nation.? Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel?s rhetoric is cooler, but still he calls the threat of computer network attacks nothing less than ?the greatest threat to our security.? Over the last year, both secretaries have considered pulling the military command responsible for countering such threats ? U.S. Cyber Command ? out from under U.S. Strategic Command and making it a unified combatant command. That would put CYBERCOM on equal footing with the six regional combatant commands, as well as functional unified commands established to oversee special operations, nuclear deterrence operations and global transportation. Many experts say the move would make sense, cementing cyber warfare as a focal point of the Defense Department?s 21st-century national security responsibilities. Supporters say the new unified command would become an integral part of global operations, as Special Operations Command has done since its activation in 1987. Others suggest that once the current wave of cyber enthusiasm passes, a top-level Cyber Command could lose steam and end up like U.S. Space Command. It was created in 1985 amid planning for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and disestablished in 2002 when, as one expert said, ?it turned out as a domain, space isn?t as cool as we thought.? For now, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey seems to be on the side of the naysayers, recently telling the Senate Armed Services committee that while an independent CYBERCOM might make sense in several years, ?we just aren?t there yet.? Hagel?s take on the matter, and ultimately President Barack Obama?s, will trump Dempsey?s opinion, however, and the Pentagon said the matter is still under review. ?On a number of occasions the Secretary and the Chairman have discussed their concerns about the growth of cyber threats and the need to ensure DoD is organized, trained and equipped to address these threats,? Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said in a written statement to Stars and Stripes. ?While the Joint Staff has been examining different command options, including maintaining the status quo, the Secretary has not made a decision at this time on whether to recommend a change to the President.? The cost of elevating Cyber Command is one of the questions Hagel and the Pentagon brass must weigh carefully, said Jason Healey, a former Air Force cyber warrior and director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. ?With sequestration and the military pulling back in so many areas, how do you justify it?? Healey said. ?The amount of senior leader attention and budget that would go into creating another command is highly questionable.? Before any move to set up a unified CYBERCOM, Congress wants to know the costs in advance, legislators told the Pentagon in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. Even a modest cost could be swimming against the tide, with budgets contracting and fresh memories of another unified combatant command ? U.S. Joint Forces Command, with a nearly $1 billion yearly budget ? eliminated in 2011 as a cost-saving measure. Healey, a founding member of the U.S. military?s first joint cyberwarfare command in the late 1990s ? a precursor to the current Cyber Command ? said there may be a dawning realization that creating a large new bureaucracy won?t solve the Pentagon?s most basic cyber problem: sloppy and incomplete defenses across the many networks of the sprawling department. ?Since 1998, we?ve changed command structures every three years or so but, but we suffer the same problems as [we did] then,? he said. But another cyber expert said it?s a ?natural step,?to promote Cyber Command to a unified combatant command. Previous attempts to establish a joint cyber operations command haven?t been fully satisfactory, possibly because the commands haven?t held enough power, said James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International studies. ?The United States typically has to experiment with different structures to park a new function; sometimes it?s in a service, and sometimes it?s a command,? he said. ?Cyber is going through that right now as we figure out how to organize ourselves.? One of the factors holding up the elevation of Cyber Command could be its current close association the National Security Agency, charged with foreign electronic spying. Both agencies are led by Army Gen. Keith Alexander, and based at Fort Meade, Md. The close association with the NSA gives Cyber Command a ?black magic? aura and makes it harder to explain its straightforward, though often classified, military role to Congress and some in the private sector, said John Bumgarner, chief technical officer at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research organization, as well as a former Army cyberwarrior attached to special operations command. Congress has similar misgivings. In the 2013 defense spending bill, it singled out the uncertain lines between the military and intelligence communities when it comes to cyber. Congress said it wanted an explanation from the Pentagon of ?how a single individual could serve as a commander of a combatant command that conducts overt, though clandestine, cyber operations under Title 10, United States Code, and serve as the head of an element of the intelligence community that conducts covert cyber operations under the National Security Act of 1947.? Several observers who asked not to be named said that while the Pentagon values the utility of having CYBERCOM attached to an agency with the capabilities of the NSA, many in Congress are uncomfortable with the arrangement. The elevation ? and potential separation of the two entities ? may occur after Alexander?s retirement. ?The pressure certainly exists to have this as an independent command, perhaps within the next year,? a Washington analyst said. ?But a lot of this could depend on who is in charge, who is in office, and what the structure is.? Ian Wallace, a visiting fellow in cybersecurity at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said cyber is likely to be elevated in coming years, but that there would remain a number of crucial issues to sort out. How would the service branches and the other combatant commands operate together with the newly elevated CYBERCOM? What level of capability will the new command have, and how much of the various services? current cyber capability will it pull under its wing? What ties the questions together, said Wallace, a former cybersecurity official for the United Kingdom?s Ministry of Defense, is that they would be easier to answer if CYBERCOM were promoted to an independent command. ?It would be more efficient to have those discussions with a strong combatant commander at the center than to have them as a sub-unified command,? he said. --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 30 11:24:01 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:24:01 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - ICE Starts Raiding Mobile Phone Repair Shops To Stop Repairs With Aftermarket Parts Message-ID: <25C47B56-B978-4D01-A064-841ECE4BFB0B@infowarrior.org> ICE Starts Raiding Mobile Phone Repair Shops To Stop Repairs With Aftermarket Parts from the is-this-really-the-best-use-of-taxpayer-money dept Apparently Homeland Security's Immigration & Custom's Enforcement (ICE) team has found a new tech issue to overreact to and overhype. shutslar points us to a story of ICE agents raiding 25 smartphone repair shops in South Florida for daring to repair phones with aftermarket parts, rather than original products from Apple. As seems standard for ICE these days, rather than actually understanding the details at hand, they're taking orders from a corporate entity, in this case, Apple... < - > http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20130429/07214322874/homeland-security-participates-trademark-raid.shtml --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it. From rforno at infowarrior.org Tue Apr 30 15:09:17 2013 From: rforno at infowarrior.org (Richard Forno) Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:09:17 -0400 Subject: [Infowarrior] - Every now and then Ron Paul makes sense. Message-ID: <1776DCAB-3B12-44BD-8AA2-8443960194A8@infowarrior.org> Ron Paul: Police manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspect scarier than attack http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/29/ron-paul-police-manhunt-boston-marathon-bombing-su/ --- Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.